“Good. Horrible man.”
Cairo opens the clamp on Lana’s foot. She frees her left hand. She stands moments later and unclamps Emma.
“You son-of-bitch,” the woman sneers at the head.
“He was that,” Lana says. “Her, too.”
“That I see,” the Russian replies. “Do that to young girl.” She shakes her head. “Get clothes.”
Lana and Emma rush upstairs and find Fayah’s bureau and walk-in closet. They dress quickly. Then Lana searches for guns, weapons of any kind. ISIS and Al Qaeda, the “martyrs,” would be there in minutes.
She fails to find any firepower until she notices a wood-trimmed opening in the closet ceiling. She pulls on the handle, unfolding a sectional ladder.
“Em, can you help me?”
Her daughter looks like she’s in shock. Numbly, she comes over. Lana hands down three M16s, rounds of ammunition, and three Glock pistols with extra magazines, then leads Emma from the bedroom.
Seconds later, she hears a barrage of bullets outside the house and knows it’s only beginning.
Chapter 33
Bullets rip through the front walls of Fayah’s house, shattering windows and shredding sheetrock. Spirals of white dust swirl in the air above Lana and Emma as they dive to the entryway floor.
Cairo drops beside them, as though trained to belly down when the ammo starts to fly.
The shooting stops abruptly after tearing a line of holes across ten feet of wall and windows.
Lana springs to her feet with one of the M16s she grabbed from upstairs. “Stay down,” she orders her daughter and dog, peering through one of three small squares of glass in the upper part of the door.
She sees nothing but trees and thick brush. Lana has no doubt that Fayah’s allies want to reclaim the house and their reputation as fighters: the ceiling cams showed a woman thwart their gruesome plan to chainsaw Emma and Lana to death.
The Russian woman and the border collie scale the stairs. So much has transpired in so few seconds. She sees Fayah’s armory of rifles and Glocks.
“Who are you?” Lana asks, keeping her eyes on the area in front of the house.
“Ludmila Migunov.” She grabs an M16.
“You know how to use that?” Lana asks.
“Russian army five years. Private security U.S., pro football. Do you?” she asks, checking her magazine.
Before Lana can respond, she spots two men sprinting toward the door. She smashes a pane with the butt of her rifle and cuts them down as they barrel within twenty feet of it.
“Answer is yes,” Ludmila says, patting Lana’s shoulder.
Lana keeps looking for the enemy, wondering how many more are out there. Without looking back, she asks Ludmila why she’s there.
But the Russian’s already sprinting with the M16 and her dog to the far side of the great room that runs the length of the house and opens to the kitchen. The vantage point gives her views of the side and back of the bungalow.
“Husband Bones Jackson,” she calls out. “Met on goodwill tour, Russia. Horvat bastard to him. I come back to kill him. Day late, dollar short. But hate these bastards, too. Kill father in Kabul. Who they killing now?” she asks as shooting resumes, but farther from the house. She looks out a window and answers her own question: “Helicopter.”
Lana sees the chopper now. No, two choppers. They’re taking fire from the woods about one hundred feet away. The birds fly almost directly overhead. The house shudders from the backwash and loud whup-whup-whup of the rotors.
“Killer Egg. Delta Force,” Ludmila calls out.
“Killer what?” The choppers wheel toward the lake.
“MH-6 helicopter. Good news.”
It appears to be stupendously good news to Lana — on both birds heavily armed soldiers sit on platforms on each side of the cabin.
What a relief.
Or would have been if a heat-seeking missile didn’t rip out of the woods that very second and blow up the one in the lead, incinerating it in a microsecond. The other chopper starts evasive maneuvers. Too late. A second missile takes it out. Two fireballs drop below trees far from the house.
Lana hopes they fell into the lake, which might spare lives.
She nudges Emma with her foot. “I want you in the basement. They’ve got missiles. It’s all concrete down there. Take a gun.”
“I don’t know how to use that kind,” Em says, standing slowly.
She’s fired revolvers at a gun range with her mother, but not semi-automatics. They were next in her weapons training, which had been upended by the swiftly escalating violence of recent events.
Lana glances, sees it’s clear, and grabs a Glock. She racks it, inserting a round into the chamber, and hands it to her daughter. “It’s all ready. Remember, two hands, point and shoot. Go!”
Emma scampers toward the cellar door, watched closely by Cairo. Lana hopes Em can handle being around the remains of the bloodbath down there. Better than dying up here.
Em freezes at the sight of Fayah’s chainsawed chest. The blade is still buried in her body. She hears more shooting and forces herself to go down the last few steps.
The door slams behind her. She figures that’s her mother’s doing. All Em’s really worried about is the woman who tried to cut her in half for all the world to see.
She looks down at her captor again.
What if she’s still alive?
Em tells herself that’s not possible. Rationally, she knows this is true, but her skin feels like it’s crinkling from her groin to her upper back, as if she’s made of tinfoil. The brute fear also shallows her breath.
She tries to step around the blood. That’s hard, it’s everywhere. And then it’s impossible — because the lights go out.
Ludmila tosses Lana a phone as shots tear into the house again. Cairo flattens on the floor. Glass shatters in the kitchen. Lana looks up, drops the device and fires toward the back door three times. A bearded body crashes into a counter and onto the floor.
Lana sprints forward and looks over a half-wall divide into the kitchen. The man’s hand grasps his abdomen. She sees a wire and shoots him twice in the head, yelling to Ludmila, “Suicide vests.”
Black smoke billows into the sky more than 150 yards away from the crash of one of the choppers; the other must have fallen into the lake. She retrieves the phone and backs up till she can keep an eye on the front of the house. Then she keys in a code for a Department of Defense command center. It’s so secret she’s never known where it’s located or even if it’s ground-based.
“Identify yourself,” a man says.
Lana reels off a digital code, then a series of letters in Alpha-Bravo- Charley style before reporting the Delta Force choppers down at Hayden Lake. “Heat-seekers hit them.”
“We have it on satellite.”
“We need help. We’ve got two adults and a seventeen-year-old. We don’t know how many we’re facing.”
“Our count is eighteen. You have some dead inside, correct?”
“Yes. But eighteen more? Can’t you get us help? We’re way outgunned. One of them had a vest.” Shots ring out in front of the house and behind it. “You hear that?” Lana yells as Ludmila takes cover behind a blue enamel wood stove and forces the border collie into the down position.
“We’ve alerted the county sheriff and local police. The chief is on his way.”
“Please tell me you’re deploying forces from Fairchild Air Force Base.” Lana recalls her planned testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the mistake of relying too heavily on local law enforcement during national emergencies. Then a national emergency — a terrorist attack on the Capitol — claimed scores of lives and shut down the hearing.