Where was Scorpion? And his obnoxious sidekick? How could they leave her like this? Even her own family had left her. She didn’t want to die.
Her gaze fell on the detonators. The clackers. Giant shotguns. Their last resort. Their Alamo position.
The only way to save her boys’ lives.
But Scorpion might be out there among the attackers.
“Don’t do anything unless you hear me say…” Whatever. Something. How was she to know if Scorpion was even alive anymore?
She didn’t care.
Dom knew from her voice alone that Venice was in distress. Her message was out of character. She needed him.
Yet here he stood, paralyzed by indecision. He knew it was a trap. If he walked through that door, God only knew what might come next. He’d get shot, probably. But to stay out here while Venice was in danger in there was… cowardly. How could he The turning doorknob settled it. Dom darted to the hinge side of the door and waited. When the tongue of the latch cleared the strike plate, he launched his full weight against the heavy panel.
As he’d hoped, his explosive entrance caught the intruder off-balance. He backpedaled to keep from being propelled to the floor, but unlike the man downstairs, this one was agile and light on his feet. As Dom clutched fistfuls of the man’s suit jacket and tried to drive him to the floor, the intruder effortlessly pirouetted free. His hands were empty, though.
The intruder struck a martial arts pose, and Dom knew right away that he was in trouble. Army training notwithstanding, Dom could not prevail in a hand-to-hand confrontation. He prayed for a weapon, and in that instant saw the intruder’s pistol on the floor. That was his only hope.
The intruder moved first. He seemed to have read Dom’s mind as he struck like a snake to throw a punch at the left side of the priest’s head-the side closest to the weapon on the floor. Dom dod his knees and sent him tumbling to the floor. He knew without doubt that his jaw had been broken. And he knew that the pistol was still on the floor. He could see it. If his arms were four inches longer, he could have touched it.
If only he could move. But he had to move. He had to save Venice or die trying. Rolling to his side, he stretched his arm to its full length and beyond, a lunging reach stretched his shoulder nearly to dislocation. He might even have made it but for the kick to his forehead. Lights flashed behind his eyes, and he felt himself balanced in a sickening nether-world between consciousness and coma.
When his vision cleared, he saw the pistol in the intruder’s hand.
Then he heard the gunshot.
The Green Brigade advanced on the lodge. They moved out of the tree line, shooting constantly, laying a deadly volume of fire on the cabin.
There was nothing nuanced or subtle about Jonathan’s plan. He and Boxers split left and right and came at the line fast and hard from their right flank. Jonathan circled to the left to come in from behind, while Boxers circled to the right to hit them on an oblique angle from the front. If the plan worked, they would close in on the attackers in a quickly advancing V-formation and roll them up to their left.
He advanced in a walking crouch, his weapon to his shoulder and set to fire three rounds with every trigger pull. When he saw a bad guy, he shot him, center of mass, and moved on to the next. No time to confirm the kill or worry about him hopping up again.
There are rhythms to war, ebbs and crescendos that no one plans, but that nonetheless give audible clues about what was happening. Presently, as he closed in for his third undetected kill, Jonathan heard a shift in the action, a peak in shooting that seemed less random, more focused. He looked to his right, through the trees, in time to see someone dart out from the cabin, only to be cut down.
He spat an obscenity and nearly turned back to reacquire a target, when more movement from the front of the cabin triggered an even more intense fusillade. Jesus Christ, one Hughes was trying to save the other.
Jonathan needed to support them. He brought his rifle to his shoulder, sighted on a muzzle flash, and fired a three-round burst. A weapon spiraled off into the darkness.
A brilliant flash near the lodge startled him, followed by the distinctive wham of a claymore. Whatever lay in the woods to the left side of the lodge was now torn to bits.
In his earpiece, Jonathan heard Boxers’ shout, “Who the fuck-”
The fusillade never came. Even as Gail was airborne, tumbling out of the window, she’d expected to be torn apart by incoming fire, but somehow she was still here.
She didn’t pause to wonder why, or to thank God, or to even give it much of a thought. One of her team was dead, two were wounded, and she had to bring them to safety. She didn’t think any of these things, she just knew them; sensed them as her duty.
Gail belly-crawled on elbows and knees to the back corner of the house, and then around to the left-hand side. In the near distance she saw Thomas on the ground writhing in agony, screaming curses to the night while his father covered him with his body. They were alive. Beyond them, she saw the attackers closing in. They were char’d been raining covering fire in the rear to mask the joining of the two skirmish lines.
But there was even more to it than that, she realized. They were protecting the true target of their assault. “Oh, my God,” she said aloud. “They’re-”
A blinding, white-hot flash took the world away.
The echo of the first claymore was still rolling across the yard when a second one erupted, this one on the left side of the front of the house. Ahead of him, through the green light of his NODs, Jonathan saw people and vegetation shredded by the high-velocity pellets as they shrieked through the night, destroying everyone and everything.
In his three decades as a warrior, he’d never been on this end of a claymore, and it was orders of magnitude louder than he’d expected. If you hear the explosion, you’re okay.
But not for long. Since he was just outside the arc of that claymore, he could count on being just inside the arc of the next.
He slapped the transmit button on his chest. “Box, get-”
The last word was cut off by the explosion.
Inside the lodge, Julie had nearly forgotten that it took three clicks to detonate a mine. On her first try, she’d squeezed the initiator only once. When nothing happened, she quickly squeezed it twice more, and was again disappointed. Third time, she squeezed it three times rapidly and screamed as the explosion ripped the night.
She’d thought it through as best she could. She remembered that the danger zone behind the mines didn’t allow you to be very close. If she didn’t shoot them now, she didn’t know when the attackers would be behind the kill zone or when Steve and Thomas might be in front of it.
Moving without pause to the second detonator, she did it right on the first try, and this time, the detonation flashed within her peripheral vision: a brilliant light, then a cloud that obscured everything. The punishing concussion came an instant later.
She moved to the third, wrapped both hands around the clacker and cowered behind the timbers as she squeezed and counted aloud. “One. Two. Th-”
This blast was a hundred times louder than the first two, but only for an instant before her ears shut down from the pounding. The inside of the lodge erupted in splinters and broken glass.
Then she felt nothing.
Dom thought he was dead. He had to be dead. How could the killer have missed? He felt a pair of strong hands on his shoulders, and a vaguely familiar voice saying, “Father? Father! Jesus, are you all right?”
The voice crystallized before the images did. It was Doug Kramer.
“I’m alive?” Dom asked.
“Are you shot?” the chief asked.
