The news channel cut to commercial, an advertisement for a book and audio book on the end times.
For a moment, Joey couldn’t breathe. How had his mom gotten into so much trouble? What could the army do to her? He got hold of himself, blowing out a breath and taking another one in. He had to get home. He couldn’t stay away with something like this going on.
Chris’s singsong voice whispered in the back of his head: “Now I lay me down to sleep… . C’mon, Joey, say it with me. Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
“What are you doing here?” a man’s voice demanded.
Startled, Joey turned around, swinging so fast that the pry bar he carried slammed into the desk.
A slender Asian man stood in the doorway. He held a pistol in both hands, pointing it first at Derrick then at Joey and back again. The barrel looked huge.
In the back of Joey’s mind, Chris’s voice whispered, “If I should die before I wake …”
12
United States 75th Army Rangers Temporary Post
Sanliurfa, Turkey
Local Time 0521 Hours
Over the past few days, Danielle Vinchenzo had seen a lot of Sergeant Samuel Adams “Goose” Gander. She had seen him in command, confident and fighting fit, and she had seen him in his downtime when he didn’t realize she was watching, when his haggard face had shown her how much the death and destruction taking place around him had taken from him physically, emotionally, and—yes, even though it wasn’t something Danielle thought about much—spiritually.
One thing she was convinced about First Sergeant Goose Gander—there was a lot going on spiritually within him. She was sure of it. It wasn’t just the times she’d seen him at church or in the company of Corporal Baker. The spirituality she’d … felt surrounding him resonated within him. He was a natural-born leader, a man other men looked up to. But there was something more to him than that. Something that seemed to be growing. It had to be growing, she knew, because she hadn’t felt it about him as much when she had first met him during the rescue in Glitter City. And it wasn’t that she’d missed it, because she knew she would never have missed something like that.
Mostly she remembered the stark images of the first sergeant, the way he had looked when he’d swooped in and taken charge of Glitter City after the initial SCUD attack, announced himself and his unit, and told everyone there that the U.S. Rangers were there to save them. And she remembered the image of him when he’d carried that wounded marine from the fallen helicopter, the image that OneWorld NewsNet had turned into an icon for the Turkish-Syrian conflict news footage.
And wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants, she thought as she stood there in the darkness of the alley less than an hour before dawn, if OneWorld found out their chosen hero-guy is the one working to bring their little empire of assassins to the ground?
Just as quickly as that thought occurred to her, Danielle dismissed it. If OneWorld NewsNet discovered what she and the first sergeant knew, if Nicolae Carpathia had any inkling that they were trying to put their hands on materials that could possible damage his bid for international attention—and maybe the office of secretary-general of the United Nations, if the scuttlebutt Danielle had heard was true—she and Goose would be killed.
It’s not like all the Rangers are in on this, Danielle told herself. There’s no safety in numbers. So far, the resistance movement consisted of an unknown computer hacker, herself, and First Sergeant Goose Gander.
Despite all the ways she had seen him—on the battlefield and off, winning and losing—Danielle had never seen Goose like this. She hid in the shadows across the street from the two-story building Goose had identified as one of the hidden headquarters of Alexander Cody’s CIA team and watched him, barely able to make him out in the darkness and through the rain that continued to assault the city. The storms to the south hadn’t stopped either, nor did they show any signs of slackening.
Goose was dressed in all black, a drenched shadow out in the night. The black suit he wore was standard night wear for these kinds of operations. His pants fit into high-topped combat boots. A mattefinish combat knife rode in a black sheath at his right ankle. He still carried an LCE, but instead of the M-4A1 he normally carried, he’d switched to an MP5 SD3. The small machine pistol was fitted with a suppressor to prevent any gunfire from being heard very far over the falling rain. He carried his M9 on his hip, but it had been outfitted with a suppressor as well.
Danielle had noted the change in weapons but hadn’t asked him about them. She knew why the first sergeant carried them. Alexander Cody and his men were killers. Goose didn’t intend for them to kill him.
Without warning, Goose vanished on the other side of the street.
Anxiety ripped through Danielle. Goose had taken charge of their escape from the three-agent CIA surveillance team two hours ago. They’d managed a two-hour nap in one of the public areas in the downtown sector after leaving Baker’s church, then lost themselves in the maze of alleys and side streets Sanliurfa was full of.
Goose’s knowledge of the city’s layout was staggering. They’d gone on foot, making better time and passing relatively unnoticed. When she’d asked him how he knew so much about the city, he’d told her it wasn’t a city; it was a battlefield. A sergeant’s job was to know a battlefield, every natural feature
