Joey tried to fight back, but Zero pointed the .357 at him.
“You’re going in the trunk for now,” Zero said. “Maybe later I’ll let you beg for your life. Or maybe you can figure out how you’re going to convince me you won’t rat us out.” He spoke louder, for the benefit of all the others. “If anyone finds out that we were here tonight and that I shot that guy in the mall, we’ll all be tried for murder.”
The others didn’t say anything. Not even Derrick.
“So we all stay together,” Zero said. “When we get back to the house, we’ll figure out what to do with Joey.”
Dropper and Bones threw Joey into the trunk and closed it.
Hurting and out of breath, Joey lay still for a while and tried to recover. He knew once they returned to the house where they were currently crashing, he was dead. He’d seen that in Zero’s eyes. The others wouldn’t stop Zero from killing him because they were afraid of Zero and they were afraid of getting charged with murder.
Desperate, Joey pushed aside the pain and took out his flashlight. He knew several luxury edition cars had trunk releases built into them. Shining the light around, he located the release on the left, waited till the car slowed. Then he popped the release, shoved the trunk lid up, and rolled out.
He fell, tripped up by the car’s forward momentum. But he pushed himself back to his feet and started to run toward an alley to his right. Brake lights flared ruby red behind him.
Pistol shots rang out. Bullets ricocheted from the street near his feet, then from the alley wall as he ran inside. Sparks jerked into motion, then flared out and died.
Joey ran, ignoring the tearing pain in his side, knowing if he stopped even for a second they would catch him and kill him. His friends weren’t his friends, and he was in more trouble than he’d ever imagined in his life. All he wanted was for everything to be normal again.
But it seemed like the whole world was against him.
Rubber shrieked behind him, letting him know someone had turned the car around or they’d taken off. Joey didn’t know which. He didn’t look. He just ran.
13
GAP International Airport
Sanliurfa, Turkey
Local Time 0606 Hours
They didn’t call it a suicide mission. None of them talked about the fact that many of them—maybe all of them, if the op really turned sour—wouldn’t come back. They were Rangers of the twenty-first century, some of the best fighting men the United States of America had ever turned out.
More than that, they were the team of professional soldiers First Sergeant Samuel Adams Gander had chosen for the op behind enemy lines. Sixty men strong, they’d been bloodied in wars and conflicts long before the current action that ran from the Turkish-Syrian border to Sanliurfa.
As he stood watching them load into two CH-47D Chinook helicopters, Goose felt proud and scared. He’d handpicked the men for the mission, disagreeing with Captain Remington’s calls for the team only occasionally because he had more information regarding the men’s current physical health than Remington did. And Goose had had that edge only because the captain hadn’t yet called for or received his morning report.
After Goose reached the command center thirty minutes ago, Remington had ordered him to the airfield with the briefing to follow later. By the time Goose reached the airfield, thirty of the men he and Remington had agreed on were already there.
Remington’s investment in this mission was considerable. The 75th had originally fielded roughly six hundred men for the peacekeeping mission that had turned into a war. Those men had been divided along the front line and fallback positions before the border skirmish had escalated into war. Two hundred and eight of those men had vanished across the board just days ago, leaving behind their empty uniforms and dropped weapons. Another hundred and seventeen were casualties, either dead or too wounded to stand a post. The unit had a lot of walking wounded, too. The Rangers had been taking hits ever since the initial battle along the border, and they’d had major damage from the last attack two days ago. Remington had assigned sixty of the healthiest men to Goose’s mission.
The Rangers stood in the rain, their ponchos covering them and the seventy-pound packs they carried. All of them had stripped their gear down to water, light rations, ammo, and medkits. If the op went as planned, they’d be away from the city for fourteen hours. Of course, they all knew that ops never went as planned.
More Rangers arrived by jeep, RSOV, and cargo truck as Goose clambered out of the Hummer he’d been assigned. He walked to the back of the vehicle and took out his own pack. He secured the heavy weight across his back and shoulders and fastened it to his LCE, then checked the headset communications.
The op was set up through Remington’s new access to whatever satellite array he was currently using. Goose knew the array wasn’t the standard mil-sat set they were assigned to use. Having to depend on an outside source for communications unnerved Goose, especially when he remembered the way Nicolae Carpathia had so quickly and callously rescinded the satellite access he’d given Remington during the confusion immediately following the Rapture.
The Rapture, not “the vanishings” or “the disappearances.” Goose realized that was now how he thought of the event. The Rapture. You have come a long way in your thinking, he told himself.
But maybe not in his beliefs, he knew. Goose still had doubts there, about whether God really knew him or God cared. About whether a weary soldier could ever figure out how he was supposed to get closer to God. He wasn’t sure if he even showed up on God’s radar, or if God’s radar—like Remington’s—so often seemed to be focused more on the big picture than on one worn-out,
