Inside Out

101

Shadows among shadows, the quartet of cutouts moved west through the narrow line of trees along the drainage canal. They cut a hole in the eastern ILS fence and slipped through. Their starlight goggles painted the world a Saint Elmo's fire green. They wore sensitive, sound-activated headsets and could talk to each other in an emergency.

Nearing the gate separating the tank farm from the lodge property, they slowed and crept to the edge of the road, where it exited the tank farm and entered Manelli's property. A clot of four guards, who couldn't have been more visible to the cutouts if they had been on fire, stood just inside the gate. As one of the men waved his hand in the darkness, his lit cigarette looked like an acrobatic firefly.

Lewis took up his position not fifteen feet away from the four guards.

Tomeo, Mickey, and Apache kept going toward the lodge.

Normally they would have taken out the four guards and moved on, but Lewis was not going to put a single team member at unnecessary risk. He wanted a lightning strike whereby all of the exterior guards were neutralized at once. He didn't want any of the guards to have an opportunity to resist-or for a shout or a gunshot to alert anyone inside the lodge. The body armoring all but removed that risk for Tomeo and Apache, but his and Mickey's lighter suits offered superior maneuverability with full protection of only their torsos. Even if the inserts were missed, the latest version of Kevlar would take multiple rounds in the same spot without failure.

According to Russo, there could be as many as fourteen guards there, all of them aware that they were not to fire at anyone without Russo's orders. Russo thought the cutouts were going to erase only Sam and Sean.

Despite what Lewis had told Russo, Fifteen's orders had been clear. “Erase everybody there and leave no witnesses.” As Lewis had put it to his people, “If they didn't come here with us, they're staying after us.”

Figuring his team was in position up the road, Lewis raised his MP5 SD and fired at the men standing like cows in the curve of a nameless dirt road.