Target America

64

Special Agent Spencer Starks was not looking to become a hero. Far from it. To begin with, most heroes wound up dead, and he had no intention of concluding his FBI career as the thirty-seventh Service Martyr in the Hall of Honor. On the other hand, he believed fully in the old dogface axiom that had been drilled into his head during basic training: “Do something—even if it’s wrong!”

And those dudes back at the crossroads didn’t have the slightest clue. That didn’t make them bad guys, it just made them the wrong guys for the job, and it was probably a good thing they knew it. The problem for Starks was that even if he wasn’t exactly the right guy for the job, he wasn’t exactly the wrong guy, either, and he couldn’t just stand around back there listening to their hemming and hawing while people were fighting for their lives five miles up the road.

Sure, he might get there too late to do any good, but somebody had to try, and since he was the only combat vet on the scene, the responsibility fell to him.

At least, that’s how he saw it.

Starks was making pretty good time driving through the fog with the parking lights on, and according to the odometer, he was almost at the ranch. He was glad for the fog, thinking it might allow him to approach the scene without drawing fire. The main gate appeared out of the mist, and he pulled the car to the side of the road, killing the lights and the engine. He dismounted with a pair of Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, one slung around his back, and the other in his hands with the stock extended.

The night was dead quiet, and he couldn’t see more than five feet in any direction. Missing the protection of an Abrams tank and its Chobham armor, he knew that to continue directly up the dirt road would be unwise, so he took the iPhone from his pocket and checked to make sure that the compass app was functioning correctly. The agent took a bearing and left the road moving east, hoping the house would be more or less directly north of the main gate.

His load-out consisted of six magazines for the machine guns and three mags for his laser-sighted Sig Sauer .40 caliber pistol. He promised himself that he would withdraw if he lived long enough to run out of machine gun ammo. If he couldn’t get the job done with ninety machine gun rounds, he wasn’t likely going to turn the tide of battle with a pistol.

He came to a barbed wire fence and followed it north. Suddenly Starks stumbled over a dead body. Crouching down to examine it in the dim blue glow of his iPhone screen, the first thing he noticed was a vicious bite wound to the back of the neck.

“Looks like a Montana werewolf got your ass.” He rolled the body onto its back and noted immediately the Arab features of the face. “Welcome to America, asshole.” Starks peeled the night vision goggles off the dead man’s head and was about to move out, when he heard someone trotting toward him in the fog.

He slid to his belly, resting his thumb on the laser button of the MP5.

A figure appeared out of the fog gripping an AK-47. Starks’s laser sight appeared green in the night vision. He fired a six-round burst, and the man flew backward off his feet.

Starks jumped up and pounced on the body, bashing in the face with the stock of the MP5, as he had been trained to do as a soldier. Quickly stripping the body of the rifle and ammo pouch, he slung the MP5 and moved forward with the AK-47, feeling suddenly invincible as he muttered his uncle Steve’s old catchphrase from an all but forgotten war: “Charlie owns the night — but we’re taking it away from him.”