High Treason

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The release on the trailer hitch didn’t want to let go. The latch had frozen shut, and no matter how hard David pulled, he couldn’t get the lever to lift. “Unbelievable.” Will anything go right tonight?

He pressed his transmit button. “Hey, Mother Hen.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re not going to believe this. The trailer hitch is frozen. I can’t release it.”

A pause.

“And before you ask, I don’t have a hammer, and as far as I can tell, this truck doesn’t have any tools on board. Everything that was heavy and solid is out there on the boat.”

When Mother Hen’s voice returned to his ear, he could hear a smile in it. “Wolverine wants to know how full your bladder is.”

What the hell kind of stupid question—

Then he got it. Pee on the latch. Not the most dignified solution, but there was a certain elegance to it. Plus there was the whole thing of killing two birds with one stone.

And it worked. The hitch was still steaming when he used his gloved hand to release the latch. Memo to file: throw the gloves away. That done, the trailer lifted easily off the ball. He gave it a little shove to impart momentum, and then watched as it drifted into the water… and stopped two feet from shore.

Screw it. He keyed his mike. “I’m free of the trailer. Now I’m on my way to save the day.”

As he walked carefully through the snow to the front of the truck, he wondered if there’d be DNA or something in the yellow snow that would connect him to this night.

Then he realized it was silly to worry. He’d probably be dead before dawn.

The vest he wore over his coat was as bulky and uncomfortable in the front seat as it had been in the back, but he kept it on. The imagery that Scorpion had conjured as he explained the ballistic trenches that bullets carved through human flesh still lingered vividly in his mind.

The seat was as far back as it could go to accommodate Big Guy, and with the vest in place, David couldn’t reach to the floor between his legs to get to the adjustment bar. Muttering a curse, he climbed back outside to make the adjustment from a spot next to the door. When he was done, the seat was probably still going to be too far back, but he’d find a way to deal with it.

Finally settled into his seat, grateful that they’d let the engine and its heater continue to run, he pulled the transmission lever into drive and stepped on the gas.

Nothing happened. The engine whined louder and the tachometer climbed, but the truck itself didn’t move.

“You have to be friggin’ kidding me.” He was stuck in the snow.

Don’t panic. You’ve been stuck before.

He pulled the transmission lever all the way to the right, to low, and tried to be more gentle on the gas. With the slightest application of torque, the rear wheel spun as if it were… well, as if it were on ice.

With a flash of inspiration, he searched for the lever that would engage the four-wheel drive. There was none.

“Are you shitting me?” he yelled to the car’s interior. He pressed the radio button. “Hey Mother Hen. You there?”

“Go ahead.”

“Who’s the genius that ordered up a rear-wheel-drive truck?”

Silence. Then: “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“Yeah,” David said. “I’m friggin’ kidding you because that’s what I do when I’m about to get caught in the middle of a shit storm. No, I’m not kidding! When we came out here, we were about a thousand pounds heavier than I am now. The bed of the truck is empty, the tires are on ice, and this puppy isn’t moving. And please don’t tell me to take a shit in the snow, because I really don’t see how that could help.”

“Stand by.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said off the air. “I’ll stand by. Because, you know, there’s no other goddamn option!” He slammed the steering wheel with his hand. He tried the gas again, pressing a little harder this time. The result was to move sideways and drift closer to the water. He took his foot off entirely.

“Shit.”

Boxers had just cut the throttles to coast into the shore when Venice delivered the news that the truck was stuck in Ottawa and would not be able to make the rendezvous in Quebec. The news knotted Jonathan’s gut.

He looked to Big Guy. “I say we’re in too deep to abort now,” he whispered.

“You’re damn right we’re not aborting,” Yelena said. Under the circumstances, Jonathan had granted permission to join them on channel one.

“Hush,” Jonathan said. “You don’t get a vote, and keep your voice down.”

Boxers said, “I think it’s tonight or it’s not at all.”

Jonathan acknowledged with a nod. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. Y’all need to get us an exfil alternative, and you need to do it quickly. Wake up Striker and get him back in the game. If nothing else works, he’ll be able to pluck us out of the boat in the river.”

Jonathan let up on the transmit button and looked to Boxers. “Are you ready?”

“I’m always ready to make noise.”

Jonathan keyed his mike. “We’re going hot.”

Jonathan turned to Yelena. “Your job is to do exactly what I tell you, exactly when I tell you to do it. You don’t shoot at anything unless it shoots at you first, understand?”

She nodded. At last, that hard emotionless mask had started to crack. There might actually have been some fear in her eyes. Jonathan was happy to see it.

“I need you to say it,” he pressed.

“I understand.”

Jonathan continued. “If all else fails, stay low. Big Guy and I have night vision, you don’t. If you go completely blind, say something and we’ll stop. Do not turn on a light unless I tell you to. Got it?”

“Yes.”

He gave her a harder look, testing those eyes, then decided she was as stable as she was going to be.

“Okay, Big Guy, let’s go.”

Barely moving the throttles an inch, Boxers drove the boat up to the edge of the ice line, and then surged the engines once to run the bow aground. He kept the throttles engaged as Jonathan moved around the cockpit to the bow, where he grabbed the once-coiled thirty-foot line and stepped gingerly out onto the ice. With all the crap he was wearing, if he fell through, he would become the anchor.

The ice held. Jonathan suspected that the ice was really just snow-covered ground, which meant that they were lucky not to have broken off the motors’ propellers. Waddling across the snow at a crouch, he made his way to a young but sturdy-looking tree, and tied the rope around its trunk. Behind him, the engines cut off.

By the time he turned around, Boxers was helping the First Lady out of the boat and onto the ground. Ever the grouch, he was likewise always the gentleman.

Their designated entry point into the walled compound was the main entrance, an iron gate in the middle of the north-south wall, a hike of about a hundred yards. They moved along the western coast of the island, where the gentle slope down to the water gave them complete defilade from anyone who was not standing on the roof of the building. And after scanning the roofline carefully with a digital monocular, Jonathan determined that no one was.

When his GPS told him that he was directly across from the main gate, he beckoned for Boxers to follow him. “You stay there,” he said to Yelena.

Adjusting their equipment to stay out of the way, Jonathan and Boxers moved in unison to drop to their bellies and crawl the last fifty feet or so of the incline. Even the most bored, inattentive of sentries would be attracted to a pair of black silhouettes moving against the horizon.

They lifted their NVGs out of the way so they could survey the area more closely with their monoculars. The amount of ambient light, reflected as it was off the snow, gave them a pretty clear view.

River Road lay between them and the gate, and the far edge of the road passed within fifteen feet of the outermost wall. The front gates were not nearly as imposing as Jonathan had expected, consisting of wrought-iron spikes that rose not quite to the height of the twelve-foot stone walls. And they were wide open. A courtyard lay beyond the gate, measuring sixty feet wide by thirty feet deep. Two massive doors blocked entrance to the main building — building Foxtrot — on the far side of the courtyard.

“You suppose those big doors are locked?” Boxers whispered.

“Nothing a GPC can’t handle,” Jonathan said. A GPC — general purpose charge — was a block of C4 explosive with a det cord tail. Jonathan liked to think of them as skeleton keys. They guaranteed entry to anyplace he wanted to go.

“I count two sentries,” Jonathan said. Both stood inside the courtyard, flanking the big doors. They stomped their feet as if they’d been standing in the cold for a long time. “I see AKs — no surprise there — but no sign of body armor. You concur?”

“I concur.”

The other sentries they’d seen in the satellite photos patrolled areas inside the compound walls.

“Then let’s go to work,” Jonathan said. He flipped the NVGs back down and brought the extended stock of the MP7 tight against his shoulder. He’d outfitted the weapon with an infrared laser sight, the beam from which would be invisible to anyone who did not have night vision. At this range, the sight guaranteed a kill.

“You take the guy on the left,” Jonathan whispered. “I’ve got the guy on the right.”

“Rog.”

“In three, two, one.”

The weapons fired in unison, one shot each, emitting a pop that sounded more like a firecracker than a gunshot, and launching a tiny 4.6 millimeter bullet at 2,300 feet per second. The targets died in unison. They were already falling before the sound of the gunshots made it halfway across the road.

“Let’s go,” Jonathan said. He turned to beckon Yelena forward, but she had clearly heard him and was already on her way. When she joined them, Jonathan said, “Think of yourself as my shadow. Do what I do, but don’t shoot unless I tell you to.”

This time, he didn’t wait for an answer.

Boxers moved out first, just as far as the near edge of the road, where he took a knee, and, with his weapon to his shoulder, he scanned an arc from left to right. “Clear,” he said.

Jonathan moved next. He grabbed Yelena by her vest to get her going, but then let go as he led her past Boxers and then all the way across the road to the left-hand edge of the gate wall. “Stay,” he said to Yelena, and then he pivoted into the courtyard to scan for any threats they night have missed. Seeing none, he keyed his mike. “Clear.” He motioned Yelena to come closer.

Five seconds later, Boxers was back with them. “I hate it when things start easy,” he said. Call it warriors’ pessimism, but this was a classic way to pull your opponent into a trap. You give them all the encouragement they need to keep moving forward, and then you let them have it when they’re in too deeply to retreat.

Jonathan turned to address Yelena and saw that she was staring at the dead sentry who lay at her feet. The sentry seemed to stare back at her. Jonathan rapped on her helmet to get her attention and she jumped. “If you see somebody with a weapon, you say ‘gun to the right’ or wherever they are, and Big Guy and I will take him out. Your weapon is too loud. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“And to think that I actually had to train for years to master this shit,” Boxers grumbled.

Jonathan brought his weapon back to his shoulder and nodded to the six-inch ring that served as the knob for the enormous door. “Just how easy is it?”

The ring turned and the door floated open. “Too,” Big Guy said.

“Yelena, stay till we call for you.” To Boxers, “You call it.”

“Three, two, one.” Boxers pushed the door open all the way. Following their long-standing protocol, Jonathan went in low and turned to the left while Boxers went in high and turned to the right.

The doors opened onto a wide stone vestibule that Jonathan guessed might have been a processing area back in the day, or maybe a waiting room for visiting relatives. More a part of the structure of the wall than of the prison it surrounded, the vestibule was devoid of furniture and was dimly lit by only a single bulb that dangled from the ceiling. The prominent feature of the room was another door on the far side, directly across from the one they’d just entered.

Jonathan turned back toward the courtyard, where the First Lady stood in the doorway. “Yelena, come in.”

As she stepped inside, her eyes never stopped scanning. It was as if she was trying to memorize everything she saw.

When she cleared the jamb, Jonathan and Boxers moved around her to drag the dead sentries inside. With luck, if they were noted to be missing, no one would see the blood slicks. They laid the bodies side by side in the middle of the room, and Jonathan went back to shut the doors. With the panel closed, Jonathan could see the locking mechanism that was clearly designed to keep people out rather than in. Foot-long steel bars slid into matching keepers on the opposite panel — four of them in total, at eye, chest, belt, and knee level. Boxers started to push one of them home, but Jonathan stopped him.

“I’m not sure that’s a great idea,” he said. “I think we want stuff to look as normal as possible for as long as it can.”

“You mean, except for the corpses?”

“Maybe we should move them off to the side,” Jonathan conceded. They each chose a body and dragged it from the middle of the floor to the corner where the southern and eastern walls met.

Yelena watched in silence. In the yellow glow of the incandescent light, the massive head wounds stood out in clear relief.

“Don’t freak out on us now,” Boxers said. “This is what you signed on for.”

“I’m not freaking out about anything,” she said. “I’ve seen bodies before.”

Big Guy drew his KA-BAR knife from its sheath on his shoulder, and used it as extension of his arm to kill the overhead lightbulb with a single swipe, drenching them in darkness.

Jonathan flipped down his NVGs, turning the darkness into green daylight. “Just stay close to us, Mrs. Darmond,” he said. “Keep a hand on my back if you have to. We can see everything just fine.”

“I can see shadows,” she said.

If their intel was right — and so far, it had been holding up pretty well — the door ahead led to a hallway. A turn to the left would take them to the chapel, and a turn to the right would take them to the oldest portion of the jail, which they believed to be empty. Going straight would take them out to the prison yard, and the cluster of buildings that comprised the cell blocks and barracks. If things went according to plan, they could be out of here and on their way home in ten minutes. Fifteen, max.

They moved to the next door, and paused to repeat the same entry maneuver. “Ma’am, remember that you are always the last one through a door, okay? Going in or coming out, you’re last.”

A radio broke squelch behind them.

Jonathan pivoted and reflexively pushed Yelena to the floor. He planted a knee on her back to keep her out of any field of fire. “Ow!” she protested, but he didn’t care.

“Guard units report in,” a voice said in a Russian-accented English. It came from one of the dead sentries.

“Unit One is on post and cold.”

“Unit Two’s okay.”

Silence.

In unison, Jonathan and Boxers said, “Uh-oh.” Jonathan stood and helped Yelena to her feet.

“Unit Three? Are you there?” the Russian voice said.

“This is trouble,” Boxers grumbled.

“What is it?” Yelena asked.

“Unit Three, report.”

“Some kind of situation check. Making sure the guards are awake and on station.”

“Unit Four?”

No response.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Boxers said, gesturing to the bodies, “allow me to introduce Units Three and Four. We need to get moving.”

Jonathan moved to one of the bodies and found his radio. “Might help to know what they’re up to,” he said.

He joined Boxers at the door, checked to make sure that Yelena was out of harm’s way, then nodded to Big Guy. “Let’s go.”

Becky hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep until somebody rattled her shoulder. She awoke with a start and a hammering heart, and the utter conviction that she should be running away from something.

“All right, Chickadee, it’s time to go to work.” It was Striker, and his eyes looked even more intense than usual.

Apparently, she’d been pretty deeply into REM sleep because none of this resonated with her. “I don’t understand.”

“Scorpion needs our help,” he said. “Looks like we get to join the shooting war.”

Becky felt a chill. “I still don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. Get your pretty little ass up and I’ll fill you in.”

As wakefulness bloomed larger, Becky became aware of the cold. She’d been sitting in the cargo area of the helicopter as she waited for the others to return from their mission, and at some point, she’d apparently drifted off. Now, as she sat back up, she became aware of the breeze that poured through the aircraft. A few seconds later, she realized that Striker had modified things significantly.

“What happened to the doors?” she asked.

“I’m sorry to say that they had to be sacrificed. Small price to pay, though.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s because you haven’t got your ass up yet.”

Becky rolled to her feet and stood. It turned out to be even colder than she’d expected.

“Put your vest back on,” Striker said. “We’re going into the shit, and I don’t want your guts messing up the back of my helicopter.”

The vest lay on the floor, where she’d dropped it. Becky stooped and picked it up, then shrugged herself into it. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Close all the fasteners,” Striker said. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing all the way.”

She worked the Velcro straps. “Tell me again where the doors went?”

“I had to take them off so that you can be my door gunner.” Striker said that as if it were the most obvious thing in the world; as if she should have figured it out for herself.

“Your what?”

He held out a harness, loops made of three-inch-wide strips of nylon. “Put this on.”

“No. Why?”

“So you don’t fall to your death out of the open doors.”

Okay, that made sense, she supposed. She took a step closer. “How do I…”

“Put your legs in here,” Striker said. The harness looked a lot like a parachute without the parachute. Becky stepped into the leg openings first, and then allowed him to thread her arms through what was essentially a pair of suspenders. Then Striker clipped it all together into a square plate just below her breasts.

“This is the DFWI button,” Striker said, pointing to a round spot on the plate.

“Don’t fuck with it,” Becky translated. “Like the selector switch on the rifle.”

“Right. Press that and the whole harness falls away. You only use it if we, like, fall into the water and you’re being dragged down by the sinking aircraft.”

“Oh my God.”

He waved at the air. “No, I don’t mean to spook you. We’re not going to spend a lot of time over water.”

“Where are we going to spend a lot of time?” she asked. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Striker nodded to the two rifles that lay on the floor. One was the one Scorpion had given her, and the other was one that Scorpion had left behind. To her eye, they both looked the same.

“Were you any good with those?”

Something in the way he asked the question rang a warning bell. “I’m not shooting at anyone,” she said.

“I get that,” Striker said. “And the only people you’ll need to shoot at are the ones who shoot at you first.” As he spoke, he stretched out a bungee cord from a spot between her shoulder blades and hooked it into a wire that she’d not noticed, which ran the width of the helicopter, from door to door. “We’re open on both sides because I don’t know where the enemy will be. You’ll be our only defense, though, so try to shoot straight when the time comes.”

Becky felt as if she’d entered a show in the middle of the third act. Worse, it was a show she didn’t like. “I’m not shooting at anyone,” she said. “I’ve already told you that.”

“I respect that,” Striker said as he lifted one of the rifles from the floor. He arranged the loop in the strap so that she could slip her right arm into it.

She complied.

“Here’s the thing,” Striker continued. “I got a call from Mother Hen that the team is in trouble and they need us to pluck them out of it. This chopper is your ride home, and I’m going. Your choices are to stay behind and find your own way back to wherever you come from, or you can roger up and save a few lives.”

“I don’t believe in killing,” Becky said. Why couldn’t these people understand such a simple concept?

“Then you’re just flat-out in the wrong damn place,” Striker said.

Becky opened her mouth to respond, but shut it when she realized that she had no idea what to say.

Striker inhaled deeply, and then planted his fists on his hips, his head cocked to the side. “Look, Miss. Becky, is it?”

She nodded.

“Look, Becky. With all respect, you’re in exactly the same position as every soldier who’s gone to war for the first time. You’re scared shitless. Thing is, you don’t know if you’re more scared of killing or being killed. That’s fine. All I know is there’s a bunch of people out there who are taking a lot of risk to separate good guys from bad guys. I’m going out there to help them, and all of us have a lot better chance of coming home alive if I’ve got a gunner in the door. If you say no, the answer is no, and you get to live the rest of your life wondering how things would have been different if you answered the call. Call it a shitty deal if you want, but it’s the facts. Tell me what you want to do.”

What she wanted to do was set the clock back and tell David to eff off when he asked her for help.

“I’m not going to shoot,” she said.

“Put the safety on, then,” Striker said.

She placed her thumb on the lever and pressed. The switch was already in the right place.

Striker twitched his head in an approving nod. “All right, then,” he said. “That lanyard should hold you. If we get into some wild gyrations, though, you might should hang on to keep from rolling out of the door. Worst case, though, you can’t fall out.” He smiled. “You good?”

The only appropriate answer was a lie. “I’m fine,” she said.

Striker’s smile became a grin. “Cool. Let’s go save us a couple of lives.”

“Rooster, Mother Hen. We have instructions for you. You need to leave the vehicle. You’re too close to a main highway to risk being seen by police.”

It was an outcome that David hadn’t even considered. He hadn’t seen any traffic, but that was more a function of the hour than the location. Plus, there were tire tracks leading from the roadway to this spot. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for a passing cop car to assume that someone had driven off the road into danger.

He’d already pulled the door handle and was sliding back out into the cold when he said, “Where do you want me to go?”

“Are you armed?”

“I can be.”

“No. Leave all weapons behind and just start walking east. Keep the river on your left. Walk toward the downtown. If Scorpion gave you a ballistic vest, leave that behind, too. You need to look like a guy out for a walk.”

“I want to be very clear,” David said. “I do not want to be stranded here.”

“Understood. But there’s no more surefire way to get stranded than to get yourself arrested.”

It was a very good point. He stripped off the vest with its pouches of ammunition and tossed it onto the Chevy’s front seat. For good measure, he leaned back inside and turned off the ignition and removed the key. He slipped it into his pants pocket. He was about to close and lock the door when he remembered that the radio was attached to the vest. He pulled it out of its pouch, disconnected the remote transmit connection and slipped the radio into his coat pocket. From now on, he’d have to bring the unit to his mouth to speak.

Wanting to avoid the highway, he turned left and headed down toward the water, where a ring of trees along the shoreline would give him a little cover.

He pressed the mike button. “What do I tell a cop if I do run into one? And how am I getting out of here?”

A long silence.

“Mother Hen?”

“Rooster, right now, I don’t know how anybody’s getting out of there. Do your best to stay safe and I’ll get back to you. Keep the channel clear.”

There was an edge to Mother Hen’s voice that he hadn’t heard before, and in a rush, he realized how many people he’d just let down. Here he was, trying to extract himself from danger at the very moment when everybody else was walking headlong into it. A terrible weight appeared in his gut. It felt like cowardice.

It felt like shame.

But what choice did he have? He wasn’t the one who’d abandoned anyone on the shore. The others had abandoned him.

The slope toward the river steepened as he approached the tree line, and he forced himself to take smaller steps.

Why did he feel so guilty about all of this? He was a victim, for God’s sake. He only came along because it felt like a grand adventure. That, and because if the mission failed, he’d have nothing to live for back home anyway.

He came along because a perfect stranger saved him from certain death, and it seemed like the right thing to do. The decent thing to do.

Now those perfect strangers were heading into hell to save him again. And he was walking away.

He wished he’d jumped on the boat with the First Lady. Except he couldn’t have, because then they’d have no way of getting away.

Which they still didn’t because he’d stranded the goddamn truck.

The air among the trees was noticeably warmer than the air directly at water’s edge, but the footing became progressively more treacherous.

He hadn’t walked very far — maybe a hundred yards — when he saw a line of headlights approaching. It looked like a clutch of six, maybe eight trucks, neither huge nor small, heading right for him down the Ottawa River Parkway. At the last minute, just before they would have passed closest to him, the first vehicle swung a hard right onto River Road, the approach that led exclusively to Saint Stephen’s Island. The second truck in the line followed, and then the third and the fourth. The others, too. They all bore the markings of various moving and storage companies.

David pulled his radio from his pocket and keyed his mike. “Yo, Mother Hen, is your satellite picture picking up the parade of trucks that’s headed right toward our team?”

The last truck in the line — there turned out to be nine of them in all — stopped just after making the turn, maybe twenty, thirty yards away from David. A man dressed in a puffy blue ski jacket climbed out of the driver’s seat and walked around to the back of the truck.

Mother Hen’s voice chirped loudly, “Do you have traffic for me?”

The noise might as well have been a cymbal crash, it was so loud against the silence of the night. David moved quickly to press the radio against his chest to muffle the sound, but it was too late.

Blue Coat stopped abruptly and turned. He looked in David’s general direction, but not straight at him. And he had a pistol in his hand.

Shit, shit, shit…

If Mother Hen tried to contact him again, they guy would hear it for sure. David reached with his other hand and turned the button he thought was the volume control until it clicked. He’d either turned it off or changed the channel. He hoped that either one would buy him invisibility.

Blue Coat didn’t move for a long time. In the wash of the taillights, David could see him squinting into the night. After what must have been two solid minutes, he holstered his gun — his weapon—and slid open the roll-up panel in the back of the truck. He removed what looked to be planks and saw horse supports.

In fact, that’s exactly what they turned out to be. Blue Coat assembled them at the turn and positioned them in such a way as to block off the entire roadway. Battery-powered yellow lights flashed to alert people that from that point north, River Road was closed.

Blue Coat didn’t bother to close the back of the truck before heading back to his driver’s seat. As he mounted the vehicle, he pulled something from the side door panel and swung it around to point back toward David.

The beam of a powerful flashlight nearly blinded him. He froze, certain that he’d been seen, and, because he could no longer see the driver, equally certain that he would be shot dead within seconds.

Then the light moved. The driver was scanning the tree line, one last look to convince himself that he hadn’t heard what he in fact had. Apparently satisfied, he turned off his light and climbed into his seat. Ten seconds later, he was on his way to join his friends.

His heart hammering and his hands trembling to the point of convulsion, David turned his radio back on.

“… Hen. Respond, please.”

“Rooster here. But barely.”

“Be advised that there’s a line of trucks heading right for you.”

“No kidding,” he said. “You be advised that I am not walking into town. It’s wrong and I’m not doing it.”

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not running. Now I’m going to keep the channel clear.” He turned the volume down to nearly nothing and put the radio back into his pocket.

He’d spoken the truth about not knowing what he was going to do. But one thing was certain: Bad things were about to happen to people to whom he owed a lot. If they needed him, he was going to be as close as he could be — not as far away.

If it came to that, though, he was going to need firepower.

He spun on his heel and ran as fast as the snow would allow back toward the stranded Chevy.