The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 38

By and large, the men George Pierce had lost already were of very little concern to him.

Nor did he fret about the fate of those who would surely die in the bloody weeks ahead. This terror and turmoil he was helping create would soon transition to the war that he’d always wanted—a bloody battle against the tyranny of the elitists, their heathen puppets, and the one-worlders. At last the day of reckoning was coming, and all those who would give their lives in this final showdown, civilians and soldiers alike, could not have dreamed of a higher endeavor in which to make that sacrifice.

There would be a bleak period of adjustment, no doubt, a time of cleansing, reconstruction, and reeducation. Sadly, there were some so-called Americans who simply wouldn’t be a part of this future. Twenty-five million or so was the conservative estimate his strategists had given him. But so be it; many more had been lost in the name of far less noble goals.

The end was near, and only a few tasks remained in the menial part he was currently playing. He’d gone along and done as he was told, biding his time and preparing to return to his own agenda when the time was right. And there was still one burning need in him, admittedly a personal vendetta, and he would have it satisfied before the night was done.

He didn’t consider himself to be a man whose wrath was easily kindled, but if George Pierce had a flaw it was this: once he was wronged and his sense of justice was awakened, it wouldn’t rest again until the books had been brought back into balance.

Warren Landers had recently made contact and ordered him to be ready if the need arose to move against Molly Ross and her people, wherever they were hiding. It might not be necessary at all, he’d said. The Founders’ Keepers were to be implicated in the planning of a massive domestic attack of some sort, as if such high-and-mighty weaklings would ever be capable of doing such a thing. But that story wouldn’t play if they continued to cower somewhere in a safe house, so Pierce’s role would be to flush them out of hiding if they wouldn’t come out on their own.

Landers was not a trusting man. He’d still insisted on keeping her location a secret. In the course of this conversation, though, he’d inadvertently said too much and let slip some important information.

Wherever she was hiding, Molly Ross was within a two-hour drive from the spot where George Pierce was currently standing in his war room. Two hours away over land: that was the time frame he’d been given in which to execute his role if called upon. With that knowledge he’d measured and drawn a small, scaled circle on the terrain map, with his compound at its center point.

Other scattered details further narrowed the possible locations. The place was rural and remote, far from the nearest town, he’d been told, and its two dozen or so able-bodied residents might be well prepared to mount an armed defense. Their large dwelling was in the midst of a great deal of private land, and that meant that if they managed to call for help it would be a long time in arriving. They were under surveillance from eyes in the sky, so it was known that Molly Ross and her people were still hunkered down in the same place they’d run to when they’d made their escape two weeks before.

Now the other puzzle pieces could be laid aside. Their unexpected nearness and the fact that a drone was orbiting above them: those two bits of information would be her undoing.

Pierce had used some of the money he’d been paid to buy an assortment of black-market radio gear and a set of classified schematics that had been on his wish list for a long time. With these items his technical men had built a home-brewed transceiver. This rig had actually first been invented by al-Qaeda engineers almost ten years before, back when American drones had first begun to play an increasingly publicized role in finding and killing their leadership. Later versions of this setup were rumored to be capable of disrupting or even taking control of the aircraft, but those weren’t the capabilities he needed right now. All George Pierce required was to hack in and see what those airborne cameras were seeing, and to be able to ask that drone exactly where it was.

The men had brought in a folding table, set up the rig, and run the proper line to an antenna array outside. His most skilled communications specialists sat before the snowy display screen, tuning and tweaking the dials with a safecracker’s touch, searching along the narrow spectrum for a faint encrypted signal somewhere out there, just within range.

Those Talion people Landers had hired to do his bidding were very well trained and equipped. Their gear, however, wasn’t the latest tech available to the legitimate U.S. military. They had weaponry, helicopters, tanks, APCs, and even jets, but it was all years old, the type of equipment often sold to second-rate allies overseas.

Their drones were yesterday’s news as well, and the secrets of this particular class of craft had been studied and ultimately cracked by the very terrorist forces they’d been deployed to watch and harass along the Afghan–Pakistan border. A UAV maintains a constant data link with its controllers, and that signal can be captured if a man knows where to find it.

At last the picture swam and hissed and then stabilized. An image appeared, the same one he’d seen for only a second when Landers had shown it before: a large house, outbuildings and corrals, and sprawling open land surrounding it all. With a tapping on the keyboard an electronic inquiry was sent and back streamed a screen full of telemetry data, including the coordinates of the target residence.

The men let out a triumphant yell, one of them turned up the lights, and another called out the key data to be copied down. George Pierce bent over the large map on his table, traced the coordinates with his fingers, and quickly found the place.

“Feed those numbers into a GPS,” he said, “then get all the men together, get everybody, but do it quiet.” He was thinking of the skeleton crew of Talion mercenaries that Landers had left with him, camped in the field outside. Without any doubt part of their job was to keep watch over their hosts and report any hints of revolt.

But a time comes when every leader must face the Rubicon and make his choice to cross it or deny his destiny. This was a turning point, and although it had come sooner than he’d expected, he would not shy away.

“No,” Pierce said. “We’re not going to slink off our own land and sneak away to do what’s right. Now listen up. Keep the man out there in the radio tent alive, and we’ll persuade him to keep his boss informed that we’re all still doing what we’re told. As for the others, I want you boys to go now and kill everyone outside that ain’t one of us. Take them all at once, and I don’t want to hear any alarms go off, you understand? Make it quick and quiet and clean.”

The men nodded, and a few of them smiled.

Then Pierce thumped the X he’d drawn on the map in front of him.

“And then you go there,” he said, “all of you. Drive down to that ranch and murder everything moving. Man, woman, or child, it makes no difference to me. Kill them all and we’ll let God sort ’em out. Burn the place to the ground, but you save one thing for me.” He raised his voice so all could hear. “I’ll give ten thousand in gold to the man who brings that Molly Ross back here alive to face the music.”