Threat warning

CHAPTER THIRTY

Jonathan saw the man torturing the boy, but there was too much movement for a clear shot.

“Gunslinger’s in trouble. They’ve got me in my vehicle.”

Jonathan’s heart skipped. He threw a glance over his right shoulder, to where Gail had to be, but all he saw was the crowd of bad guys.

“PC-Two is in hand,” he heard Boxers say. “We’re going to Alpha.”

When he looked back down the green side, the torturer had let the kid drop and was already disappearing around the corner to the black side of Alpha. His distraction with Gail had let his moment to shoot evaporate.

“They’ve got me.”

Jonathan cursed under his breath.

And he turned his back on Gail. He had a job to do. This mission was first and foremost about the Nasbes. Once he had them secure, he could start worrying about the team. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.

With his weapon pressed against his shoulder, he made his way down the side of the building to the boy. “Ryan Nasbe,” he said.

The kid looked confused. “You’re not my dad.”

“No, I’m not,” Jonathan said. “But I sure could use his assistance right now. Can you walk?”

He was already rising to his feet. “My arm’s broken.”

“Then I promise I won’t make you walk on your hands. Stick very, very close to me.”

In his ear, her heard all kinds of commotion as people grabbed Gail and pulled her out of the pickup. It filled the airwaves.

“Who are you?” Ryan asked.

The distraction of Gail’s capture unnerved him. It would unnerve all of them. He switched his radio to push-to-talk. “Big Guy and Mother Hen, switch to channel two and PTT. Mother Hen, continue to monitor channel one. Hang tough, Gunslinger. We’ll come and get you soon.” The words hurt his stomach. Gail was on her own.

“Are you talking to me?” Ryan asked.

Jonathan placed a protective arm around the kid. “Scorpion on channel two. PC-One in hand, on our way to Alpha.”

The words had barely cleared throat when he heard intense gunfire from inside the building.

“We’ve got bad guys in Alpha,” Boxers said on channel two. Another burst of gunfire followed his words.

To Jonathan’s ear, they all sounded like rifles. Five-five-six millimeter, if he wasn’t mistaken, and some were set on full-auto.

“I’m coming in on the green side,” Jonathan said. “How does it look there?”

“I’m looking forward to you telling me when you get here,” Boxers said. Translation: Hurry the hell up.

“What’s going on?” Ryan asked.

“The beginning of a long night,” Jonathan said. “I need you to do exactly what I tell you, in exactly the way I tell you to do it.”

Ryan nodded.

Behind them and to the right, the crowd was catching on. They needed to get inside now.

Jonathan moved to the green-side door and tried the knob. Thank God it was unlocked. If he’d had to blow it to gain entrance, there’d have been no way to lock it behind him. He pushed Ryan flat against the wall. “Crouch down,” he said, and the kid did exactly as he was told.

Jonathan cracked the door. It was thick and heavy, true to its suspected role as the castle keep. He peeked in. It appeared to be an anteroom of some sort, not unlike the vestry in St. Katherine’s Church, where he’d spent hours of his youth as an altar boy. It was empty.

“Come on,” he said to Ryan, training his weapon down the side of the building now, in case any of the panicking mob saw them and decided to take action.

PC-One reacted instantly, slipping through the opening and into the room. Jonathan followed and pushed the door closed. It moved with the kind of momentum that would take a hand off if it got caught in the jamb. On the inside, Jonathan used the heavy metal lever to slide steel pins into the sides of the jamb with a resonant thunk.

“What was that?” Ryan asked, reminding Jonathan that in the zero-light environment, the kid was literally blind.

Beyond the interior door, a battle raged.

The anteroom provided no decent cover. Jonathan escorted Ryan to the exterior corner. “Stay here,” he instructed. “No matter what, stay right here.”

Ryan nodded.

“Say it,” Jonathan said. In stressful moments, people are many times more likely to remember something they’re told if they say it aloud.

“I’ll stay here.”

“No matter what.”

“No matter what. Can I have a gun?”

“No.” He didn’t have time for this. Boxers needed “A knife, then,” Ryan said. “I’m not letting them take me again. I’m not letting them cut off my head.”

Something in the words resonated with Jonathan. There was a desperation to them, but also a visceral commitment. And the kid had a point. At Resurrection House, Jonathan told the children that if someone tries to snatch them, they should fight to the death.

How was this different?

He lifted the trouser flap near his right calf, and produced a. 38-caliber snub-nose revolver. It was his last-resort backup weapon. He placed it in Ryan’s hand.

“Tell me you’re left handed,” he said.

“Okay, I’m left handed.”

Jonathan caught the tone. “But you’re not, are you?”

“ No.”

“Consistent with the rest of the night,” he said.

“Scorpion, Big Guy,” Boxers shouted in his ear above the chatter of gunfire. “Sit rep? I sure could use some company.”

Jonathan kept his focus on Ryan. “You don’t have to cock it,” he instructed. “Just point it and shoot. You’ll have to pull the trigger kind of hard. You have five shots.”

“If they get to me, I’ll only need one,” he said.

That one stunned him. He clamped his hand around the gun. “Listen to me, Ryan. I made a deal to bring you and your mom home safely. If you shoot yourself, I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

Even in the artificial light, he saw the boy smile. He got the irony.

Now it was time to join the war.

Gail understood that the promise to come get her was an empty one. This vehicle was their only way out. Without it, the entire mission was doomed. Looking back, she realized that it had been doomed from the beginning. The whole thing had been driven by too much testosterone and bravado, and not nearly enough thought.

Yet, she’d gone along, and here she was. Having witnessed what they’d tried to do to that little boy, she could only imagine what they had in store for her. She wasn’t going to give them that chance.

It was useless to resist as the mob rolled the pickup truck all the way onto its roof so that they could drag her out through the broken windows. She closed her eyes as she passed through the shards, and once her face was clear, her gear kept her pretty well protected from the rest of the wreckage. Her only hope was they would be so distracted by manhandling her that they wouldn’t notice in the dim light that the tactical holster on her thigh was empty.

They stood her up and pushed her backwards against the side of the vehicle. Hands started to paw at her. She fired her Glock from her hip, and the attacker closest to her dropped. Perhaps the noise was lost in the gunfire coming from the church, but the remaining attackers did not react until she fired again. And again. As two more attackers fell, the others caught on. Most backed away a few steps, some ran. Two raised their rifles. She shot them both, one in the forehead, one on the point of her jaw.

Startled, the rest of the crowd dove for cover. She knew they wouldn’t stay down for long, and from what she could see, most of them were armed; they just hadn’t yet set themselves to fight. She emptied her Glock at the assembled crowd as she scooted away, not so much aiming as peppering them. The intent was to keep their faces in the frozen ground long enough for her to get out.

When the slide locked back, she dropped the empty mag and slapped in a new one on the run. She slid the pistol back into its holster and switched her hands to the M4 dangling from its sling.

Nothing in her FBI training had ever addressed full-out retreat like this, but she instinctively knew to run in a zigzag and to keep low. She thought she heard firing behind her, but she didn’t turn to verify. All that mattered was that she hadn’t yet been hit. As long as that was the case, she was fine.

Her only hope at this point was to get to the black side of the church. From there, she’d at least have some cover. After that, well. ..

When she got to the red-black corner, Gail hook-slid on her butt and rolled to her stomach with her weapon poised on her shoulder. Even without night vision, she could make out a cluster of five or six of them running after her. When they saw her go to ground, two dropped to their knees and brought weapons to their shoulders. The others assumed standing firing positions.

She saw muzzle flashes and she opened up on them. They all dropped, though she wasn’t at all sure that she’d hit any of them. Moving with speed she hadn’t mustered in a very long time, she belly-crawled to the shelter of the back wall, where she switched to a left-handed grip and peered back around the corner at the troops she’d just shot at.

She felt a huge relief as she saw them all running away.

The first indication she had that anyone was behind her was when something heavy smashed into the back of her head.

Jonathan pressed his mike button and said, “I’m entering from a door on the green side.”

“About damn time,” Boxers replied. “If it’s the door I think it is, you’ll be able to hook left a few feet and enfilade these assholes. They’re all hunkering under pews and shooting like girls. I’m at the green-white corner. When you’re ready, I’ll lay down covering fire for you.”

Jonathan inched the door open enough to slither out on his belly and pushed it closed again. It was indeed a church, and it was lighted by a massive, three-tiered candlestick chandelier, which cast a bizarre, dancing light in Jonathan’s night vision. “Ready,” he said.

The second syllable had barely left his mouth when Boxers opened up from Jonathan’s right. The M4’s muzzle flashes nearly whited out Jonathan’s NVGs.

To his left, he saw chunks of wood flying from the wooden pews, and he knew precisely where the bad guys were. He pivoted to his left, rose to a crouch, and with his weapon up and ready, he advanced down the side aisle until he was even with the rows Boxers was targeting.

There they were. He didn’t have time to count, but it looked like eight or ten of them. They all wore the stupid caftans, and each of them was armed with some form of rifle, not that they were doing them any good at the moment. They looked more like they were trying to melt into the floor.

They looked so frightened that Jonathan decided to give them a single chance at survival. He said into his radio, “Cease fire.”

Boxers’ fusillade ceased as quickly as it had started.

In the silence that followed, Jonathan bellowed, “Nobody move! Stay down or I will kill you.”

Instinctively, he supposed, two of the shooters raised up. Jonathan stitched the wood above their heads with a three-round burst, and they dropped again.

“Down means down, assholes!” His tone was equal parts madman and drill instructor, specially cultivated for moments just like this. “Flat on the ground, arms out, fingers splayed. That’s the only way you survive.”

He sensed movement to his right from the white-green corner, and a quick glance confirmed that Boxers has risen to give him better cover.

“Everybody over there good, Big Guy?”

“One of us is bruised up and scared shitless, but-” He cut off his words and shifted his aim toward the back wall. “Guns!”

Boxers opened up at the back wall, where a black-clad figure pivoted and fell.

Jonathan dropped to a knee and brought his own weapon to bear on the shadows.

“Goddamn idiots!” Boxers boomed.

Where there was one gunman, there almost always was another. Jonathan held his aim, scanning the altar for a target to shoot. In the enhanced artificial light, he looked for curves where there should be straight lines and straight lines where there should be curves. And he looked for movement.

He saw it on the right-hand side of the altar, someone emerging from the shadows, and he swung his aim on it to take it out. He was half a pound from trigger break when he realized that the emerging target was Gail.

“Hold your fire!” he yelled. “It’s Gunslinger.”

She moved awkwardly, sidestepping out just a few feet into the open. Her weapon was gone, and he thought he could see a smear of blood in her hair.

Then he saw the pistol pointed at her head from behind the curtains that framed the altar.

“Take them, brothers and sisters!” a voice yelled from behind the curtain. “They won’t shoot as long as-”

Boxers’ rifle shot severed the man’s hand at the wrist, and the pistol dropped harmlessly to the floor. It hadn’t yet bounced when Jonathan raked the man’s location with bullets. Gail dropped out of sight.

In those two seconds of bedlam, mass insanity was born.

It started with a single voice launching a guttural yell from the cowering fighters huddled among the line of pews. It was the sound of raw emotion, and in two seconds, it had metastasized to the entire room.

“This can’t be good,” Jonathan said.

It wasn’t.

As the chorus of voices rose from all corners, he shot a look to Boxers. The Big Guy seemed hopeful for a fight.

He got his wish.

As the ear-shattering eruption of noise crescendoed, robed gunmen seemed to materialize out of ether. One second, the church seemed mostly empty, and the next, it was filled with target silhouettes, each one standing, and each one brandishing a rifle of some sort.

Jonathan eliminated the most immediate threat by unleashing the remainder of his M4’s magazine-twenty-one steel-jacketed rounds-down the length of the gunmen to whom he’d tried to show mercy. The bullets left the muzzle of his rifle in seven three-round bursts, and the bad guys were so well aligned that individual bullets had to be taking out multiple targets as they passed through one person into the people standing behind him. He did it all from his knee, and in less than five seconds, the bodies were everywhere.

With that threat neutralized, he shifted his aim to the rest of the cavernous room. He saw one gunman in the far right-hand corner-the red-black corner-but even as his finger tightened on the trigger, he saw blood spray from his shoulders, and he dropped, dead on the spot from a burst delivered by Boxers.

As quickly as the sound had peaked, the room was now silent, save for the moans of the wounded. Jonathan yelled, “Big Guy?”

“Fully satisfied,” Boxers yelled back.

“And PC-Two?”

“Still scared, still okay.”

“Gunslinger?”

Gail sat up on the stage, her legs crossed, and pressed her hand against her bleeding head. “I’m fine,” she said.

Jonathan started his check of the room and the wounded. The issue at this point was not to provide them with medical assistance-they’d lost that courtesy when they opened fire en masse-but rather to disarm them to make sure that they could pose no further threat.

The numbers were astounding. Jonathan counted eighteen dead and seven wounded, all of whom would likely be dead before the sun rose. With the gift of marksmanship came the curse of accuracy. While he surveyed the carnage from the green-side aisle, Boxers shadowed him from the red side. When they were done, they’d collected an impressive arsenal of weapons.

They met in the middle, near the altar, where a Klansman lay with his head unzipped and his brain excised. Jonathan said, “I think we’re clear.” He walked a few steps to Gail, and stooped to assess her head wound. “Are you okay? Here, let me take a look.”

She pulled away. “I’m fine.”

“Let me see anyway,” he said. He pulled his NVGs out of the way for a better look. The candlelight wasn’t nearly bright enough, but he didn’t dare give the enemy outside a white-light target. He thought he saw a one-inch gash, maybe worthy of a couple of stitches, maybe not. “I think you’ll be fine,” he said.

“I already told you that,” Gail replied. She surveyed the carnage, really taking it in for the first time. “What’s with these people? That was like a mass suicide.”

“I write it off to zealotry,” Jonathan said.

Christyne Nasbe stood from behind the pew where Boxers had taken shelter. “Where’s Ryan?”

Boxers pointed his forefinger as if it were a gun. “You stay down.”

“Shut up!” she shouted. “Where’s my son?”