Threat warning

CHAPTER THIRTY – TWO

Kendig’s ten-minute deadline was overly ambitious, but he’d known that when he’d first issued it. It would take longer than that to get the Army fully outfitted and ready to fight. Ultimately, as the deadline came and went, that would further unnerve the Users who had commandeered the assembly hall.

The silence from inside the building seemed to have unsettled the soldiers in his Army as they moved farther and farther back from the building. There’d been no more suggestion of mutiny since Brother Kurt’s outburst, but the invader’s radio ruse had had some impact. Outside the Army’s security force, Kendig hadn’t had a lot of contact with the rank and file because there’d been no need. He was on the Board of Elders, and as such served an executive role; but living off the compound as he did, he didn’t get much opportunity to interact in routine matters.

All of that translated to not a lot of personal loyalty.

The ranks had thinned considerably. Some of his soldiers had been martyred, but he suspected that even more had fled. Those who remained-he figured it to be a force of eighty, maybe eighty-five-were terrified.

The assault that lay ahead fell far outside any training that the cadre of soldiers had received. Their training had always focused on specialized two- or three-person disruption teams who focused on their particular missions. The idea of a mass assault had never been addressed.

But now it was necessary.

Once Sister Colleen returned from Brother Michael’s house with his equipment, they’d be ready to begin. He’d allowed her to take his sheriff’s vehicle, so it shouldn’t take long.

As that thought was passing through his mind, he saw lights moving to his right, and he turned to see his Ford sedan pulling onto the grass from the driveway and heading straight toward him. When it stopped, he was shocked to see four people climb out. He walked over to join them, and as he closed to within a few yards, he recognized the sentry staff from the front gate.

“I found them tied up in the trees,” Sister Colleen explained as she opened the tailgate and pulled out two cases that looked not unlike electric guitar cases, but which in fact contained Barrett M82A3 fifty-caliber sniper rifles.

Kendig lost interest in the sentries and turned his attention to the rifles. “Only two?”

“The other two are missing,” Colleen explained.

Kendig scowled. “You checked the armory rooms in the basement?”

“That’s where I found these.”

“And the ammunition?”

Sister Colleen pointed to the two cans on the car deck. “That’s them. Green and silver tips, right?”

Kendig smiled. The heavy walls of the assembly hall made a conventional assault virtually impossible, but these Raufoss MK 211 explosive penetrator rounds would make quick work of it all. Tipped with an RDX explosive mixture, the Raufoss round left the barrel at twenty-eight hundred feet per second, but on impact with armor would launch a tungsten spike at four thousand feet per second to punch a three-quarter-inch hole. As the penetrator continued through the hole, it would spew zirconium particles, which would then ignite like a high-velocity sparkler. What wasn’t dismembered by the penetrator or blown apart by the high-order detonation of the RDX would likely be incinerated in the long-burning cloud of zirconium.

It was a heck of a bullet.

As he started to load ten-round magazines, he said to Sister Colleen, “Please find Brother Kurt and Brother Absalom and tell them I need to see them.”

The narrow view allowed by the slots in the shutters rendered Jonathan’s NVGs useless. He wore them rocked back on his head and pressed his monocular against his eye. His first impression was that there were a lot of them out there, followed by a more depressing realization that they were becoming organized. What had once been a crowd of people swarming in their panic had settled down to something that resembled organized units.

“Big Guy,” Jonathan called. “What do you see?”

“I got nothing over here.”

“Gunslinger?” When he got no response, he called again. This time, she responded. “Right here.”

“Do you see any activity?”

“Nothing back here.”

“Hey, Nasbe family!”

“We can’t see anything either,” Christyne reported.

So their entire assault force was gathering in the front of the building. Why would they do that?

“Hey, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked. “If you’re the opfor commander, why would you assemble your entire force to the same side of a structure?”

“Got a lot of people out there, do you?” Boxers quipped. “They could just be stupid.”

“Let’s assume they’re smart.”

Boxers shook his head. “I can’t get there. If they knew what they were doing, they’d at least come in on two angles. Let’s shoot at them and get them to disperse. Lord knows we’ve got the ammo and weapons.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. By firing into the gathering crowd, he could disrupt their assault even before it began. It was such a rookie mistake for them put all of their forces in such a small area that it almost seemed irresponsible not to capitalize on it.

Unless it wasn’t a mistake. A piece of the puzzle fell into place for Jonathan.

“Hey, Big Guy-”

From a hundred yards away, the woods line came alive with muzzle flashes as the opposing force-the opfor-opened up with a torrent of small-arms fire. Their bullets hit with the sound of so many hammers pounding on the wall. Jonathan brought his weapon to his shoulder and slipped his finger in the guard.

For every muzzle flash, there was a shooter just two feet behind it.

Then he understood.

“Everybody away from the windows!” he yelled.

Boxers looked at him as if he’d just discovered a second nose on his face.

“Nobody return fire,” Jonathan ordered. “They’re trying to draw muzzle flashes. That’s why they’re being so obvious.”

That didn’t help Boxers. And then he got it. “The fifty cal,” he said. It was the gun they’d heard being fired while surveilling Michael Copley’s house. He pulled away from his window.

“Everybody come into the sanctuary,” Jonathan said. “And everybody stay down.”

Gail looked particularly confused. “But what about-”

An explosion cut her words-a startling double blast, followed by a fireball and stuff erupting on the altar just beside her. She dropped instantly.

Then the living nightmare began.

Brother Kendig could sense the soldiers’ relief when he told them to open fire from way back here. That meant not exposing themselves to return fire. At least for now. There was something oddly beautiful about watching a building come apart a chunk at a time under the onslaught of bullets. Even in the relative darkness of the starlight, he could see chunks and crumbs flying away.

But those were distractions. He stayed focused on the front windows. Once he saw a flash of return fire, he’d know exactly where to put his Raufoss rounds, and once he started placing them, he wouldn’t stop until there were no more to place.

Only the return fire didn’t materialize.

“Could they be dead?” Brother Absalom shouted over the din.

Kendig couldn’t see how. But he was tired of waiting. “Open fire,” he said.

Ryan would never admit this, but he was relieved by the word to pull away from the windows. As tired as he was of this shit, and as cruel and awful as these Klansmen or whatever were, he didn’t think he had it in him to kill them. Brother Stephen had been an accident. That was a whole world away from aiming at a human target and shooting it. He didn’t even like first-person-shooter video games. Way too intense.

In the dark light of the candle wash from the sanctuary, he could see that his mom was relieved, too.

The urgency in Scorpion’s voice was scary, though. Apparently there was danger in The front wall of the church erupted in splashes of white-hot silver and gold fire as thunder boomed through the sanctuary and huge holes were blown through the front and back walls. Pews erupted in fountains of splintering wood. It was too much to take in all at once. Whole chunks of their universe were exploding, one after another, with less than a second in between.

Ryan and his mom stood there, half crouched and frozen in the doorway between the vestry and the sanctuary. He’d never seen this kind of destruction. Off to his left, the altar turned to powder. To his right, the front wall was burning in half a dozen places, and spot fires flared throughout.

The noise was unbearable-off-the-charts loud, like Fourth of July times ten.

His mother was screaming. So was he, he thought, but all he could hear was the rapid-fire boom-boom-boom of whatever they were shooting at him.

The dim light of the room grew darker as the smoke from the fires billowed under the roof, and soon he found himself coughing from it.

Ryan and Christyne were both staring at the tableau of billowing destruction when Scorpion tackled them.

People never ceased to amaze Jonathan. Their capacity for self-endangerment-known in his world as simple stupidity-seemed limitless.

The Nasbes just stood there like human targets, out in the open, watching the damage caused by the world’s most powerful sniper weapon as if it were a football game. He scrambled down the green side aisle as round after round sailed over his body to wreak havoc within the church.

“Get down!” he yelled. “Ryan! Christyne! Get down!” But they continued to stare.

If Jonathan was destined to lose this one, this was not how it was going down. He was not going to see them blown apart like pottery targets at a carnival shooting game. Throwing away countless years of experience and training, he rose to his feet under fire and took them both down with all the subtlety of a goal line tackle.

They hit hard, and Ryan howled in agony as Jonathan lay across both of them to protect them with his body.

“Ow!” Ryan yelled. “Oh, God, my arm!”

“You’re hurting him!” Christyne yelled, and she pushed at Jonathan to get off of her.

“Stop!” Jonathan commanded. “Both of you, just stop!”

The command worked.

Jonathan felt for the kid. On the positive side, he was still breathing enough to yell, and he was not going to die as long as Jonathan was still alive.

In a minute or so, the punishing onslaught ended as abruptly as it has started. Dozens of spot fires had been ignited, and the entire front wall-what was left of it-was ablaze. Two-inch holes had been blasted through the armored masonry in dozens of places, and the shutters had been reduced to tatters.

“What the hell was that?” Gail yelled from the back of the sanctuary.

The sound of her voice answered half Jonathan’s immediate question as he rose from the PCs. “Big Guy?”

“Whole and healthy,” he said. “Here they come.” Rising to one knee, Boxers brought his M4 to his shoulder and opened fire, sending twenty rounds downrange in one fully automatic string, and then he ducked for cover as a new fusillade of. 50-caliber rounds consumed his corner of the world with debris and fire.

The punishing assault had just ended when Boxers’ face appeared at the end of the nearest line of pews. “We can’t stay here, Boss,” he said.

“I concur,” Gail said, appearing a few seconds later. “Who knew they had a cannon out there?”

Jonathan ran the options through his head and came up with nothing but bleak outcomes. If they stayed in here, they’d either get burned out or sniped out. If they tried to escape the building, they’d get torn apart; but even if they could make it to the woods, what then? Enemy evasion was a specialized enough skill for professionals. He had a mother and her son along for the ride.

His instincts said to stay put and fight it out, but that option, bravado aside, could only end badly for all of them.

His earpiece popped as someone broke squelch on the radio. Kendig Neen’s voice said, “Last chance to surrender. That is, if you’re still alive. In thirty seconds, we’re coming for you.”

Jonathan looked to Boxers. “We’ve had this discussion before,” Big Guy said. “I don’t surrender. You want to try to make a break with them in tow, I’ll cover your six, but I don’t surrender to nobody.”

Christyne cried, “They’re going to kill us all!”

He looked to Gail. “I don’t see we have a chance either way,” she said.

“I’ll take that as a vote to fight,” Jonathan said.

She shrugged.

Christyne whined, “Maybe they’ll show mercy if we surrender?”

“No way,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen their mercy. I’m not going through-” He paused. “I hear a helicopter.”

“Fifteen seconds,” Neen said.

Jonathan glanced past the fire and saw skirmish lines forming. With the shutters gone, that would be their entry point. He heard the helicopters, too. “Big Guy?”

Boxers cocked his head. He scowled. Then he smiled. “Little Birds?”

Then, as if in answer to his question, a new voice arrived in his ear. “Scorpion, this is Romeo Foxtrot Six.”

The cavalry had arrived.

The sound of approaching helicopters startled Kendig. Aircraft never flew over this part of the world, unless they were ferrying Brother Michael from one place to another. Was it possible that he’d sent for his chopper to flee by air? If that were the case, then he must have been hiding from Sister Colleen when she went to his house to collect the weapons.

Then he heard the new voice on the radio. “… Romeo Foxtrot Six. We’re on quarter-mile final, coming in hot, and recommending you stay inside with your heads down.”

His stomach seized at the realization of what was happening. The sound of the rotors grew louder. The soldiers heard it, too, and shifted their gaze skyward, but there was nothing there. The sky remained black, free of any signs of approaching aircraft. All he saw were stars.

“There!” someone yelled, and he fired his rifle into the night sky.

Kendig saw the ink-stain silhouette against the stars just a second before the sky started returning fire. Muzzle flashes strobed like angry fireflies as the helicopter swooped to the ground with startling speed, and then, after only a second or two on the ground, swooped back into the sky.

Five seconds later, it happened again. The night roared with the sound of rotors and gunshots as the second chopper touched down and took off.

Now, though, the gunfire was louder. Black-clad killers moved out there among them, rending devastation.

Soldiers of the Army of God did their best to shoot, but no one knew for sure what the targets were, or where they were. Near Kendig, and all around him, people were dying in the darkness. He felt blood splash his face as one of the soldiers closest to him fell across the Barrett, rendering it momentarily useless.

Kendig looked to his left, to where Brother Absalom should be crouched with the other Barrett, but the young man had literally been blown in half at his navel.

Panic of the most malignant kind spread like floodwaters through a field, and in mere moments, the Army of God had been reduced to a fleeing mob. They pushed and jostled Kendig, who wasted precious seconds trying to reorganize them into something resembling a fighting force, but in the darkness and the confusion, that moment had passed.

With no one left to lead, he joined his fleeing troops.