Against All Enemies (41 page)

Ahead of him, Jolaine vaulted two of the dead sentries without slowing, then dropped to a knee about eighty feet farther in. He mirrored the posture next to her. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Just want to make sure I have my bearings,” She Devil replied. “Those are the barracks over there, do you concur?” Pointing with her whole hand, as if it were a karate chop, she indicated what looked like a residential arrangement of trailers downrange and to the right.

“I concur.”

“All right, then,” she said. “Let’s do our job.”

Ian stepped out into the darkness of the front stoop and was dismayed to see so little activity. Shots had been fired, for God’s sake. There’d been explosions. Where was the . . . panic? “Wake up, everyone!” he yelled. He fired a long burst of 5.56 millimeter rifle bullets into the ground just beyond the stoop. “We’re under attack, goddammit!”

He strode down the steps of his quarters and across the gap that led him to the next quarters. These officers were of lesser rank, and occupied four to a building. He pounded on the door with the butt of his rifle, then threw the door open. “Where are you?” he yelled. He stared into the darkness, where he saw movement but no faces. “I want every man in this room dressed, armed, and out of here in less than one minute. Less than ten seconds. Find your teams, organize them, and be prepared to fight.”

“Who are we fighting?” Little asked.

“Whoever’s fighting us back. Weapons and ammo, men. Right by God now!”

Dylan and Jolaine advanced in lockstep on the cluster of house trailers that served as barracks for the residents of this place. Dylan had a hard time thinking of them as soldiers. Alpha’s mission was to roll a thermite grenade to the base of one of the trailers. Nothing was more disorienting to anyone—soldier or civilian—than waking up the knowledge that your world was on fire. Given the fact that trailers such as these were constructed mostly of plywood and glue, that world would ignite with startling speed.

The plan was both simple and brutal, and in his heart, Dylan was happy that the barracks residents had had a chance to wake up. Since the first moment when they’d discussed the plan, he’d been plagued by images of people burning to death in their beds. Friend or foe, that’s a shitty way to go.

By the time they got to the end of the street, there were visual and audible signs of movement within the darkened residences. Time was running out for the attackers to have maximum benefit of their diversion.

“How many thermites do you have?” Jolaine asked him.

“Four.”

“Me, too. You take left, I’ll take right. I figure every other building will do it. Ready?”

“Whoa, whoa,” Dylan said. “Our orders are to light one structure. We want a diversion, not a wholesale execution.”

Even through the distortion of night vision, Dylan saw the serious set of Jolaine’s face. “We’re here to win,” she said. “The more fires we set, the bigger the diversion, the better our chances of survival.”

Dylan didn’t know what to say. This was crazy.

“Give that look to someone else,” Jolaine said. “Self-righteousness works better coming from someone who didn’t kill American agents from a couple hundred yards away.”

“Hey—”

“Suit yourself,” she said. “I have a job to do, and apparently I’m doing it alone.”

She took off at a jog down the center of the street, her rifle slapping against her body. As she passed the first trailer on her right, she lobbed a grenade. It rolled under the steps to the main door and ignited with ferocious intensity.

Dylan stood still, anchored in place for five, maybe ten seconds—long enough for her to lob her second grenade to the base of a trailer on the left-hand side of the road—unsure what to do. This was horrible. This was murderous.

The sound of panic growing in the first trailer snapped him out of his fog. Even if Jolaine was a psycho, she was still a member of his team. He owed her security. With his rifle up and at the ready, he took off after her. By the time he caught up, the first trailer was well involved in fire, and people had begun spilling out into the street. Four other trailers were also on fire.

And the screaming had started. There are no screams like those of a man on fire. He had heard it many times in his past, and every time was a new exercise in nausea. Warfare would be many times more gratifying if it weren’t for the killing it required.

With the new source of light—the fires—he lifted his NVGs away and turned to see Jolaine’s face. He wasn’t surprised to see her smiling.

“Scorpion, Alpha,” she said into her radio. “Diversions are active. We’re going to take out targets as they present. Advise when the primary is achieved, and we’ll join up.”

“Scorpion copies.”

Dylan was horrified. “Now we’re going to snipe people as they flee a burning building?” he asked.

“Only if they’re armed,” Jolaine replied.

“Jesus, that’s murder.”

She hit him hard with a glare. Her NVGs up and out of the way, the intensity of her eyes was well north of frightening. “I figured this was the part you’d be best at.”

“Did I just copy that Boomer and She Devil are going to kill people as they run out of their burning quarters?” Rollins asked over the engine noise as he barreled toward the gate at the second ring.

“That’s what I heard,” Boxers responded. The fact that he didn’t editorialize indicated to Jonathan that Big Guy was as horrified by the thought as he was.

But he kept his mouth shut. He couldn’t think of a single instance in his career where a discussion of the morality of an ongoing mission inured to the benefit of the ongoing mission. As they passed through the gate, he ignored the bounce as Rollins rolled the Batmobile over a sentry’s corpse. “Do you know where officers’ country is?”

“Committed to memory,” Rollins said. “Oh, my God,” he added, pointing toward the roiling plume of flames.

“Holy Christ,” Jonathan said. “How many fires did they start?” It was a rhetorical question, the answer to which was,
too many.

Big Guy looked uncomfortable sitting in the seat that wasn’t driving. In the backseat, as he was with Jonathan, he looked like he might explode. For all of the misery that was being inflicted, though, not a single shot had been fired since that initial volley—except for a one-off a few seconds ago that seemed to come from the top of the hill they were approaching.

“This is feeling too easy,” Jonathan said. He was a little surprised to actually hear the words. He’d been intending to just think them.

“I hate it when you say stuff like that,” Boxers said.

Ian saw the fires burning down the hill, and he knew right away that it was the barracks complex. From the color of the flames and the size of the inferno, he knew that it was not a natural fire, and he sensed that it was in fact a diversionary measure. Whoever his attackers were, they knew what they were doing. These were military tactics, but was it even possible that the military would be involved? He could wrap his head around the notion that the FBI had gotten wind of what they were doing, and if that were the case, they might mount a raid that was military in scope, but they would never risk the lives of innocents by setting fires. By running the rats out of the ship.

Yet laws existed to prevent the military from using military tactics on American soil. Truth be told, he’d counted on it, just as countless terrorist groups had counted on American laws to take them a step closer to victory.

But if this was a military operation, where were the helicopters? Where were the drones? The drones in particular were a signature of the Darmond administration, which showed no compunction about vaporizing American citizens without benefit of due process.

“Colonel Carrington,” a voice called from behind, from the darkness. “Where are your defenders?” It was General Karras. In the dim, deflected light of the fires, he looked like he might have showered before stepping outside his quarters.

“They’re down the hill where you insisted they be,” Ian said.

He heard the pops of individual gunshots in the distance.

“And I’m guessing they’re being killed, either en masse or one at a time.”

“Then do something!” Karras yelled. His eyes showed something north of fear yet south of terror.

Ian spun around, turning his back on Karras, and headed for the next building in officers’ country. “What a great idea,” he mocked under his breath. “Do something. Why didn’t I think of that?” He stepped to the next building and pounded on the outside wall with the butt of his rifle. “Wake up! Get out here! We’re under attack!”

Behind him the door to the barracks building he’d just left opened, and four men streamed out. All were armed, but none were fully clothed. He saw underwear and boots, shirts, pants and barefoot, boots and pants and shirtless. Every permutation, it seemed, but for now, the weapons were the important part.

“You four!” Ian shouted, pointing to them. “Fan out and form a defensive perimeter.”

They started to move, then one stopped and turned. “How do we do that?”

This was the nightmare. They’d planned their security around keeping people in, rather than keeping them out. The tactics to which the men had been trained were all about small unit offense. He’d offered up nothing for defensive fighting. It had always seemed too unlikely that the camp would have to be defended. Who’d attack it, after all?

Ian walked to the young man who’d asked the question, put his left hand on his bare shoulder and pointed with his right with a wide, horizontal sweeping motion. “Out there,” he said, shouting to be heard by the others. “Form an arc around this complex of buildings. Keep ample space between you. Don’t fire until I say to fire.”

“Who are we shooting at?”

Damn good question.
“Don’t fire until I give the command,” he said again.

At first, it seemed that the residents of the enlisted barracks had chosen to burn to death. For the longest time—although it was probably no more than a few seconds—no one moved. Dylan and Jolaine both had time to take positions at the far end of the street. Dylan used a stout tree for cover on the left side and Jolaine had hunkered in behind a serious tree stump on the right.

Then the yelling started and doors started flying open. Men spilled out of the burning trailers first, most dressed only in undershorts, several in less than that. A few T-shirts, all barefoot. Dylan watched, transfixed, through his scope as the scale of the disaster they’d created continued to escalate.

At the far end—the barracks he thought of as Trailer One—one of the evacuees was clear of danger before he turned and ran back inside. As far as Dylan could tell, he never came out again. He pretended that he couldn’t hear the screams of those who were being burned alive. On Jolaine’s side of the street, from what would have been Trailer Three, one man dragged another man out of the inferno, only to collapse on the ground. Neither of them moved after that. Dylan felt sick. He’d faced down what had seemed like certain death countless times over his career with the Unit, and he’d always found the physical strength and the strength of character to pull himself through. If faced with the certainty of burning to death, however, he believed he’d eat his own bullet before he’d allow the flames to consume him.

Suddenly, the streets were filled with soldiers. Those who streamed from the trailers that had been spared the horrors of the thermite raced to help those who fled from the infernos.

Across the street, Jolaine’s rifle burped. She fired a second time, and then a third. “Am I working alone here?” she bitched in his ear.

Dylan snapped his head back in to the game.
Anyone with a gun dies.

And per their training, no doubt, many—maybe most of those fleeing from the unburned structures—had spilled out into the street carrying rifles, either in their hands, or slung over their shoulders.

Dylan checked to make sure that his selector switch was settled on single-fire and he settled his reticle on a soldier’s head. The trigger broke, his rifle barked and the man fell. At this range, there was no consideration of additional elevation or Kentucky windage. At this range, you pressed the trigger and the target dropped.

The terrified soldiers didn’t seem to understand that they were under fire. Dylan settled his reticle on another soldier, took a settling breath, and didn’t shoot. “I can’t do this,” he said, apparently into an open mike. This was murder. And no matter what Jolaine chose to think, this was
different
from the agents he’d killed. They had betrayed him. They had betrayed Behrang, too. Those killings had been
justified.
Those men had been trained killers.

These poor bastards . . . They weren’t even soldiers. They were amateurs with guns and delusions.

Who’d already killed a congressman, and had attempted to kill a senator. He tried one more time to shoot. It wasn’t in him.

But Jolaine kept shooting. And men kept falling. It took the longest time, but when the reality finally sank in, the terror among the men blossomed to full-blown panic.