Carnival (34 page)

From the bestselling authors of
Tyranny
and
Stand Your Ground
comes the explosively charged story of a full-scale terrorist attack on American soil—on the biggest shopping day of the year . . .

Black Friday. The American Way Mall is packed with holiday shoppers. bargain seekers. Machine gun rings out, and within minutes of the attack, hundreds are dead and dying. . Others are taken hostage by an army of fanatical Middle Eastern terrorists ready to blast the American Way Mall to rubble. But one man—Iraq War vetTobey Lanning—refuses to go down without a fight. Separated from his soon-to-be fiance, Lanning finds himself on the frontlines of a new war against terror. The FBI and the local police are helpless. The battle is going be lost or won inside the mall. With thousands of innocent lives at stake, Lanning assembles a makeshift platoon of Black Friday shoppers. A teenage security guard. A retired Chicago cop. A school teacher who's never fired a gun. A young ex-con who has. A soccer mom. A priest. A wheelchair-bound WWII vet . . .

These brave everyday Americans will stand up and meet the enemy face to face. Defend their land, their values, their honor—and if necessary pay the ultimate price for freedom . . .

Tobey Lanning didn't know what was worse about
Iraq: the heat, the sand, the bugs . . .

Or the people trying to kill him.

Considering that the air was full of flying lead
and the thunder of automatic weapons fire, and
shards of ancient brick were raining down on him
from the crumbling wall behind which he crouched
as bullets tore into it, he decided he might have to
go with the last item on that list.

This sucked. Royally.

Tobey looked over at the man kneeling a few feet
away from him and shouted over the roar of gunfire,
“You gettin' anybody on that radio, Sagers?”

“Not yet, man. I'm transmittin', but I don't know
if anybody's hearing me. I'm not getting a thing
back.”

Tobey bit back a curse and glanced at the truck
that lay on its side in the road, next to the crater
that the IED had left. The vehicle was just a burnedout
shell now, sort of like the charred husks of the
unlucky bastards who'd been caught inside.

A few minutes earlier, Tobey and Sagers had
dropped off to relieve themselves. Seemed safe enough, since there was nobody around and nowhere for the enemy to hide except the ruins of
some old building about fifty yards off the road.
Hotchkiss, who was at the wheel, slowed down so
the truck wouldn't get too far ahead.

Their business taken care of, Tobey and Sagers
had been trotting after the truck when the improvised
explosive device went off, toppling the vehicle,
rupturing its gas tank, and creating a fireball that
had engulfed it before any of the guys inside could
get out.

That left Tobey and Sagers on their own.

Of course, there was an ambush to follow up the
explosion. Tobey didn't know where the Iraqis
came from. They were just there all of a sudden,
shooting like madmen, mostly with AK-47s. Tobey
and Sagers returned fire as they legged it toward
the nearest of the abandoned buildings.

One stroke of luck was that Sagers was carrying
the patrol's radio. That good fortune might have
been canceled out by the slug that glanced off of
the radio, inflicting damage it was impossible to
assess under these conditions.

And it was also lucky, Tobey thought, that they
had made it to the ruins without getting shot to
pieces.

“Wasn't supposed to be like this!” Sagers yelled.
He was a chubby East Texas boy, a redneck with an
intellectual bent. “This sector was supposed to be
peaceful and secure!”

“Ain't no such thing in this country, you know
that!” Tobey shouted over the gunfire.

He knew it was only a matter of time before some
of the Iraqis circled around to catch them in a
crossfire. Another half-fallen-down wall rose about
twenty feet behind them. He needed to get over
there so he could meet the inevitable attack that
would come from that direction.

“I'm gonna crawl over to that other wall!”

“You better keep your head down!” Sagers
warned him.

“No, I figured I'd stand up and dance a little jig
along the way!”

“Better toss me that picture of your girlfriend
before you do! I'll look her up when I get home
and tell her I found it in the desert, like in that
movie!”

Tobey made a colorful and somewhat obscene
suggestion about what Sagers could do when he got
home, then bellied down and started crawling,
pushing his rifle ahead of him and being careful
not to let the sand foul it. Behind him, Sagers's
M16 barked occasionally as he tried to keep the
enemy distracted.

No way in hell they were getting out of here. Not
unless the radio actually was transmitting and help
would soon be on the way, if it wasn't already. They
had no way of knowing if that was true, so Tobey
had to assume that it wasn't and that he'd be dying
soon, probably sometime in the next few minutes.

That possibility scared him, but more than anything
else it made him angry.

He still had things to do in his life, and he didn't
want to lose it over some patch of sand.

A bullet whined past his head. He'd heard that
eerie noise more times in the last few minutes than
he liked to think about, but something was different
about this one.

It was going the other direction.

Some of the enemy forces were behind the ruins
now, as Tobey had expected. He stayed on his belly
and tried to wriggle along like a snake in a hurry.

When he reached the wall, he thrust the barrel
of his M16 over the ragged top and squeezed off a
few rounds, more to keep the Iraqis honest than
anything else. He didn't believe he would do much
damage.

He thought about Ashley. Beautiful, golden-haired
Ashley. They had dated for a year before he
deployed. Things had gotten pretty serious between
them.

Then Tobey had gotten his new orders. The relationship
took a hit, but not one that they hadn't
been able to repair before he went overseas. They
sent thousands of e-mails, Skyped almost every day,
and things were okay. She wasn't happy when he'd
decided to stay on for a second tour, but he had
smoothed that over . . . he hoped.

She had to understand: there were times when a
guy just couldn't leave his buddies.

Now it appeared the choice had been taken out
of his hands. Except for him and Sagers, the other
patrol members were dead. Nothing he could do
for them.

He had Sagers's back, though, and Sagers had
his. That was the way it would end, just as soon as
the insurgents decided it was time to rush the ruins.

The firing stopped suddenly. Tobey knew it
might be a trick to get him to look, but he raised
his head anyway. What he spotted made his eyes
open wide in shock.

Fifty yards away, just behind a little rise, a guy
knelt with what looked like a section of pipe balanced
on his shoulder. Tobey recognized it as a
bazooka, the same kind used in World War II. Lord
knows where the Iraqis had gotten such an ancient
weapon.

But the antique still worked, because smoke suddenly
gushed from it and the heavy round screamed
through the air toward the ruins. With an involuntary
shout, Tobey surged to his feet, forgetting
about all the bullets flying around as he dived away
from the wall.

The shell slammed into the wall and exploded,
blowing the part that hadn't fallen down already
into a million pieces.

The concussion drove Tobey into the ground.
Debris pelted him. He was stunned, half-deafened.
His muscles didn't want to work, and neither did
his brain.

But he had held on to his rifle, and his mind was
functioning just well enough to tell him that the
Iraqis would be on top of him any second now. He
forced himself to roll over and raise the M16. His
grit-clogged eyes spotted dark figures swarming
toward him. He barely had the strength to hold
down the trigger and spray bullets toward them.

Slugs whined past his head and kicked up dirt
around him. He dug his heels into the ground
and scooted backward on his butt as he continued firing. When he put pressure on his legs, his right
thigh screamed in pain. Glancing down, he saw the
blood on his trousers. There wasn't a lot of it, and
it didn't seem to be spreading fast, so he was hit but
maybe not seriously.

Didn't matter. The enemy was still coming.

Tobey's back bumped into something. He
glanced over his shoulder, saw that Sagers had retreated
the same as him. The Texas boy said,
“Gotcha, buddy,” as they sat back to back and fired
at the attackers charging them from both directions.
Tobey felt Sagers's body jerk as bullets
pounded into it, but Sagers's rifle kept chattering
until it fell silently empty.

Tobey's hearing had returned quickly after the
explosion from the bazooka round, so he was able
to hear the sudden rumble. Blood was running into
his eyes. He seemed to be peering through a red
curtain as machine gun fire swept through the
Iraqis, shredding them and knocking the grisly
corpses off their feet.

More explosions made the desert shiver. Tobey
knew he was badly disoriented, but the only explanation
that made any sense to him was that help
had arrived. The call for help over Sagers's radio
had gotten through after all.

The insurgents who hadn't been chopped down
in the first volley turned and ran. All but one of them,
who stood maybe fifteen feet in front of Tobey,
staring death in the face.

He was just a kid, probably not out of his teens
yet, no beard or mustache, so skinny the AK he
held seemed almost as big as he was. His dark eyes locked in on Tobey's flinty blue ones. He was frozen
in place by fear.

All Tobey had to do was press the trigger, and
he'd stitch a line of slugs right across the kid's torso.
He wanted to. For Hotchkiss and the other guys in
the truck, for Sagers, who was slumped forward, no
longer shooting or moving, for everybody this little
shit and his friends had hurt.

But he didn't, and after a heartbeat or two that
seemed much longer, the kid broke and ran. Tobey
lost sight of him quickly as troops in desert camo
thronged around him, some of them giving chase,
others securing the area around the ruins.

A lieutenant dropped to a knee in front of Tobey
and asked, “How bad are you hit, soldier?”

“Don't know, sir. What about . . . Sagers?”

“Your buddy behind you?” The officer shook his
head. “Sorry, son.”

“Hell.” A wave of weakness washed through Tobey.
Maybe he'd lost more blood than he thought. He
started to topple to the side as darkness closed in
on him, like curtains drawn to shut out the bright
daylight.

“Hang on, soldier,” he heard the lieutenant say
as he passed out. “You're going home . . .”