Revolution No. 9

T
he man who called himself Freeboot crouched in the darkness outside the main security station at Sapphire Mountain Estates, a gated community forty miles north of Atlanta, Georgia. It was 2:11
A.M.
He had been hiding for almost twelve hours—first in the back of a delivery truck, then after dark, when the groundskeepers and golfers chasing stray balls were gone, sneaking through the shrubbery to here.

Getting into and around a place like this was not hard. Getting back out again was a different thing.

The sky was blue-black and starry, the air frosty. His
maquis
partner, Taxman, had warned him about the November cold, even in the deep South. Taxman had done a lot of training in the Georgia woods, during jump school at Fort Benning.
Travel light, freeze at night
, went the riff. But Freeboot hardly felt the cold. In the California mountain hide-away where he spent most of his time, he went barefoot
except when it got so bad that frostbite might slow him down. Tonight, he only wore boots to keep from leaving footprints.

At 2:17
A.M.
, the Estates' security patrol car returned from a routine cruise through the streets. The car, like the rest of security here, was no Mickey Mouse setup. Freeboot could see the barrel of an assault shotgun above the dashboard.

The driver, a uniformed guard armed with a large caliber semiautomatic pistol, parked under the sodium lights and walked to the station, a concrete building that looked like an above-ground bunker. Like the barrier fence, and anything else that might remind Sapphire Mountain Estates residents that there was a hostile world out there, it was placed out of view of the luxury houses.

The guard was young, Hispanic-looking, and buff, with a tight-fitting tailored uniform. He seemed alert if not wary, on the cocky side. Like a pimp, Freeboot thought. No—more like a whore, peddling his ass to the kind of people who lived in places like this.

Necks
, Freeboot called them. They owned it all now, but the heads were going to start rolling—bigtime.

When the guard got to the building's heavy steel door, he passed his magnetic badge through a scanner, then pressed his palm against a glass plate. A few seconds later, the door's electronic bolt opened with a solid
thunk
.

He stepped inside. The door closed behind him.

Getting into that building, for Freeboot, was Phase One of this operation.

Security guards were usually untrained and sloppy—even easy to bribe. But these guards were a cut above. The residents of Sapphire Mountain Estates paid for the best, and they got it. A low-end house here cost 2.5 million dollars. The compound was surrounded by an inertia sensor fence that could pick up, literally, a mouse crawling through. The
only entry point was a kiosk manned by another armed guard and backed up by a video camera that scanned each incoming vehicle's make and license plate, not allowing it to pass unless it agreed with computerized data on an authorized list. A third guard kept watch inside the main station, where individual perimeter and trap alarms from every house were wired in on dedicated phone lines. The system was as secure as anything outside of top-secret military installations. There had never been a whisper of trouble here.

In just five minutes that was going to change.

Freeboot checked his watch, then pressed the beeper on his two-way belt radio—once, for alert, then five times slowly. Immediately, it beeped in return—the signal that Taxman was in place, just outside the entry kiosk.

Freeboot flexed his surgically gloved hands to limber his fingers, and screwed a stainless-steel sound suppressor onto the barrel of his HK MP5/10 submachine gun. It was set to fire a thirty-round clip of 10-mm ammunition on full auto. It was also equipped with a high-intensity Tac light, to illuminate and temporarily blind anyone who stood in its path. Along with the gas mask and PVS-14 night-vision goggles in his pack, the Tac light would come into action during Phase Two.

With three minutes left to go, Freeboot reached into a pocket of his black fatigues and took out a can of Copenhagen. Instead of chew it was filled with a finely ground white powder. He dipped in the tip of his survival knife and raised a good-sized mound to each nostril, inhaling sharply. The harsh wild rush of methamphetamine burned up behind his eyes and swelled through his brain. The stars took on a crystalline glitter, and the chilly breeze cut into his flesh with a delicious edge.

He was ready. He pulled his ski mask down over his face, slipped the HK's sling over his shoulder, and eased his wiry
body into final position—in the building's shadows, five meters from the door. A backlit man stepping through would be a perfect target, standing in what was known as a vertical coffin.

Two minutes and twenty-four seconds later, his radio beeped twice, fast. He picked up the baseball-sized rock at his feet and sidearmed it into the security fence. It hit with a whispering rattle, the same kind of disturbance as a raccoon or deer brushing against it would make, and that was what the guards would think it was. But they were required to go out and check.

A minute passed, then another. The guards were in no hurry about this kind of thing. False alarms caused by animals happened all the time.

He flexed his fingers again, waiting.

There: the
thunk
of the iron bolt. The guard appeared a second later, saying something laughingly over his shoulder to his partner inside the room. Freeboot kept waiting, so that the guard would block the door open as he fell.

When he turned and took another step forward, Freeboot opened fire, starting at the knees and sweeping up, left hand flat over the HK's muzzle to keep it from jumping. The silenced staccato rounds were hardly louder than a kid would make sputtering through his lips. The guard slammed back against the door and slid to the ground, his eyes still open.

Freeboot sprinted past him into the building. The other guard swiveled in his office chair. His face just had time to register terror before a second burst from the HK tore into his chest. He let out a sobbing groan and slumped into a huddle.

Freeboot gripped the back of his chair and heaved it forward, dumping him onto the floor. This man was older, heavy-set, with a clipped brindle mustache. He wore a wedding ring on a thick finger. Freeboot flipped the HK's selec
tor switch to single shot and fired an insurance round into his ear canal, angling it slightly upward. He stepped to the first guard and dragged him inside, pausing to pull off his cap and unsnap the keyring from his belt. There was no need to fire another round into this one.

For ten more seconds, Freeboot waited, getting control over his breath, listening for beeps on his radio that might signal trouble. None came. Which meant that Taxman had now killed the guard at the Estates' entry kiosk, and that the local police hadn't been alerted. If that had happened, the third member of their team, monitoring a police scanner in the getaway car, would have picked up the call and sent them a warning.

From here on, there was no need to try the risky task of disabling any alarm systems. No one was watching the watchers, and no one was left alive to respond to the alarms when they went off.

He beeped his belt radio three times—
all clear here, ready to move on
.

The answering three beeps came from Taxman. He was ready, too. He had earned his name because he collected what was owed.

Freeboot closed the door behind him and trotted to the patrol car, pulling the guard's cap onto his head. Driving deliberately, he headed for the entry station to pick up Taxman. It was 2:25
A.M.
Phase One had gone down without a hitch.

 

The home of Mr. and Mrs. David C. Bodewell was a long, low hacienda-style complex that took up most of an acre. An intruder could waste precious time trying to find his way around inside, but Freeboot and Taxman had memorized the layout. The blueprints had been easy to get.

The place bristled with silent perimeter and trap alarms, and there was one more major wrinkle in this operation: a
live-in bodyguard with an attack-trained Rottweiler. The dog was not much of a worry. The bodyguard would require more care. A quiet annunciator in his attached ground-floor apartment would alert him as soon as an alarm was triggered. Like the other guards, he would first think it was caused by an animal, but very quickly, he would know this was a break-in. If he was loyal, he would move to protect his employers. Or he might hide, try to ambush the attackers, or get outside and go for help.

Taking on a personally guarded house added considerable risk. Which was precisely why they'd chosen it.

He swiveled to the gaunt figure of Taxman, crouched beside him on the street. Freeboot nodded. Taxman nodded back.

They sprinted toward the house.

Taxman circled it, placing four high-powered quad-band cell phone jammers at strategic corners. Freeboot ran straight to the rear, where the underground phone and power lines rose up through conduits into metal service boxes. These were locked with padlocks. He blasted the phone-box lock with freon from a spray can, freezing it instantly and turning the metal as brittle as glass. It snapped with a blow from a hammer. He yanked the box open and ripped through the low-voltage phone line with his knife.

No one was going to be calling out now.

The power was next—another quickly snapped lock, the master breaker pushed to
OFF
, and the few dim lights that showed through the windows went out.

Freeboot ran on around the house's corner to the bodyguard's apartment. Taxman had already lined the door with det cord, stuffed tightly against the stops, then sprayed with sound-deadening foam insulation. Both men stepped to the sides and pulled on their gas masks and night goggles. Taxman pressed the detonator.

The door blew into the house with a barely heard
whump
, and hung sagging from the top hinge.

Freeboot lobbed in a grenade of CS gas, throwing it as hard as he could. It exploded with a searing burst that should blind the bodyguard at least for a few seconds.

They went in one at a time, low and fast, leaping to opposite sides. Nearby, a large dog was barking in deep, ferocious challenge. Freeboot scanned the room swiftly. Furniture and objects showed luminescent green through the goggles.

But there was no human figure.

Then he saw something move, a flicker of light on the other side of the room's interior door. Just as he recognized it as a man's arm extending toward him, a gunshot smashed into the wall behind his head.

He dropped prone to the floor. More shots blasted past him. Blinded or not, the bodyguard was aiming damned close.

Freeboot fired a burst in return, but there was no time to tell if he had hit—now the dog was charging, a thick snarling shape that appeared in the goggles to be burning with ghostly fire. Taxman met it with a swooshing spray of hydrocyanic acid. The dog yelped, a high-pitched sound that turned to a near scream as the acid burned its eyes and throat. It pitched forward, paws flailing at its face, sliding and thrashing on the hardwood floor.

The bodyguard was gone.

“You
fucker
,” Freeboot hissed. The man was better than they had figured. Now he was loose in the house, and there was the risk that neighbors had heard his unsilenced gunshots.

Freeboot clamped his hand on the HK's squeeze-activated Tac-light, flooding the far side of the room with an instant of brilliant light.

There was blood spattered on the wall where the bodyguard had crouched.

“I'll get him,” Freeboot told Taxman in a harsh whisper. “You take care of business.”

They shoved through the interior door and separated, Taxman running to the master bedroom suite. Freeboot followed the blood trail, stalking cautiously, weapon ready. The splashes were almost continuous. The bodyguard was badly hit, but a desperate man was all the more dangerous. Freeboot moved through a large laundry room, then into a shotgun hallway. The door at the end was closed. Blood was pooled on the floor in front of it.

From deep inside the house he heard a muted
puh-puh, puh-puh, puh-puh
—Taxman firing businesslike two-round bursts.

He had found Mr. and Mrs. Bodewell.

Freeboot charged down the hall, dropping to the ground at the last second like a baseball player sliding into home, and driving both boots into the door below the knob. It burst open. He just had time to see the bodyguard's flaming-green outline as more gunshots smashed into the wall above him.

Lying on his back, aiming between his own spread feet, Freeboot fired a long burst in return.

He heard a shriek of rage and pain that could have come from an animal.

The man lay still. Freeboot stayed flattened for ten more seconds, then got to his knees.

A bullet slammed into his armored gut like a cannonball, spinning him back against the hallway wall. His hands flew loose from his weapon, but it was still on its sling, and the barrel swung around to slap him hard across the face.

He growled with fury and clawed for control of his gun. His finger found the trigger. This time, he took an extra second to sight at his target.

The bodyguard was holding his pistol in both hands. It was wavering, like it was too heavy to hold. He fired one more round past Freeboot's head, before Freeboot emptied his clip.

The pistol dropped from the bodyguard's hands.

Freeboot stood slowly, shaking. He snapped a fresh clip into the HK, then stepped to the guard and delivered the insurance round to his head. His gut ached from the bullet that had almost taken him out. He welcomed the pain, letting it fuel the anger that he turned now on himself. That had been a mistake, his mistake, and a bad one. It could have fucked up
everything
. From now on, he was going to take men like this more seriously.

He strode back to the door where they had come in, past the Rottweiler lying on its side with tongue hanging out and fore-limbs stretched, as if it was running in its death dream. Too bad about that. It was a good dog, dying while doing its job. It couldn't have known what kind of people it was protecting.