Threat Warning (32 page)

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Authors: John Gilstrap

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BOOK: Threat Warning
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The kid took it, but he wasn’t happy about it.
“You want to shoot it out with them?” Christyne gasped. The horror was evident in both her tone and her body language. “They’ll kill us.”
“Bet you thought you were dead ten minutes ago, didn’t you?” Boxer said. His voice rolled through the rafters of the sanctuary.
“But there must be a hundred people out there.”
Jonathan held out a rifle for her. “But there’s five of us.” He said it with his most charming smile.
“That means we have to shoot twenty apiece,” Ryan said.
“Well,” Jonathan said, “some of them will run away.” He was trying to keep it as light as he could, because the reality of their situation was at best dire.
“Generally speaking, we prefer to plan a little more carefully,” Gail said from up at the altar. “But the whole execution thing put us on a fast track.” To Jonathan, she said, “Everything’s battened down back there.”
“Are you really a friend of my dad’s?” Ryan asked.
Christyne brightened. “You know Boomer?”
“We worked together for a while,” Jonathan said.
“So you’re in the Army?”
Jonathan gave a coy smile. “We worked together for a while.”
“Hey, Boss,” Boxers said from the red side wall. “I think you, me, and Gunslinger need to powwow.”
Gail heard for herself and walked that way.
To the Nasbes, Jonathan said, “You guys go on with your reunion. Stay away from the wounded, and if you see anything scary, yell out right away.”
With that, he walked across the sanctuary to join his colleagues. “What’s up?” As if he didn’t know.
“You realize our position is untenable, right?” Boxers asked, getting right to it.
Jonathan inhaled loudly. These sorts of standoffs never worked out well for the people behind the barricade. Even with the reinforced walls, the good guys were still only one RPG round or even a bonfire away from dying in place or being overrun. “I’m open to any and all ideas,” he said.
“Well, let’s take surrender off the table first,” Boxers said. “It’s not in my nature.”
“Nor in mine,” Jonathan agreed. “Besides, their judicial system here sucks.”
“We have the wounded,” Gail said. “They should give us at least a little leverage, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Jonathan said. “They’re taught to kill themselves rather than submit. If that’s their worldview, the wounded are just collateral damage.”
“I agree,” Boxers said. “So they’re coming. What do you think? Good old-fashioned frontal assault?”
Jonathan shrugged. “If I were them, I’d run a feint attack on one side to buy time to set charges on the doors. Blow them, they’re inside and we’re dead.”
Gail looked horrified. “You know, playing with you guys is nowhere near as fun as I had hoped.”
Boxers said, “So, we each take a side and stick to our posts no matter what. Is that it?”
Jonathan shrugged. “The best I can come up with. We’ll keep the Nasbes together on the green side. I’ll take white. Big Guy, you’re red. Gunslinger—”
“Black,” she said. “I got it. And when we get home, I’m getting a new handle.”
“All right,” Boxers said, heading to his post. “We’ll have us a good old-fashioned gunfight.” He’d never sounded more self-actualized.
Jonathan headed off to give the Nasbes their assignments. He gave them a crash course in how to work their weapons, and then took them into the vestry and planted them in front of their assigned windows.
“Keep your selector on single fire,” he told them for the second time. “If you see someone with a gun, shoot. If they fall down, move to the next target. If they don’t, shoot them again. Questions?”
Each of their faces was like a giant blank oval.
“Okay, good. I’ll be in the front. If you need anything, just shout out.” The muzzle of Christyne’s rifle had started to drift in toward Jonathan, so he reached out and gently pushed it to the side. “And try to remember to keep your weapon pointed outside.”
“But the windows on the other side of the shutters are closed,” Ryan said.
“They’re glass,” Jonathan said. “They’ll go away once the shooting starts.”
This wasn’t the way an 0300 mission was supposed to go. If they came out the back end of this thing alive, he was going to owe Boomer one hell of an explanation.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-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.

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