Chapter Forty-Five
Forty-Five
Zack and Pete commandeered a small dusty rental cabin, just under one quarter mile west and on the same heavily wooded hillside as the one Kincaid held.
From Google Maps, Zack could see that there was only one more cabin in the woods between the two structures, and he had no idea if it was inhabited or not.
To be safe, the two men drove to the cabin they commandeered with their lights off, and they did not use the electricity inside, in case Kincaid sent out a patrol to check the woods or the neighboring dwellings.
Zack called Court and directed him to take a different route to the target than he had. It was shorter, shaving off a little time, but it also meant twenty minutes of difficult driving, navigating down a steep decline and three-foot boulders covered in ice.
—
It was just past four p.m. when a black Jeep Wrangler turned onto a small utility road, wound its way up and up a hill, and then through thicker and thicker trees and deeper and deeper snow.
Sunset would officially come at four thirty, but gray skies and consistent snowfall, along with the higher mountain peaks all around, made it effectively dark, so the headlights of the Wrangler bounced across the foliage and the precipitation as the vehicle picked its way through.
Court arrived before dusk, climbed out of the Jeep, and then grabbed a pair of thick duffel bags, heaving them out of the backseat. He thought he was going straight into the cabin, but Zack met him outside on the front porch.
“Delaney’s inside. I wanted to talk in private first,” Zack said.
Court dropped the bags as snow fell in fat flakes in the darkening light off the porch. He said, “Easy day, man. We’re gonna get her back.”
Zack did not respond to this; instead, he said, “What can you tell me about Kincaid?”
“What do you need to know? Tactically sound. Crazy as an outhouse rat.”
“Yeah, I picked up on that.” He sighed. “Six, here’s the deal. Don’t know why I didn’t tell you this already. He’s offering to give me the girl back if you go up there unarmed. You for her.”
Court nodded, looked through the trees. “I wondered if that would be the deal.”
Zack said, “But you and I both know how that would play out.”
“He kills me, then kills the kid. Probably goes after you anyway, for the money.”
“Yep,” Zack said. “No doubt. So we’re going to have to hit that place.”
“You able?” Court asked.
Zack sniffed out a little laugh. “Don’t see we have a choice. It’s that or get local SWAT out here, and that’s just going to get Andie killed. I hear SWAT here is top-notch, but Gauntlet is going to get word of it before they can muster, and that can’t happen.”
Court pointed down to Zack’s leg. Even in the poor light, the blood on his jeans was obvious. “I meant that. Can you operate on that leg?”
“Pete just rebandaged me, actually. This is mostly dried. It will slow me down, but I can still do some damage.”
Court turned to look in the window of the darkened little cabin. “Pete? You been making friends?”
“He’s a good man, actually. He fucking hates me for putting his family through this, I’m sure, but I can’t say I blame him.”
“Let’s fix it, then,” Court said. “How far to the target?”
“Seven hundred yards due east. The target is in a clearing in the woods, right next to a sheer hillside that goes all the way down to the road. Lots of trees. There’s a trail a couple hundred yards east of that, leads down to the road.
Looks like a good exfil route for after.
The trouble is going to be getting into that property undetected and getting the girl. ”
Court scoffed at this. “We’re going to be detected, all right. We hit that house, we own that space, we get that kid, we get the fuck out.”
Court then said, “The guys with Lancer. Jill is guessing there are probably three, maybe four. How good are they?”
“The two I met? Dangerous, but nowhere near tier one,” Zack said. “One thing’s for sure: Lancer only gives a shit about Lancer. He’ll let all the other dudes with him die, and he’ll grab Andie to use as a bargaining chip if he’s outnumbered.”
“Understood.”
Zack put a finger up in Court’s face. “Andie is the objective. Not Kincaid. And not me. If it comes down to it, your job is not to watch my back. Your job is to get her. Are we clear?”
Court nodded. “Same rules apply for me. You, me. One of these days, we’re gonna get what’s coming. That’s just the way it is. But that girl doesn’t deserve any of this bullshit. The girl is mission critical, end of story.”
Court pulled his neck gaiter up over his nose, essentially masking himself, then picked up the two bags.
Zack opened the door to the cabin. Here, in the low light of a single flashlight pointed at the ceiling, he saw a man in his forties wearing a firefighter’s uniform, a black sweater with an emblem, black cargo pants, and black boots sitting nervously on a barstool at a kitchen island.
As a way of introduction, Court said, “Hey, man. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“That’s what I keep hearing,” Delaney said.
Court turned to Zack as he dropped the bags. “I’ve got two subguns, two pistols, three sets of soft body armor, medical equipment, extra mags. A couple of nine-bangers, too.”
Delaney said, “What the hell’s a nine-banger?”
“It’s…it’s a disorientation device. Like a flash-bang grenade.”
Zack said, “I’ve got my piece and a knife.” He looked to Delaney. “Pete’s got a big-ass can of bear spray, fire extinguishers, breaching tools, and a blowtorch.”
Delaney said, “And I’ve got two face masks and two oxygen tanks.”
Court nodded. “I like it.” He thought a moment. “We know anything about the layout of that structure?”
Again, Delaney spoke up. Reaching for his phone on the island, he opened it and then handed it over. “Got about thirty photos of the inside of the cabin.” Court took the phone, utterly confused, until Delaney said, “It’s for rent online. You can see every room of the place, the area outside, too.”
Zack added, “We think they’d be holding her in one of the bedrooms upstairs. We can’t be sure.” He looked to his watch. “Okay, Kincaid is going to call me in forty-five minutes.”
Court nodded slowly. “When he calls, I want to be looking at that property.” He turned to Delaney. “We need your help.”
“She’s my kid. I’ll do anything.”
“Let’s start by getting some useful shit out of your truck.”
—
Scott Kincaid, code name Lancer, looked at the watch on his wrist, saw it was nearly five, then looked outside as the last light of dusk gave way to darkness.
He headed for the stairs to grab the girl before calling Hightower. The man was going to want proof of life, so he’d have to put her on the phone, even for just a moment.
It was wild to Lancer that this fifteen-year-old didn’t even know the man she’d be talking to was her real dad, and he thought about blowing her mind with that information, just to be a dick, but he decided he had enough to worry about without this kid freaking out.
Lancer’s plan was simple, and it was variable.
If Hightower said he had Gentry along with him, then Lancer would tell them he’d meet them at the gas station up the road, and then, when Winter drove by in the Bronco and saw them there, Lancer, Bennett, and Maybus would be following along to do a drive-by in the Wagoneer, all three men pouring rounds into the two men right there.
They’d have the girl in the Jeep and they’d shoot her at the scene, kick her body out into the street.
Lancer didn’t particularly love that part of the operation, but it didn’t bother him, either.
He’d killed kids before in war, and some of them had been unarmed.
He’d even gotten court-martialed for it, though he eventually received a pardon.
What was one more dead body?
But if Hightower said that Gentry was not with him but was on the way, Lancer would just direct Hightower up here to the cabin, wait with him at gunpoint for Gentry to arrive, then kill them both and shoot the daughter right there in the bedroom.
Maybus had gotten two more local nationalists to join them, so there were five other armed men on the property, and Kincaid felt very comfortable in his plan.
Maybus sat on the front porch of the cabin; he had Todd Voorhies’s hunting rifle, a Savage 110 Switchback in 7-millimeter, and a .
357 Magnum pistol on his hip. Bennett was in the room with the girl, but it was also his job to keep looking out the window.
There was a sliver of the road visible from there, many hundreds of yards down the hill and to the east, so any cars approaching from Boulder with their lights on could be seen well in advance.
Bennett had a Glock and a hunting knife, same as Lancer himself.
The two new guys had been introduced to Lancer as Dog and Rausch; each had an AR-15, and they sat in a Chevy Silverado behind the cabin, watching the trees and waiting for orders.
The last man, Ron Winter, sat in the living room on the couch, trading time outside with Bennett. He had a pistol-grip 12-gauge shotgun in his lap, loaded with five shells of double-ought buckshot, along with a Smith and Wesson semiautomatic pistol under his coat.
Lancer had been moving from room to room, looking out the kitchen window at the trees in the back, then out the open garage back to the west, but now, as he walked along the mezzanine that looked over the living room, he told himself it was time to get down to business.
He opened the door to the upstairs bedroom where he’d been keeping the girl for the past few hours and saw Bennett standing by the window in the empty room, looking out into the darkness.
The girl was nowhere to be seen.
Just then, the toilet flushed in the en suite bathroom.
Lancer addressed Bennett. “How long was she in there?”
“Like two minutes. I checked the bathroom beforehand. Got everything out of there that she could use as a weapon.”
“Good. Eyes on the road. I’m making the call.”
“Got it, boss.”
Lancer heard the water running in the bathroom sink through the door right next to him, and then he pulled out his phone and dialed Hightower at exactly five p.m.
The phone rang once, twice, and then, on the third ring, it was answered.
“That you, Kincaid?”
“Yeah, man. You got the Gray Man?”
“He’s in a car right behind me. I’m heading west on 119, just leaving Boulder. I told him I’ve got a staging area; he thinks we’re heading there now.”
Lancer was pleased but still suspicious. He put the phone on speaker as the door to the bathroom next to him began to open. “Good. I’m going to let you talk to the kid, just so you can—”
Lancer let go of the phone and brought his right arm up to protect his face, just as he was hit hard by something flying down at him.
It was the porcelain lid of a toilet tank; it banged his elbow and the side of his head, but his reflexes were good, and he collapsed his legs just at the point of impact, and this had blunted the force.
He went all the way down to the floor, clutching his elbow in pain.
—
Andrea Delaney jumped over the boss and ran towards the man standing by the window, who had been looking in the other direction.
She yelled wildly as he turned in surprise, and she swung the ten-pound lid again, striking the man on his left shoulder and knocking him off balance.
The man extended his right hand to brace himself, but he put it straight through the glass window, slicing his hand in the process.
Andie still held the lid; she turned back around to swing again at the boss back by the bathroom, but as soon as she turned, she found him up and running across the room, closing on her fast. He drew a pistol, but she swung at him anyway, missing.
He grabbed her by her hair, yanked her so hard she dropped the toilet tank lid, and threw her across the floor. She rolled several times, almost all the way back to the bathroom.
When she came to a stop, she looked up through the hair in her eyes and saw him charging towards her, his eyes wild with rage.
“Fuck you!” she shouted.
And then it happened.
A single gunshot cracked outside, somewhere on the property. Then another.
Then came the crashing of glass downstairs.
Another shot came from outside at the front of the cabin.
Andie began to crawl towards the bathroom, but the boss was on the floor behind her; he had hold of her ankle, and he pulled her back.
In the living room, a series of incredibly loud explosions went off, one after another after another after another. It sounded like a war down there, and then the lights of the cabin went out.
Andie kicked at the man who had her; she got him up on the shoulder and his cheek, and she brought her snowboard boot back to stomp down again, but before she did, she heard the click of a pistol, then felt the barrel of a handgun jammed into her stomach.
More shooting came from below. The man who she’d pushed into the glass window staggered past the two on the floor; he held a gun in his hand and blood dripped on Andie’s forehead as he passed.
The boss leaned into her ear. “Your dad just got you fucking killed!”
He began yanking her to her feet, but before they’d gotten all the way up, she heard a scream from the man with the cut wrist, now in the doorway. Andie started to scream herself, then realized she could not breathe.
Her eyes began to sting.
The man at the doorway began coughing, but he fired his pistol down at something below him in the living room at the same time.
The boss who was holding her coughed, as well, dropped down to his knees, then dropped low and began crawling towards the door, out of the room. He passed the man standing there shooting down into the living room and disappeared in the direction of the stairs.
Andie remained in the empty room, now lying on her back, covering her face with her coat. She didn’t know what was happening, but she couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
She was sure she was about to die.