Chapter Forty-Six
Forty-Six
Court Gentry shattered the already broken window with the silencer on the end of his Scorpion submachine gun, all but leapt off the ladder, then landed on the floor of the room where someone had smashed the window out just twenty seconds earlier.
He’d placed the ladder at a second-floor window to another room on the east side of the building and had begun to climb, but when he heard the commotion one room over, he dropped off the collapsible ladder he’d taken from Pete Delaney’s truck and carried through the forest for hundreds of yards, then hurriedly moved it twenty feet to the right and climbed back up to the damaged window.
He moved fast, but he would have moved a hell of a lot faster without the gear he wore. In addition to his body armor and his weapon, he had an oxygen tank on his back and a mask on his face, and another mask was hooked onto his belt and connected with a hose to the same tank.
Now in the room, he swept for targets, but the bear spray Pete Delaney had deployed through the garage door downstairs had already made it up here and it was only adding to the darkness and confusion of the smoke from the nine-banger Zack had thrown after shooting the man on the porch.
Court shined his weapon’s light and immediately saw a target in front of him, an armed man facing away. He pressed the trigger on his subgun and shot the big man three times in the back. He pitched forward, flipped over the railing of the mezzanine, and disappeared.
But Court noticed one more figure in the middle of the small and empty bedroom, a small girl with a beanie on her head, writhing on the barren hardwood floor, covering her face and eyes with her coat.
He ran to her, pulled the secondary mask from his belt and put it on her, then lifted her back up to her feet.
She seemed to recover quickly; Court kept his weapon on the doorway as he waited for her to do so. She looked towards him in the low light, and Court thought she might have been expecting to see either her father or some other firefighter she knew.
Instead, he saw confusion on her face, looking through her mask at him.
He wanted to move out to the landing with his weapon, to help Zack, who was down there fighting God knows how many people, including Lancer.
But he was tethered to the girl, the girl was the mission, so he pulled her back to the window. She coughed and staggered, but she followed along nonetheless.
As soon as he got to the window, however, he saw that the ladder had fallen over.
Shit.
—
Over the past half hour, Zack, Pete, and Court had been moving through thick woods; Court had used a compass on his watch because they weren’t getting consistent signals on their phones, but eventually they’d found the cabin.
The lights were on; the Wagoneer and the Bronco were parked inside a garage with the door open.
Court tracked around the back of the property, carrying a small folding ladder and an oxygen tank, and here he had stumbled upon a pickup truck with two men inside.
He couldn’t make noise by shooting them; even with the suppressor on his weapon, the report would be audible inside the cabin, so he’d given them a wide berth, stayed out of the lights, and gone around to the eastern side to access the cabin from one of the upstairs bedroom windows.
Zack had stayed on the western side, in the trees but within view of the front of the cabin, right across the steep driveway. He carried a subgun and a pair of flash-bang grenades, and he immediately set his sights on a man standing on the porch.
Pete Delaney had been given a hands-on job, as well.
He had a firefighter’s crowbar for accessing locked doors easily.
He knew that the breaker switch to shut off power to the entire cabin was in the garage.
And he had the two cans of Sabre Frontiersman bear spray, one from Zack’s truck and one from his, and each with fourteen ounces of propellant that would shoot the powerful chemical irritant forty feet.
The three men had determined from the online photos of the cabin that the garage door opened into the dining area, which itself looked straight over the living room.
The living room was surrounded by a second-floor landing that ran in a U shape, which meant applying the spray straight through the garage door into the unit would, effectively, cover the entire building.
Pete had been reluctant to use the bear spray, not because he was afraid for his safety prying open the door of a building full of armed men but because he didn’t want to hurt his daughter in the process.
But Court had assured him that he would have a mask on Andie within just a few seconds of the beginning of the attack.
Pete had been waiting to hear Zack’s first gunshot, to take out the man they’d seen through the trees standing on the porch, and then he was to wait even longer, till Zack got a pair of nine-bangers through the front windows, before prying open the door, then standing to the side and deploying both cans of the spray, one at a time.
But before either Zack, Court, or Pete were quite ready, a window broke on the east side of the cabin. Not knowing what this meant but assuming it to mean Andie was in danger, all three men decided individually to begin the operation instantly.
Zack shot the man at the door, then ran as fast as he could across the slippery driveway towards the front window to throw in the nine-bangers.
Pete ran across the driveway through the open garage, threw the breaker to shut off power, then raced to the door, just past the Bronco.
As the nine-bangers began going off inside, he slammed the hook of the thirty-inch pry bar into the door.
He ripped it free of the doorframe, using a foot to kick it open farther, then stood to the side just as a burst of gunfire came his way from inside the cabin.
He got the bear spray out just as the second distraction grenade began going off, and then he blasted the potent chemical into the building.
Zack was at the front door now, and it had been his worry that any enemy trying to escape would go through the garage and not towards him. He’d given Pete his Staccato pistol, but Pete wasn’t well trained, and he would have his hands full with the two large cans and the crowbar.
But the men had seen no alternative to this plan. Zack told Pete to just continue blasting the spray, sweeping it up and down and back and forth, and hopefully it would drive any enemy squirters away from the garage door and not towards it.
In the end, that part of the plan had worked.
One man came racing out the front door just seconds after Zack tossed the grenades.
The two men were just six feet apart on the porch when Zack shot the man, but his momentum took him right into Zack.
They slammed together; Zack took a blow to the face from the barrel of a shotgun, but then the enemy staggered off the side of the porch.
The man tried to get his weapon up and pointed at Zack, but Zack was faster; he blasted the Scorpion a half dozen times, the enemy dropped his shotgun, and then the forward momentum of his stumble off the porch caused him to tumble farther out into the snow, and he slid down the hill into the trees, painting it red with blood as his lifeless body slowly descended.
—
On the second floor, Court looked out the window at the long drop to the uneven ground. He didn’t like it, but he could do it. His worry, however, was that Andie would balk and he’d have to waste precious time coaxing her.
He shouted into his mask, “We need to jump! It’s soft down there! You good?”
Without saying a word, she climbed past him on the windowsill, squatted, and pulled off the oxygen mask. Then she leapt out, away from the house, and disappeared in the darkness.
Court was pleasantly surprised, but he recovered quickly, held his breath, removed the tank and let it fall to the floor, then leapt out, keeping the subgun away from his body so it didn’t strike him when he impacted the ground.
It was fifteen feet down, but the angle and over a foot of snowfall blunted the impact. Court rose, found Andie brushing herself off, and he grabbed her and ran to the east, slipping quickly into thick pines.
No words were spoken for over a minute; the two of them just ran, coughing and hacking, wiping their eyes.
Andie Delaney in front, Court Gentry in back.
—
Thirty seconds after he opened the garage door, Pete Delaney exhausted the second can of bear spray. It had been his plan—a plan he did not communicate with the two CIA men—that he would then draw the pistol Hightower loaned him, brave the chemicals, and race in to try to help find his daughter.
But the bear spray was already wafting back into the garage, and he found it impossible to breathe.
Delaney drew the pistol, then began backing up, backing up more, then even more. Finally he was outside the garage, in the snow, exposed to the upper windows.
His eyes burned and tears rolled down his face.
Just then, the man Hightower just referred to as “his friend” broadcast over his AirPod.
“Got the kid! Dropped one enemy! He’s not Lancer.”
Delaney continued backing up; his eyes were watering even more heavily now, but he tried to keep them on the door.
Hightower broadcast, as well. “I smoked two enemy. Neither are Lancer.”
Fuck, Delaney thought. The guy behind all this was still in there, but his daughter, according to some stranger he just met, was safe.
He began to turn away from the door, but just then, he saw movement. It was difficult to discern through his burning eyes, but eventually he realized it was a man holding a towel to the lower portion of his face, with an AR-15 rifle in his right hand.
Pete aimed as best he could, fired, fired again, fired again.
The man in the garage next to the parked Wagoneer fired back, and then Pete just emptied most of the magazine of Zack’s gun into the area.
He saw Hightower running around from the front of the house. He waved Delaney off, telling him to stop shooting.
Hightower approached the side of the Wagoneer with his submachine gun at his shoulder, spun around the side, and found a man there on his knees, leaning against the wall of the garage, right next to the open fuse box door.
Hightower blasted the man with at least a dozen rounds.
Delaney fell to his knees into the snow, dropped the pistol, looked on.
Hightower kicked the body in the garage, flipping it over.
He turned to Delaney and gave a thumbs-down.
This wasn’t Lancer, either.
Just then, another man came running around the back of the property, an AR-15 at his shoulder. Pete saw him before Zack, because Zack was still inside the garage.
Pete was far enough out of the light that the armed man hadn’t seen him, but Pete picked up the pistol and fired once at the man at a distance of sixty feet.
The round missed, but the enemy raised his weapon and fired back into the trees, narrowly missing the deputy fire chief.
Zack couldn’t see the man shooting to his left, but he was well aware of him now, so he raced out of the garage, onto the slick and steep driveway, and fired his submachine gun fully automatic, dumping round after round into the man.
When Zack’s gun emptied, the man was dead just twenty feet away, but Zack was slow in his reload, because he dropped to a knee and began hacking the choking bear spray from his lungs.
Pete Delaney looked on and began walking towards him to try to help, but he’d made it only a few feet before yet another man appeared from the cabin.
Running out of the house, through the garage with a towel covering most of his face, the man staggered, slowed, and put a hand on the Bronco to steady himself.
Whoever he was, Pete was sure the man was almost overcome with the chemicals, and when he began walking forward again, a pistol swinging in his left hand, the man rubbed his face and eyes with the towel.
Pete realized Zack didn’t see the man approaching from behind, and the man approaching was unaware of Zack, just steps in front of him.
The fireman raised his pistol at the threat, but he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t going to shoot Zack in the process.
Ultimately, he did nothing, because the two men collided, fell to the ground, and Zack knocked the pistol out of the other man’s hand and threw a reactive punch.
They fought there on the driveway on the slick surface, the empty submachine gun between them, and very quickly Pete got the impression Zack was battling the man called Kincaid, because even partially blinded and coughing uncontrollably, this individual was one hell of a ground fighter.