High Treason (33 page)

He hadn’t walked very far—maybe a hundred yards—when he saw a line of headlights approaching. It looked like a clutch of six, maybe eight trucks, neither huge nor small, heading right for him down the Ottawa River Parkway. At the last minute, just before they would have passed closest to him, the first vehicle swung a hard right onto River Road, the approach that led exclusively to Saint Stephen’s Island. The second truck in the line followed, and then the third and the fourth. The others, too. They all bore the markings of various moving and storage companies.

David pulled his radio from his pocket and keyed his mike. “Yo, Mother Hen, is your satellite picture picking up the parade of trucks that’s headed right toward our team?”

The last truck in the line—there turned out to be nine of them in all—stopped just after making the turn, maybe twenty, thirty yards away from David. A man dressed in a puffy blue ski jacket climbed out of the driver’s seat and walked around to the back of the truck.

Mother Hen’s voice chirped loudly, “Do you have traffic for me?”

The noise might as well have been a cymbal crash, it was so loud against the silence of the night. David moved quickly to press the radio against his chest to muffle the sound, but it was too late.

Blue Coat stopped abruptly and turned. He looked in David’s general direction, but not straight at him. And he had a pistol in his hand.

If Mother Hen tried to contact him again, they guy would hear it for sure. David reached with his other hand and turned the button he thought was the volume control until it clicked. He’d either turned it off or changed the channel. He hoped that either one would buy him invisibility.

Blue Coat didn’t move for a long time. In the wash of the taillights, David could see him squinting into the night. After what must have been two solid minutes, he holstered his gun—his
weapon
—and slid open the roll-up panel in the back of the truck. He removed what looked to be planks and saw horse supports.

In fact, that’s exactly what they turned out to be. Blue Coat assembled them at the turn and positioned them in such a way as to block off the entire roadway. Battery-powered yellow lights flashed to alert people that from that point north, River Road was closed.

Blue Coat didn’t bother to close the back of the truck before heading back to his driver’s seat. As he mounted the vehicle, he pulled something from the side door panel and swung it around to point back toward David.

The beam of a powerful flashlight nearly blinded him. He froze, certain that he’d been seen, and, because he could no longer see the driver, equally certain that he would be shot dead within seconds.

Then the light moved. The driver was scanning the tree line, one last look to convince himself that he hadn’t heard what he in fact had. Apparently satisfied, he turned off his light and climbed into his seat. Ten seconds later, he was on his way to join his friends.

His heart hammering and his hands trembling to the point of convulsion, David turned his radio back on.

“. . . Hen. Respond, please.”

“Rooster here. But barely.”

“Be advised that there’s a line of trucks heading right for you.”

“No kidding,” he said. “You be advised that I am not walking into town. It’s wrong and I’m not doing it.”

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not running. Now I’m going to keep the channel clear.” He turned the volume down to nearly nothing and put the radio back into his pocket.

He’d spoken the truth about not knowing what he was going to do. But one thing was certain: Bad things were about to happen to people to whom he owed a lot. If they needed him, he was going to be as close as he could be—not as far away.

If it came to that, though, he was going to need firepower.

He spun on his heel and ran as fast as the snow would allow back toward the stranded Chevy.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY

L
en Shaw’s spirits lifted when the watchman told him that the trucks were on the bridge. At Dmitri’s insistence, he’d answered the call on speaker. It was already after 1:00
A.M.
, which put them nearly an hour behind schedule, but there was still plenty of nighttime left to get them loaded up and off the major roads before the morning commuters started to clog the highways.

“Tell the sentries at the gate to line the trucks up the length of the front wall,” Len said. “I want them loaded one at a time. When one is filled, it can be on its way, and the next can pull up to take its place.”

“Will do,” the watchman said. “Once I can find the gate sentries.”

Dmitri’s face darkened. He stood and leaned close to the phone. “You can’t find them? Where did they go?”

“I don’t know, sir.” The watchman’s tone became more formal—more fearful—when he heard Dmitri’s distinctive voice. “All I know is I couldn’t raise them on the radio.”

“Did you send anyone to look for them?”

“Well, sir . . . no.”

“Don’t you think that might be a good idea?” Len asked.

“I suppose it would, yes. I’ll get right to it.”

“Thank you.” Len pushed the disconnect button. He walked to his window and tried to look down to see the sentries, but couldn’t. Even if he opened the window, the bars over the opening would keep him from being able to look straight down.

“Do you see them?” Dmitri asked.

“The angles are wrong,” Len answered.

Dmitri walked to the window for his own look. “I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t like the timing.”

“I’m sure the watchman will tell us—”

His phone rang again and he pressed the button to connect. “Have you found the sentries?”

“Not yet, sir, but I’ve sent someone to find them. This comes from one of the drivers. He just radioed to tell me that he thought there might have some people lurking at the far end of the bridge. He thought he heard a radio.”

Len felt something dissolve in his chest. One anomaly could be coincidence. A second almost certainly spelled trouble. “Wake everybody up,” he commanded. “Turn on the yard lights, and send a five-man team to the end of the bridge. I want that area scoured. I want to talk personally to whoever they find.”

“Suppose it’s the police?”

Dmitri said, “If it’s the police—”

Len raised his hand to silence him. “If it’s the police, then we are done here, and we do all the damage we can do.” He hung up.

“I’m proud of you,” Dmitri said.

Len smiled and donned the coat that had been draping the back of his chair. “I told you dozens of times, my friend. Growing old and tired does not make me less committed to our cause.”

On the wall opposite Len’s desk, a gun rack held three AK47s and two American M16s. Len walked to the rack and grabbed an AK and a bandolier of spare magazines. He gave it to Dmitri. “Speed is now of the essence,” he said. “We need to get the trucks loaded and back on the road as soon as possible. It could be that this is nothing, or it could be that we are under attack. Either way, the sooner we get the trucks rolling, the better off we’re going to be.”

Dmitri racked the bolt to chamber a round. “And you?”

Len gestured to the bank of computer screens on his desk. “I’m going to organize the defense. Let’s get this done.”

 

 

The door on the far side of the vestibule opened onto a dimly lit hallway. Probably enough light for Yelena to see where she was going, but not enough to flare out the NVGs.

“Clear,” Jonathan said of his view down the left-hand side of the hallway.

“Clear,” Boxers said of the right.

“Sidesaddle,” Jonathan said at a loud whisper. “On me. Now.”

He never looked to confirm—instead keeping his eyes trained continuously on his segment of the kill zone—but he heard her footsteps as she cleared the jamb. Directly across from the vestibule door was the secured passageway that led to a cross hall that led to the cell blocks, the second largest one of which, designated Building Bravo, had reportedly been converted to barracks for the folks who minded the store here.

Jonathan told Yelena to close the vestibule door behind her and put her hand on his rucksack.

The door latched. Yelena said, “I can see all right.”

“You’re arguing,” Jonathan said. “It’s not about what you can see. It’s about not shooting you because you get in the way. If your hand is on my ruck, I know where you are.”

He felt the tug in his shoulders as she grabbed on. “Moving left,” he said. He led the way, his weapon at his shoulder, knowing that Boxers was moving as his shadow, in reverse, as they made their way past a heavily reinforced door on the right that led to the north-west quadrant of the yard. This main hallway served in the old days as the primary conduit from the north end of the prison to the south end. Since it was an administrative area, it lacked the internal security walls and gates that blocked free passage through the cell blocks themselves.

Jonathan was still ten feet from the closed chapel door when he caught the first hint of the aroma of explosives. He’d heard others describe the smell as that of almonds, but that never resonated with him. As far as he was concerned, it was a chemical smell unique to itself. For the odor to escape the size of the door he was looking at, there had to be a shitload of them. In the slice of time it took to snap a finger, he’d begun to second-guess his own plan. It was one thing to create a diversion. It was something else to blow up a chunk of Canada.

“I’m at the door,” Jonathan announced. He found the knob—actually, another ring—and he turned it. This time, while the lock turned, the deadbolt clearly had been set. The deadbolt actually looked new. “Hey, Big Guy. Take a look.”

Boxers bent at the waist to get closer to the lock. Then he stood tall and looked at the hinge side of the jamb. “If you’re asking my opinion, I think the Mossberg is a waste of time on this.”

“I agree. But a GPC—”

“—is a bad idea. There’s a shitload of boom-boom in there. For all we know it’s stored right up against the door. I vote we use the irons.”

“All right. Yelena, look at me.”

She did.

“Watch both ends of the hallway. If you see anyone, shoot them. And I mean anyone who’s not Big Guy or me.”

She looked terrified.

“You said you’ve done it before,” Jonathan reminded. As he spoke, he shrugged out of his ruck and laid it on the floor. “You go to hell for the first one. After that, the others don’t count. Can you do it?”

“Of course.”

Jonathan was learning that one of the most surefire ways to motivate Yelena was to imply that she was somehow soft. “Safety off, finger off the trigger till you need it, and don’t point that muzzle anywhere close to me.”

Point made, Jonathan unstrapped the irons kit from the outside of his ruck. “Irons” was the collective name for a mini-Halligan bar, a five-pound sledgehammer. and a K-tool, a nifty device that resembled a stylized letter
K
, and was specifically designed to pull the cylinders out of deadbolts. It worked by sliding the K-tool to the edge of the lock’s keyway, and then seating it with a few sharp hits from the hammer. Once it was seated, you inserted the flat end of the Halligan into a slot on the K-tool and through pure leverage, you stripped the cylinder from the lock. After that, the rest was normally easy.

The thickness of the door translated to the need for a lot of leverage. Jonathan’s first attempt proved to be light.

“Get out of the way, little man,” Boxers said.

“Bite me.” On the next try, Jonathan all but jumped on the end of the Halligan. It budged, but didn’t clear. The third try took care of it. The cylinder cleared the lock casing and launched across the hall with a metallic clang. With the mechanism exposed, the next step was some quick work with a pick, and the door floated open.

“There you go,” Jonathan said. “Now, it’s your turn.”

As Jonathan reassembled the irons, Big Guy scooted past with a huge grin on his face. Truly, Boxers was at his happiest when he got to blow shit up. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said.

Boxers’ slice in the hierarchy of assault team assignments was the deployment of heavy weapons, the piloting of vehicles, and the placement of explosives. Big Guy was a true artist when it came to breaking things. He could fashion a shaped charge out of C4 if he wanted to poke a hole in steel, or he could turn a flat spot into a crater if shock and awe were the orders of the day.

Tonight’s mission was all about using a small explosive to detonate a lot of explosives. There wasn’t much elegance to it, but it was astonishing what a few blocks of C4 connected by a few feet of detonating cord could do. Det cord was Jonathan’s greatest friend. Essentially a plastic tube stuffed with PETN, known to chemists as pentaerythritol tetranitrate, detonating cord could transmit an explosion from one charge to another at a velocity of about four miles per second.

Jonathan stayed in the hallway with Yelena, watching the darkness.

The dead sentry’s radio rasped in his pocket, “Central, the trucks are arriving.”

The now-familiar Russian-accented voice said, “Unit One, go check on Units Three and Four. I can’t raise them on the radio.”

Yelena’s eyes grew huge. “This is bad.”

“As good a word for it as I can think of,” Jonathan said. He keyed his mike. “Big Guy, we’re in trouble. Step it up.”

“Never rush an artist.” It didn’t sound like it, but that was Boxers-speak for “okay.”

Thank God for satellite maps. Jonathan had already figured out the routes from one place to another, and unless he was woefully mistaken, the quickest way for the yard guards to access the front gate was to pass through the door that was just fifteen feet from the spot where he was standing.

He used his arm to sweep the First Lady from the hallway into the chapel. “I need you to join Big Guy for a minute,” he said. Alone now in the hallway, Jonathan squatted to a rice paddy prone position, leveled his MP7 at the door from the yard, and waited. It didn’t take long.

Unit One showed no sense of urgency as he pushed the big panel open and stepped inside. He pushed the door shut again, and as he looked up, he saw Jonathan and froze.

Jonathan triple-tapped him, two to the chest and one to the forehead, in the space of a heartbeat. The target fell straight back, arms outward, and he flung his AK high. Jonathan cringed as it crashed to the thick wooden floor, half expecting it to discharge on impact. It didn’t.

A second or two later, every light in the world turned on, igniting the yard in brilliant yellow, which flooded the hallway through the windows. In the distance, an alarm bell rang. It sounded like one of those rotary jobs that he used to hear in school.

Into his radio, Jonathan said, “Now would be a really good time to announce that you’re finished.”

Big Guy materialized out of the darkness behind him. Scared the shit out of him. “What the hell just happened?” He glanced down the hall and saw the body. “Oh, you shot a guy. Cool. You know, there’s a lot of shit in that chapel. They’ve got Stingers, mines, grenades, rifles. Some pretty advanced shit. All of it US military. Even saw a couple of mortar rounds, though I didn’t see any tubes. KFB, baby.” KFB was ka-fucking-boom.

“How big a charge did you place?”

“Big enough. Daisy-chained a couple of GPCs in all the right places. You wanted a crater, right?”

Jonathan thought he heard a hint of teasing in Boxers’ voice, but there was no way to be sure. Big Guy was a professional, first and last, and even his lust for big bangs wouldn’t cause him to create more havoc than was necessary.

“Where’s Yelena?”

“Stuck in the doorway,” she said. There was a tremor in her voice that matched the one in her hands.

Boxers moved aside to let her pass. “Oops,” he said.

Jonathan pulled her close. “Same drill as before. Hand on my back. Big Guy, I’ve got point, you make a lady sandwich.”

“Yup.”

Jonathan more sensed than saw a lot of new movement in the compound. The bad guys had sounded the alarm. That blew the element of surprise, but only one part of it. They still didn’t know what was going on. Given the fact that the transfer of explosives was clearly being made tonight, they probably thought that was the focus. The wild card was how nervous would that make the Mishins’ guards. Nervous guards either shot too early or ran away too early. There seemed to be no middle ground. Jonathan was going with ran away, if only because it better served his priorities.

Jonathan led the way to the door that would take them down the passageway to the cell blocks. The entry door was unlocked. It made sense, he supposed, that the internal doors would be unlocked. After all, Saint Stephen’s wasn’t a prison anymore. Soon, it would be hotel rooms and cocktail lounges, if the owners had their way.

Jonathan predicted that the value of the real estate was about to drop precipitously.

By Jonathan’s estimation, the greatest hazard lay directly ahead, at the end of this passageway. To go straight would be to take them directly to the cell block that served as the barracks. That meant that everyone who had just been rousted would be heading straight at them. Two and a half against many became far more daunting odds when the confrontation came head-to-head out in the open.

With his NVGs flipped up and out of the way to accommodate for the wash of light, Jonathan noted in his peripheral vision just what terrible shape this place was in. The once whitewashed walls now looked cancerous with peeling paint, and the stone walls radiated cold.

“I’m picking up the pace,” Jonathan said. He accelerated. If he could get to the end of the passageway and turn to the right, then they’d have a chance at remaining invisible. If they couldn’t—if they got caught here in the middle of the complex, they would have to fight for every step.