The Fires of Atlantis (Purge of Babylon, Book 4) (22 page)

T
here were
houses along the shoreline, and from what he could tell, the soldiers were only staying at the two-story red building. So he made the decision to move sideways with Carrie and Lorelei instead of retreating back up Route 410 and found a house about 300 meters from their last spot (and the dead body currently occupying it).

It was a small white house, quaint compared to its neighbors, with a dirt driveway and an old red pickup parked up front. They hurried across the backyard and entered through a sliding glass kitchen door. Keo went in first with his MP5SD, Carrie and Lorelei following close behind.

He was surprised the women hadn’t put up more of a fight when he suggested this course of action. He was almost sure they would battle him tooth and nail, the idea of sticking around in a place filled with soldiers almost as deplorable as being captured by them again, but they hadn’t. Keo wasn’t sure if that was because they trusted him (go figure) or if they were too shocked by what he had done to the soldier to think straight.

Either way, he was glad for the lack of drama. Working behind enemy lines was nothing new for him, but he preferred a quiet area of operation when possible. He had been doing this, in one form or another, since he was twenty-one. The organization paid good money for people who were willing to throw their lives away for a hefty paycheck. It wasn’t as if he was good at anything else.

“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money.”

Like its exterior, the inside of the house wasn’t much to look at. The kitchen was tiny, as were the living room and a single bedroom on the other side. A wooden rickety dock extended from the side of the house into the lake, so walking on dirt was entirely unnecessary. There was nothing attached to the end of the dock, though he did find two fiberglass paddles leaning against the wall next to the side glass door.

Carrie and Lorelei were searching the cupboards in the kitchen for supplies when he returned. “Anything?” he asked them.

“Nothing worth taking,” Carrie said. She stopped what she was doing and looked out the glass window. “What are we doing here, Keo? Shouldn’t we be running?”

“Run where?”

“Away from here.”

“There are only two directions to go—here or back up the road. Once they discover the body, and they will sooner or later, they’ll launch a full-scale search. When that happens, they’ll spot us from a mile away. There’s nowhere to hide out there, Carrie. No place they can’t find us before nightfall.”

“And here…?”

“The less shitty of two really shitty alternatives.”

He glanced at his watch: 4:16 p.m. Keo unclipped the radio he had taken from the dead man. It hadn’t squawked yet, which meant the body was still undiscovered. He was surprised it was taking so long. Apparently the soldiers weren’t nearly as organized as he had thought.

“Why did you take the radio?” Carrie asked.

“They’re going to start communicating when they find the body,” Keo said.

“So this way we can listen in on them. Find out what they’re going to do.”

“Yeah.”

“Smart.”

He smiled. “I’ve had recent experience dealing with assholes trying to kill me.”

Keo went into the living room and sat down with his back against the wall, both eyes focused on the glass side door. Lorelei sat silently across from him, knees pulled up against her chest. She had reverted back to the frightened girl from yesterday morning at the marina. He thought he would be grateful for the quiet, but after a while he found himself missing the sound of her voice.

The radio finally squawked about five minutes later, and a man’s voice said, “Lewis is dead.” Keo picked up a lazy Southern drawl. “You should see him. Goddamn.”

“What the fuck happened?” another man asked.

“Hell if I know,” the first one said. “He’s got a big hole under his chin where someone shoved a knife up into his face.”

“Fuck.”

“What I said.”

“Everyone, sound off,” the second man said.

Keo listened to three other voices calling out on the radio as ordered.

One of them was a woman, who said, “You said Lewis is dead? How the hell did that happen? I just saw him taking a piss about twenty minutes ago.”

“Yeah, well, someone clocked him while he was taking the whiz probably,” the Southerner said. “His fly’s still open. Luckily, he shoved his little Lewis in before they took him out. Thank God for small miracles.”

“Ouch, what a way to go,” someone else said, and there was laughter.

I guess Lewis wasn’t the most popular guy in the group.

“Shut the fuck up,” the second man snapped.

Must be the leader of this little sideshow
.

“Everyone get back to the OP until we can figure out what happened,” the leader said.

“Travis,” the woman said.

“What?” This was the Southerner.

“Lewis’s radio. Does he still have it?”

There was a brief moment of silence before Travis finally responded. “No, it’s gone. Shit.”

“What?” the leader said. “What’s going on now?”

“Lewis’s radio is gone,” Travis said. “Whoever killed him has it.”

“That means they might be listening in on us right now,” the woman said.

Looks like there’s at least one with a working brain cell in the bunch. So why isn’t she in charge?

“Fuck,” the leader said, annoyed. “Everyone, get back here.
Now.
Until then, no one uses the radio.”

The radio went dead after that. Keo waited to hear more, but they had completely shut down on him. He assumed they were going to switch radio frequencies as soon as they met in person, which, again, meant they weren’t nearly as stupid as he had originally thought.

Carrie came out of the kitchen where she had been watching the back window and, probably, listening through the open door. “They found the body.”

“Uh huh,” Keo nodded.

“What now?”

“They’re probably going to start looking for us once they meet up and come up with a plan.”

“Then we should go before they get here.”

He looked out the window at the empty dock. “We’re not going to walk the rest of the way to Song Island from here, Carrie. And I’m not getting to Santa Marie Island without a boat.” He gave her his best reassuring smile. “Besides, there’s only five of them left.”

“Only five?”

“Five’s better than six. I’ve seen worse odds.”

“Really? Where?”

“Have you ever been to Kabul in the spring?”

Carrie started to answer when he held up his hand and tilted his head to listen.

“What is it?” she said instead.

“Outboard motors.” He looked back out the window. “They’re coming back. The boat that left earlier.”

“How does that help us? Doesn’t it just mean the bad guys will have more people looking for us now?”

Keo smiled.

“What are you smiling at?” Carrie asked, annoyed.

“The guys at the house are meeting in person to change their radio frequency so I can’t listen in on them anymore, remember? The ones on the boat don’t know that.”

“How can you be sure?”

He held up the radio. “I’ve been listening. There’s no way the guys on the boat know about what’s happening here. Besides, this thing has a max range of two miles.”

“I still don’t know where you’re going with this.”

“We need a boat. There just happens to be one coming toward us right now. The question is, do you trust me?”

She stared at him and didn’t answer.

“Carrie. Do you
trust
me?”

She finally sighed and nodded. “Do I have a choice?”

“Daebak.”

“What?”

“It means let’s get us a boat.”

I
t was an all
-white twenty-footer with three guys inside. One stood behind the steering wheel in the center while the other two sat on a long plastic seat behind him, both cradling M4 rifles. They looked like men who had been on a long but uneventful trip and were glad to be back. The outboard motor was a Yamaha, about 200 horsepower from the sound of it, pushing the boat through the calm Beaufont Lake surface without any trouble.

It took the three men exactly fifteen seconds to spot Carrie standing at the end of the dock, waving her hands frantically over her head at them. It took them another ten seconds to slow down before he saw one of them on a radio, no doubt trying to reach someone at the house. He knew that was the intention because the radio he had picked up from Lewis squawked softly (he had turned down the volume) and he heard a male voice asking about “the woman.”

Of course no one answered, because the men at the two-story red house had already switched frequencies, though he figured they could probably hear the boat coming right about now. How long did he have before the leader switched back to the old frequency to warn the returning soldiers? Ten seconds? Twenty? This entire plan was already tenuous enough, but it was going to go straight to hell as soon as someone from the house realized what was happening.

But for some reason, no one had responded by the time the boat slowed down as it neared Carrie, who had lowered her hands to her sides and was watching the vessel approach. The two men on the seat had stood up and were clutching their rifles as they scanned the area, looking wary of an ambush.

You have no idea, boys.

He was impressed with Carrie. She had to have nerves of steel to just stand there as the boat came straight toward her. It was either insane courage, or she was too terrified to do anything else. He couldn’t see her face from his position, but he guessed it was probably a mixture of both.

The boat slowed down as it sidled up to the dock. One of the men had moved toward the bow, one hand on the gunwale to keep from toppling over. The soldier behind the tall, clear plastic windshield at the helm fixed Carrie with a hard look, hands carefully manipulating the vessel with surprising deftness.

“Don’t move!” the man behind the steering wheel shouted. “Stay right where you are!”

Carrie didn’t move or say anything back.

The third soldier had started to let his guard down. Maybe it was the sight of Carrie in her jeans and sweat-stained T-shirt, with no signs of a weapon anywhere on her. It was hard to look at the woman and think she was dangerous, especially the way she hardly moved.

Nerves of steel. Or suffocating, mortal terror.

Either/or works for me.

Keo was lying in the grass at the end of the dock, almost completely hidden among the two-foot-tall yard that grew around the house and up and down the shoreline. He watched the boat sidling alongside Carrie’s still form and the man at the bow leaping out, landing on the wooden planks in front of her.

The third man slung his rifle and threw a line to the first one, who wrapped it around a wooden post. When Keo saw the man finish wrapping the rope and pull it tight, then straightened up, he pulled the trigger and shot the man in the back.

Even before the soldier went down, Keo was already scrambling up from the warm ground.

It took the two in the boat a few seconds to realize what had happened. Keo didn’t blame them. They hadn’t heard anything—the suppressor on the MP5SD had done its job. The fact was, they had a better chance of seeing the bullet casing ejecting (if they had been looking in his direction) instead of hearing the actual gunshot.

Keo didn’t give them a chance to gather themselves.

He was on one knee, using the higher angle to aim and put the second round into the driver’s chest. The shot shattered the protective screen at the same time. The soldier stumbled back and into the third one, and the two of them went down in a tangled heap. The boat rocked but was held in place by the line.

Keo was on his feet and racing forward, shouting, “Get down! Get down!”

Carrie dropped and flattened herself against the dock as Keo ran up at full speed. He hadn’t taken his eye or the submachine gun’s red dot sight off the boat the entire time and was waiting patiently for the third man to pop back up.

One second…

…two…

There, finally.

Keo shot him once in the chest, then put a second bullet into his forehead as he was falling back down.

He reached Carrie a second later, stepped over her prone form, and checked on the first man. Dead. He swept the boat, making sure the other two weren’t going to get back up anytime soon, either.

“Lorelei!” he shouted.

The teenager burst out of the house before he even finished screaming her name. She was carrying their supply bag, which probably weighed almost as much as her. She didn’t seem to feel the extra weight, though, and he guessed that was thanks to a combination of fear and adrenaline.

Carrie scrambled back up and Keo helped her into the boat. “What about the bodies?” she asked.

“We’ll toss them later,” he said.

She looked as if she was about to throw up again but thankfully managed to keep it in this time.

The boat moved under them and Carrie had to grab at the rail for support, almost stepping on one of the dead soldiers. He waited for Lorelei, then helped her onto the boat, too. She wasn’t quite as lucky and actually stepped on the driver’s open palm.

“Oh God,” she whispered, her face pale.

“Later,” he said.

He turned, grabbed the rope, and was untying it when the first volley of gunfire sliced through the air and pelted the dock around him, the already-rotting wood disintegrating inch by inch against the barrage.

“Keo!” Carrie shouted.

He looked across the lake and at another dock seventy meters away as uniformed men fired in his direction. Bullets
zip-zip-zipped
past his head and sliced into the water, and more than a few drilled holes into the boat’s fiberglass side.

More men were running along the shoreline toward them, assault rifles and legs pumping wildly as they sprinted with everything they had.

Keo tossed the line back into the boat and jumped in after it, landing between Lorelei and Carrie, both crouched behind the gunwale amongst the two dead soldiers. Keo moved behind the steering wheel and grabbed the throttle and pushed it up, doing his best to ignore the fact he was standing on a dead man’s arm. It couldn’t be helped. There was only so much space inside a twenty-foot boat, especially around the cramped space around the steering console.