She shook her head, disgusted with the fantasy that had attempted to seduce her. It was ludicrous, attacking armed professionals with little cups of water. They would all be killed at once unless the gunners were delayed by laughter, forced to catch their breath before they opened fire. It was a foolish plan. Worse yet, the thought of running water had awakened stirrings in her bladder, forcing Helen's full attention from the problem of the moment into confrontation with the routine problems of biology.
The plastic seat was cold, and Helen warmed it with herself, examining the stark surroundings for potential weapons, noting that the shower curtain had been left in place, its plastic curtain hooks completely useless to her now. Assuming she could get the curtain off its rod... She froze, humiliated by the knowledge that the answer had been there before her all the time. The rod. A hollow shaft of lightweight metal held in place by tension, it could be dismantled by a child. It would not weigh enough to make a decent fighting staff, but if they flattened one end, mashed it down and twisted it somehow, they might produce a clumsy sort of lance. If it was driven into unsuspecting, unprotected flesh with adequate velocity and force... There was another rod inside the closet, Helen realized, and that one was a hefty wooden cudgel mounted into brackets that facilitated its removal in the interests of space. No tools would be required, and in a few more moments they would have a staff, a spear — the makings of a mini-arsenal.
She flushed the toilet and tugged up her slacks — immediately conscious of another weapon close at hand. Before the tank refilled itself, she found the shutoff valve and closed it tight. She raised the heavy lid, aware that it could do some damage if the slab of porcelain was smashed against a human skull, and laid it carefully across the sink. She studied the assembly of tubes and floats and wires that had released mankind from midnight rambles to a reeking privy in the yard, and knew that it could serve her now in other ways.
She broke three fingernails and cut her fingers twice before she finished disassembling the mechanism, salvaging the slender float arm and an eight-inch metal slat that had been previously connected to the flush handle. Either one was stiff and sharp enough to savage unprotected eyes and throats at need, assuming she got close enough to try. Without a wrench to loosen pipes beneath the sink and give herself a bludgeon worthy of the name, it was the best she could do.
But she could not do everything alone.
They had four weapons now, albeit primitive and flimsy in the face of submachine guns. She would need the full cooperation of her children if they were to have a chance at all.
The risks were staggering, but there was finally no alternative. Inaction was a form of suicide, she realized, and once their deaths were finally decreed, the end would come in seconds for herself, for Jeff. But not, perhaps, for young Eileen. The leader might not have the interest or the energy to finally restrain Gino and Carmine once the killing started. When it came right down to it, the leader might enjoy a little stolen sex himself.
If there had been a chance, however slight, of their survival, Helen might have counseled Eileen to submit, to save herself by any means and confront the ordeal another day, when she was safe and sound and out of there. But they were doomed; she knew that much with numbing certainty. And knowing that, she saw no need to make it easy for their would-be murderers.
It went against the grain to simply watch her life, the lives of both her children slip away. A fighter as long as she could remember, the lady knew that she would go down fighting. Before she let the gunners take Eileen and foul her with their touch, she was prepared to die, prepared to kill.
Soon now. At midnight or a little after. When the gunners got their orders on the telephone.
She called the children and showed them what she had already done, and set about dismantling the shower rod. The closet would be next, and they would take it one thing at a time, while time remained.
A maximum of sixty minutes now, and Helen felt a tightness in her chest as she began to count her life, her children's lives, in measured heartbeats. They had one chance in a hundred thousand of surviving, but she could not let that single opportunity slip by without attempting to secure it. By midnight she would know if she was capable of killing physically; the mental qualms had long since disappeared.
And she would need the grim resolve that had already settled on her shoulders, worming deep into her heart and mind with tentacles of ice. She was relying on the threat against her children to provide her with the killer instinct she would need to do the job.
By midnight.
By the witching hour.
Sixty minutes minimum, and counting down.
A lifetime.
"Time to go."
Brognola checked his watch and nodded, startled by the hour. Saturday was damn near gone, and Sunday morning promised little in the way of respite from the empty ache he felt inside.
"Okay."
He finished wiping down the Smith & Wesson .38 and stowed it in a holster riding on his hip. The Bulldog .44 from Charter Arms was snug beneath his arm in horizontal rigging that would shave a heartbeat off his draw, and both were loaded with the lethal Glaser "safety slugs" designed for heavy stopping power. Copper-jacketed projectiles filled with Number 12 shot suspended in liquid Teflon, the bullets were designed to exit from the muzzle at terrific speeds, exploding savagely on impact with a human target. And if impact from the Glasers failed to drop your man, there was the grim fringe benefit of creeping poison, Teflon working through the veins until it reached the heart, occluding vital passages and valves, arresting life.
More Glasers went into his pockets, rattling softly as he hoisted off the bar stool, following the others. Leo was already waiting for them by the door, one arm pressed tight against his side, securing the Uzi that he carried beneath his trench coat. He was tight-lipped, somber, but his hands were steady, and Brognola had no fear that he would fade when it was in the fan.
Mack Bolan wore his nightsuit underneath a bulky topcoat, weapons visible as bulges to Brognola's eye. A casual observer wouldn't notice, and in any case they would not be encountering a crowd at Arlington this time of night. The Unknown Soldier would be keeping any secrets to himself, and as for their intended contacts... well, they would be seeing Bolan's hardware right up close and personal. With any luck at all, it just might be the last thing that the bastards ever saw.
Provided that they kept the date, of course.
In spite of their precautions, there was a possibility that the contact team might smell a rat, take off without completing the connection. Hal would never know until it was too late, and he would have to live with his decision. But in the meantime he was banking on their plan, betting everything that they would keep the rendezvous.
No matter that it was a trap. That much was obvious from the beginning. Anyone possessed of the ability to follow him for months on end and photograph his meetings with a number of important undercover operatives had no need to negotiate for secret witness lists. The snapshots and phone logs were persuasive evidence that Justice had been penetrated weeks before the move against his family. If further evidence was needed, it would be found in the fact that Justice staffers hadn't yet identified the undercover agents. Someone on the other side was miles ahead of federal investigators when it came to cracking Hal Brognola's private org-crime network.
From day one his work on SOG was strictly need-to-know. No more than half a dozen people in the government had access to his files, the true identities of agents in the field. Brognola had designed the system to be foolproof... or as nearly so as he could make it, short of absolute — and unattainable — infallibility. The files that had been confiscated from his office would contribute little to the enemy, but from the photographic evidence, they needed little more in any case.