“Henry!” Danny bellowed, practically in his ear. “We have to go now!”
The headlights of a Gemini vehicle cut through the fire and smoke. As it got closer, Henry could see there were several Gemini soldiers hanging off it ready for action; mounted in the center was an M134 Minigun.
But it was the sound of gunfire and glass breaking behind him that stirred him into action. Danny had shot out the front window of a liquor store and she was dragging him toward it. She managed to pull him inside just as the vehicle came to a stop. The soldiers jumped off and fanned out on the street, taking aim.
He and Danny dropped as everyone opened fire.
Bottles exploded, spraying glass and booze in all directions, shelves broke and collapsed, the doors of refrigerated cases cracked and shattered, their contents disintegrating.
Keeping their heads low, the two of them belly-crawled toward the back of the place so that they were practically wiping the floor with their faces. Machine-gun fire shredded the walls, punching out chunks of drywall and wood to mix with the booze and broken glass on the floor. If they kept this up, Henry thought, the Gemini team were actually going to cut the building in half sideways. He and Danny had to get out of here before the entire structure collapsed in on itself.
He looked at Danny, brushed a scrap of wet paper from her cheek. Maybe the alcohol would disinfect any cuts they got from broken bottles. Maybe he could think up some other absurdities to help him avoid wondering how he was going to live with himself after what had happened to Baron.
Henry wrapped his grief for Baron into a tight little package and stowed it away next to Jack Willis and Monroe. He had to concentrate on doing everything he could to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to Danny Zakarewski, the exemplary agent who’d never gotten a demerit, recently undercover as a grad student in marine biology. She had signed up to serve her country and instead it was serving her up as toast. She hadn’t asked for any of this. Maybe she even wished she really was a grad student in marine biology; he certainly did.
She turned to look at him then and flashed him a grin as they continued to inch forward. He promised her silently that he absolutely would not let her buy it on the floor of a shot-up liquor store; he would get both of them out of there alive. Danny would go home and live a long and fulfilling life, while he was going to live long enough to shoot Clay fucking Verris in the fucking face.
They finally made it to the storeroom. The back door was heavy-duty metal. Yeah, this was a small town, all right—security door in the back, no shutters up front. Henry wondered if the owner was insured for damage due to domestic terrorism—probably not. Most insurance carriers wouldn’t cover war or so-called acts of God. No doubt Gemini would take care of all the damage and fix the new giant pothole in the road as well. It probably wouldn’t be the first time.
Henry heard more shelves collapsing out on the sales floor as well as the creak and groan of load-bearing walls that hadn’t been made to withstand heavy artillery and wouldn’t be able to bear their load much longer. He reached up for the door lever and a burst of machine-gun fire nearly took his hand off. He sneaked a quick look behind and saw it was only the Jeep out front now. The soldiers would have circled around to cover the back door. The bastards knew exactly where they were and wanted to keep them pinned down. If the building didn’t collapse and bury them alive, the soldiers would either ambush them when they came out or come in and finish them off.
Henry conveyed this to Danny in a combination of whispers and sign language, then reached for the lever a second time. Again he had to yank his hand back while bullets punched into the metal.
When he tried a third time, however, nothing happened. Henry couldn’t help grinning. Four thousand rounds per minute was lethal but it ate ammo fast. While the guys out front were reloading, he got the door open and he and Danny slipped out into the alley behind the store, still keeping low.
From where he stood on the gravel roof of the Masonic Hall in the very center of downtown Glennville, Clay Verris listened to status reports on his comm unit while he kept an eye on the action at street level. Using binoculars, he saw the soldiers had moved around to the back alley behind the liquor store, ready to greet Henry and Zakarewski if they managed to get out. He didn’t think they would, not without getting at least winged by the M134.
The back door of the liquor store swung open but Verris couldn’t see much else—Brogan and Zakarewski were crawling on their bellies. If they stood up, the soldiers would say hello. It would be a kind of Butch and Sundance moment, only not as cinematic—
His anticipated triumph cut off; underneath the four thousand rpm music of the M134, he heard the sound of police sirens. Glennville’s small-town police force was riding to the rescue. They took their police vehicles home with them; it was the sort of thing they did in small towns. After Glennville’s station house closed at nine, emergency calls were forwarded to Chief Mitchell’s home phone. It must have been ringing off the hook with panicky citizens reporting that World War III had broken out on Main Street.
Verris had intended to call the chief as soon as Henry Brogan’s plane had landed but Junior’s belated adolescent crisis had distracted him. It was crucial to keep Mitchell and the rest of his Barney Fifes from cluttering up his battlefield. If any of them got hurt, the county authorities would open an investigation and who knew where that would end. At the very least, it would be inconvenient.
Verris tapped a button on the comm set he was wearing. “Chief Mitchell? Clay Verris. I need your units to stand down. We’re engaging with a terror cell that has a weaponized biological capability.”
“Shit,” Mitchell said, in direct violation of FCC regulations governing acceptable language on police frequencies. Not that Verris was going to file a complaint.
“Federal authorities have been notified and are en route,” he told the chief.
“Affirmative. Keep me posted, Clay,” the chief said.
“Yes, sir,” Verris said in his best just-doing-my-job voice. “Will report back to you shortly. Thank you.”
He clicked off before Mitchell could enlarge on how grateful he was that Gemini was on the scene to save Glennville from evil terrorists, or to tell him to call if he and his men could help in any way, although the latter was highly unlikely. If you wanted to keep civilians out of your face, all you had to do was say weaponized biological capability and they vanished as if by magic. They wouldn’t even ask if they could observe. Nobody in their right mind wanted to be within sight of people infected with Ebola—what if they sneezed while you were downwind? Mitchell was probably hiding under his bed with a ten-gallon bottle of hand sanitizer and a twenty-gallon barrel of Savannah Bourbon.
Now, where the hell was Junior?
Henry and Danny lay on the ground amid some overturned trashcans while the Gemini soldiers fired on them, keeping them pinned down. Maybe Verris planned to come and finish them off personally since Junior wasn’t going to do the job. In any case, it allowed Henry to figure out the position of each shooter just by listening. When he had pinpointed each one’s location, he conveyed this to Danny in sign language and was gratified to see she knew what he wanted to do.
He and Danny mouthed the countdown together silently: Three, two, one.
Go.
They rose up back to back, and took out their targets. Three, two, one.