They rounded the guys up and sent them creeping forward in the weeds, heads down, guns up. Once there, it didn’t take long to find the bunker. It was a slightly sunken concrete structure covered mostly with grass.
From this distance, it looked damn near impenetrable. “Any chance that we can get into that place?” Nathan asked Zan.
“Doesn’t look like it,” his second-in-command replied.
“We may not have to,” Niko added. “The guy who went in wasn't planning on being in there all night. So really, we just have to wait things out until he comes out, then we charge the door and get inside.”
“All right, guys,” he said as they neared the place. “Step one is we wait for some to leave the place, and then we pounce.”
AFTER NEARLY AN HOUR PASSED, the gang started to grow restless, with some even threatening to head back to the barn. But when the back door of the bunker swung open, it was clear things were right on track.
They charged the door as the homesteader fumbled to get his rifle into his hands and fully trained, but he couldn’t get there quickly enough. He was shot down as the woman filled the nighttime air with a horrifying screech.
She had never fully walked out, so when the gangers began firing away, she was able to fall back inside. From outside, the gangbangers could hear her stumbling to her feet, and when they tried to shove the door open, they could feel her weak efforts to push the door shut. She whimpered as they shoved harder and harder, sending her to the floor in a matter of seconds.
Once inside, they saw her body scurrying to her feet and racing into the next room. The guys jumped after her, but Nathan stopped them. “No, no, no. I want to take this myself. You guys have had enough fun already.”
He laughed maniacally as her hysterical cries grew wilder and louder. When she clumsily picked herself up off the floor and scampered out of the kitchen and down a dark hallway, this only brought more joy to his eyes. He liked a good game of hide-and-seek. And as he tiptoed after her, gesturing for the guys to stay at the door, he said, “Come out, come out wherever you are!”
No answer.
He crept into the dark hallway, actually just an elongated tube, like the kind that connected the plane to an airport terminal. He kept going, no idea where she was. But that only made the game more fun. At the end of the long tube, he found himself in a compact cube-shaped room. There were three doors, two at the sides, one straight ahead.
He flung the one at his side open. This revealed nothing but more darkness. The game was getting to be a challenge, but he liked that.
“Marco!” he yelled. After another minute of creeping forward and hearing nothing, he screamed, “Hey! You’re supposed to say—”
Out of the next door, a hand jabbed out, spraying something in his eyes, mace or maybe something worse. “Arrgh!” he howled as three small bodies raced out of the doorway, shoving him to the floor.
Eyes in agony and vision blurred, he could hear their footsteps tap away into the distance. “What the hell happened?” somebody called into the room.
“She maced me. That’s what happened!”
“She got out?” Zan asked. “Shit, let’s go!”
“No, no,” he said, climbing to his feet. “Let her go. We got what we came for. We came to get ahold of this place, and now that we’re here, we just have to make sure that damn missile is here. And Niko, wherever the hell you are,” he said, groping around, vision still impaired, “You better hope it is here if you don’t want to get shot in the face.”
They all split up as Nathan leaned against the wall, eyes slowly coming back to focus, the pain still sharp but fading slightly. He laughed to himself, not remembering the last time he’d had this much fun.
HEARING that bell in the middle of the night, waking up everybody, wasn’t something that had happened before. So Hatfield knew it must have been alerting everybody to something serious.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Justin asked.
“No idea, Justin, but I get the feeling it’s something we better pay attention to.” The Hatfield family jumped into their clothes and left the room, meeting everybody else gathered in the living room.
Jade—the woman he’d seen earlier, was there, her small body shaking with tears. Her kids—also distraught—were there too. The three of them were huddled together as if they’d just experienced something horrific.
A group of homesteaders gathered around her, watching her, waiting for her to catch her breath and find enough of her bearings to speak. When she finally pushed words from her quivering mouth, she said, “They got him. They killed him!”
“Who, ma’am?” Cecil asked.
She couldn’t bring herself to say his name, but Hatfield knew who she was talking about—even though he never knew the man’s name.
“Ryan!” she said, the name buried in desperate sobs. “They came out of nowhere and started firing as we left the bunker. They must have been waiting for him, waiting for us.”
Cecil’s face was creased by confusion. “Hold on a second, ma’am. You’re talking about Ryan? Ryan Hasselbeck? One of our homesteaders? What was he doing in your bunker? I was under the impression he was out on guard duty.”
Hatfield stepped forward, answered the question the woman couldn’t. “He was assisting her some food storage problems, Captain. He asked if I could cover for him while he went over to her bunker to help, and… well, we see what happened. I take full responsibility.”
Cecil’s expression was hard to read. The confusion on his face was lingering. He took a deep breath and asked her, “I understand if you’re in too upset a state to answer any of these questions, but was there anybody else harmed during all of this?”
“Not as far as I know,” she replied. “The three of us hid in a closet, then ran out and left once they attacked.” She spat out a small laugh. “I remember Mike—my husband—saying something about adding an escape hatch, but he never got around it. So we had to use mace and—” She collapsed into tears.
As the woman was ushered toward the living room couch, along with her kids, Cecil said, “I would like to speak with Mr. Hatfield alone.” The crowd dispersed, and the two of them were alone, with nothing protecting Hatfield from the captain’s laser glare.
“I know what you’re going to say, and yes, I made a bad call,” he said. “And it cost a man his life. You have no idea how bad I feel about all of that and—”
Cecil stopped him. “Trevor, you feel bad enough as it is. I didn’t come over here to browbeat you. I just anticipated that you may have some objections to the course of action we have to take here.”
“What course of action are we talking about here?”
“Don’t make me say it. We have to turn this woman away. We’ll let them stay for the night, but by morning, we’ll have to let them go.”
“But, Captain—”
“I’m afraid that is my final word. I just felt I’d tell you this now so you didn’t attempt to blindside me as you did the last time.”
“Captain, we need to get that woman’s bunker out of these people’s hands.”
“You want us to risk the remaining troops we have fighting for the bunker of some family we don’t know? Trevor, that’s madness.”
“No, no. Our reasons for getting that bunker back have nothing to do with this woman. She’s got things there that could put us all at risk if put into the wrong hands.”