“Go for it,” he said. He shook his head, trying to clear the loud ringing noise that was echoing inside his skull from being at the center of the Claymore blasts.
Then he looked as best he could through the splintered glass toward the surrounding country-side. He knew there was no way he would be able to spot the sniper who’d been firing at him. He hadn’t expected that.
“Change in plans,” he said to himself, rubbing his scarred face and glancing over his shoulder at the still running motorcycle. If the sniper was any good, he wouldn’t make it twenty feet before he got cut down.
The exhaust fumes from the bike in the enclosed space of the truck were beginning to make him light-headed as he tried to figure out what to do. Crack a window. He laughed out loud.
Right. And take a round right through the skull. Besides, the bulletproof windows he’d installed didn’t open.
He looked at the farm-house. Foley had reached his wife and was trying to help her staunch some of the bleeding, which meant she was still alive also. “How nice. How noble,” he muttered out loud. His brain was fuzzy, the carbon monoxide combined with the after-effects of the explosions combining to push away reality.
The Security had gone with the Sniper on several missions. They had trained together for years. He knew all about how a sniper worked. Given the angle of the bullets that had hit the truck, the sniper was most likely on the knoll to the north. Which meant the south side of the truck was safe. For the moment.
He shook his head, realizing he wasn’t thinking straight. The armored interior of the truck was the safest place, despite the motorcycle fumes. The truck’s engine was still running. The solid tires should hold. He turned the wheel and pressed the accelerator. The truck slowly rumbled forward toward the farmhouse, the right front end dipping sharply from either a ruined shock or ripped up tire. There was a bump and he realized he had driven over the body of one of the guards. He kept the truck moving.
“The truck is heading toward the house,” Neeley reported.
“No shit,” Gant muttered. He was moving, crawling forward, the sub-machinegun tucked in the crook of his arms. The truck was less than thirty feet away, the farm-house slightly more than that. He could see Foley cradling his wife’s body in his arms but he couldn’t tell if the woman were alive.
The battered mail truck rumbled to the base of the short flight of steps leading to the couple. Gant could see rounds impacting on the windshield, further shattering it and knew Neeley was keeping up the fight from her position. But as the truck came to a stop it was angled now in such a way that whoever was driving it could get out the driver’s side and get close to the porch behind its cover.
Of course, that also gave Gant a covered approach on the other side of the vehicle, safe from the driver’s view. Gant got to his feet and dashed to the rear of the truck.
“I see you, Gant,” Neeley said. “But I can’t see the porch anymore.”
The truck engine stopped running, but Gant could hear another engine still going, something inside the back of the truck. Then he heard the driver’s door open and he knew there was no more time.
Gant exhaled, then stepped around the side of the truck.
A man dressed in black fatigues and wearing an armored vest was walking up the steps toward the prone couple. He had a sawed-off shotgun in his hands and wore a black balaclava over his head. He came to a halt standing just short of the couple, enjoying the cover the truck provided him from Neeley. Foley was looking up at the man, a small trickle of blood flowing out of the side of his mouth. The front of Foley’s shirt was splattered with blood, both his own and his wife’s.
The man reached up with his free hand and began to pull the balaclava off. Gant’s finger was on the trigger, but he didn’t fire. He knew what was coming and what was at stake.
“Remember me?” the man shouted and Gant knew everyone’s ears were ringing from the explosions.
Foley was looking up, his hands staunching the flow of blood from a wide wound on his wife’s stomach. Foley shook his head. “Please.”
Gant didn’t hear the word as much as he could tell what it was by the way Foley’s lips moved. Gant took another step closer.
Foley must have realized he hadn’t been heard. “Please,” he yelled. “I didn’t do anything to you. I don’t know who you are.”
“Should have thought of that before you betrayed us,” the man said, raising the shotgun up to firing position.
Gant took the opportunity to fire a quick three round burst into the man’s left thigh, spinning him about. As the man went down, Gant charged forward, while firing again, putting two rounds into the man’s gun arm, causing him to drop the shotgun while his other hand went to his chest. Emily. That was the thought foremost in Gant’s mind as he kept the target alive.
Gant was stopped on the middle step, the muzzle of the sub-machinegun pointing at the target’s face. Gant saw the scars that were seared into the man’s skin and knew he had Kathy Svoboda’s killer. And the killer of Svoboda’s baby.
“Where is Emily Cranston?” Gant demanded.
The man was smiling and Gant looked down at his good hand and saw the pin for a grenade in it. Time slowed down for Gant as he then saw the live grenade still hanging on the man’s vest on top of a lump of explosive charge. Gant dove off the steps, hitting the ground and rolling as the sharp crack of the grenade going off split the sky, followed immediately by a secondary explosion from the charge.
Blood and body parts splattered the ground.
Gant lay on his back for a few seconds, breathing hard.
“Are you all right?”
Gant saw Golden’s face in his field of vision. She was leaning over him.
“We fucked up,” Gant said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Gant slowly got to his feet and looked over at the porch. The target was gone except for a smear of blood, the remnants of his spinal column and some chunks of meat. Surprisingly, Foley was still moving, futilely grasping at his wife with the stump of a wrist. The wife was undoubtedly dead, her throat and chest a bloody mess.
Gant shook his head, trying to clear it of the new loud ringing. The stench of death was in the air. And gunpowder and explosives. And the damn engine inside the truck was still running, the sound now a dim thrumming in the background.
He walked up the steps and knelt next to Foley. First aid would be a waste of time — the man had lost too much blood already and the wounds were too severe. Besides the severed hand, he was bleeding profusely from over a dozen places. Less than a minute Gant estimated.
“Who else was involved?” he shouted at Foley.
The State Department bureaucrat was staring at his wife’s body. Shock, both physical and emotional ruled him. “I didn’t do anything,” he whispered, a froth of blood coating his lips. “She didn’t do anything.”
Then he died.
Getting to his feet, Gant added up the body count: five if he counted the target. And they were no closer to Emily. “I’m on my way down,” Neeley called in over the radio. “Sitrep?”
“Everyone’s dead,” Gant reported.
“Golden? I lost her.”
“She’s here. She’s all right,” Gant said, although that was debatable as he watched the psychiatrist take in the gory scene. Gant was reminded of the mission he had done in Iraq the previous year and seeing the results of an improvised explosive device on a Humvee full of young National Guard troops and the surrounding innocent civilians. It was something the American public wasn’t being treated to, seeing the cost of the war on ‘terror’.