An umbrella rack by the front door held four M4s and on the hat rack above several pairs of night-vision goggles and a half-dozen gas masks. The two-acre grounds were normally lit by hundreds of walkway and shrubbery lights that actually created the feeling of perpetual twilight. Now the outdoor lighting was being knocked out with bullets. They took up night-vision goggles and placed them on their foreheads, ready to use. Each of them, including Anna, held an M4. Sam handed Anna a gas mask.
The weapons fire was deafening. Muzzle blasts flashed everywhere. Men screamed. Men swore. The radio crackled constantly.
“Did you get the Mounties on the phone?” Sam said.
“I’ll do it now,” T.J. said.
Heavy fire poured through the house. All over the groundsmen were shooting, each man with his own personal war.
“They’re everywhere,” a harried voice shouted.
“Roger that.” There was a roar of shots running together.
After a second of fiddling, T.J. shouted: “Lines down. I’ll use the cell.”
After a minute he spoke again. “Nothing.”
“Let me try.” Sam pulled out a cell.
“Hello, hello,” the police dispatcher said.
“We have a firefight up the hill from Ganges,” Sam said.
“Mister, I got a whole war up there.”
“That’s right. Send officers, tell them to be careful.”
“There are three Mounties on the island, a boat at Galliano. Won’t be much. Won’t be fast.”
“We’re losing good guys up here.”
“I know, I know. We’ll do what we can. I’ll have them call you.”
The cell lost the signal before he could give her the number. The place wouldn’t be hard to find.
“These assholes won’t quit,” somebody shouted.
“Just blow them to pieces,” another man replied.
There were three explosions. The first blew out the windows. The second knocked the texture from the walls and buckled the ceiling and Sheetrock. Dust was everywhere. With the third explosion the entire structure shook and strained like a groaning old man. Two fighters came through the windows, and their bodies were ripped with bullets from outside and in. One of them lost at least half his head, but for seconds the breath of him still wheezed bloody froth out the trachea.
“We have a shrinking perimeter. Our men are withdrawing to their clusters around the house and grounds.” Sam saw Anna shooting next to him. Something in him reacted and he pulled her low to the ground.
“Be careful.”
As if to punctuate his words, rifle bullets began popping through the room and blowing holes in the wall. They remained hunkered behind the sandbags except when Sam rose, looking for shadows in the half-light. Outside it might have been Gettysburg, the way the smoke drifted in the night breeze. Men were down and screaming, calling out their anger as blood ran from ragged wounds and the cold of death crept through their bodies.
Bullets continued pouring through the windows, shattering remaining shards of glass. Sam could feel the jolt of the sandbags as they took rounds through the wall. Tear gas sailed through the window, streaming a picturesque arc of noxious balls of light before it hit the floor. They threw on the masks.
Then a. 50-caliber machine gun began answering from just outside the house, and soon a similar gun responded, shaking the walls, blowing apart the studs. Wood flew from the ceiling as it knocked chunks out of the timbers. Then more huge explosions.
“They’re back into the rockets,” Sam said. “What have they got?” he shouted into the radio.
“No armor. All stuff you can carry. Rockets, fifty-caliber stuff. These bastards are crazy. You blow parts off ’em and they keep coming.”
Just then the wall behind them exploded and a cloud of white went everywhere.
“I got him, I got him.”
Sam knew that some soldier meant the guy with the launcher. Then a second rocket hit the house above their heads. “Must be more than one,” he muttered inanely. The concussion was bad and they were swathed in cotton-white dust clouds. Without the masks they’d have been choked nearly dead.
As the dust cleared, one of Sam’s men jumped through the window. His arm came off in midflight, leaving only red muck and the white of a blood-spurting artery.
Anna screamed from down the wall. In the confusion she must have moved away from him.
“Everybody out,” T.J. cried.
Sam knew he was right. The house was a target and the enemy had rockets. Either they were not that worried about Jason or they knew about the safe room.
Sam crawled after Anna just as another explosion ripped through the room. Able to see nothing, he crawled ahead, grabbing for her, but somehow she must have moved away from the wall. He could see nothing.
“Anna,” he called.
“Out, out,” T.J. said. “I sent her out.”
Sam scrambled, hoping Anna had indeed run out into the night. Grady and Jason would be safe in the concrete and steel.
He leaped through the window and crawled clear of the house for maybe thirty yards, shouting, looking for Anna. Finally he lay in the winter grass. Shots were being fired on every quarter. There were pockets of light and fleeting shadows, the rush of adrenaline, the craze of killing. One of Sam’s men sat on the grass holding a torn arm and wrapping a belt around it, trying to stop the blood. One of the enemy crawled with only his arms, his back obviously broken by a bullet, but undaunted.
Soldier profile.
Sam aimed at his head, but couldn’t or wouldn’t shoot. He wasn’t sure which. The man had no rifle but wore a pistol on his belt. Sam crawled over and yanked it away as the man struggled for it. There was a grenade belt that Sam also stripped. The man continued on. It appeared he was still attacking the house.
“You’re going soft,” T.J. said.
“Without a doubt.” Sam’s men were in little clusters, making no line that could be charged. Approaching the house could be a deadly sport and going inside worse-just as it had been for Sam. Now the enemy would have to slow down or be shot to pieces.
“Have you seen Anna?”
“No. I thought she was ahead of us. She could be anywhere around here,” T.J. said.
He looked at the cavernous black of the blown-out windows. Then his dream came back to him. Anna calling from a cave. He knew what was happening.
“You manage things from out here,” he said to T.J., and ran for the house.
“Like hell,” he heard T.J. say.
Forty
Nothing in Anna’s life had prepared her for the intensity of the killing frenzy going on around her. War movies were not war. The man’s arm had landed beside her and she’d stared dumbfounded at the wedding ring. A naked dangling artery spewed the man’s life onto the wool carpet. Before an explosion blew him away, she had put her hand on the flesh trying to squeeze off the great fountain that spurted obscenely over everything. T.J. came and helped, shooing her away.
“Go with Sam,” he said, pointing into the cloud of white. When she couldn’t find Sam in the immediate rubble where T.J. had pointed, she struggled to move farther until she felt him tugging on her arm. Instinctively she moved with it.
“Sam, I’m so glad…”
Bullets pounded through the house and she was crawling fast.
He tugged her to go faster. Past the safe room she crawled, following a very determined Sam. Then the air cleared slightly and she looked ahead, finding Sam wearing black. But Sam had not worn black. Sam had worn camouflage.
“Hey!” she said. The man was faster than a cat, and in an instant a heavy French accent pierced the pounding of the bullets.
“Come with me.” There was the dull metal business end of a razor-sharp carbide blade at her throat. “I’ll kill you if you give me the slightest reason.”
He yanked her by the hair. She screamed and went with him when she felt the knife hot and stinging slice the skin of her neck.