“Damn,” Blaine said.
“Yeah.”
“What’s the plan now?”
If I’m smart, I’ll go back and shoot you and the girl and take the truck and not look back until I’m halfway to Texas.
“Sit tight,” he said instead.
Blaine and Bonnie were waiting for him about three kilometers up Route 410. They had stopped even further back than that before pushing the vehicle with the gear on neutral for almost two extra kilometers so they wouldn’t give away their approach. Well, he and Blaine had pushed anyway, while Bonnie steered. Keo had hiked the rest of the way. It was a pain in the ass, but necessary since sound traveled these days, especially car engines. Even with all those precautions, he kept expecting gunfire coming his direction at any moment.
He was probably 200 meters from the red house, just further back than when he was last here with Carrie and Lorelei, and well hidden behind a brown building that was once a house before a fire gutted it years ago, leaving behind three walls and not much else. Keo was crouched along one of those still-standing sides, peering through his binoculars up the road at men transferring supplies from the house and parked trucks over to the docks. One of the men was looking through a box and pulled out night-vision goggles and tried it on.
Looks like they’re getting ready for a night assault.
The sentries at the two-story structure, including the one on the rooftop, looked alert. Two men paced the road almost exactly halfway between him and the shoreline. One of them was carrying an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, an ammo belt wrapped around his shoulder and waist like he was a bandito out of a Western. That was the first time Keo had seen a machine gun in the last year, and he wondered where they found that little beauty.
“Are we still good?” Blaine said through the radio. “Keo?”
Keo didn’t answer right away. Then, “Nothing’s changed. Just more targets.”
“Maybe we should come up with another plan,” Bonnie said.
“I’m listening…”
“I didn’t say I had any ideas. I just think we should go back to the island and talk it over with Lara. Or wait for Will and Danny to come back tomorrow.”
“They’re going to attack tonight,” Keo said.
“How do you know that?” Blaine said.
“They brought night-vision goggles.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah,” Keo said.
He put the MP5SD away and reached for the M16. Besides the extra two pounds, he also disliked the length of the rifle, but the M203 grenade launcher more than made up for that. Keo opened the ammo pouch along his right hip and took out a 40mm grenade round — the size of a deodorant dispenser, except cylindrical and with a bulbous head — and fed it into the tube under the barrel.
The M203 had an effective range of 400 meters, which was more than enough to take out the house and maybe a few of the trucks. They were still moving supplies back and forth, so if he could knock out the vehicles and what they were carrying, all the better. Maybe they had ammo in there, or if he was really lucky, things that went boom. Some secondary fireworks might even result in collateral damage.
The house, though, was the main objective. Besides being the biggest and easiest target, he counted at least a dozen soldiers inside (and the one on top of it). If he could take it out, that would probably cut the invasion force in half, or close enough. Hell, if he was really lucky, he’d take out their command and control, too. That would really cripple them. Even weekend warriors needed someone to give the orders.
It wasn’t a bad plan. Best of all, it was a safe plan, with minimal risk to his scalp. He felt even a little bit like a coward shooting from a distance hidden behind the gutted house, but what the hell, these soldiers were about to invade an island full of women and children. Keo had done a lot of bad things in his life, but he wasn’t going to sit by and let that happen.
I’m an asshole, but I’m not a fucking asshole.
The M16 came with a second sight for the grenade launcher toward the front of the barrel, and Keo flicked it into position now. He remained crouched but scooted a bit further out from behind the building, then moved left toward the road until he could see (and shoot) around the wall. He spent a few seconds adjusting for wind and elevation.
It was going to be a hell of a shot, but firing a grenade launcher wasn’t quite the same as shooting a rifle. It was mostly about angles and adjustments and letting the round do all the work. Unlike shooting a rifle from long-distance, an explosion was easier to “miss” with and still be effective. He was also comforted by the fact that he had extra ammo in his pouch if the first shot went astray.
See, adjust, and fire again. So simple even a baby could do it.
Of course, he would have loved to get closer. Maybe another fifty meters. Oh, who was he kidding. A nice, round hundred meters would have been ideal.
He aimed for the roof, hoping to land a round somewhere in that vicinity so the resulting impact would take out the second floor and collapse it down onto the first. If not, a second shot into one of the walls would just about do it. The one thing Keo knew for sure was that if one grenade didn’t accomplish its goal, two — or hell, three — usually got the job done. Usually—
Clink!
The sharp sound of metal grinding against metal made Keo stand up and spin around, his finger sliding away from the grenade launcher to the main trigger. He was prepared to fire, to spray and pray (Thank God he had kept the fire selector on three-round burst), but instead Keo lost a second processing what he was seeing.
It was a kid.
A goddamn kid.
He was sitting on a shiny new bicycle in the middle of the road, wearing one of those plastic shell helmets that was supposed to protect him from cracking his head if he fell. He had on wrist and knee pads and brand new Nike sneakers. The kid couldn’t have been older than ten, sporting a white T-shirt that was stained in equal measure with sweat and what looked like chocolate.
He stared at Keo, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Join the party, pal.
Then the brat reached down and unclipped a rectangle black object housed inside a holder along the bike’s down tube, where a water bottle was supposed to go. The kid pulled out a walkie talkie, and Keo remembered what Carrie had told him after the marina shootout back at Lake Dulcet. It was how the soldiers knew there was a boat at the marina in the first place.
“They’re spies. Lookouts. Their job is to go around the city looking for survivors. The guys in uniform come later. That’s how they found us. One of those stupid kids spotted us and the trucks swooped in.”
“No,” Keo said, taking his finger off the M16’s trigger, hoping that would have some kind of effect. “Don’t do that, kid. You don’t want to do that.”
The little bastard didn’t hear a word he said. Or if he did, it never registered, because he lifted the walkie talkie to his lips, pressed the transmit lever, and shouted into it, “There’s someone here! There’s someone down the road! And he’s got a machine gun!”
Aw, hell.
Keo turned back around and saw the two soldiers in the road looking in his direction. Because he was standing now, they saw him immediately and started pointing.
When Keo glanced back at the kid, the little tyke was bicycling away at full speed, the clink-clink-clink of his chains against heavy metal frame.
“Yeah, you better run, you little bastard!” Keo shouted after him, but he hadn’t gotten “bastard” completely out when gunfire split the air and bullets buzzed past his head.