Luke stared at the house. “I don’t know. But in most cases I’ve seen, the prisoner room is either upstairs or in the basement. We’re on the beach and the water table is too high for a basement. So I’ll guess that if they’re in this house, they’re upstairs, in that far right corner, the one with no windows.”
He checked his watch. 4:01 p.m.
Right on cue, a blue armored car came roaring around the corner. Luke and Ed watched it pass. It was a Lenco BearCat with steel armor, gunports, spotlights, and all the trimmings.
Luke felt the tickle of something in his chest. It was fear. It was dread. He had spent the past twenty-four hours pretending that he had no emotion about the fact that hired killers were holding his wife and son. Every so often, his real feelings about it threatened to break through. But he stomped them back down again.
There was no room for feelings right now.
He looked down at Ed. Ed sat in his wheelchair, grenade launcher on his lap. Ed’s face was hard. His eyes were cold steel. Ed was a man who lived his values, Luke knew. Those values included loyalty, honor, courage, and the application of overwhelming force on the side of what was good, and right. Ed was not a monster. But at this moment, he may as well be.
“You ready?” Luke said.
Ed face’s barely changed. “I was born ready, white man. The question is are you ready?”
Luke loaded up his guns. He picked up his helmet. “I’m ready.”
He slipped the smooth black helmet over his head, and Ed did the same with his. Luke pulled his visor down. “Intercoms on,” he said.
“On,” Ed said. It sounded like Ed was inside Luke’s own head. “I hear you loud and clear. Now let’s do this.” Ed started to roll away across the street.
“Ed!” Luke said to the man’s back. “I need a big hole in that wall. Something I can walk through.”
Ed raised a hand and kept going. A moment later he was behind the line of parked cars across the street, and out of sight.
Luke left the trunk door up. He crouched behind it. He patted all his weapons. He had an Uzi, a shotgun, a handgun, and two knives, if it came to that. He took a deep breath and looked up at the blue sky. He and God were not exactly on speaking terms. It would help if one day they could get on the same page about a few things. If Luke had ever needed God, he needed Him now.
A fat, white, slow-moving cloud floated across the horizon.
“Please,” Luke said to the cloud.
A moment later, the shooting started.
CHAPTER TWO
Brown stood in the small control room just off the kitchen.
On the table behind him sat an M16 rifle and a Beretta nine-millimeter semi-automatic, both fully loaded. There were three hand grenades and a ventilator mask. There was also a black Motorola walkie-talkie.
A bank of six small closed-circuit TV screens was mounted on the wall above the table. The images came to him in black and white. Each screen gave Brown a real-time feed from cameras planted at strategic points around the house.
From here, he could see the outside of the sliding glass doors as well as the top of the ramp to the boat dock; the dock itself and the approach to it from the water; the outside of the double-reinforced steel door on the side of the house; the foyer on the inside of that door; the upstairs hallway and its street-facing window; and last but not least, the windowless interrogation room upstairs where Luke Stone’s wife and son sat quietly strapped to their chairs, hoods covering their heads.
There was no way to take this house by surprise. With the keyboard on the desk, he took manual control of the camera on the dock. He raised the camera just a hair until the fishing boat out on the bay was centered, then he zoomed in. He spotted three flak-jacketed cops outside on the gunwales. They were pulling anchor. In a minute, that boat was going to come zooming in here.
Brown switched to the back porch view. He turned that camera to face the side of the house. He could just get the front grille of the cable van across the street. No matter. He had a man at the upstairs window with the van in his gun sights.
Brown sighed. He supposed the right thing to do would be to raise these cops on the radio and tell them he knew what they were doing. He could bring the woman and boy downstairs, and stand them up right in front of the sliding glass door so everybody could see what was on offer.
Rather than start with a firefight and bloodbath, he could skip straight to fruitless negotiations. He might even spare a few lives that way.
He smiled to himself. But that would spoil all the fun, wouldn’t it?
He checked the foyer view. He had three men downstairs, the two Beards and a man he thought of as the Australian. One man covered the steel door, and two men covered the rear sliding glass door. That glass door and the porch outside of it were the main vulnerabilities. But there was no reason the cops would ever get that far.
He reached behind him and picked up the walkie-talkie.
“Mr. Smith?” he said to the man crouched near the open upstairs window.
“Mr. Brown?” came a sarcastic voice. Smith was young enough that he still thought aliases were funny. On the TV screen, Smith gave a wave of his hand.
“What’s the van doing?”
“It’s rocking and rolling. Looks like they’re having an orgy in there.”
“Okay. Keep your eyes open. Do not… I repeat… Do not let anyone reach the porch. I don’t need to hear from you. You have authorization to engage. Copy?”
“I copy that,” Smith said. “Fire at will, baby.”
“Good man,” Brown said. “Maybe I’ll see you in hell.”
Just then, the sound of a heavy vehicle came in from the street. Brown ducked low. He crawled into the kitchen and crouched by the window. Outside, an armored car pulled up in front of the house. The heavy back door clunked open, and big men in body armor began to pile out.
A second passed. Two seconds. Three. Eight men had gathered on the street.
Smith opened up from the skies above.
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.
The power of the gunshots made the floorboards vibrate.
Two of the cops hit the ground instantly. Others ducked back inside the truck, or behind it. Behind the armored car, three men burst out of the cable TV van. Smith lit them up. One of them, caught by a rain of bullets, did a crazy dance in the street.
“Excellent, Mr. Smith,” Brown said into the Motorola.
One of the police had gotten halfway across the street before he was shot. Now he was crawling toward the near sidewalk, maybe hoping to reach the shrubbery in front of the house. He wore body armor. He was probably hit where the gaps were, but he might still be a threat.
“You’ve got one on the ground still coming! I want him out of the game.”
Almost immediately, a hail of bullets struck the man, making his body twitch and shudder. Brown saw the kill shot in slow motion. It hit the man in the gap at the back of his neck, between the top of his torso armor and the bottom of his helmet. A spray cloud of blood filled the air and the man went completely still.
“Nice shooting, Mr. Smith. Lovely shooting. Now keep them all locked down.”
Brown slipped back into the command room. The fishing boat was pulling up. Before it even reached the dock, a team of black-jacketed and helmeted men began to jump across.
“Masks on downstairs!” Brown said. “Incoming through that sliding door. Prepare to return fire.”
“Affirmative,” someone said.
The invaders took up positions on