Chapter 46
The biggest surprise for Colter’s men wasn’t Craig firing two tranquilizer darts into one of them or her taking down the man with the machete; it was Doug. When the men raised their guns to counter the attacks from both sides, Doug swung his left elbow into the knee of the man behind him, spun around on his knees as the man went down, smashed his palm into the man’s chin, grabbed the man’s gun away from him and hit him in the face three times with the butt of it as hard as he could.
There was little left of the dead man’s mouth and nose.
“Canadian Armed Forces,” he said once she had limped over to him. “Craig and I met in Afghanistan and found out we shared the same interest in animals. Come on, we need to help Barbara.”
He took them to Nyland. She was wounded in the right hip and just below her right shoulder, but she was still alive.
Craig and Doug tended to Barbara as quickly as they could with the kit Craig had retrieved from the hospital.
“What about that guy with the tranquilizers in him?”
“He’s dead,” Craig said. “About one-quarter will take down a gorilla or a tiger. Half-full will take down an elephant. I just filled them all.”
“What will that take down?”
He shrugged. “The Hulk, maybe.”
Barbara moaned.
Doug said, “One bullet just grazed her shoulder, but the other one hit the bone and is still in her hip.”
“Take the truck.” Craig got up. “I called Harry. Your FBI has just arrived in Dominion. Units from ATF and Portland SWAT arrived with them. FBI, ATF and Harry are on their way to Colter’s farm. Portland SWAT is coming here. National Guard and a Portland Police bomb disposal squad arrive in an hour or so. Looks like you had an idea something like this would happen.”
“I had no idea something like this would happen. How could anyone possible know someone would dig a tunnel so they could launch an attack against their neighbor?”
They loaded Nigel’s body into the box of the truck beside Barbara. Doug stayed in the box with her. The two staff members got into the cab and drove away slowly.
She started to limp toward the Suburban, but her left leg gave out.
Craig caught her.
“I have to find Shana.”
“And we will, but how good are you going to be if you keep falling down?”
She let him tend to her wound while she took a look around the farm. Only Nigel was dead. Barbara was seriously wounded, but because the Oregon State students had returned to school and there were no animals from zoos and the people who would come with them, there had only been a skeleton crew here. The other staff had taken off when the explosions started and were hiding somewhere. Nigel was killed because he tried to protect Cleo.
“This is sick. I don’t care what they think they’re trying to accomplish.”
“I need to seal the wound. I could put in a few staples.”
“Then do it.” She pulled down her trousers.
“You’re wearing red. Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Just get on with it.”
The wound required four staples. He bandaged it once they were in place. “Done, but I can’t guarantee it won’t open again. I can give you a shot to ease the pain.”
“Will it knock me out?”
“It could make you a bit dizzy, but it should make it easier to move.”
She nodded. He gave her the shot in her leg. She pulled up her trousers and headed for the Suburban.
“Joan, you need slow down and—”
“I need to get my daughter back. Help me or get out of my way.”
At the Suburban, Craig gave her back the fob to open the rear door. There were eight rounds for the shotgun and two magazines for the AR-15. She took out another two magazines for her Beretta, handed the AR-15 and its extra magazines to Craig. She kept the Mossberg.
“We should wait for Portland SWAT to get here. We could use the reinforcements.”
“I’m not waiting.”
Faint laughter from the tool shed grew louder. Bobby and Billy led a squad of twelve men out. Two men followed the squad out. One of them carried a portable rocket launcher. The other carried the case containing the rockets.
She and Craig ducked down behind the Suburban.
“This is getting us nowhere.”
“They’re the mop up crew. Can we use the Suburban?”
She peaked underneath. “It’s lost all of its fluids. We wouldn’t get far even if we could get it started. They’d fire on us the moment we tried.”
Two explosions went off one after the other. The enclosures caught fire.
“They’re obliterating everything. They’re mimicking a Taliban attack.”
“Why? They can’t possibly get away with it now.”
“Keep with the mission.”
Her report on the Crowley farm had drawn a similar conclusion to explain the motivation for the terrorists to continue fighting against overwhelming odds once the reinforcements had arrived. The terrorists had simply kept firing and started destroying everything with explosions.
The rocket team, the ones laughing the most, fired again. Three rockets struck the hospital. Two more hit the office building to finish it off. Two struck Craig’s house and two turned the visitor’s dormitories into piles of smoking rubble.
“Maybe we can sneak past them and get into the tunnel.”
“I don’t think so.”
Guns started firing, bullets began hitting the Suburban. Craig fired back, but others started shooting, too.
“We need to get to the trees.” He pointed to where Shana had come running down the hill north of the barn.
He shot another burst as covering fire while she limped to the hedge. He ran after her just ahead of the rocket hitting the Suburban. The explosion knocked him down, but he rolled, scrambled to his feet and caught up to her at the hedge.
After waiting for the initial destruction to subside, the men came to the Suburban to check for bodies.
“We blew them to hell,” the trigger man said and they all started laughing.
Bobby barked, “Shut the fuck up and keep looking. The Colonel wants bodies.”
“There’s a path over this way.” Craig took them toward the burning barn. At the barn, he pointed into the woods. “There are caves up there that we can hide in on the way to Lookout Peak.”
“I’m not hiding in any caves. I’m going after Shana.”
“It’s a longer trek, but we can still get to the Colter farm. We don’t know what’s waiting for us in the tunnel, and we can only go in one direction, assuming they dug only one tunnel. This way, we have a number of paths to use. They won’t know which direction we’re coming from.”
A scream that sounded like Shana came from the shed. Gunfire erupted again inside the tunnel. On orders from Billy, four of the unit ran back to respond. The firefight was more intense and sustained than the previous one. There might have been a few grenade explosions.
Were some of Colin’s men attempting a rescue? How could they? They couldn’t know who else besides Colter’s men were in there. If they had found the tunnel, they might just have launched an attack or else been ambushed by Colter’s men. If it was only Zemar, he couldn’t stand up to all that firepower for long on his own.
Had Shana screamed because Zemar had gone down? She started for the shed just as something to her right moved.
A man ran out from behind a tree and tackled Craig. They rolled on the ground, just missing the trunk of another tree. The man on top of Craig raised his knife. The macho asshole was determined to get a kill his own special way. Craig had a good hold of the man’s knife hand, but the blade was slowly getting closer to his throat.
If she fired the Mossberg, it would only bring the other men to them. She limped up behind the man and struck him with the butt of the shotgun.
He tumbled off Craig onto his back.
“Where’s my daughter?” She aimed the shotgun at his
camouflaged face.
He just looked up at her and licked his lips. “Yummy.”
She struck him again.
He groaned and started laughing. “She was delicious. Her skin was so smooth, so supple, it just peeled right off.”
“He’s just trying to keep us here. I heard her, too. She’s still alive.”
A bullet struck a nearby tree, then another struck and another. She and Craig ducked.
The man rolled away, retrieved the knife and rose up to throw it as more firing came from the burning barn.
She fired and hit him in the chest with both rounds.
Craig picked up the AR-15 and returned fire. He was soon out of ammunition while the shooting from the other direction only increased. It was still random fire. They didn’t know exactly where their targets were, they were just hoping to hit something or flush them out.
“Where are the other magazines?”
“I lost them in the explosion.”
She fired three rounds with the shotgun as they started backing up along the trail. The shooting from the other side stopped.
“How many darts have you got?”
“Two more.”
“Shit.”
“This way.”
She fired two more rounds before taking Craig’s hand.
The screech came from behind them. The rocket hit uphill about sixty yards in front of them, exploding with a shockwave of flames that set grass and trees on fire.
She handed the shotgun to Craig, drew her Beretta and pushed the both of them behind a Douglas-fir.
The rocket launcher team came along the trail. The one with the case also carried an Uzi sub-machine gun.
“We can’t outrun those. They probably only missed with that one because they haven’t spotted us yet.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” he said.
“How good are you with a gun?”
“I was part of the Medical Corps. I’m better at taking bullets out of someone than putting them in.”
“I can hit a gnat at one hundred yards, but I can’t move fast enough to get both of them and retrieve the launcher before the rest of their unit catches up to us.”
The pair reloaded the launcher. The trigger man dropped to his knee and lifted it to his shoulder. The other man looked through a pair of targeting binoculars.
“If I take out the spotter, the other one may see the flash or get a bearing from the sound to locate us.”
“Not if I fire from somewhere else at the same time.” He pointed downhill. “I can take care of the launcher.”
“Where are the other guys?”
“Standard operating procedure; they will stay back to keep out of the way until they get the all clear. I’ll signal when I’m ready.”
He left the medical kit behind and ran downhill, keeping in the shadows of the forest canopy and zigzagging from tree to tree. He signaled to her once he was beside the men about fifty yards away.
Her best shot was the spotter. He was standing and didn’t have a portable rocket launcher acting as a partial shield. He was standing because these guys were conceited enough to believe their prey was fleeing. Any moment now, their targets would reveal themselves and it would be all over. It wouldn’t occur to them that the hunted might turn on them.
She aimed the Beretta at the man with the binoculars and squeezed the trigger.
Craig fired off the last two rounds from the shotgun and missed both men.
She fired, hitting the standing man in the head. When the trigger man turned in reaction to the shotgun blast, she stepped out from behind the tree and fired four times, hitting him in his right leg above the knee, his ribcage and his right ear.
The other men immediately opened fire and came running into the woods. She ducked back behind the tree, emptied the magazine, shoved in another and kept firing.
Craig ran to the launcher, hit it with the butt of the shotgun and pulled something off it. He then sprinted up the slope, grabbed hold of her and the medical kit on the way and took them into the hills.
Her left leg twitched and tightened. The pain killer wasn’t doing the job it was supposed to. She tried hopping for few steps to keep from bringing both of them down.
When Craig turned to take them northwest, and further from Shana, she glanced back to see only four men coming after them: the two men who had installed the new network in her office and the Cotton brothers.
Why had Shana screamed? If Zemar was down, she had no one left to protect her.
She cajoled herself to keep going against the pain that threatened to topple them with every step. The quartet behind them was fit, angry and armed with guns, hatred and devotion to whatever was behind all this madness.
Hold on, baby, just hold on. Please, oh please, oh please.