Firepower by John Cutter (ebook reader online .txt) 📕

hazel and buckeye. The trees were still partially leaved but the ground was swathed in the first fall of southern autumn. There was just enough room in there to move and Vince plunged in, slipping as quietly as he could between the shrubs and trees, his eyes adjusting to the deeper darkness. A night bird called plaintively. The scents of pungent plants and, somewhere, a dead animal, were musty on the humid air. He trudged on up the hill, sometimes having to force his way between small trees. Starting to breathe hard, he lifted the balaclava from the lower part of his face to give him more air. To his right, the gravel road was a dark-blue slash between the shrubs.

When he thought he was two-thirds of the way up the hill, he stopped under a pine to catch his breath and listen. Nothing but the owl, the night bird, and something rustling lightly overhead. He glanced up and saw two eyes glowing golden-brown at him. Then the thing shifted, and he could make out the silhouette of a racoon climbing up the pine bole.

He waited another minute, listening, thinking about the FBI agents who were in the area and the parts of his plan Gustafson and Colls knew nothing about.

Sweat itched its way down his back. He heard no sound of alarm and no one coming.

Vince started out again, and in a few minutes saw the road was curving sharply to the left. The moon had slipped out of the clouds and he could see the blackened remains of the lightning-burnt oak at the curve.

The brief had said follow the road up to a lightning-blasted oak at a sharp left turn. Around the curve, the road would quickly reach the gated compound. At that point there would be security cameras.

He wasn’t within the observation radius of the cameras now, but he would be when he got closer to the target. He would have to look for a blind spot. If he didn’t find one, he’d have to rush past the cams and trust to luck — and probably simply shoot some white supremacist knuckleheads who thought they were more badass than they were.

Vince lowered the black balaclava to cover the rest of his face, then moved forward in a crouch till he got to the blasted oak. He laid the assault rifle across two knobby roots, in the shadows, where he could easily find it later. Then he slipped around the side of the oak within view of the gate to his right. It was a red-painted metal-pipe gate under a strong light. There was a small gatehouse; little more than a metal and glass box resembling an old-style phone booth. The guard sat in the gatehouse looking at his cellphone — a thin guy with his head pig-shaved, blurry, overlapping tattoos on his cheeks, his mouth slackly open. He wore a brown leather jacket with some kind of vintage military insignia on its shoulders.

Beyond the gate, at the crown of the hill, was a large barnlike house with a silo attached. It was one of those houses literally converted from a barn. Windows and a front door had been neatly built into the old, refurbished barn structure. Two floors of rooms had been added inside. The silo was now a sort of tower, with little windows going up its side. There was a light atop it, and lights in the windows, and one over the front porch. There were supposedly no women or children in the place, but Vince was making no assumptions about that. His uncertainty was another reason he didn’t want to use his firearms unless he had to.

There was a camera on the light pole at the gate and another one visible above the front door. Just standard home security stuff. The side of the house nearest him was dark, deeply shadowed, the silo blocking the moon. He doubted there were cameras on that side, unless they had infrared. Not impossible.

An ordinary barbed-wire fence enclosed the property, running up to the gate on both sides. Vince slipped through the underbrush into the darker area near the fence, crouched by the bole of a pine, and put on his night-seeing goggles. The view sprang out in shades of green, gray, and black. He touched zoom and looked closely at that side of the house. No cameras. But when he looked left, he saw a sentry coming down the fence line about sixty strides away. He was a stocky guy with a pig-shaved round head. He was carrying an Uzi on a strap over his shoulder, his body language conveying boredom. He wore a sleeveless Levi jacket with vintage Nazi SS patches on its breast pockets.

Vince wasn’t sure, yet, if he was going to have to kill the guy in the gatehouse. But the patrol sentry was in the way. He was going to have to die.

Deirdre’s report on the place left Vince confident every man here was a domestic terrorist or would soon be. He had no concern about killing them. Of course, since it was all extra-judicial, he hadn’t run that part of his plans by FBI Agent Corlin. Nor did she ask. She didn’t want to know.

Vince took off the SWIR goggles, drew the combat knife, slipped back a little from the fence so that he was hidden by the tree trunk, and waited.

As a young soldier, Vince had sometimes seen a man he knew he would have to kill and had let himself think about what kind of man the tango might be; about the guy’s possible wife and family, about who had misled him to become the enemy. Vince would think about how this guy had been born, lived his life, and come all the way to that spot — just for Vince to kill him.

Unsettling thoughts. He’d eventually learned not to think them. Now, once he