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

see him approach. At twenty feet off, he could hear what they were saying. “So Herb says, ‘There’s two uses for liberals, and one of them is sucking dick.’”

This was apparently a punchline, as both men burst into raucous laughter. Vince used the noise to creep up even closer. He switched his knife to his left hand, holding it by the blade, then took the Desert Eagle in his right, holding it by the barrel.

“One time I was in this bar in Vancouver, Washington, place called the Ice House, and we—”

The man broke off, staring, as Vince jumped down into the cupola and threw the knife with his left hand at the man across from him. It sped true, and bisected the militiaman’s throat, right through the voice box — something Vince only saw peripherally as he spun to his left and brought down the pistol’s butt hard on the other man’s forehead. Hard enough to smash it in so that blood and brains spurted and the man crumpled, dead in under a second.

Vince stepped back to avoid the blood, frowning to find some of it had gotten on the bottom of the seven-round clip in the Desert Eagle.

He knelt by the dead man’s legs and used the corpse’s trouser cuffs to carefully wipe the blood off the clip of the big pistol. Blood drained from the bodies and down the flood drain in the concrete floor of the emplacement.

Retrieving his knife, he wiped it off and took one of the night-seeing SWIR devices from the shelf. He hung them from his belt, then began moving across the terrain toward the other emplacement, staying west enough that they wouldn’t likely spot him.

Vince was aware on some level that he’d shifted into a certain highly specialized state of mind. It was a state of heightened acuity; of taut reflexes and crystalline objectivity. His pulse was up and he tasted metal in his mouth. But it wasn’t from fear. It was the watchful intensity of a professional warrior. It was the mental and physical state of a specialist.

He started moving faster, almost running, not wanting to be caught in the open if one of them spotted him. In a minute he’d reached the igloo-like curve of the second emplacement’s semi-dome — and then one of the men chose that moment to step up onto the ridge for a cigarette.

The unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, the gangly militiaman stared in shock, seeing Vince. He opened his mouth to shout and only got a gurgle out as Vince’s spinning knife buried itself in his throat.

But a second man, powerfully muscled and thick-necked, blurted, “Son of a bitch!” and pulled his pistol as Vince turned to him. Vince had been planning to use the Desert Eagle as a hammer again; now he had to reverse the gun in his hand, which took half a second, and the man had time to get off a shot. The bullet cracked by Vince’s head, and he fired back — the big Desert Eagle .50 round slamming into the militiaman’s breast bone. The man went staggering back, his face contorted by pain and fear. He fell onto his back, over the steel trapdoor that led to the lower levels.

The bullet had passed through the body-builder and into the concrete wall, punching deeply between the gun slits. The .50 was a powerful load in a powerful handgun.

Wondering if anyone had heard the shot down below, Vince holstered his gun, retrieved his knife, cleaned and sheathed it. He noticed a select-fire extended clip AR-15 leaning against the wall. Why not?

He dragged the muscle-builder off the trap door —the big guy’s dead weight took some real effort to move. He found the trap door locked.

Vince dug in the pockets of the dead man, came up with a small ring of keys. He unlocked the trap door, lifted it up a few inches and peered through. He could see the empty top-flight of the stairs, lit by a dull-yellow overhead light. He listened and heard nothing from below. He opened the trap door the rest of the way, pocketed the keys, took the AR-15, slinging its rifle strap over one shoulder, and climbed down the ladder.

He took the assault rifle into his hands, checked the clip — it was fully loaded — and set the fire to semi-auto. Then he started down the stairs, reviewing the top floor in his mind. There was the upstairs barracks to the south, but there would likely be no one in it. Everyone bunked in the first-floor barracks. At this hour there might still be Brethren lingering in the cafeteria and kitchen, also on the top floor. Most of the base’s troops would be done with dinner and probably in the downstairs barracks, prepping for training.

Vince hoped he didn’t have to kill the two Brethren-loyal Shield Maidens. Or Shaun Adler.

The alert would have gone out on him. He’d probably have to kill anyone he encountered. If Deirdre were still alive she’d probably be down in a basement cell or in Gustafson’s office. And that office would be Vince’s first stop.

Vince reached the third floor, stepped through the door from the stairway — and immediately saw Rocky Chesterton, coming down the corridor from his right.

Rocky was a craggy-faced man, tall and wide-shouldered and deft in his movements. And he was raising his Glock — but as he was doing that, Vince was aiming.

Vince squeezed off an AR-15 round and it caught Rocky in the forehead. The man’s head jerked back and he convulsively squeezed the Glock’s trigger. The bullet spanged off a metal brace in the wall and cut through a corner of Vince’s leather jacket, just missing his waist.

Three shots, one ricochet. So much for stealth, Vince thought.

Rocky fell, and gun smoke swirled in the corridor. Behind Vince was the empty barracks; ahead was