Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(84)

“No, he’s not.” He slid his foot off the accelerator. “Take the wheel.”

I ordered Clyde to lie flat and reached over him to grab the steering wheel. It bucked in my hand as the truck slowed and the tires fought the ruts.

“Stop!” the guard yelled.

Dougie lowered the window.

The guard raised his weapon. A bullet punctured the windshield and thumped into the seat, missing Dougie by less than an inch.

He leaned out the open window and leveled his own rifle.

The guard’s head burst apart in a red rain.

Dougie brought in the rifle, took the wheel, and stomped the gas pedal. We roared around the dead man and through the barricade, shattered wood flying into the air.

I stared out the back window at the man lying in the road.

“Shit,” I said. My hands were shaking.

“He would have sounded the alert.”

“What if he’s expected to call in?”

“Then they’ll be waiting for us.” Dougie threw me a harsh look. “From here on, follow my orders. No questions. No arguing. We’re heading into a kill zone. Do you understand?”

The dead man vanished in a swirl of dust. In his place stood a ghost—staved-in head, fingers gripped around the cord to an electric burner.

Fadden.

“I understand,” I said.



A few minutes later, Dougie pulled off the road and drove the truck behind a thick grove of cottonwoods growing on the bank of a shallow creek.

“Five minutes,” he said. “Then we head out.”

While he fieldstripped the rifles we’d taken from the strip club and checked the rest of our gear, I ran Clyde through a series of maneuvers we’d practiced with Clyde’s trainer. I went through each of the most critical commands in English, German, and Hebrew, then ran through them all again using hand signals.

Clyde performed flawlessly.

I called him in, gave him his fill of water, then buckled his Kevlar vest around his stomach and chest and shrugged into my own vest. I slid on my thigh harness with my personal Glock and the shoulder holster with the stun gun and grabbed Cohen’s jacket—the fleece I’d borrowed from him and never returned. I tied it around my waist. At the back of the truck, Dougie was loading his backpack. The last thing to go in were explosives and a few remote detonators.

“I thought this was a quick in and out,” I said.

“Plan B. Things go wrong, we’ll want leverage. I’ll go in first and set things up. If Cohen can’t walk, I’ll acquire a vehicle.”

“How long?”

“I’ll be fast.” He glanced down at my hands. They were still shaking. “Clyde and I can do this alone.”

“It’s Cohen. I’m going.”

He gave me a measured stare, then handed over one of the suppressed M4s, a folding knife, and a pair of binoculars. I hung the glasses around my neck and slung the rifle over my right shoulder. The knife went into my pocket. We clipped on headsets and ran through a radio check. Then I whistled up Clyde, and the three of us headed south at a jog toward the ridge.



The land stretched dry and golden brown around us, the day heating up as it moved toward midmorning. The stream soon trickled to nothing, but the dry arroyo wound steadily south. The wind became a beast, flattening the grass and swirling grit through the air.

Fifteen minutes brought us to the ridge we’d noted on the maps. I signaled Clyde, and the three of us dropped to our stomachs and crawled up the last few yards, not sure whether the compound would be a hundred yards away or almost three miles. And if they’d be watching for us.

We edged over the top and peered down.

The hill dropped steeply on the other side, flattening into a plain of tall grass and the occasional tree. A quarter mile away, a handful of man-made structures rose from the earth like ancient ruins.

Dougie and I eased up on our elbows and glassed the site.

I recognized it immediately. The angle was different. But this was the subject of Kane’s photographs.

In the center of a large leveled area rose a two-story tan brick building, a plain rectangle whose only adornment was a series of narrow vertical windows up high, like those used by archers in medieval times. On the near side of the building, an obstacle course sprawled across a chunk of acreage. Rope ladders, a set of hurdles, muddy trenches covered by barbed wire. At the far end were scaling walls and a fifteen-foot-high wall used for rappelling.

“They’re running a training center,” Dougie said.

“But for who?”

“Good question.” He kept panning. “I don’t see any security cameras on the buildings or near the fence. They’re probably still hooking things up.”

Most of the rest of the site was still open prairie. But on the far side, just visible, a steel-and-concrete airplane hangar spread across a large area. A metal door covered the opening. Nearby, two private jets sat behind a chain-link fence. In one corner of the fenced area was a small collection of backhoes and tractors.

Next to the hangar, a concrete runway ran north-south.

“The planes are Cessna Longitudes,” Dougie said. “Set you back twenty-five mil. They probably keep the really expensive aircraft inside the hangar. You see the green rectangle with the white sword painted on the sides of the jets?”

I turned the focus on the binoculars. “What is it?”