True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(44)

“Oh,” Margo said. “That kind of woody. Let’s find the car, fill it with your weapons and treasure, and get the hell out of here.”

“No,” Ian said. “We’re done running.”

“What’s the alternative?” Margo said. “Hide in Ronnie’s shelter for a year or two until they forget about us?”

Ian held up his paperback. “Clint Straker wouldn’t run and he wouldn’t hide.”

“You aren’t Clint Straker,” she said.

“Everybody keeps telling me that but you’re wrong,” he said. “I am Clint Straker. I created him. Everything he is, everything he’s ever done, came from within me.”

“He’s imaginary.” She grabbed the book out of his hand and flung it like a Frisbee into the burning wreckage of the pickup truck. “You made up his past and everything that he does. You don’t actually have his training or combat experience.”

“I have something more important. I know how he thinks and how he reacts. He doesn’t wait for things to happen. He makes them happen,” Ian said. “It’s time I stopped thinking like me and started thinking like him.”

“That’s it, man, get into character.” Ronnie clapped Ian on the back. “I got so into the Vine that by episode thirteen, I was capable of photosynthesis.”

Margo gave Ronnie a cold, hard look. “You can convert sunlight into energy.”

Ronnie held out his arms and tipped his face up to the sky “The sun is my Big Mac.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Margo said. “Get real. We’re talking about our lives here.”

“That’s why it’s time to embrace our true selves and harness our potential,” Ronnie said. He turned to Ian. “So, buddy, there’s one question you’ve got to ask yourself. What would Clint Straker do right now?”

“He’d take the fight to them,” Ian said.

“Damn right he would,” Ronnie said. “It’s going to be the three of us against the C-I-fucking-A.”

“That’s suicide,” Margo said.

“Actually, it sounds just like a Clint Straker book to me,” Ian said. “All I need to do is plot it.”

Margo took a deep breath, and when she spoke, it was in a calm, patronizing tone, like she was talking to a child. “When you’re writing a book, you’re in complete control of the universe. It doesn’t work like that in the real world.”

“Is that so? Tell that to the CIA. If they could use my story idea to kill people in the real world, why can’t I do the same thing to bring the CIA down? Someone has to make them pay.” Ian tore the duct tape off his cast, pulling chunks of plaster away and throwing them on the ground until his pale, bone-thin right arm was revealed. He stretched his arm out and made a fist. “It’s going to be me.”

Ian sounded just like Straker and he knew why—because he was, and always had been, Straker inside. For the first time since this nightmare began, he felt strong and unafraid. Ronnie and Margo could see it, too.

Ronnie raised his RPG launcher. “I’m right there with you, man.”

Margo looked at Ian for a long moment as she thought it over and then sighed with resignation as she came to a decision that she appeared to already regret. “If we’re dead anyway, we might as well go down fighting.”

“We’re going to have to work on your winning attitude,” Ian said.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The enemy came in an unmarked black helicopter a couple of hours later. They flew in from the south and circled twice over the charred ruins and smoking craters before landing about fifty yards from the compound.

Two men emerged from the helicopter wearing dark sunglasses and white jumpsuits, white gloves, and white rubber boots. They both carried toolboxes that Ian presumed, based on his extensive experience watching police procedurals on television, were evidence-collection kits.

Ian and Margo crouched side by side and watched the men from under a camouflaged tarp that was spread over several artificial boulders atop one of the rocky hillsides that bordered the compound. It was where Ronnie had been hiding when Ian and Margo drove in that morning.

Margo used binoculars to track the men while Ian watched them through the scope on the rocket-propelled grenade launcher that rested on his shoulder. The RPG launcher was essentially a tube with a rocket stuck in the front and a trigger on the bottom. Ronnie had given Ian and Margo a quick lesson in how to use it. It wasn’t a complex device. Ian shifted his aim to the helicopter, putting the craft in the center of his sights. It would be a hard target to miss.

The weapon was too heavy for Ian’s weak right arm so he propped the end of it on a rock in front of him, took a deep breath, and squeezed the trigger.

The rocket shot out, the blazing backfire scorching the rocks behind Ian. An instant later the rocket slammed into the helicopter and blew it apart. The concussive force of the explosion knocked the two men off their feet, which was fortunate, because a split second later a severed rotor blade sliced through the air where they’d stood. The two men landed facedown on the ground. They lifted their heads and saw Ronnie under the tractor, smiling and pointing an AK-47 at their heads.

“Keep kissing the dirt, assholes,” he said. “Hands behind your backs.”