Any Minute Now (2 page)

“Outlaws at your ten o'clock,” Sandofur said in his ear.

Whitman froze, and the others with him. Whitman turned his head, as an owl will, without moving his body. “I got trees. You have eyes on, Sandy?”

“A deuce,” Sandofur replied. He was on Whitman's left flank, with a far better angle on the outlaws, their name for enemies. “AK-47s, for sure, and bandoliers.”

Slowly, carefully, Whitman crept to his left.

“Engage?” Sandofur asked.

“Negative. They're on a course away from us.” Whitman made a futile gesture to wipe rain off his forehead. “We detour west, then continue on.” He glanced at his GPS, whose history could be erased at a moment's notice. “We're almost to the ranch. We're here for a snatch, not a slaughter.”

“Roger that.”

Whitman could hear the disappointment in Sandofur's voice. He was a good man, an excellent armorer, and there was no one Whitman would rather have at his back in a firefight, but Sandy had a bit too much of a taste for blood for Whitman's liking. In another era, he would have made a first-class berserker.

No point in reiterating what his men already knew: if the outlaws were outliers from the compound, as seemed likely, they'd be in periodic touch with their home base. It was far too risky taking them out. Better to leave it all quiet on the western front.

Heading southwest, they came over a hillock so rocky it looked like an old man's rotten mouth. Lights glimmered through the rain in the swale below. They had reached the compound at last.

*   *   *

“No electronics on the perimeter,” Flix informed them as they crouched behind a line of rocks that snaked along the swale. They had made three complete sweeps around the periphery of the compound, which was defined by a six-foot stone-and-mortar wall, crumbling in three places.

“No sign of the outlaw outriders,” Sandofur said as they made their sweeps.

“Let's roll then,” Whitman said, and the raid commenced.

*   *   *

It was Whitman who chose the spot to breach the wall, but it was Sandofur who went in first. He had scented the dogs on the humid night air, their musk rank and bitter. Whitman had chosen the break in the wall that was the least damaged. Through their night vision goggles they had seen movement behind the part of the wall that had crumbled to almost half its height. The section they chose was perhaps three hundred yards from where two guards stood smoking, talking in whispers.

The dogs—Pakistani bulls, white as ghosts and bred for fighting—charged Sandofur as he entered the compound. He raised his gun, shot them both with tranquilizer darts. They went down as if poleaxed, which was a pity because Sandofur loved dogs—dogs of all kinds, even Pakistani bulls, though he'd seen only one before this. It was a puppy, just twelve days old. How cute was that!

A high-pitched yelp from the second bull before it succumbed brought Sandofur's attention back to the present. To his right, the pair of guards swiveled in his direction, their AK-47s leveled. He shot them both with the same tranquilizer and they fell to their knees before toppling over, mouths open in surprise.

Sandofur pressed a remote and the incendiary charge he had planted at the other end of the compound exploded in a blinding green-white fireball. Whitman and Orteño followed him in. Flix was already at work jamming any communications from inside the compound.

The three raced across the sparse grass to the central villa that protected Seiran el-Habib. By this time, men should have been pouring out of the structure's two doors, and now Sandofur had another scent in his nose, so sensitive to the tremors of intention.

“It's a trap!” he shouted, moments too late. A bullet slammed into his chest, embedding itself in his body armor. He staggered, firing at the men who had melted out of the shadows along the periphery of the wall. They had been waiting in the darkness, waiting as if they knew precisely—

A second shot caught Sandofur in the throat. Blood and air poured out of him. His head lifted and the rain fell upon his face as softly as snowfall out of the Canadian Rockies. He smelled the blood of the felled elk and in his mind he ran to it, elated at his first kill. Soon, he and his father would slaughter the beast, then butcher it, making mouthwatering steaks three inches thick. In the here and now, he continued to fire, but now, on his knees, he could see nothing of the others. Then a third shot took apart his skull, rendering him oblivious to their fate.

*   *   *

“We've got to fall back!” Flix shouted, giving Whitman cover fire as he raced toward Sandofur. “Whit, get back here! We've no chance to nab the target! Whit! Let's haul ass!”

“I'm not leaving him behind!” Whitman shouted. “Keep me covered!”

Flix heaved a grenade at the nexus of enemy fire, ducked down at the resulting burst of stone, cement, and body parts. By this time, Whitman had grabbed Sandofur, hoisted him over one shoulder, and turned back toward the compound's wall.

Flix led them directly into the smoke and pink dust at the center of the blast, which had created a kind of sickening corridor for them, strewn not with rocks, but with bodies and bloodied limbs and, at one point, a head ripped clear off its neck.

Enemy fire continued, but it was lighter and more sporadic. Flix launched another grenade behind them, and they were over the wall by the time it went off. They raced through the rain, which seemed heavier now, coming in bursts like machine-gun fire. The sky seemed lower, the clouds roiling, as if being stirred by a giant's hand. Neither Flix nor Whitman had time to worry about whether the helo could make it through the low ceiling; they were too busy running for their lives.

Over the rocky terrain they fled, following their GPS path home. Behind them they heard what might have been another explosion. Or it could have been the throaty roar of an armored vehicle starting its pursuit of them. If that was the case, their chances of reaching their exit position would be severely lowered.

As they ran, Flix attempted to raise the helo on his emergency comm band. He tripped and fell into a shallow puddle. His left knee struck something sharp, and when he rose and carried on, it was with a distinct limp. He felt a hot trickle run down his shin, pool inside his left boot, but he did his best to ignore his loss of blood. They would be at the exit point soon; he'd worry about the wound then. At last, he raised the helo, gave the pilot their current SITREP.

“Hang tight,” the pilot said in his earwig. “Coming to getcha.”

An eighth of a mile to go, by Whitman's GPS reckoning. They were making good time, despite the worsening weather and his burden, which seemed to become heavier with each step.

He thought he could hear the helo's rotors chopping through the rain, and he glanced up. At that moment, shots were fired, and Flix went down.

The two outriders they had bypassed on their inward trek. Whitman cursed himself; in the flurry of the snafu he had forgotten all about them.

Taking shelter behind a boulder, he lay down Sandofur's corpse and crawled out to where Flix half-lay, one hand clutching his right shoulder. The enemy fire started up again. Grabbing the back of Flix's collar, he dragged him backward toward the protection of the boulder. The ground around them burst apart, sending a buckshot of dirt into their chests and faces. Turning his head away, Whitman redoubled his efforts and, with Flix helping him, scrambled back to the boulder.

“How bad is it?” he asked his comms man.

“Never mind me. How's Jonas?”

“He's not.” Whitman took up his AR-15. “Stay here.”

“You can't do this on your own, Whit.”

“Hear that?” He pointed upward. “The helo's almost on top of us.”

“Then let the gunner handle the motherfuckers.”

“Do you know what they're armed with besides the AKs, Flix? 'Cause I don't. I'm not gonna give them the chance to bring down our ride home.”

Without another word, he raced out from behind the boulder. No fire ensued. They couldn't see him, but he could see one of them, and he prepared to hunt both down.

The air began to dance, then turn into a whirlwind as the helo descended. Rain was flung into his face like shrapnel. He caught the first jihadist in the side. He'd aimed for the kidney, to cause maximum pain, and his aim was true. The jihadist screamed, as Whitman had wanted him to. The second one, drawn out of hiding, began to fire wildly, spraying bullets every which way. Whitman, flat on his stomach, took aim, squeezed the trigger, and a line of bullets flayed the target to shreds.

Then he was up and running in a semi-crouch back to the boulder. The helo appeared like an apparition from the underside of the clouds. A rope ladder was unfurled.

“Come on!” Whitman called.

He hoisted Sandofur onto his shoulder, pulled Flix to his feet with his free hand, then sprinted for the ladder, which rippled and spun in the helo's draft like a spectacular child's toy. Around and around its end circled. The gunner was halfway down its length, staring at them. He leaned down, his right arm extended as if in friendship.

“Get a move on!” he shouted. “Bogie vehicle approaching at speed!”

Whitman handed Sandofur up to him, and he began to climb back up into the helo. Flix winced as he dragged himself onto the ladder. Whitman launched him upward, then followed. A livid glow in the darkness of the night began to grow in both size and clarity. The armored vehicle was almost upon them.

Whitman pushed Flix, but his wounded shoulder had stalled his ascent. Clambering over him, Whitman reached back, clasped his left hand, and hauled him upward.

Below them, the armored car appeared out of the gloom, hulking and huge. Its machine guns swiveled around. A burst cut through the bottom of the rope ladder, pieces of it flying everywhere. Then return fire started up from the helo. Whitman at last gained the aircraft. The instant he hauled Flix inside, the helo shot upward like an arrow piercing the blackness of the heavens as it vanished from view.

 

PART ONE

FULL ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise.

—Terence McKenna
on alchemy and Renaissance magic

 

1

“A mess,” King Cutler was saying.

“A mess?” Whitman echoed. “It's a goddamned clusterfuck, is what it is.”

Cutler watched Whitman with the eyes of a tiger, green and glittering. His torso, tense and leaning slightly forward, gave him the aspect of someone about to rend anyone who opposed him limb from limb. “Seiran el-Habib was an extremely high-risk target, even for you guys.”

“And that's another thing,” Whitman said, heatedly. “There
are
no ‘you guys,' not anymore. Sandy is dead and Flix just got out of surgery. Red Rover is dead, gone, finished, kaput
.
”

“Flix will be fine.” Cutler struggled to maintain an even tone in the face of Whitman's rage and pessimism. “They got the bullet without any difficulty. No bones involved. With our accelerated PT program he'll be as good as new in a week, ten days at the outside.”

“And what about Sandy? Will he be good as new? Are you going to resurrect him?”

Cutler made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. They were seated opposite each other in Cutler's office, which had the look of a room in a gentleman's club rather than an office. Paneled in gleaming mahogany, its myriad shelves were filled with books on military history and biographies of great generals and admirals going all the way back to Alexander the Great. Only one anomaly appeared in the room, and it was a doozy: an enormous flat-screen TV set into the wall opposite a massive tiger-oak desk, on which played an endless rotation of scenes of battle zones from across the globe, images from closed-circuit and drone cameras, exclusive to Universal Security Associates.

“I know you've got your team to consider, Gregory, but I have to take in the big picture.”

“Which is what? What's more important than one of your men being shot dead?”

“The president.” Cutler stared at his flat-panel computer screen. “This fucking president is going to be the death of us all. He's just not that into war. On every front he's dragging his feet. This crap with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had breathed some new life into our business, but for how long? That's the question that keeps me up at night. We need wars, no matter the size. No American military presence, no business for us.” He shook his head in consternation. “It's a new day, Gregory. Our world is becoming smaller and smaller. I'm lucky I have my contacts in NSA, otherwise the company's bottom line would be bottoming out.”

Outside the bullet- and soundproof windows, the expanse of the Washington Mall flowed away like a stream on which ten thousand pleasure boats drifted back and forth.

Whit appeared entirely unmoved. He'd heard this lament before from the members of the Alchemists. “Like you say, my focus is on my team, and because of this snafu one of them is dead and another is injured. It's unacceptable.”

Cutler was wrenched away from his contemplation of USA's future. “Are you really going to make me say that we all know the risks?” he said, clearly annoyed. “In our business, it's such a fucking cliché.” He was a big man in all directions, tall and wide as a Mack truck. He was an ex-Marine, had seen combat three times that Whitman knew of. Divorced twice, two kids, one from each marriage. They stayed in touch, even if his exes didn't. “Worse than a cliché.” He had a head like a football, his hair still shorn in a Marine high-and-tight, and there was not a gray strand to be found on him. His knife slash of a mouth was always grim, his nose constantly questing for danger. “Honestly, Gregory, this talk will go better when you simmer down to a rolling boil.”

“You weren't there, boss. You didn't see…” Whitman gritted his teeth, stopping of his own accord. “We were betrayed. There was a leak, a breach of security, call it what you want. The upshot is that someone from inside—
one of us
, boss—didn't want us to get to Seiran el-Habib.”