John Gilstrap - Threat warning

All of that translated to not a lot of personal loyalty.

The ranks had thinned considerably. Some of his soldiers had been martyred, but he suspected that even more had fled. Those who remained-he figured it to be a force of eighty, maybe eighty-five-were terrified.

The assault that lay ahead fell far outside any training that the cadre of soldiers had received. Their training had always focused on specialized two- or three-person disruption teams who focused on their particular missions. The idea of a mass assault had never been addressed.

But now it was necessary.

Once Sister Colleen returned from Brother Michael’s house with his equipment, they’d be ready to begin. He’d allowed her to take his sheriff’s vehicle, so it shouldn’t take long.

As that thought was passing through his mind, he saw lights moving to his right, and he turned to see his Ford sedan pulling onto the grass from the driveway and heading straight toward him. When it stopped, he was shocked to see four people climb out. He walked over to join them, and as he closed to within a few yards, he recognized the sentry staff from the front gate.

“I found them tied up in the trees,” Sister Colleen explained as she opened the tailgate and pulled out two cases that looked not unlike electric guitar cases, but which in fact contained Barrett M82A3 fifty-caliber sniper rifles.

Kendig lost interest in the sentries and turned his attention to the rifles. “Only two?”

“The other two are missing,” Colleen explained.

Kendig scowled. “You checked the armory rooms in the basement?”

“That’s where I found these.”

“And the ammunition?”

Sister Colleen pointed to the two cans on the car deck. “That’s them. Green and silver tips, right?”

Kendig smiled. The heavy walls of the assembly hall made a conventional assault virtually impossible, but these Raufoss MK 211 explosive penetrator rounds would make quick work of it all. Tipped with an RDX explosive mixture, the Raufoss round left the barrel at twenty-eight hundred feet per second, but on impact with armor would launch a tungsten spike at four thousand feet per second to punch a three-quarter-inch hole. As the penetrator continued through the hole, it would spew zirconium particles, which would then ignite like a high-velocity sparkler. What wasn’t dismembered by the penetrator or blown apart by the high-order detonation of the RDX would likely be incinerated in the long-burning cloud of zirconium.

It was a heck of a bullet.

As he started to load ten-round magazines, he said to Sister Colleen, “Please find Brother Kurt and Brother Absalom and tell them I need to see them.”

The narrow view allowed by the slots in the shutters rendered Jonathan’s NVGs useless. He wore them rocked back on his head and pressed his monocular against his eye. His first impression was that there were a lot of them out there, followed by a more depressing realization that they were becoming organized. What had once been a crowd of people swarming in their panic had settled down to something that resembled organized units.

“Big Guy,” Jonathan called. “What do you see?”

“I got nothing over here.”

“Gunslinger?” When he got no response, he called again. This time, she responded. “Right here.”

“Do you see any activity?”

“Nothing back here.”

“Hey, Nasbe family!”

“We can’t see anything either,” Christyne reported.

So their entire assault force was gathering in the front of the building. Why would they do that?

“Hey, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked. “If you’re the opfor commander, why would you assemble your entire force to the same side of a structure?”

“Got a lot of people out there, do you?” Boxers quipped. “They could just be stupid.”

“Let’s assume they’re smart.”

Boxers shook his head. “I can’t get there. If they knew what they were doing, they’d at least come in on two angles. Let’s shoot at them and get them to disperse. Lord knows we’ve got the ammo and weapons.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. By firing into the gathering crowd, he could disrupt their assault even before it began. It was such a rookie mistake for them put all of their forces in such a small area that it almost seemed irresponsible not to capitalize on it.

Unless it wasn’t a mistake. A piece of the puzzle fell into place for Jonathan.

“Hey, Big Guy-”

From a hundred yards away, the woods line came alive with muzzle flashes as the opposing force-the opfor-opened up with a torrent of small-arms fire. Their bullets hit with the sound of so many hammers pounding on the wall. Jonathan brought his weapon to his shoulder and slipped his finger in the guard.

For every muzzle flash, there was a shooter just two feet behind it.

Then he understood.

“Everybody away from the windows!” he yelled.

Boxers looked at him as if he’d just discovered a second nose on his face.

“Nobody return fire,” Jonathan ordered. “They’re trying to draw muzzle flashes. That’s why they’re being so obvious.”

That didn’t help Boxers. And then he got it. “The fifty cal,” he said. It was the gun they’d heard being fired while surveilling Michael Copley’s house. He pulled away from his window.

“Everybody come into the sanctuary,” Jonathan said. “And everybody stay down.”

Gail looked particularly confused. “But what about-”

An explosion cut her words-a startling double blast, followed by a fireball and stuff erupting on the altar just beside her. She dropped instantly.

Then the living nightmare began.

Brother Kendig could sense the soldiers’ relief when he told them to open fire from way back here. That meant not exposing themselves to return fire. At least for now. There was something oddly beautiful about watching a building come apart a chunk at a time under the onslaught of bullets. Even in the relative darkness of the starlight, he could see chunks and crumbs flying away.

But those were distractions. He stayed focused on the front windows. Once he saw a flash of return fire, he’d know exactly where to put his Raufoss rounds, and once he started placing them, he wouldn’t stop until there were no more to place.

Only the return fire didn’t materialize.

“Could they be dead?” Brother Absalom shouted over the din.

Kendig couldn’t see how. But he was tired of waiting. “Open fire,” he said.

Ryan would never admit this, but he was relieved by the word to pull away from the windows. As tired as he was of this shit, and as cruel and awful as these Klansmen or whatever were, he didn’t think he had it in him to kill them. Brother Stephen had been an accident. That was a whole world away from aiming at a human target and shooting it. He didn’t even like first-person-shooter video games. Way too intense.

In the dark light of the candle wash from the sanctuary, he could see that his mom was relieved, too.

The urgency in Scorpion’s voice was scary, though. Apparently there was danger in The front wall of the church erupted in splashes of white-hot silver and gold fire as thunder boomed through the sanctuary and huge holes were blown through the front and back walls. Pews erupted in fountains of splintering wood. It was too much to take in all at once. Whole chunks of their universe were exploding, one after another, with less than a second in between.

Ryan and his mom stood there, half crouched and frozen in the doorway between the vestry and the sanctuary. He’d never seen this kind of destruction. Off to his left, the altar turned to powder. To his right, the front wall was burning in half a dozen places, and spot fires flared throughout.

The noise was unbearable-off-the-charts loud, like Fourth of July times ten.