Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Fernandez had only driven a short distance west when he came to sudden, jarring halt. Howard and Wasserman looked at the screens.

There were at least ten people on the ground near the perimeter fence. Men and women in outdoor exercise clothes. Sweaters, mufflers, leggings, sneakers.

They were covered in blood. The clothes saturated with it.

“It’s Doc Hughes,” Fernandez said. His voice shook. “Her runners.”

Howard snapped open his safety harness. “I’m getting out.”

Fernandez tore his eyes from the windshield to glance at the base map. “Spree...the southern ’hog, it’s still close by.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn. ”

Fernandez gave Wasserman a quick glance, nodded for him to take the wheel, then disengaged the hatch lock. By the time he got out of his straps, Howard was halfway outside.

The two men approached the inert bodies. Or what was left of them. They had been cut to pieces, and there was blood everywhere. It dripped wetly from the fence linkages. It seeped from their wounds in red streams and runnels. It ate away at the snow on the ground, soaking in and mingling and pooling and making the ground slippery underfoot.

Howard saw dozens of shell casings scattered around the ’hog’s track marks like metal seeds. He saw Andy Benslow heaped near the fence. He saw Doug Ryder on his back, the fine white dusting of snow on his contorted face giving it the look of a plaster mask. He saw Jason Pierce and Lavonne Hughes, his mauled body partly covering hers, as if he’d tried to shield her from the gunfire. He saw one of the nurses—her name was Donna Apple. Apple of my eye , he’d always ribbed her during his checkups, knowing she must have heard the line a thousand times. There was a soldier named Jameson who had just volunteered for Quickdraw the month before, and two civilian staffers named Brennen and Tovias. There were a few people lying on the ground who had been so badly torn apart by bullets they were unrecognizable.

The wind picked up, and the snow fell harder. Howard was barely aware of it. Then he noticed Fernandez coming up on his right with a flashlight in his hand.

“They were slaughtered,” Howard said. “This was planned. All of it.”

The sergeant aimed the flash at the caterpillar tracks. They ran in a continuous west-to-east line and then ended about ten feet away and doubled back on themselves. “The ’hog must’ve followed them here, opened fire, and turned around,” he said. “Tread marks run toward the barracks, sir.”

Howard turned to him, his upper lip curling back over his front teeth.

“Somebody’s gonna pay,” he said savagely. “I swear to you. I will make somebody pay. ”

Fernandez felt a shiver run though him. He wasn’t sure if it was the horror of what he saw on the ground, the look in Howard’s eyes, or a combination of both.

“What makes you think those Argos sats can get word out without an intercept?” Howard said.

“Different reasons,” said Fernandez. “They use concentrated beams—spot beams—to relay their signals. Sat to sat, sat to earth, no ground stations. There are antijamming measures. And there’s Soto’s firewall. I’d be amazed if they were hacked.”

“Then we need to give Duchess a sitrep,” Howard said. His jaw muscle worked. “Nothing we can do here. I want to get the hell over to the barracks. We’ll come back for these people later.”

The sergeant nodded his understanding. The living took precedence over the dead. They had to be sure there was room in the Puma for anyone they evacuated.

Howard turned toward their vehicle, took a step or two forward, then stopped. He listened, looked up, and listened some more, squinting into the windblown snow.

The buzzing in the sky again. How could he have missed it after leaving the Puma?

“You hear that?” he said.

Fernandez nodded. He was also listening closely. “Yeah,” he said. “Heard it before, too.”

“Back in the Heights?”

“Right, sir. Figured it for a plane.”

Howard kept looking up. And he’d thought it might be a helicopter. But now it didn’t seem like either. Somehow it was too...

He didn’t know the right word. Wide , maybe.

He lifted a hand over his eyes to screen them from the snow, but it was coming down harder now, the flakes dipping and darting and spinning under his palm and between his fingers to peck coldly at his cheeks. As he stood peering into the sky, the sound seemed to first strengthen, then gradually fade out, and then strengthen again, as if whatever was up there was in a repetitive, elliptical flight pattern, with the gusty wind drowning it out at the more distant points in its trajectory.

Which explained why he hadn’t heard it immediately, he thought. But he still couldn’t see anything overhead.

“I don’t like this, Julio,” he said. “Not one bit.”

They trundled back to their idling vehicle. Howard’s entire body felt sore, and there was a pressure in the middle of his chest that seemed to clamp down hard around his lungs. He didn’t so much sit down as spill back into his seat, breathless and dizzy, hoping the others wouldn’t notice.

Up front and on the move again, Fernandez noticed.

10

Satu Mare District, Romania

Dixon thundered forward in the BearCat, the high, long-limbed trees crowding close on either side. His GPS showed Castle Graguscu several hundred yards up around a wide bend in the access road.

Carmody’s idea seemed half-crazy to him. Which he supposed made it fifty percent less crazy than most of Carmody’s ideas.

“We’re almost there,” he said to Kali. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“Look, I’ve seen you in action. I know what you can do. But a man just died in your arms.”

She pulled on her balaclava, leaving the bottom down under her chin.

“Everyone dies,” she said. “He moved on. He wasn’t afraid.”

Dixon nodded. “Carmody was right.”

“About?”

“The whole world wanted you locked up,” Dixon said. “He knew you weren’t what they said you were.”

She reached into a jacket pocket for her gloves.

“I’m what I need to be,” she said. “What people say isn’t my concern.”

Dixon took the cue and shut up. Kali slipped on the gloves and they turned the bend. The outline of the castle came into view against the darkness of night. It was about fifty yards away, all towers and turrets and crenellated battlements thrusting into the sky.

“Okay,” he said. “They’re on the way.”

She clicked open her seat harness.

“I’m ready,” she said.

The lift platform climbed evenly up from the buried garage, a horizontal sliding door retracting overhead as it rose to the surface.

Carmody and Schultz stood atop it with the two Ninja motorcycles. As it stopped its silent ascent, they realized they were in the middle of an artificial pond that had been drained of water, probably for the winter season. The platform had replaced its bottom and come up level with the surrounding lawn.

They looked around them. It was no longer snowing, but the temperature must have plunged ten degrees since their drop from Raven , freezing and solidifying the lingering airborne moisture into microscopic needles of ice. The particles flicked and spun into the lenses of their DNVGs, blurring them with a thin crystalline film.

Schultz snapped his goggles up over his helmet with a gloved hand. He was looking south toward the main gate, hoping to spot Dixon’s BearCat amid the trees and hedges.

“I don’t see them,” he said through his balaclava. “You?”

Carmody raised a hand and gestured to his right, eastward, where the walls and turrets of Castle Graguscu loomed high above them. He’d heard the low grumbling surge of an engine.