Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

With the butt of the rifle she broke out a window and then laid down a metered pattern of suppressing fire. The closest men outside had been caught unawares and now they turned and ran away from the house, shooting backward and sideways without effect as they fled toward their cohorts and the nearest cover available: the burning truck about fifty yards away.

When their initial panic subsided they would no doubt hope to regroup out there and try to draw her attention from safety, then wait and watch until she and the boy had run out of ammunition, before moving back in for the easy kill.

Just as she’d glimpsed a tight line of formation lights moving among the stars to the northwest, an incoming round splintered the window frame and sprayed them both with razor shards of glass. She told the boy to stay low and then returned fire to cover him as she urged him away from danger with a gentle push toward his mother and sisters in the adjoining room.

The gunmen outside were getting bolder all the while. Their wild shooting had ceased, replaced by more accurate tries from more widely positioned hiding places. It was all she could do to mask and shift her location while keeping them mostly contained behind the truck.

Having had time to think and reestablish their pecking order, they must have been weighing the overwhelming strength of their numbers against the vulnerabilities of the single armed opponent they now faced. Their only real question would be how and when they would choose to make the final advance.

Whatever they might have been scheming, however, their designs were interrupted a split second later by the awesome and on-time arrival of the Arizona Air National Guard.

Virginia Ward had just expended her last round as the first of the Falcons tore through below treetop level at full afterburner, trailing the scream of an avenging angel. All the front windows shattered and blew violently inward as the clap of the pressure wave slammed against the house. Without firing a shot, in its supersonic wake the lead F-16 had flattened the men outside who’d still been standing.

As the first jet peeled off the second followed on, flying slow on a guns-only strafing run. In a flash of heavy-metal demolition its Vulcan cannon plowed a relentless, rooster-tailing furrow across the driveway and cut through the heart of the clustered enemies. The truck’s fuel tanks burst and exploded and the fire roared heavenward, and as the dust swirled and settled, by the light of the gangsters’ burning treasure she could see no human movement amid the devastation.

There would be a last stroke coming. She picked up a pistol from a dead man’s hand as she hurried away from the window and back to Harland Dell’s huddled family. She held them close, shielding them with her body as the shriek of a Maverick missile sheared the air overhead. A final concussion shook the house to its foundation as the explosion cratered whatever remained of the threat from the men outside.

As the echoes of the strike were still fading away she continued speaking softly to the four survivors. Her voice was reassuring and calm as she listened and watched with her pistol held cocked and rock-steady and trained upon the open door. The sounds of a helicopter approaching with the rescue party barely eased her mind at all; she knew from long experience that the last moment before salvation can be as deadly as any other.

And Virginia Ward also knew something else: the nightmare was far from over for this widowed woman and her children. In fact, it never fully would be; they’d have to learn to live with scars even deeper than her own.

But they would live through this, just as their brave father would have wanted. For tonight, that was the very best that she could do.

Chapter 24

When the rescue helicopter had arrived at the burned-out ranch, one of the physicians had insisted that Virginia be flown to a secure medical facility in Colorado for observation. She’d agreed, in part so she could accompany the Dell family to that same hospital and oversee the beginnings of their care.

Once she’d settled into her recovery room she had to admit that the rest would be welcome. She’d taken a legitimate beating and after two rough flights and an endless debriefing she was left feeling every blow this latest mission had dealt her. Despite multiple cuts and bruises and two grazing bullet wounds, she’d chosen to forgo most of the painkillers when they were offered. She needed to preserve all of her mental faculties for a supposedly urgent meeting set to take place later on.

At least there had been a good hot shower in the bargain, and there would be no more traveling for the moment, not even a walk down the hall. Her next appointment was coming directly to her hospital room; she wouldn’t even need to change out of her bathrobe to meet with him.

With the bedside remote she adjusted herself to a more upright position. She was still too wired for a nap and too tired to pace the floor, but there was no shortage of reading to be done.

A stack of materials in various media had been brought and left alongside her dinner tray by someone’s assistant. The encrypted touchscreen tablet placed on top would contain all things sensitive and classified, including issue-specific position papers from various intelligence services and an up-to-the-minute recap of the President’s Daily Briefing. A generous bundle of domestic and international newspapers and magazines rounded out the pile, and that’s where she began.

Not that she believed much of the sponsored propaganda that was parroted by the press in these times. No, Virginia kept up with the papers and periodicals purely to see what the general public was being told. Through study of the covert trends and agendas between the lines she could sometimes assemble a better forecast of where and when the next crisis might arise.

The truth was predictably scarce in all those spoon-fed pages. But as someone who spent her days immersed in the undisguised reality of a global house of cards on the brink of total catastrophe, she couldn’t help but think that maybe it was better this way. There was some form of mercy in the fact that the majority of people didn’t have any idea what was coming.

Virginia Ward no longer harbored any fantasies of a happy ending, not even for the nation she loved. Her work was not at all strategic but purely reactive and tactical in nature, clear-cut and eye-to-eye. She put a stop to things that were wrong; that’s how she phrased it on those rare occasions when she was asked what she did for a living by someone who merited an honest answer. Desperate circumstances arose and she went out to meet them, and then she put things right and made that single problem go away.

This was how she wanted it; nothing ambiguous, no soul-searching was required, and there was enough self-determination in her work to make it seem worthwhile. She retained the absolute right of refusal for these missions, and when she had the opportunity to choose an assignment for herself, she was free to take it on.

That bloody siege in Arizona had been one of her own choosing. The next, though, whatever it was, would no doubt be suggested for her by someone higher up, one of the many competing power brokers who worked their patient plots from behind the tinted glass.

The man she would soon be meeting was new to her. This made it even more important that her mind be clear. It was beyond unusual for her services to be requested—or even learned of—by anyone she didn’t know personally.

As she was lost in her reading there soon came a quiet knock at the door frame. She signed out of her tablet, looked up, and motioned the visitor inside.