AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A single doctor and three nurses were inside waiting, with all the medical equipment they needed to patch up any wounds, set any broken bones, treat any possible infections. There was no surgical suite here, but the doctor was accustomed to doing good work with limited resources and would do the best with what he had.
Pace trailed Court and Zack, and while everyone else went inside, the older man reached out and put his hand on Court’s shoulder.
Court turned to him, anger, exhaustion, tension all visible on his face.
“What?”
Pace looked off towards the hogs in the predawn. “What happened to Anthem. That’s on me.”
“On you?”
“She wanted me to blow the servers and get down there and support you. Watkins had ordered me to upload Cyrus if I could, so I denied her request.” He sighed. “If I just blew that place to hell at the beginning, she wouldn’t have gone off on her own to help you.”
This weighed on Court a moment. Finally, he said, “Not your fault, Jim. Hinton’s the one to blame.”
They continued on towards the porch and then into the house.
Inside, Court saw that the worst of the injured had been taken off to a back room with a doctor and a nurse, and two nurses, Black women in their thirties, worked on the walking wounded.
Anton Hinton had been sat in a chair in the living room; Hightower stood across from him.
Other Ground Branch men stood at windows, pulling security, while Jim Pace took out his sat phone to make a call in the kitchen.
Court stood there in the doorway, his eyes locked on the billionaire across the room, the fury in his heart all-consuming.
Mike One stood next to him, drinking water from a CamelBak that he held in his hands, his rifle on his back, his pistol in its holster on his hip. The man was pretty banged up himself, Court saw, and his clothing and equipment were blackened with soot.
The man dropped the nozzle of the CamelBak, closed his exhausted eyes for a moment, and started to wipe his dirty face with his hands.
When his arms were raised to do this, Court reached out, pressed the retention button on the man’s holster, and pulled Larry Repult’s gun off his hip.
Before Mike One could react, before anyone could react, Court pointed the gun at Anton Hinton.
After a second of hushed silence, nearly everyone in the room began shouting. Men raised weapons at Court, belted orders for him to drop the gun and get down on his knees, and Pace ran out of the little kitchen and into the confined space full of big men, body odor, and fury.
The two nurses fled to the back room, leaving the wounded behind.
Joe Takahashi leveled his pistol at Zack Hightower at a distance of just a few feet now, unsure if the two men were working together on whatever the fuck was going on.
Court Gentry was the coolest person in the room. Calmly and quietly, he said, “Jim. I am walking out of here with Hinton.”
Hinton looked absolutely terrified, and Pace didn’t seem much better. “Wha…what for?”
“I’m going to use him to get Anthem back.”
Pace shook his head. “You can’t. You can’t, Court. Giving Hinton back to the Chinese is just going to give them the weapon. Maybe not instantly, but in three years, five years…at some point Hinton will get engineers and scientists back up to speed and they will replicate, maybe even improve Cyrus, or something even worse. They will lose control of it.”
“But you want to give him to America,” Court said, his eyes still locked on Hinton, his target. “You don’t think they will do the same thing? You don’t think we’ll lose control of it, too?”
To this, Pace said, “I…I don’t know. But I do know China can’t be allowed to take it.”
Now Zack spoke. “Pace, Hinton told me himself that Cyrus was designed to defeat the Chinese once it was deployed by them. How do you know he won’t do the same to America?”
“I don’t know, Zack. I have my orders. That’s all.”
Court stepped up closer to Hinton; most of the guns in the room stayed on him.
“Well I…I don’t have any orders. Maybe I’ll just do him right here.”
