Her eyes began to sting.
The man at the doorway began coughing, but he fired his pistol down at something below him in the living room at the same time.
The boss who was holding her coughed, as well, dropped down to hisknees, then dropped low and began crawling towards the door, out of the room. He passed the man standing there shooting down into the living room and disappeared in the direction of the stairs.
Andie remained in the empty room, now lying on her back, covering her face with her coat. She didn’t know what was happening, but she couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
She was sure she was about to die.
Forty-Six
Court Gentry shattered the already broken window with the silencer on the end of his Scorpion submachine gun, all but leapt off the ladder, then landed on the floor of the room where someone had smashed the window out just twenty seconds earlier.
He’d placed the ladder at a second-floor window to another room on the east side of the building and had begun to climb, but when he heard the commotion one room over, he dropped off the collapsible ladder he’d taken from Pete Delaney’s truck and carried through the forest for hundreds of yards, then hurriedly moved it twenty feet to the right and climbed back up to the damaged window.
He moved fast, but he would have moved a hell of a lot faster without the gear he wore. In addition to his body armor and his weapon, he had an oxygen tank on his back and a mask on his face, and another mask was hooked onto his belt and connected with a hose to the same tank.
Now in the room, he swept for targets, but the bear spray Pete Delaney had deployed through the garage door downstairs had already made it up here and it was only adding to the darkness and confusion of the smoke from the nine-banger Zack had thrown after shooting the man on the porch.
Court shined his weapon’s light and immediately saw a target in front of him, an armed man facing away. He pressed the trigger on his subgunand shot the big man three times in the back. He pitched forward, flipped over the railing of the mezzanine, and disappeared.
But Court noticed one more figure in the middle of the small and empty bedroom, a small girl with a beanie on her head, writhing on the barren hardwood floor, covering her face and eyes with her coat.
He ran to her, pulled the secondary mask from his belt and put it on her, then lifted her back up to her feet.
She seemed to recover quickly; Court kept his weapon on the doorway as he waited for her to do so. She looked towards him in the low light, and Court thought she might have been expecting to see either her father or some other firefighter she knew.
Instead, he saw confusion on her face, looking through her mask at him.
He wanted to move out to the landing with his weapon, to help Zack, who was down there fighting God knows how many people, including Lancer.
But he was tethered to the girl, the girl was the mission, so he pulled her back to the window. She coughed and staggered, but she followed along nonetheless.
As soon as he got to the window, however, he saw that the ladder had fallen over.
Shit.
—
Over the past half hour, Zack, Pete, and Court had been moving through thick woods; Court had used a compass on his watch because they weren’t getting consistent signals on their phones, but eventually they’d found the cabin. The lights were on; the Wagoneer and the Bronco were parked inside a garage with the door open. Court tracked around the back of the property, carrying a small folding ladder and an oxygen tank, and here he had stumbled upon a pickup truck with two men inside.
He couldn’t make noise by shooting them; even with the suppressor on his weapon, the report would be audible inside the cabin, so he’d given them a wide berth, stayed out of the lights, and gone around to the eastern side to access the cabin from one of the upstairs bedroom windows.
Zack had stayed on the western side, in the trees but within view of the front of the cabin, right across the steep driveway. He carried a subgun and a pair of flash-bang grenades, and he immediately set his sights on a man standing on the porch.
Pete Delaney had been given a hands-on job, as well. He had a firefighter’s crowbar for accessing locked doors easily. He knew that the breaker switch to shut off power to the entire cabin was in the garage. And he had the two cans of Sabre Frontiersman bear spray, one from Zack’s truck and one from his, and each with fourteen ounces of propellant that would shoot the powerful chemical irritant forty feet.
The three men had determined from the online photos of the cabin that the garage door opened into the dining area, which itself looked straight over the living room. The living room was surrounded by a second-floor landing that ran in a U shape, which meant applying the spray straight through the garage door into the unit would, effectively, cover the entire building.
Pete had been reluctant to use the bear spray, not because he was afraid for his safety prying open the door of a building full of armed men but because he didn’t want to hurt his daughter in the process.
But Court had assured him that he would have a mask on Andie within just a few seconds of the beginning of the attack.
Pete had been waiting to hear Zack’s first gunshot, to take out the man they’d seen through the trees standing on the porch, and then he was to wait even longer, till Zack got a pair of nine-bangers through the front windows, before prying open the door, then standing to the side and deploying both cans of the spray, one at a time.
But before either Zack, Court, or Pete were quite ready, a window broke on the east side of the cabin. Not knowing what this meant but assuming it to mean Andie was in danger, all three men decided individually to begin the operation instantly.
Zack shot the man at the door, then ran as fast as he could across the slippery driveway towards the front window to throw in the nine-bangers.
