Firepower, John Cutter [best summer reads .txt] 📗

claw away the hand that choked him. His face was turning scarlet.

The short blond guy was gaping at Vince.

“You tell me your name — your real name — and I’ll let you three live,” Vince told him.

“Shaun Adler!” the short guy blurted.

“Dammit, Shaun!” Colls snapped.

“And the other two, Shaun?”

“Mac Colls and Wynn Foster!”

“Goddamn you, Adler!” Colls roared.

“Now drop your gun,” said Vince. “You too, Sergeant. Do what I say and you can all walk away. Fail, and I’ll cut you three down like weeds. I’ve killed enough men, it’ll come easy.”

Adler dropped his gun.

Licking his lips, Colls looked into Vince’s eyes — then he took a long breath — and angrily tossed his own rifle aside.

Vince shoved Foster into the short guy so they both fell backwards, one atop the other.

“Now what?” Colls growled, and the two other militiamen untangled and got gasping to their feet.

Vince took the AR-15 into both hands, leveling it at Colls from waist height. Almost as an afterthought, he flicked off the safety. He knew by the weight of the gun that it was loaded. “Now,” Vince said, “this.”

He swung the muzzle of the gun a couple inches over and squeezed the trigger, sending a short burst into the dirt of the trail between Colls and the two men.

“Yah-h-h!” wailed Foster as he turned and bolted into the forest to Vince’s right.

The other two raised their hands. “Don’t shoot!” Adler squeaked.

Vince grinned. “I just did!” He nodded toward his driver’s license, still in Colls’ left hand. “Sergeant, lay that on the trail there. Then you take Shaun here and follow Foster off into the brush. Go on back to shooting your playthings at targets. And don’t fuck with me ever again.”

“What about our weapons?” Colls asked, putting the driver’s license on the ground.

“I’ll wreck two of them. I’ll keep the third. I’m going to be moving fast and carefully through the brush. You won’t be able to track me. If you come looking for me, I’ll nail you.”

Between grating teeth, Colls said, “You don’t know who you’re fucking with!”

“I truly do not care who you are. I mind my own business, whenever I can. Chalk the loss of your weapons off to the learning curve.” He raised the rifle to his shoulder and pointed it at Colls’ head. “You’ve got a two count. One…”

Colls turned and strode off to Vince’s right, into the brush, Adler scrambling after him.

Vince went to the verge of the slope and peered down through the underbrush. He could see Colls and Adler half sliding, scrambling down the hillside.

Vince removed the ammo from two of the rifles then smashed the weapons against a granite outcropping till they were unusable and beyond repair.

He picked up the intact rifle, his license, and his backpack, and headed off into the deepening shadow of the brush, making his roundabout way toward Dead Springs.

*

“What did you get off his driver’s license?” Gustafson asked.

Colls handed him a sheet of paper with the info written on it. “Wasn’t time to get a lot of it, sir. His name is Vincent J. Bellator. Residence is given as Harstine Island, Washington State. I didn’t have time to get the street address but how many Vincent J. Bellators could there be on some island in Washington?”

Raoul Gustafson nodded as he looked at the paper, his coke bottle-lens glasses flashing in the caged overhead light of the bunker. A stocky, middle-aged man, he wore paramilitary desert cammies, and on his shoulders were a general’s four stars. “Vincent Jack Bellator? Do you know that Bellator is Latin for warrior?”

Colls shook his head. He wasn’t surprised that Raoul knew it. Gustafson had a PhD. He’d been a professor, but they’d booted him out of the post for Holocaust denialism.

“I’ll run it past my contact in the State Department. He’ll get this man’s records. We’ll find out soon enough if he’s a federal agent of some kind.”

The two men were standing in Gustafson’s small Operations Office in the Germanic Brethren bunker complex. The entrance of the Wolf Base complex was a mile from the border of the Talladega reserve. Mostly subterranean — built into the side of a steel granite ridge — the complex rose at the center of Gustafson’s four hundred-acre property.

A man with $180 million of inherited tobacco money to spend, Gustafson had given the complex every relevant amenity. Barracks with showers and latrines, air conditioning and central heating, well-stocked kitchens, extensive storerooms for food and munitions and medical supplies, an armory, a basement brig, and high-powered communications gear that kept him in touch with Brethren cells around the country.

Gustafson turned away, going down the hall to the comm room, calling out, “Sit down, have some coffee if you want, and wait for orders, Mac.”

Mackenzie Colls didn’t feel like sitting — he was too tense, too angry. But the habit of obedience to General Gustafson was strong, and he sat in the creaking gray-metal folding chair in front of the oak desk.

Quietly fuming, Mac Colls went over the incident again in his mind. Bellator had humiliated Colls and his patrol detail. The others were the weaker elements of the Brethren, and perhaps they deserved it. But Colls was a seasoned soldier. He was a former Marine; he’d fought in the Iraq war. He’d received a bronze star and two purple hearts. It was true he’d been dishonorable discharged — but that was all part of the conspiracy against him. When they’d found out he had let his men use “enhanced interrogation” on the suspected Al Qaeda operative and, indeed, had executed the man himself to shut him up, the MPs jumped at the chance to get rid of him. They knew his feelings about Densmore, the black captain who so blithely ordered Colls around. Mac Colls had