Rogue Commander, Leo Maloney [classic books for 11 year olds TXT] 📗

ceiling again. It hurt like hell, but she ignored it. Focus!

She brought the phone back up to her face, nearly touching the screen to her nose, and squinted at the video that was already running. She carefully keyed the volume up just barely enough. A man in some sort of hunting garb was holding a gun like the one right there in front of her. He smiled and pointed at all its strange parts.

“The standard twelve-gauge shotgun is one of the simplest, and most effective, home defense firearms. Even a child or a housewife can use it...”

Jenny’s eyes were like saucers as she watched. She swallowed hard and prayed as the car seemed to pick up even more speed—racing faster to the end of something horrific.

“Hurry up!” she commanded the phone. But unlike her, the man in the video had all the time in the world.

Oh God....

Chapter Thirty-Nine

At the naval submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, a six-ton dump truck packed with wet sand smashed right through the main gate.

It didn’t matter that the rolling iron fences had been closed and locked or that the bright orange, water-loaded car-bomb barriers had been dragged into place. The gate itself, constructed of concrete, with three wide lanes and a twenty-foot-high green-tile roof, had been designed for its guards to check credentials rather than weather a full-on armored assault.

By the time it happened, the base had gone into its highest alert. But it was well after midnight, and the sailors, who moaned and rolled from their bunks, dragged their fatigues on and picked up their rifles, assuming it was just one more tiresome active-shooter drill. After all, this was Connecticut, not Kabul.

One mile northwest of the gate, where the nuclear subs rolled in the wash of the Thames River, snug in their pens like whales in repose, things were a bit different. Just off the pens to the east were the hardened bunkers of nuclear warheads and Polaris missiles, and their round-the-clock guards had received a call directly from Naval Special Warfare in Quantico.

This was no drill, they were told. Enemy action of some kind was imminent. However, the naval armorers and Marine Corps FAST leathernecks were ordered to remain in place. They were to stay on station at all costs, to stand and fight. Only a single navy lieutenant from Security Forces had scrambled his stand-by team of eight men and two women and rushed to the main gate.

From exit 86 off I-95, the ride was just over two miles. The dump truck, driven and manned by two North Koreans who, up to that minute, were sure they were doing Kim Jong Un’s bidding, picked up steam again as it hit Route 12 and was soon doing a mile a minute. A hundred yards behind it, General James Collins was driving a black Chevy passenger van, which he’d switched to at a highway rendezvous rest stop.

Seven more Koreans filled the seats, but they were no longer carrying their 9mm MP5s. Now they gripped fully automatic AK-47s and wore combat vests loaded with topped-up magazines of 7.62-mm ammunition, three hundred rounds per man. Collins had ordered them to not wear their caps. He wanted everyone to see their faces, and eyes. And just behind the van trundled a single eighteen-wheeler, its roof removed and replaced with tear-away camouflage netting—its interior walls lined with blankets of Kevlar.

Inside the cargo space a massive, pneumatic, steel-gray Tomahawk launcher hulked. Only three of its four tubes were loaded, but that would do, and its firing system controls had been rewired to an MBITR radio module clipped to Collins’s belt. He’d wanted the Koreans to make it work from his cell phone, but apparently there was no app for that.

When the dump truck turned left onto Crystal Lake Road, its driver had the pedal to the metal. Half a mile later, it swerved hard to the right, then left again, and was bearing straight down at the gate when the young sailors in their blue digital cammies saw it.

The lieutenant yelled, “Scatter!” and his team threw themselves to the left and right, but he stood his ground and opened up with his rifle. A couple of bullets punched high through the truck’s windshield, and then he disappeared as the beast flattened the fence, exploded the water barriers in bursts of spray, and took out the central booth and its columns. A pylon shot up and split the green tile roof, which yawned open at the sky like a roaring dragon.

Collins’s van came next, bouncing over the fallen gate like it was nothing more than chicken wire. The fallen lieutenant’s sailors, enraged by just having seen him crushed into pulp, took knees on both flanks and opened fire. But Collins had prepared for all that and had had the Chevy up-armored at a chop shop.

Bullets scarred the heavy Plexiglas windshield and punched through the skin, but didn’t get any farther. The side windows were already open, the Koreans’ bristling AK barrels exploding white light from both flanks, and they mowed down the sailors as if the van were a rocketing frigate. However, as instructed, they left one alive.

Collins drove on, feeling nothing. Five million dollars was a shit ton of money. He knew from his youth that once you picked up the gun, you took your chances and, one way or another, would get paid until you eventually paid it back with your life.

He glanced in the rearview mirror. The big rig was roaring through the shattered gate, hard on his heels. He’d never been to Groton before, but he knew where to go from a DoD classified map, and he curved to the right and took a left on Tang Avenue. The dump truck had pulled off the road and stopped. Two Koreans were out there waving him down. He roared right past them.

Let ’em run.

He didn’t need to get to the bunkers themselves. That would have just meant drama. The Tomahawks were already targeted to