Chapter 15

Things started with a bang, or, actually a crash. Carol and Stella were cuddled together on one couch, Christine and JJ on another, and Lane was in the kitchen fetching a new bottle of wine. Doug had rolled over to one of the side walls, investigating a painting that seemed to show a civil-war era battle.

‘INCOMING!’

None of them was prepared when one of the huge, floor to ceiling, supposedly unbreakable widows shattered into a million pieces of safety glass. The accompanying explosion was strangely muted, the primary heft of the blast being redirected out of the chalet.

Doug, his right side towards the windows twenty feet away, felt the blast of superheated air and the stinging cuts as he was peppered by flying glass fragments. He didn’t even realize he had reached for his pistol until it was in his hand, tracking the moving figures that were climbing over the sill into the room.

Carol, with a strength that would have amazed anyone but Stella, gave a massive shove with her legs, toppling the loveseat, and Stella herself, over backwards and dumping them unceremoniously to the floor.

Christine and JJ, closest to the widows, were rocked by the blast and left almost helpless, dazed, and confused as the glass opened dozens of small cuts on any exposed skin.

Three men were climbing through the widow, dressed head to toe in white tactical gear. Each had a short, bullpup-style rifle in their hands and they were tracking, looking for targets as soon as they were on their feet.

Doug’s first shot took the left-most intruder in the throat, sending a broad fan of blood splashing over the man in the middle. His victim’s hand flew to his throat, his rifle dropping but coming up short, tethered to the battle harness on the man’s chest.

Carol, gun in hand, and steady over the top of the love seat, shot the man on the right. Her shot hit the man just below and to the left of his nose, dropping him in his tracks. He hit the floor bonelessly, his rifle clattering to the flagstones beside him.

The middle man opened fire at Carol, the shots going wide and missing Stella’s prone form by mere millimeters as Doug and Carol fired together, the bullets impacting within milliseconds of each other, the .45 caliber round from the Glock 30 entering below his left eye and the .40 caliber round from Carol’s Sig punching through the bridge of his nose. He froze for half a second before toppling forward like a felled tree.

Carol was the first to move, vaulting the couch, and rushing the bodies. Doug spun in place, his pistol questing for more targets. Carol reached the bodies and stripped the weapon from one, inspecting it briefly before clearing the chamber and letting the slide load another round.

The FN P90 was made in Belgium and designed for use in close quarters. It fired a hot 5.7mm round from a magazine along its spine, instead of suspended below like most rifles. It was favored by vehicle crews, protective details, and special operators of all types. Carol was intimately familiar with the design, it having been adopted by her old agency, the Secret Service.

She snugged the rifle to her shoulder and began to move, stalking towards the front entrance, her eyes questing for targets.

“Friendly incoming!” The shout came from the front door and a figure inched into the room, hands first, and followed by a quick peek by a head that scanned the room.

One of JJ’s people stepped forward, his hands still held shoulder high and clearly not holding anything. He got a nod from Carol and lowered them, his hands falling to the M-14 that was tethered to his harness.

“Three more dead outside, a vehicle on the road below, burning. Aldo’s the one that snagged a frag from the body and tossed it, so he is checking it out. We have one down, Jim, and one wounded, Danny, but it was a graze.”

“How did they get close enough for this, Frank?” Carol demanded, her arm sweeping out towards the shattered windows and the bodies laying there in the scattered safety glass fragments.

“Climbed the cliff below.” the man shrugged his shoulders, looking embarrassed. “With two man teams, shift on, shift off, we couldn’t cover everything and that looked low priority.”

Doug had rolled his chair over the wreckage of the windows to where his sister sat, silently weeping on the couch. JJ had gotten her gun out, once the confusion of the blast had cleared, and was hovering over her spouse looking angrier than he had ever seen her.

“JJ, are you and Chris okay?”

She nodded, her jaw clenched tight. They both had dozens of cuts that were oozing blood, but no major injuries that he could see. The sight of his weeping sister filled him with rage though, and he turned back to the three dead men on the floor, wishing they would move, just to give him an excuse.

Carol and Frank moved over and started searching the body. Other than a simple hand-drawn map, there was no other paperwork, no IDs, no dog tags, no labels in the clothing and even the serial numbers on the weapons had been ground down. “Black bag” is all Frank had to say.

It took thirty minutes for the locals to show up and the resulting confusion lasted for several hours. All of them were hauled down to the police station and it was, in the quaint military parlance of the US Army, a cluster fuck.

It was clear that the local Sheriff’s department had never dealt with a gun battle on this scale. The seven dead bodies at the Chalet, six intruders and one private security, along with the one dead body in the burned vehicle on the road below, had the Deputies treating the whole group as if they were terror suspects instead of the victims of an armed assault. That four of them were armed when they arrived just reinforced that idea.

Christine had been magnificent, putting all of her dealings with the rich and powerful to work for her, she demanded, and got, a phone call. She made sure that one phone call was a good one. She contacted Marcy. JJ called her office, of course, and they were sending more security and James Dunmore on a chartered aircraft.

The interviews continued through the night, tempers frayed and overwhelmed Sheriff Department investigators started making threats even though every single person had requested a lawyer. When it came time for Doug to be brought to the interrogation room, things got worse.

“What the fuck is he still doing in that damned chair? Have you even searched it? He could be hiding fucking explosives or a fucking bazooka in there, and you idiots ... you know what? I don’t give a fuck. Yank his ass out of that chair and impound it as evidence.” The investigator, a balding man in his late forties with a bad comb-over, was livid.

Doug was as well. He was mentally reviewing the ways he had learned to kill in unarmed combat when he snickered. If he attacked this man, it would literally be unarmed combat.

The investigator, seeing Doug’s smile, looked like he was going to have a stroke. He leaned over the table where Doug sat, handcuffed to a chair, and screamed. Spittle was flecking the table top and Doug’s shirt as the man ranted and raved until he ran out of breath.

“I would like to invoke my right to counsel.” was all Doug would say, smiling at him again in a perverse desire to see if the man really would have a heart attack.

Relief came from an unexpected source in the form of Special Agent Justin Allen of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He blew into the station at about four in the morning and wowed the locals with his credentials. That he had both the Lieutenant Governor and the Sheriff himself in tow certainly helped.

By nine, Doug and his entire entourage were once again ensconced in a luxurious Chalet. Their personal gear had been released and delivered, medical care for the various cuts and bruises and they were gathered in the living room with Agent Allen. Stella seemed to distrust the big bay windows and chose to sit as far away from them as possible. Even his chair had been released, though it was in several pieces. It seems the lab boys had tried to search it for anything they could use to induce him to talk.

Once coffee had been served, liberally dosed with a hooker of whiskey for a few, Allen told them what he could.

“The information you sent, well, we’re assuming it was you since it went to all of the agents you had contact with, along with several members of congress, lit off a fire in DC. I don’t have a list of all the agencies that had a presence in your area of operations, it’s not my job, but I can assure you of this. The FBI did not. We were not involved and the director is hot to prove it to anyone who cares to look.

“The director has ordered a full investigation of all events related to your data. Well, everything that has happened domestically, anyway. When Marcy Stratton called from Ramos Investment Group and asked to speak to me, personally, all hell was already breaking loose. The suspected terrorism report was already being passed around for the firefight here, and Marcy’s call let us put it together.

“Anyway, your lawyer landed a half hour ago, he is being choppered out here, but your security team was held at the airport. We have HRT on the ground that will provide security until we can get you on a plane to anywhere else.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?” Allen looked at Doug in amazement.

“No. It’s a very simple word.”

“No, what, Mr. Ramos?”

“Since I am not sure you guys aren’t involved, you seem to be around a lot when people are trying to kill me, follow me, and break into my apartment and so on, that I prefer my own security people.”

Allen started looking angrier and angrier until Doug mentioned the attempted break-in.

“Look, I have my orders. As long as you are here in the Salt Lake area, you will be protected by HRT. I can and will stop you from leaving until things are cleared up locally, and after we allow you to leave, we will be trailing you as long as this threat remains.”