Chapter 13

"Hello Norman, please tell me that you have some good news for me and that we'll all be going home without the need to break out any gun-cleaning kits?"

"I think I do." He slyly replied. "My employer very much wants those files and is willing to overlook some unfortunate past history to obtain them. I will be collecting Miss Lee from her comfortable temporary housing shortly."

"Good. No changes then to our eight-thirty meeting tonight?"

"None. That will be acceptable."

"Any other business then?"

"None. I'll see you then." With that Norman disconnected the line. With his team surrounding the building, I assumed someone (probably the two scouts who'd arrived first) was monitoring the signal detection equipment and didn't need more than a few seconds to confirm that my satellite phone was in use upstairs in that building.

He needed me alive (I kept whispering to myself over and over again), just in case the files weren't present, readily at hand, and now he had just two options left. Wait in position for at least another full hour, perhaps longer and hope to catch me either moving to my rental car, or else trap me in the driveway inside it. That would limit my offensive and defensive capabilities but it wouldn't 100% guarantee that the files would be with me. Perhaps I'd already stashed them away someplace nearby the mall.

Alternatively, he could just decide to take me right now, by immediate forced entry. Why wait? I would be badly outnumbered by over thirty to one and how who knows what accidents might happen trying to take me out in the open or in my car. This would be the smart and aggressive move, and with the highest probable percentage of taking me alive as a prisoner.

Norman checked the playbook and came to the same conclusion. Less than a minute later he gave the 'Go' order and the two six-man assault teams started racing for the main doors, with another four-man team heading around to the lake side to cover the only other ground entrance or exit at the glass patio doors. These twelve had M4 assault rifles and full body armor and assault helmets, their two team leaders undoubtedly had mounted video cameras streaming the live feed directly to Norman in his command vehicle.

The two direct reserve teams of shooters moved up behind the frontal group and started to spread out around the house to cover all of the possible avenues of escape. They wore lighter armor, not much more than flak jackets and only their team leader had a helmet (also with a video camera), and also came equipped with M4's, ready for any sort of shootout. They were preparing for a fast mobile sort of firefight where they might have to move rapidly to chase down any escape I might attempt to make, and any added ceramic armor plates in their vests would only slow them down. That would be their loss, but I couldn't fault their preparation ... that was the textbook solution for this particular situation. Besides, these guys were the reserve, the dozen front door busters would be lads at the sharp end and would undoubtedly be the ones bagging the prize. It was the percentage play ... usually.

Even before the dirty dozen had burst through the two main doors into the house, I was already in motion and going 'hey diddle-diddle, straight up the middle' to ambush the sniper team and it didn't take long. Concentrating on their spotting and sniper scopes and not what was happening behind them, I crept right up to within about fifteen feet behind them and introduced them both to HushPuppy. One fast headshot each, followed up at point-blank range by another round each to the back of their heads. Then I did much the same again, quietly but from a slightly further range to the pair of flanking shooters playing defensive safety on each flank, just a bit further up ahead closer to the house.

That made eight rounds fired out of a full magazine of nine, so I reloaded while things were quiet and I was alone. With the rear guard quietly taken out, it was now time to start phase 2, so I reported in to the Foole while throwing my face into the bare dirt behind a large pile of bulldozed trees that one of the sniper guards had been using for frontal cover. He didn't need it anymore ... but I did!

"Snipers cleared. Four down. Fire triggers #1 and #2 now, and then #'s 3 through 6 after a five second delay please."

Trigger #1 & #2 were to be the big ones of course, blowing the house and even its entire foundation sky high and scattered across most of the entire subdivision. If the Foole understood the meaning of overkill, he didn't much care.

I'd watched the two main assault teams enter the house and then while reloading I'd mentally counted to twenty, giving the dirty dozen intruders time to quickly search the downstairs and declare it clear before climbing the stairs to the upstairs bedroom where the sat phone and the heated mannequin was waiting. This should ensure that the majority, if not quite all of the shooters were upstairs where they'd be most vulnerable to the explosion.

For starters, the Foole and his crew of six assistants had pried up most of the floorboards and walls in the entire house and filled the hollow spaces between the framework with military grade explosives. Always a good start. Needless to say the remains of anyone inside of the house would never be located in pieces larger than a thumbnail. The world's largest wood chipper couldn't have made a finer puree of the entire organic contents of the house.

Then for sheer nastiness, the interiors of the walls had been filled with cheap nails bought by the sack-load from a dozen hardware and home improvement stores. Propelled at hyper-velocities by the explosions, these flechette missiles filled the air everywhere surrounding the house as its walls suddenly became the world's largest (and most powerful) claymore mine, shredding everyone and everything within a lethal zone of about seventy-five yards around the structure. This disintegrated the entire lakefront deck, and the support team securing the patio as the superheated hurricane of thousands of cheap iron nails minced them into pond chum covering the waters of the small lake like the floors of a Chicago slaughterhouse.

No ... a simple 'KABOOM' didn't even begin to describe it.

The front and side bare dirt lawns too were misted red with isolated pools of quivering ichor and gore where the seven of the eight reserve mercenaries had stood on perimeter guard, about fifty yards from the metal-filled buzz-saw cloud of death. Clinging to life amidst this charnel field, one lone survivor somehow stood tall in the crimson fog of vaporized blood, bone and sinew even while obviously missing part of one leg, most of one arm and a bleeding handless stump where his right wrist and hand should have been.

Shock and blood-loss would kill him, but to simplify matters I gave him four three-round bursts with my grease gun from about a distance of one hundred yards while I ran parallel to him into the trees to my left. At least one burst scored hits and the shattered victim finally fell over. I couldn't spare the time to double-check on him, but obviously he wasn't crawling anywhere.

If this wasn't quite enough pyrotechnics for our simple little house-bomb, about one second after the main explosive charges went off, the real primary explosion then ignited, turning the house and everything around it for another fifty yards into a giant fireball. The first explosion, albeit horrifically lethal to everyone inside or nearby, was really just a warm-up, a sort of explosive 'throat clearing' for the next explosion ... the true main event.

I didn't understand the chemistry of the firebomb when the Foole tried explaining it me while it was being installed, but it involved massive amounts of something called Fallbrook napalm, a concoction composed of huge amounts of common ingredients such as polystyrene, gasoline and benzene that when combined burns at a temperature similar to the surface of the sun. For fun, let's examine these items one by one.

Polystyrene is best known by the trademark name 'styrofoam'. You hold polystyrene in your hand everytime you drink coffee from a styrofoam cup. If you have ever eaten off a 'paper' plate made of plastic, you've eaten off a styrofoam product. Styrofoam is also used as protective packaging purchasable in insane bulk amounts as 'moving peanuts' – and without the need to supply an ID or sign any paperwork, if you pay cash. If that wasn't enough, about one third of all the plastic around you is polystyrene.

Next we have Thermite, which burns at 4,532° and is usually used to ignite napalm, which needs a tremendously high, constant source of heat to ignite. A road flare, which will not ignite napalm, burns at 3,632°. A hot forest or structure fire burns at 1,800-2,000°. This stuff only burns when you want it to burn. No incidental military firepower was going to set of these early.

Our old companion in arson gasoline needs no introductions. All combined together, this particular flavor of napalm is extremely secure against accidental ignition and burns with an inferno that no water could ever hope to extinguish. This conflagration would probably even consume tooth enamel and bones, leaving virtually no trace of the sixteen men that had once been where this firestorm now burned ... and would continue to do so for hours.

In a bit of unusual cleverness that I would never have thought of on my own, the Foole had gone to the local police and fire departments in the county leaving a fraudulently but nicely forged document at each office informing them that his demolition and construction company would be demolishing an old house today and that they could safely ignore any phone calls reporting any explosions or fires in this area. Sneaky. The way this fireball was rising into the sky like the fist from a very angry god, someone had to see it, but now it was unlikely that any police or firemen would be rushing over here! Still, we needed to finish our business and get out of here fast! Sure, we'd cut the phone lines from this subdivision earlier this morning, but even old retirees might have cell phones and eventually the word would get out that what was happening here today was certainly not a normal commercial demolition of an abandoned property.

Trigger #2 also fired off a more mundane car bomb that was another Fallbrook napalm device, albeit much smaller, that would purge the decoy rental car of any trace evidence and even remove any identifying vehicle marks. Even the etched security markings on the glass, let alone the VIN number and engine numbers were going to turn to melted sludge with the heat that this fire was going to percolate at.

Triggers #2 through #6 were for mostly anti-personnel charges planted in or around all of the mostly likely places that Norman could stage troops. Basically more oversized improvised claymore mine devices that converted cases of cheap nails into daisy-cutters that shredded everything within fifteen yards. I don't think they contributed much to the party at this stage but I couldn't have eyes right now everywhere and if there were any more shooters lurking about in the immediate area that I'd somehow overlooked, this is where they'd likely be.

Charges #7 through #10 hadn't fired off yet, but these were all roadside improvised munitions designed to take out vehicles. We might have a chance to use them later, so there was no reason to fire them off prematurely yet.

Keeping score now in my head, I counted off as toast the dirty dozen, plus four of Norman's six teams of shooters. The two six-man teams inside the inferno that used to be a house, the team on the lakefront deck next to back door of the house, the three teams on the ground outside, and of course the rear guard sniper team that I'd rehabilitated all by myself. Totaling twenty-eight DOA, with none WIA. Probably. More even than what I'd counted on taking out with the big bang! This was everyone stationed here for the assault on the house. Now we just had the reserves to deal with!

I figured I had the original two-man scout team nearby left to deal with plus the two remaining teams of shooters that were on roadblock detail, east and west of us on the circular lakefront road. That was much more suitable odds for me to face in a firefight! Certainly better than the original 30+ against one odds!

The scouts were good, good enough so that they located me slinking in the woods behind them at about the same time that I found them. They'd seen two full baker's dozen of their friends go up in smoke literally, and they didn't have much stomach for the idea of hunting me down in the woods. They were bugging out pretty fast and we nearly ran right into each other, but the trees were thin enough that we both had enough cover to play a good deal of shoot-move-cover. They actually had a bit more firepower in their hands than I did and they didn't mind at all firing full rock'n'roll to keep me pinned down while they covered each other's movement. They were also just clever enough to try and flank me from both sides, but I decided not to play their game.

I kept low and retreated straight back staying under cover and then sidled sideways off to my left. If I ate dirt and moved slow and quiet, I could then flank the left-hand scout coming in trying to flank me, and have a shot at him from behind, through trees and brush that he'd just passed through. He'd be back to me (or mostly so), maybe even in HushPuppy range so I could do him nice and quietly.

I wasn't that lucky, but he was now well within range of the grease gun, which I'd taken the time to screw the long silencer onto the barrel. I gave him three controlled single shots into his back and Pete was indeed quite right. The vintage submachine gun wasn't quite completely whisper quiet, but it softly burped rather than barked when it fired. My target could have probably heard the report of those quiet rounds, but not enough so to obviously react to them. He went down quietly in a heap and I finished the job with a quick swipe of my combat knife. I didn't need to waste those precious remaining hand-loaded HushPuppy rounds!

Now with the remaining scout probably located at about 90 degrees back to my right, where I'd been previously, I didn't have a lot of pleasant options for how I'd dig him out. He might be low on ammo now, having fired off about three full clips in my general direction earlier. Standard load-out was one loaded plus three extra mags in your pack. Some wiser folks like me carried an extra magazine or even more. There is nothing worse than running out of ammo before your enemy does! I'd rather bring home too much unused ammo than not have enough when I needed it. In Iraq, no one in my unit usually carried less than 203 5.56 rounds loaded 29 per magazine (26 ball, 3 tracer), but Norman's troops usually only packed about half of that... 100 rounds, more or less.

I hugged some dirt and decided to do a quiet radio check. I strained my ears first listening around me and didn't hear any footsteps, brush rustling or even dirt scraping. Probably my foe was dug in right about where I'd been earlier and waiting for me to charging in after him. That would be a bad mistake.

"Folks I'm tied up in a shootout here in the woods of deep center field. One scout down, one left to go. It's going to be 67/33 who gets whom first. What's the status on the two road teams? This would be a really bad time for them to charge in here as reinforcements."

Both scouts had earpieces and radios (but no video cameras fortunately) and had undoubtedly now reported my presence in the woods south and west of the lakefront road. Fleeing wasn't an option now for the remaining scout, especially if one or both remaining reserve teams were sent in to surround and smoke me out.

As for my ammo supply, I'd loaded up for bear, prepared for a worst case scenario where I was fighting for my life against dozens of veteran shooters all gunning for my ass. Well things now weren't quite that bad, but still I was going to face all I could handle ... and maybe more so."

"Ree, west roadblock remains in place. If they'd move east about another hundred yards or so, I could fire off #7 to stop and disable them. I'm waiting for them to move somewhere, either forward or back before I engage the Marauder. That is one obscenely huge vehicle!" The Foole remarked.

"Yeah, the best military grade off-road vehicle you can buy, assuming you've got a half-million dollars to blow." I replied. DeeDee took a few moments to make his own report and from the sound of things the shockwave of the explosion had pretty much taken out his lakeside vantage point too.

"I've got three of those fucking nails in my left leg, which I guess was the only part of me that wasn't under enough cover once you blew the house! You're going to all owe me for this!" He grumbled, but not sounding particularly sincerely angry. "Looking over at the house next door, where the east road team was sitting, they're having something of a personal disagreement. They were all in their car when it began to rain nails and no one seems to be hurt, but that SUV is going to need a lot of bodywork. Just guessing I'd say that part of the team wants to either quit and go home but a couple of die-hards want to stick around and maybe do some shooting. Yep, that's what's up! Two staying, guns in hand and heading inbound on foot from the bullpen in deep right field and the other two still inside the SUV and turning it around to leave. They'll be driving past Pete's position in about twenty or thirty seconds. Ready to give the word on trigger #10?"

"Ready ... I hear them coming now, passing the house and heading to the crossroads. Fire number number ten on my mark ... fire!"

From the distance I could hear the 'Krumph' of our improvised roadside munitions positioned right at the lake road met the eastern crossroad heading out. This explosive was mostly just high explosive, but with enough big bits of scrap metal to probably shred a commercial SUV pretty thoroughly, especially one with a bunch of nails already imbedded in its front and right side. As far as I know, Norman hadn't paid for any milspec upgrades to his commercial vehicle fleet. Not even any bulletproof glass, let alone door or body frame armor plating. It was expensive to do and he was already well protected in his huge battlewagon of a vehicle. Grunts were replaceable, not to mention that Norman was always allergic to spending money on anything not absolutely necessary.

Another reason why Blackwell's Security Services was a strictly minor-league operation these days.

"Bullseye!" Pete reported. "The car's been blown clear off the road into the drainage ditch and driver and passenger both are KIA's. Missing too many body parts to be just wounded," he rather sadly added.

The lad was clearly disappointed that so far he'd have no one left to work his own special sort of field surgical magic upon. Privately, that was exactly the way I wanted it. I didn't want any of Norman's people here surviving to report just how badly I'd reamed them. Facts can be rationalized given enough time and inclination. I wanted Norman and his shooters to just disappear, their fate becoming an unsolved mystery. That would scare the piss out of anyone left back in Georgia who still had a care once Norman was dead and gone. The survivors there would be fleas fleeing the carcass of a dead dog, off to new employers even before the dust settled ... and hopefully all forgetting that I ever existed.

"Good," the Foole added. "Now drop in[R] that extra little insurance package I gave you into the wreck, click the switch and return back to DeeDee. You'll have one full minute to get away from the napalm bomb so don't panic and twist an ankle running."

"Burning ... and looks good and hot!" Pete replied, and that seems to have completed the status updates. I'd whispered the few times I'd talked, and after the reports were completed I even risked taking out my earpiece so that I could listen intently to anything happening around me, but still I heard nothing.

It was time to shit or get off the pot. I'd have five minutes at most, possible[y] less before the pair of reinforcements arrived and changed the odds back into their favor, so I needed to find and take out the last scout pretty quickly. This remaining one was smart and had probably just stayed put, hidden and silent, and waiting for me to come into his own ambush. For the lack of a better idea, I started crawling on my belly again to my left, then backwards again and after a few minutes of serious crawling I thought I could risk a squatting trot through an especially thick collection of bush, and then take a hard turn due east. It was going to be a race against time, but I sort of had a plan now that might at least equalize the odds again once more.

The western road team, all four of them, still remained fixed in place, undoubtedly under Norman's orders to provide him with some frontal protection. Typical for the coward! If he'd released that team to come charging into the woods after me also, especially coordinated with the two loyal members from the eastern team, they really could have fucked up my entire combat mobility and outflanked me pretty darned quickly. Instead, now I made it back to the edge of woods right on the lakefront road just about in front of the burning crater that had been the house, and its surrounding abattoir.

I'd made it just barely in time! The two reinforcing shooters were trotting on the double-time right down the outside shoulder of the lake roadway. They were wisely avoiding the more open terrain to their right, on the lake side of the road, but with the rather incomplete landscaping work to the left there was now only minimal cover for when they'd eventually have to leave the dangerously open asphalt road. Really, they'd chosen the best available path which did have a little bit of remaining brush cover, but they'd still need to cross a 50 foot section of more or less wide open terrain before reaching the full brush and tree cover where I was lurking.