He said proudly, “Country by country, leader by leader, step by step. It was all in the timing. It was a perfect jigsaw puzzle. I spent two years figuring it out. Every contingency. Everything that could go wrong. Everything was accounted for.”
“Not everything.”
“That’s impossible,” he snapped.
“You didn’t account for me.”
Reel heard the noises before he did. But when he did he smiled.
“Your time is up, little lady.”
“I’m not little. And I’ve never been a lady.”
Her boot came down on the back of his head, bouncing it off the hard dirt and knocking him out cold. She grabbed the pages and stuffed them back into her duster.
Reel retraced West’s safe path to the cabin and gave it the quick once-over. There were stacks of weapons, ammo, grenades, packs of C-4, Semtex, and other plastic explosives. Through a window looking out on the back porch she saw fifty-gallon drums of what looked to be gasoline and maybe fertilizer. She doubted they were for the generator or to grow crops. She figured the barn was probably full of those containers as well.
She also glimpsed detailed plans of attack on major cities in the United States. These folks were domestic terrorists of the worst kind. She grabbed anything that looked like it might be important, including a USB stick plugged into his laptop, and stuffed them in her coat pockets.
She also snagged a couple grenades. A “lady” could never have too many grenades.
She ran back out, raced over to his Jeep, threw open the rear door, and pulled out the scoped rifle and a box of ammo in the cargo pad.
She hustled back to her Explorer, jumped in, and peeled out. But before she got to the main road, she realized it was too late. When she saw what was coming at her, she had no option other than turning around and heading back toward the cabin.
It looked like a few precious seconds were going to end up costing Reel her life.
CHAPTER
41
REEL PUSHED THE GAS PEDAL to the floor and the Explorer roared up the twisting gravel drive. In her mind she was planning her attack. When outnumbered, retreat wasn’t always an option. Superior forces rarely expected an outgunned opponent to charge at them.
Reel wasn’t going to exactly do that. She was going for a modified version of an all-out assault.
She checked the rearview mirror and gauged the distance between her and the massive Denali chasing her. It was full of what she presumed were wackos posing as freedom fighters, and she presumed they were all heavily armed.
Well, she would find out exactly how heavily armed they were in a few seconds. And how well they handled their weapons. She just hoped the feint she was planning worked.
She gained the separation she needed, lowered the window halfway, and skidded the Ford to a stop, leaving it blocking the road. She grabbed the rifle, rested the barrel on top of the half-lowered window, took aim, and shot out the front tires on the Denali. For good measure she put a round through the front grille. Steam started to pour out and the Denali ground to a halt.
The doors opened and men jumped out gripping a variety of weapons.
Pistols and subguns did not concern her. They didn’t have the range to hurt her.
They opened fire but nothing came close to her.
She shot three times and three of the shooters fell, all with nonfatal wounds, which was intentional on her part. She just wanted them out of the action. And there was a sense of fairness as well. She didn’t have to kill them and so she let them live but in no condition to fight.
She shifted her attention to another man who jumped out on the left side of the Denali. He was holding a scoped rifle.
That could reach her. So Reel put him down with one shot to the forehead. He fell backward and the rifle spun out of his dead hands. No one went to retrieve it.
The men, probably wondering what the hell they had gotten themselves into, retreated to the back of the Denali, using the big vehicle as a shield.
But through her scope Reel could see some of them pulling cell phones out.
They were calling in reinforcements.
Ironically, that was what she wanted. It would give her the time to proceed with part two of her plan. She gunned the engine and headed toward the cabin.
A few moments later she skidded to a stop a good distance from the cabin behind a stand of trees and leapt out. She pulled the grenades from her pocket, ran toward the cabin, pulled the pins, and threw the grenades through the structure’s front window.
She was turning back to run to the Explorer when Roy West plowed into her.
Reel managed to keep her feet, but he had one hand wrapped around her throat. He assumed that with his superior size and strength the battle was over.
ot good. A quick calculation in her head put her survival rate at less than five percent.
Then she heard vehicles moving in behind her. She glanced at the rearview mirror and saw two more trucks and ten more militiamen slide in less than a hundred yards behind her.
Now she was outgunned and outflanked.
My survival rate just dropped to zero.
She pulled her gun and stepped from the truck. She had decided she was not going down without a fight. They would never be able to say that about her.