The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (324 page)

Mac liked a clear mission, a black-and-white assignment. This one was infiltrate, then storm the gates, free your man, and hit the road. Now there was the underground complication. He wouldn’t leave Greece without his man, and now he couldn’t leave without defending the believers.

The original plan didn’t figure he and his people would be outnumbered. There were four hostage takers. Mac, his two team members, and George made four good guys. Those odds he could live with. But to walk Hannah down the road to Chloe and six GC, knowing there were at least two dozen more in the area, well, that didn’t make sense.

“Hold up,” he told Hannah. “You know how to hot-wire a car?”

“Do I admit it or not?”

“Just say so. Time is not on our side.”

“Yes.”

“Do it.”

While she trotted to Sebastian’s car, Mac radioed Chloe. “Johnson to Irene.”

“Irene, go.”

“Unforeseen delay here. Need your assistance.”

“Ten-four. Should I bring help?”

“Negative. Let them go on. We’ll catch up.”

“You heard the boss, gentlemen,” Chloe said. “We’ll see you at the destination.”

“We’d love to help the senior commander, ma’am.”

“Thank you, no.”

“Can we meet him later?”

“I’ll see to it.” And as she said it, Chloe was overwhelmed with a deep impression, and she had to express herself. “If you do me a favor.”

“Anything, ma’am.”

“Senior Commander Johnson’s presence tonight is a surprise for Commander Stefanich. He’s going to be compensated for some of his recent actions. So . . .”

“Don’t let on he’s coming?”

“Exactly.”

“You got it, ma’am. And you know what? We didn’t know Commander Stefanich was going to be here. Fact is, we don’t know what we’re doing here.”

Chloe blanched. What if Stefanich wasn’t there? “It’s all part of the surprise, boys.”

Chang knew God had protected him, probably more than he realized. But he had no reason to think God owed him anything or was obligated to act in this instance, just because Chang had asked. With zero confidence that his pleas had done any good, Chang wearily returned to his chair before the computer.

The screen was alive with red flashes. The search engine had reached secure files at the highest levels and was matching, comparing, translating languages, turning spoken word into written. A small box in the upper right-hand corner showed six matches already between some element of the GC operation in Ptolemaïs with top brass at the palace. Top.

Chang feared multitasking would slow the search, but he had to take the chance. Mac and the two women were in danger, outnumbered, without any idea what they faced.

He checked the first three matches and found they were routine interactions of Ptolemaïs administration reporting statistics to GC command. But the fourth was different. It was highest security interaction, a series of e-mails between TB and OT, plus more than one phone call, also between the same two, being reduced to typed transcription.

Chang keyed in, “Match logic?”

The response was immediate. “Meets broad, simple criteria: initials one letter removed from key personnel in GC Greece and GC Palace.”

Chang squinted. That’s what he had asked for: any connection based on standard search sequences and codes. TB was one letter away from SA. OT was one letter away from NS. Chang shot from his chair and stood hunched over the keyboard. He typed in, “Show interaction,” and as the files cascaded onto the screen, he called Mac.

Mac heard the car running and footsteps jogging toward him from the north and the east. “Ladies?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Yep.”

His phone buzzed. “Stand by. Hey, Chang.”

“Mac! I’ll say this once and get back to you as fast as possible with details. Ready?”

“Go.”

“Akbar and Stefanich have communicated personally several times today.”
Click.

“Busted,” Mac said. “Listen up. No time for questions. Hannah, you’re driving. Chloe, you’re riding. Take the DEW, Uzi, and a sidearm each, phones on, radios on. Get to the Co-op now. Clear ’em out, including anything they don’t want found in a midnight raid. Then straight to the airport and wait out of sight for Sebastian and me, ready to hightail it to his plane. If we don’t show, that means we’re dead and you’re on your own.”

Mac bent and heaved the Fifty up against his chest. “Time to go to work, big boy,” he said.

Hannah and Chloe ran around the shack to the idling car.

“Thank you, Lord,” Chang said, still standing as his fingers danced on the keyboard. In seconds he had opened the transcripts of four phone conversations on a line so secure that Carpathia himself had once said even he didn’t have access to it.

But David Hassid cracked it, Nicky. Access that.

Chang also had copies of e-mails that showed up on neither the palace nor the Ptolemaïs mainframe and were supposedly guaranteed to disappear from every record after they had been read. Hassid’s master disk probably had the only copies in existence, including the correspondents’.

Though he was curious, Chang knew it was irrelevant how someone at Stefanich’s level had personal access to the director of Security and Intelligence. The way they interacted evidenced some history, but if the box in the corner had not begun flashing again, Chang would not have wasted the time tracking it down until the crisis was over. He quickly clicked on the box to find “100 percent primary match, no decode necessary.”

He opened the manifest and sped read: “Straight correlation from List A to List B: Suhail Akbar and Nelson Stefanich registered at Madrid Military School, overlapping tenures.”

From the years listed, Chang calculated they had been there together as teenagers, more than twenty-five years before.
That would get a phone call returned.

Chang was flying now, his eyes darting over the copy, looking for how the ruse fell apart.

Stefanich had asked whether Howie Johnson was “a fair man.”

Akbar responded that the name didn’t ring a bell.

Stefanich told him, “Senior Commander under Konrad.”

“I’ll look him up.”

Akbar found him and reported, “Stellar record, but our paths have not crossed. Unusual for someone at that level, but it happens.”

“Don’t want to be a pest,” Stefanich had followed, “but does Konrad vouch for him? Want to be sure before exposing him to prisoner.”

“What prisoner? And who’s Konrad?”

“The Judah-ite, George Sebastian.”

“Still nothing out of him?”

“We’ll break him or kill him.”

“Break him. I know you can.”

“You’re not Konrad’s immediate superior?”

“No. Do I need to look him up too?”

“You’d better. He’s supposed to be your top guy, deputy commander, office on your floor.”

“Send documentation.”

Later, Akbar told Stefanich, “You’re being duped. Johnson and Konrad are in the system, everything adds up, except they don’t exist.”

“Permission to reverse sting them?”

“With my best wishes. Bring them in, dead or alive, and I’ll move you to the palace.”

As the phone calls and e-mails progressed, the women’s identities proved phony too. “The one from Montreal was in my office.”

By early afternoon, Akbar had decided, “If Sebastian is worth all this, they’re tied in tight with the underground. Announce a raid and see if they reveal location.”

Chang called Mac. “The raid’s phony. If you warn the believers, you could give them away.”

“Call Chloe or Hannah. I’m occupied.”

“Your location is a trap too, Mac.”

“All right, listen, Chang. You saved our lives. But whatever you do, find Sebastian. I’ll get him out or die tryin’.”

Chloe answered her phone.

It was Chang. “Raid was a setup so you’d lead the GC to the underground. Abort.”

“Hannah, you were right.”

“What?”

“Hannah was right, Chang. She suspected we were being followed. I didn’t notice a thing and thought she was paranoid.”

“I told you!”

“Ditch them or lead them nowhere,” Chang said. “From what I can tell, the GC has no clue where the Co-op is or that it’s the meeting place. I gotta go. Mac is calling.”

“Go, Mac.”

“Question. If this is a trap, why wouldn’t Peacekeepers have come back with Chloe and taken me then?”

“I don’t follow.”

Mac told him of her encounter with the half-dozen.

“You got me. I’m still reading the back-and-forth between Akbar and Stefanich. Possible not everybody knows.”

“That could be.”

“It’s to your advantage.”

“Confirm if you can.”

“Will do.”

Mac had moved east far enough to see the lean-to, if there was one. He saw nothing. Not even the GC Hannah or Chloe had seen. That meant the meeting place for the ground troops was at least a little farther on. If Chang was right, Sebastian wouldn’t be within miles of there.

Brilliant military mind, Mac. Left yourself alone in the wilderness, way outnumbered.

Mac considered his options and few advantages. He was hard to see. He knew enough not to be lured to where Sebastian was purported to be. He had the Fifty. He was a long walk or a medium jog to the car, but the car had to already be under surveillance. It would be surrounded, so if he were stupid enough to try to get to it, he would be easily apprehended. “Lord,” he said quietly, “I’m gonna thank you for keepin’ me motivated to stay in shape, and I’m gonna ask you for more stamina than I’ve got. All I’m tryin’ to do is get your man and my two partners out of here alive. Now I’m thankin’ you as if you’ve already done it, ’cause I’m going to be busy here awhile. And if you’ve chosen not to, I figure you know best and I’ll be seein’ you real soon.”

Mac made his way back toward the shack and stopped about a hundred yards above it. He removed his big, outer jacket, kept only three fifty-caliber shells and two clips for the Uzi, then wound the Uzi strap twice so the weapon was snug to his body.

He couldn’t actually run carrying the Fifty, but he loped the best he could, staying high on the ridge and following the terrain, often as far as two hundred yards above the road. The air was cool on his arms and neck and face at first, but soon his body heat made him sweat. This, he knew, was only the beginning.

Mac’s muscles ached and knotted and all but cried out, but he would not stop. He didn’t even slow. He just kept moving, farther and farther west, trying to gauge the distance to where he had left the car. After traversing a rugged stretch with loose rocks that nearly made him fall several times, he finally decided to look for the vehicle.

Mac stretched out on the steep slant, facing down toward the road. He set the bipod, his arms shaking from effort and fatigue, popped open the telescopic sight, loosened the connection so he could scan with it rather than trying to move the heavy gun, and searched the road.

It seemed to take forever for his eye to adjust in the darkness. The gravel road was a ribbon of only slightly lighter gray against the blackness of the woods, but he knew what he was looking at. At the far right of his field of vision—far enough that he knew he would have to move the weapon nearly a hundred feet—he spotted something that picked up a hint of starlight. Only the white car would do that.

Mac gulped another minute’s worth of the cool air, then forced himself up and over to where he could line the Fifty up with the car. He was nothing if not patient. While he tightened the sight and made several seat-of-the-pants calculations, he swore he saw movement on the north side of the road. If he was right, GC waited for him down there—and almost certainly on the other side of the road too.

He remembered from experience to tear cloth from his undershirt and stuff both ear canals. He set an extra round of ammunition next to the weapon, then dug himself footholds. It was a huge benefit to be pointing downhill, because the recoil could shove him up and back only so far. He had to remember to keep his knees bent.

Mac’s plan was to fire two rounds into the car in as rapid a succession as possible, knowing that he would have to force himself to follow through, because no one who had shot this rascal once—and that included him—ever wanted to shoot it again, let alone right away.

He stretched out and settled in, leaving his finger off the trigger until he had drawn the butt of the rifle to his shoulder. He maneuvered it until it lay in a soft spot and not on bone, aware that the thing would still wreak havoc with his whole body.

Mac ran through the checklist. Steady. Relaxed. Pull firm to the shoulder. Trigger finger relaxed. Ears protected. Feet in holds. Elbows slightly bent. Knees flexed and ready to give. Barely visible crosshairs dead on the roof of the car, a tick left, allowing for wind. Distance just under two hundred yards. No matter what the thing does to me, reload and fire again, not worrying about accuracy the second time.

It warmed Mac as he silently counted himself down from three that he definitely saw movement through the lens. Unless someone was so spectacularly unfortunate as to step into his line of fire, no one would be hit, certainly not by the first round. By the second, even if he got it off inside a few beats, he expected the GC to be halfway back to the shack already.

When he got to one, Mac aborted. Better idea. Go for broke. Aim a little left, hope to hit the gas tank. Even if he missed, these guys had to think they were facing a tank or at least a bazooka. But if he got lucky, they’d think they were facing eternity.

He reset, just a smidge. Checklist.
Three, two, one, zero,
oh, Mama!

Mac thought he had been prepared. It was as if he had nothing in his ears. The sound was so massive it seemed to weigh on him. The woods had exploded, and yes, the erupting of that gas tank and the rebounding of that car on the gravel would have made a sound whether or not people had been there to hear it. The perverse nightmare of the sheer volume of it lay atop him longer than the orange ball rode his eyeballs.

The violence drove him back and onto his left side. As Mac struggled to gather his senses, he rolled back to his belly and slid back down into the same position. Fingers fluttering, he wrestled the extra round into the chamber, made sure the thing was generally facing away from him again, and forced himself against every instinct to pull the trigger again.

He should have run through the checklist again. One foot had not been secure. He was neither tight nor firm. The butt had been at least a half inch from his shoulder. The recoil sent it back seemingly at the speed of light and drove a ridge into the top of his shoulder he was sure would be there for weeks.

The sound was lessened only by the damage the first shot had done to his eardrums. His ears buzzed and rang, and he dumbly lifted his head to see trees falling, two on this side of the road, one on the other. His aim had been ten feet to the left of the now flattened and burning car, which prettily illuminated the carnage of machine and fauna—all wrought by two fairly simple pulls on a metal lever.

Mac wished only that he could have heard what had to be the frightened cries of the young Peacekeepers on the dead run. He awkwardly forced himself up on all fours like a spindly newborn colt and fought to keep from pitching down the hill.

When he was finally standing, arms outstretched for balance and to stop the woods from spinning, he waited. And waited. When his balance mechanism finally made the necessary adjustments, Mac caught his breath, shook his head, stretched each limb—even the one with the violated shoulder—and began to jog.

His intention was to jog what had taken him more than a half hour to drive. He would find his way back to where he and Chloe and Hannah had engaged in their sortie soiree that late afternoon that now seemed so long ago. There Mac would find the hidden Jeep, hot-wire it, and set off on what he truly hoped was his last caper of the day. Surely by the time he got there, he would have heard from Chang where he might find George Sebastian.