22
The tear-gas canisters crashed through the windows of the house in volleys, rapidly filling every room with a noxious cloud.
In the second floor office, Janet leaned back against the corner, breathing slowly in and out the air that filtered through her M95 protective mask, holding the Uzi and twin green clackers. She waited. It wouldn't be long now. A matter of seconds.
The sound of imploding glass downstairs signaled the arrival of the special weapons assault team into the Johnson house. Janet squeezed the handle on one of the clackers, sending an electrical signal down the line to the Claymore antipersonnel mines positioned behind the couch and in the pantry downstairs. The shock wave lifted the floor beneath her, signaling that the thousands of small ball bearings had introduced themselves to her attackers, blowing what was left of them back out through the doors and windows they had just crashed through.
Before the second floor of the house could quit vibrating, Janet was on her feet, pressing the handle of the second of the twin green clackers. This one shook the house from the outside as a long daisy chain of Claymores cleared a path from the back door into the canyon behind the house and set off the thermite grenade in the attic.
She moved through the smoke-filled hallway and down the fractured remains of the stairway by feel, since smoke rendered visual cues nonexistent. In the kitchen Janet paused just long enough to orient herself to the doorway before launching herself into a dead run down the line that had been cleared through the SWAT perimeter by the four daisy-chained Claymores.
Before the first layer of smoke had begun to clear, she was already in the steep wooded canyon, moving toward the distant rally point where she would meet up with Jack. Behind her, the sound of gunfire directed into the roaring inferno gave ample evidence that the SWAT team did not yet have a good idea what had just happened.
The whup-whup of a helicopter moving out over the canyon indicated that this situation was changing. Yells from above her to her left and right indicated that the leader of this assault team knew what he was doing. He had been surprised by the Claymores and had lost several men, but he was now getting things put together. He had sent men racing out on two sides in an attempt to cut off escape along the line cut through his perimeter by the daisy chain of Claymores. Clearly, she had not been seen, but the man was making all the right assumptions.
Job one was to get rid of the chopper; then she could worry about slowing the pursuit. Janet pulled off her protective mask, stuffing it into the backpack, and raised the Uzi into firing position. From where she knelt, deep in a thicket, she could judge the direction from which the helicopter was approaching. As the sound grew louder, she waited, her finger gradually tightening on the trigger.
Janet shifted position slightly, clearing her line of sight to the chopper, which was now almost directly overhead. Leading it by a half-hand, Janet squeezed the trigger, cutting a lazy S-pattern along the helicopter's line of flight, letting it fly into the spray of 9mm slugs.
The pilot banked hard to the right, but that only helped her, providing a moment when the entire body of the aircraft aligned itself with her firing line. And during that moment, the Uzi chewed into it, rupturing the fuel tank and sending it struggling back up toward the rim in a desperate attempt to set down before it lost the capacity for controlled flight.
Once again, Janet was moving. The helicopter had cost her precious seconds, and during that time, the FBI assault team had been busy. The sound of rolling rocks to her right indicated that the lead elements on that side had almost reached a point even with her.
Janet turned right, moving toward them in a running crouch that kept her in the midst of the thorn brush, accepting the small rips it inflicted on her clothes and skin in payment for the concealment it provided. Reaching a small, rocky outcropping, Janet dropped to her belly, wiggling into a slot between boulders, which gave her a view up the canyon. Almost immediately, she spotted them, three men scrambling down the steep slope, trying to get ahead of her. She slapped a new clip in the Uzi, aimed, and fired.
The short barrel weapon had limited accuracy at this range, but one of the men stumbled forward and the other two dived for cover, sending a volley of return fire into the rocks. Janet ducked down the backside of the outcropping and resumed her former path down a sheltered draw into the depths of the canyon. She didn't know how long her pursuers would pause before figuring out that she had gone on, but they would certainly proceed with more caution from here on out. And that would let her build her lead.
Something slapped her left thigh hard enough to send her rolling down the slope to crash into the thick branches of a juniper tree. The echo of the shot followed her down. Pain exploded in Janet's brain, shock narrowing the straw of her vision and threatening to extinguish her consciousness. A quick glance at the rapidly expanding red wetness along her pant leg meant she didn't have long. But before she could deal with that, she had to get some separation.
She aimed the Uzi up the slope in the general direction from which the shot had come and emptied an entire clip. Slapping in a replacement, she forced herself to move, although the pain almost made her scream. Reaching back inside the backpack, she extracted another of the white phosphorous grenades, pulled the pin, and tossed it into the thick, dry brush above her.
As she struggled down the slope and into the defile of a narrow ravine, she could feel the heat of the blaze on her back. Within seconds, the inferno spread to the tinder-dry surrounding brush. Fed by the wind that funneled up through the canyon, the fire began to climb upward, throwing off a thick cloud of smoke and burning embers.
Janet continued to move down until she found a long line of brush that let her turn right. Already, blood loss was weakening her, but she needed to get outside of the direct line the two pursuit teams were taking. It was now apparent that if she didn't get the bleeding in her thigh stopped, she wasn't going to be alive for them to catch.
She slumped to the ground with her back against a jutting rock ledge and slit open her left pant leg above the knee. The bullet had entered on the outside of her thigh and punched a clean hole out the top, barely missing the bone. Janet ripped the bottom of her pant leg free, cutting it into long strips. Then, grabbing the small, military first-aid pouch from her bag, she wadded the gauze into twin lumps, which she pressed into both sides of the wound and bound tight to form a pressure bandage.
It wasn't great, but it had slowed the bleeding to a mere trickle. It would have to do.
Janet forced herself to get up and moving again. On the hillside above, the fire had become a firestorm, generating its own local updrafts, which drove it all the harder. And with every fresh bit of dry brush that it consumed, the smoke and flying embers became denser. Already the entire upper part of the canyon was masked behind a dark haze.
She focused her attention on the task ahead. The rally point Jack had designated lay three miles to the southwest, separated from the spot where she currently stumbled along by incredibly rough terrain. No use thinking about that now. No matter how bad she hurt, it all boiled down to putting one foot in front of another and repeating that process over and over.
She reached the canyon bottom and paused. The FBI might be delayed, but soon they would recover, and when they got back on the trail, they would use dogs. Janet reached into her backpack and extracted the baggie with the balls of strychnine-laced hamburger meat, sprinkling a handful of the doggie treats along and to either side of her trail. The remainder she put back into the backpack for use farther down her trail.
She began moving forward again, rounding a bend in the canyon and moving up along a winding arroyo on the far side, letting the natural folds in the land and the periodic dense vegetation hide her movements. Her leg was tightening up more with each stride so that now she was almost dragging the left leg behind her.
Her thoughts flashed back to Dahlonega, Georgia, and the Camp-Merrill Mountain Ranger Camp. She had been the first woman to successfully complete Army Ranger training. Even though hers had been an unofficial class, it had been the real thing, conducted by real ranger instructors or RIs, as they were known to the current crop of students. Nine weeks of hell began at Ft. Benning, made its way into the mountains of Georgia, and eventually culminated in the swamps of Northwestern Florida.
Twenty-three of the ninety-seven members of her special CIA class had been women. Of those, she had been the only woman to graduate, along with forty-two of her male classmates. The only sign she had noticed that was different from that given to the graduating men was a slight nod from one of the ranger instructors as she had received her ranger tab. It had been the slightest of movements, but one that had meant the world to her at the time, something that said, "You did good, Ranger."
Putting one foot in front of the other was what being a ranger was all about. When everyone else quit, they didn't. They didn't at Point Du Hoc in World War II and hadn't from then through Somalia to now. And although she would never be a part of a real ranger unit, Janet wasn't about to let mere pain and fatigue drive her to quit either. She would never have a uniform to wear it on, but that ranger tab felt like it had been branded onto her left shoulder, and the force of that brand pulled her onward toward the rally point and Jack.
As night descended, Janet dispersed the rest of the doggie meatballs, unconsciously dropping the baggie that had contained them along the trail. She was no longer sure how much farther she needed to go. Sickness leached its way into her very soul, a weakness that spread to her uninjured limbs, making them weak as a kitten.
Exactly when she had stopped walking and started crawling, Janet could not recall. But with each lurch forward it became clearer that she was not going to make it. Still she could not quit. She was going to die, but she would die trying to get to the spot where Jack had told her to go.
It seemed that she had merely blinked her eyes, but then she found herself staring up at the star-filled sky. Somehow, she had passed out and rolled over onto her back. For several seconds, Janet struggled to rise. She barely managed to raise her head before collapsing back to the ground.
Suddenly, he was there. Jack's face was illuminated in the red glow of his hooded flashlight as he examined her body. A sharp pain surged through her injured thigh as Jack replaced her pressure bandage with one of his own making. Then his face was back, leaning in close.
"Stay awake until I get back. Don't you go to sleep on me. Got it?"
Janet did her best to smile up at him. "Got it."
As he stared down at her, she saw it, that red flicker of flame that leaped deep within his pupils.
Then Jack turned his head back toward her pursuers. As he disappeared along her back trail, Janet finally managed that smile. Her hunters had just become the hunted. In the midst of the dark night, a deeper darkness was coming for them—and they didn't even know it.