The machine gunners took up a position ten yards to Peter’s side of the Mercedes, the big guns held at their shoulders. They fired off a few decent bursts until the armor plate looked like hammered steel, paint gone, windows starred to opacity. The M249 fired 5.56 rounds designed to kill unarmored combatants rather than pierce an armored vehicle, but they’d have made a serious impression. Peter had been inside armored Humvees while under fire, and it wasn’t fun. Like huddling inside an oil drum while someone beat hell out of it with a framing hammer.
If anyone inside the Mercedes could still think rationally, they’d be considering the fact that the attackers hadn’t used the minigun, which would have peeled the vehicle like a grape and turned it into a crematorium. So the attackers weren’t trying to kill everyone inside.
When the machine gunners stopped firing, the Mercedes’s off-side doors opened slowly, probably because the driver’s-side doors had been seriously dented by a few hundred rounds. Two pairs of empty hands emerged over the rooftop.
The lead rifleman waved them on, and two men got out with their arms held high and stepped carefully away. One wore jeans and a T-shirt under a ballistic vest, and the other wore a blue seersucker suit. The lead rifleman pointed at the Mercedes, then made the same sideways wave, and two more pairs of hands emerged, followed by two more men, also in jeans and vests.
“Vic, who’s wearing the suit? Is that our guy?” Wilkes asked. A pause while he seemed to listen to whatever came in over his earpiece. “Okay, get him to one side and put down the rest.” Another pause.
Wilkes glanced at Oliver, who was watching the action down on the road and didn’t seem to notice him. Then he looked at Sally, who put her finger to her own ear and said, “Consider them homegrown terrorists. They’d have killed any of us without hesitation. Do it.”
Wilkes’s voice was resigned. “You heard her, Vic. That’s an order from the top. Take down the other three.”
The riflemen took aim and shot the three guys in vests, who dropped to the ground. The man in the seersucker suit dove for the ruined car, but the riflemen fired into the dirt at his feet and he froze, hands high. Two gunmen approached the fallen and finished each man with a single shot to the head. The leader walked up to the man in the seersucker suit and knocked him on the temple with the butt of his weapon.
He folded like a bad poker hand.
In a war zone, Peter knew, Sally’s order to kill disarmed combatants who had clearly surrendered would be a war crime. In this little valley in Washington State, it was just plain murder.
He was starting to suspect that she had gone off the reservation. Maybe quite a long way.
“Nice work, people,” Sally called cheerfully. “Who’s ready for cabrito?”
55
LEWIS
Lewis watched Peter and the three others pick their way down from the rocky outcrop. The big guy who looked like Lewis’s old drill instructor had been up there all morning. Rather than start the party too early, Lewis had found a less obvious spot with a hidden approach a quarter-mile up the valley.
Peter’s plan was definitely out the window now.
Lewis had used the rifle’s optics—excellent optics—to watch Peter’s truck arrive in the valley and roll up to the funky-ass greenhouses, where June got out and talked to a woman who looked like a Texas sharecropper and a young guy with a pitchfork who might have been her helper, except he didn’t move like a farmer. He moved like a good cop in a bad neighborhood, smooth and casual but knowing everything going on around him. Even though he was peering out from behind a rock with the no-glare scope, Lewis was pretty sure the guy had seen him.
Lewis saw June meet the big guy with the Rip Van Winkle hair, then hug him, which was not what he’d expected.
He watched this crazy little gold airplane swoop down, loop up and around and come in for a landing. Then another one took off.
He didn’t figure either one was good for him, but he wasn’t in any position to do anything about it. He just pulled his camo jacket over his head and tried to look like part of the landscape.
When he’d seen Peter head toward the rocky outcrop, he pulled out his radio to warn him about the big guy and the Texas sharecropper woman waiting for him, but Peter didn’t answer. It was probably turned off. Lewis’d had his turned off, too. Better that than it making a squawk when he was trying to be quiet. He started moving to follow Peter up to the outcrop, maybe even the odds, but the young guy was on his way, too, head on a swivel.
Again, Lewis opted not to start the shooting too early, and had gone back to his hidden perch.
From there, he’d watched the massacre on the road. Pretty cold shit. Whoever was running this show was playing realpolitik for sure.