“Do you want me to take the pack?” Cass asked.
“No,” Whitaker said. “It’s mine.”
The first shot rang out from the woods back by the Old Baltimore Road access. One of Whitaker’s men fell. Two more shots. Another collapsed.
Hobbes, Fender, and Cass turned and opened fire, spraying bullets at their unseen enemies in the trees.
CHAPTER
100
I SHOT. MAHONEY shot. So did Sampson.
We all hit our targets before a modern John Brown and his Regulators returned fire. I had to dive behind a log to protect my head. All we had were pistols and Major Lacey’s M4. They had rifles equal to Lacey’s as well as a weapon of mass destruction.
Major Lacey seemed unfazed at the idea of facing a WMD. He jumped up, aimed, and shot again, attacking the retreating Regulators with short bursts that took down three more of Whitaker’s people. Sampson and Mahoney broke out onto the lawn surrounding the facility.
I charged after them with Lacey just as the rain finally stopped. One of Whitaker’s soldiers turned and opened up. A bullet hit Mahoney’s left arm, broke bone, and knocked him down.
“Go!” he yelled when I got to his side.
I spotted an AR rifle by one of the dead Regulators, grabbed it, and kept on in a full sprint toward Sampson, who was peeking around the corner of the building. He had one of the ARs too and when I got to him he said he’d just seen the colonel and a woman running toward the sea marsh behind the storage facility.
As he swung his body around the corner, Sampson pulled the AR’s trigger. I jumped out after him in time to see Whitaker vanish into the swamp. The woman, however, lurched and stumbled before she disappeared after the colonel.
“I think you hit her,” I said.
I flipped on my Maglite and gripped it beneath the fore stock of the rifle. Sampson and Lacey joined me. We quickly spotted splotches of blood on the lawn. The blood flow was small but steady until we reached a maze of reeds, cattails, and towering marsh grass.
We lost the blood trail there. We cut back and forth along the edge of the marsh, seeing where the group had split up and gone in, breaking reeds. When we located the most pounded-down trail through the cattails, we took it and found blood again.
Mud sucked our shoes off in the first hundred yards, but we kept after them, Major Lacey calling in our location and direction of travel over a two-way radio.
“Coast Guard has birds in the air,” Lacey said with a gasp as we fought to stay somewhere in range of Whitaker’s band of fleeing Regulators.
“Here’s big blood,” said Sampson, shining light on a splash near a tan reed. “And more there. She’s really starting to throw it now.”
CHAPTER
101
CASS WAS STRUGGLING. Colonel Whitaker could hear the liquid building in her lungs with every breath.
“Leave me, Jeb,” she said. “I don’t think I can make it.”
Squinting to adjust the fit of his night-vision goggles, Whitaker grabbed her under the elbow. He ignored the fire in his knee and fought forward through the muck, following their back trail through the reeds as well as Hobbes and Fender, who’d gotten ahead of them.
“We just have to make the Zodiacs, Cass,” Whitaker said. “Even if they bring in a Coast Guard cutter, they can’t cover the whole mouth of that creek. We’ll sneak out running electric. We’ll disappear in the storm.”
Cass stumbled and went to her knees. She coughed, and through the night-vision goggles, Whitaker saw black sprays of blood blow from her lips.
“Jesus,” he said, starting to panic. “Jesus.”
“Leave me, Colonel.” Cass gasped.
“Can’t do that, Captain,” he said, trying to get her up.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “They’ll find me. They’ll make sure I live.”
After a beat, Whitaker let her go. He took one long last look at Cass in the green hazy light of his goggles, pointed his rifle, and shot her through the head.
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WE HEARD THE rifle shot loud and clear, so close it helped get us back on the track when we’d lost it. I cupped my hand over the Maglite to keep it from being seen and pushed on until I heard a sudden choked cry behind me.
I twisted around and saw Sampson about six yards back, struggling, his right leg buried to the thigh in the muck.
“I’m stuck,” he said, grimacing. “Shit. Some kind of root. Go!”
“We’ll come back for him,” Lacey said, pushing by me.
The rain began again, and the major and I forged on through the sea of reeds, seeing blood every six or seven yards until we came upon the woman we’d seen in the images from the Guryev massacre. Blond now. There was a bullet hole in her skull.
“Whitaker can’t be far,” Lacey said and took off in front of me again.