An ambush, the pile of car parts blocking the street just a little too neat, just a little too close to the bottleneck of encroaching buildings.
Her intuition might have saved them. Jess had stopped short of the road’s choke point, but there was no easy way to back out, and who knew what nasty surprises might lurk if they did. Get to cover. Stop and assess. Gather tactical information.
“Giovanni,” Jess grunted into her walkie-talkie in as low a voice as she could manage, sucking air in and out of her lungs, trying to control the flood of adrenaline into her bloodstream. Her hand shook. “Do you have Hector?”
The walkie-talkie crackled. “He's in the brick schoolhouse half a block back,” came Giovanni’s reply.
Jess peered through the murk to see an arm waving, a hundred feet back on the opposite side of the street, behind the Range Rover and Jeep. Schoolhouse. It looked like any of the other shattered piles of rubble. “And Leone?”
“He’s with me,” Giovanni replied. “What can you see?”
What can I see? Jess almost laughed. Not much. In the dying light, dirty snowflakes fell from the indistinct soup above. Daytime was an eternal brown twilight, with nights so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The atmosphere was transformed into a murky aerosolized soup stinking of rotten eggs, the foulness burrowing its way into the brain and filling the lungs with coughing phlegm. The air itself seemed to suck out light, drowning the feeble rays of flashlights and headlamps, smothering everything in a pasty layer that scratched eyeballs and coated tongues.
Her goggles off, she rubbed her eyes and strained to see through the semidarkness. The temperature dropped ten degrees in the past two hours, another frigid night descending. The Humvee’s headlights pierced conical pools of light into the swirling snow and muck. There. A head peered around a corner from an open garage entrance. The person stood and came into view, not more than a hundred yards forward.
“Who is it?” Giovanni’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.
A second person appeared from around the corner, exposing himself. These weren’t professionals. “Don’t know. But they look like amateurs.”
“What do we do?”
Jess flicked snowflakes off her face and pulled her gloves back on. Two three-story buildings lined the street, most of the windows still oddly intact. The destruction was like that. Almost everything was flattened, with buildings reduced to piles of brick and steel, but every now and then a reminder of civilization stood unaffected, like the delicate marble statue standing defiant at this town’s entrance. The two figures doubled-over and ran behind the jumble of car parts blocking the middle. Whoever it was, they must have saw Giovanni exit the Range Rover and run into the school. Jess hadn’t fired back yet, so they had no idea if her party was armed.
It was their ambush, but surprise was on Jess’s side now.
“Leave Leone with the shotgun to protect Hector, and take Raffa and Lucca down the south side street, flank them.” Jess looked at Lucca, gripping his rifle in tight fists. She exchanged her AK-47 for his rifle and flicked her chin in Giovanni’s direction. Lucca nodded, crouched and took off at a half-run. “I’m going up to the roof. When you get in position, lob two grenades into the lobby of the red building. That’ll flush them out. You open fire from one side, and I’ll pick them off from the other.” A flush-and-flank maneuver.
Static hissed over the walkie-talkie. “Jessica, are you sure? Perhaps we should offer something?”
Jess clenched her jaw. The two figures peered out from behind the burnt-out car. “They don’t want something, they want everything. I said this was going to eventually happen, and now it’s happening.”
A hissing silence. “Okay. I have Raffa and Lucca.”
“Good. Tell me when you get there.”
“Jess, you’re sure?” Giovanni asked again.
She closed her eyes and tried to take a deep lungful of air, but a wet cough erupted mid-breath. “Just do it,” she gasped.
A pause. “We’re on our way.”
Trial by fire. Her army consisted of two teenagers, the elderly Leone and the Baron Giovanni Ruspoli, who Jess suspected had never shot at anything more dangerous than a clay pigeon. Still, seeing another of their attackers peer carelessly out from the doorway ahead, these were scavengers. A few grenades and sniper fire should be enough to scare them off.
She hoped.