He was about to throw the truck into drive to take off for the main house when a horrible thought struck him. Jumping out of the truck, he ran into the guard shack only to stop when he saw booted feet sticking out from behind a desk. Blood seeped under the other side of the desk, streaks and splatters of the stuff covering the wall.
Racing around the desk, he knew the guard was dead before he even checked for a pulse. Two rounds in the chest, one in the head. Whoever thesebad guyswere,they weren’t randos, they were professional killers.
It had to be Keller.
Cursing, he grabbed the guard’s Glock off his equipment belt, along with the single extra magazine he could find. Then he was up and running for his truck again.
Driving one handed, Lennox pulled out his cell and dialed Colt. “Call the cops and get them out to the Rybak residence. I think Keller is here. The guard at the gate is dead, and Talia and Maria are hiding in the safe room. I’m going to get them. Get here as fast as you can.”
Colt said something about waiting for backup but that wasn’t going to happen, so Lennox hung up. A few seconds later, he slid to a stop in front of the big two-story house and the three suspicious SUVs parked there.
Crap.
He could be facing more than a dozen bad guys in there.
Lennox silently darted along the left side of the house. He glanced in several windows as he moved but he didn’t see movement inside. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. The ground began to slope downward a little around the back of the house and the entrance to the basement. Hopefully, Talia and Maria were already in the safe room and all he’d have to do was find a defensive position and take out anyone who came too close.
That plan went to crap when he rounded the corner of the house and practically ran into four men in black tactical gear. The way they all lifted their military grade assault weapons and started firing without even bothering to ID their target confirmed his initial assessment—they were cold-blooded killers.
Lennox ducked back around the corner, barely avoiding the hail of bullets that came his way. He hit the ground and rolled, coming up on his feet and immediately moving to the edge of the house again, kneeling down and hugging the wall.
The first of the attackers rounded the corner of the house at full speed, firing down the length of the wall as if he expected Lennox to be running in that direction but the bullets went right over his head. It was still disconcerting to have bullets zippingover that close to him—and hard as hell on the ears—but much better than the alternative.
Finally realizing where he was, the guy tried to adjust his aim but was unable to get a shot off before Lennox fired three 9mm rounds into the man’s lower torso, avoiding the thick tactical vest that covered the guy’s chest and upper stomach.
When the man started to collapse, Lennox dropped the handgun and snatched the short-barrel assault rifle from his hands. Using the guy’s body as a shield, he flipped the weapon around and opened full-automatic fire as his three buddies ran around the house.
Two of them went down immediately while the third retreated back around the corner, giving Lennox time to scramble out from under the body and dig for the extra rifle magazines in the guy’s vest. Picking up the Glock he’d dropped earlier, he shoved it in his back pocket and got ready to go after that last shooter.
Unfortunately, when he peeked around the corner to try and find his target, he realized it had taken him too long to get moving. The guy now had backup—too many for Lennox to stand there in the open and engage.
Praying Talia and Maria were already securely locked away in the safe room, Lennox turned and sprinted back the way he’d come, looking for the closest place he could reach that would get him out of sight before the men came around the house. If they caught him out in the open, it was all over.
When he heard the thud of boots behind him closing fast, he knew he was out of time. Cursing, Lennox launched himself toward the closest window, twisting at the last second so his shoulder was the first thing to impact the glass instead of his face.
He landed on the floor of a darkened guest bedroom hard enough to knock the air from his lungs but he forced himselfupright all the same, knowing there’d be bullets coming through any minute. His concern proved correct as the walls of the room were ripped apart with automatic weapon fire as he lunged into the adjacent hallway and low-crawled away as fast as he could, chunks of drywall raining down on him.
Fifteen feet later, the darkened hallway split, with another corridor off to the right and a set of stairs leading up to the second floor on his left. He started to go right, hoping to find a way down to the basement, but paused as his cell buzzed.
Crappy time to stop and check his phone but he rolled over all the same so he could pull the thing from his back pocket. The text could be from Colt or even Maria. One look at the screen revealed that the message was from the latter.
couldn’t get to house
hiding in barn
bad guys are here
“You got to be kidding me,” Lennox groaned, shoving the cell back in his pocket. He’d spent all this time and effort trying to reach the basement, and they weren’t even there. But it hopefully meant they were safe, that was the important thing.
Pushing himself to his feet, Lennox turned toward the stairs on the left only to dive to the floor once again as bullets tore through the air over his head.
Twisting around, Lennox got his assault rifle up in time to send multiple three-round bursts back down the hallway toward the men who’d run out of the bedroom he left a few seconds earlier. One of them went down hard but the rest scrambled back into the bedroom, giving him enough time to get up and race for the stairs. He climbed fast, the thumping of multiple boots behind him in the hallway telling him that they were right on his heels.
When he reached the second floor and ran through the reading nook area, he tried to envision the layout of the house,and which direction would take him closer to the maintenance shed—or barn as Maria insisted on calling it.
Darting in what he hoped was the right direction, Lennox tore down a long hallway, pointing his assault rifle behind him in the general direction of the bad guys, and pulled the trigger until the magazine was empty. He heard a couple thuds but didn’t waste time looking back to see what he hit. Instead, he put his head down and charged through the master bedroom, not slowing as he dropped his shoulder and threw himself through the window on the far side of the room. Two windows in less than five minutes. That had to be a record.
The fall was about as thrilling as he’d imagined, though the impact that followed wasn’t fun at all. Crazy how he could parachute out of a plane at twenty thousand feet, and it was no big deal but jump out a second story window and it felt like he’d done a belly flop in a granite-filled swimming pool.
