“They were in and out in a hurry,” White said, looking at thesetup. “No snow melt where the shooter’s legs were, or the spotter’s knees. They came, they saw, they shot, they ran.”
“Which makes me think about a drone again,” Sherwood said, looking up at the sky. “Overhead’s pretty thin. Maybe it’d be too high to be heard. It spots our SUVs coming in and that triggers the shooters. They were here in what, fifteen minutes? They knew where they were going and exactly how long it would take to get here, where they would go in the woods. They did all that even though they couldn’t know that we’d be late arriving.”
Lucas nodded and said, “Brass,” and pointed. “Don’t touch anything.”
Sherwood and White looked at the end of a rifle shell protruding from the snow near the log. Lucas bent over it, close enough to see the stamp on the case head, stood up and said, “Huh. Says .277, never heard of it. There’s another shell over there, so it’s a semiauto, at least.”
“That’s the new Army rifle,” Sherwood said. “Rare gun, at this point. I guess some of them are getting out to the public, a civilian version. If it’d been a stolen Army rifle, they could have hosed down the whole kitchen and we’d all be dead.”
“The American Army, you mean, not Russian,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. You can touch the shell, if you want to look at it. This won’t be a basic police investigation, looking at a trial,” Sherwood said. “These people are not the kind to surrender. It’ll come to a bloody end, or if they manage to exfiltrate, nothing at all. We’re locking down private jets, by the way. Nothing moves in or out of the local airports without a complete inspection. Wherever they are, they’re going by car. They’ll have to do something about their wounded.”
“I’ll leave the shells for the crime scene people—you can never tell what’s going to happen. By the way, you also ought to lock down some U.S. Marshal cell phones,” Lucas said. “If they were tipped by one of the marshals here, it would have had to be by a cell phone.”
“Yes, I thought of that, and we will do that,” Sherwood said. He looked through the woods to the house and said, “This was a nice op, up to the point where you two ran down the driveway and shot them up. That shouldn’t have happened. The driver should have been covering them with an automatic weapon, just in case. She didn’t.”
“You sound disappointed,” White said.
“You learn from the mistakes of the dead and wounded,” Sherwood said, like a classroom professor. “Somebody didn’t think this through, not quite well enough. They didn’t think about the Marshal’s Service and all the guns you people carry. I’d be more impressed by the hitters if you two were dead at the end of the driveway.”
“Thanks,” White said.
“Didn’t say I’d be happy; just impressed,” Sherwood said.
• • •
Not happy, justimpressed. Lucas felt a finger of the depression ghost stroking his brain. He’d been close to two high-powered rifle slugs, hadn’t been hit, but had seen the blood spraying across the hideout’s kitchen, had thought for an instant that a friend had been hit—White still showed streaks of blood on her parka. If it got worse, he’d be on the meds again. He hated them, but clinical depression was a real thing, and not his friend.
It wasn’t a coincidence, because White was feeling the same finger: she asked: “You okay?”
“Yeah. Sorta getting on some hate.”
• • •
Lucas’s phone rangand he took it out. He recognized the 9-1-1 operator’s voice when she said, “We found your Subaru, but you’re not going to like it.”
“Where is it?”
“I understand it’s in a little lane up by Barret’s Pond. Abandoned. No cameras nearby. No way to walk out of there, I’m told, so it looks like there was a third car picking them up. More blood in the Subaru.”
“Gimme the address. We’ll head up there.” Lucas took down the address, and after a last look around, they started walking back to the house. The sky was turning darker, and the cold was getting stronger.
• • •
Sherwood: “Before weleave here…I have to ask for your phones.”
White: “Aw, man, we’re the ones who lit them up.”
“If one of you is hard enough to be running this op, maybe that’s what you would have been told to do.” He held up his hands, to fend off objections: “I don’t really believe that, because you guys didn’t have to run out there as quick as you did. A little slower and they’d have been gone. But I have to ask for your phones as part of the routine. If I didn’t, how would I explain that to everybody else? I need all the phones.”
“Including yours,” Lucas said. “You should call a neutral agency like the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension over in Saint Paul. They can take the phones apart as fast as you guys or the FBI and start an hour from now. Beard or one of the other marshals can help you take the phones over to Saint Paul, so they’ll never be alone with one guy.”
Sherwood nodded: “Let’s get it done.”
White asked, “What am I going to do without my phone? My life’s in there. My kids might call.”
“Burners,” Lucas and Sherwood said together, and Sherwood continued: “We’ll pay for them. Get you good ones.”
