Looking through the rifle’s scope, Levi saw the beginning of the snaking line of kids. It was exactly as Lucy had described. The two men leading the stumbling kids were about twenty feet ahead, and on their belts they each had activated glow sticks, presumably to make it easier for the kids to follow them in the dark.
Levi adjusted the scope to zoom in on the kids. They were struggling, their eyes were as wide open as they could make them, each of them concentrating on the person ahead of them, and Levi saw the glint of tears on some of their cheeks. Most of them had terrified expressions, and he forced himself to look away.
Clouds had swept in, and the bright moonlight from earlier was now a muddy glow that barely extended to the shores of Frost Creek. The two men leading the kids wore what looked to be some type of night vision equipment, but Levi needed no assistance.
Levi’s vision was completely adjusted to the dark and he’d always been able to see much better than most in very low light conditions. So much so, that with the help of the muted moonlight, he had no problems seeing at all.
The men headed south, followed by a train of bedraggled kids that was long enough that he hadn’t yet spied the trailing end. But Levi’s aim focused on the two men that were leading the group.
The chances of him being able to take out six armed men without further endangering the kids or himself was practically nil, but he’d prepared for them. There was a plan.
And these two men were about to act as unwilling diversions.
Levi had prepared a surprise on both shores of the creek: shallow pits covered by sticks, snow, and scattered pine needles.
The first of the men crunched onto the snow-covered sticks, plunged three feet, and screamed.
He shifted his aim toward the man’s partner, the one who’d managed to just barely skirt the pit trap. Levi aimed and fired.
Without a sound, the bullet connected—a head shot—and the second guard collapsed in a heap.
Levi chambered another round.
Chaos erupted in the front of the line as the one guard, who’d likely been impaled by at least one of the inverted wooden spears in the pit, gave off a blood-curdling scream of pain.
The front of the line of kids stepped back as two other guards rushed forward, rifles drawn.
Levi took careful aim at the guard on the far side of the kids. He held his breath and felt the slow rhythm of his heartbeat as he focused on his target. Compensating for bullet drop and horizontal movement, he put the very slightest pressure on the trigger, waited between heartbeats, and fired.
The bullet whizzed at the target at nearly a thousand feet per second. When it connected, it was like someone had snipped the strings from a marionette. The guard tumbled face first, arms and legs splayed in every direction.
Levi soundlessly chambered the next round, smiling at the attention being paid to the front of the caravan. Now the two other guards from the back were rushing into view as well.
Panning his rifle toward the one remaining guard from the middle group, and just before he could reach his screaming partner and raise further alarm, Levi released another round.
The man fell face forward, twenty feet from the impaled guard in the pit.
A chunk of bark exploded near Levi’s head, and he ducked behind the trunk of the pine he’d perched himself in.
How…?
And then he realized. His gun, and especially his suppressor, they’d built up a significant amount of heat from the shots he’d just fired. If those guys had put on any thermal imaging equipment, his rifle would be standing out like a torch.
Levi threw the weapon twenty feet to his right and dove to the ground.
He heard several shots as he scrambled away from the heated weapon and pulled out two balanced, razor-sharp bo shurikens, a type of throwing spike. Rushing through the woods, he ignored the crying of the kids and the screaming of the impaled guard. Instead, he focused on the two men he was closing in on.
They both wore headgear with monoculars.
As Levi approached, one of them took a shot at the discarded rifle.
A loud metallic ping rang through the forest, and Levi threw the first of the spikes.
It slammed into the soft tissue under the man’s chin, and before his first target could even emit a choking gurgle, Levi threw the second spike.
But this one ricocheted off the second guard’s rifle as he spun toward him.
A shot rang out just as Levi swept the man’s feet out from under him, plunged his stiffened fingers at the man’s exposed neck, squeezed, and pulled.
Levi snatched away the man’s weapon before sending a devasting kick to the side of his head. He heard the snap of vertebrae as the guard’s neck broke.
He then raised his newfound AK-47, pulled back and released the charging handle, and then put a bullet in the other man’s head, just to be sure.
Finally he rushed toward the line of kids and said in Mandarin, “Don’t be scared. I’m here to help you.”
Several of the kids stared wide-eyed at him and backed away. That was understandable, seeing as he had just appeared out of the shadows and killed their escorts. He was also covered from head to toe in a black thermally isolated dry suit, and held an automatic weapon. To them he probably looked like a creature from a nightmare.
He unlatched his face mask, flipped it up, and repeated the message.
One of the kids said something in another dialect of Chinese, and the nearest kids began to cry and give him a thumbs up.
Levi reached out to the nearest kid—a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve. He cupped her chin in his hand, gave her the warmest smile he could manage, and said, “You’ll all be fine. I’ll be right back.” He looked toward the man in the pit, who was still yelling. “I have something to finish.”
###
Lucy peered through the binoculars and saw that the heat signatures were now in two different parts of the building. That was fine. What was important was that her outside activity hadn’t brought either of them scrambling for the door.
She skirted around the building, spotted the electric meter, and hurried over to it. Her formal education had stopped at the age of ten, when she moved in with her husband, but that hadn’t stopped her from learning—and one of her interests was electricity. She’d become interested in the subject when an ox that her father owned rubbed against an electrical transformer and was electrocuted.
It scared her, and she hated to be scared of anything.
So over the years, she’d tinkered, and she learned. And she knew what her next steps were going to be.
Canada had the same type of electrical grid that the US had, and spotting the power meter made things very easy. She had no transformer to deal with, and she knew that the building’s power was running through the single meter.
From her backpack, she pulled out a modified electrical transformer that she’d salvaged from a microwave. Normally it would only put out about one amp, so she’d disassembled it, salvaged the coil, and removed some of the metal shunts from within the transformer’s core. It now would put out over eight hundred amps. Plenty for what she needed.
She placed the device at the base of the meter and wrapped two silver leads around the thick cable where the utility’s electrical line met with the building’s wiring. All too often these junctures used copper, which was a poor choice, due to oxidation. It increased resistance at the joint points. But she was counting on that. She turned the dial on the timer, setting her device’s activation for two minutes from now and hustled to the building’s entrance.
She crouched at the door, twisted the doorknob, and waited.
She’d planned this all ahead of time. She knew what was about to happen. As soon as the timer went off, the power supply built into her box would feed the modified transformer, and the metal leads from her contraption would surge with current. The slightly oxidized metal in the utility’s connection would act as a resistor, heating up to the point of melting.
Tapping her finger on her knee, she kept count of the time.
Five … four … three … two … one … now.
She imagined the cable beginning to smoke, a red glow from the heat building within the wires and then suddenly she heard it.
Electric sparks buzzed from the lamp post she’d shot, and someone yelled inside the building.
Lucy went in.
The lights were out, and there were no windows or other sources of light, but her night vision monocular projected a wide but invisible beam of infrared light. In her left eye, she saw the world bathed in a green hue.
“I can’t see a damned thing!” yelled a man in Cantonese. He was up ahead and to Lucy’s left.
Another voice, this one a woman’s, yelled through the darkness from somewhere to her right. “Don’t move—you’ll just break something. I’m looking for the flashlight. It’s in here somewhere.”
Lucy slung her MP5 over her shoulder, drew her silenced .22, and moved down the hall toward the woman’s voice. She passed several open doors leading to small offices.
Then from just ahead came the sound of someone opening the drawer to a file cabinet. She followed the sound and stepped into the office.
A dowdy Asian woman looked blindly toward her. “Gao Jie?” Her eyes shone brightly in the reflected infrared light, almost like a cat’s.
Without a word, Lucy aimed and fired twice.
Two pings, and the woman grabbed at the file cabinet as she fell backwards. The metal cabinet fell on top of her, making a tremendous crashing sound.
“Chen Bao! Are you okay?”
Lucy slipped her .22 in the carrying loop of her backpack, wielded the MP5 once again, and stepped out into the hall. A man stumbled from around a corner, blindly feeling his way.
He had no idea what was waiting for him.
Lucy pulled the trigger.
Three shots fired in less than a third of a second. All three direct hits, center mass.
The man staggered, murmured something unintelligible, and collapsed to his knees. Blood trickled from his lips.
Without a shred of remorse, Lucy shot another burst of three rounds. The man fell backwards, his face an unrecognizable mess.
Lucy turned from the corridor and went back to the dead woman’s office to look through the operation’s files.
“Lucy, you there?” Levi’s voice crackled in her ear.
“I am. I’ve secured the shipping outpost. How goes it with you?”
“Six down. Kids are spooked as hell, but they’re all fine. Isn’t someone going to be looking for these kids if they don’t show up wherever they were going in a couple hours?”
“Yes, I’m sure someone’s probably waiting at a handoff point. That’s why we need to get the kids away from there.” Lucy grunted as she lifted the file cabinet off of the dead woman’s body and was about to go rummaging through the files when she turned to the file-laden desk. “Listen, we don’t have much time. Doug’s got limits to what he can call in for assistance. Start walking them toward our car.”
“Roger, that.”
She heard Levi giving instructions in Mandarin, and most likely, some of those kids would understand him.
Lucy opened up a file folder that was laying on the desk. It was information about the children: contact names, phone numbers, age, height, virginity status, and more. She pulled out her cell phone and took pictures. Lots of pictures.
“Lucy, we’re heading to the car. Be there in about half an hour or so. But then what? Obviously we can’t all pile into your car. If people come looking for these kids, we’re not exactly going to be able to hide which way we’ve gone.”
Lucy sent the first batch of photos to Doug’s inbox, then texted to him a set of GPS coordinates.
“Levi, we’ve struck the motherlode here. I’ve got location of origin, recruiter, purchaser, kids’ names, prices, everything.” Her phone buzzed with a text from Doug. “And I just got word from Doug. I don’t know how, but he’s got a pair of Chinooks lifting off from Lewis-McChord near Tacoma. He says they’ll be there in about forty minutes.”
“There where? At your car?”
“Those are the coordinates I sent him.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it. Anyway, I’ll make sure the kids get on the choppers, and I’ll wait for you at the car.”
Lucy felt something warm up inside of her that reminded her of times that were long gone. “No, go with the kids. The military guys will need you at least until a translator gets there. I’ll be driving back south by the time you guys land.”
“Lucy, please be careful coming back, and don’t walk along the shores of the creek. There’s a couple of fresh pits with spikes on the bottom. One of them’s occupied, and I removed the undergrowth hiding the other, but it’s dark and you know…”
“I’ll be fine. We’re done now. Maybe we’ll meet up again on some other occasion. Bye, Levi.” Lucy removed her earpiece and ripped off the throat mic.
Knowing there’d be people arriving soon, she raced from the office, jumped over the dead trafficker, and focused on getting home in one piece.
Things were about to get very ugly for one of the triads.