Page 47 of Duke
I just had to keep us both alive long enough to figure this shit out.
***
We reached Harris’s compound two and a half hours later. The main gate was closed, as always, but there was a keypad, and every A1S employee had a personal keycode. The gate was a good ten feet high, made of solid black iron, connected to an eight foot high stone wall extending to either side into the thick stand of pine trees surrounding the compound. You couldn’t see the buildings from the gate, and the stone wall continued a good hundred feet into the woods in both directions, where it transitioned from there to a fifteen foot high steel prison fence topped with razor wire. The entire compound was surrounded by fencing, with the gate as the only way in and the only way out, and it was heavily fortified, electrified, monitored, and alarmed.
Beyond the gate, the narrow dirt road wound away out of view, disappearing into the trees. Eventually the woods gave way to open space around the house and various other buildings of the compound, but even that was under constant watch. The compound encompassed a good portion of the foothills in which this place was nestled, and from several points in those hills a sniper could settle in and keep a hawkish eye on the whole compound—which I knew for a fact was something Anselm often took upon himself to do quite frequently, his big old Barrett fifty cal rifle in hand.
But I was nervous. This wasn’t my car, which meant Anselm was likely to shoot first and worry about wondering how I got past that gate later; Anselm didn’t take well to unannounced visitors.
I took a deep breath and hoped for the best, then entered my keycode. The gate swung open on silent hinges admitting the Jeep, and then closed again seconds after I was through. The cameras didn’t follow me, I noticed, which meant they were recording but were not necessarily being actively monitored—not good news, because someone watching the camera would see me and alert Anselm not to send a fifty caliber slug through my skull.
I pulled carefully through the woods, emerging into the opening holding my breath. I made it twenty feet, fifty…a hundred…
And then a fountain of dirt exploded ten feet in front of the hood, and second five feet away—a clear message to halt. Those bursts of dirt were HUGE, and definitely from Anselm’s Barrett.A fifty caliber slug from a Barrett would go straight through the engine block like a hot knife through melted butter from a thousand yards; I’ve seen what it does to a human, and that’s a nasty, nauseating image I know I’ll never forget. I tapped the brakes to stop the Jeep, exited the Jeep slowly, hands up, standing in the open door where I’d be visible.
“It’s me, numbnuts!” I shouted.
I heard a distant, shrill, two-note whistle, an acknowledgment from Anselm. Thank fuck. I got back behind the wheel and pulled forward again, Temple still snoring. Five minutes later, I was braking outside Harris and Layla’s house. It was a sprawling, custom-built ranch, single story, and it looked deceptively ordinary. It wasn’t ordinary, though, atall—Harris didn’t do anything in half measures. The main, visible level consisted of maybe three thousand square feet, enough to be roomy yet small enough to be cozy, considering it was just the two of them. Really, the house looked like any old Colorado ranch home, and the main level supported that illusion. It was what was hidden underneath that was unusual: a massive underground bunker, literally fortified against nuclear warfare, coded to Harris and Layla’s palm and voiceprints alone. The bunker contained enough weapons and ammo to take on a medium-sized third world country’s army, plus extra living quarters and enough rations to last seven or eight people for a year. Outside the house, there was a huge, custom-built barn.
Well…barnis a misleading term. We called it a barn but it was, in fact, an airplane hangar capable of housing several full-sized aircraft, and it usually housed at least one plane in it at any given time. Aircraft were Harris’s hobby and, like everything else, he didn’t do it half-assed. He had WWI biplanes, WWII fighters, a MiG, an F-4 Phantom, and a Huey all from the Vietnam era, and several generic, less exciting single and double engine private prop planes, plus his six-person Gulfstream.
Some guys restored hot rods or bought vacation properties; Nick Harris restored fighter jets and bought heavy weaponry.
He’d personally restored each one of the vintage aircraft, and was licensed to fly anything that would go up in the air, from passenger jets to fighter jets, from helos to prop planes. Not only licensed, but one of the most talented pilots I’ve ever met. A little known fact about those fighters he owned: he’d procured, somehow, machine gun ammunition and rockets for all them. As in, if he wanted to, he could carry out his own goddamn airstrike. I wasn’t sure even Layla knew he had another bunker underneath the larger, more nondescript hangar by the runway, which contained his stock of heavy duty ordinance—rockets, grenades, fifty and thirty-eight caliber machine gun ammo, a few crates of SAMs, and that was just what I’d personally inventoried.
The man was legitimately ready for war.
I kicked open the door of the Jeep, checked to see that Temple was still out, and decided to leave her be for the moment. Let her sleep, she needed it. I had a feeling shit was about to get seriously wicked.
I expected Layla to burst out the front door and holler some funny shit at me from the wraparound porch, and I even had a few good comebacks chambered, but she never appeared.
“What the hell?” I muttered to myself. “Layla! Where you at, bitch?” I bellowed.
The buzzing rattle of a powerful dirt bike echoed up in the hills, the noise getting louder as it approached. I assumed it was Anselm, but I wasn’t about to take any chances. I fetched one of the rifles from the backseat, tracking the incoming dirt bike from across the hood of the Jeep. It appeared after a minute or two, and even though the figure on the bike was wearing all black BDUs and a full-coverage helmet, I knew it was Anselm by the sight of the fucking enormous rifle strapped across his back.
He braked to a dramatic, arcing rear-tire skid, planted one boot in the dirt and stood up to let the dirt bike lean against his thigh. Tugging off the helmet, he passed a hand through his messy brownish blond hair, smoothing it back across his scalp.
“Everyone has been searching for you, Duke,” Anselm said, by way of greeting. He spoke English more fluently than I did, though he spoke it with a thick German accent, and sometimes he rearranged the grammar in quirky ways.
“Yeah, well, I ran into some trouble.”
He peered into the passenger window. “And still managed to procure a lady friend.”
“She’s not my usual brand of lady friend,” I said, tossing the barrel of the rifle onto my shoulder. “And she’s part of the trouble.”
Anselm’s eyebrow lifted upward which was, for him, kind of like shouting a question. “Meaning?”
“Meaning, someone whacked me across the back of the head, shot me full of sleepy time drugs, and stuffed me in some shitty ghetto basement in the Denver suburbs. I’d been about to chat up this chick outside the bar, so I guess they decided to not take any chances and just grabbed her too.”
Anselm nodded. “I have much to fill you in with, and we must also call our mutual employer. Thresh is rather worried about you, I should mention.”
“You know what’s going on?” I asked.
“To a degree,” he answered. “Cain is making a play for his vengeance.”
“I thought Harris said Cain was a low-level kingpin with more ambition than sense or some shit like that?” I lifted the rifle. “The guys I’ve been cleaning out haven’t been amateurs, man. The last bunch were pro mercs, eight of ‘em, well armed and decently trained.”
“They chased Thresh and a…a friend of his all the way into the Everglades, and he barely made it out alive himself. Puck had a run-in of his own, and Lear is hiding somewhere digging for information. We are scattered, my friend. It seems Harris greatly underestimated this Cain individual.”