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  “I’m talking about the big picture,” Greengrass had said. “You don’t have a clue. Not a whit. There’s a grand plan happening that you don’t even know exists. It’s kind of sad, really.”

  It didn’t make any sense. What kind of idiot would tug at Superman’s cape? And that was exactly what Black Tide was at the moment. Granted, Keo had only talked to Buck over the radio, and only once at that, but he didn’t think a man like Greengrass would fall in line with an idiot. Greengrass was too experienced and too smart for that.

  So what the hell was going on in Fenton that Buck thought he could take on Black Tide? Did it have anything to do with what had happened at Darby Bay three days ago? Was that it? Was all of this just an excuse for that?

  “There’s a grand plan happening…”

  Keo shook the questions away. The answers weren’t going to do him a lick of sense right now.

  Rudolph had disappeared temporarily to his right before reappearing on the other side of a tree. Gholston did the same on Rita’s left. Both men walked with purpose, careful of every step they took to lessen their noise pollution. Keo and Rita were doing the same, even though he hadn’t had to tell her to do so.

  This part of the woods was new to Keo, even if every wooded area up and down the state of Texas tended to look the same. The tree species may change the farther north he traveled up the continental United States, but when you got right down to it, it was still just a wall of brown and gnarled trunks and green leaves, right?

  A tree was a tree, was a tree, was a tree…

  After another twenty or so minutes, they stopped and gathered in a semicircle while Rudolph pulled out a map. The big man with the bushy beard had taken over navigational duties from Wells and was keeping track of their movements. Looking at the map that Rudolph put on the ground, Keo was surprised by how close they already were to Fenton. No wonder his scar was really tingling now.

  “We’re here,” Rudolph said, pointing. Then, moving his forefinger slightly, “That’s Fenton.”

  Keo nodded before giving all three of them a good, hard look. “There’s no turning back now, boys and girl. I know all of you volunteered for this, so if you wanna unvolunteer, now’s the time to do it.” He glanced at his watch. “You can still make one of the evac sites before nightfall if you go now.”

  The three of them exchanged a look with one another, but it was Rita who said, “Not a chance. I mean, there was never a chance before, but now there’s not even a sliver of one after what happened.”

  “What she said,” Gholston added.

  “Yeah, let’s get this done,” Rudolph said as he folded the map and put it back into one of his pockets. “I didn’t come all the way out here just to turn tail now.”

  “All right,” Keo said, standing up. “Let’s get this done. I don’t wanna still be out here when night falls.”

  After about ten more minutes of carefully plodding through the woods, they finally reached the rendezvous point. It was an old trailer park about half a mile from a river that flowed from the main Lake Mansfield that gave Fenton its water. The place was overgrown, the road that connected its grounds to a highway somewhere beyond the trees already reclaimed by the woods that surrounded it. Three or so dozen structures, most of them old single and double-wide mobile homes, were lined up in three surprisingly orderly rows.

  There were no signs of people, and no voices, movements, or anything that even gave the impression someone had been using the area as a home recently. The park had been scavenged and gutted of anything useful years ago, from the looks of it. Given its current condition—dirty and moss-covered, the buildings rotting and falling apart at the seams—it wouldn’t have made a very good place to seek shelter.

  Which, Keo guessed, made it a perfect spot to meet up in secret.

  Not that they ran out there and started calling out the contact’s name right away. Instead, they spent thirty minutes hidden in the tree line and watched the park. It had a name, once upon a time, but vines had swallowed up whatever was written on the sign a while ago.

  Keo checked his watch. They were cutting it close, and he could already see small hints that the bright sky, now fully exposed above the clearing that housed the park, wasn’t going to stay that way for very long.

  Rita was crouched next to him, with Gholston and Rudolph farther back. She was looking through her Mk 14’s scope while Keo used his binoculars to scan the buildings, going from one former dilapidated home to another. The houses were built from cheap material, designed to temporarily house people, and he wasn’t too surprised by their current condition. Time and the elements had taken their toll, and it wouldn’t be long now before the whole lot disappeared completely.

  “How much longer are we gonna wait out here?” Rudolph whispered behind him.

  Keo lowered his binoculars. “Thirty more minutes.”

  “What if they’re not here?” Gholston asked. “It can’t be easy to get out of the city unnoticed while it’s locked down.”

  “Thirty more minutes.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we call it a day and head back.”

  “We’ll be cutting it close,” Rudolph said. “Real close.”

  “Shaving my balls close,” Gholston added.

  Nice imagery, Keo thought, when Rita pulled her eye away from her scope and gave him a quick look before peering back through her device.

  “Where?” Keo asked.

  “Third building in the middle row,” Rita said.

  Keo lifted the glasses back up and looked through them, moving slightly to the right. Fortunately they had approached the trailer park at the right angle, with the three rows spread out evenly in front of them. They couldn’t see every single building in the clearing, but it was probably the best view—

  There.

  The white curtains behind a broken window in the third mobile home in the middle row. Keo couldn’t make out a face looking out at them but the fabric was clearly being held back by a hand—for a couple of seconds—before they fell back into place, covering up the window once again.

  “Someone’s definitely in there,” Keo said. He put the binoculars away and unslung his MP5SD. “Gholston, you’re with me. Rudolph, watch our six with Rita.”

  “Gotcha,” Rudolph said.

  “Good luck, boss,” Rita said.

  Keo nodded at Gholston, who moved over. Then, together, they jogged out of the tree line and into the clearing.

  They kept low, but even with the grass slapping at their knees—some reaching up as high as their waists—they were still more exposed than Keo would have liked. But they’d been watching the grounds for over thirty minutes and no one had even made a peep (Until now), and Keo only felt like he was about to get shot dead by another Calvin-like sniper every three or four steps instead of every single one.

  Yeah, that’s better.

  He wasn’t sure how Gholston was doing as the man followed close behind him, but the Georgian didn’t slow down as they moved steadily across the field, covering the thirty or so meters of open space as fast as humanly possible. Keo was at least reassured that Rita was watching their backs, and that even if a sniper took them out she’d get them in return.

  Unless, of course, this guy was as good as Calvin had been.

  That’s it, pal. Positive thoughts. Think positive thoughts!

  He almost laughed. It said something about how low his expectations had gotten that his best-case scenario involved Rita avenging his murder by sniper fire.

  Remember the days when good news was you living through a gunfight?

  Ah, good times, good times.

  He didn’t have time to look at or inside any of the mobile homes as he passed them, and kept his sights squarely focused on the third building up ahead. The path got rocky as soon as he entered the main housing area, with pebbles sliding underneath his boots. He imagined he was making just as much noise as Gholston behind him, and Gholston was making a lot of noise as he ran after Keo.
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  Too much noise. Way too much noise.

  The target was directly in front of him, and Keo tightened his grip on the submachine gun as they approached it. The windows were still covered by curtains, and there were no signs anyone was inside or outside.

  He was about to slow down when the single-wide’s door snapped open on its own.

  Now that’s an invitation if I ever saw one!

  Keo slid to a stop and pointed his MP5SD, Gholston doing the same next to him and aiming with his camouflaged AR. The other man was breathing hard, and Keo assumed he was, too, except it was too difficult to hear anything over the pounding in his ears.

  “Well?” a voice said from inside the house. “You guys going to stand out there all day, or come in?”

  Keo exchanged a look with Gholston before lowering his weapon and hurrying forward. The steps up to the mobile home squeaked way too loud and threatened to buckle underneath him and Gholston.

  There weren’t any artificial lights inside the structure and very few natural ones, but Keo could make out a figure leaning against the counter in the kitchen area looking back at him and Gholston as they stepped inside. The figure had long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and was wearing a long-sleeved sweater. Blue eyes watched Keo and Gholston with just a hint of amusement as they took a moment to catch their breaths.

  “You guys really took your time,” their contact said. “I was this close to taking off.”

  “Glad you didn’t,” Keo said. He walked over and smiled at her. “Damn, you got tall, kid.”

  She laughed and came out from behind the counter. “And you got ugly.”

  “Hey, come on.”

  “I meant handsome.”

  “There you go.”

  Keo smiled as she hugged him. The fourteen-year-old kid he remembered had grown up to become a tall and fine-looking woman, even though she was probably still just nineteen. A teenager, even if she had always been much older than her age, and nineteen for her might as well be twenty-nine, or older.

  “So where’s the rest of your posse, KY One?” she asked.

  “Don’t go there,” Keo said.

  She grinned. “Why? Still tough sledding? I thought it’d already be heavily lubricated by now.”

  Keo groaned, then muttered, “Fucking Danny.”

  Gholston cleared his throat behind them. “Have we met?”

  “Gholston, this is Claire,” Keo said. “She’s our inside man.”

  “Some ‘man,’” Gholston said, and walked over to shake Claire’s hand. He had a big, stupid grin on his face.

  “Watch it,” Keo said.

  “What?” Gholston said.

  “Just watch it.” He turned back to Claire. “I hear you can get us into Fenton?”

  Claire nodded. “That’s the plan.” She glanced out the window. “Speaking of which, we should get going. It’ll be dark soon, and you know what happens when it gets dark.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Keo said as memories of a pair of bright blue eyes flashed across his mind’s eye.

  Jesus. I can’t believe I’m walking right back into that.

  Keo managed to hide the slight shiver from both Claire and Gholston by turning toward the door and walking back to it. Or at least he hoped he had done it in time.

  “How’s everyone?” Claire asked as she fell in beside him.

  “You don’t know?” Keo said.

  “I’ve been in daily communications, but I’ve had to keep everything straight and to the point to limit the risks of being discovered. There was never really any time for ‘Hey, how’s it hanging.’” She watched his face closely when she added, “Everything’s okay over there? Everyone’s fine?”

  “Yeah, everything’s okay and everyone’s fine,” Keo lied.

  Nine

  Three Days Ago

  “Claire? The kid? That’s your spy inside Fenton?”

  “She’s hardly a kid anymore,” Lara said.

  “What is she, seventeen?”

  “Nineteen,” Gaby said. She took a slightly frayed Polaroid out from her back pocket and handed it to Keo. “We took this at the last Christmas party.”

  Keo took the picture. “You guys had a Christmas party?”

  “Every year.”

  “Didn’t you?” Lara asked.

  “Uh, no,” Keo said.

  He looked at the picture—Claire standing with Gaby, the two women almost exactly the same height, while holding see-through plastic cups filled with dark liquid. He wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart from a distance. He also wouldn’t have recognized the fourteen-year-old he had spent months with after Houston teaching how to fight and shoot alongside Danny and the others if he’d met her out there in the wilds.

  “She’s almost as tall as you,” Keo said, handing the picture back.

  “Taller,” Gaby said. “I was wearing boots in the picture.”

  They were inside a room in a building next to the one Keo had been staying in for the past few days. There was just the three of them standing in front of a large and heavily annotated map of Texas taped to a blackboard. Overhead surveillance photos of Fenton covered the walls and were laid out on tables around them. To look at the city, it didn’t stand out as anything different from the hundreds of towns he’d walked through since The Purge—rooftops, streets, and acres of agriculture, usually with a nearby water source. The only thing that made it different were the recent additions next to the lake, separated from the rest of Fenton by hurricane fencing. And there, surrounded by water, was a small island with one lone building in the middle.

  What’s in that warehouse, Buck? What are you trying to hide?

  The briefing room was really just a classroom minus the desks, which were stacked in a pile in the back. One of many inside what was once the Darby Bay High School, since repurposed for Black Tide Command. Instead of desks, there were big flat tables, and instead of ABCs on the walls there were black and white surveillance pictures of Fenton. Black Tide had been busy watching Buck’s every move, even if the man himself didn’t show up in any of the pictures.

  “She was outside a town called Penn Hall about a week ago when it came under attack,” Lara was saying. “It was one of the places I sent men to help them defend it in case it came under attack. There was a fight, but our guys were able to repel Buck’s men. While they were retreating, they found Claire along the road and captured her.”

  “‘Found’ her?” Keo said.

  “More like she let them capture her,” Gaby said. She sighed and shook her head. “That girl…”

  “She knew we needed intel on Fenton, and she was in a position to get what we needed,” Lara said. “I’m not saying I would have approved if she’d told me what she was going to do and asked for permission, but, well…”

  “What did she do, exactly?” Keo asked.

  “She took off her uniform, put on civilian clothes, and when the Buckies were running with their tails between their legs, flagged them down.”

  “And they took her back to Fenton with them, just like that?”

  “Keo, did you get a good look at nineteen-year-old Claire in that picture?”

  Keo chuckled. “Of course they took her back with them.”

  “When she was in Fenton, she got her hands on a radio—don’t ask me how, she didn’t say—and made contact. She’s been sending us daily intel ever since.”

  “So she knows about the warehouse?”

  Lara shook her head. “She hasn’t been able to get close to it. The military area is closed off from the civilian side.” She nodded at Gaby. “She saw the same thing when she was there. They don’t let anyone past the fence who isn’t supposed to be there.”

  “She couldn’t get to the island, but she asked around,” Gaby said. “Bottom line, the civilians have no idea what’s really going on inside the compound. Or, more importantly to us, what’s in that warehouse.”

  “I hope she asked around carefully,” Keo said.

  “Don’t w
orry about Claire. She got through basic training like everyone else, and everything Danny and you couldn’t teach her, I did.”

  Keo gave her a curious look. “Which is what?”

  “Everything Danny and you couldn’t teach her because the two of you don’t have titties. Do you really need me to elaborate?”

  “Ah, not necessary.”

  “She’s your inside man, but keep that just between us,” Lara said. “You’re the only one she’ll respond to. If you’re not there, I gave her explicit orders not to make contact.”

  “Is she even going to recognize me? It’s been a few years.”

  “She’s changed a lot, Keo, but you haven’t.”

  “Plus, that ugly scar,” Gaby said.

  “Scars give a man character,” Lara said.

  Keo grunted.

  Gaby chuckled before continuing. “Claire’s been working on this plan for a while now, and she’s assured me it’s almost there.”

  “‘Almost there?’”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not sending anyone out there until it’s completely there,” Lara said.

  “That makes me feel better,” Keo said. “A little.”

  There was a knock on the door behind them.

  Lara looked over. “Come in.”

  A man stepped inside. Early thirties with short blond hair. He wore the same blue-themed BDUs as Lara and Gaby, with a gun identical to Gaby’s. Lara was unarmed, and Keo hadn’t bothered to arm himself since arriving at Darby Bay. That sudden revelation surprised him—more so that he hadn’t noticed until now—and he couldn’t remember the last time he had walked around without a gun for so long.

  The man—the name Biden was stenciled across his name tag—immediately searched out Lara. “Commander Hartford’s on the radio, ma’am. He’s waiting for you.”

  “He’s early,” Lara said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Lara turned to Keo. “Come on. You’ll want to hear this, too.”

  Keo followed her and Gaby out of the room, with Biden in the lead. There was a second man waiting for them outside in the hallway. Loman was written on his name tag.