The Quest (21 page)

Another awkward pause.

Sally Richardson smiled at Merlin and said, “It’s okay, Arthur. You can tell them.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Adrian,” said Merlin, “but you are the only real Knight here, not me. It is true that I am a trained Guardian Knight, but it’s also true that I have never been in a real combat situation. Mrs. Harding has done such an excellent job of keeping us hidden that our settlement has never once been attacked, and as you know by now, we don’t go around looking for trouble.”

I gaped at him.

This was even worse than when Terry had admitted that she didn’t know how to land our stolen airplane. Of our entire team, I was the only one who had any experience taking down an enemy stronghold.

We might have stared at each other for a full minute before I finally gulped and said uneasily, “Alright. I’ll lead.”

I looked around at my team. “Is that okay?”

Everyone nodded or smiled to show that it was.

I took a deep breath and forced a grim smile. “We’re going tonight.”

It was still late morning. In order to keep this mission from being a complete suicide run, I had to master my desire to rush to Alia’s rescue and instead form a passable plan of attack. My greatest fear was that for every hour we waited, my sister might be removed from the outpost or Terry might die of her wounds, but those were chances we would have to take if we were to have the cover of darkness.

Merlin was carrying a large brown envelope from which he pulled what little information the Walnut Guardians had on their Angel neighbors. We gathered in the dining room to look over the documents.

“This is the place,” said Merlin, showing us a close-up photo of a square red-brick two-story house. The photo looked like it was taken from a speeding car, and was slightly blurry. All of the windows had their curtains drawn, but fortunately the place had no fence around it.

“Here’s another,” said Merlin, “and this one is an aerial shot.”

The second photo was even worse than the first, but the aerial shot confirmed that the outpost wasn’t part of a block of houses. It stood alone a short distance from an asphalt road running through a grassy field.

“The next house is more than half a mile away,” explained Merlin.

“Gunshots can be heard from farther than that in the open,” I said, frowning.

Merlin shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll need to worry too much about the noise we make, Adrian. Mrs. Harding pulled some strings this morning with the local police to keep them from coming here when our neighbors reported gunshots fired. I’m sure she’ll help us tonight in the same way.”

“That may be,” said James, butting in from my side, “but even so, we could certainly use the element of surprise.”

“That’s why we’re waiting for night,” I reminded him.

“I know that,” said James. “But we could do more. What if we all got silencers for our pistols?”

“Silencers?” I repeated. “For our pistols?”

“Yeah,” James said enthusiastically. “Keep the guns quiet. That way, if we could somehow sneak into that house, we might even be able to get all the Angels before they wake up.”

“You’ve been watching too many spy movies, James,” I informed him.

A sound suppressor, more commonly known as a silencer, was a long cylindrical metal tube that attached to the barrel of a gun to reduce the noise of the rounds. But the key word here was “reduce,” and unlike in the movies, real-life silencers didn’t bring the noise of a pistol down to those silly little whispering
put-put-put
s that wouldn’t wake a cat in a library. Even with silencers, guns were as loud as jackhammers. That was why the Angels had come at us with only crossbows, knives, tear gas and psionics. They didn’t want to wake the neighbors.

James looked quite embarrassed as I explained this to him, but I suspected that most people who had never used sound suppressors before didn’t know how ineffective they were. I hadn’t known myself until Terry told me during my first year of combat training.

“Unfortunately, silencers are expensive and pretty much useless,” I concluded, and then added, “Besides, we already have one silenced weapon.”

“What weapon?” asked James.

I raised my right index finger in reply. While my telekinetic blasts did make little whooshing sounds, they were even quieter than the silenced pistols in movies.

“What we really need to get are some quiet radio transceivers,” I said.

“I’ll handle the shopping,” volunteered Mr. Richardson. “How many do you need?”

I wasn’t sure yet. “Four, just in case.”

“No problem.”

“What else you got, Merlin?” I asked, noticing that Merlin still had two papers.

“Map to the location,” replied Merlin, “but I have that in my head. And this one here is purely hypothetical.” He passed me a set of blueprints mapping out the first and second floors of the Angel outpost. “We’ve never actually been inside, but this is the design of another house with the exact same size and shape. If the Angels’ house follows any logical architectural design, the inside should look something like that.”

“This is good,” I said, looking over the map. “They’ll have made some modifications, though.”

“No doubt,” agreed Merlin. “Probably a pretty extensive basement, possibly multilevel to hold their captives.”

“It’s better that way,” I said. “Alia will be locked out of the way when the shooting starts.”

Looking at the blueprints again, I noticed a back door that led into the kitchen. “Is there a back door on the Angels’ house too?”

“Yes,” replied Merlin. “We don’t have a photo, but our guy who took the aerial shot says there was a door right where it’s shown on that paper.”

“Two teams, then,” I said. “We’ll enter from both sides, and try not to shoot each other by accident.”

Everyone laughed, but I hadn’t meant that as a joke.

“Let me study this map for a while,” I said. “In the meantime, you can all rest or go check up on the injured, and Mr. Richardson can go get us our radios.”

My team complied without question, and I spent the next hour alone, lying on my bed thinking through various ways in which we might go about taking the Angels’ house. I suspected that the Angels would also have a night watch or perhaps an electronic security alarm. Once we were discovered, speed would be everything. I needed to find a sequence of movement that would let us clear the house of threats before the Angels could react.

Staring at the floor plans, I pictured two small teams breaching simultaneously. Team One enters from the front door into the living room, clears the front half of the first floor, and then moves to the stairs leading up into the second floor. Meanwhile, Team Two enters from the rear door into the kitchen, taking the rest of the first floor before heading down into the basement. Team One could follow into the basement after clearing the second floor.

That would keep my teams from bumping into each other, but it was still too slow. The Angels sleeping upstairs could be wide awake before Team One got up to them.

How would Mr. Simms have done this?

When he planned the attack on the Holy Land, Mr. Simms made sure that the first target the Raven Knights hit was the barracks.

Take no prisoners. Kill them in their sleep.

I checked the photo of the front of the house again to confirm what I saw on the blueprints: a second-floor balcony with a glass door that opened into one of the bedrooms. I smiled. This was by far the path of least resistance.

Sally Richardson was putting the final touches on our lunch when I came into the kitchen.

“Chicken soup for the sick,” she announced. “Or rather, the injured.”

Mrs. Richardson explained to me that Rachael, Heather and Walter had returned from Dr. Land’s office and were all resting upstairs in their rooms.

“I’m sorry I didn’t help with lunch,” I said. “The kitchen is usually my station in this house.”

“It’s no problem,” said Mrs. Richardson. “You obviously have more important things to do today.”

I remained silent, and Mrs. Richardson asked, “Are you alright, Adrian?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied.

Mrs. Richardson gave me a sympathetic look. “It’s not easy being the leader, is it?”

“How am I doing so far?”

“You look like a natural to me, but I guess you’re not exactly feeling it inside.”

Time to change the subject. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“By all means,” said Mrs. Richardson.

“Aren’t you scared?” I asked. “I mean, you and your husband could both die tonight. Aren’t you afraid that you’ll never see your son again?”

Mrs. Richardson smiled. “The truth is, Tom and I are more afraid that our son won’t see us in the way we want him to see us if we turned our backs now.”

I nodded solemnly, but inside, I was sorely disappointed. I didn’t appreciate this kind of heroism in the least. People should fight for people, not perception. Still, I wasn’t about to tell her that she couldn’t come. We didn’t have the luxury of being choosy.

I helped Mrs. Richardson deliver her chicken soup to our three injured comrades, and then we set the dining table together. Mr. Richardson had already returned with our radio transceivers, so after a hasty lunch, I announced my revised battle plan.

“Once we’re on target, we’ll divide into three teams,” I began as we sat in a circle around the supposed floor plan of the Angels’ house. “We’re taking no prisoners, so we’re not going to bother with call signs for anyone except Merlin here who we already know as Merlin. Our teams will simply be called Rabbit One, Two and Three.”

“Why rabbits?” asked Mrs. Richardson.

I explained to the Richardsons that Rabbit was Terry’s Guardian call sign, and then continued, “Each team leader will have one radio. We’ll practice using them later. Rabbit One is Merlin and me. We’ll levitate onto the second-floor balcony and enter from there. James will lead Rabbit Two, with the Richardsons, and enter from the front. The front door will be locked, but they’ll breach from the window to the left of the porch. We don’t know what’s behind those curtains, so be careful.”

I stopped to make sure that James was okay with being a team leader. I had originally considered putting the adults in charge of Rabbit Two, but after what Mrs. Richardson had told me, I decided that James was probably more reliable. He was one of Terry’s students, and he knew his CQC stuff as well as could be expected considering the limited time he had spent with us. Besides, I felt a little bad about having publicly humiliated him over the silencer issue earlier.

I continued, “Rabbit Three enters from behind the house. Scott will lead, with Daniel and Candace. There’s a back door that opens into the kitchen, but that will be locked too. The door opens inwards, and isn’t as heavy-duty as the front, so you’ll break it down.”

“Kick it?” asked Scott.

“No.” I gestured toward two heavy red objects that I had placed by the wall, saying, “Those there are multi-purpose breaching tools.”

“They look like fire extinguishers to me,” said Daniel.

“And they are,” I said, smiling. “Rabbit Two and Three will carry one each. Scott can use his as a battering ram to break down the back door. Once inside, pull the pin, tape down the lever and let it create cover and chaos for you. We don’t have gas or smoke bombs, but these will work almost as well. James can turn his on before throwing it through the front window. The smoke will hide you as you enter, but be careful not to breathe in too much of the gas. It’s supposed to put out fires, so there isn’t much oxygen in it.”

“Terry hadn’t taught us this one yet,” said Scott.

I didn’t mention that Terry never expected our students to have fire extinguishers on the Historian’s mountain.

I ran my finger along the floor plans as I said, “Once inside, Rabbit One, that’s Merlin and me, will start clearing the second floor, where I’m hoping we’ll catch most of the Angels in their sleep if we’re fast enough. Meanwhile, Rabbit Two clears the living room and adjacent dining room, as well as this room next to it which I don’t know what’s inside, and then proceeds up the stairs to join us. So far okay?”

James and the Richardsons nodded.

“Rabbit Three clears the kitchen and what I think is some kind of storage room here, and this little hall, and then down to the basement. The basement entrance is here, next to the kitchen.” I looked warningly at Scott, adding, “We don’t know what’s down there. It could be trapped, so take it slow.”

I couldn’t tell them what kind of traps might be set anywhere in the house. Back when the Guardians had raided the God-slayer house where I had been held captive, one of the Knights had been badly burned by acid.

I said seriously, “Remember that you’re looking for my sister and possibly other captives down there, so check your targets carefully.”

“We will,” said Scott, and Daniel and Candace nodded.

I had some misgivings about putting Daniel and Candace on the basement crew, not only because of the possibility of traps, but because they might accidentally shoot a captive, namely Alia. But as my weakest links, I didn’t want them upstairs where I suspected most of the Angels would be. I was counting on Scott to keep his team from causing any real damage.

“Now, most likely there won’t be more than four or five Angels,” I said in a hopeful tone. “If we’re lucky, that’ll be one night guard on the first floor and the others asleep on the second, but don’t count on it. I suspect that their only combat psionics are the pyroid and the telekinetic that attacked us this morning. If they had a berserker or something, he would have come too. The other Angels would include at least one hider, but the rest might be non-psionic. They’ll all be well-trained Seraphim, though, so stay sharp.”

“What if we bump into Steven?” asked Scott.

“Use your best judgment,” I suggested. “Do what you have to, but stay alive.”

“And the monster telekinetic?” Daniel asked worriedly.

“I’m hoping to find him on the second floor,” I replied. “But if you do see the telekinetic, stay clear of him if at all possible. Report where he is, and Merlin and I will deal with him.”

“What if we get a shot?” asked James.