The companions chuckled at the bravado, and the bedroom soon filled with metallic clicks and clacks as weapons were prepared for battle.
“When do we move?” Dean asked impatiently, jacking the slide on his Browning Hi-Power.
Walking over, Ryan squinted at the boy. “You tell me. When would Overton least be expecting any action on our part?”
Knowing this was another test, Dean thought hard for a few minutes before answering. “It’s almost dawn,” he said, weighing each word. “We should wait until nightfall, then hit the barracks at midnight.
“No, wait a tick,” the boy said, hurriedly changing his mind. “The clock in the bell tower will wake everybody up, make them alert. So we go tomorrow night, say, thirty minutes after midnight. Just enough time for the guards to relax again.”
“Nice to have known you,” J.B. said grimly, checking the contents of his munitions bag.
“Bad call,” Ryan stated, slinging the Steyr over a shoulder. “The longer we wait, the worse our position.”
“And we need every ounce of surprise to pull this off,” Krysty added, rubbing out the scratches on the floor.
“What, now?” the boy asked, surprised. “At dawn?” Outside, some birds were chirping and a horse whinnied as it was forced awake to start the work of the day.
“Yes, right now,” Ryan confirmed, working the slide on his handblaster and chambering a fresh round as he headed for the door.
A FEW MINUTES LATER, there was a loud knock on the front door to the barracks, and a sleepy sec man rose from his wooden stool to swing open the tiny conversation hatch in the thick door.
“Yeah?” the corporal asked, sleep making his voice rough.
“We have a new prisoner,” a smiling guard in a blue shirt said through the grilled portal. The sec man stepped aside, and the dirty face of Ryan Cawdor filled the view for a second.
“Hot damn!” the corporal cried, and he rushed to push aside the iron bolts locking the door. “How the hell did we get him so soon?”
“Didn’t,” Ryan said, firing through the crack of the opening door. The silenced pistol was no louder than a cough, but Overton’s sec man staggered backward, his chest spraying blood from the multiple wounds. He groaned, then slumped onto a table, rattling the dirty dishes and wine bottles.
“What the hell was that noise?” somebody called out.
Rushing inside, the remaining companions dragged in two more dead guards from the street. Hauling the live blue shirt aside, Jak brutally rammed the head of the captive against the wall. The sec man sighed and folded to the floor, leaving a crimson trail along the rough bricks.
Holding an AK-47, Clem stayed outside trying to act casual in his tight blue shirt and baggy trousers. The Enfield was strapped across his back, his long hair tied in a ponytail and tucked into the collar of the shirt. Only the most cursory glance would fool anybody that he was one of Overton’s neatly dressed troops.
“Get the wag,” Krysty ordered through the door grille, as she slid home the bolt.
Clem nodded and dashed down the street out of sight.
“Sarge?” a worried voice called from down the hallway.
Wiping the mud off his face, Ryan took a position near a locked blaster rack as J.B. went to work on the padlock holding the chained weapons in place. The device clicked in less than a minute, and the companions all took an AK-47 blaster, then stuffed their pockets with extra clips. J.B. closed the padlock and broke off the tip of his lock pick inside the mechanism.
“I wish them luck opening that again,” he said, his tone triumphant.
“Get ready,” Ryan warned, gently pulling the bolt on the submachine gun until it loudly clicked. “Once we start, there’s no going back.”
Just then a group of armed sec men walked into view, the man in front pulling up his pants by the suspenders. At point-blank range, Ryan shot him in the face, brains and bone fragments spraying onto the guards behind him. On the left side, Doc lunged forward with his sword, stabbing one in the heart, and Jak threw a knife into the throat of the other. Sighing into death, the falling bodies were caught and dragged out of the way.