Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

Before the driver of the Viper behind the semis could even get out of his car, Cass came up fast behind him and head-shot him with a .223 AR rifle mounted with a suppressor. From the roof of the southern shed, one of Hobbes’s men armed with an identical weapon shot the passenger through the windshield.

Others positioned on the roofs of the sheds took out the drivers and passengers in all three semis. The six men died in their seats even as the Mustang’s driver and passenger realized what was happening. They came out of the Mustang fast and low, carrying automatic weapons.

Fender rose up from behind the berm in front of the Mustang and shot both men before they got twenty yards from their vehicle.

“Clear,” Fender said.

“Clear,” said Hobbes.

Brown said, “Leave the trucks and cars running. Police your brass, sweep your way out; we’ll meet on the road.”

Cass said, “Are you sure we shouldn’t check the produce?”

Brown grimaced as he fought his way up out of th

e crouch. They’d been over this before and she was still challenging him on it.

“Negative,” Brown said emphatically. “Nobody gets anywhere near that cargo.”

Chapter

47

Midmorning, an FBI helicopter picked up Sampson and me on the roof of DC Metro headquarters. Special Agent Ned Mahoney, grim and quiet, sat up front.

Ninety minutes earlier, a Caroline County sheriff’s deputy had been driving by a tobacco-drying facility northeast of Ladysmith, Virginia. A heavy chain usually blocked the entrance, but he noticed that today the chain lay in the mud next to the tracks of many large vehicles.

The deputy thought it odd because the harvest was still weeks off, and he drove in. He saw enough to call the state police and the FBI.

“Who’s been through the scene other than the deputy?” I asked.

“No one,” Mahoney said. “As soon as I heard, I was on the horn to Virginia State Police to seal off the area. We should be looking at it fairly clean.”

Forty-five minutes later we were dropping altitude over mixed farmland and woods, rolling terrain, mostly, with some creek beds and rivers. After the chopper soared over a last stand of towering oaks, the forest opened up and we flew in an oval pattern around the scene.

The grille of a blue Mustang was nosed up against an earthen barrier, the vehicle’s doors open. Two bodies, both male, were sprawled nearby in the grass. Between the long drying sheds, three gray, refrigerated semitrailers were lined nose to tail like elephants on parade. The truck windows and windshields were shot through and spiderwebbed. Behind the last semi was a black Dodge Viper with two dead men in the front seat.

The pilot landed out by the highway, where a perimeter had been established. After checking in with the Virginia State Police lieutenant and the county sheriff, we went to the crime scene on foot.

It was hot. Insects buzzed and drummed in the forest around the tobacco facility. Truck engines idling swallowed the sound of blowflies gathering around the Viper.

“They’ve swept their way out again,” Mahoney said when we were ten yards from the Dodge.

I looked at the glistening dirt road between the Viper and us. I saw faint grooves in the moist dirt and said, “Or raked.”

The door to the muscle car was ajar. The window was down. The driver had taken a slug through the back of the skull, left occipital. Blood spattered the windshield and almost covered two bullet holes, one exiting, and one entering. The passenger in the Viper had been rocked back, his left eye a bloody socket and a spray of carnage behind him.

“Two shots, two kills,” Sampson said. “Driver was shot from behind.”

“And at a slight angle,” I said. “The passenger was shot from one of those roofs, probably the left one.”

We walked on, seeing the trucks parked grille to bumper and the signs that said they belonged to the Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. Two dead men in every cab. Each of them shot once.

“They were suckered in here and then executed from above,” I said, wondering if Nicholas Condon and his buddies could have dreamed up this ambush. Yes, I decided, probably relatively easily.

“Shot from one shed roof or another,” Mahoney agreed. “The roofs are slanted toward us and yet we haven’t seen a single spent casing on the ground.”

“If each sniper shoots once, there’s no reloading, so no brass,” I said.