The Day After Never (Book 4): Retribution Read online

  The Day After Never

  Retribution

  Russell Blake

  Copyright © 2016 by Russell Blake. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact:

  [email protected]

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  Table of Contents

  Books by Russell Blake

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Excerpt from The Goddess Legacy

  Books by Russell Blake

  Co-authored with Clive Cussler

  THE EYE OF HEAVEN

  THE SOLOMON CURSE

  Thrillers

  FATAL EXCHANGE

  FATAL DECEPTION

  THE GERONIMO BREACH

  ZERO SUM

  THE DELPHI CHRONICLE TRILOGY

  THE VOYNICH CYPHER

  SILVER JUSTICE

  UPON A PALE HORSE

  DEADLY CALM

  RAMSEY’S GOLD

  EMERALD BUDDHA

  THE GODDESS LEGACY

  The Assassin Series

  KING OF SWORDS

  NIGHT OF THE ASSASSIN

  RETURN OF THE ASSASSIN

  REVENGE OF THE ASSASSIN

  BLOOD OF THE ASSASSIN

  REQUIEM FOR THE ASSASSIN

  RAGE OF THE ASSASSIN

  The Day After Never Series

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – BLOOD HONOR

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – PURGATORY ROAD

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – COVENANT

  THE DAY AFTER NEVER – RETRIBUTION

  The JET Series

  JET

  JET II – BETRAYAL

  JET III – VENGEANCE

  JET IV – RECKONING

  JET V – LEGACY

  JET VI – JUSTICE

  JET VII – SANCTUARY

  JET VIII – SURVIVAL

  JET IX – ESCAPE

  JET X – INCARCERATION

  JET – OPS FILES (prequel)

  JET – OPS FILES; TERROR ALERT

  The BLACK Series

  BLACK

  BLACK IS BACK

  BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK

  BLACK TO REALITY

  BLACK IN THE BOX

  Non Fiction

  AN ANGEL WITH FUR

  HOW TO SELL A GAZILLION EBOOKS

  (while drunk, high or incarcerated)

  About the Author

  Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Chicago Tribune, Russell Blake is The NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of over forty novels, including Fatal Exchange, Fatal Deception, The Geronimo Breach, Zero Sum, King of Swords, Night of the Assassin, Revenge of the Assassin, Return of the Assassin, Blood of the Assassin, Requiem for the Assassin, Rage of the Assassin The Delphi Chronicle trilogy, The Voynich Cypher, Silver Justice, JET, JET – Ops Files, JET – Ops Files: Terror Alert, JET II – Betrayal, JET III – Vengeance, JET IV – Reckoning, JET V – Legacy, JET VI – Justice, JET VII – Sanctuary, JET VIII – Survival, JET IX – Escape, JET X – Incarceration, Upon a Pale Horse, BLACK, BLACK is Back, BLACK is the New Black, BLACK to Reality, BLACK in the Box, Deadly Calm, Ramsey’s Gold, Emerald Buddha, The Day After Never – Blood Honor, The Day After Never – Purgatory Road, The Day After Never – Covenant, The Day After Never – Retribution, and The Goddess Legacy.

  Non-fiction includes the international bestseller An Angel With Fur (animal biography) and How To Sell A Gazillion eBooks In No Time (even if drunk, high or incarcerated), a parody of all things writing-related.

  Blake is co-author of The Eye of Heaven and The Solomon Curse, with legendary author Clive Cussler. Blake’s novel King of Swords has been translated into German, The Voynich Cypher into Bulgarian, and his JET novels into Spanish, German, and Czech.

  Blake writes under the moniker R.E. Blake in the NA/YA/Contemporary Romance genres. Novels include Less Than Nothing, More Than Anything, and Best Of Everything.

  Having resided in Mexico for a dozen years, Blake enjoys his dogs, fishing, boating, tequila and writing, while battling world domination by clowns. His thoughts, such as they are, can be found at his blog:

  RussellBlake.com

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  just join my readers’ group here:

  http://bit.ly/rb-jet

  Chapter 1

  Houston, Texas

  A pall of inky smoke obscured the glimmer of stars in the night sky, the air toxic from oil fires that dotted the huge abandoned refinery across the ship channel from Houston. Armed guards manned outposts along a walled section that ringed the plant, a sprawling complex easily as large as a medium-sized town – a collection of buildings and tanks that occupied a two-and-a-half-mile square section of the promontory. Spotlights roved across the area outside the wall, fueled by the output from a crude oil-heated steam turbine.

  It had been barely a week since Snake had announced Magnus’s untimely demise to the Crew, as well as the astounding defeat in New Mexico. He’d assured the regional chiefs that the change in leadership would result in no disruption to the Crew’s ongoing operations and domination of the surrounding states, and had vowed to proceed more prudently than Magnus to eradicate the threat posed by Shangri-La.

  The loss of almost a thousand men with nothing to show for it had stunned the Crew’s upper echelon, and Snake had been quick to exploit their shock by enacting draconian new rules to crush dissent to his domination of the group: anyone questioning Snake as its head would be summarily executed, which quickly chilled any disgruntled murmurs and cemented his leadership.

  The majority had gone along with Snake’s plan, but almost a third of the Houston branch had splintered off and refused to recognize Snake’s authority, believing him too unstable and weak to lead effectively. They’d seized the refinery as their territory, the strait between it and the city a natural barrier, and had recruited a growing membership of Crew fighters who were unhappy about the recent turn of events.

  The faction was led by the Salazars, a trio of cousins who’d been incarcerated with Magnus and had despised Snake as he’d risen through the ranks to become one of their leader�
�s inner circle. The idea of a meth-addled madman running things was unacceptable, and they’d split from the main group on the second day, taken over the refinery, and raided adjacent Baytown to reinforce their stake.

  The Salazars had no long-term plan, but as the number of their followers grew, they began formulating a scheme to spread east and claim nearby Louisiana – it wasn’t as though the Crew membership that operated in that area was particularly loyal to Snake, and if the cousins offered them a better deal, it was likely they would jump at it. They’d sent a few riders to feel out the New Orleans leadership and were waiting to hear back. A positive response would spread through the Crew ranks like wildfire, further weakening Snake’s support in Houston and swelling the cousins’ gang with disgruntled fighters. Their hope was that at some point they would become too big to challenge and could work out a cooperative deal where they existed autonomously from the Crew, operating as an ally.

  But for now they were Snake’s enemy, on alert against an attack that grew less likely with each day. Their spies had told them morale was at an all-time low as Snake settled old scores with enemies and bolstered his power through cunning and treachery.

  The Salazar cousins’ faction now boasted over seven hundred gunmen, a powerful force growing stronger with each hour. The fighters had set up a tent city in the center of the massive refinery, whose main buildings housed the cousins and their lieutenants. A quarter of the force was on guard at any given time, armed and ready for whatever Snake ultimately managed to throw at them – assuming the weasel didn’t leave the Baytown area to them.

  Night had fallen three hours earlier, and the evening shift was halfway through its watch. The warm air was sticky with humidity, and bright trees of lightning over the Gulf pulsed in a cloudbank on the horizon. The sentries manning the guard posts were equipped with handheld radios, and roving patrols along the perimeter checked in with clocklike regularity. One of the details near the southern approach had failed to call in five minutes earlier, and the boredom of long hours of monotonous inactivity was replaced by anxiety as the shift leader attempted to raise them.

  “Repeat. Scorpion, this is Ruger. Do you read? Over.”

  Ruger, a seasoned killer with a face hardened from a lifetime spent behind bars, listened intently to the soft hiss of static from his handheld, his eyes darting along the area outside the wall. After ten more seconds of silence, he shook his head at his subordinate.

  “Could be their battery’s dead,” he said. Two days ago the same thing had happened – one of the patrols had gone dark, sending a chill through the guard detail until the patrol appeared out of the gloom ten minutes later, unharmed, their radio out of juice. “Damned things are getting worse every week.”

  “Could be,” his lieutenant agreed, his voice doubtful.

  “They still have fifteen minutes before they’re due back, so let’s not freak out until they don’t show.”

  The subordinate nodded, and then his head jerked back like he’d been swatted by an invisible hand, and the back of his skull erupted in blood. Ruger gasped at the sight, and then another muffled pop sounded from beyond the range of the spotlight, and the guard to Ruger’s right grunted, the thwack of a high-velocity round through the base of his throat barely louder than a slap. Ruger fumbled with his radio and ducked down. He was almost below the wall when a slug sheared the top of his head off, sending him tumbling backward, the radio and his Kalashnikov assault rifle clattering beside him.

  The fourth guard raised his weapon, searching for a target. He saw nothing, but when he squinted into the shadows to better make out any movement, his left eye was replaced by a neat hole, and he slumped to the side, dead before he hit the ground.

  The suppressed sniper rifles had been nearly silent, and when six gunmen appeared from the perimeter, walking unhurriedly, they were indistinguishable from a genuine patrol. They made their way to the access gate, and one of the snipers drew a bead on the nearest spotlight and fired.

  The light exploded in a shower of glass and blinked out, triggering a rush of men who swarmed toward the gate from across the field. The intruders moved in silence, the night quiet other than the dull pounding of their footsteps on the grass. When the first reached the opening, he led the rest through, signaling to his companions with curt gestures. Within a minute several hundred men had breached the refinery’s defenses and were spreading out, gliding like wraiths in the gloom as more gunmen crossed the field and entered behind them.

  Shots rang out from north of their entry point, where another mass of gunmen had used the same ruse to breach the refinery, and then the staccato chatter of assault rifles filled the air as the defenders engaged the attacking force. A tall Crew gunman motioned to his fellows and pointed to the occupants’ tent city off in the distance, and the men advanced at a trot toward the heart of the compound.

  They’d made it no more than two hundred yards when a grenade detonated in their midst, followed instantly by a hail of bullets as a half dozen defenders fired at them from atop one of the storage tanks. The attackers took what cover they could as they returned fire. One of the attack force shouldered an RPG and launched it at the top of the tank, where it exploded near the rim, sending a shower of metal and flesh skyward in a shower of destruction. What oil remained in the tank ignited and added to the clouds of toxicity as the gunmen pushed forward, the defenders above no longer raining death down upon them.

  The intensity of the shooting increased as they neared the cousins’ headquarters, and the attack force suffered heavy casualties as it fought for every inch against a determined group of cornered rats who could expect no mercy if captured. Both sides lost hundreds of men as they brought their heavy machine guns to bear, the .50-caliber rounds shredding through everything in their path.

  Eventually the attack force overwhelmed the defenders, and the headquarters exploded in a fiery blaze. Anyone trying to escape the inferno was gunned down, and a half hour after the assault began, the last shots died away, leaving only the moans of the wounded and a cloud of black smoke from the blaze.

  Snake’s radio operator turned from the shortwave console, removed his headset, and fiddled with it nervously.

  “Well?” Snake barked from the corner of the room.

  “It’s over. We won.”

  A harsh smile creased Snake’s hatchet face, twisting the tattoos that covered it so they resembled squirming insects. He nodded in satisfaction and rubbed a hand over his shaved head.

  “Of course we did. Any survivors?”

  The operator shook his head. “No. As you ordered, everyone we found was executed.”

  “How bad are our casualties?”

  “They’re still searching, but it looks like almost two hundred.”

  Snake’s smirk transformed into a frown. “Christ.”

  The operator had nothing to add. Snake spun toward the door and dismissed the man with a wave of his hand. “I’ll be upstairs if anything else comes in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Snake pushed the metal door open and appraised the six fighters waiting for him outside – his security detail of the bodyguards he trusted with his life. He’d known each man for years, and they’d proved their loyalty – a commodity he’d learned to prize since taking over Magnus’s throne, when he had become a target for every malcontent in the Crew.

  He’d been insulated from resentment-driven reprisals when Magnus had been alive, his rivals’ enmity blunted by their leader’s ferocity. But Magnus was dead, and when Snake had assumed permanent command, many had refused to play along, culminating in the Baytown refinery faction presenting him with an open challenge that couldn’t go unanswered.

  Victory there had been essential to maintaining control, but he knew his problems were far from over. The Crew had far too much influence and wealth for his underlings to give up on their schemes. Snake had known when he announced Magnus’s death that he would face numerous obstacles, but he was ready for them. Inside of a week he’d manag
ed to eliminate the immediate threats, starting with his murder of his rivals among Magnus’s inner circle. The Salazars had been a surprise he hadn’t foreseen, but his swift and absolute elimination of them would send a clear message to anyone else thinking of challenging him.

  Framed by his guards, Snake mounted the steps from the basement, lost in thought. He leaned toward his security chief and spoke in a low voice.

  “I want my guard detail tripled. Can you find enough loyal men?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll hold you responsible if any prove…unreliable.”

  “I understand.”

  Snake bypassed the ground level and proceeded to his quarters – a lavish suite of rooms cooled by air conditioning on the upper level of the cavernous hall. His men could hold off a battalion from that vantage point, but he still had difficulty sleeping for more than a few hours at a time, his mind revving into the redline even in slumber. Part of the problem was the meth he consumed in prodigious amounts, but the constant stress of being in the crosshairs wasn’t helping, and he’d taken to softening the buzz with downers, which only partially worked.

  The guards took up their station outside his main chamber door and he triple-locked it behind him. The idea of taking over the Crew had seemed like genius, but now, barely a week in, the pressure was wearing at him. The tic in his left eye had started three days ago, and the surge of blinding rage that threatened to drown him when he received bad news had become the norm rather than an occasional aberration. He shook his head as he removed the Desert Eagle he wore at his hip, set it beside the bed, and then lowered himself onto the mattress, fully clothed. His breathing was ragged; he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, his time consumed with planning the elimination of the Baytown threat, and now even the meth wasn’t keeping him alert enough to function.

  Snake’s eyes drifted to the bag of white crystals on a round table by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and he forced himself up, the lure of the drug stronger than his body’s demand for rest. A little hit would enable him to keep functioning for a few more hours as reports from the refinery came in. He would sleep after the situation was completely resolved, not before.