it had to be now. They wanted to be in and gone before Sakal arrived. Weak or not, if he had anything close to the kind of enhanced senses that Xavier and his people exhibited, Sakal might sense their presence, and they’d be cooked. She glanced at the other woman and found her staring back, waiting.
“We go now,” Layla said softly. “They’re probably settling in for their evening meal down there, before prepping for the vamp’s arrival. If they eat communally—and why wouldn’t they, with the whole group- think mentality—they’ll all be in one room, so we can snoop some.”
“Right, but make it fast,” Brian said, crouching next to them. “You need to be out before they finish eating.”
“We’ll be careful. I’m not going to get caught by a bunch of brainwashed teenagers.” As she spoke, she was removing her ballistic vest, followed by her boots, which she exchanged for a pair of well-used sneakers. Her weapons had been removed, except for her Glock pistol with a thirty-round mag, and her belt knife. She and Kerry were both dressed in tank tops and khaki pants, which they’d rolled up to mid-calf.
When they’d checked their comm units and were ready to go, Layla looked at Kerry and said, “You’ve got our route fixed, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good, you lead. And you guys stay frosty and alert up here.”
Brian and River chuckled at the favorite movie quote, but their nods were serious. This mission had been a cakewalk when all they’d been doing was talking about it. But now shit might go down.
The two women moved with practiced ease through the thick shrubs and stunted trees covering the hillside between them and the compound. They’d marched twice as fast through much more hellish environments on other battlefields, but the tough part of tonight’s approach was still ahead of them. Once they paused to lie flat on the ground and brought up scopes to check out the building, looking for cameras or watchers they might not have spotted from above. Layla found it impossible to believe there was no security at all on this place.
“Maybe the doors are locked,” Kerry murmured, as she continued to scan.
“Probably. From the little I could see, they looked like push-bar fire doors. Easy open from the inside, easy lock from the outside.”
“Not an easy lock to by-pass, though. Not with a crowd inside. If we open a door and they’re all sitting there eating dinner, they just might notice us.”
“Roger that. I say we go in a window.”
“I’d sure like to get a look inside before we pick an entry point,” Kerry commented.
“Yeah. No ground level windows on this side, though. Let’s go down a bit more, take a stroll around the building, see if we can get a peek into where they all are.”
“Agreed. On three.”
They ran across the open ground, crouched low and moving fast. If they were wrong, and someone was perched in a crow’s nest outlook on top of the building, they were fucked. But there hadn’t been any sign of that. So it was a risk, but a good one.
And it worked. In minutes, their backs were pressed up against a windowless wall, listening to nothing but silence. Looking over, Layla lifted her chin ahead of them, got a confirming nod from Kerry, and took off down the length of one wall to the corner, where they paused long enough to verify there was no one on the next side of the building, then moved along that wall in the same fashion.
They were about to give up on the idea of windows, when they peeked around next corner and found a long row of them starting about waist height and stopping a foot from the roof eaves. They could hear a steady hum of noise coming through those windows—lively conversations, with an occasional shout of laughter, the clank of flatware on cups and plates, the random scrape of a chair on a tiled floor. It was the sound of a large group of people having a meal. There were no amplified voices, no announcements or speaker that they could detect. Not yet, anyway.
Dropping to their hands and knees, they crawled below the windows, careful to remain close to the wall to avoid anyone catching a glimpse of movement. It was unlikely, but why take the risk? Once past the final window, there was a short expanse of wall—three feet maybe— and then an apparent portico, which Layla verified led to another closed,