Ashley Bell: A Novel by Dean Koontz Page A

prettier women endured gang rape and dismemberment, the remaining citizens—men, women, children—were executed in the following three days. Bodies were stacked by the hundreds in pyres, sprayed with gasoline, and set afire. On the sixth day after the invasion, the killers took down their flags and left. They had wanted nothing in that settlement, only its destruction.
    Savages though they were, they nevertheless filmed the massacre and made a recruitment video that spoke to the souls of like-minded radicals everywhere. It had found an eager audience on the Internet.
    Seventeen months after the massacre, Lead Petty Officer Paxton Thorpe and three warriors, three friends, three of the finest men he’d ever known—Danny, Gibb, and Perry—were on the hunt for big game where, only a week earlier, no targets were thought to exist. Some in the American media called their primary target the Ghost, which lent him an air of glamor—intentionally or not. Pax and his guys called their quarry Flaming Asshole, FA for short.
    Back in the day, FA had led the assault on this village, but that was not the only crime for which he was currently sought. It seemed unlikely that he would return to such a place of slaughter, far from the comforts of civilization that terrorist leaders now felt to be their right, far from most of his multitude of admirers. But the head sheds had intel that they found convincing, and they were far more often right than wrong.
    They were in a nation not worthy of that designation, but at least it was not currently an active supporter of terrorists or colluding with anyone against the United States. And its wrecked economy could not support a military adequate to regularly patrol most of its territory. Pax and his men had gotten in without an encounter, but now it might be fan-and-feces time.
    The town contained more than two hundred buildings, mostly one and two stories, none higher than three, some of stone, many of mud bricks covered with stucco, crudely constructed, as if no engineer existed in this country with more than a medieval education. A third of the structures had been reduced to rubble in the assault, and the remaining were damaged to one degree or another. If FA and six of his most trusted allies were holed up here, they would most likely secret themselves in a central building, so that no matter from which point of the compass a hostile force might arrive, they would have plenty of warning that a search of the town had commenced.
    Intel suggested that a three-story building at the northwest corner of the burg offered an ideal observation post. The team’s attention needed to be focused only east and south for some sound or sign of habitation. The roof had a parapet behind which they could remain hidden, conducting surveillance with two periscopic cameras.
    As Paxton, Danny, Gibb, and Perry came quietly out of the fields to the back of the building, they passed the horned skeletons of what might have been three goats, which regarded them with hollow sockets as deep as caves. The savages who killed the people of the town had also shot the livestock, leaving the animals to rot where they fell.
    The back door had long ago been broken down. They cleared the rooms as though they expected resistance, but found no one. The walls were bullet-pocked. Spent cartridges littered the floors; also chunks of plaster and broken crockery and what might have been bits of skull bones with streamers of human hair attached. Debris-strewn stairs led to the flat roof. The four-foot-high parapet was as described. In the liquid dark of the arid night, they dared to stand, surveying the ghost town to the south and east, looking for the smallest of lights, whether mundane or supernatural, finding neither.
    Having arrived safely, they slept two at a time, the other two always alert and listening, watching. Every sound would travel far into the hush of the dead town, and therefore they said nothing to one another. They had