Countdown: A Joe Ledger Prequel Short Story to Patient Zero

Jonathan Maberry Countdown

(1)

I didn’t plan to kill anyone.

I wasn’t totally against the idea, either.

Sometimes things just fall that way, and either you roll with it or it rolls over you. Letting the bad guys win isn’t how I roll.

(2)

When I woke up this morning it was going to be another day on the job. I’ve been Baltimore PD for eight years now. I did four in the Army before rotating back to my life with a Rangers patch but no ribbons for doing anything of note because nothing of note was happening at the time. I got out right before 9/11.

It was different on the cops. Baltimore’s been a war zone ever since crack hit the streets during the 80s. Families fell apart, kids took to the street in packs, and every corner belonged to one of the drug gangs. Down there, “murder” is so common a word it doesn’t even give people pause. I wore the blue and knocked a few heads, made some busts, climbed the ladder. Couple of times it got Old West on me and there was gunplay. They taught me well in the Rangers, and the other older beat cops taught me even better. It’s never been about who draws fast or draws first — it’s only ever been about who hits what he aims at. I’m good at that. And if the scuffle is hands or knives or broken broom handles, well, I’m okay there, too. Baltimore isn’t the richest city in the world, and it definitely has its issues, but it doesn’t breed weaklings. The streets taught me a lot I didn’t learn from the Army or in a dojo.

In the years since the planes hit the towers, every police department in the country grew an umbilical chord attached to the bureaucratic monster that is Homeland Security. Shortly after I got my shield I got “volunteered” to be part of a joint task force that was cobbled together by lend-lease cops from Baltimore, Philly, and D.C., and all of us on Homeland’s leash. We profiled suspects, invaded a lot of personal privacy, listened to thousands of hours of wiretaps, and tried to build cases — mostly against people whose closest ties to Middle Eastern terrorists was a collection of Sinbad movies at home. Every once in a while we’d get a minnow, but we never even caught a whiff of a shark.

Until we did.

I was sitting wiretap on a warehouse down by the docks. Our big break started as a fragment of info here and another fragment there — sketchy stuff, but we started seeing some movement patterns that looked covert. Conversations over the tapped phones started sounding like code, people talking about importing agricultural products when the warehouse was licensed to a shoe business. Stuff like that. Then somewhere in the middle of the night I caught a brief conversation on a cell phone line that was hardly ever used. Just a little bit of back-and- forth in which one of the players dropped the name “El Mujahid.” The immediate response from the other party was to hang the hell up.

El Mujahid.

The name was so frigging big that I had about three seconds of thinking it was a joke, like everyday Schmoes might drop the name Bin Laden into the middle of a conversation or as the punchline to a joke. We all do it. But this didn’t have that feel.

The transcript of the line I’d heard was this: “… that will all change when El Mujahid—”

At which point the other guy curses in Farsi and hangs up. Farsi’s one of the languages I know. Actually, I know a lot of languages — that stuff’s always been easy for me.

I called my lieutenant and he called the major who woke up the colonel who woke up the Homeland supervisor. Suddenly I was the golden boy, and when a full-team hit was planned on the warehouse, I got to play. Perks of ringing the bell.

El Mujahid was the right name to hear on the wire. It means “the fighter of the way of Allah.” That son of a bitch was only a short step down from Bin Laden. If U.S. soldiers roll their Bradley over a landmine, chances are this asshole is responsible. If there was even the slightest chance to get a lead to him we had to move and move fast.

(3)

There were thirty of us the next morning, everyone in black BDUs, helmet-cams and full SWAT gear. Each unit was split into four-man teams: two guys with MP-5s, a pointman with a Glock.40 and a ballistic shield, and one guy with a Remington 870 pump. I was the shotgunner on our team. The task force hit the warehouse hard and fast, coming in every door and window in the place. Flashbangs, snipers on the surrounding buildings, multiple entry points, and a whole lot of yelling. Domestic shock and awe, the idea being to startle and overpower so that everyone inside is too dazed and confused to offer violent resistance. Last thing anyone wanted was an O.K. Corral.

My team had the back door, the one that led out to a small boat dock. There was a tidy little Cigarette boat there, and while we waited for the go/no-go, the guy next to me — my buddy Jerry Spencer from DCPD — kept looking at the boat with the calculating lust of a cop nearing early retirement. I bent close and hummed the Miami Vice theme and he grinned. He had a few weeks before getting out, and that boat must have looked like a ticket to paradise for him.

The “go” came down and everything suddenly got loud and fast.

I had a Shok-Lok round chambered in the shotgun and I blew the steel deadbolt to powder. We went in yelling for everyone to freeze, to lay down their weapons. Even if the bad guys don’t speak English there’s no one alive who doesn’t get the gist when SWAT waves guns, yells, and points at the floor. I’ve been on maybe fifteen, eighteen of these things in my time with Baltimore PD, and only twice was anyone stupid enough to draw a gun on us. Cops don’t hotdog it and generally neither do the bad guys, ’cause it’s not about who has the biggest balls — it’s about overwhelming force so that no shots are ever fired. I remember when I went through the tac team training, the commander had a quote from the movie Silverado made into a plaque and hung up in the training hall: “I don’t want to kill you and you don’t want to be dead.” That’s pretty much the motto.

So, the bad guys usually stand around looking freaked out and everyone bleats about how innocent they are, yada yada.

This wasn’t one of those times.

Jerry, who was the oldest man on the task force, was pointman for our team, and I was right behind him with two guys at my back. We hustled down a short corridor and then broke left into a big conference room. Eight Middle Eastern guys around a big oak table. Just inside the door was a big blue phone booth-sized container standing against the wall. “Freeze!” I yelled in three different languages. “Put your hands above your heads and—”

That was as far as I got because the eight guys threw themselves out of their chairs and pulled guns. O.K. Corral, no doubt about it.

When IAD asked me later to recollect how many shots I fired and who exactly I fired them at, I laughed. Twelve guys in a room and everyone’s shooting. If they’re not dressed like your buddies — and you can, to a reasonable degree of certainty, determine that they’re not civilian bystanders — you shoot and duck for cover.

I shot the first guy to draw on us, taking him with two to the body. It spun him against the wall even as he opened up with a Tech-9, and as he spun he poured half a mag into one of his buddies. A ricochet burned the air three inches from my face.

The only lucky part of a free-for-all shootout is that everyone is so caught up in not getting shot that they don’t have time to aim. That’s a little less true for SWAT, and the ratio of aim-to-hit improves once the shock of the moment wears off.

The unlucky part — and this is a real bitch — is that no matter how much you prepare for a shootout, you never really expect one. Most people have this moment — it feels like an hour but it’s really a splintered part of a second — where they don’t think or move or do anything the way that they should. It’s not called fatal hesitation for nothing, and in that fragment of a second I saw two of our guys take hits. One was aimed and well placed and the other was a wild shot from the melee and it could have as easily been friendly fire as a bullet from a bad guy.

I wasn’t caught in that moment. For whatever reason — martial arts, Ranger training, years or the street, or maybe I’m wired different — I don’t hesitate. As soon as the game started I was in my groove. I pivoted toward the