shoulders.
Then the world erupted in gunfire.
In the space of a heartbeat, the five kidnappers opened up on the jungle, firing randomly at targets they couldn’t see. Farther away on Jonathan’s right, the rest of the newly arriving shooters returned fire, proving that whatever their skills might be, marksmanship did not rank among them.
Jonathan fired a three-round burst and dropped the terrorist at the right front bumper. Two seconds later, he was under fire from his right, his position being raked by the late arrivers. He slapped his transmit button. “I’m under fire,” he said.
He’d barely released the transmit button when Boxers started stitching the area with.30-caliber rounds. Whoever they were, they didn’t have the stomach for a protracted gun battle. As loud as they had been coming in, they made a hell of a lot more noise as they ran away.
In a perfect world, Jonathan would have caught them in a cross fire to keep them from escaping; but today those people were just a distraction. His real targets were down there on the ground below.
Jonathan’s worst nightmare would come true if the soldiers on the ground turned their attention to the bus. In the twisted logic that was hostage negotiation, they had every right to do so. They no doubt felt both betrayed and doomed. It only made sense to take the hostages with them.
As if on cue, two of them turned their weapons on the bus and opened fire. Boxers was already a beat ahead. Jonathan couldn’t hear the Big Guy’s rifle, but he recognized the marksmanship. On the far side of the bus, a spray of blood marked the demise of one gunman, and before his buddy could even react, he, too, dropped dead.
Jonathan went to work, too. He killed the bagman first, with a double tap to the chest, and then he moved to the two on his side of the bus, killing them with two shots apiece.
Then it was done. All the bad guys were dead, and the whole gun battle had lasted less than ten seconds.
Half a tick later, Boxers nearly shouted over the radio, “What the hell’s going on, Boss?”
Jonathan pressed the transmit button to respond, but froze when he heard more gunshots. These seemed muffled compared to the others, and they were followed immediately with the sound of screaming.
“Shit!” he spat on the air. “There’s a shooter on the bus.”
Tristan had never seen so much blood. The spray of bone and brains went everywhere, misting the windows pink. An instant later, the world outside erupted in gunfire. He looked out the side window and saw the soldiers or the kidnappers or whatever the hell they were shooting long blasts of machine gun fire into the jungle.
“They’re going to kill us!” Allison screamed.
And then the guys outside spouted blood and fell to the ground.
Paul McDaniel, another jock, shouted, “Get down!” and then the loudest bang Tristan had ever heard startled everyone into silence. And there was more blood in the air. Tristan could taste it.
People started screaming. Danielle Taylor was next. Tristan had never gotten to know her very well, but she smiled a lot. He’d wished several times that he could have been handcuffed to her instead of to Allison. The soldier at the front of the bus knew none of this, of course, as he pressed his rifle against the side of her head.
“Please don’t,” Danielle begged. “I-”
The kidnapper pulled the trigger.
At least she died fast.
What surprised Tristan the most was the clarity of it all. It was as if time had slowed to a heartbeat every five seconds. As the gunman strolled casually down the center aisle, Tristan’s brain recorded every detail. The muzzle flashes. The way people just went limp when their souls were blasted out of their heads. Always a head shot, always a dead body.
With Danielle gone, the soldier pivoted and leveled his rifle at Ray Greaser. Tristan had never liked Ray, but right now, he felt like a brother. He started to cry when the rifle turned to him. “Please don’t,” he said.
Good guys never pleaded for their lives in movies, Tristan thought, yet everybody pleads when their time comes. Even as his heart hammered in his chest hard enough to break a rib, Tristan wondered what he would do when his time came.
This was so unfair. They were all handcuffed together, and the soldier with the rifle could move as fast or as slowly as he wanted. Every advantage lay with the murderer. That just wasn’t right.
The soldier was about to kill Ray when someone yelled, “Hey, asshole!” It was in English, and when the gunman pivoted and pointed his gun at the shouter, Tristan was shocked to realize that the words were his own.
But they were, and he was already in for a dime. Now it was time to be in for a dollar. “You don’t have to do this,” he said in Spanish. As the words left his mouth, he caught movement off to his right, outside the bus.
“Yes, I do,” the soldier said. He murdered Ray, and then his gaze followed Tristan’s. First his eyes, then his head, and finally his rifle. Someone was storming the bus.
The gunman flipped a switch on the side of his rifle. Tristan knew he was going to die now. He hooked his free hand around Allison’s neck and he pulled her to the floor.
The shooting became insane.
“Give me covering fire on the hill,” Jonathan said into his radio as he sprinted toward the vehicle full of precious cargo. Whoever took the shot at the driver had screwed up everything, and the penalty was death.
An instant later, Boxers opened up, raking the trees above and behind Jonathan with bullets. If the shooter was still there and they didn’t kill him, they would make him go to ground, which accomplished more or less the same goal.
The sound of the gunfire must have startled the killer on the bus, too, because he stopped firing at the hostages and looked out the far side window toward Boxers’ location.
The distraction lasted for only a second or two, and then the shooter returned to his executions. Jonathan knew from sound alone that he was firing big ammunition-probably 7.62 millimeter-and he knew from experience how much damage they could do to the human anatomy. God only knew how many PCs the shooter had already killed, but Jonathan aimed to stop him.
As he closed the distance, he let the carbine fall against its sling and he drew his Colt 1911.45 from the holster on his thigh. At this range, any bullet he fired from the carbine would pass completely through the man he intended to shoot and then go on to endanger the people behind him. Besides, the Colt was the best weapon ever made.
He was still ten yards out when he identified his target, but he didn’t have a clean shot. Too many heads bobbing in and out of the sight picture. Even from out here, he could see the blood on the windows and the walls of the bus. He could also see the holes through the sheet metal that marked the paths of the bullets that had exited their victims. The gunman was walking down the aisle, front to back, casually taking aim at hostages’ heads and blowing them away. For Jonathan, the worst of it all was the lack of screaming inside the vehicle.
People screamed only when they thought they had a chance to live.
The movement must have caught the gunman’s attention, because when Jonathan was still thirty yards out, the guy opened up on full auto inside the bus. It was a slaughter.
The gunman turned as Jonathan leaped through the open door and dove on his belly. The shooter followed him with his own weapon, a stockless AK with a banana clip. Jonathan saw in a blink that the bad guy’s aim was off by half a foot, and that would be his last mistake.
The AK launched its massive bullets at two thousand three hundred feet per second. At this range, the boom was beyond deafening. The sound pressure hit with a force all its own.
Jonathan’s mind recorded all of the sights and the noises as a matter of instinct, dismissing everything so far as inconsequential. He had lives to protect, and to do it he had to kill this asshole or die trying. As he hit the floor on his right side, he slid across the blood-slick grooved rubber matting and came to rest with his head nearly touching the foot of the dead driver.
Before the AK could cycle for a second burst, Jonathan’s hand flexed and his pistol barked. The angles were all wrong for a reliable one-shot kill, so he took out the shooter’s knee with the first shot to get him falling. A quarter second later, the collapsing terrorist spread his arms just wide enough to expose his chest, and Jonathan drilled his heart. Just for good measure-in case the bad guy was wearing body armor Jonathan couldn’t see-he launched a final round through the bridge of the shooter’s nose. Three shots in just over one second, and the world had one
