it at the front door. The SUV punched a truck-sized hole through the shattered doorway, then it ripped across the living room floor and slammed into the stairs with enough force to rocked the entire house to its foundation. I hadn’t had time to buckle up for safety, so I got bashed forward and backward in my seat. I could taste blood in my mouth as I bailed out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back.
“Sergeant Rock, coming in!” yelled Top as he pounded down the stairs. He had to vault the wreckage of the bottom steps, then run across the hood, up onto the roof, and then drop with a grunt into a squat next to me. He yelped in pain as his forty-year-old knees took the impact; but he sucked it up, forced himself up, and staggered over to me as I raised the back hatch.
“Coming in!” yelled Bunny and then he was there, coming at us from the kitchen.
I clumsied open the gun lockers and immediately six pairs of hands were reaching for all the toys. I grabbed a bag of loaded magazines and an M4 and peeled away.
“Yo!” Top barked and tossed another bag to me. “Party favors!”
I snatched it out of the air and flashed him a grin. He grinned back. This was a total nightmare scenario and only an insane oddsmaker would give us one in fifty on getting out of this. So . . . might as well enjoy it.
“Where, Boss?” asked Bunny.
“Kitchen. The fog might work for us. It’ll confuse everything out there. Go!”
“On it.” He shoved five drum magazines for the shotgun into a bag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he was gone, running back to the kitchen.
“Top,” I said, “upstairs.”
“Why you keep making the old guy run up and down stairs?” We both laughed.
He grabbed his gear and climbed over the wreckage.
I glanced out through the broken window. The lead car was almost to the roundabout. It had slowed, though, and I figured that the converging teams were suddenly aware of one another. Who knows, I thought, maybe Burke was right. Maybe they’d slaughter each other while Top, Bunny and I stayed in here and played cribbage.
And maybe tomorrow I’d wake up looking like Brad Pitt. About as much chance of that.
I heard voices shouting and car doors slamming.
Then gunshots.
The first rounds were fired away from us, off to my three o’clock, the direction of the team on ATVs.
Then three other guns opened up on the house.
So much for cribbage.
-8-
The Safe House
Pine Deep, Pennsylvania
August 16; 6:51 P.M.
It became hell.
A swirling surreal white hell, with the red flashes of muzzle fire filtered by thick fog, and all sounds muted to strangeness. Overhead the storm grumbled and growled, but no rain fell.
Maybe one of these days I’ll look back on that ten minutes under the August sun in backwoods Pennsylvania and laugh about it. Maybe it’ll become one of those anecdotes soldiers tell when they want to story-top the last guy. Or, maybe when I think about it I’ll get the shakes and go crawling off to find a bottle.
Everyone was shooting at everyone.
I’ve never seen anything like it. Don’t ever want to see anything like it again.
One team was dead. That left five teams of shooters, sent by God only knows who. Three of the teams were Middle Eastern, I could tell that much, and that made sense. Then I heard someone yelling in Russian. Someone else was yelling in Spanish.
I was yelling in every language I could curse in . . . and I am fluent in a long list of languages.
I crouched down behind the open door of the SUV, reached around with the M4 and opened fire. I wasn’t aiming. No-damn-body was aiming. But everybody was sure as hell capping off a lot of rounds. My hearing will never be the same. Ditto my nerves.
I think I even screamed for a little bit. I’ll admit it, I’m not proud.
I fired the magazine dry, dropped it, slapped in another, fired, swapped it out, fired. The effort of holding the gun was rattling the bones in my arm to pieces and I don’t think I hit anything with the first four magazines. The mist was chest-high now and the men out there were crouched down. It was like trying to fight in the middle of a blizzard.
So, I set down the gun and dug into the bag for one of Top’s “party favors.” An M67 fragmentation grenade.
“Come to Papa,” I murmured.
The M67 looks like a dark green apple, but instead of juicy sweetness the spherical body contains six and a half ounces of composition B explosive. When it goes boom, the body bursts into steel fragments that will forever change the life of anything within fifteen meters. I lobbed one out through the gaping hole that had been the front wall of the house. I never heard it bounce, never heard it land.
Everyone heard it when it blew. A loud, muffled
And everyone heard the screams that followed.
Another thing I’m not too proud to admit. I enjoyed those screams. Part of me did. The Killer that shares my mind with the Civilized Man and the Cop. That’s the part of me that’s always waiting in the tall grass, face grease- painted green and brown, eyes staring and dead, mouth perpetually caught in a feral smile.
The Killer wanted more, so I popped the pin on two more party treats and threw them out. More bangs, more screams.
Then I was up, laying the M4 over the hinge of the open door. Hot shell casings pinged and whanged off of the SUV’s frame and smoke burned my eyes. All I could taste in my mouth was blood and gunpowder.
The smoke from the grenades wafted away on a breeze and I could see one of the cars belonging to one group sitting on flat tires, its sides splashed with blood, windows blasted out. Two ragged red things lay sprawled on the gravel, and a travel of blood led away toward the tall corn. The second vehicle was sitting askew in the ditch that lined the driveway, its windshield and driver’s side polka-dotted with hundreds of bullet and pellet holes.
“Hey, Cap’n!” yelled Top from upstairs. “I’m running out of wall to hide behind.”
“I’m open to ideas,” I yelled back.
I think I heard him laugh. Top’s a strange guy. Like Bunny. Like me, too, I suppose. As much as the Civilized Man inside my head was cringing and whimpering, the Killer was totally jazzed. I’m kind of glad I didn’t have Kevlar and a ballistic shield, or I might have done something stupid.
Luckily, someone
No, correct that, a bunch of people did a bunch of stupid things, and that’s why I’m still here to tell you about it.
It spun out this way . . .
The team that came in on the ATVs were yelling something in Farsi and trying to cut their way to the house. No way to tell if the guys who came in the cars were their enemies, or simply business rivals. In either case, the ATV guys came rolling in, firing over the handlebars with their AKs, chopping the cars to pieces and ripping up the last three car guys. If this was a two-way fight, or even a three-way fight, they might have won. They were the biggest team.
Eight men on four ATVs.
I leaned out and sighted on them and started to pick them off. I got both men in the lead vehicle with four shots, and the ATV twisted and fell over onto its side, slewing around with one of the men still in the saddle. The second ATV hit that one at about forty miles an hour and the driver and passenger tried to leap to safety. “Tried” wasn’t good enough.
Suddenly a shooter stood up out of the mist and aimed a pump shotgun at me. He caught me flat-footed while I was watching the ATV wreck. He was twenty feet away, right outside the shattered wall, and I saw his face crease into a wicked smile as he raised the barrel.
Suddenly the fog around him changed color from a milky white to a bright red. The shooter’s fingers jerked
