traffic, lots of tourists. We parked the van around back and halfway up the block. We were not wearing our usual combat rig—unmarked black BDUs, helmets, and ballistic shields. Too many civilians and no way to know who was a spotter for the bad guys.
I wore a Hawaiian shirt over jeans. We all wore vests, though, but these were the latest generation of spider silk bulletproof vests with carbon nanotubes filled with nanoparticles that become rigid enough to protect the wearer as soon as a kinetic energy threshold was surpassed. Stuff that’s not on the open market yet, but Church has a friend in the industry and he always buys us the best toys.
I strolled down the street with Khalid Shaheed, one of my newest shooters. Khalid looks like a schoolteacher and came to the DMS by way of Delta Force. A good guy to have at your back.
We pretended to argue about whether Brooks Robinson should be considered the greatest Orioles player of all time rather than Cal Ripken. I used a prearranged cue word to escalate the argument into a shouting match just as we passed the front of the target house. Shouts escalated into shoves and soon the front door opened and a man wearing a blue sports coat stepped out onto the porch.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Stop that … . Get out of here!”
He had a Palestinian accent, and Khalid turned to him and in brusque Palestinian Arabic told him to mind his own business. Actually, Khalid told him to have anal sex with a three-legged dog. Nice. The man began screaming at Khalid and soon they were nose to nose. The door was still open and I could see other faces appear at the windows and in the doorway.
My sunglasses had a mike pickup built into the frame. I whispered, “Go.”
Instantly the rest of Echo Team hit the house. Big Bob Faraday, a former ATF field man who was built like Schwarzenegger’s big brother, kicked the back door completely off its hinges. Top Sims, my second in command, swarmed past him with Joey Goldschein at his heels. Joey was our newest member, a good kid, six months back from Afghanistan. They bellowed at the top of their lungs as they moved through the empty kitchen and into a side hall.
“Federal agents! Lay down your weapons!”
The adjoining dining room was filled with men, most of them crowded around a big oak dining table that was covered with bricks of C4 and all the wiring needed to blow the whole house into the next dimension.
You’d think that people would be disinclined to initiate a firefight when there’s forty pounds of high explosives lying right there on the table. You’d be wrong. Lot of crazy people out there.
Suddenly it was the O.K. Corral.
Out front, the man arguing with Khalid turned sharply at the noise from inside the house. He never saw Khalid pull open his loose Orioles shirt and pull his piece. Maybe the man heard the shot that killed him, but I doubt it.
Khalid and I both had the whole team yelling in our ears about explosives and armed resistance. Deep Throat’s intel had been solid.
Khalid and I opened fire together, hammering the front windows and the doorway. The men were so tightly clustered that there was no way for us to miss.
Then the dead were falling and the others were backpedaling into the house. We jumped up onto the porch and I covered Khalid while he reloaded. Then I had to duck behind the brick wall between window and door as a hail of heavy-caliber bullets ripped through the frame. There were screams and blaring horns from the street behind us, and I knew that backup teams were closing on the house. The Hamas team was in a box that we were nailing shut. It was up to them whether the box was a container or a coffin.
Khalid and I both yelled in Palestinian Arabic for them to lay down their arms. The only answer was a renewed barrage of automatic gunfire.
“Flash out!” I barked into my mike, and then pulled a flash bang out from under my shirt and lobbed it through the doorway. Khalid and I covered our ears and squeezed our eyes shut. The blast was huge.
“Go! Go!” I snapped, and Khalid spun out of his protective crouch and rushed inside. I was right behind him. He fanned left; I took the right. There were five hostiles in the living room, but all of them were down, rolling around on the floor, screaming but unable to hear their own voices. Flash bangs blow out the eardrums and temporarily blind the unwary. We kicked weapons out of their hands and kept moving. The firefight in the dining room was still hot and heavy. I saw Top Sims in a shooter’s squat behind a breakfront that bullets had reduced to little more than splinters and shattered crockery. Big Bob and Joey were firing from the hallway entrance.
I tapped Khalid and he nodded and took up a shooting position from the living room doorway while I peeled off and headed for the stairs. From the sound of it there was a second firefight up there. The team’s other big man, Bunny—a moose of a kid from Orange County—had been on-point for the second-floor entry, and he had former MP DeeDee Whitman on his wing.
“Green Giant, this is Cowboy. On the stairs and coming up,” I barked into the mike.
“Join the party, Cowboy.” Bunny’s voice sounded relaxed.
Then DeeDee added, “Stay away from the windows. Chatterbox is enjoying himself.”
“Copy that, Scream Queen.”
Chatterbox was our last team member. His real name was John Smith, and the DMS had headhunted him away from LAPD SWAT. He was one of those silent, introspective types who looked like a beatnik poet from the Village but who was the hammer of God with a sniper rifle.
I tapped the command channel and keyed over to Smith’s frequency.
“Chatterbox, this is Cowboy. I’m on the second floor. No window shots until I give you the word.”
“‘K,’” he said.
I peered around the wall at the top of the stairs and looked right into the eyes of a dead man. He was sprawled on the floor with a black bullet hole above his left eyebrow and a look of profound surprise stamped onto his face. The whole back of his head had been blown out. John Smith at work. I’ve seen a lot of great shooters in the military and on the cops, and I’ve met a few whose accuracy bordered on the supernatural. But John Smith was a Jedi. He was spooky good. If you’re unlucky enough to step into his crosshairs, then you’d better be right with Jesus.
I leaned farther out into the hall and saw that most of the second floor was an open-plan studio. There were two more men slumped like rag dolls. Automatic weapons lay near each one. Three other men knelt beside the windows, weapons in hand. They were probably too smart and too scared to try to return fire after three of their brothers had taken head shots. It was a tough nut to crack, because a sniper is the most feared man in any battle scenario.
The second most feared is the guy who sneaks up behind you.
I ducked back onto the stairs and whispered into the mike. “Cowboy to Chatterbox. I’m moving into the field of fire. No shots until I give the word or fifteen seconds is up. Copy?”
“‘K,’” he said again. Guy never shuts up.
I took my Beretta in a two-handed grip and then I was up and moving, rounding the corner, entering the open room, running fast as I cleared the corners with a flick and then fanned the barrel back to the shooters, taking the one farthest from me first with two in the head and shifting to the next gun without a pause. The other two shooters started to turn, but I shot the middle guy twice through the side of the head and the impact sent him crashing through the broken window.
The third guy was almost in kicking range and he was moving at lightning speed, swinging his AK-47 up, turning toward me, finger already inside the trigger guard. If he’d had a handgun instead of a long gun he might have beat me to the shot, but I put the first one in the center of his chest, then raised the gun fourteen inches and put the second one through his forehead. Double tap. All six shots fired in less than three seconds and my head ringing with thunder.
Then John Smith’s voice was yelling in my ear, “On your six! On your six!”
I ducked and spun to one side as a hail of bullets burned through where I’d been standing. Four shooters were crowding into the doorway and I had no idea where the hell they’d come from. The first two banged into each other trying to get through the doorway, and I was already coming up out of my jump and roll. I killed them both with five shots between them. I moved like a son of a bitch, rushing in but to one side, firing one-handed as I tore a fresh magazine out of my pocket. The bodies in the doorway fell face forward just as my slide locked back. The third shooter kicked his way into the room, starting to turn as he cleared the doorway and the bodies.
Shit. No time to swap out the mags, so I dropped my Beretta and drew the Rapid Response Folding knife
