He didn’t want to risk going through that doorway, though. If there were Green Shirts on the other side, they were probably crouched down as close to the near wall as possible, their weapons pointed right at the door.
Keeping his Galil trained on the open door for as long as he could, Flanagan turned and stepped through the door into the storage room, pivoting to clear the corner as he did so, then sweeping back as Hank followed him through. The shelves were stacked, and there were all too many hiding places where a Green Shirt could be crouched weapon pointed and waiting, but no targets immediately presented themselves.
With a nod to Hank, he started to move up, Galil held ready, careful to check each angle as he moved through the standing shelves, stacked with boxes of every foodstuff that had probably come into San Tabal since just before the coup. As per, the Communist revolutionaries would eat like kings, while the people they were supposedly “liberating” struggled and starved.
History might not quite repeat itself, but it sure comes close.
The two of them reached the end of the rows of shelves, and found another door leading deeper into the house. It was still closed, but they moved quickly toward it, Hank covering the door while Flanagan reached for the doorknob.
He wondered a little that no more Green Shirts had tried to make entry through that door to flank them. They had to know the layout of the mansion by then. While there hadn’t been much evidence that these thugs ever really trained or drilled, by the time they knew that the resistance was coming for them, they had to have figured out that some kind of preparation was needed.
But the answer reached his ears a moment later, as he grasped the doorknob and threw the door open. The sound was a bit muffled, but just then a storm of gunfire erupted out by the front, near the plaza.
The local volunteers had arrived and were attacking the mansion. Clemente was probably throwing every remaining Green Shirt he had at the front door.
Hank went through the door, going right. Flanagan went left.
The Green Shirts had fallen back to the corner of the hallway, all the way to the left, and barricaded on the corner itself. Muzzle flashes flickered in Flanagan’s face, but he was moving fast, dashing toward the corner and pivoting as he went, already answering the Green Shirts with a devastating storm of rapid fire, bullets chewing into the plaster and forcing them back, as he hoped that he was fast enough to keep Hank from getting shot in the back of the head.
***
Wade was starting to feel the urgency. He could hear the shooting down by the plaza and the mansion. Flanagan had already opened the ball. The Green Shirts in the police station were going to be even more alert now. But it had taken some time to get that big truck around the block and pointed at the gate. They’d taken some sporadic fire from the upper windows, but nothing accurate enough to worry about.
The Green Shirts knew what was coming. Or at least they thought they did.
Wade made sure the truck was aimed about as well as it could be, put it in gear and sent it surging toward the gate as he made himself as small as possible behind the engine block. If he’d had any other option, he’d have tried to wedge the accelerator and bail, but there wasn’t time, and there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t have swerved off course or simply stalled out. So, he was riding this train all the way to the end of the line.
Bullets smacked into the hood and the windshield. Glass rained down on him, and then the truck hit the gate.
The impact was brutal. Even braced as he was, he was thrown against the steering wheel as the shock slammed his teeth together painfully. For a moment, he couldn’t be sure if it had worked, or if he’d just put himself in the middle of a catastrophic vehicular accident for nothing.
But while he stomped on the gas and the engine roared, something creaked, groaned, then shrieked horribly and the truck suddenly surged forward, bouncing up and over as the gate was torn off its hinges and the bar holding it closed broke. The gate folded inward and the truck slanted upward as it went over the broken barrier, then one of the front tires dropped over the edge and stuck. More bullets poured into the front of the truck, but the engine block was absorbing most of the punishment. For the moment.
He kicked the driver’s side door open and bailed, dragging his Galil with him, hoping that Bianco hadn’t picked that side to lay down covering fire.
He hadn’t. The Negev opened up on the other side of the cab, hammering the front of the police station with bullets, as Wade dove for the dubious cover of one of the handful of green and white Toyota Hiluxes parked against the wall. He waited for more fire to reach out to punch through the flimsy body of the pickup, but Bianco was playing his Negev like a concert pianist, moving from window to window, putting a burst through each seemingly at random. He wasn’t wasting ammo on the wall. Every round was calculated to keep the Green Shirts’ heads down.
Taking a split second to catch his breath, Wade got his feet under him and checked that the rest of his assault force had come through the gate. Burgess and Jenkins had led their recruits along the wall, protected from the police station itself, while Wade and Bianco had
