The Tin Man

“Then it is time we are off,” the Major said calmly, and began issuing instructions to his men via his headset commlink.

“What about me?” Mullins bleated. “I don’t have any armor! They’ll cut me down in three seconds!”

“Shall I put you out of your misery now?” asked the Major, leveling his rifle at the turncoat.

“No!”

“Then go, get out of my sight. You are on your own. I let you keep your life, since you served us well. But I warn you: If you are caught, and if you even think about revealing anything about myself or my organization, then you had better pray the police kill you first. Because I will see to it that your agony is prolonged over several long days. Now verschwinde! Go! My troops and I have work to do.”

Paul McLanahan had been taught about the Code 900 in the academy, listened to the instructors, heard the recordings of actual radio calls. But the main thing he learned was never, ever call for one on the radio-it was reserved for someone in a much higher pay grade than himself. He could call for “backup” or “cover” or “officer needs assistance” or “officer in distress” or even “HELP!” but could never call a Code 900. The only reason to ever call one, the instructors had said seriously, was if the earth was splitting open and all the citizens of hell were flying forth.

But he knew that was exactly what was happening. He saw and heard the rocket explosion on the other side of the complex on J Street, saw the fires, heard the gunshots, heard the heavy machine-gun fire in return. Jesus, Cargo, please get on the radio. Say something, man. Say something…

And when Paul heard the “officer down” call, he knew it was his partner. And with the sector sergeant calling a Code 900 over the air, he also knew this battle had probably just begun.

There were men shouting over on Seventh Street, the wail of sirens just a few blocks away. The sounds were reassuring to the young rookie, alone and pointing his gun at a darkened building. All he wanted to do right now was be with his partner, cover him, defend him, carry him to safety. But he would never leave his post until given an order to do so, so he was glad that other officers were responding and rushing to help Cargo. He would just have to…

An ear-splitting explosion blasted him out of his reverie. The main doors of Sacramento Live! on the K Street Mall blew open, scattering a wall of glass and fire thirty feet away. He felt a hard slap to his head, followed by a gust of super-heated air. His ears were ringing so loud, he thought he might be completely deaf. He found his finger had tightened on the trigger of his SIG, and was afraid he might have accidentally squeezed off a round. Then another explosion rocked the night, and Lamont’s squad car burst into flames over on Seventh Street- another rocket had been fired from the alley, destroying the car and sending officers scurrying for cover.

And then they appeared: two columns of four wearing helmets and gas masks, led by a figure dressed completely in thick black body armor who was firing an AK-74 out onto the street as the columns brazenly strode out the shattered front doors of the Sacramento Live! complex. The men behind him fired smaller but still murderous-looking H amp;K MP-5 submachine guns, sweeping both sides of the street with a hail of gunfire. As the column marched down Seventh Street, the Step Van wheeled out of the alley onto Seventh, moving into position to pick them up.

But they were marching away from Paul, and they didn’t see him. He took aim on the closest gunman and fired three rounds at his head. The last man in the right column stumbled, stopped, turned directly at Paul, lifted his visor, saw the squad car parked there, and swept it with a two-second burst of automatic gunfire. Highlighted in the glare of a nearby streetlight, he made an ideal target, and Paul took the shot and hit him square in the face. The man screamed and went down, clutching his face and writhing on the ground.

Paul was lining up another shot when two of the gunmen in the right column wheeled around and opened fire with their MP-5’s. He returned fire, pulling the trigger as fast as he could, rather than aiming, in the hope that his attackers might dive for cover or run. But they did neither. They fired again, concentrating their fire now.

They were coming after him, two deadly assailants with submachine guns. Time to get the hell out.

Paul had started to move along the right side of the squad car, getting ready to retreat to his chosen fall-back position, a sturdy-looking information booth a few yards away, when he felt a pain in his right leg. He looked down to see half of his right calf ripped open, just above the top of his boots.

He was a kid from the TV age and had seen plenty of guys get shot on TV. They all had it wrong, he realized. His leg did not fly backward-he never even felt the bullet hit. His leg was not shot off. There was no spurting blood. He felt very little pain-that was the weirdest part. What he could see of the wound-it wasn’t much-was big and ugly-obviously a ricochet, the bullet spinning after it hit a wall or the ground, and not a direct hit.

Paul tried to run but then the wound got him-now he felt the goddamn pain! He sank down to his right knee. The gunmen were reloading, flipping the big banana magazines upside down to reload from fresh clips taped against the first ones. He aimed and fired again, missing. This time they did not return fire, evidently satisfied that they had gotten him enough so that he was no longer a threat. He saw them head back north on Seventh to catch up with the others, who were still sweeping the streets with volleys of gunfire, covering the Step Van until it could pull up beside them.

No fucking way! Paul McLanahan shouted to himself. You’re not getting away, not after killing my partner! But all he had was his 9-millimeter pistol-no match for submachine guns. But something else was.

Paul grabbed for his keys, thankful that he had rubber-banded all but the car key together so he could find it easily. He unlocked Caruthers’s squad car from the passenger side, leaned inside, started the engine, and put it in gear. Then he laid himself across the front seat, left hand on the steering wheel, right hand down on the gas pedal, pushed on the accelerator, and shot forward.

The two gunmen who thought they had disposed of him turned, aimed, and fired, but they were too late. Paul mowed both of them down under the squad car, hurling them up, then under the fender like corn stalks under a harvester. More automatic gunfire hit the car. The windshield shattered. Without letting up on the accelerator, Paul shifted the car into reverse. Tires screeched. He was shoved forward under the dash by the momentum, losing his grip on the steering wheel. With the right front tire shot out, the car looped to the right and crashed into the corner of a building on K Street. The engine died. He was trapped.

Paul looked up. There was another attacker less than ten feet away, his submachine gun raised, aiming right at him, moving closer for a cleaner shot.

Paul hit the tiny switch on the radio console and the electro-clamps released on the big Remington 12-gauge shotgun mounted on the dashboard. Now lying on his back in the front seat facing the approaching terrorist, Paul racked the action, leveled the shotgun, aimed for the face and neck, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing but a dull click! Christ, the shotgun wasn’t loaded. Caruthers, doing an off-duty job, obviously hadn’t thought he needed to bother loading it. In desperation, Paul tossed the shotgun at his assailant. The muzzle caught the assailant right in the middle of his gas-mask lens, shattering it.

“Ich bin verletz! Helft mir!” The terrorist screamed something in a foreign language-was it German? Paul didn’t know.

The gunman ripped off the broken mask, lifting his helmet off with it. Paul got a good look at a very young, chiseled face, square jaw, close-cropped black curly hair, dark bushy eyebrows, and a nose twisted awkwardly to the right, obviously broken. The guy seemed frozen, paralyzed with fear, as if realizing that Paul could identify him. Paul reached for his SIG Sauer P226 sidearm…

… but it never cleared leather. Another masked and helmeted figure pushed the unmasked guy aside, shouted, “Zeit zu schlafen, Schweinehund!” and opened fire with his MP-5 submachine gun from fifteen feet away, raking the rookie cop with a three-second full-auto burst at point-blank range.

“Mr McLanahan!” the nurse shouted from the door of the operating room. “Come with me! Hurry!”

Patrick felt his heart lurch. “Is Wendy all right?”

“Put on your mask and follow me,” the nurse ordered. My God, Patrick thought, what in hell have we done? He didn’t hear a baby’s cry-what in God’s name had happened?

Gowned and masked figures surrounded the operating table. All he could see was Wendy’s head. Her eyes were closed, and a large white drape hid her body from his view from the shoulders down. A plastic bonnet covered her hair, and he could see her arms fastened down to the sides of the table with Velcro straps. The