“Bravo 16–20,” I said again.
Still nothing.
I hit the red emergency button on the top of my radio. It should have given me dedicated access to the airwaves. Hit that tone and nobody hears anything but you.
“Bravo 16–20,” I said. “Bravo 16–20.”
But I got silence.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked him.
“They’re jamming us. You won’t be able to talk with anyone until this is all over. That is, if you’re still alive.”
Before I could answer, gas canisters came flying through the windows, spewing OC. It spread across the ceiling and then started to seep its way down between the rows of shelves. I felt the familiar bite in my nostrils and the fullness in the back of my throat, but I held back the coughing. At Fort Benning I spent more time in the gashouse than most soldiers spent in the latrine. OC and I were old friends.
“Better get ready,” Grunt Boy said. He crouched down near one of the endcaps, his stolen rifle at the ready.
Hesitation kills, but I hesitated anyway. That man had saved my life back in the office, but I still had no idea who he was. I didn’t know who the men he’d killed were, either. They were wearing foreign-made gear, but that didn’t mean they weren’t U.S. military. Back in my time in the Sandbox, at one time or another, I wore everything from a burka to a fine Italian suit to full-on BDUs and body armor. It just depended on the mission.
“Get down!” Grunt Boy barked at me. “They’re coming through the door.”
I crouched down just as a team came crashing through the windows. Grunt Boy returned fire, dropping two of the soldiers before they even cleared the rack of girlie mags next to the door.
I pulled my pistol and peered around the opposite end of the shelf.
One of the soldiers fired at me, hitting the bags of chips on the endcap and showering me in Pringles and Lay’s.
I ducked back behind the row. “Damn it.”
“Hey!”
It was Grunt Boy. He was nodding toward Jun Kwai over at the register. The poor man’s normal glassy calm was gone. He looked like a deer in headlights. He just stood there, staring at the men chewing his store up with bullets. He was holding his Ruger Super Redhawk, though.
“What’s wrong with your friend?” Grunt Boy said. “He’s gonna get himself killed.”
I had to hand it to Grunt Boy. No hesitation. He laid down a steady line of fire as he ran from cover over to the register. I saw him grab Jun Kwai by the shoulders and turn him around, away from the door. It looked as if he were smoothing the man’s shirt. With more of the soldiers charging through the door, Grunt Boy pulled Jun Kwai from behind the registers and pushed him toward the office.
I watched Jun Kwai stumble by me, looking like a sleepwalker. There was snot running out his nose and he was crying like a baby, but he hardly seemed to notice. He just made his way to the office in a haze.
“Behind you!” Grunt Boy said.
I spun around just as one of the soldiers came around the corner. His face was lost behind a gas mask, but I knew he saw my uniform. He saw my police uniform and raised his rifle to kill me anyway.
Before the soldier could fire, Grunt Boy got the jump on him. He came around from behind the man and hit him in the back of the head with the butt of his rifle.
Once the man was down, Grunt Boy shot him.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he said to me. “Pay attention.”
By way of an answer I raised my pistol and fired at the two soldiers who had come up behind him.
Both dropped like a bag of rocks.
Grunt Boy’s eyes went wide. He stared at the business end of my pistol for just a second, then glanced over his shoulder at the two dead soldiers.
“Pay attention,” I said. “It don’t cost nothing.”
His eyes went even wider. “Fort Benning?”
“You guessed it.”
“I should’ve known.”
“Shoulda but didna.”
He reached down to the corpse at his feet and relieved it of its machine gun. He slid it over to me.
“I guess you know how to use that, then?”
It was a Heckler & Koch MP5, 9 mm. Fantastic weapon. Not my preferred platform, but still a beauty. I scooped it up, ejected the magazine to make sure it was functional, and then slammed it back home.
“I’ve seen the training films,” I said.
He chuckled, then turned back to the front door. Two of the remaining soldiers were moving to the register counter for better cover.
He smoked them both.
I had no idea how many men they had left, but I could tell, at that moment, that we had them scared. They weren’t popping their heads up, and they weren’t putting down suppression fire. When you stop taking the fight to your enemy, you know you pretty much have given up.
Knowing that, I actually cracked a smile. I’d gone from wondering what in the hell was going on to actually feeling like I had a handle on this thing.
Crazy how that happens.
I made hand signals to him that I was going around the other way so we could put channel fire their way.
He nodded, and I moved out. I went down to the end of the row, near the coolers, nearly all of which were shot to hell, with waterfalls of beer and soda and milk running into lakes on the floor. There was a little bit of glass still hanging from a corner of the store’s front window, and in it I could see the reflection of one of the soldiers. I could tell at a glance how scared the man was, and it occurred to me at that moment that we weren’t dealing with soldiers at all, but mercenaries.
Well-equipped mercenaries, but still mercenaries.
A man who fights for money has no cause, and a man who fights without a cause can never win.
I genuinely believe that.
You either believe in what you do, or you fail.
And when you play the kind of game we were playing, that means you die.
Still, it made me wonder what Grunt Boy was fighting for.
I took a deep breath and got ready to charge the man. He was armed with a full-auto MP5, but so was I, and I knew at that moment that I could take him. This would be over in four seconds.
But just as I was tensing to strike, I heard a familiar noise.
Helicopters.
I stopped and picked apart the noise in my head. Two of them. Sounded like Black Hawks. As they got closer, I could feel the thropping of their rotors beating against my chest, and the Warrior part of my mind hardened and took over.
How well I remembered that sound, that feeling.
At first I thought it was more mercenaries, but one look in the broken window dispelled that. The mercenary was frantically trying to call into the mic built into his wrist-comm system and obviously getting nothing.
His backup must have abandoned him.
Outside the window, a dozen or more ropes hit the street.
Within seconds, U.S. Army troops were fast-roping down to the pavement. They moved toward the store with guns blazing, mowing down the mercenary I’d been watching, plus four more I hadn’t seen.
I stood up just as one of them came around the corner.
He leveled his machine gun at my chest as a reflex when he saw me, paused for a second, then lowered it.
I did the same with my MP5.
He took off his gas mask, and I was shocked to see my old friend Mark Roberts. We’d served in the Rangers together, and from the looks of things, he was still with the teams.
Only now, judging from the insignia on his chest, he was a command sergeant major.
“Joe?” he said. “What the hell?”
“Command Sergeant Major?” I countered. “They just giving that rank away now?”
“Screw you.”
“Yeah? Only if you kiss me first.”
“In your dreams, you skanky little whore.” He threw his arms wide. “Come to papa.”