Bob’s hand flew at a speed which could never be known or measured, so fast that he himself had no sense of it happening, he just knew that the Kimber.38 Super was locked in his fist, his elbow locked against his side, his wrist stiff, the weird, maybe autistic brainfreak in his head solving the complexities of target identification, acquisition, alignment that had been the gift of the Swagger generations since the beginning, his muscles tight, all except the trigger finger, which-you get this about ten thousand repetitions into your shooting program-flew torqueless and true as it jacked back, slipped forward to reset then jacked back again, four times, all without disturbing the set of the gun in his hand. Brass bubbles flew through the air, as spent shells pitched by the Mach 2 speed of the flying slide as it cycled, all four within an inch or three of the others, and Bob put four.38 Super CorBons into the center-mass of the fellow closest to him, who immediately changed his mind about killing.
Nick fired. Bob’s opponent fired finally, but into the ground. The man on Nick fired twice more from a smallish silver handgun, though crazily, and Bob vectored in on him and fired three more times in that superfast zone that seems to defy all rational laws of physics. The night was rent by flash. From afar it must have looked like a photo opportunity as a beautiful star entered a nightclub, the air filling with incandescence, the smell of something burned, and the noise lost in the hugeness of all outdoors. But it was just the world’s true oldest profession, which is killers killing.
It was over in less than two seconds.
Bob dumped his not-quite-empty mag, slammed a new fresh one in and blinked to clear his eyes of strobe, then looked for targets. The guy he hit second was down flat, arms and legs akimbo, his silver revolver three or four feet away, weirdly gleaming in the dark from a random beam of light. The other fellow, hit first, was not down but he had dropped his gun. He walked aimlessly about, holding his stomach and screaming, “Daddy, I am so sorry!”
Bob watched as he went to a big car and settled next to it, his face resting on the bumper. The lack of rigidity in the body posture told the story.
Bob knelt to Nick.
“Hit bad, partner?”
“Ah, Christ,” said Nick, “can you believe this?”
“No, but it sure happened. I’m looking, I don’t see no blood on your chest.”
“He hit me in the leg, stupid fucker. Oh Christ, what a mess.”
By this time, people had come to their balconies and looked down upon the fallen men.
“Call an ambulance, please. This officer is hit. We are police!” yelled Bob.
But in seconds another man had arrived, a smallish Indian with a medical bag.
“I am Dr. Gupta,” he said, “the ambulance has been called. Can I help?”
“He’s hit in the leg. I don’t think it’s life threatening. Not a spurting artery.”
The doctor bent over, quickly ripped the seam of Nick’s suit pants with scissors, and revealed a single wound about an inch inboard on his right thigh, maybe off-center enough to have missed bone. The wound did not bleed profusely, but persistently. It was an ugly, mangled hole, muscles puckered and torn, bad news for weeks or months but maybe not years.
“Tie,” said the doctor.
Bob quickly unlooped Nick’s tie and handed it to the doctor, who wrapped it into a tourniquet above the wound, knotted it off, then pulled out and cracked open a box, removed a TraumaDEX squeeze applicator and squirted a dusting of the clotting agent on the wound to stop the blood flow.
“Don’t know when the ambulance will arrive in all this traffic. Can you give him something for pain?”
“No, no,” said Nick, “I am all right. Where’s that damned phone. Oh, shit, we can’t get a chopper in here. Oh, Christ, I need to-”
“You ain’t going nowhere,” said Bob, “except the ER.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Nick. “I hope they got my message.” But even as he said it, he knew it was hopeless, as did Bob. The shooters would bring their weapons to bear, the cops were strung out, the situation was a mess, nobody would know a thing, it was-
“I’ll get there,” said Bob.
“How, you can’t-”
“My daughter’s bike. It’s over there. I can ramrod through the traffic. I’ve got some firepower. I know where they’re going. I can intercept them at the hill, put some lead on them, maybe stop them from that chopper pick-up.”
“Swagger, you can’t-” but then he stopped.
“Okay,” said Bob. “Who, then? You see anybody else around? You want these lowlife fucks to get away with this thing, and the contempt it shows for all law enforcement, for civilians, for anything that gets in the way? You see anyone else here?”
But there wasn’t anybody else around. Funny, there never was.
“Here,” Nick finally said, “maybe this’ll stop the cops from shooting you.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out a badge on a chain around his neck. “This makes you officially FBI and there goes my career. Good luck. Oh, Jesus, you don’t have to do this.”
“Sure, why not,” said Bob. “I got nothing better to do. It’ll be my kind of fun.” Bob threw the chain around his neck so that the badge hung in the center of his chest, signifying, for the first time since 1975, his official righteousness.
He rose, walked through the gathered crowd. He walked across the parking lot to his car, but next to it, came across the curious scene of a Vietnamese family standing in a semicircle around the gunman who had fallen against the bumper of his red Cadillac. One of them was a pretty young girl in a Hannah Montana T-shirt.
“You yelled the warning?” he asked.
“Yes. They were in our apartment all day, scaring my family to death. Horrible men. Monsters,”
“Can on co em. Co that gan da va su can dam cua co da cuu sinh mang chung toi,” he said.
She smiled.
He walked to his car, popped the trunk. He withdrew the DPMS 6.8 rifle, and inserted a magazine with twenty-eight rounds. He looped its sling, held by a single cinch, diagonally across his body so that the gun was down across his front with enough play to allow him to get it either to shoulder or a prone position. He looked at the monitor atop it, that EOtech thing that looked like a ’50s space-cadet toy, figured out which of several buttons turned it on, so that if he had to do it in the dark, he’d know which one to use.
He threw on the vest Julie had provided, in which he’d inserted, in dedicated mag pouches, the other nine magazines, all full with ammo.
Slamming the trunk, he walked back to the stairwell where Nikki’s bike rested under a tarp. He ripped the canvas free and climbed aboard the Kawasaki 350. Shit, the pain in his hip from Kondo Isami’s last cut flared hard and red, but he tried not to notice it. He turned the key to electrify the bike. It took three or four kicks to gin the thing to life, but he saw that he had plenty of fuel. He heeled up the stand, lurched ahead, kicked it into gear, pulled into the lot, evaded the gawkers, and took off into the night, running hard, disappearing quickly.
Nick, his leg throbbing but feeling no pain, watched him go.
Lone gunman, he thought, remembering Lawrence’s words defining the American spirit: “hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer.” But on the Night of Thunder, so necessary.
THIRTY-FOUR
The muzzle flash of the Barrett 107 was extraordinary, a ball of fire that bleached the details from the night, so bright that it set bulbs popping in eyes for minutes. Caleb, who was holding it under his shoulder like a gangster’s tommy gun, felt the heavy surge of the recoil as the weapon rocked massively against his muscle, almost knocking him from his feet, while at the same moment fierce blowback from the point of impact lashed against his face. Without glasses, he’d have burned out his eyes. The muzzle blast, expanding radially at light speed, ripped up a cyclone of dust from the earth beneath; it seemed a tornado had briefly touched down, filling the air with substance.