It was a heck of a bullet.
As he started to load ten-round magazines, he said to Sister Colleen, “Please find Brother Kurt and Brother Absalom and tell them I need to see them.”
The narrow view allowed by the slots in the shutters rendered Jonathan’s NVGs useless. He wore them rocked back on his head and pressed his monocular against his eye. His first impression was that there were a lot of them out there, followed by a more depressing realization that they were becoming organized. What had once been a crowd of people swarming in their panic had settled down to something that resembled organized units.
“Big Guy,” Jonathan called. “What do you see?”
“I got nothing over here.”
“Gunslinger?” When he got no response, he called again. This time, she responded. “Right here.”
“Do you see any activity?”
“Nothing back here.”
“Hey, Nasbe family!”
“We can’t see anything either,” Christyne reported.
So their entire assault force was gathering in the front of the building. Why would they do that?
“Hey, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked. “If you’re the opfor commander, why would you assemble your entire force to the same side of a structure?”
“Got a lot of people out there, do you?” Boxers quipped. “They could just be stupid.”
“Let’s assume they’re smart.”
Boxers shook his head. “I can’t get there. If they knew what they were doing, they’d at least come in on two angles. Let’s shoot at them and get them to disperse. Lord knows we’ve got the ammo and weapons.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. By firing into the gathering crowd, he could disrupt their assault even before it began. It was such a rookie mistake for them put all of their forces in such a small area that it almost seemed irresponsible not to capitalize on it.
Unless it wasn’t a mistake. A piece of the puzzle fell into place for Jonathan.
“Hey, Big Guy-”
From a hundred yards away, the woods line came alive with muzzle flashes as the opposing force-the opfor-opened up with a torrent of small-arms fire. Their bullets hit with the sound of so many hammers pounding on the wall. Jonathan brought his weapon to his shoulder and slipped his finger in the guard.
For every muzzle flash, there was a shooter just two feet behind it.
Then he understood.
“Everybody away from the windows!” he yelled.
Boxers looked at him as if he’d just discovered a second nose on his face.
“Nobody return fire,” Jonathan ordered. “They’re trying to draw muzzle flashes. That’s why they’re being so obvious.”
That didn’t help Boxers. And then he got it. “The fifty cal,” he said. It was the gun they’d heard being fired while surveilling Michael Copley’s house. He pulled away from his window.
“Everybody come into the sanctuary,” Jonathan said. “And everybody stay down.”
Gail looked particularly confused. “But what about-”
An explosion cut her words-a startling double blast, followed by a fireball and stuff erupting on the altar just beside her. She dropped instantly.
Then the living nightmare began.
Brother Kendig could sense the soldiers’ relief when he told them to open fire from way back here. That meant not exposing themselves to return fire. At least for now. There was something oddly beautiful about watching a building come apart a chunk at a time under the onslaught of bullets. Even in the relative darkness of the starlight, he could see chunks and crumbs flying away.
But those were distractions. He stayed focused on the front windows. Once he saw a flash of return fire, he’d know exactly where to put his Raufoss rounds, and once he started placing them, he wouldn’t stop until there were no more to place.
Only the return fire didn’t materialize.
“Could they be dead?” Brother Absalom shouted over the din.
Kendig couldn’t see how. But he was tired of waiting. “Open fire,” he said.
Ryan would never admit this, but he was relieved by the word to pull away from the windows. As tired as he was of this shit, and as cruel and awful as these Klansmen or whatever were, he didn’t think he had it in him to kill them. Brother Stephen had been an accident. That was a whole world away from aiming at a human target and shooting it. He didn’t even like first-person-shooter video games. Way too intense.
In the dark light of the candle wash from the sanctuary, he could see that his mom was relieved, too.
The urgency in Scorpion’s voice was scary, though. Apparently there was danger in The front wall of the church erupted in splashes of white-hot silver and gold fire as thunder boomed through the sanctuary and huge holes were blown through the front and back walls. Pews erupted in fountains of splintering wood. It was too much to take in all at once. Whole chunks of their universe were exploding, one after another, with less than a second in between.
Ryan and his mom stood there, half crouched and frozen in the doorway between the vestry and the sanctuary. He’d never seen this kind of destruction. Off to his left, the altar turned to powder. To his right, the front wall was burning in half a dozen places, and spot fires flared throughout.
The noise was unbearable-off-the-charts loud, like Fourth of July times ten.
His mother was screaming. So was he, he thought, but all he could hear was the rapid-fire boom-boom-boom of whatever they were shooting at him.
The dim light of the room grew darker as the smoke from the fires billowed under the roof, and soon he found himself coughing from it.
Ryan and Christyne were both staring at the tableau of billowing destruction when Scorpion tackled them.
People never ceased to amaze Jonathan. Their capacity for self-endangerment-known in his world as simple stupidity-seemed limitless.
The Nasbes just stood there like human targets, out in the open, watching the damage caused by the world’s most powerful sniper weapon as if it were a football game. He scrambled down the green side aisle as round after round sailed over his body to wreak havoc within the church.
“Get down!” he yelled. “Ryan! Christyne! Get down!” But they continued to stare.
If Jonathan was destined to lose this one, this was not how it was going down. He was not going to see them blown apart like pottery targets at a carnival shooting game. Throwing away countless years of experience and training, he rose to his feet under fire and took them both down with all the subtlety of a goal line tackle.
They hit hard, and Ryan howled in agony as Jonathan lay across both of them to protect them with his body.
“Ow!” Ryan yelled. “Oh, God, my arm!”
“You’re hurting him!” Christyne yelled, and she pushed at Jonathan to get off of her.
“Stop!” Jonathan commanded. “Both of you, just stop!”
The command worked.
Jonathan felt for the kid. On the positive side, he was still breathing enough to yell, and he was not going to die as long as Jonathan was still alive.
In a minute or so, the punishing onslaught ended as abruptly as it has started. Dozens of spot fires had been ignited, and the entire front wall-what was left of it-was ablaze. Two-inch holes had been blasted through the armored masonry in dozens of places, and the shutters had been reduced to tatters.
“What the hell was that?” Gail yelled from the back of the sanctuary.
The sound of her voice answered half Jonathan’s immediate question as he rose from the PCs. “Big Guy?”
“Whole and healthy,” he said. “Here they come.” Rising to one knee, Boxers brought his M4 to his shoulder and opened fire, sending twenty rounds downrange in one fully automatic string, and then he ducked for cover as a new fusillade of. 50-caliber rounds consumed his corner of the world with debris and fire.
The punishing assault had just ended when Boxers’ face appeared at the end of the nearest line of pews. “We can’t stay here, Boss,” he said.