Her pulse quickened as the speed hit the blood stream. Neeley pushed aside the poncho liner and crammed it into a stuff sack, placing the sack inside a small backpack. She felt around the floor with her hands. Nothing left out. Just the pack and rifle. Methodically, she did a mental inventory of her actions of the past day and a half and all the equipment she had brought with her. The room was sterile, everything accounted for. Rule number four: Always pack out what you pack in. There were some rules you just couldn't break and the remembrance of one of Gant's rules brought a wry smile to Neeley's lips.
Neeley laid the pack down three feet inside the window and sat on it, laying the rifle across her knees. She was used to waiting. She'd spent most of her thirty-two years learning that patience was a virtue; a life-saving one.
She picked the rifle back up, the feel of plastic and steel a familiar one. It was an Accuracy International L96A1, a venerable sniper rifle of British design, firing NATO standard size 5.56mm by 51mm rounds, each of which Gant had reloaded to reduce velocity to sub-sonic speeds. A bullet that broke the sound barrier made a cracking noise as it left the muzzle and the special load eliminated that noise. On the end of the barrel was a bulky tactical suppressor, which absorbed the other large noise source for the rifle, the gasses that came out of the end of the barrel upon firing. In essence, the suppressor was a series of washer-like baffles around the end of the barrel that took the force of the expelling gasses. It was good for about ten shots before it had to be retooled. The combination of the two made the rifle almost noiseless to operate although they did drastically reduce the range and change the trajectory of the rounds, both of which Neeley was prepared for after many hours on the range firing it.
A pair of headlights carved into the northern end of the alley. Neeley tried to control the adrenaline that now began to overlap the speed. She watched the car roll slowly down the alley and come to a halt, the dumpster and its hidden contents thirty meters ahead.
Looking through the scope, Neeley saw one of the men in the building across the street, the one on the left speak into his hand.
The car was an armored limo. Another pair of headlights came in from the south. This one was a Mercedes. Not obviously armored, as it rode too high for that. It came to a halt thirty-five meters from the limo, headlights dueling. The dumpster flanked the Mercedes, to its right front.
The doors on the limo opened and four men got out, two to a side. Three had submachineguns. The fourth a large suitcase. The Mercedes disgorged three men, all also heavily armed. One went back and opened the trunk.
"I want your man out of the window up there," one of the men from the Mercedes yelled. The guy in the dumpster had seen the glow from the same cigarette that Neeley had. This also confirmed that the man in the dumpster had communication with the Mercedes.
After a moment's hesitation, the man with the suitcase pulled a small Motorola radio off his belt and spoke into it. A minute later, the man who had been smoking walked out of the building and joined the other four.
"Satisfied?" the suitcase man yelled back.
"Yes," the chief Mercedes man answered.
Neeley adjusted the scope's focus knob, zooming in. The remaining man across the way was now resting the bipods of an M60 machine gun on the windowsill. She shifted back to the standoff in the alley.
The men from the Mercedes unloaded two heavy cardboard boxes from the car's trunk and stacked them ten feet in front of the headlights. The five men from the limo side moved forward, fanning out, the man with the suitcase in the middle.
Neeley placed the crosshairs of the night-scope on the head of the suitcase man. She began to note the rhythm of her heart. The tip of her finger lay lightly on the trigger, almost a lover’s caress. She slowly exhaled two-thirds of the air in her lungs, to what Gant had called the natural respiratory pause, and then held her diaphragm still. In between heartbeats, she smoothly squeezed the trigger and, with the rifle producing only the sound of the bolt working in concert with a low puff from the barrel suppresser, the 7.62-millimeter subsonic round left the muzzle. In midstride, the target's head blew apart.
Reacting instinctively, not knowing where death had winged its way from, the other four men swung up their submachineguns and fired on the Mercedes crew. The dumpster man replied, only to be lost in the roar of the machine gun in the window. In the ensuing confusion, and on the same paused breath, in between new heartbeats, Neeley put a round into one of the limo men.
After ten seconds of thunderous fire, an echoing silence enveloped the street. All the Mercedes men were down. The M60 had swiss-cheesed the dumpster. Two of the limo men were still standing.
Neeley took another breath and slowly exhaled, then paused. In between the next three heartbeats, she fired three times. First round, a headshot blowing the M60 gunner backwards into the darkened room across the way. Second and third rounds finishing the two-left standing before they even realized that death was silently lashing out of a window above their heads.
Satisfied that all were down, Neeley pulled out a red lens flashlight and searched the dirty floor of the room. She collected the five pieces of expended brass and placed them in a pocket on the outside of the backpack, insuring the Velcro cover was tightly sealed. She listened to the earpiece from the portable police scanner in her pocket as she swung on the backpack and started down. She was on the street before the first call for a car to investigate shots fired came over the airway. The police would not respond with any particular alacrity. Shots fired were common calls in the South Bronx at night. Cops tended to band together here and only became excited if the radio call was ‘officer down’.
As she headed toward the Mercedes, movement from one of the bodies caused her to swing the muzzle up; one of the men was still alive. Neeley watched the figure writhing on the ground for a few seconds. She stepped forward, and with one boot, shoved the body over, keeping the muzzle pointed at the man's head. The man's stomach was a sea of very dark, arterial blood: gut shot. Neeley's training automatically started scrolling through her consciousness, outlining the proper procedures to treat the wound.
The bulky barrel of the rifle mesmerized the man’s gaze. Looking above it, into Neeley's dark pupils, his own widened with surprise. They searched for mercy in the depths of Neeley's thickly lashed eyes. Neeley's entire body started sweating and the adrenaline kicked up to an even higher level. The muzzle didn't waver.
The round entered a small black dot between the man's eyes. The bullet mushroomed through the brain and took off the entire rear of the head, spraying the dirty street. Neeley watched the body twitch and become still. She automatically scooped up the expended brass casing and stuffed it into her pocket.
Moving to the cardboard boxes, she pulled a thermal grenade out of one of the pockets of her loose fitting black leather, knee-length overcoat and pulled the pin. She placed the grenade on top of the boxes and released the arming lever, pocketing both it and the pin. Acting quickly, trying to make up for the seconds lost dealing with the wounded man, she tore the briefcase out of the limp hand still holding it and jogged to the end of the alley. A subdued pop and a flicker of flames appeared behind her as two million dollars worth of cocaine began to go up in flames.
Satisfied she was out of immediate danger, and before reaching the corner, Neeley twisted the locking screw and broke the rifle down into two parts. She hung the barrel on the inside right of her coat and the stock on the left, securing them with specially sown in bands of Velcro.