Renny paused his breathing and gently pressed the trigger, the center of the reticle steady on the lead soldier’s neck, willing his body to stone. The rifle bucked and he automatically worked the bolt. The reticle settled and he saw the man was down, legs kicking. The soldier next to him grabbed him by his webgear and pulled him farther behind the IMP, not knowing from where the shot had been fired.
The second soldier looked panicked, then pressed his hands against the side of the downed man’s neck. They were immediately covered in blood, bright even at that distance. Renny stilled himself and broke another shot. It felt clean. The round took the kneeling soldier where his neck met his shoulder, inside the collar of his armor, angling downward into his body. He fell backward, dead instantly.
“Damn,” Weasel said. There was a third man behind the IMP, but the body of the vehicle mostly blocked him from view. Weasel panned the binos around. “To the right. There’s a Growler. Guy in front of it, behind a wall.” He shook his head, then grabbed earplugs he had in a pocket and shoved them into place. That big rifle was fucking LOUD with that muzzle brake, Jesus. It was like being next to a grenade going off.
“On him,” Renny said quietly. Two seconds later the rifle barked loudly. The soldier fell, thrashing and screaming loudly enough for his cries to carry all the way to their roof.
“You pulled it low,” Weasel said, as Renny worked the bolt.
“Nope,” Renny murmured, not taking his eye from the scope. A soldier ran up to his injured screaming squadmate and knelt down, thinking he was safe as they were both behind the wall and out of view from the Fisher Building. It still hadn’t registered to the men they were being shot at by someone else, somewhere else. Renny fired and the 250-grain A-Tip bullet took the man under his arm, just above his armor. It traversed both lungs and his heart and exited his lower back, the exit wound the size of a baseball. The hydrostatic shock of the bullet’s passing through the man at nearly twenty-five hundred feet per second ruptured nearly every organ in his chest. He fell atop his injured compatriot with his eyes open, dead.
Weasel glanced at Renny. He realized the senior citizen had coldly and deliberately injured the one man to sucker in another. And he’d just gone four for four.
“Okay, now they’ve figured it out,” Weasel said, as he and Renny began to take incoming fire. He hunkered down a little behind the roof edge, their height and the angle providing some protection, but the return fire wasn’t very accurate. It rarely was. He grabbed his radio. “Quigley has engaged troops north side of Nakatomi. Four down, still at least four to six out there.” Something occurred to him. “Hey, you want to put a round through that Growler’s radiator?”
Renny didn’t respond, he just shifted his aim, and fired a second later. They could hear the metal THUNK as the bullet impacted the vehicle. “And I’m out,” he said, leaving his bolt open. He scooted backward on the roof several feet, just to be sure he was under cover and out of sight, then removed the magazine from his rifle and began reloading it.
“That was some fucking good shooting,” Weasel said, having moved back with the man.
There was a burst of full-auto fire nearby, and both men jerked. “Weasel!” Carrells shouted from the stairwell, his voice cracking.
“Stay here,” Weasel told Renny, MP5 in hand. Before he’d taken two steps there was a roar of gunfire, multiple weapons firing on full auto, and then someone screaming.
Weasel came in through the roof door with the MP5 stock to his shoulder, pointed downward. He saw Carrells on the landing below him, face down and unmoving, with a pool of blood under his head, large and getting larger. There was the rush of boots on the stairs and bullets whined past Weasel’s ear. He jerked back, but not before he felt something warm on the side of his head. He grabbed a hand grenade off the front of his carrier and yanked the pin, then let the lever fly.
Even with earplugs in he swore he could hear the swish as the lever flipped through the air, and he counted to three Mississippi before under-handing the grenade in a gentle toss over the metal stair railing toward the sound of pounding boots. As he moved away from the door he grabbed a second grenade off his carrier and was pulling the pin before the first grenade detonated with a thundering roar he felt in his feet. He let the lever fly, yelled “Kobe!”, then hurled the second grenade through the open doorway at an angle. He heard it bounce off two of the cement walls, then start thudding down the stairs.
The grenade exploded, shrapnel clattering off the walls, and then Weasel was charging down the stairs, MP5 up. Past Carrells’ body two Tabs were dead on the stairs. Below them another was crawling slowly. Weasel put a burst into the back of the soldier’s neck, dropping him, but didn’t slow in his headlong rush down the stairs. He charged around another corner, then another, and found himself face-to-face with two young soldiers on the fourth-floor landing. Weasel shot them in their faces as one of the soldiers fired, and his momentum carried Weasel into them. They bounced off the open doorway and fell into a heap.
Weasel shoved himself upright, but even as he brought his MP5 to bear on the men on the floor he saw they were dead. He looked down and saw the rifle burst had stitched across his chest plate, destroying one spare MP5 magazine, but missed his flesh. He reached up and felt his neck. It was wet with blood, but the ricochet off the steel railing had done little more than graze his skin.
“I’m just better!” he shouted into the dead men’s faces, half deaf. Above him he heard the thunder from Renny’s big rifle as the man fired again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Cambridge West ran through the second-floor pedestrian tunnel connecting the New Center One building to the Hotel Saint Regis. Brooke was at the rear, on the radio. “Cambridge East, what’s your location, over? Cambridge East, do you copy?” There was no response.
Cambridge East had been on the sixth floor all the way at the east end of the long hotel but there was no way to know if they still were. “Shit,” Brooke spat. “Up,” she called out to her three squadmates. “We’ll head up to six, then all the way across, and see if we can find them. If they’re not up there we’ll work our way down.” She paused. “Quiet. And ID your targets before you shoot, I don’t want to waste any friendlies.”
They moved up the nearest stairwell, trying to do it quietly but quickly, listening closely. They hadn’t heard anything by the time they got up to the sixth-floor door. Brooke paused, listening, then tried the radio again. “Cambridge East, do you copy?” she said quietly. She waited ten seconds, then shook her head, opened the door, and waved them through.
The hallway was narrow, the carpet busily patterned. The color scheme of the old hotel seemed to be white and black—not her style at all, but it seemed to work. The hallway ran quite a long way in front of them, making it seem even narrower than it was.
They crept down either side of the hallway, rifles up. There was only a hint of movement at the far end before the rifles opened up, the bullets hitting all around them. The man in front of her went down as Brooke flung herself against the closest hotel room door, flattening her back against it. It was recessed slightly from the hallway proper, giving her six inches of cover. She shoved her rifle out and fired half a dozen times blindly. Incoming bullets bounced and whined around them, chunks of plaster and wood flying around her. Robbie was directly across the hall from her, back against another door, trying to suck in his chest.