So, the bad guys usually stand around looking freaked out and everyone bleats about how innocent they are, yada yada.
This wasn’t one of those times.
Jerry, who was the oldest man on the task force, was point man for our team, and I was right behind him with two guys at my back. We hustled down a short corridor and then broke left into a big conference room. Eight Middle Eastern guys around a big oak table. Just inside the door was a big blue phone booth-sized container standing against the wall. “Freeze!” I yelled in three different languages. “Put your hands above your heads and—”
That was as far as I got because the eight guys threw themselves out of their chairs and pulled guns. O.K. Corral, no doubt about it.
When IAD asked me later to recollect how many shots I fired and who exactly I fired them at, I laughed. Twelve guys in a room and everyone’s shooting. If they’re not dressed like your buddies — and you can, to a reasonable degree of certainty, determine that they’re not civilian bystanders — you shoot and duck for cover.
I shot the first guy to draw on us, taking him with two to the body. It spun him against the wall even as he opened up with a Tech-9, and as he spun he poured half a mag into one of his buddies. A ricochet burned the air three inches from my face. The only lucky part of a free-for-all shootout is that everyone is so caught up in not getting shot that they don’t have time to aim. That’s a little less true for SWAT, and the ratio of aim-to-hit improves once the shock of the moment wears off.
The unlucky part — and this is a real bitch — is that no matter how much you prepare for a shootout, you never really expect one. Most people have this moment — it feels like an hour but it’s really a splintered part of a second — where they don’t think or move or do anything the way that they should. It’s not called fatal hesitation for nothing, and in that fragment of a second I saw two of our guys take hits. One was aimed and well placed and the other was a wild shot from the melee, and it could have as easily been friendly fire as a bullet from a bad guy.
I wasn’t caught in that moment. For whatever reason — martial arts, Ranger training, years or the street, or maybe I’m wired different — I don’t hesitate. As soon as the game started I was in my groove. I pivoted toward the guy who’d just shot one of mine and I took him off at the knees with two rounds from the shotgun. Take this message home: don’t shoot at cops.
I spun out of the way of some return fire and ducked behind the big blue case. I fired the Remington dry and then dropped it so I could pull my Glock. I know the .40 is standard but I’ve always found the .45 to be more persuasive.
A bad guy rose up behind a stack of file boxes and pointed a SIG Sauer at me in a very professional two-handed grip. I gave him a double-tap — one to the sternum to make him stand at attention and the next through the brain pan.
After that it was duck, scream, shoot, reload. Everyone doing the same damn dance. Jerry Spencer was near me, and we covered each other during reloads. The report says I dropped four hostiles in that initial firefight. One of them was the thirteenth man.
Yeah, I know I said that there were eight of them and four of us, but during the firefight I caught movement to my immediate right and saw the door to the big blue case hanging loose, its lock ripped up by gunfire. The door swung open and a man staggered out. He wasn’t armed so I didn’t fire on him; instead I concentrated on the guy behind him who was tearing up the room with a QBZ-95 Chinese assault rifle, something I’d only ever seen in magazines. Why he had it and where the hell he found ammunition for it I never did find out, but those rounds punched a line of holes right through Jerry’s shield, and he went down.
“Son of a bitch!” I yelled and put two in the shooter’s chest.
Then this other guy, the thirteenth guy, comes crashing right into me. He was pale and sweaty, stank like raw sewage, and had a glazed bug-eyed stare. I thought, drug addict. He wasn’t armed, so I gave him a flat kick in the upper leg to drive him off. That usually takes a man down with a knot of screaming cramps in the dense meat of the thigh, but all it did to him was knock him against the edge of the conference table. He rebounded and lunged at one of my guys — a tough little monkey named McGoran — and I swear to God the dope fiend tried to bite him. McGoran butt-stroked him with his rifle stock and the pale guy went down.
I turned to offer cover fire while McGoran dragged Jerry to cover, but I caught movement to my left and there he was again: the fruitcake with the bug eyes. He snarled at me, his lips peeling back from green and grimy teeth. I don’t know what kind of drugs this guy was taking, but he was having a really freaky high. I stepped back to avoid his lunge, but my back slammed hard into a file cabinet and the sweaty guy clamped his teeth on the forearm I put up to ward him off. He tried to tear a chunk out, but he had a mouthful of sleeve and Kevlar. All I could feel was a bad pinch, and in the madness of the moment part of my mind lingered to marvel at how determined he was to chow down on my arm.
“Get off!” I screamed and gave him an overhand left that should have dropped him, but only shook him loose. He dropped to a crouch and scuttled away like a cockroach, pushing past me to make for the back door. The firefight was still hot so I couldn’t give chase even though I figured he was making for that sweet Cigarette outside — Jerry’s boat — so I leaned out into the hall and parked two in his back, quick and easy. He hit the deck and skidded five feet before he stopped, then he simply sagged against the floor and stopped moving. I spun back into the room and now McGoran provided cover fire so I could pull Jerry behind the table.
A second team crowded into the room and now we had the numbers to turn the place into a shooting gallery.
I heard gunfire coming from a different part of the warehouse so I peeled off from the pack to see what was happening and immediately spotted a trio of hostiles in a nice shooting-blind laying down a lot of fire at one of the other teams. The team under fire had a wooden crate for cover, and the automatic fire was chopping it to kindling. The hostiles knew their business, too: they fired in sequence so that there was always a continuous barrage while the others reloaded.
Screw this, I thought as I raced forward. I ran as fast as silence would allow, well out of their line of sight. I had my pistol out, but to open fire from that distance would have been suicide. I might get one or two but the other would turn and chop me up. There was no cover at all between me and the hostiles, but I hugged the wall, running on cat feet, making no noise that could have been heard above the din of the gunfire.
When I was ten feet out I opened fire. My first shot caught one of the hostiles in the back of the neck, and the impact slammed him into the crates. As the other two turned I closed to zero distance and fired one more shot, which hurled the second hostile backward, but then the slide on my gun locked open. There was no time to change magazines. The third shooter instantly lunged at me, swinging his rifle barrel to bear. I parried it one-handed with my gun arm, and while I was still in full stride I used the empty pistol to check the swing of his rifle while simultaneously jabbing forward with my left hand, fingers folded in half and stiffened so that the secondary line of knuckles drove into the attacker’s windpipe. A Leopard Paw punch, nasty but useful. As this was happening I made a quick change midstep so that my left foot went from a regular running step into a longer lunge and the tip of my combat boot crunched into the cartilage under the hostile’s kneecap. I brought my gun hand up and jabbed the exposed barrel of the pistol into the hostile’s left eye socket.