I fired my last two rounds into his chest, and my slide locked back.
The remaining shooters opened up on me, and I dove behind the armored SUV. Their bullets pinged off of the heavy skin and smoked the window before ricocheting high into the sky.
The shooters wanted me so badly they forgot, in that one fatal instant, about Top and Bunny.
Bunny spun out a side door to the garage and fired three rounds with the shotgun, catching the left-hand shooter in the chest and face. Top leaned out of the second floor window and put half a magazine into the last shooter.
As the last one fell I swapped out the magazine in my Beretta and crept to the edge of the car. Simon Burke had said that there were six buyers. Five men lay sprawled on the bloody gravel.
Where was the sixth…?
I tapped my ear bud. “We have one more hostile,” I began, but Top cut me off.
“Negative, Cowboy,” he said, using my combat call sign, “we have multiple hostiles inbound.”
I turned and saw the fog swirling around two cars barreling down the long dirt road. Then there was a roar to my right and I saw another pair of vehicles — ATVs with oversized tires — crashing our way through the cornfields.
“Where’s this fog coming from?” demanded Top. “Can’t see worth a damn?”
“I got a team coming in on foot,” called Bunny. “Behind the house, running along a drainage ditch. Can’t make out numbers with that mist out there. No, wait…there’s a second team farther back in the corner. Damn! A third at nine o’clock to the front door. Four men in black. Geez…Boss…we’re under siege here. We need backup.”
We needed an army, but we weren’t likely to get one. The closest help was the naval airbase in Willow Grove. Half an hour at least.
With a sinking heart I understood the enormity of what Simon Burke had done. Not six buyers. Six teams of buyers. Conservative estimate — twenty men. Depressing estimate — thirty.
Coming straight at us.
Chap. 7
We needed five minutes. With five minutes we could have fitted out with Kevlar and ballistic helmets, strapped on vests heavy with fresh magazines, picked optimum shooting positions, and turned the whole farm into a killbox.
We needed five damn minutes.
We had thirty seconds.
“Talk to me, Cowboy,” said Top.
“Sergeant Rock and Jolly Green,” I barked. “Converge on me. Living room. Now.”
I spun around, yanked open the door of the SUV, ground the key in the starter, spun the wheel and stamped down. The big machine took an awkward, ugly lurch, then found footing and rolled heavily away from the house. I went completely around the roundabout, then jerked the wheel over and put the pedal to the floor as I aimed for the front door. The SUV punched a truck-sized hole through the shattered doorway, ripped across the living room floor and slammed into the stairs with enough force to rock the house to its foundations. I hadn’t had time to buckle up for safety, so I bashed forward and backward. I could taste blood in my mouth as I bailed out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back.
“Sergeant Rock, coming in!” yelled Top as he pounded down the stairs. He vaulted the wreckage of the bottom steps, ran across the hood, onto the roof, and dropped with a grunt into a squat next to me. He yelped in pain as his forty-year-old knees took the impact, but he sucked it up and staggered to me as I raised the back hatch.
“Coming in!” yelled Bunny, and then he was there, coming at us from the kitchen.
I clumsied open the gun lockers, and immediately six pairs of hands reached for the toys. I grabbed a bag of loaded magazines and an M4 and peeled away.
“Yo!” Top barked and tossed another bag to me. “Party favors!”
I snatched it out of the air and flashed him a grin. He grinned back. This was a total nightmare scenario, and only an insane oddsmaker would give us one in fifty on getting out of this. So…might as well enjoy it.
“Where, Boss?” asked Bunny.
“Kitchen. The fog might work for us. It’ll confuse everything out there. Go!”
“On it.” He shoved five drum magazines for the shotgun into a bag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he was gone, running to the kitchen.
“Top,” I said, “upstairs.”
“Why you keep making the old guy run up and down stairs?”
We both laughed.
He grabbed his gear and climbed over the wreckage.
I glanced through the broken window. The lead car was almost to the roundabout. It had slowed, though, and I figured that the converging teams were suddenly aware of one another. Who knows, I thought, maybe Burke was right. Maybe they’d slaughter each other while Top, Bunny and I stayed in here and played cribbage.
And maybe tomorrow I’d wake up looking like Brad Pitt. About as much chance of that.
I heard voices shouting and car doors slamming.
Then gunshots.
The first rounds were fired away from us, off to my three o’clock, the direction of the team on ATVs.
Then three other guns opened up on the house.
So much for cribbage.
Chap. 8
It became hell.
A swirling surreal white hell, with the red flashes of muzzle fire filtered by thick fog, and all sounds muted to strangeness. Overhead the storm grumbled and growled, but no rain fell.
Maybe one of these days I’ll look back on that ten minutes under the August sun in backwoods Pennsylvania and laugh about it. Maybe it’ll become one of those anecdotes soldiers tell when they want to story-top the last guy. Or, maybe when I think about it I’ll get the shakes and go crawling off to find a bottle.
Everyone was shooting at everyone.
I’ve never seen anything like it. Don’t ever want to see anything like it again.
One team was dead. That left five teams of shooters, sent by God only knows who. Three were Middle Eastern, I could tell that much, and that made sense. Then I heard someone yelling in Russian. Someone else yelling in Spanish.
I was yelling in every language I could curse in…and I am fluent in a long list of languages.
I crouched behind the open door of the SUV, reached around with the M4 and opened fire. I wasn’t aiming. No-damn-body was aiming. But everybody was sure as hell capping off a lot of rounds. My hearing will never be the same. Ditto my nerves.
I think I even screamed for a little bit. I’ll admit it, I’m not proud.
I fired the magazine dry, dropped it, slapped in another, fired, swapped it out, fired. The effort of holding the gun was rattling the bones in my arm to pieces, and I don’t think I hit anything with the first four magazines. The mist was chest high now, and the men out there were crouching. It was like trying to fight in the middle of a blizzard.
So I set down the gun and dug into the bag for one of Top’s ‘party favors.’ An M67 fragmentation grenade.
“Come to papa,” I murmured.
The M67 looks like a dark-green apple, but instead of juicy sweetness the spherical body contains six-and-a-half ounces of composition B explosive. When it goes boom, the body bursts into steel fragments that will forever change the life anything within fifteen meters. I lobbed one out through the hole that had been the front wall of the house. I never heard it bounce, never heard it land.