I waved my hands at him, shouted, “Hey! Tell the driver to stop!”
The man stiffened, took a few steps toward us, put his hand to his ear. “What?”
“Shut off that bulldozer!” Sampson yelled, and he shone a flashlight on the badge he was holding. “Metro DC Police!”
The bulldozer surged up again. The man froze, and then nodded. He ran toward the cab. I couldn’t make out any details of the driver.
“Police!” the man yelled. “They said stop!”
The machine ground to a halt atop the snowbank. The engine dropped into an idle.
“What is the matter?” the man on the snowbank called.
“Sir, could you come down here?” I called back. “We believe this is a crime scene. Who told you to clear the construction site?”
The man hesitated, tapped his ear as if to indicate he could not hear me with the dozer so close, and then crouched as if he were going to butt-slide down the snowbank to me. I heard the whine of hydraulic lines engaging and glanced up and over at the bulldozer blade starting to rise.
“CSX?” Sampson said.
Sampson trained his Maglite on the chest of the guy sitting on top of the snowbank. The patch on the jacket said CSX. Why would train workers be clearing out a federal construction site at four fifteen in the morning?
I started reaching casually for my service pistol, wishing that I was not standing in deep snow, and readjusted the beam of my own flashlight until it shone up and through the windshield of the bulldozer. Just before the blade got high enough to block my view, I saw a man wearing a blue CSX coat. His right eye was covered in bandages.
CHAPTER 106
“Gun!” Sampson roared. He leaped to his right and got down into a combat shooting crouch, clawing for his weapon.
My Glock came free of its holster and I saw the man lying prone on the snowbank just before he shot. The round hit low in front of me and sprayed chips of ice everywhere.
Up to our knees in that chunky snow, vulnerable due to the high ground, Sampson and I were the proverbial fish in the barrel. But Sampson didn’t seem to feel that way. He squeezed off two shots at the gunman on the snowbank just as the bulldozer engine roared. Both rounds hit left of the prone man, and he immediately returned fire. I was aiming the Glock when I heard the crack of his bullet passing an inch from my head. My shot hit beneath him.
The bulldozer clanked into gear and came straight down the snowbank at us, blade up, blocking any shot at the windshield.
Both Sampson and I are tall. I’m six two. He’s got three inches on me. Which means we have long legs, which we used to run in opposite directions. Sampson went straight at the one shooting at us, firing nonstop, driving back the man on the snowbank.
I tripped and sprawled in the last deep snow before the plowed road. My shoulder smashed hard against an ice boulder, and I felt bones break and things tear apart.
The pain of the impact and the shock that blew through my system were indescribable. Eyes closed, gritting my teeth, I moaned and felt my pistol fall from a hand that no longer worked.
“Alex!” Sampson yelled above the roar of the bulldozer.
I forced open my eyes, peered through the spots that danced there. Sampson was sixty feet from me, less than ten feet from the bulldozer blade, scrambling toward the plowed road to Eleventh Street.
He slipped, stumbled. The blade closed the gap.
“John!” I croaked, trying to get to my feet, realizing that my entire right arm was useless and dangling at my side.
My oldest friend had been a great athlete in his day, a man with deceptively fluid moves and an uncanny sense of balance. But Sampson was DC through and through, not used to running in snow. When the blade was less than three feet from him, he stumbled again, and I thought he was about to take the hit of his life right there on M Street.
CHAPTER 107
The guy up on the snowbank shot at Sampson when less than a foot separated Sampson from the bulldozer blade. The bullet hit the upper back part of the blade, ricocheted, and shattered the bulldozer’s windshield.
The machine lurched hard left, as if the driver had ducked and pulled the steering wheel. Now the blade was coming right at me from about fifty feet away. I got to one knee and then up to my feet, gasping at the pain shooting everywhere around my right shoulder.
Gun.
The butt of my Glock was right there in the snow, the barrel buried all the way to the trigger. I grabbed at it with my left hand and pulled it from the snow as the bulldozer closed on me. I heard someone shoot, and someone scream.
I stood unsteadily, my right arm swinging stupidly at my side. But my survival voices were taking over: Wait until he’s right there, and then jump to the side, just off the blade. Clear the steel treads, and you’ll have your shot at him. Left-handed, but you should be close enough.
But then a louder voice screamed, Snow! You’ve got snow in your barrel. Pull the trigger, and your barrel explodes!
The bulldozer was right on me then, no more than ten feet away, and I was sure my entire body was about to feel like my right shoulder. But then it dawned on me that the driver could no longer see me, that the blade was blocking him, that he was driving blind.
I jumped. The upper corner of the blade just missed my head. I landed, jumped again, pivoted, hoping to aim the gun at the driver and tell him I’d shoot if-
Sampson’s gun went off behind me. I heard the bullet ping inside the cab. The driver did what I absolutely did not expect. He jumped out of the cab, landing awkwardly in the snow about three feet away, while the bulldozer kept on, climbing the snowbank on the median strip, headed toward an office building across the street.
I raised my gun at the one-eyed man even as he raised his gun at me.
CHAPTER 108
Our weapons were less than two inches apart. The one-eyed terrorist and I were in a Mexican standoff that looked like a no-winner for me any way it went down. If he pulled the trigger, I was dead. If I pulled the trigger, my barrel would explode and I was dead. Maybe he was dead too, but I was definitely in a black body bag with a grieving wife and family.
The man’s uncovered eye was wide and glistening. “Inshallah!” he whispered to me.
I got it. We were both in the hands of God now, about to discover His will.
The sound of the bulldozer crashing into something was followed by a gunshot that came from behind and above me. Both the driver and I instinctively cringed and ducked, but I recovered much quicker.
My arms were longer than his. I probably had three, four inches of reach on him. My right arm was useless, but my left had been bent as I aimed my plugged gun at him, not extended at all.
My left hand jabbed at him, setting him up for a straight impossible-to-deliver right cross. Instead, I slapped the side of his pistol hard to his left with the barrel of my gun and then stepped into his very, very large blind spot.
The terrorist shot wildly. Sampson fired at virtually the same time, and I heard the sound of a hit and the cry of a wounded man somewhere up on the snowbank before I chopped down with my pistol, hitting the man right in the bandages, right on the bone above the socket of his scalded eye.
His knees left him, and so did everything else. He crashed onto his side, out cold.
CHAPTER 109
A week later, it was raining and warm; the deep freeze that had gripped the city so severely was gone, and the snow had turned into slush and puddles. But that would not stop me from taking my wife out for dinner and dancing on New Year’s Eve. We were going to double-date with John Sampson and his wife, Billie. We’d done it up right, rented a car and driver to chauffeur us to our dinner at the rooftop-terrace restaurant of the W Hotel-best view in the city-and then across the river to the Havana Breeze Latin Club in Fairfax for a little salsa, a little merengue.