Someone opened fire with an M4 behind him, and he turned just in time to see a figure at the front gate firing-but not at him. The man was shooting at the group of office buildings across the marina, the muzzle flashing, lighting up the guard booth nearby with every pull of the trigger.
Dave.
A man running out of Marina 1 stumbled and fell, his body illuminated by bright lights from inside. Other figures were moving visibly on the other side of windows, scrambling for cover as glass around them exploded from Dave’s barrage.
Keo started lifting his rifle to help Dave out when another bullet slammed into the key box inches from his head-ping! — and ricocheted into the pavement.
He scrambled away from the box, hoping that taking himself away from the stationary object would make him a harder target to reacquire. Then again, if the guy had some kind of night-vision-capable scope, than it probably didn’t matter how far Keo moved-
Buzz! as another round hit the parking lot a foot to the right of him, spraying water and concrete chunks on impact.
Keo would have gotten up and ran away if he had the time, but he didn’t. Men were pouring out of the offices across the marina, and Dave had stopped firing. Either he had run out of bullets and was changing magazines, or something else had happened. Keo flicked the fire selector to burst fire and unleashed half of his rifle’s magazine into the source of light across the parking lot.
He wasn’t trying to hit any specific target, but simply firing at where the lights were the brightest, which at the moment was the single wide-open door that a pair of figures were rushing out of. The distance was fifty meters, and it was a little hard to miss when you were just shooting into the only source of light in, at that moment, the entire world.
His aim was true enough that both men fell out of the door and didn’t get back up.
Keo spotted a tall silhouette behind one of the broken windows, looking out, and he put another burst in that direction. The man ducked his head just in time, and two others behind him scrambled for cover behind a desk.
He was waiting for more soldiers to come out of the other offices, but the windows behind those remained blackened. Which meant all the soldiers had, for whatever reason, congregated in one place. That was good for him and Dave.
That is, if Dave was even still alive.
He was standing up, looking at the gate to make sure Dave was still there, and at the same time realizing that he had stayed at the same spot for way too long when instead of a buzzing sound, there was instead a sudden sting and his right leg buckled slightly under him. Keo knew what had happened before he saw the blood pour out of the right side of his thigh and flood down the parking lot along with the rain, as if drawn irresistibly to the river.
He pushed himself back up, turned around, flicked the fire selector on his rifle to semi-auto, and squeezed off everything he had left in the magazine at the water tower. He aimed for the largest target-the barely visible tip-while knowing full well he wasn’t going to hit anyone from this distance, but hoping he did just enough to distract the guy. He imagined he could hear the ping! ping! of his bullets bouncing off the metal tower, but of course that was impossible given the pounding rainstorm around him.
He moved left while shooting, angling back toward the docks. Keo sent off his last round and dropped the magazine and slammed in a new one, turning around almost simultaneously as two men in the office opened fire-except not at him. Maybe they couldn’t see him very well, but they certainly had no trouble seeing the golf cart as it rumbled slowly (Christ, that thing is slow) across the parking lot.
Keo switched his fire over to the office, again using the lights as his target finder. He stitched the two rectangle-shaped windows, forcing the two figures firing out of them to stop shooting and duck for cover.
He was still shooting when Keo heard the buzz! as the bullet tore through the left sleeve of his raincoat and took away a chunk of his flesh underneath. Blood poured out, but the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as when he had gotten hit in the thigh. Maybe it was the cold numbing his flesh or the fact that he knew stopping to dress his injuries now meant death, but Keo managed to grit his teeth through the shoulder wound and turned around just as Dave appeared, the golf cart flying in his direction like an out-of-control lumbering beast.
“Take the first boat!” Keo shouted. “Go go go!”
Dave slammed on the brake and climbed out of the golf cart as Keo turned around and took a step sideways and squeezed off a round at the water tower. He took another step and fired again, and kept repeating the process until he heard Dave running past him, gasping for breath as he went.
Keo glanced back in time to see Dave make the docks and run up it toward the twenty-footer, Jordan’s body a big black unmoving clump draped over his shoulder.
He glanced back at Marina 1. Lights poured out of the windows and the open door, but he couldn’t detect any signs of movement. Maybe they had finally had enough and didn’t think it was worth it to get their heads blown off-
Buzz! as another bullet came within an inch of Keo’s right ear.
Sonofabitch.
He ran after Dave and Jordan, grabbing the third and final magazine from his pouch as he did so. A hole appeared in the plank in front of him, splintering wood, as the sniper fired again. The bullet disappeared into the water below, and Keo ran past the newly created hole without wasting a precious half-second contemplating the near-miss. His entire night had been a series of near-misses. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had two holes in him as proof of that.
Dave had already climbed into the boat and placed Jordan’s body across a long bench in the back while scrambling to one of the two lines keeping the boat in place. Dave glanced up as Keo ran over. “The key!” he shouted.
“I got it!” Keo shouted back.
He reached into his raincoat pocket and fisted the key. He would have tossed it to Dave, but he didn’t have any faith in either one of them making the exchange in this weather. So he ran the whole distance and leaned over and handed it to Dave instead, then ran back to unwind the bowline.
All of that took three precious seconds, enough time for the sniper to reacquire them, and there was a sharp ping! as a bullet drilled into the portside of the boat. Dave either didn’t see or hear the impact, or he was too focused on putting the key in the ignition to do anything about being shot at. The boat’s motor roared to life at about the same time Keo got the line free and tossed it into the back.
That was also when he heard the familiar clop-clop-clop of horse hooves and looked back and saw the elongated, shadowy forms of men on horseback coming through the marina gate. While the distance and darkness made making out their exact numbers impossible, he managed to distinguish three, maybe five forms out of the moving blob, though he had no illusions that that was all of them.
“Come on!” Dave shouted behind him.
Keo hopped into the boat just as something buzzed! past his head and hit the water a few meters off starboard. He pretended it was a fly instead of thinking about how close he had just come to having his brains splattered in the river.
Think positive!
He almost laughed as he landed in the back of the boat next to Jordan’s swaddled form resting on the bench to his right. Dave was already reversing out of the slip, having also seen the horsemen coming in their direction, the clop-clop-clop of hooves somehow managing to pierce through the rain’s stranglehold on sounds.