“Green Giant, this is Cowboy. On the stairs and coming up,” I barked into the mike.
“Join the party, Cowboy.” Bunny’s voice sounded relaxed.
Then DeeDee added, “Stay away from the windows. Chatterbox is enjoying himself.”
“Copy that, Scream Queen.”
Chatterbox was our last team member. His real name was John Smith, and the DMS had headhunted him away from LAPD SWAT. He was one of those silent, introspective types who looked like a beatnik poet from the Village but who was the hammer of God with a sniper rifle.
I tapped the command channel and keyed over to Smith’s frequency.
“Chatterbox, this is Cowboy. I’m on the second floor. No window shots until I give you the word.”
“‘K,’” he said.
I peered around the wall at the top of the stairs and looked right into the eyes of a dead man. He was sprawled on the floor with a black bullet hole above his left eyebrow and a look of profound surprise stamped onto his face. The whole back of his head had been blown out. John Smith at work. I’ve seen a lot of great shooters in the military and on the cops, and I’ve met a few whose accuracy bordered on the supernatural. But John Smith was a Jedi. He was spooky good. If you’re unlucky enough to step into his crosshairs, then you’d better be right with Jesus.
I leaned farther out into the hall and saw that most of the second floor was an open-plan studio. There were two more men slumped like rag dolls. Automatic weapons lay near each one. Three other men knelt beside the windows, weapons in hand. They were probably too smart and too scared to try to return fire after three of their brothers had taken head shots. It was a tough nut to crack, because a sniper is the most feared man in any battle scenario.
The second most feared is the guy who sneaks up behind you.
I ducked back onto the stairs and whispered into the mike. “Cowboy to Chatterbox. I’m moving into the field of fire. No shots until I give the word or fifteen seconds is up. Copy?”
“‘K,’” he said again. Guy never shuts up.
I took my Beretta in a two-handed grip and then I was up and moving, rounding the corner, entering the open room, running fast as I cleared the corners with a flick and then fanned the barrel back to the shooters, taking the one farthest from me first with two in the head and shifting to the next gun without a pause. The other two shooters started to turn, but I shot the middle guy twice through the side of the head and the impact sent him crashing through the broken window.
The third guy was almost in kicking range and he was moving at lightning speed, swinging his AK-47 up, turning toward me, finger already inside the trigger guard. If he’d had a handgun instead of a long gun he might have beat me to the shot, but I put the first one in the center of his chest, then raised the gun fourteen inches and put the second one through his forehead. Double tap. All six shots fired in less than three seconds and my head ringing with thunder.
Then John Smith’s voice was yelling in my ear, “On your six! On your six!”
I ducked and spun to one side as a hail of bullets burned through where I’d been standing. Four shooters were crowding into the doorway and I had no idea where the hell they’d come from. The first two banged into each other trying to get through the doorway, and I was already coming up out of my jump and roll. I killed them both with five shots between them. I moved like a son of a bitch, rushing in but to one side, firing one-handed as I tore a fresh magazine out of my pocket. The bodies in the doorway fell face forward just as my slide locked back. The third shooter kicked his way into the room, starting to turn as he cleared the doorway and the bodies.
Shit. No time to swap out the mags, so I dropped my Beretta and drew the Rapid Response Folding knife from its sheath clipped inside my jeans pocket. The RRF has a wicked little 3.375-inch blade that locks into place with a snap of the wrist. What it lacks in weight it makes up for in speed, because at only four ounces it moved as fast as my hand. No drag at all.
I bashed the rifle aside with my left and whipped him across the throat with a very tight semi-circular slash. Blood exploded outward in a hydrostatic jet. I faded left and took a hard leap past his shoulder, and drove the point of the knife into the face of the fourth shooter. The blade caught him beside the nose and I punched it all the way through. He screamed and his finger clutched around the trigger, sending half a magazine into the legs of the guy whose throat I’d cut. I gave the knife a quarter turn and yanked it out, then plunged it back into his throat.
He collapsed over the tangled legs of his comrade.
I tore the knife free and wiped it clean on a dead man’s sleeve, then retrieved my Beretta and swapped out the mags.
My heart was hammering in my chest and I could smell my own sweat mixed with the copper stink of blood. There hadn’t been time to be scared before now, but it was catching up to me like a son of a bitch.
I tapped the commlink. “Chatterbox, Green Giant—center room clear. All hostiles down. Repeat: All hostiles are—”
“Get out!”
It broke into the team channel. Top’s voice. Screaming.
“Hostile with a vest! Hostile with a vest! Out–out–out!”
A vest.
Jesus Christ.
We all knew about those vests. Anyone who had been in Iraq or Afghanistan knows about suicide bombers who follow the compulsion to strap on forty pounds of high explosives and turn the day into red nightmare.
Suddenly we were all yelling and running. I ran for the window and went out like I was Superman. Maybe a drop of fifteen feet to the street. There was a huge black noise behind me, and just as I cleared the window I felt myself lifted as if wishing I could fly was making it so.
As if.
The force of the blast threw me out over the street. I pinwheeled my arms, and my legs mimicked running as I flew. There were cherry trees along the curb. In one of the weird moments of clarity that happen in the middle of a crisis, I knew that the leaves and branches were going to break my fall, but I wasn’t going to like it one bit. Behind me the fireball burned the air and ignited the leaves and sucked all the air out of my lungs. Then the tree curled its branches into a fist and knocked me out of all sense and understanding.
I WOKE UP in an ambulance. Top and Khalid were with me, both of them covered with soot and bloodstained field dressings. Top told me the news.
One of the hostiles had come up out of the cellar wearing a vest packed with bars of Semtex. Everyone on Echo Team had taken cuts and burns except John Smith.
I started to say that we’d gotten off lucky, but something in Top’s face stopped me.
“What—?” I asked.
“Joey,” he said. “He pushed Khalid out the door, but he caught his foot on a throw rug and went down. He got up, but he was one step too late.”
Joey Goldschein had been the only one of my team left inside when everything went to hell. He was six months back from his second tour in Afghanistan. He deserved a longer life.
That was our first encounter with the Seven Kings.
AFTER THAT, DEEP Throat came to Church with dribs and drabs of intel. My part in the Seven Kings affair slowly evaporated as I became involved in several unrelated cases. Other DMS teams worked on it, and it’s both sad and frightening to say that there are always multiple threats chewing at the fabric of our society. Vultures and predators, sharks and parasites, bent on destroying us in order to satisfy their own political agendas. I don’t say that they do this to satisfy their religious agendas, because I’m either idealistic enough or cynical enough to believe that religion is deliberately misused as a label for greedy sons of bitches whose real objective is wealth and power. Sure, the freedom fighter in the trenches may think that God wants him to strap C4 to his chest and walk into a post office, but until the so-called religious leaders do that themselves I think it’s a scam. And they’re scamming their own loyal followers as much as they’re scamming the rest of the world. I think this was true during the Crusades and it’s true now in the Middle East. I seldom trust the guys at the top.