Last Man Standing by David Baldacci
disorienting and would have given HRT the slight edge it needed to prevail without loss of life.
Since there were only two assault teams, snipers were standing by to jump into their blacks, or Nomex flight suits, and help in the attack. Each sniper carried, in addition to his sniper rifle, a CAR-16 auto assault rifle with a three-power Litton night scope. The plan was to hit from the front and the side in blitzkrieg style and contain the Frees in the main building. At that point the regular FBI would come in, read rights, execute search warrants and the next stop for the Frees would be court and then prison.
There was just enough to make this interesting, thought Web. The Frees had to know that the FBI was watching them. This was a very rural area and word of strangers got around, and the Bureau had had them under surveillance for a while now. HRT had to assume that their chief weapon, the element of surprise, would at least be diminished in this case.
Having learned something from the Charlie Team debacle, they had brought along two very bulky but very powerful thermal imagers. Romano fired one up and performed a sweep of each building on their side of the compound. Gulf was doing the same from the front. This thermal imager could look through darkened glass and even walls and nail the heat-filled image of any person lurking there with a slingshot or a mini-gun. Romano completed his surveillance and gave the all-clear. No automated sniper nest this time. All buildings except the main one were empty. It might go very clean.
Through his NV goggles Web looked around and noted the lights winking through the jumble of trees. These light pulses represented snipers who were wearing fireflies, infrared glow plugs the size of a cigarette lighter. The flies would blink every two seconds in a light spectrum visible only with night optics. This way the snipers could keep in touch with one another without giving away their position. If a target was suspected of having night optics as well, the flies weren’t used, for obvious reasons. Assaulters never used them. Each wink of light represented a friendly body with a .308 suppressed rifle backing him up. It was comforting when you weren’t sure whether you were walking into an ice-cream parlor or a hornet’s nest. Web assumed tonight that it would be the latter.
With a flick of his thumb, Web put the fire selector on his MP-5 to multiple-round bursts and then worked on getting his pulse rate down to the proper zone. There were the sounds of wildlife all around—squirrels, mostly—and birds flitting from tree limb to tree limb, disturbed by the men crouched in their space with all this fancy gear. The padding of animal paws and the flapping of bird wings was somehow comforting, if only to reassure Web that he was still on planet earth, still connected to living, breathing things, though he had potential killing on his mind.
The plan here was a little dicey. The snipers were not going to open fire on the sentries. Gunning down folks in cold blood who had yet to be convicted of anything was not something law enforcement types got to do very often; Web certainly never had. It would take a very high-stakes hostage situation to justify that sort of approval from Washington. The director and probably the attorney general would have to bless that sort of operation. Here they were going to flank the guards, jump them and make sure they had no time or opportunity to warn their comrades inside of the coming attack. The assaulters could have employed a diversionary explosive, or perhaps drawn the guards into the woods somehow to be met by assaulters in Ghillies waiting to jump them, but the flanking plan had been devised based on prior intelligence gathered on the Frees. That intel had proved correct in the careless nature of the sentries. It might just work, thought Web.
If the exterior breach points were locked, they would be blown, of course. That would warn the rest of the Frees, but by then HRT would be inside and the battle would pretty much be over, barring something extraordinary occurring, which Web could no longer rule out, ever again. Hotel was going to hit from the rear, Gulf from the side, in a very explosive way. Assault teams always tried to hit from angles, never front-back or side-side, to avoid friendly fire casualties.
Web tensed as Romano asked TOC for compromise authority and quickly got it. Now Web took one last cleansing breath and assumed the total focus of an assaulter with one of the most elite law enforcement teams ever put together. Pulse at sixty-four, Web really did just know his body’s inner workings.
Romano gave the high sign and he and Web went to the left and the other two operators slid to the right. A minute later they were on both flanks of Gameboy, who was still intent on his video screen, apparently having a great time whipping the computer’s ass. By the time he looked up, there were .45 pistols stuck in both of his ears. Before he even had a chance to say, “Shit,” he was down on the ground, Peerless cuffs around his hands and ankles, and a plastic chain strap tied the cuffs together so that he was fully immobilized like a tethered calf during a roping contest. At the same time a strip of adhesive was placed over his mouth. They took his pistol, cell phone and a knife they found in a sheath tied to his ankle. Web did leave the man his precious Gameboy.
They passed the living quarters of the group and moved to the crisis site, the exterior rear door of the main building, and crouched low. Romano touched the door gingerly, then grasped the door handle and tried it. Through his mask, Web could see him grimace. It was locked. Romano called up the breacher, who quickly moved forward, laid his four-hundred-grain flex linear charge, rolled out his cable and readied the detonator, while the rest of the team watched his back even as they took cover.
At that point Romano informed TOC that they were at phase line green and Web listened to TOC’s confirmatory response. Thirty seconds later, members of Gulf did the same thing, so Web knew they had successfully bagged Pale Shaq out front and then gone to the side of the building for their very special assault. TOC stated that it had control, and the line rankled Web even more now than it had before. Yeah, that’s what you said to Charlie, wasn’t it?
Three snipers joined the Gulf boys on the side and Ken McCarthy had come down from his Sierra One position and become an instant assaulter, along with two other Whiskey snipers who joined Web and Hotel Team. When Ken saw Web, Web couldn’t see the man’s expression, but Web was sure it was a surprised one. They all took off their NV goggles, since muzzle flashes and explosives made them useless anyway and would actually leave you blind and defenseless in such a light-filled environment. From here on, everyone had to simply use their ordinary five senses, and that was okay was Web.
The countdown began. Web’s heartbeat seemed to slow even more with each number. When TOC reached three, Web was fully in the zone. At the count of two, every HRT operator looked away from the crisis site so that the blast wouldn’t blind them. At the same moment each man’s fingers also slipped off his weapon’s safety once more; and then index fingers slid to triggers. Here we go, boys, Web thought.
The charge blew and the doors fell inward and Web and company roared through.
“Banging,” called out Romano as he drew a flash bang from his stretch cordura holder, pulled the pin and lobbed. Three seconds later a hundred-and-eighty-decibel explosion screamed through the hallway with a million-candlepower flash in its wake.
Web was to the right of Romano, looking for threats from any source, his gaze going first to distant corners, then pulling back. There was a small interior room with a hallway heading left off that. Their intelligence, confirmed by their thermal imagery, had told them that the Frees were gathered in the main room in the left rear of the building. It was a large space, maybe forty-by-forty, and mostly open, so they didn’t have to worry about lots of nooks and crannies for resistance to hole up in, but it was still a large space to secure, and there would no doubt be furniture and other equipment to hide behind. They dropped off one guy to hold the room they had first entered. The rules of engagement were that you never gave back ground you had taken, and you never allowed yourself to be rear-flanked. The rest of the strike force raced on.
So far, they had seen no one, although there were shouts up ahead. Web and the rest of Hotel flew down the hallway. One more turn and they’d hit the double doors to the target space.
“Banging,” yelled Web. He pulled the pin, lobbed the flash bang around this last turn. Now anybody looking to ambush them from up there would have to do so while blind and deaf.
When they reached the double doors, no one bothered to check whether they were locked. Romano quickly placed a slap charge on the doorjamb. The explosive consisted of a length of tire rubber one inch wide and six inches long with a strip of C4 explosive called a Detasheet. At the bottom of the device were a shock tube and a blasting cap. The men stood back, and Romano whispered into his mic. A few seconds went by and the slap charge blew and the doors collapsed inward.
At the exact same moment the side wall of the main room exploded inward and Gulf Team charged through the opening. They had placed a flex-linear charge—a V-shaped strip of lead and foam, loaded with explosives—around the wall. It had completely taken out the wall, throwing debris into the room. One of the Frees was already on the floor, holding his bloodied head and screaming.
Hotel charged in from the main doors and blitzed the danger zones that were basically any space where somebody with a gun could take cover and do HRT harm.
“Banging,” called out Romano as he raced down the right side of the room. The flash bang explosion sounded seconds later. The room was filled with smoke and blinding light and the shouts and screams were deafening as the Frees fell over each other trying to escape. However, there were no shots and Web began to think that this might just end peacefully, at least by HRT standards. Web followed Romano, his gaze sweeping the area, looking to the farthest corners for threats and then reeling back. He saw both young and old men hiding under overturned chairs, prone on the floor or pushed against the walls, all covering their eyes and holding their ears, all of them stunned by the carefully crafted assault. The overhead lights had been shot out by HRT as soon as they entered the room. They were all operating in darkness now except for the occasional flash bang.
“FBI! On the floor. Hands behind your head. Fingers interlocked. Do it! Now! Or you’re fucking dead!” Romano screamed all this out in a Brooklyn-accented, staccato roar.
That mouthful even got Web’s attention.
Most of the Frees in Web’s line of sight began to obey the instruction, semi-incapacitated as they were. That’s when he heard the first shot. And that was followed by another shot that hit the wall right next to Web’s head. From the corner of his eye Web saw a Free coming up from the floor holding an MP-5 and pointing it his way. Romano must have seen the same thing. They fired together, both their MP-5s on multiple-round bursts. All eight shots hit the man either in the head or torso and he and his gun went back down to the floor and stayed there.
The other Frees, blinded and disoriented but also angered by the death of one of their members, pulled their weapons and opened fire from behind whatever bulwarks they could find. HRT did the same. However, it was pistols, shotguns, flesh and overmatched men playing soldier against body armor, subguns and men trained for battle and killing. The gunfight did not last very long. The Frees foolishly looked at the eyes of their opponents. Web and his men calmly keyed on the hands and the weapons held there as they fired round after round, moving forward, staying on their marks. Aim-point red laser dots from the finders bolted to their subguns were directly on their targets. They maintained their fields of fire, shooting around and over each other as though they were performing a superbly choreographed dance. The frantic Frees shot wildly and with no discipline and missed badly. HRT aimed with precision and scored hit after hit. Twice HRT operators were shot, more out of luck than skill, but they were torso hits, ordinary pistol ammo running right into the latest-generation Kevlar; and while the impacts of the bullets stung like a bitch, the only result was a deep bruise. HRT aimed for the head and chest and each time a round impacted, another Free died.
With the rout clearly on, Web had had enough of this carnage and he flipped his MP-5 to full auto and raked the tops of the cheap tables and chairs, blowing chips of particle board and wood veneer and strips of metal into the air and filling the opposite walls with lead as his weapon threw out slugs at the rate of almost nine hundred a minute. HRT did not fire warning shots, but there was nothing in the manuals or in any other training Web had done that said you had to slaughter an outclassed enemy for no reason. The remaining Frees were no danger to anyone anymore; they just needed some extra persuasion to officially give up. Romano did likewise with spray from his gun. The resulting blizzard of destruction had the opposition flat on their bellies, hands over their heads, their thoughts of fighting and perhaps winning obviously gone. In unison Web and Romano slapped in fresh ten-millimeter ammo stacks with machinelike movements and speed.
They opened fire again, once more aiming just over the heads of the cowering enemy, and poured it on until the last of the Frees still alive finally made the only sensible choice. Two crawled out from the debris of dead bodies and destroyed chairs and tables, their hands in the air, their weapons on the floor. They looked shell-shocked and were sobbing. Another Free just sat there staring at his hands, bloody from touching a large, seeping wound on his leg, and there was vomit on his shirt. An operator went over to him, cuffed him and then laid him gently back, slapped on surgical gloves and mask and started ministering to the wound; a gunman suddenly turned lifesaver of his enemy. Paramedics were called up from the medic truck that accompanied every HRT assault to tend to the wounded. The guy would probably live, Web concluded, after checking out the bloody leg, if only to spend the rest of his life in prison.
As Romano and another assaulter cuffed the first two Frees to surrender, several other operators went quickly around the room making sure that the dead actually were. The men on the floor were just bodies now, Web felt certain. Humans were not built to withstand one shot to the head, much less half a dozen.
Web finally lowered his gun and took a deep breath. He surveyed the battlefield, looked over the survivors. Some didn’t even appear old enough to drive, dressed in oversized farm jeans, T-shirts and dirty boots. One of them had a peach-fuzz goatee; another even had acne. Two of the dead men looked old enough to be grandfathers and maybe had recruited their grandsons to join the Frees; and die as one. They hardly qualified as worthy opponents. They were just a bunch of stupid people with guns and screwed-up lives who had run into the realization of their worst nightmares and foolishly chosen the wrong course of action. Web counted eight dead bodies, the blood flowing thick and absorbing fast into the cheap carpet. And, though the Frees would contest it, all blood, regardless of ethnic or racial background, flowed red out of the body. At that level, everybody was the same.
He leaned against the wall even as he heard the sirens coming. It hadn’t been a fair fight. Yet it had not been a fair fight last time either. A part of him should have at least felt some level of satisfaction. However, the only thing Web London felt was sick to his stomach. Killing was never an easy business and maybe that’s what separated him from men like the Ernest B. Frees of the world.
Romano came up to him. “Where the hell did those shots come from?”
Web just shook his head.
“Well, shit,” said Romano, “it ain’t exactly how I figured this going down.”
Web noted the large bullet hole in Romano’s cammie smock that revealed the Kevlar underneath. The hole was near his belly button. Romano followed Web’s gaze and shrugged it off like it was a mosquito bite.
“Another inch lower and Angie’d have to get her kicks somewhere else,” said Romano.
Web struggled to recall exactly what he had seen and what he had heard and exactly when. Web knew one thing for certain: they were all in for a lot of questions and none of those questions held easy answers. Pritchard’s warning came hurtling back to him. They had just annihilated numerous members of the Frees, the group suspected of wiping out a team of HRT. What Web and the others had really done was open fire and wasted a bunch of young boys and old men because shots had come from a source they weren’t sure of and because Web had seen one of them lifting up his gun and pointing it his way. Web was completely justified in doing what he did, but it wouldn’t take a master spin doctor to whip that set of facts into something that smelled to high heaven. And in Washington, D.C., they had more spinmeisters per capita than anywhere else on the planet.
Web could hear feet pounding toward them. The regulars would be showing up soon, the Bates’s of the world. They would take over the task of figuring out what the hell had happened. Like Ro- mano had said, HRT was just in the business of banging and hanging. Well, they just might have hung themselves this time. Web started to feel something he never had when the bullets were flying: fear.
There was movement over a thousand yards away in the woods to the rear of the compound and behind the perimeter set up by HRT. The ground seemed to rise up and a man crouched there, his sniper rifle with attached scope held in his right hand. It was the same rifle he had used to kill Chris Miller outside Randall Cove’s house in Fredericksburg. The FBI probably thought that Web London had been the target, but they would be wrong. Miller’s death was just another way to bring further misery to Web London. And what the man had just done, instigating the fight between the hapless Frees and HRT, was simply another method of adding to London’s mounting troubles. The man laid aside the cloth that was covered with dirt, mud, animal feces, leaves and other things designed to help him blend in with the surroundings, his very own Ghillie suit. He had long ago concluded that one should only copy from the best. And, at least for now, HRT was the best. And Web London was supposed to be the best of this elite group. That distinction put him squarely in the man’s sights. This was personal to him. Very personal. He folded the material and hooked it to his backpack, and Clyde Macy quietly made his escape. Despite his normally stoic nature, the man just had to smile. Mission accomplished.
44
Since he hadn’t been able to get a handle on the origin of the group supplying Oxy and other prescription drugs to the D.C. area, Randall Cove had changed strategies and decided to hit it from the receiving instead of the supply end. He had used what the informant T had told him to latch on to a drug crew, who T had told him had lately been dealing these narcotics. It was amazing the results you could get from a snitch when you held him upside down over a hundred-foot drop. Cove figured at some point they would have to pick up more of the product. This new tactic had brought him here tonight, and he hoped it would produce some huge dividends.
The woods were thick and Cove moved through them as quietly as a human being was equipped to do. He stopped near the tree line, squatted low and surveyed the terrain. The vehicles were parked on a dirt road that snaked through these woods near the Kentucky–West Virginia border. If Cove had had any backup to call, he would have. He had thought about bringing Venables, but Sonny had done enough and he also had a wife and kids and was getting ready to retire. Cove was not going to mess with that. Cove was a brave man, well used to being in dangerous situations, but still there was a fine line between courage and idiocy and Cove had always kept on the right side of that flimsy divider.
Cove ducked down as several men gathered around one of the vehicles. He slipped out his NV monocular for a closer look. The plastic-wrapped items the men were carrying confirmed Cove’s suspicions. Not coke bricks but what looked to be tens of thousands of pills. He pulled his flashless camera and took some pictures, and then Cove debated what to do next. There were at least five men that he could see, and all of them were armed. He couldn’t really execute an arrest without putting himself in serious jeopardy. While he was contemplating his next act, Cove didn’t notice, but the wind changed slightly. He didn’t realize it, in fact, until the dog that had been lying on the other side of the truck, and out of Cove’s line of sight, came tearing around the vehicle and directly at his position.
Cove swore under his breath, turned and fled through the woods. The dog was gaining, though, with each step, and Cove’s battered knees just weren’t up to this anymore. And he heard something else that didn’t provide him with much hope either. There were two-legged animals coming his way.
They cornered him in a swampy section of earth. The dog came at Cove, fangs bared, and Cove aimed his pistol and shot it dead. That was the last time he would fire, as an array of pistols were leveled at him. He put his gun up in the air in surrender.
“Drop it,” said one of the pursuers, and Cove dropped it.
The men came forward and one of them frisked Cove and found the other gun he kept stashed in his coat sleeve and also took his
Since there were only two assault teams, snipers were standing by to jump into their blacks, or Nomex flight suits, and help in the attack. Each sniper carried, in addition to his sniper rifle, a CAR-16 auto assault rifle with a three-power Litton night scope. The plan was to hit from the front and the side in blitzkrieg style and contain the Frees in the main building. At that point the regular FBI would come in, read rights, execute search warrants and the next stop for the Frees would be court and then prison.
There was just enough to make this interesting, thought Web. The Frees had to know that the FBI was watching them. This was a very rural area and word of strangers got around, and the Bureau had had them under surveillance for a while now. HRT had to assume that their chief weapon, the element of surprise, would at least be diminished in this case.
Having learned something from the Charlie Team debacle, they had brought along two very bulky but very powerful thermal imagers. Romano fired one up and performed a sweep of each building on their side of the compound. Gulf was doing the same from the front. This thermal imager could look through darkened glass and even walls and nail the heat-filled image of any person lurking there with a slingshot or a mini-gun. Romano completed his surveillance and gave the all-clear. No automated sniper nest this time. All buildings except the main one were empty. It might go very clean.
Through his NV goggles Web looked around and noted the lights winking through the jumble of trees. These light pulses represented snipers who were wearing fireflies, infrared glow plugs the size of a cigarette lighter. The flies would blink every two seconds in a light spectrum visible only with night optics. This way the snipers could keep in touch with one another without giving away their position. If a target was suspected of having night optics as well, the flies weren’t used, for obvious reasons. Assaulters never used them. Each wink of light represented a friendly body with a .308 suppressed rifle backing him up. It was comforting when you weren’t sure whether you were walking into an ice-cream parlor or a hornet’s nest. Web assumed tonight that it would be the latter.
With a flick of his thumb, Web put the fire selector on his MP-5 to multiple-round bursts and then worked on getting his pulse rate down to the proper zone. There were the sounds of wildlife all around—squirrels, mostly—and birds flitting from tree limb to tree limb, disturbed by the men crouched in their space with all this fancy gear. The padding of animal paws and the flapping of bird wings was somehow comforting, if only to reassure Web that he was still on planet earth, still connected to living, breathing things, though he had potential killing on his mind.
The plan here was a little dicey. The snipers were not going to open fire on the sentries. Gunning down folks in cold blood who had yet to be convicted of anything was not something law enforcement types got to do very often; Web certainly never had. It would take a very high-stakes hostage situation to justify that sort of approval from Washington. The director and probably the attorney general would have to bless that sort of operation. Here they were going to flank the guards, jump them and make sure they had no time or opportunity to warn their comrades inside of the coming attack. The assaulters could have employed a diversionary explosive, or perhaps drawn the guards into the woods somehow to be met by assaulters in Ghillies waiting to jump them, but the flanking plan had been devised based on prior intelligence gathered on the Frees. That intel had proved correct in the careless nature of the sentries. It might just work, thought Web.
If the exterior breach points were locked, they would be blown, of course. That would warn the rest of the Frees, but by then HRT would be inside and the battle would pretty much be over, barring something extraordinary occurring, which Web could no longer rule out, ever again. Hotel was going to hit from the rear, Gulf from the side, in a very explosive way. Assault teams always tried to hit from angles, never front-back or side-side, to avoid friendly fire casualties.
Web tensed as Romano asked TOC for compromise authority and quickly got it. Now Web took one last cleansing breath and assumed the total focus of an assaulter with one of the most elite law enforcement teams ever put together. Pulse at sixty-four, Web really did just know his body’s inner workings.
Romano gave the high sign and he and Web went to the left and the other two operators slid to the right. A minute later they were on both flanks of Gameboy, who was still intent on his video screen, apparently having a great time whipping the computer’s ass. By the time he looked up, there were .45 pistols stuck in both of his ears. Before he even had a chance to say, “Shit,” he was down on the ground, Peerless cuffs around his hands and ankles, and a plastic chain strap tied the cuffs together so that he was fully immobilized like a tethered calf during a roping contest. At the same time a strip of adhesive was placed over his mouth. They took his pistol, cell phone and a knife they found in a sheath tied to his ankle. Web did leave the man his precious Gameboy.
They passed the living quarters of the group and moved to the crisis site, the exterior rear door of the main building, and crouched low. Romano touched the door gingerly, then grasped the door handle and tried it. Through his mask, Web could see him grimace. It was locked. Romano called up the breacher, who quickly moved forward, laid his four-hundred-grain flex linear charge, rolled out his cable and readied the detonator, while the rest of the team watched his back even as they took cover.
At that point Romano informed TOC that they were at phase line green and Web listened to TOC’s confirmatory response. Thirty seconds later, members of Gulf did the same thing, so Web knew they had successfully bagged Pale Shaq out front and then gone to the side of the building for their very special assault. TOC stated that it had control, and the line rankled Web even more now than it had before. Yeah, that’s what you said to Charlie, wasn’t it?
Three snipers joined the Gulf boys on the side and Ken McCarthy had come down from his Sierra One position and become an instant assaulter, along with two other Whiskey snipers who joined Web and Hotel Team. When Ken saw Web, Web couldn’t see the man’s expression, but Web was sure it was a surprised one. They all took off their NV goggles, since muzzle flashes and explosives made them useless anyway and would actually leave you blind and defenseless in such a light-filled environment. From here on, everyone had to simply use their ordinary five senses, and that was okay was Web.
The countdown began. Web’s heartbeat seemed to slow even more with each number. When TOC reached three, Web was fully in the zone. At the count of two, every HRT operator looked away from the crisis site so that the blast wouldn’t blind them. At the same moment each man’s fingers also slipped off his weapon’s safety once more; and then index fingers slid to triggers. Here we go, boys, Web thought.
The charge blew and the doors fell inward and Web and company roared through.
“Banging,” called out Romano as he drew a flash bang from his stretch cordura holder, pulled the pin and lobbed. Three seconds later a hundred-and-eighty-decibel explosion screamed through the hallway with a million-candlepower flash in its wake.
Web was to the right of Romano, looking for threats from any source, his gaze going first to distant corners, then pulling back. There was a small interior room with a hallway heading left off that. Their intelligence, confirmed by their thermal imagery, had told them that the Frees were gathered in the main room in the left rear of the building. It was a large space, maybe forty-by-forty, and mostly open, so they didn’t have to worry about lots of nooks and crannies for resistance to hole up in, but it was still a large space to secure, and there would no doubt be furniture and other equipment to hide behind. They dropped off one guy to hold the room they had first entered. The rules of engagement were that you never gave back ground you had taken, and you never allowed yourself to be rear-flanked. The rest of the strike force raced on.
So far, they had seen no one, although there were shouts up ahead. Web and the rest of Hotel flew down the hallway. One more turn and they’d hit the double doors to the target space.
“Banging,” yelled Web. He pulled the pin, lobbed the flash bang around this last turn. Now anybody looking to ambush them from up there would have to do so while blind and deaf.
When they reached the double doors, no one bothered to check whether they were locked. Romano quickly placed a slap charge on the doorjamb. The explosive consisted of a length of tire rubber one inch wide and six inches long with a strip of C4 explosive called a Detasheet. At the bottom of the device were a shock tube and a blasting cap. The men stood back, and Romano whispered into his mic. A few seconds went by and the slap charge blew and the doors collapsed inward.
At the exact same moment the side wall of the main room exploded inward and Gulf Team charged through the opening. They had placed a flex-linear charge—a V-shaped strip of lead and foam, loaded with explosives—around the wall. It had completely taken out the wall, throwing debris into the room. One of the Frees was already on the floor, holding his bloodied head and screaming.
Hotel charged in from the main doors and blitzed the danger zones that were basically any space where somebody with a gun could take cover and do HRT harm.
“Banging,” called out Romano as he raced down the right side of the room. The flash bang explosion sounded seconds later. The room was filled with smoke and blinding light and the shouts and screams were deafening as the Frees fell over each other trying to escape. However, there were no shots and Web began to think that this might just end peacefully, at least by HRT standards. Web followed Romano, his gaze sweeping the area, looking to the farthest corners for threats and then reeling back. He saw both young and old men hiding under overturned chairs, prone on the floor or pushed against the walls, all covering their eyes and holding their ears, all of them stunned by the carefully crafted assault. The overhead lights had been shot out by HRT as soon as they entered the room. They were all operating in darkness now except for the occasional flash bang.
“FBI! On the floor. Hands behind your head. Fingers interlocked. Do it! Now! Or you’re fucking dead!” Romano screamed all this out in a Brooklyn-accented, staccato roar.
That mouthful even got Web’s attention.
Most of the Frees in Web’s line of sight began to obey the instruction, semi-incapacitated as they were. That’s when he heard the first shot. And that was followed by another shot that hit the wall right next to Web’s head. From the corner of his eye Web saw a Free coming up from the floor holding an MP-5 and pointing it his way. Romano must have seen the same thing. They fired together, both their MP-5s on multiple-round bursts. All eight shots hit the man either in the head or torso and he and his gun went back down to the floor and stayed there.
The other Frees, blinded and disoriented but also angered by the death of one of their members, pulled their weapons and opened fire from behind whatever bulwarks they could find. HRT did the same. However, it was pistols, shotguns, flesh and overmatched men playing soldier against body armor, subguns and men trained for battle and killing. The gunfight did not last very long. The Frees foolishly looked at the eyes of their opponents. Web and his men calmly keyed on the hands and the weapons held there as they fired round after round, moving forward, staying on their marks. Aim-point red laser dots from the finders bolted to their subguns were directly on their targets. They maintained their fields of fire, shooting around and over each other as though they were performing a superbly choreographed dance. The frantic Frees shot wildly and with no discipline and missed badly. HRT aimed with precision and scored hit after hit. Twice HRT operators were shot, more out of luck than skill, but they were torso hits, ordinary pistol ammo running right into the latest-generation Kevlar; and while the impacts of the bullets stung like a bitch, the only result was a deep bruise. HRT aimed for the head and chest and each time a round impacted, another Free died.
With the rout clearly on, Web had had enough of this carnage and he flipped his MP-5 to full auto and raked the tops of the cheap tables and chairs, blowing chips of particle board and wood veneer and strips of metal into the air and filling the opposite walls with lead as his weapon threw out slugs at the rate of almost nine hundred a minute. HRT did not fire warning shots, but there was nothing in the manuals or in any other training Web had done that said you had to slaughter an outclassed enemy for no reason. The remaining Frees were no danger to anyone anymore; they just needed some extra persuasion to officially give up. Romano did likewise with spray from his gun. The resulting blizzard of destruction had the opposition flat on their bellies, hands over their heads, their thoughts of fighting and perhaps winning obviously gone. In unison Web and Romano slapped in fresh ten-millimeter ammo stacks with machinelike movements and speed.
They opened fire again, once more aiming just over the heads of the cowering enemy, and poured it on until the last of the Frees still alive finally made the only sensible choice. Two crawled out from the debris of dead bodies and destroyed chairs and tables, their hands in the air, their weapons on the floor. They looked shell-shocked and were sobbing. Another Free just sat there staring at his hands, bloody from touching a large, seeping wound on his leg, and there was vomit on his shirt. An operator went over to him, cuffed him and then laid him gently back, slapped on surgical gloves and mask and started ministering to the wound; a gunman suddenly turned lifesaver of his enemy. Paramedics were called up from the medic truck that accompanied every HRT assault to tend to the wounded. The guy would probably live, Web concluded, after checking out the bloody leg, if only to spend the rest of his life in prison.
As Romano and another assaulter cuffed the first two Frees to surrender, several other operators went quickly around the room making sure that the dead actually were. The men on the floor were just bodies now, Web felt certain. Humans were not built to withstand one shot to the head, much less half a dozen.
Web finally lowered his gun and took a deep breath. He surveyed the battlefield, looked over the survivors. Some didn’t even appear old enough to drive, dressed in oversized farm jeans, T-shirts and dirty boots. One of them had a peach-fuzz goatee; another even had acne. Two of the dead men looked old enough to be grandfathers and maybe had recruited their grandsons to join the Frees; and die as one. They hardly qualified as worthy opponents. They were just a bunch of stupid people with guns and screwed-up lives who had run into the realization of their worst nightmares and foolishly chosen the wrong course of action. Web counted eight dead bodies, the blood flowing thick and absorbing fast into the cheap carpet. And, though the Frees would contest it, all blood, regardless of ethnic or racial background, flowed red out of the body. At that level, everybody was the same.
He leaned against the wall even as he heard the sirens coming. It hadn’t been a fair fight. Yet it had not been a fair fight last time either. A part of him should have at least felt some level of satisfaction. However, the only thing Web London felt was sick to his stomach. Killing was never an easy business and maybe that’s what separated him from men like the Ernest B. Frees of the world.
Romano came up to him. “Where the hell did those shots come from?”
Web just shook his head.
“Well, shit,” said Romano, “it ain’t exactly how I figured this going down.”
Web noted the large bullet hole in Romano’s cammie smock that revealed the Kevlar underneath. The hole was near his belly button. Romano followed Web’s gaze and shrugged it off like it was a mosquito bite.
“Another inch lower and Angie’d have to get her kicks somewhere else,” said Romano.
Web struggled to recall exactly what he had seen and what he had heard and exactly when. Web knew one thing for certain: they were all in for a lot of questions and none of those questions held easy answers. Pritchard’s warning came hurtling back to him. They had just annihilated numerous members of the Frees, the group suspected of wiping out a team of HRT. What Web and the others had really done was open fire and wasted a bunch of young boys and old men because shots had come from a source they weren’t sure of and because Web had seen one of them lifting up his gun and pointing it his way. Web was completely justified in doing what he did, but it wouldn’t take a master spin doctor to whip that set of facts into something that smelled to high heaven. And in Washington, D.C., they had more spinmeisters per capita than anywhere else on the planet.
Web could hear feet pounding toward them. The regulars would be showing up soon, the Bates’s of the world. They would take over the task of figuring out what the hell had happened. Like Ro- mano had said, HRT was just in the business of banging and hanging. Well, they just might have hung themselves this time. Web started to feel something he never had when the bullets were flying: fear.
There was movement over a thousand yards away in the woods to the rear of the compound and behind the perimeter set up by HRT. The ground seemed to rise up and a man crouched there, his sniper rifle with attached scope held in his right hand. It was the same rifle he had used to kill Chris Miller outside Randall Cove’s house in Fredericksburg. The FBI probably thought that Web London had been the target, but they would be wrong. Miller’s death was just another way to bring further misery to Web London. And what the man had just done, instigating the fight between the hapless Frees and HRT, was simply another method of adding to London’s mounting troubles. The man laid aside the cloth that was covered with dirt, mud, animal feces, leaves and other things designed to help him blend in with the surroundings, his very own Ghillie suit. He had long ago concluded that one should only copy from the best. And, at least for now, HRT was the best. And Web London was supposed to be the best of this elite group. That distinction put him squarely in the man’s sights. This was personal to him. Very personal. He folded the material and hooked it to his backpack, and Clyde Macy quietly made his escape. Despite his normally stoic nature, the man just had to smile. Mission accomplished.
44
Since he hadn’t been able to get a handle on the origin of the group supplying Oxy and other prescription drugs to the D.C. area, Randall Cove had changed strategies and decided to hit it from the receiving instead of the supply end. He had used what the informant T had told him to latch on to a drug crew, who T had told him had lately been dealing these narcotics. It was amazing the results you could get from a snitch when you held him upside down over a hundred-foot drop. Cove figured at some point they would have to pick up more of the product. This new tactic had brought him here tonight, and he hoped it would produce some huge dividends.
The woods were thick and Cove moved through them as quietly as a human being was equipped to do. He stopped near the tree line, squatted low and surveyed the terrain. The vehicles were parked on a dirt road that snaked through these woods near the Kentucky–West Virginia border. If Cove had had any backup to call, he would have. He had thought about bringing Venables, but Sonny had done enough and he also had a wife and kids and was getting ready to retire. Cove was not going to mess with that. Cove was a brave man, well used to being in dangerous situations, but still there was a fine line between courage and idiocy and Cove had always kept on the right side of that flimsy divider.
Cove ducked down as several men gathered around one of the vehicles. He slipped out his NV monocular for a closer look. The plastic-wrapped items the men were carrying confirmed Cove’s suspicions. Not coke bricks but what looked to be tens of thousands of pills. He pulled his flashless camera and took some pictures, and then Cove debated what to do next. There were at least five men that he could see, and all of them were armed. He couldn’t really execute an arrest without putting himself in serious jeopardy. While he was contemplating his next act, Cove didn’t notice, but the wind changed slightly. He didn’t realize it, in fact, until the dog that had been lying on the other side of the truck, and out of Cove’s line of sight, came tearing around the vehicle and directly at his position.
Cove swore under his breath, turned and fled through the woods. The dog was gaining, though, with each step, and Cove’s battered knees just weren’t up to this anymore. And he heard something else that didn’t provide him with much hope either. There were two-legged animals coming his way.
They cornered him in a swampy section of earth. The dog came at Cove, fangs bared, and Cove aimed his pistol and shot it dead. That was the last time he would fire, as an array of pistols were leveled at him. He put his gun up in the air in surrender.
“Drop it,” said one of the pursuers, and Cove dropped it.
The men came forward and one of them frisked Cove and found the other gun he kept stashed in his coat sleeve and also took his