The door was the kind that opened outward, so I grabbed the handle and pulled it hard.
Unlocked door.
My first clue.
A junkie would have locked it while he shot up.
I quickly scanned the visible half of the bathroom, then threw my shoulder into the open door and leveled my weapon on the other half.
Empty.
Filthy, covered in graffiti, and stinking of piss, but still empty.
I repeated the drill at the women’s restroom. Same thing. A busted crack pipe and some scorched Brillo pads on the floor, but otherwise empty.
I stepped into the hallway and looked to the only other place Grunt Boy could have gone.
Jun Kwai’s office.
I’d watched about a million store surveillance videos on the TV in there, and I knew he kept it locked.
Always.
But the door was open by a crack. The lock had a few fresh tool marks on it, and it occurred to me that nowhere in my Ranger training had I ever been taught to pick a commercial dead-bolt lock. Blow them with det cord, sure, but not pick them.
Who, exactly, was I dealing with here?
Jun Kwai’s office was tiny. It was shaped like an L, with the small part of the room wrapping around behind the coolers. He kept it packed to the gills with boxes of inventory records and old surveillance tapes and all the other odds and ends he’d accumulated from twenty years of running a busy grocery store. In the cramped little space left over he had crammed an old schoolteacher’s desk and a battered chair. There was hardly enough room to breathe in there, and if I was going to have to fight an operator in a space like that, it was going to be interesting, to say the least.
But hesitating gets you killed, so I threw open the door and leveled my gun on the darkness inside the office.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness in time to see one of Grunt Boy’s sneakers disappearing into the ceiling. He’d pushed back one of the sectioned tiles that hid all the plumbing, and in another five seconds, he’d have been completely out of sight.
I didn’t give him the chance to slip away.
“Hey, what are you doing?” I called out to him.
The foot hung there for a second. It was all the chance I needed.
I jumped onto the desk and grabbed hold of his leg. I felt him flinch, and then start to buck and kick. His leg slipped from my hands, and when I reached back to grab him, he kicked at my face.
I was ready for him, though. I leaned right just enough to let the kick go by, and at the same time threw a block that caught him just above the ball of his ankle. I heard him grunt in unexpected pain, and that was all the encouragement I needed. I grabbed his leg again and jumped from the desk. My body weight pulled him straight through the ceiling tiles, and he came crashing down in a shower of crumbled ceiling panel dust.
He crashed down on the desk with a loud thud. Papers and old VHS cassettes slid to the floor. Grunt Boy let out a noise somewhere between surprise and pain, and for a moment, I thought I had him.
He was fast.
Before I could even climb to my feet, he’d jumped from the desk and kicked the chair out of the way.
I found myself nose to nose with him, the two of us standing in a space no bigger than a bathroom stall. He threw a quick jab with his right. I tried to move, but he was fast. He caught the side of my jaw and left me with a ringing in my ears.
I didn’t let him follow up, though. Before he could pull the punch back and strike with a backhand, I snaked my right arm over his wrist and shot my hand up behind his shoulder, putting him off balance. I jammed my knee into his thigh, causing him to snarl in pain.
I raised my boot to bring it down on the back of his knee, but he was ready for that. He took all the weight off his left leg and knelt down.
It was a basic move, but it was perfectly executed, and with him gone as my support, I rolled over the top of him and landed in the chair.
He was on me before I could get up. He snapped a front kick right at my chin. I managed to deflect it with my hands. Grunt Boy followed it up with another front kick, and I blocked that one, too. When I was first learning how to fight, my sensei told me that one day my techniques would be so finely honed I could fight in a phone booth, and I learned my lessons well. Grunt Boy sure seemed surprised.
He tried the front right kick a third time, but I was ready for it. I caught his heel with my left wrist and pushed up on his calf with my right. With his leg still in the air I lunged toward his other knee with a side kick and caught him just below the joint. He fell forward, hard, and landed facedown on the desk.
When we stood up to face each other again, his lip was busted up and leaking blood all down his chin.
“I bet that hurt,” I said.
That got him mad, but rather than try to hit me again, he just wiped away the blood. “You need to let me go,” he said.
“Yeah, the chances of that happening are hovering right about zero,” I said. “How about you turn around and put your hands behind your back. That way I won’t have to bust that other lip.”
He glanced down at my nameplate. “Look, Officer Ledger, you have no idea what’s going on here.”
“You just described most of my life, buddy. Why don’t you explain it to me after we put these cuffs on you?”
“There’s no time for that.”
“Oh we got—”
I didn’t get the rest of the sentence out. Before I knew it, he’d kicked a broom leaning up against the wall, making it flip in midair. He caught it and swept at my knees the next instant, leaving my calf muscles screaming from the sudden pain. I staggered a bit and lurched forward—right into the business end of the broom. He brought it up under my chin and shoved upward, causing me to rock back on my heels. The last place I wanted to be.
Grunt Boy could have slapped my temples and laid me out, but he didn’t follow through. Instead, he backed off. I heard boots hitting the floor outside the office door, and then the sounds of men barking fast, clipped commands.
So they weren’t worried about us hearing them.
Not a good sign.
“There’s no time to explain,” he said. “I have to get out of here. You should, too. You don’t want to be here when those guys come through that door.”
“Who are they?”
“Sorry,” he said, and tossed the broom aside. “That’s classified.”
He put his hands on the table and was about to jump onto it when the door burst open. He was caught in a bad spot, but Grunt Boy moved fast, I had to give him that. He spun around and kicked the door back into the soldier’s face.
“You’re gonna want to move,” he said, and grabbed the front of my uniform. He pulled me toward the wall next to the door and threw his arm across my chest, as if I were some kid in the front seat and he was my mom trying to keep me from going through the windshield.
The next instant I heard the rattle of a fully automatic rifle and the door exploded into splinters.
Grunt Boy stayed frosty.
Two of the soldiers came running through the door. Grunt Boy kicked the second one in the back, just below his body armor. The man crumpled to the floor. The lead man turned, and even through his gas mask, I could see the surprise in his eyes. He tried to bring his rifle up, but Grunt Boy was on him. He knocked the rifle to one side and got in close enough to throw one arm around his neck. He snaked his other hand under the man’s chin, and kept up steady pressure until the man’s neck snapped like a twig.
Grunt Boy had the pistol out of the dead man’s holster even before the body hit the ground.
He kicked the second man’s helmet, exposing a portion of the back of his head, then shot him twice.
“Whoa!” I said.
I looked down at the dead man. His gear was state of the art, but there wasn’t a single piece of insignia on it. It didn’t look like American gear, though. Russian, maybe. Maybe even Israeli.
“Who are these guys?” I demanded.
??
?I told you,” he said as he scooped up the rifle. “That’s classified.”
“You just shot a man in front of a Baltimore police officer. You’re gonna need to do a whole hell of a lot better than that.”
“Look,” he said. “All you need to know is that these guys are part of a team, and here in about five seconds, all their friends are going to come running through that front door.”
He walked out the office door and into the bright lights of the store.
I keyed my lapel-mic and said, “Bravo 16-20.”
Nothing.
Grunt Boy glanced at me over his shoulder. “That’s not gonna work.”
“Bravo 16-20,” I said again.
Still nothing.
I hit the red emergency button on the top of my radio. It should have given me dedicated access to the airwaves. Hit that tone and nobody hears anything but you.
“Bravo 16-20,” I said. “Bravo 16-20.”
But I got silence.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked him.
“They’re jamming us. You won’t be able to talk with anyone until this is all over. That is, if you’re still alive.”
Before I could answer, gas canisters came flying through the windows, spewing OC. It spread across the ceiling and then started to seep its way down between the rows of shelves. I felt the familiar bite in my nostrils and the fullness in the back of my throat, but I held back the coughing. At Fort Benning I spent more time in the gashouse than most soldiers spent in the latrine. OC and I were old friends.
“Better get ready,” Grunt Boy said. He crouched down near one of the endcaps, his stolen rifle at the ready.
Hesitation kills, but I hesitated anyway. That man had saved my life back in the office, but I still had no idea who he was. I didn’t know who the men he’d killed were, either. They were wearing foreign-made gear, but that didn’t mean they weren’t U.S. military. Back in my time in the Sandbox, at one time or another, I wore everything from a burka to a fine Italian suit to full-on BDUs and body armor. It just depended on the mission.
“Get down!” Grunt Boy barked at me. “They’re coming through the door.”
I crouched down just as a team came crashing through the windows. Grunt Boy returned fire, dropping two of the soldiers before they even cleared the rack of girlie mags next to the door.
I pulled my pistol and peered around the opposite end of the shelf.
One of the soldiers fired at me, hitting the bags of chips on the endcap and showering me in Pringles and Lay’s.
I ducked back behind the row. “Damn it.”
“Hey!”
It was Grunt Boy. He was nodding toward Jun Kwai over at the register. The poor man’s normal glassy calm was gone. He looked like a deer in headlights. He just stood there, staring at the men chewing his store up with bullets. He was holding his Ruger Super Redhawk, though.
“What’s wrong with your friend?” Grunt Boy said. “He’s gonna get himself killed.”
I had to hand it to Grunt Boy. No hesitation. He laid down a steady line of fire as he ran from cover over to the register. I saw him grab Jun Kwai by the shoulders and turn him around, away from the door. It looked as if he were smoothing the man’s shirt. With more of the soldiers charging through the door, Grunt Boy pulled Jun Kwai from behind the registers and pushed him toward the office.
I watched Jun Kwai stumble by me, looking like a sleepwalker. There was snot running out his nose and he was crying like a baby, but he hardly seemed to notice. He just made his way to the office in a haze.
“Behind you!” Grunt Boy said.
I spun around just as one of the soldiers came around the corner. His face was lost behind a gas mask, but I knew he saw my uniform. He saw my police uniform and raised his rifle to kill me anyway.
Before the soldier could fire, Grunt Boy got the jump on him. He came around from behind the man and hit him in the back of the head with the butt of his rifle.
Once the man was down, Grunt Boy shot him.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he said to me. “Pay attention.”
By way of an answer I raised my pistol and fired at the two soldiers who had come up behind him.
Both dropped like a bag of rocks.
Grunt Boy’s eyes went wide. He stared at the business end of my pistol for just a second, then glanced over his shoulder at the two dead soldiers.
“Pay attention,” I said. “It don’t cost nothing.”
His eyes went even wider. “Fort Benning?”
“You guessed it.”
“I should’ve known.”
“Shoulda but didna.”
He reached down to the corpse at his feet and relieved it of its machine gun. He slid it over to me.
“I guess you know how to use that, then?”
It was a Heckler & Koch MP5, 9 mm. Fantastic weapon. Not my preferred platform, but still a beauty. I scooped it up, ejected the magazine to make sure it was functional, and then slammed it back home.
“I’ve seen the training films,” I said.
He chuckled, then turned back to the front door. Two of the remaining soldiers were moving to the register counter for better cover.
He smoked them both.
I had no idea how many men they had left, but I could tell, at that moment, that we had them scared. They weren’t popping their heads up, and they weren’t putting down suppression fire. When you stop taking the fight to your enemy, you know you pretty much have given up.
Knowing that, I actually cracked a smile. I’d gone from wondering what in the hell was going on to actually feeling like I had a handle on this thing.
Crazy how that happens.
I made hand signals to him that I was going around the other way so we could put channel fire their way.
He nodded, and I moved out. I went down to the end of the row, near the coolers, nearly all of which were shot to hell, with waterfalls of beer and soda and milk running into lakes on the floor. There was a little bit of glass still hanging from a corner of the store’s front window, and in it I could see the reflection of one of the soldiers. I could tell at a glance how scared the man was, and it occurred to me at that moment that we weren’t dealing with soldiers at all, but mercenaries.
Well-equipped mercenaries, but still mercenaries.
A man who fights for money has no cause, and a man who fights without a cause can never win.
I genuinely believe that.
You either believe in what you do, or you fail.
And when you play the kind of game we were playing, that means you die.
Still, it made me wonder what Grunt Boy was fighting for.
I took a deep breath and got ready to charge the man. He was armed with a full-auto MP5, but so was I, and I knew at that moment that I could take him. This would be over in four seconds.
But just as I was tensing to strike, I heard a familiar noise.
Helicopters.
I stopped and picked apart the noise in my head. Two of them. Sounded like Black Hawks. As they got closer, I could feel the thropping of their rotors beating against my chest, and the Warrior part of my mind hardened and took over.
How well I remembered that sound, that feeling.
At first I thought it was more mercenaries, but one look in the broken window dispelled that. The mercenary was frantically trying to call into the mic built into his wrist-comm system and obviously getting nothing.
His backup must have abandoned him.
Outside the window, a dozen or more ropes hit the street.
Within seconds, U.S. Army troops were fast-roping down to the pavement. They moved toward the store with guns blazing, mowing down the mercenary I’d been watching, plus four more I hadn’t seen.
I stood up just as one of them came around the corner.
He leveled his machine gun at my chest as a reflex when he saw me, paused for a second, then lowered it.
I did the same with my MP5.
He took off his gas mas
k, and I was shocked to see my old friend Mark Roberts. We’d served in the Rangers together, and from the looks of things, he was still with the teams.
Only now, judging from the insignia on his chest, he was a command sergeant major.
“Joe?” he said. “What the hell?”
“Command Sergeant Major?” I countered. “They just giving that rank away now?”
“Screw you.”
“Yeah? Only if you kiss me first.”
“In your dreams, you skanky little whore.” He threw his arms wide. “Come to papa.”
We man-hugged.
“You guys really tore this place a new one,” he said.
I looked around. He was right. Grunt Boy and I had pretty much leveled Jun Kwai’s shop. There wasn’t a shelf, a drink display, a magazine rack, a cooler door, or a wall of cigarettes that didn’t have a bullet hole in it. The flood of spilled soft drinks and beer and milk and orange juice was an inch deep on my boots.
Not to mention the spilled ice.
And the Skittles and the M&M’s all over the place.
And, of course, the dead mercenaries.
“The cleaners are going to have a bitch of a time with this place,” Mark said.
“You’re using cleaners?” Cleaners were our support staff, the guys who came in and erased all evidence that the team had been there. They weren’t used that often, but when they were, they were a wonder to watch. They could make evidence of a firefight disappear in a moment’s notice.
“Actually,” Mark said, “that’s classified.”
“I’ve heard that word a lot tonight,” I said. “What gives?”
“What gives is it’s classified.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Seriously. You really stepped into the shit tonight, Joe. You gotta stop doing that.”
Seriously, I thought. I used to be one of these guys. I hold a top-secret clearance, even now. I looked around and realized that, at one point or another, I had been to a school with every single one of the guys in Mark Roberts’s team. They couldn’t tell me what was going on?
But of course they couldn’t.
I knew that.
I was once part of the team. I was on the outside now.