It happened fast, faster by far than the speed of coherent thought, faster almost than the pulse rate that was in any event suspended by blood chemicals, and each of the four at close range in the dark devolved into creatures of instinct and training, and the victory would go to the one with the best instinct and the most training. The determining factor was distance; up close, skill counted for nothing, but at ten feet out in the dark, it wasn’t just who shot fast, but who shot best, who had the knack to hit movers in bad light on the fly.
Bob’s hand flew at a speed which could never be known or measured, so fast that he himself had no sense of it happening, he just knew that the Kimber .38 Super was locked in his fist, his elbow locked against his side, his wrist stiff, the weird, maybe autistic brainfreak in his head solving the complexities of target identification, acquisition, alignment that had been the gift of the Swagger generations since the beginning, his muscles tight, all except the trigger finger, which—you get this about ten thousand repetitions into your shooting program—flew torqueless and true as it jacked back, slipped forward to reset then jacked back again, four times, all without disturbing the set of the gun in his hand. Brass bubbles flew through the air, as spent shells pitched by the Mach 2 speed of the flying slide as it cycled, all four within an inch or three of the others, and Bob put four .38 Super CorBons into the center-mass of the fellow closest to him, who immediately changed his mind about killing.
Nick fired. Bob’s opponent fired finally, but into the ground. The man on Nick fired twice more from a smallish silver handgun, though crazily, and Bob vectored in on him and fired three more times in that superfast zone that seems to defy all rational laws of physics. The night was rent by flash. From afar it must have looked like a photo opportunity as a beautiful star entered a nightclub, the air filling with incandescence, the smell of something burned, and the noise lost in the hugeness of all outdoors. But it was just the world’s true oldest profession, which is killers killing.
It was over in less than two seconds.
Bob dumped his not-quite-empty mag, slammed a new fresh one in and blinked to clear his eyes of strobe, then looked for targets. The guy he hit second was down flat, arms and legs akimbo, his silver revolver three or four feet away, weirdly gleaming in the dark from a random beam of light. The other fellow, hit first, was not down but he had dropped his gun. He walked aimlessly about, holding his stomach and screaming, “Daddy, I am so sorry!”
Bob watched as he went to a big car and settled next to it, his face resting on the bumper. The lack of rigidity in the body posture told the story.
Bob knelt to Nick.
“Hit bad, partner?”
“Ah, Christ,” said Nick, “can you believe this?”
“No, but it sure happened. I’m looking, I don’t see no blood on your chest.”
“He hit me in the leg, stupid fucker. Oh Christ, what a mess.”
By this time, people had come to their balconies and looked down upon the fallen men.
“Call an ambulance, please. This officer is hit. We are police!” yelled Bob.
But in seconds another man had arrived, a smallish Indian with a medical bag.
“I am Dr. Gupta,” he said, “the ambulance has been called. Can I help?”
“He’s hit in the leg. I don’t think it’s life threatening. Not a spurting artery.”
The doctor bent over, quickly ripped the seam of Nick’s suit pants with scissors, and revealed a single wound about an inch inboard on his right thigh, maybe off-center enough to have missed bone. The wound did not bleed profusely, but persistently. It was an ugly, mangled hole, muscles puckered and torn, bad news for weeks or months but maybe not years.
“Tie,” said the doctor.
Bob quickly unlooped Nick’s tie and handed it to the doctor, who wrapped it into a tourniquet above the wound, knotted it off, then pulled out and cracked open a box, removed a TraumaDEX squeeze applicator and squirted a dusting of the clotting agent on the wound to stop the blood flow.
“Don’t know when the ambulance will arrive in all this traffic. Can you give him something for pain?”
“No, no,” said Nick, “I am all right. Where’s that damned phone. Oh, shit, we can’t get a chopper in here. Oh, Christ, I need to—”
“You ain’t going nowhere,” said Bob, “except the ER.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Nick. “I hope they got my message.” But even as he said it, he knew it was hopeless, as did Bob. The shooters would bring their weapons to bear, the cops were strung out, the situation was a mess, nobody would know a thing, it was—
“I’ll get there,” said Bob.
“How, you can’t—”
“My daughter’s bike. It’s over there. I can ramrod through the traffic. I’ve got some firepower. I know where they’re going. I can intercept them at the hill, put some lead on them, maybe stop them from that chopper pick-up.”
“Swagger, you can’t—” but then he stopped.
“Okay,” said Bob. “Who, then? You see anybody else around? You want these lowlife fucks to get away with this thing, and the contempt it shows for all law enforcement, for civilians, for anything that gets in the way? You see anyone else here?”
But there wasn’t anybody else around. Funny, there never was.
“Here,” Nick finally said, “maybe this’ll stop the cops from shooting you.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out a badge on a chain around his neck. “This makes you officially FBI and there goes my career. Good luck. Oh, Jesus, you don’t have to do this.”
“Sure, why not,” said Bob. “I got nothing better to do. It’ll be my kind of fun.” Bob threw the chain around his neck so that the badge hung in the center of his chest, signifying, for the first time since 1975, his official righteousness.
He rose, walked through the gathered crowd. He walked across the parking lot to his car, but next to it, came across the curious scene of a Vietnamese family standing in a semicircle around the gunman who had fallen against the bumper of his red Cadillac. One of them was a pretty young girl in a Hannah Montana T-shirt.
“You yelled the warning?” he asked.
“Yes. They were in our apartment all day, scaring my family to death. Horrible men. Monsters,”
“Can on co em. Co that gan da va su can dam cua co da cuu sinh mang chung toi,” he said.
She smiled.
He walked to his car, popped the trunk. He withdrew the DPMS 6.8 rifle, and inserted a magazine with twenty-eight rounds. He looped its sling, held by a single cinch, diagonally across his body so that the gun was down across his front with enough play to allow him to get it either to shoulder or a prone position. He looked at the monitor atop it, that EOtech thing that looked like a ’50s space-cadet toy, figured out which of several buttons turned it on, so that if he had to do it in the dark, he’d know which one to use.
He threw on the vest Julie had provided, in which he’d inserted, in dedicated mag pouches, the other nine magazines, all full with ammo.
Slamming the trunk, he walked back to the stairwell where Nikki’s bike rested under a tarp. He ripped the canvas free and climbed aboard the Kawasaki 350. Shit, the pain in his hip from Kondo Isami’s last cut flared hard and red, but he tried not to notice it. He turned the key to electrify the bike. It took three or four kicks to gin the thing to life, but he saw that he had plenty of fuel. He heeled up the stand, lurched ahead, kicked it into gear, pulled into the lot, evaded the gawkers, and took off into the night, running hard, disappearing quickly.
Nick, his leg throbbing but feeling no pain, watched him go.
Lone gunman, he thought, remembering Lawrence’s words defining the American spirit: “hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer.” But on the Night of Thunder, so necessary.
THIRTY-FOUR
The muzzle flash of the Barrett 107 was extraordinary, a ball of fire that bleached the details from the night, so bright that it set bulbs popping in eyes for minutes. Caleb, who was holding it under his shoulder like
a gangster’s tommy gun, felt the heavy surge of the recoil as the weapon rocked massively against his muscle, almost knocking him from his feet, while at the same moment fierce blowback from the point of impact lashed against his face. Without glasses, he’d have burned out his eyes. The muzzle blast, expanding radially at light speed, ripped up a cyclone of dust from the earth beneath; it seemed a tornado had briefly touched down, filling the air with substance.
The 650-grain bullet hit the steel door two inches below the window frame, blowing a half-inch-size gaper and leaving a smear of burnt steel peeling away from the actual crater. It took both driver and assistant driver down, spewing a foam of blood on the far window inside the cab, after the tungsten core, liberated from the center of the bullet by the secondary detonation, flew onward at several thousand miles per hour and ripped them apart.
“Jesus Christ,” said Caleb, himself awestruck and even a little nonplused by the carnage he had unleashed.
“The rear, the rear,” screamed the old man.
Caleb lumbered around behind the truck with the heavy weapon in his hands, locked under his shoulder, as the Grumleys fanned out to surround the vehicle, while at the same time gesturing with their submachine guns to frozen passengers in the jammed cars to abandon ship and run like hell.
“G’wan, git the hell out of here, git them kids out of here, there’s going to be a lot of goddamned shooting.”
Caleb closed his eyes, fired one more time, point blank, into the rear of the truck from dead six o’clock. He even remembered to crouch and hoist the weight to orient the gun at a slight upward angle so that the tungsten rod it flung wouldn’t continue forward, exit the end of the armored box, shred the dash, and end up chewing the bejesus out of the engine. That would have been a mess.
Again, the fireball blinded any who happened to observe the discharge from within a hundred yards, though most civilians had abandoned their cars and were running en masse in the opposite direction. Again, the muzzle blast unleashed a cyclone of atmospheric disturbance. Again, the recoil was formidable, even if slightly dissipated by the give in Caleb’s arms and body as he elasticized backward from the blow. This time, for some reason, the noise was present in force and Caleb, even with ear plugs in, felt his eardrums cave under pressure of the blast.
A crater ruptured the upper half of the rear door.
A Grumley leaned close and yelled into the hole, almost as if there were a chance in hell anyone inside could hear, “You boys best open up or he’ll fire six more in there.”
There was a moment, then the door unlatched. Two uniformed men, with darkened faces from the blast, their own blood streaming from ear and nose, someone else’s splattered randomly about them, eyes unseeing for the brightness, staggered out, fightless and dazed. Instantly the Grumleys were on them, disarmed them, and shoved them to one side of the road, where they collapsed and crawled to a gully to try and forget the horror of what they had just seen—the third member of their crew, who’d evidently taken a full injection of flying tungsten frontally, vaporizing the upper half of his body. His legs and lower torso lay on the floor, like the remains of a scarecrow blown down and scattered by a strong wind; the plastic bags of baled cash stacked on racks now wore a bright dappling of his viscera.
“Damn thang means business,” a Grumley said.
“Go, go, boys, git going, no goddamned lollygagging,” shouted the old man, a kind of cheerleader, amazingly animated and liberated by the violence. “Watch for them coppers.”
A Grumley took up a position at each of the four compass points around the truck. The idea was to try and locate approaching police through the lines of cars, and engage them far away, because with their handguns the cops couldn’t bring effective fire from that range. Meanwhile, other Grumleys set about their business. One dragged the second half of poor Officer Unlucky out of the truck, and dumped him. Another flew to the bags and began to pull out the ones containing change, which he dragged out and dumped. No need for extra weight on the upcoming hill.
Now it was Richard’s turn.
“Tire guys, go, go, get it done,” he shouted, and as they had so often practiced, a Grumley team of three hit the rear axle of the vehicle, got the heavy power-jack underneath, and with swift, focused strength jerked the thing atilt. Meanwhile, from roadside, two heavy tires with off-road treads meant to bite and tear at the earth in maximum, tractor-pull traction, trundled out, driven by Grumley power to the site of the armored truck, and the changing commenced.
Richard raced to the engine with his trick bag, not looking at the cab, not wanting to see what remained of the crew; he’d let Grumley minions clear that mess out. A Grumley struggled against the locked hood, then fired a blast of tracer into it. The bullets tore and bounced and in seconds had reduced the metal to tatters so that the hood could be lifted and hoisted high.
Richard set to work, as flashlights beamed onto the chugging complexities of the engine. He waited till a Grumley turned it off, and it went still. It was exactly as he expected, a Cat 7-stroke diesel, producing around 250 horsepower, which is why the big truck would always move sluggishly, underpowered for the extra weight of the armor. Quickly, he plunged into the nest of wires, found the MAP sensor, disconnected it, and reconnected the Xzillaraider wire harness. Plug and play was the principle. As the Grumleys held the flashlights, his fingers flew to the right wires, cut them, and quickly and expertly clipped in the new wires. He grounded the assembly, this time taking the time to unscrew the negative terminal, carefully wrap the grounding wire against the plug, then rescrew the cable terminal, making sure everything was nice, tidy, and tight. He paid no attention to what was going on around him, and so maximized was his concentration that he missed the crash of a helicopter brought down by Caleb. Then he leapt back to the rear of the engine compartment, pulled a knife, and cut through the rubber grommet and stuffed the wire harness through into the cab.
Ugh. Now the unpleasantness. When he got to the F-750’s cab, however, the bodies were gone and some Grumley with a thoughtful touch had thrown a wad of NASCAR T-shirts on the blood and flesh matter that the Mk.211 had blown loose from the drivers. It wasn’t so bad; no hearts or lungs or heads lay about, it only looked like several gallons of raspberry sorbet had melted.
He got to work, linking the harness of wires to the Xzillaraider module. He quickly wired the unit to the fuse box, then slid behind the wheel, paying no attention to the three gunshots that ricocheted weirdly off the three-inch glass, leaving a smear, nor to the fact that the whole scene appeared to be lit by an orange glow, as the crashed helicopter blazed brightly in the middle of NASCAR Village. Under normal circumstances, who would not stare at an aviation disaster such as that one? But these weren’t normal circumstances, and Richard was much more fascinated by the blink sequence on the module. Yep, as he turned the key, the lights went through their positions and ended up in the red of high power.
He turned to see the Reverend, a Peacemaker in his hand and a cowboy hat on his head, and Brother Richard said, “When the tires are finished, old man, we are good to go.”
While Richard worked, the old man had been commanding Grumley defenses. His gunners peered three-sixty, looking for targets, and when a poor police officer approached on foot, illuminated by his traffic safety jacket, a Grumley put a burst of 9mm tracer into him. The tracers were a wonderful idea: they made manifest the strength and invincibility of the Pap Grumley firepower.
Pap watched as a sleek streak of 9-mils raced down the corridor between abandoned cars, struck the poor officer, who had not even drawn his pistol, and flattened him. Those that missed their targets spanged off the cars on either side, pitched skyward into the night air. Hootchie mama, it was the Fourth of July! It was Jubilee! It was hell come to earth, fire, brimstone, the whole goddamned Armageddon thing.
“Good shooting,” he yelled, “that’ll keep their damned heads down.”
Then someone poked him in the ribs and he looked down and saw a black hole in t
he lapel of his powder blue Wah Ming Chow custom suit. Fortunately the armored vest underneath stopped the bullet, but it meant some cop had fired from nearby up on the hill to the right.
“Over there,” he commanded, and two Grumleys put out a blaze of noon light in the form of a half-mag apiece. If they got the cop or not, nobody could say, but the bullets sure chewed the hell out of an SUV in line to get out of a parking lot. Fortunately for all concerned, it had been long abandoned and so if anyone died, it would only have been a copper.
The sound of shots rang out everywhere as Grumleys on the perimeter either saw or thought they saw policemen slithering closer, and answered with long, probing bursts of tracer. Now and then something caught fire, including the rear of a Winnebago, a souvenir stand whose supply of T’s and ball caps went up in flames, a propane heater for a barbecue stand. These small disasters added yet more hellish illumination to flicker across the already incredible scene, part monster movie (the citizens flee the beast), part war movie (the noise, the tracers, the screams of the wounded), and part NASCAR documentary (the tire crew operates at top speed, well choreographed and rehearsed) as the Grumley tire team, having gotten one of the off-road tires rigged, switched sides of the F-750, and went hard to work on the other.
But then a new source of illumination shocked all the Grumleys with its relentless quality. It was a harsh beam of light from a state police helicopter thirty feet up and fifty yards out, catching everything in high, remorseless relief.
“Drop your firearms,” came the amplified order, “you are covered, drop your firearms and—”
“Caleb, take ’er down,” yelled the old man.