by Matt Rogers
So he sped up.
Even though it was detrimental to his own safety.
He couldn’t allow his own arrival to result in the deaths of all the innocents in the site.
Theresa’s estimation ran through his mind. Roughly six or seven hostiles left. Three families, six innocent people total — three women, three children. All wrenched from their homes because of the insider information a bent central district commander had managed to acquire.
D’Agostino, you piece of shit.
Slater heard voices.
Dead ahead.
No time for thought.
Only action.
He raised the Glock, pulse pounding in his ears, heart racing, fatigue seeping in, and powered straight around the corner, ready for anything.
21
They’d heard him coming.
As soon as he burst into the open, rounding the L-shaped bend in the corridor, a blast of air washed against his left cheek. Ordinarily the sensation would mean nothing, but Slater understood exactly what it signified.
A bullet had just come within inches of blowing his face apart.
He recoiled instantly as his own recklessness hammered home. In his last three operations he’d become increasingly brazen with every passing altercation. There was something about being able to react faster than anyone you ran into that made him charge forward with a certain unhinged temperament. Now it had almost cost him his life. Usually he would have rounded the corner and let off a series of shots with the Glock before anyone had even realised he was there, but these men were a class above the common criminal.
Whatever the case, Slater ducked straight back out of sight. Both guys had their weapons trained on the space he’d been occupying a second earlier. Their buddy must have warned them that he was coming.
Heart pounding, he steadied his grip on the Glock and prepared for a close-quarters firefight, something he considered himself excellent at.
But then the two henchmen got greedy, and Slater realised it would be even easier than that.
He heard them barrelling down the hallway toward him not long after he’d ducked out of sight. He figured they were both charging recklessly, probably figuring they could capitalise on his retreat.
Did they really think he was fleeing with his tail between his legs?
They must have expected to send a couple of rounds through his back as he ran away. They hadn’t prepared for the fact that Slater was a seasoned professional, and although it might have appeared that he’d turned and run away, he was in fact positioned only a couple of feet around the corner.
So when the first guy — a bulky, six-foot-three Eastern European man with the standard shaved head and sturdy jawline — exploded into sight, Slater put him down with a pair of well-placed shots to the centre mass.
He was a little more accurate, and a little more prepared, than his adversaries.
The twin blasts from the Glock ripped through the top of the construction site, blending with the howling wind seeping through the cracks in the exterior. The first thug dropped like a stone as he took two lead projectiles to the chest, rupturing his internal organs and freezing his mad charge. His legs gave out from underneath him and he started to topple, but not before his friend bringing up the rear of the procession crashed straight into him.
Slater couldn’t quite believe his luck.
The second guy tripped over the first and tumbled head over heels across the bend in the corridor. He kept an admirable grip on his weapon — an identical Kalashnikov AK-15 no doubt purchased in bulk from the same supplier — but he didn’t get a chance to use it. Slater put a third round straight through the side of the head, taking somewhat more of a risk by targeting the tiny surface area whilst the target was on the move.
But he had momentum on his side.
The shot drilled home.
Both of the gangsters went down in an uncontrollable heap, bleeding from three separate bullet wounds spread across two bodies. Slater didn’t spend a moment admiring his handiwork, or even making certain that both hostiles were dead. They were out of commission, and wouldn’t pose him any problems, so he instantly forgot about their existence and hustled straight back around the corner, maintaining the same frenetic pace he’d sported earlier.
Because now the bulk of the thugs knew he’d reached the top floor, and they would be prepared to defend their operation with their lives.
Good.
Slater wouldn’t give them the chance to surrender anyway.
As he entered a new, unimpressive, half-finished stretch of corridor, he knew immediately where the rest of the gangsters were. He could hear their frantic shouts, the short panicked commands in Russian, and above that the sudden screams of hostages.
Where?
Slater zoned in on a section of the eighth floor that branched off from the hallway he was racing down, spiralling to the right through another unfinished, open doorway. Based on a rough estimate, he figured he was getting close to the front of the construction site. He imagined a wide concrete expanse devoid of furniture or decorations of any kind, exposed to the elements, lacking a roof. He painted a vivid picture of the setting in his mind, because he would need every available millisecond to react once he made it to the final hurdle.
It all came down to this.
Could he perform?
He didn’t know. He simply didn’t have a clue. The Glock in his palm seemed like an extension of his own body, and his senses had never been more tuned to the present moment, but all the skill in the world couldn’t overcome five or six gun barrels pointed in his direction. And he couldn’t hesitate — there was almost nothing separating the hostages from death. The thugs would no doubt have a contingency plan in place — eliminate the cumbersome innocents with shots to the head, destroying the collateral, and then flee.
They might be enacting it right now.
So Slater didn’t think twice about his own life. He couldn’t. Acknowledging the fact that he would have to willingly make the same move that had almost got him killed twenty seconds ago, he raised the Glock to shoulder level and sprinted straight through the open doorway, all the neurons in his brain firing on full alert.
Go time.
22
The first incoming shot hit him in the soft flesh on top of his left hand.
In fact, it didn’t sink home. It simply grazed past, taking most of the skin off in a thin line, sending specks of blood flying back into Slater’s own eyes. Despite the screaming nerve endings and the sudden hot burst of agony and the shock to his system as he realised he’d been hit, he kept his composure. Eyes darting in ten directions at once, he surveyed the scene at the same time as the bullet sliced across his hand and passed him by.
The expanse certainly was concrete, and it certainly was devoid of furniture or obstacles of any kind, and it certainly didn’t have a roof — all the things he’d conjured up in his mind’s eye before entering the room. It was a giant grey bowl, with half-completed walls and a couple of empty rectangular holes in the far wall looking out over the urban Chicago street. Construction had ceased before window panes had been put into place. Wild activity was taking place in every corner of the room at once — burly men hauled small children and cowering women off the dusty floor, urging them to their feet as fast as they could, preparing them for movement.
Too late.
Slater had arrived.
He counted five remaining men at first glance, all carbon copies of each other. It made sense — living in squalor amidst an ageing construction site, they probably employed the same daily routines. All five of them were pale-skinned and sported identical buzzcuts. They were all built like tanks, either a byproduct of their profession or an attempt to stay in shape whilst laying low. They all seemed to originate from the same region — inductive reasoning pegged them as Eastern European, considering everyone he’d dealt with so far sported the same ethnicity. Even from a single glance he could see coldness in their demeanours — these wer
e harsh, cruel men, accustomed to fighting for survival and making a living however they could. They would have served D’Agostino well, and none of them would understand the concept of surrender.
They wouldn’t even consider it.
Slater weighed all this up in a split second. Next he assessed the nearest hostiles — he quickly determined that the man who’d shot him was the same guy whose nose Slater had shattered downstairs.
In the carnage, Slater had almost forgotten the fact that his own nose was broken, too.
This man was the closest, and his Heckler & Koch sidearm was raised to shoulder height in anticipation for Slater’s arrival. As far as Slater could tell, none of the other four thugs had bothered to line their aim up with the open doorway. They all had bulky rifles swinging off shoulder straps, but they were uniformly preoccupied with the hostages.
Done.
Situation processed.
All in the time it took for blood to spray off Slater’s hand and into his eyes.
Black Force recruited those with phenomenal reaction speeds for a reason.
Because in situations like these, when the odds were horrifically stacked against Slater, he could still come out on top.
He turned and blasted two shots in the direction of the guy with the broken nose. Both struck home, punching twin holes in the man’s forehead, and the guy folded over unnaturally as important neural connections were destroyed by lead. Slater ignored him, deploying a mental tally mark to indicate a neutralised enemy, and maintained his mad pace deeper into the room.
Now, two of the remaining four started to react to the gunshots. Slater was locked in a tunnel, zoned in on anything that lay in front of him with zero regard for any other aspect of his consciousness. He’d experienced the feeling a couple of times before, and it was difficult to properly articulate how everything clicked, but he transitioned seamlessly from one millisecond to another in a way he couldn’t understand. Everything was streamlined. All the stars were aligned.
He was ready.
Ignoring the blood pumping out of his left hand — he barely even noticed the injury had happened, and perhaps wouldn’t have realised at all if not for his own blood spraying across his face — he wrenched the Glock’s aim from hostile to hostile, laser-focusing on the two men raising assault rifles in his direction. With barrels heading his way, he knew he could fire at will without any risk of wild shots hitting the hostages. If the two thugs were going to impulsively pull their triggers in their death throes, the bullets would hit Slater instead of the hostages.
That suited him just fine.
So he hit the guy on the left twice in the chest, and sent a third round through the throat of the guy on the right. All three bullets did obscene damage, and they sunk home before either of the pair had the chance to fire a shot. The rapidity with which events were unfolding, coupled with Slater’s constant movement and complete lack of hesitation, resulted in a strange, dream-like experience for the hostiles. They would have barely registered Slater’s presence before he fired rounds into them and dropped them where they stood.
Which was exactly what happened to the pair he targeted.
They collapsed — one of the gangsters crumpled into the side of the kid he’d been pulling to his feet, a small boy no older than eight. The child screamed and jerked away from the body, wrapping his tiny arms around his mother standing only a foot behind him.
Slater couldn’t pay the situation any attention.
He couldn’t afford to waste a millisecond.
Two left.
It was strange to even attempt to process what was happening. Slater knew he was moving, and he knew his life was on the line, but the speed with which he had to react took its toll, transitioning him over to an impulsive, reactionary state he couldn’t control. He relied on the years of constant training and discipline to carry him through. He simply isolated the next targets, and surged toward them.
Too late.
He saw the gun arcing in his direction, but this time even his unfathomable reflexes couldn’t save him. The big Eastern European man behind the Kalashnikov was going to let off a couple of shots, and Slater’s charge into the room had taken him directly into the line of fire. He had sprinted forward with such brazenness that he ended up only a few feet away from the big man when the muzzle of the Kalashnikov flared and bullets spat from the rifle.
Pain seared through Slater.
He’d been directly hit.
23
He didn’t have time to discern the damage.
In that moment in time all other thoughts fell away, replaced by the sheer instinct to survive. He zigzagged from left to right like a madman, putting all his momentum and energy into acting as wild as possible, but even the most efficient movements couldn’t dodge bullets. The thug would manage roughly three or four shots by the time Slater closed the gap and surged out of the line of fire.
He needed to survive for the next half-second, and prevent himself from succumbing to any life-threatening injuries.
Which proved harder than he originally anticipated.
The rifle cracked four times, shockingly close, aimed right in Slater’s direction. Pain exploded in his hand holding the Glock, and the weapon fell out of his hands as blood spurted. He didn’t have time to check where he’d been hit, because another round grazed his hip, running a thin red line across the side of his jeans. The third must have missed, because Slater didn’t feel any hot burst of fire, and the fourth came within an inch of his throat. Any kind of connection with that sensitive area would have left him bleeding out on the floor, but by the time he hurled himself into the man with every last ounce of effort in his body, he found himself flabbergasted that he was still alert and breathing.
Bleeding, sure, but alive.
The two spilled to the ground and Slater descended into a rage, tapping into the natural high that came from surviving a situation he’d considered unsalvageable. He’d fully expected to take four rounds to the chest or head and find his synapses cut off as he sunk into an early grave, but the thug must have been jittery with his aim and missed the bulk of his shots. Slater caught a fleeting glimpse of his right hand and saw blood flowing from the webbing between his thumb and index finger — the bullet had torn straight through the skin. With both his hands mangled, he had no hope of using them to throw punches.
But he didn’t need his fists to finish a fight.
He drove a knee down into the guy’s stomach, pinning him against the dusty concrete, and smashed the Kalashnikov out of his grip with a side-swiping elbow. The rifle skittered away, now useless, and Slater changed direction with the same elbow and dropped it into the thug’s unprotected face. Red hot anger took over and Slater used the shift in momentum to deliver another elbow, then another, then another, pumping his left arm like a piston until the man underneath him offered no more resistance.
He wasn’t dead, but Slater had smashed him unconscious in the space of a couple of seconds, no thanks to the burning intensity running through his veins.
The thug had come within an inch of ending Slater’s life.
That deserved retaliation.
Slater fell off the thug. Pain seared in his hip, and his hands throbbed uncontrollably, but he didn’t pay any of his injuries a sliver of attention. They were superficial, and they meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. What mattered above all else was the last remaining hostile in the room, the sole guy up the back of the concrete box that Slater had glimpsed earlier. Slater’s vision was a blur but he rolled like a madman toward the loaded Kalashnikov, wondering how the hell he was going to fire the gun with a pair of hands that had suffered grievous injuries.
He didn’t have time to think about it.
At any moment, he expected to catch a bullet as he moved. He vaguely sensed cowering innocents all around him, pressed up against each of the respective walls with their heads bowed as chaos raged in the room, but Slater couldn’t spot the last guy anywhere. Admittedly, he hadn’t
stopped to look yet, madly scrambling for the dormant rifle he’d elbowed away, but the guy could be anywhere.
Slater clamped a bloody hand down on the Kalashnikov and finally took the time to dart his vision around the room, searching for any sign of…
No shots came. No bullets struck the dusty ground around him, or punched straight through his clothing and sunk into his flesh. He heard no crack of automatic weaponry, or even so much as a string of Russian cursing.
In fact, he couldn’t have heard a thing if he tried.
The four shots the last thug had fired from the AK-15 had effectively deafened Slater. Besides the fact that most of them had grazed him, they had burst from the barrel of the rifle at such close proximity that his eardrums might have been permanently disabled. He could hear nothing over the heartbeat pounding in his ears.
But where the hell is the last guy?
Then, in the tunnel vision that had settled over him, he saw it.
The cluster of three people, their backs turned to Slater, fleeing at breakneck speed from the room.
Hustling straight through the same doorway he’d entered moments earlier.
The last thug, barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, with big pasty hands the size of dustbin lids, had a frail thirty-something woman with brunette hair and a young girl no older than ten in a vice-like grip, holding them by an arm each. With both hands preoccupied, the assault rifle on a shoulder strap was swinging uselessly across his burly frame. He didn’t have the resources to use it.
But he didn’t need to.
He was fleeing with his precious cargo.
Slater only caught a glimpse of the trio, and by the time he brought his own weapon up to aim at the doorway, they had vanished.
24
