by Dale Brown
“Schweinehund! You needlessly caused the death of one of your workers to save your profits!” the Major shouted, and shot the general manager point-blank in the groin with a three-round burst from his assault rifle. The burn from the muzzle blast was a full foot in diameter, and the noise in the small cash room was deafening-but not as loud as the agonized screams of the emasculated manager until he finally bled out and died.
“Schnell!” the Major shouted, and three more of his men rushed in, as heavily armed as their leader. “Get the bins to the truck!” They pulled the steel cash bins out of the vault and wheeled them outside. The Major ignored the two surviving club managers, issued more instructions through his radio, then turned to Mullins. “How will the police deploy outside? Will they use heavy weapons?”
“I don’t think… no, they won’t,” Mullins replied, more afraid than ever of saying he didn’t know to a guy who had just killed five men in cold blood right in front of him. “I haven’t heard any reports of a SWAT call-out, and anyway this city’s SWAT teams are only on fifteen-minute alert during graveyard shifts-it’ll take them at least a half hour to get here. The shift sergeant might have a semiautomatic M-16, but they don’t train with it much…”
“Bin einziges Gewehr? One rifle? What kind of police force does this city have?” The Major laughed. “A child with a Kalashnikov can do battle with the police in this city and have a good chance of winning! Kinderpolizei!”
“Hell, only SWAT had M-16’s until just a couple months ago-and half the politicians in this city want the cops completely disarmed,” Mullins said. He was so glad to actually know something that he was babbling. “All the other cops only got sidearms or shotguns with double-ought buck. Your only real problem is that the county jail is only three blocks away, and police headquarters is only six. Once the call goes out, lots of help will arrive real fuckin’ fast.”
“We will be out of here long before that,” the Major said confidently. “Kill all the police!” he shouted to his men as they made their way down the stairs to the rear exit, heading toward the alley and the waiting truck: “I will tolerate no gunfights with them. We hit hard, and we hit first.”
The explosion from the claymore mine rattled the windows and rippled the glass front doors of Sacramento Live! Paul McLanahan jumped. He dropped the radio, fumbled for it in the darkness, picked it up from the wet pavement, and mashed the mike button: “I heard explosions! Explosions coming from inside the building!”
“Clear this channel!” came another voice, probably Lamont. “KMA, Edward Ten, show a 211 and 994 on this location, all downtown units respond Code Three, set up a perimeter on Capitol, Eighth, Fifth, and I streets, bomb explosion inside the Sacramento Live! complex, repeat, bomb explosion inside Sacramento Live!… stand by… KMA, add a 246 on this location, shots fired… Jesus, more shots fired… requesting SWAT and Star unit call-outs for a 994 and 246 inside Sacramento Live! and request a 940-Sam on my location on Seventh Street.”
“Edward Ten, One Lincoln Ten responding,” came another radio message. That was from the downtown-sector lieutenant, obviously monitoring the radio. He was the one who would take charge of the scene when he arrived.
To a supercharged Paul McLanahan, the automatic-rifle fire from inside the complex sounded even louder than the explosion. His SIG Sauer P226 was out and leveled at the front entrance to the Sacramento Live! building before he realized it. The gunshots seemed so close, so goddamn loud, that he ducked as if the bullets were pinging off the walls around him. His gun hand was shaking, and every little sound, every gust of wind, made the gun muzzle jump. He felt vulnerable as hell, exposed to the entire world.
He started running through scenarios again. What do I do if I see a guy come out of the building? Should I challenge him? But won’t that give away my location and make me a target? If he’s got a gun, should I shoot first? What if he’s got more bombs, or even grenades?
The bulletproof vest he was wearing underneath his uniform shirt didn’t seem nearly as thick and protective as it did half an hour ago.
Craig LaFortier had the squad car’s spotlight aimed right at the delivery door that swung open behind the Step Van truck parked in the alley. It lit up the three black-clothed armed men who came rushing out of the building pushing the big wheeled bins that LaFortier knew the clubs used to hold their cash. He saw the hydraulic lift mounted on the rear of the truck rise to the level of the loading dock. Two more armed men in black were standing in the back of the truck, ready to pull the bins inside it.
“Five 211 suspects in the alley on the loading dock!” LaFortier shouted into his portable radio. “All suspects 417. Request immediate backup!” He reholstered the radio, then took a firm Weaver grip on his service pistol, crouched as low as he could behind the right front fender of his squad car, and shouted, “Police! Freeze! Drop your weapons! Now!”
He never expected them to surrender-and they didn’t. As soon as he saw one of them unsling a rifle from his shoulder and level it, he opened fire, aiming three rounds each at the five gunmen he could see across the street.
He saw them jerk and jump as the rounds hit, but they didn’t go down. Two of them leveled big assault rifles with huge banana magazines at him. Staying low, LaFortier ran up J Street to a nearby parked car and crouched behind the left rear fender, again shielded by the engine block, seconds before the suspects opened fire. They peppered his squad car with heavy-caliber automatic-rifle fire, shattering the windshield and blowing out the two left tires, and stopped shooting only when they finally shot out the searchlight.
“Shots fired, shots fired!” LaFortier shouted into his radio. “Heavy automatic-rifle fire coming from the alley, two suspects with rifles, possibly all five have automatic rifles. Suspects are wearing body armor too. Go for head shots, repeat, go for head shots!”
“Get out of there, Cargo!” he heard Lamont yell in the radio. “Clear out east to Seventh or meet up with the unit on Sixth. John Twelve and John Fourteen, John Twenty-One is coming your way. Cover him.”
LaFortier knew that Seventh Street had more units, so he decided to head toward Sixth. “This is John Twenty-One, I’m headed west down J.” He dropped the magazine from his SIG and immediately slammed home another one. Time to get the hell out…
Just then, a cop’s worst nightmare appeared before his eyes. A lone gunman, looking as if he was covered in a suit of black armor, marched out of the alley onto J Street with his AK-74 leveled. When he was thirty feet from the abandoned squad car, he shouted, “Tod allen Polizisten!” and opened fire, spraying it in a side-to-side sweeping motion on full auto. Then he continued to march forward, raising the rifle up so he could aim it at anything that moved on the other side of the car. His walk was deliberate, no hurry in his steps, no effort to hide himself-just as if he were a pedestrian crossing the street.
LaFortier dropped the radio, aimed, and fired five rounds at the guy’s head. He knew he was shooting back toward Seventh, toward Lamont and the other units, but it was a chance he had to take-this guy had to go. One of his shots must have hit flesh because the guy went down and LaFortier heard him shout, “Achtung! Ich bin angeschossen! Ich bin angeschossen!” as he clutched his neck and began to crawl back toward the alley.
But LaFortier didn’t see the second guy until it was too late. The gunman peered out from around the corner of the Sacramento Live! building, took aim at LaFortier with a shoulder-fired antitank missile launcher, and fired. The car Craig LaFortier was hiding behind blew twenty feet in the air and crashed back to earth, a ball of fire and molten metal.
Matt Lamont, who had low-crawled west on J Street up to the alley with his sergeant’s-issue M-16 rifle cradled in his arms, was too late to help LaFortier, but he was going to get a piece of this cop-killer if it was the last thing he ever did. He raised the M-16 and fired three rounds at the gunman’s head, but all of them missed. He leaped to his feet, crouched low, and approached the corner of the building next to the alley, determined to
shoot at any head that appeared under his sights. At the corner of the building adjacent to the alleyway, he risked a fast peek around the corner. A tremendous volley of automatic-rifle fire rippled the corner of the building. His semiautomatic rifle was no match for at least three automatic assault rifles in the alley. He hotfooted it back to Seventh Street and took cover behind a tree.
“Officer down, officer down!” Lamont shouted into his portable radio. “Code 900, Code 900, Sacramento Live! complex, heavily armed suspects in alleyway between J and K Streets!”
As he issued the Code 900-the dire-emergency code, the code guaranteed to get every cop in town headed this way on the double-Lamont was watching the alley for any sign of the suspects. But all he could actually see were the remnants of the burning car across J Street, the one that had protected his friend and fellow cop Craig LaFortier. At least Cargo got one of the bastards before he died, Lamont thought grimly.
“What in hell happened?” Mullins asked nervously. The explosion and the volleys of automatic gunfire outside could be heard throughout the complex-it sounded as if the whole damned area was filled with cops, all out for blood.
The Major was listening for reports through his helmet-mounted headset. “One of my men in the alley is dead,” he said.
The radio in Mullins’s hand began bleeping, the all-points alert. “They’ve called a Code 900,” he said. “Every cop in the county will be here in a matter of minutes.”
“Then it is time we are off,” the Major said calmly, and began issuing instructions to his men via his headset commlink.
“What about me?” Mullins bleated. “I don’t have any armor! They’ll cut me down in three seconds!”
“Shall I put you out of your misery now?” asked the Major, leveling his rifle at the turncoat.
“No!”
“Then go, get out of my sight. You are on your own. I let you keep your life, since you served us well. But I warn you: If you are caught, and if you even think about revealing anything about myself or my organization, then you had better pray the police kill you first. Because I will see to it that your agony is prolonged over several long days. Now verschwinde! Go! My troops and I have work to do.”
Paul McLanahan had been taught about the Code 900 in the academy, listened to the instructors, heard the recordings of actual radio calls. But the main thing he learned was never, ever call for one on the radio-it was reserved for someone in a much higher pay grade than himself. He could call for “backup” or “cover” or “officer needs assistance” or “officer in distress” or even “HELP!” but could never call a Code 900. The only reason to ever call one, the instructors had said seriously, was if the earth was splitting open and all the citizens of hell were flying forth.
But he knew that was exactly what was happening. He saw and heard the rocket explosion on the other side of the complex on J Street, saw the fires, heard the gunshots, heard the heavy machine-gun fire in return. Jesus, Cargo, please get on the radio. Say something, man. Say something…
And when Paul heard the “officer down” call, he knew it was his partner. And with the sector sergeant calling a Code 900 over the air, he also knew this battle had probably just begun.
There were men shouting over on Seventh Street, the wail of sirens just a few blocks away. The sounds were reassuring to the young rookie, alone and pointing his gun at a darkened building. All he wanted to do right now was be with his partner, cover him, defend him, carry him to safety. But he would never leave his post until given an order to do so, so he was glad that other officers were responding and rushing to help Cargo. He would just have to…
An ear-splitting explosion blasted him out of his reverie. The main doors of Sacramento Live! on the K Street Mall blew open, scattering a wall of glass and fire thirty feet away. He felt a hard slap to his head, followed by a gust of super-heated air. His ears were ringing so loud, he thought he might be completely deaf. He found his finger had tightened on the trigger of his SIG, and was afraid he might have accidentally squeezed off a round. Then another explosion rocked the night, and Lamont’s squad car burst into flames over on Seventh Street-another rocket had been fired from the alley, destroying the car and sending officers scurrying for cover.
And then they appeared: two columns of four wearing helmets and gas masks, led by a figure dressed completely in thick black body armor who was firing an AK-74 out onto the street as the columns brazenly strode out the shattered front doors of the Sacramento Live! complex. The men behind him fired smaller but still murderous-looking H amp;K MP-5 submachine guns, sweeping both sides of the street with a hail of gunfire. As the column marched down Seventh Street, the Step Van wheeled out of the alley onto Seventh, moving into position to pick them up.
But they were marching away from Paul, and they didn’t see him. He took aim on the closest gunman and fired three rounds at his head. The last man in the right column stumbled, stopped, turned directly at Paul, lifted his visor, saw the squad car parked there, and swept it with a two-second burst of automatic gunfire. Highlighted in the glare of a nearby streetlight, he made an ideal target, and Paul took the shot and hit him square in the face. The man screamed and went down, clutching his face and writhing on the ground.
Paul was lining up another shot when two of the gunmen in the right column wheeled around and opened fire with their MP-5’s. He returned fire, pulling the trigger as fast as he could, rather than aiming, in the hope that his attackers might dive for cover or run. But they did neither. They fired again, concentrating their fire now.
They were coming after him, two deadly assailants with submachine guns. Time to get the hell out.
Paul had started to move along the right side of the squad car, getting ready to retreat to his chosen fall-back position, a sturdy-looking information booth a few yards away, when he felt a pain in his right leg. He looked down to see half of his right calf ripped open, just above the top of his boots.
He was a kid from the TV age and had seen plenty of guys get shot on TV. They all had it wrong, he realized. His leg did not fly backward-he never even felt the bullet hit. His leg was not shot off. There was no spurting blood. He felt very little pain-that was the weirdest part. What he could see of the wound-it wasn’t much-was big and ugly-obviously a ricochet, the bullet spinning after it hit a wall or the ground, and not a direct hit.
Paul tried to run but then the wound got him-now he felt the goddamn pain! He sank down to his right knee. The gunmen were reloading, flipping the big banana magazines upside down to reload from fresh clips taped against the first ones. He aimed and fired again, missing. This time they did not return fire, evidently satisfied that they had gotten him enough so that he was no longer a threat. He saw them head back north on Seventh to catch up with the others, who were still sweeping the streets with volleys of gunfire, covering the Step Van until it could pull up beside them.
No fucking way! Paul McLanahan shouted to himself. You’re not getting away, not after killing my partner! But all he had was his 9-millimeter pistol-no match for submachine guns. But something else was.
Paul grabbed for his keys, thankful that he had rubber-banded all but the car key together so he could find it easily. He unlocked Caruthers’s squad car from the passenger side, leaned inside, started the engine, and put it in gear. Then he laid himself across the front seat, left hand on the steering wheel, right hand down on the gas pedal, pushed on the accelerator, and shot forward.
The two gunmen who thought they had disposed of him turned, aimed, and fired, but they were too late. Paul mowed both of them down under the squad car, hurling them up, then under the fender like corn stalks under a harvester. More automatic gunfire hit the car. The windshield shattered. Without letting up on the accelerator, Paul shifted the car into reverse. Tires screeched. He was shoved forward under the dash by the momentum, losing his grip on the steering wheel. With the right front tire shot out, the car looped to the right and crashed into the corner of a building on K Street. The engine
died. He was trapped.
Paul looked up. There was another attacker less than ten feet away, his submachine gun raised, aiming right at him, moving closer for a cleaner shot.
Paul hit the tiny switch on the radio console and the electro-clamps released on the big Remington 12-gauge shotgun mounted on the dashboard. Now lying on his back in the front seat facing the approaching terrorist, Paul racked the action, leveled the shotgun, aimed for the face and neck, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing but a dull click! Christ, the shotgun wasn’t loaded. Caruthers, doing an off-duty job, obviously hadn’t thought he needed to bother loading it. In desperation, Paul tossed the shotgun at his assailant. The muzzle caught the assailant right in the middle of his gas-mask lens, shattering it.
“Ich bin verletz! Helft mir!” The terrorist screamed something in a foreign language-was it German? Paul didn’t know.
The gunman ripped off the broken mask, lifting his helmet off with it. Paul got a good look at a very young, chiseled face, square jaw, close-cropped black curly hair, dark bushy eyebrows, and a nose twisted awkwardly to the right, obviously broken. The guy seemed frozen, paralyzed with fear, as if realizing that Paul could identify him. Paul reached for his SIG Sauer P226 sidearm…
… but it never cleared leather. Another masked and helmeted figure pushed the unmasked guy aside, shouted, “Zeit zu schlafen, Schweinehund!” and opened fire with his MP-5 submachine gun from fifteen feet away, raking the rookie cop with a three-second full-auto burst at point-blank range.
“Mr McLanahan!” the nurse shouted from the door of the operating room. “Come with me! Hurry!”
Patrick felt his heart lurch. “Is Wendy all right?”
“Put on your mask and follow me,” the nurse ordered. My God, Patrick thought, what in hell have we done? He didn’t hear a baby’s cry-what in God’s name had happened?
Gowned and masked figures surrounded the operating table. All he could see was Wendy’s head. Her eyes were closed, and a large white drape hid her body from his view from the shoulders down. A plastic bonnet covered her hair, and he could see her arms fastened down to the sides of the table with Velcro straps. The anesthesiologist was at the head of the table, his eyes fixed on an array of monitors and several automatic fluid-metering devices. There were two IV stands with empty whole-blood and plasma bags hanging from them. He motioned Patrick to an empty stool next to Wendy’s head.
