Last Man Standing

by David Baldacci

  2

  Teddy Riner went down first. Of the two seconds it took him to fall, the man had been dead for one of them. On the other side Cal Plummer fell to the ground like he’d been pole-axed by a giant. As Web watched helplessly, up and down the compact lines heavy ordnance impacted with Kevlar and then flesh, and then there was nothing else. It didn’t seem right for good men to die so quietly.

  Before the guns started firing, Web had fallen on his rifle and it was wedged under him. He could barely breathe; his Kevlar and weapons seemed crushed against his diaphragm. There was stuff on his mask. He couldn’t know, but it was part of Teddy Riner, throw-off from the monster round that had blown a hole the size of a man’s palm through his body armor and sent part of Riner flying back to where Web lay, dead last of Charlie Team and, ironically enough, the only one still living.

  Web still felt paralyzed, none of his limbs responding to pleas from his brain to move. Had he suffered a stroke at age thirty-seven? Then suddenly the sounds of gunfire seemed to clear his head, the feeling finally returned to his arms and legs and he managed to rip off his mask and roll on his back. He exhaled a gush of foul air and screamed in relief. Now Web was staring straight up at the sky. He saw spears of lightning, though he couldn’t hear even the belly rumbles of the thunder over the gunfire.

  He had a powerful if insane urge to lift up his hand into the maelstrom above him, perhaps to confirm the presence of the bullets racing past, as though he were a youngster told not to touch a hot stove and who would then, of course, think of nothing else. Instead he reached down to his belt, undid the latch on a side pouch and pulled out his thermal imager. On the blackest night the TI would pick up an entire world invisible to the unaided eye, zeroing in on the core heat signature that burned in just about everything.

  Though he was unable to see them even with the TI, Web could easily sense the vapor trails thrown off by the net of bullets zipping across above him. Web also observed that the dense gunfire was coming from two separate directions: the tenement building dead ahead and a dilapidated structure to the immediate right. He looked through his TI at the latter building and saw nothing but jagged glass. And then Web observed something that made his body tense even more. The muzzle flashes were erupting at the same time at each of the shattered windows. They moved across the apertures, stopped for a few seconds, and then moved back across, as the gun barrels he could not see yet knew were there completed their controlled firing arc.

  As the gunfire began anew, Web rolled over on his belly and stared at the original target building through his imager. Here too there was a line of windows in the lower level of the target. And the same muzzle flashes were occurring with the exact same synchronized arc of movement. Web could now make out the long barrels of the machine guns. Through the TI the silhouettes of the guns were brick-red, the metal molten hot from the amount of ammo they were spraying. No human outline, though, came up on his thermal, and if any man had been in the vicinity, Web’s imager would have nailed him. He was for sure looking at some kind of remote-controlled firing post. He now knew that his team had been set up, ambushed, without the enemy putting a single man at risk.

  The slugs ricocheted off the brick walls behind and to the right of him, and Web felt bits of shrapnel hitting all around, like hardened raindrops. At least a dozen times the deflections had skimmed his Kevlar, but most of their speed and lethality had already been depleted. He kept his unarmored legs and arms tight to the asphalt. However, not even his Kevlar could withstand a direct hit, for the machine guns were almost certainly doling out .50-caliber ordnance, with each round as long as a butter knife and probably armor-piercing too. Web could gauge all this from the supersonic cracking sound made by the guns and the signature muzzle flash. And the vapor trail of a .50-caliber was also something pretty damn unforgettable. In fact you felt the snap before you even heard the round. It raised every hair on your body, as lightning did right before its fatal blow.

  Web screamed out the names of his teammates one by one. No answer. No movement. No moans, no body twitches to show that life was still out there somewhere. And still Web yelled out their names again and again, like some insane roll call. Everywhere around him garbage cans exploded, glass burst, walls of brick were being eroded as if bludgeoning rivers were carving canyons. This was Normandy Beach, or more aptly Pickett’s Charge, and Web had just lost his entire army. Alley vermin fled the slaughter. That courtyard was as clean of such rodents as it ever had been. No city inspector had ever done as good a job as rhythmic .50-caliber ordnance did that night.

  Web didn’t want to die, but every time he looked at what was left of his team, a part of him wanted to join them. The family fought and died together. It held some appeal for Web. He actually felt his legs tense for such a leap to eternity, yet something stronger took hold and he stayed hunkered down. To die was to lose. To give up was to let everyone perish in vain.

  Where the hell were X-Ray and Whiskey? Why weren’t they fast-roping to the rescue? The snipers on the buildings overlooking the courtyard couldn’t come down without getting ripped apart, though, yet there were other snipers on the roofs of the buildings along the alley Charlie had come through. They could rope down. But would TOC give them the green light? Maybe not, if TOC didn’t know what was going on, and how could they? Web didn’t even know what the hell was going on, and he was right in the middle of it. Yet he couldn’t exactly hang around waiting for TOC to make up their mind until a stray round made it a clean sweep of Web’s team.

  He felt a thin layer of panic settle over him despite years of training designed specifically to banish that weakness from his psyche. Action, he needed to be doing something. His bone mic lost, Web snared his portable Motorola from its shoulder Velcro patch. He pushed the button, yelled into it. “HR fourteen to TOC, HR fourteen to TOC.” No response. He changed to the backup frequency and then to a general purpose one. Still nothing. He looked at the radio and his spirits sank. The front was smashed from where he had fallen on it. Web slithered forward until he reached Cal Plummer’s body. When he tried to grab Plummer’s two-way radio, something hit Web’s hand and he pulled it back. A ricochet only; a direct hit would’ve taken his hand off. Web counted five fingers still there, and the intense pain made him want to fight, to live. If for no other reason than to destroy whoever had done this, although Web’s bag of tricks was almost empty. And for the first time in his career Web wondered if the opposition he now faced was actually better than he was.

  Web knew that if he stopped thinking he still might leap up, firing at nothing that could be killed. So he focused on the tactical scenario. He was in a carefully confined death zone, automatic firing arcs on two sides, forming a ninety-degree angle of destruction and providing no human agent that could be stopped. Okay, that was the field situation. Now what the hell was he supposed to do about it? What chapter was that in the manual? The one that read, “You’re screwed”? God, the sounds were deafening. He couldn’t even hear his heart pounding. His breath came in short gasps. Where the hell were Whiskey and X-Ray? And Hotel? They couldn’t run any faster? And yet what really could they do? They were trained to gun down human targets at both long and close range. He screamed out, “There’s nothing for you to shoot!”

  Chin tucked hard to his chest, Web started in surprise as he saw the little boy, the shirtless one from the chunk of concrete. Hands over his ears, the kid was crouched at the edge of the corner, along the alleyway Web and company had come from. If he moved out into the courtyard, Web knew the boy’s body would be going into a morgue bag—probably two morgue bags, because the .50 rounds could actually cut the kid’s skinny body in half.

  The boy took a step forward, nearing the end of the brick wall and almost at the courtyard. Maybe he was intending to come help. Maybe he was waiting for the gunfire to stop so he could strip the bodies of any valuables, snagging their weapons for later resale on the streets. Maybe he was just flat-out curious. Web didn’t know or really care.