Last Man Standing

by David Baldacci

  dodging, firing, wounding and occasionally killing. There were only fifty HRT operators, because the selection process was so grueling. The average time at HRT was five years. Web had bucked that trend and was going on his eighth year of duty. It seemed that HRT was being called upon a lot more often these days and to hot spots all over the world, with HRT’s unwritten policy of being wheels up in four hours from Andrews Air Force Base. Well, the curtain had fallen on his part of that show. Web was teamless now.

  It had never occurred to Web that he would be the sole survivor of anything. It just didn’t seem in his nature. They all had joked about it, even had morbid betting pools on who would die one moonless night. Web had almost always been first on the list, because he always seemed to be first in the line of fire. Now it was torturing Web, though, not knowing what had gotten between him and the seventh coffin. And the only thing worse than the guilt was the shame.

  He pulled the Mach to the curb and got out at the barricade. He showed his ID to the men posted there, who were all stunned to see him. Web ducked down the alley before the army of reporters could glom on to him. They had been reporting live here since the massacre from their tall-mast satellite broadcast trucks. Web had caught some of the news from the hospital. They were feeding the public the same facts over and over, using their little charts and pictures, and sporting their little dour expressions, and saying things like, “That’s all we know right now. But stay with us, I’m certain we’ll have more later, even if we have to make the shit up. Back to you, Sue.” Web jogged down the alley.

  Last night’s storm had long since blown itself into the Atlantic. The air pushing behind it was cooler than the city had had in a while. Built on a swamp, Washington, D.C., handled heat and humidity better than cold and snow. When the snow fell, the only street likely to be cleared was the one in your dreams.

  He ran into Bates halfway down the alley.

  “What in the hell are you doing here?” Bates said.

  “You said you wanted my take on things, so I’m here to give it to you.” Bates glanced at Web’s hand. “Let’s get going, Perce. Every minute counts.”

  From the exact spot where the Chevy had dropped them off, Web retraced the steps of his squad. With every stride Web took toward the target, he could feel both his anger and his fear swell. The bodies were gone; the blood was not. Even the hard rain apparently was incapable of clearing it all away. In his mind, Web blitzed through every move he had made, every emotion he had felt.

  The ruined machine gun nests were being dismantled and examined by a team of people who consistently pulled legal convictions out of microscopic scraps. Others walked the square courtyard kneeling, stooping, tagging things, probing and basically looking for answers from objects that did not appear willing to give any. Watching them, Web was not confident. It was highly unlikely that crystal-clear tented arches and plain whorls were just waiting around on the guns to be plucked by the fingerprint techs. Whoever had planned this intricate ambush wouldn’t be that careless. He stepped between the bloodstains like he was tiptoeing around a graveyard, and wasn’t he really?

  “Windows were painted black so the guns couldn’t be spotted until they started firing. No light reflections off barrels, no nothing,” said Bates.

  “Nice to know we were done in by professionals,” replied Web bitterly.

  “You did a number on the fifties.” Bates pointed to one of the ruined weapons.

  “An SR75 will do that for you.”

  “They’re mini-guns, military design. Six-barrel Gatling style, tripod-mounted with the pods bolted to the floor so the firing position wouldn’t deviate. There were feeder box and conveyor belt attachments and four thousand linked rounds per gun. Firing rates were set at four hundred a minute, though its maximum setting is eight thousand.”

  “Four hundred was plenty. And there were eight guns. That’s thirty-two hundred slugs flying at you every sixty seconds. I know because all except one ricochet missed me by a few inches.”

  “With that low firing rate those guns could shoot a long time.” “They did.”

  “Power drive was electric, and they were chambering armor-piercing rounds.”

  Web just shook his head. “Did you find what tripped them?”

  Bates led him over to a brick wall on the side farthest from the alley Web had come down. It was part of the building perpendicularly placed to the targeted abandoned tenement house and the source of one-half of the firing arc that had wiped out Charlie, save Web. What was invisible in the dark was only a bit more apparent in the daylight.

  Web knelt down and looked at what he recognized as a laser device. A small hole had been punched in the brick and the laser point and power pack inserted into it. The hole was deeper than the power pack so that once inside the hole, it was pretty much invisible. The snipers wouldn’t have been able to ID it from where they had their posts set up, even if they had been looking for such a thing, and their intelligence had given them no indication of it, as far as Web knew. The path of the laser was knee height and the invisible light stream no doubt had run across the courtyard when activated.

  “Beam breaks, firing starts and doesn’t stop except for a few seconds’ pause after each cycle until the ammo’s gone.” He looked around in bewilderment. “What if a dog or cat or somebody just strolling by here tripped the laser before we got there?”

  From Bates’s expression, it was clear he had already considered this possibility. “I’m thinking people were discreetly warned to stay away. Animals are another issue. So I’m thinking the laser was armed via remote.”

  Web rose. “So they waited until we were just about there before activating the laser. That means the person would have to be reasonably close by.”

  “Well, he hears you guys coming, or he gets intelligence to that effect. He waits until you’ve maybe turned the corner and he hits the remote and runs.”

  “We didn’t see a damn soul in the courtyard, and my thermal didn’t pick up a ninety-eight-point-six temp anywhere.”

  “They could’ve been in the building—hell, any one of these buildings. They point the device out one of the windows, hit the button and they’re long gone.”

  “And the snipers and Hotel saw nothing?”

  Bates shook his head. “Hotel’s story is they saw zip until the kid brought them your note.”

  At the mention of Hotel, Web thought of Paul Romano and his spirits sank even more. Romano was probably at Quantico right now telling everyone that Web had turned coward and let his team die and was trying to blame it on a mental lapse. “Whiskey? X-Ray? They had to see something,” Web said, referring to the snipers on the rooftops.

  “They saw some things, but I’m not prepared to discuss it quite yet.”

  Web’s instincts told him to let that one alone. What would the snipers say? That they saw Web freeze, let his team charge on without him and then drop to the ground while his comrades-in-arms got obliterated? “How about the DEA? They were with Hotel, and there was a crew of them in reserve too.”

  Bates and Web looked at each other and Bates shook his head.

  The FBI and DEA weren’t the best of friends. The DEA, Web had always thought, was like a little brother kicking at his older sibling’s shins until big brother hit back, and then the little punk ran off and tattled.

  “Well, I guess we have to accept that until something makes us not,” commented Web.

  “Guess so. Were any of you wearing night-vision equipment?”

  Web immediately understood the logic of the question. NV goggles would have picked up on the laser, transforming it into a long, unmistakable band of light.

  “No. I pulled my thermal after the shooting started, but assaulters don’t wear NVs. You get any source of ambient light while you’re wearing them, then you are basically blind if you have to take them off and start shooting. And the snipers probably wouldn’t have been using them during the assault; they screw up depth perception too much.”

 

Bates nodded toward the gutted buildings where the guns had been set up. “The techs examined the guns. Each had a signal link box. They’re thinking that there was a delay of a few seconds between when Charlie Team tripped the laser and when the guns were activated in order to make sure the team was squarely in the kill zone. The courtyard and firing lanes were large enough to allow for that.

  Web suddenly felt dizzy and put his hand against the wall. It was as though he were reexperiencing the paralysis he had suffered during the doomed attack.

  “You should’ve given yourself some more time to recover,” said Bates as he slid an arm under Web’s to help support him.

  “I’ve had paper cuts worse than this.”

  “I’m not talking about your hand.”

  “My head’s fine too, thanks for your concern,” Web snapped, and then relaxed. “Right now I just want to do, not think.”

  For the next half hour Web pointed out the locations and descriptions of all the persons they had passed that night, and everything else he could recall from the time Charlie left the final staging area to the moment the last bullet was fired in the courtyard.

  “You think any one of them could have been working with the target?” said Bates, referring to the people Web and company had passed in the alley.

  “Down here anything’s possible,” replied Web. “There was obviously a leak. And it could have come anywhere along the line.”

  “There’s a lot of possibilities there,” Bates said. “Let’s go over some.”

  Web shrugged. “This wasn’t a triple-eight-beep scenario,” he said, a reference to the three number eights that appeared on his pager representing a command for all HRT operators to haul butt to Quantico. “Last night was selected as the target date in advance, so everybody met at HRT to get our gear and team configurations ready and then we moved out in the Suburbans. We did the prelim staging at Buzzard Point and then drove to the last staging area. We had a U.S. attorney available in case we needed some additional warrants issued. The snipers were already in place. They went in early posing as HVAC rehab workers doing a job on roof units on two of the buildings along the strike path. Assaulters did our down-and-dirty with the local police just like always. After we left the last point of concealment, Teddy Riner requested and received compromise authority because of the unfriendly logistics. We wanted to be able to shoot on the fly if we had to. We knew that hitting the place from the front and exposing ourselves to fire in the courtyard was risky, but we also thought they wouldn’t expect it. Plus the way the building was situated and configured, there weren’t a lot of options. We got the green light to move to crisis site and then we were going to execute on TOC’s countdown. We had one primary exterior breach point. The assault plan was to split once we were inside and hit from two points while Hotel and DEA blew in from the rear, with a unit in reserve and the snipers as backup firepower and cover. Hard and fast, just like always.”

  The two men sat on a pair of trash cans. Bates tossed his pack of gum in the trash, pulled out his cigarettes and offered one to Web, who declined.

  “The local police knew the target, didn’t they?” Bates asked.

  Web nodded. “The approximate physical location. So they can keep a presence, help quadrant off the area and keep people on the outside of the perimeter out of the way, look for associates of the target tipping them off, that sort of thing.”

  “How much advance time you figure the locals had in case there was a leak from there?”

  “Hour.”

  “Well, nobody set up that death trap in an hour.”

  “Who was the undercover on this one?”

  “Goes without saying that you take this name to the grave with you.” Bates paused, presumably for emphasis, and then said, “His name is Randall Cove. A real vet. Working the target from deep inside. I mean deep, like down-in-the-sewer deep. African-American, built like a truck and could do the street stuff with the best of them. He’s done a million of these gigs.”

  “So what’s his story?”

  “I haven’t asked him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t find him.” Bates paused and then added, “Do you know for certain if Cove was aware when the hit was happening?”

  Web was surprised by this question. “Your end would know that better than mine. I can tell you for a fact that we were not briefed that the undercover or any snitches would be at the target. If they were supposed to be there, they’d tell us in the pre-op. That way we’d know who they were, what they looked like and we’d cuff ’em and get ’em out just like everybody else, so the real target wouldn’t get a heads-up and kill them.”

  “How much did you know about the target?”

  “Druggies’ financial ops, with bean counters present. Heavy security. They wanted the money guys as potential witnesses that we were to treat as hostages. Bag ’em fast and get them out before anyone figured out what we were doing and popped them so they couldn’t rat. Our strike plan was approved, ops orders written; we got blueprints of the target and built a copy of it at Quantico. Practiced our butts off until we knew every inch. Got our rules of engagement, nothing out of the ordinary, suited up and climbed in the Suburban. End of story.”

  “You guys do your own surveillance, snipers on glass,” Bates said, referring to snipers observing the target through binoculars and spotting scopes. “Anything pop on that?”

  “Nothing special or else we would’ve been told in our briefing. Except for the possible witness angle, to me it was just a glorified dope house raid. Hell, we cut our teeth on those.”

  “If it was just a dope house, they wouldn’t have needed you guys to crack it, Web. WFO could’ve used its SWAT team.”

  “Well, we were told the logistics were really tricky, and they were. And we knew the targets were supposed to be real nasty and were packing some ordnance SWAT didn’t think they could handle. And then you had the issue of the potential witnesses. That was enough to make it our gig. But none of us were expecting eight remote-controlled mini-guns.”

  “Obviously it was all bullshit. Fed to us like mother’s milk. Except for the guns, the place was empty. Ambush all the way. There were no bean counters, no records, no nothing.”

  Web rubbed his hand against the bullet gouges on the brick. Many were so deep Web could see the concrete block underneath—armor-piercing, for sure. The only good thing was death for his team would have been instantaneous. “The snipers had to see something.” He was hoping they had seen whatever had made Web freeze. Yet how could they?

  “I haven’t finished talking to them,” was all Bates would offer on that point, and again Web chose not to press it.

  “Where’s the kid?” Web hesitated, trying to remember. “Kevin.”

  Bates also hesitated for a second. “Disappeared.”

  Web stiffened. “How? He’s a kid.”

  “I’m not saying he did it on his own.”

  “We know who he is?”

  “Kevin Westbrook. Age ten. Got some family around, but most are guests of the state. Has an older brother, street name of Big F, the F standing for what you think it does. Head street ganger as big as a tree, and smart as a Harvard MBA. Deals in meth, Jamaican sinsemilla, the really cool stuff, though we’ve never been able to build a case against him. This area is sort of his turf.”

  Web stretched the fingers of his injured hand. The Band-Aid wasn’t doing the trick right now, and he felt guilty for even thinking about it. “That’s a pretty big coincidence that the little brother of the guy who runs this area was sitting out in the alley when we came by.” Even as he talked about the boy, Web could feel a change come over his body, as though his very soul were sliding out and moving on. He actually thought he might pass out. Web was starting to wonder if he needed a doctor or an exorcist.

  “Well, he does live around here. And from what we found out, his home life isn’t all that great. He probably avoided it if he could.”

  “This big brother missing too?�� Web asked as his balance began to return.

  “Not that he actually lives at a normal address. When you’re in the kind of business he is, you keep moving. We don’t have any direct evidence tying him to even a misdemeanor, but we’re looking for him real hard right now.” He stared at Web. “You sure you’re okay?”

  Web waved off this comment. “How exactly did you lose the kid?”

  “That’s not real clear right now. We’ll know more after we finish going through the neighborhood. Somebody had to see those weapons coming in and that machine gun nest being put up. Even around here that qualifies as a little unusual.”

  “You really think anybody here’s going to talk to you?”

  “We have to try, Web. We only need one pair of eyes.”

  The men fell silent for a while. Bates finally looked up, his expression uncomfortable.

  “Web, what really happened?”

  “Say what you really mean. How come it wasn’t a perfect seven-for-seven?”

  “I am saying it.”

  Web gazed across the courtyard at the exact spot where he had hit the asphalt. “I came out of the alley late. It was like I couldn’t move. I thought I’d had a stroke. Then I went down right before the shooting started. I don’t know why.” Web’s mind suddenly went blank and then came back, like he was a television and there had been a lightning strike nearby. “It was over in a second, Perce. A second was all it took. The worst timing in the history of the world.” He looked at Bates to gauge his reaction to this. The narrowed eyes of the man told Web all he needed to know.

  “Hell, don’t feel bad. I don’t believe it either,” said Web. Bates remained silent, and Web decided to get to the other reason he had come here. “Where’s the flag?” he asked. Bates looked surprised. “The HRT flag. I have to bring it back to Quantico.”

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