Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  Assholes. Every time he thought about what they’d done to Mr. Hall and Mrs. Charlton, he wanted to kill them. He wanted somebody to kill them. Especially for Mrs. Charlton.

  The bus slowed by half—if that was even possible, given the snail’s pace they’d been traveling for the last three hours—and as it did, the terrorists became more agitated.

  “We’re almost there,” one of them said in Spanish. “It should be just around this curve.”

  “What are they saying?” Allison asked. Why she’d decided to come on a trip to rural Mexico without knowing a word of the language was beyond Tristan.

  He ignored her. A better option than punching her.

  The bus took the curve at slower than a walking pace, its engine screaming and transmission rattling as if someone had thrown rocks in the gearbox. Finally, they stopped, and the men with the guns started moving and chattering quickly.

  “They’re saying we’re here,” Tristan translated, hoping to get ahead of the inevitable question. “ ‘Positions, everyone.’ ”

  “What does that mean?” Allison whined.

  “How the hell do I know? They’re not talking to us.”

  “I see it,” said the driver, pointing through the windshield to a spot ahead of them.

  The other five terrorists abandoned their spots among the hostages and surged forward to get a look. In Tristan’s mind, the gunmen were essentially one person. He’d made an effort to avoid eye contact, or even to look at their faces. He knew that if he ever came out of the other end of this thing alive, he didn’t want their malignant eyes haunting his dreams. He prayed that there’d be some kind of hypnosis he could undergo that would erase this nightmare forever.

  “Get ready to take your positions,” said the gunman who’d staked out the front of the bus as his own territory. Tristan figured that guy to be the one in charge because he was the one who gave the most orders. “Keep watch for any sign of soldiers or police. Are you ready?”

  The answer came more as an enthusiastic roar than a verbal response.

  The bus rocked as four soldiers streamed out of the fanfold front door and formed a circle around the vehicle. They kept their rifles at their shoulders, pointed out toward the jungle. Seated where he was on the right-hand side of the bus, Tristan couldn’t see any details of what they were doing, but he noted that everyone in the bus had stopped talking.

  If it hadn’t been so quiet, he probably would not have heard the tick of the windshield breaking and the wet thwop of the driver’s head exploding as two distinct sounds.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jonathan tightened his grip on his weapon as the bus’s folding door opened and four armed men rushed out. All of them wore ancient M81 woodland cammies, and were armed with MP5 submachine guns, no doubt courtesy of a happy gun store owner in Texas. They moved with choreographed precision that demonstrated they’d been trained, albeit to a level that didn’t concern him much. The four took up defensive positions on each corner of the bus, and waited while a fifth guy—the driver of the van—hurried forward to join them. The bus driver remained in place behind the wheel.

  With everyone in position, they held for a few seconds, and then the fifth guy moved forward, his weapon pressed to his shoulder, his eyes scanning for threats. He clearly had spotted the backpack.

  He’d walked maybe a half dozen steps when a high-caliber rifle shattered the silence of the afternoon and brains spattered the interior of the bus’s windshield. The shot came from the guy on Jonathan’s right, and half a second later, he heard the whip crack of Boxer’s incoming round as it sheared the shooter’s head from his shoulders.

  Then the world erupted in gunfire.

  In the space of a heartbeat, the five kidnappers opened up on the jungle, firing randomly at targets they couldn’t see. Farther away on Jonathan’s right, the rest of the newly arriving shooters returned fire, proving that whatever their skills might be, marksmanship did not rank among them.

  Jonathan fired a three-round burst and dropped the terrorist at the right front bumper. Two seconds later, he was under fire from his right, his position being raked by the late arrivers. He slapped his transmit button. “I’m under fire,” he said.

  He’d barely released the transmit button when Boxers started stitching the area with .30-caliber rounds. Whoever they were, they didn’t have the stomach for a protracted gun battle. As loud as they had been coming in, they made a hell of a lot more noise as they ran away.

  In a perfect world, Jonathan would have caught them in a cross fire to keep them from escaping; but today those people were just a distraction. His real targets were down there on the ground below.

  Jonathan’s worst nightmare would come true if the soldiers on the ground turned their attention to the bus. In the twisted logic that was hostage negotiation, they had every right to do so. They no doubt felt both betrayed and doomed. It only made sense to take the hostages with them.

  As if on cue, two of them turned their weapons on the bus and opened fire. Boxers was already a beat ahead. Jonathan couldn’t hear the Big Guy’s rifle, but he recognized the marksmanship. On the far side of the bus, a spray of blood marked the demise of one gunman, and before his buddy could even react, he, too, dropped dead.

  Jonathan went to work, too. He killed the bagman first, with a double tap to the chest, and then he moved to the two on his side of the bus, killing them with two shots apiece.

  Then it was done. All the bad guys were dead, and the whole gun battle had lasted less than ten seconds.

  Half a tick later, Boxers nearly shouted over the radio, “What the hell’s going on, Boss?”

  Jonathan pressed the transmit button to respond, but froze when he heard more gunshots. These seemed muffled compared to the others, and they were followed immediately with the sound of screaming.

  “Shit!” he spat on the air. “There’s a shooter on the bus.”

  Tristan had never seen so much blood. The spray of bone and brains went everywhere, misting the windows pink. An instant later, the world outside erupted in gunfire. He looked out the side window and saw the soldiers or the kidnappers or whatever the hell they were shooting long blasts of machine gun fire into the jungle.

  “They’re going to kill us!” Allison screamed.

  And then the guys outside spouted blood and fell to the ground.

  Paul McDaniel, another jock, shouted, “Get down!” and then the loudest bang Tristan had ever heard startled everyone into silence. And there was more blood in the air. Tristan could taste it.

  People started screaming. Danielle Taylor was next. Tristan had never gotten to know her very well, but she smiled a lot. He’d wished several times that he could have been handcuffed to her instead of to Allison. The soldier at the front of the bus knew none of this, of course, as he pressed his rifle against the side of her head.

  “Please don’t,” Danielle begged. “I—”

  The kidnapper pulled the trigger.

  At least she died fast.

  What surprised Tristan the most was the clarity of it all. It was as if time had slowed to a heartbeat every five seconds. As the gunman strolled casually down the center aisle, Tristan’s brain recorded every detail. The muzzle flashes. The way people just went limp when their souls were blasted out of their heads. Always a head shot, always a dead body.

  With Danielle gone, the soldier pivoted and leveled his rifle at Ray Greaser. Tristan had never liked Ray, but right now, he felt like a brother. He started to cry when the rifle turned to him. “Please don’t,” he said.

  Good guys never pleaded for their lives in movies, Tristan thought, yet everybody pleads when their time comes. Even as his heart hammered in his chest hard enough to break a rib, Tristan wondered what he would do when his time came.

  This was so unfair. They were all handcuffed together, and the soldier with the rifle could move as fast or as slowly as he wanted. Every advantage lay with the murderer. That just wasn’t right.

  The soldier
was about to kill Ray when someone yelled, “Hey, asshole!” It was in English, and when the gunman pivoted and pointed his gun at the shouter, Tristan was shocked to realize that the words were his own.

  But they were, and he was already in for a dime. Now it was time to be in for a dollar. “You don’t have to do this,” he said in Spanish. As the words left his mouth, he caught movement off to his right, outside the bus.

  “Yes, I do,” the soldier said. He murdered Ray, and then his gaze followed Tristan’s. First his eyes, then his head, and finally his rifle. Someone was storming the bus.

  The gunman flipped a switch on the side of his rifle. Tristan knew he was going to die now. He hooked his free hand around Allison’s neck and he pulled her to the floor.

  The shooting became insane.

  “Give me covering fire on the hill,” Jonathan said into his radio as he sprinted toward the vehicle full of precious cargo. Whoever took the shot at the driver had screwed up everything, and the penalty was death.

  An instant later, Boxers opened up, raking the trees above and behind Jonathan with bullets. If the shooter was still there and they didn’t kill him, they would make him go to ground, which accomplished more or less the same goal.

  The sound of the gunfire must have startled the killer on the bus, too, because he stopped firing at the hostages and looked out the far side window toward Boxers’ location.

  The distraction lasted for only a second or two, and then the shooter returned to his executions. Jonathan knew from sound alone that he was firing big ammunition—probably 7.62 millimeter—and he knew from experience how much damage they could do to the human anatomy. God only knew how many PCs the shooter had already killed, but Jonathan aimed to stop him.

  As he closed the distance, he let the carbine fall against its sling and he drew his Colt 1911 .45 from the holster on his thigh. At this range, any bullet he fired from the carbine would pass completely through the man he intended to shoot and then go on to endanger the people behind him. Besides, the Colt was the best weapon ever made.

  He was still ten yards out when he identified his target, but he didn’t have a clean shot. Too many heads bobbing in and out of the sight picture. Even from out here, he could see the blood on the windows and the walls of the bus. He could also see the holes through the sheet metal that marked the paths of the bullets that had exited their victims. The gunman was walking down the aisle, front to back, casually taking aim at hostages’ heads and blowing them away. For Jonathan, the worst of it all was the lack of screaming inside the vehicle.

  People screamed only when they thought they had a chance to live.

  The movement must have caught the gunman’s attention, because when Jonathan was still thirty yards out, the guy opened up on full auto inside the bus. It was a slaughter.

  The gunman turned as Jonathan leaped through the open door and dove on his belly. The shooter followed him with his own weapon, a stockless AK with a banana clip. Jonathan saw in a blink that the bad guy’s aim was off by half a foot, and that would be his last mistake.

  The AK launched its massive bullets at two thousand three hundred feet per second. At this range, the boom was beyond deafening. The sound pressure hit with a force all its own.

  Jonathan’s mind recorded all of the sights and the noises as a matter of instinct, dismissing everything so far as inconsequential. He had lives to protect, and to do it he had to kill this asshole or die trying. As he hit the floor on his right side, he slid across the blood-slick grooved rubber matting and came to rest with his head nearly touching the foot of the dead driver.

  Before the AK could cycle for a second burst, Jonathan’s hand flexed and his pistol barked. The angles were all wrong for a reliable one-shot kill, so he took out the shooter’s knee with the first shot to get him falling. A quarter second later, the collapsing terrorist spread his arms just wide enough to expose his chest, and Jonathan drilled his heart. Just for good measure—in case the bad guy was wearing body armor Jonathan couldn’t see—he launched a final round through the bridge of the shooter’s nose. Three shots in just over one second, and the world had one fewer terrorist to worry about.

  Then there was silence. Even as Boxers hammered away at whatever targets he could find outside, nothing moved in the interior of the vehicle. This was where there should have been unbridled panic, punctuated with screams of terror and cries for help. Instead, he heard only the pounding of his own heart.

  He stood cautiously, his weapon at the ready. The metal floorboards were slick with blood. Windows and seats had been shredded by bullets, their occupants contorted into postures that were only possible in death. At first glance, Jonathan counted seven bodies, five teens and two terrorists. He neither knew nor cared what the numbers outside tallied up to.

  Jonathan pressed the transmit button in the center of his vest. “Big Guy, I need you in here now.” They usually tried to keep emotion out of their voices on the radio, but he heard the leaden dread in his own.

  “Listen up!” he yelled. “I am an American and I am here to take you home. Can anybody hear me?”

  He moved methodically down the center aisle, weapon ready but his finger out of the trigger guard. He moved seat by seat, scanning the carnage, observing the way the terrorists had bound them together. In the very back, two of the hostages—both boys—sat bolt upright in their seats, one with part of his brain exposed, and the other with two holes in his chest.

  The entire bus shifted as Boxers mounted the steps. “Holy shit.”

  Jonathan turned to the man he’d served with for so many years. It was time to say something, to give an order. But he felt frozen. He’d had ops go bad in the past, but nothing like this. “What the hell happened? Who opened fire?”

  “Are they all dead?” Boxers asked.

  “I’ve only done a primary,” Jonathan replied. In a primary assessment, you look for the obvious—weapons and people who are wounded. The secondary assessment looks for more detailed signs of life. Here, today, that seemed like a waste of time. “How secure is our perimeter?”

  “I saw them running,” Boxers said. He grabbed the dead driver by his collar, pulled him onto the floor, and slipped into his seat. “We’re getting out of this clearing,” he said. “We’re too good a target.” He restarted the engine, threw the transmission into gear, and popped the clutch.

  As they lurched forward, Jonathan sat heavily on the edge of a seat. “Where are you going?” he yelled. If they were getting away, he expected them to be going backward.

  “The money,” Boxers said. “Ain’t no way I’m leaving that much cash for the bad guys.”

  He raced forward for thirty yards and jammed the vehicle to a stop. For a guy of his size, he moved with impressive speed, slapping the transmission into neutral and then heaving himself out of the seat, down the steps, and out the door. By the time Jonathan could gain his balance to provide cover, the Big Guy was already back at the foot of the stairs, the green-and-blue backpack dangling from his hand. Within ten seconds, they were moving again.

  He jammed the stick shift into reverse and popped the clutch. As they lurched backward, he yanked the wheel hard to get them turned around, and then he shifted into second gear and gunned it. They tore down the road that the bus had come in on, and after they turned the corner and disappeared from the established shooting lanes, Jonathan surveyed the carnage. Wherever he looked, all he saw were corpses. He’d let all of them down.

  “You okay, Boss?”

  Jonathan looked up to see Boxers’ eyes in the mirror.

  No, he was not okay. Okay wasn’t even within the same emotional solar system as where he was. Someone somewhere had deliberately sabotaged this mission, and whoever it was, was going to pay dearly, so help—

  Somebody moaned. At first, it was barely audible—so low that Jonathan thought maybe he’d imagined it. But Boxers clearly had heard it, too. Then it became louder, before it became a scream: “Get it off me!”

  The bodies o
n the floor in the seat behind him moved.

  “Box!” Jonathan yelled. “Stop the bus!”

  Tristan couldn’t breathe. He felt as if he was trying to climb out of a hole in his mind, but something was holding him down. Someone was holding him down. Trying to crush his head, pressing it into something hard and lumpy.

  And wet.

  He tasted blood.

  As consciousness returned, so did awareness. Memory of what had happened. The shooting. The brains and the blood.

  Like the blood he could taste.

  He opened his eyes, and there was Allison, staring at him. Unblinking. Dead.

  He heard himself screaming before he knew that the voice was his. But once he did know, he wanted to make sure that it could be heard. Allison was dead and she was bleeding into his mouth.

  Horror flooded his veins. He needed to get her off him. He tried to push, but his hands wouldn’t work. They couldn’t be separated anyway, he remembered because they were tied together with a steel chain. Screaming seemed to be the only thing he was capable of.

  Then she moved. Dead Allison moved. Her eyes never blinked, but she somehow heard him, and she was levitating away, pulling him with her by his wrist.

  An instant later, in a transition he never saw, a man’s face appeared where hers had been. It was a hard face, but the blue eyes looked friendly—serious, but friendly. Another man stood behind him, but Tristan wondered if he was hallucinating. The second man was huge.

  The face up close was saying something to him. His hands were on Tristan’s shoulders and they were shaking him. “Easy now,” the man said. “You’re safe. It’s over. You’re going to be okay.”

  He spoke English. Tristan felt as if he hadn’t heard English in months. As his eyes focused, he saw that the man wore a uniform and that he dripped weapons. Another jolt of panic shot thought him and he tried to pull away.