Warshot wi-5

by Ian Slater

  Duguid’s preppy lawyer detested wresting, especially the degrading sight of women in mud. In fact he hated everything about Bobby Duguid except the vast amounts of money he had to launder for Bobby and “muh associates— ‘Smith, Smith and Wesson.’ Ha! Ha! Ha!” The young lawyer liked something else, too — the raw power of a man like Duguid, who could daily “rip off the system,” as Bobby so accurately put it, and not even “touch the money, man.” Bobby made it a point of never carrying cash, and let it be known in the intricate, psychosis-webbed world of drugs that he never carried it. His lawyer handled that, a sight Bobby loved to see — fine striped shirts, his “whitey,” with the Cartier watches and Rockport shoes, handling the lucre with tear-off surgical gloves, terrified of catching “dis-eeze from muh clientele!”

  At ten-thirty, outside one of the dozens of Harlem galleries owned and supplied by Duguid and his associates, the four men in the unmarked police car from the Sixth Precinct, the Alamo, knew that if they didn’t move within the next five minutes, even the crackheads who didn’t know what planet they were on would slip away into the garbage-tainted air. But they’d been ordered to wait. “No cart before the friggin’ horse,” as their chief had put it. “When we hit, it’s all got to happen simultaneously. I don’t want that roach in his flamingo-pink whorehouse uptown to get tipped off. Praise God for President Mayne. I’ll vote for him till I die.”

  There had been a rough chorus of heartfelt amens.

  The steam was still rising, going this way and that like some living thing fuming but in confusion, a red and blue neon slashing the vaporous cloud every four seconds, infusing it with a surrealistic look, hard on the eyes.

  “No need for all this palaver,” said one of the four-member squad, the short-barrel, pump-action shotgun in his right hand. “What’s the difference? With this new Emergency Powers thing, we could pick him up in the morning, right? We could be home getting sleep by now.”

  “Johnny,” said a detached, in-charge voice from the backseat, “once these friggin’ lawyers hear Mayne’s speech, they’re gonna go ape and tip off every slimeball in the territory.”

  “So where can they go?” asked the policeman with the shotgun. “We shut all the fucking airports to Canada and Mexico.”

  “They don’t have to leave the country,” said the man from the back. “Just hide out till the emergency power’s repealed. Then we’ll be back to square—”

  The radio crackled, its volume low. “Car forty-five. A code one-eight-seven on Jefferson one-four-eight-nine. Corner store—7-Eleven.” A 187 was a homicide, Jefferson, the other side of town. It was the “get ready” code to foil the smartasses who might be listening in on police radios.

  “All right, Phil,” said the lieutenant in the backseat, patting the man in the front who had the shotgun. “You do the kick. I’ll be on your left, Marty to your right. José stays with the car. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  The radio crackled again. “Ah, car forty-five, that one-eight-seven on Jefferson’s bein’ looked after.” It meant the alley behind the shooting gallery was now covered.

  “Right! Remember,” said the lieutenant, “no one out to the back door or you’ll get your balls blown off. Drabinsky’s got a pump back there and he’s so fucking short he can’t aim any higher than your prick.”

  “How the hell he get on the force?” whispered Phil, opening the front passenger door.

  “Aerobics,” said the detective. “Stretches, Simmons tapes, ah-one and ah-two and all—”

  As they slipped through the steam, the detective felt his stomach muscles tightening. Sometimes the kick didn’t work, then it was a shmoozle and you ended up having to either shoot the friggin’ lock off or use the ram log. By the time you got in, they’d all rushed for the back, and then it got really dangerous. Finding their way blocked, they turned and headed back, spaced out and wild, knowing they were trapped and that if they rushed you, most of them would probably get away. “At Duguid’s uptown,” said Phil quietly, “I’ll be they’ve got Jeeves answering the door.” He was nervous but he loved it. Tonight especially, ‘reasonable suspicion’ meant no announcement, no badge shit, no Miranda.

  Entering the crumbling brownstone, they heard an odd scrabbling noise, and the gut-thumping beat of rock in the air. There was a candle halfway up the stairs — the power long disconnected.

  Phil saw a soft light issuing from beneath the second floor door and heard the scrabbling noise again — a rat scurrying into the darkness over newspapers on the stairs. He could smell human excrement. They walked up slowly, the candle flickering, now only the slit of light beneath the door to see by, the stink becoming worse.

  “Ready?” whispered Phil.

  “Ready.”

  When Phil hit the door, it was so rotten it caved in. He was on the floor looking up through a cloud of dust and crud, the air reeking of dirty bodies, maybe fifteen or more junkies, some astonished, cigarettes, bottles held motionless in their hands, stilled for a second before they broke for the rear door. There was movement on the left side of the hallway. Phil’s flashlight picked out a man, his pants down. The man’s right hand flashed to his pocket. Phil fired twice, the blast lifting the man off the floor, slamming him against a doorjamb. A woman, breasts flying, came running through the dust-filled gloom, screaming her head off, tried to touch the man but couldn’t — blood everywhere. Now they were all coming back from a rear door — a mad-eyed sprinter, dirty T-shirt and jeans, some red thing in his hair, a shooter in each hand. He got off two wild rounds before they took him out, too. The man behind dropped his gun and raised his hands but was knocked flat by a scrawny teenager, born to raise hell on his chest. Phil gave him the butt, full face, and he was down. Phil heard his left ear ringing like an express train as the lieutenant fired twice.

  “Be cool! Be cool!” came a voice from the hysteria of candlelight and dust.

  “Put her out!” yelled Phil. One of the crackheads — a Latin — was on fire, her blouse ablaze, but no one did anything. Phil stepped forward, knocked her down, covered her with his jacket and began stomping out flame, the dust rising like talc, the smell of singed hair joining the sickly sweet smell of “dude rube,” the local wino rotgut.

  “Hey, man!” It was a white male, transvestite, early thirties, cadaverous, unshaven, wild-eyed. “Where’s your warrant?”

  “Hey!” said another. “That’s right, brother. You ain’t got no right to bust in—”

  “You know,” said Phil, standing up, resting his .38 on the white one’s nose, “I think this one’s a saboteur, Lieutenant.”

  “Armed as well,” said Marty, extracting a switchblade from the man’s handbag.

  “What the—”

  “Shut your face, Greta!” Phil said. “Now all of you against the wall — move!” He and the lieutenant started kicking legs apart. The alley team came in looking disappointed. “You bastards have all the fun,” said Drabinsky. “All we got was tiddly-dick — some crackhead trying to hide in a friggin’ garbage can.”

  “Well,” said Phil, clicking the cuffs on the last of the addicts, “I wouldn’t sweat it, Drab. Downtown says we can put in for all the overtime we need.” Drabinsky followed Phil out, helping to steer the last cracker down the spotlighted stairs past the other cops, the high, spitting crackle of walkie-talkies calling in the meat wagons through the hysteria of the crackers screaming, an arm shooter smiling, eyes glazed, not caring.

  “Drabinsky,” said Phil, “for the first time in this country we’re gonna clean house.”

  Drabinsky shifted the weight of the shotgun to the other hand. “Is it true? We can bring ‘em in, lock ‘em up for three months without—”

  “No,” said Phil. “Six.”

  “Six weeks or six months?”

  “Months!” said Phil. “Six fucking months! Everybody’s gonna get well, Drab. Give us all the time we need. You think you’ve seen plea bargaining — it’ll be a buyer’s market for songbirds.” Taking off th
e flak jacket, he put on his police jacket and zipped it up. “How do you like them apples?”

  “Christ,” said Drabinsky, the full implications washing over him. “What I wouldn’t give to be in Miami.”

  “Greedy!” Phil said, smacking him on the shoulder. “That’s your trouble.”

  “Damn right!”

  When they got back to the precinct, they thought there was a party on. Bobby “Bad-Ass” Duguid, the tall black man in flamingo-pink suit, hat, and white mink coat, was in the cage with his lawyer and assorted entourage.

  “His hair’s all wet,” said Phil. Duguid’s eyes were afire with rage, his lawyer, pale white, beside him.

  “Yeah,” agreed the sergeant. “I’m very worried about that, Phil, because if Mr. Duguid gets a cold, we could be sued.”

  “You motherfuckers aren’t gonna get away with this. You hear me, whitey?”

  Another policeman, his Puerto Rican accent cutting through the hubbub, handed Phil a wax-paper package. “Guess what we found him doin’?”

  “In his Jacuzzi,” said Phil, “wanking himself off?”

  “No,” said another cop. “She was wanking him.”

  “Where’s she?” asked Phil.

  “Downstairs,” said the Puerto Rican cop. “But lookee here. Have a look at the package.”

  “My, my,” said Phil. “Sarge, you see what we have here? Plastique.”

  “You mother!” yelled Duguid, a hand coming out of his mink through the bars. “That’s a plant and you know it.”

  “Well then, Mr. Duguid,” said the sergeant, “we’ll have to put this aside for evidence.” It joined another two plastic bags, large ones, heavy-duty, each bag containing firearms, including two Uzis, four AK-47s, and a grenade launcher.

  Under the Emergency Powers Act, Mr. Duguid was confined for six months, pending “further investigations,” including intensive audit by the IRS and investigation into the illegal importation of prohibited semiautomatic and automatic weapons.

  * * *

  Asked about reports of widespread persecution on ‘Good Morning America,’ the FBI spokesperson, Jennifer Lean, replied, “Sir, we’ve known for years that ever since the lessening of tensions between Premier Gorbachev and President Bush, a large number of ‘illegals’—spies and potential saboteurs — have been placed in strategic areas for just such a situation. We also know that these people did not come with large amounts of money. This would, of course, have immediately raised suspicion, or at least alerted the immigration officials. The question, then—”

  “You mean,” interjected the interviewer, “that the money used to purchase such weapons was drug related— that ‘illegals’ are or were involved with using drug money to finance their clandestine war efforts?”

  “The money had to come from somewhere,” said the FBI spokesperson, “incredibilized,” as she later put it to her colleagues, that the TV host could be so dumb. It was pointed out to her, however, that a good interviewer isn’t afraid to appear naive so they can get the guest to give them answers they want.

  Privately, most of the FBI agents believed the “illegals” had brought in all the money they needed by diplomatic pouch years before, and that drug money wasn’t involved.

  While Duguid was being photographed, scowling, to update his file, twelve miles south of Port Baikal, Jason Thomis of Charlie Company — or the “forgotten company,” as they were calling themselves — from III Corps’ Second Infantry Battalion, was digging in with the rest of his platoon along the rail line that ran parallel to the cliffs from between Baikal and Kultuk at the southernmost end of the lake. Thomis’s company had high, precipitous ice-sheathed cliffs behind them, the surface of the frozen lake hundreds of feet below. It allowed them to look down on the blizzard-covered lake as far north as Baikal, the thick whiteness about Baikal trembling and flashing crimson with the thunder of war. Occasionally they could spot A-10 Thunderbolts coming from the far eastern side of the lake after protective F-15 Strike Eagles had penetrated the screen of MiG-29 Fulcrums that had come screaming eastward out of Irkutsk, led by the Siberian ace, Sergei Marchenko. But for the American Eagles, having won the furball with the MiGs and driving the Fulcrums off, it was all in vain. For though the A-10 Thunderbolts were now free to dive beneath the blizzard to engage the enemy ground targets, they reappeared only seconds later without having fired a shot, their pilots confounded by the zero visibility, Minsky’s forward Siberian armored spearheads being so close to the fleeing Americans that it was near impossible to tell friend from foe.

  The U.S. M-60 and M-1 tanks were so close in most cases to the Siberian armor that the A- 10s were forced to rise and circle like frustrated birds of prey waiting for the weather to clear, which it didn’t. And all the while the A-10s continued to burn up their precious Avgas as the battle raged beneath them. Now and then an A-10 would make another attempt, only to reemerge, frustrated from being unable to differentiate between the American and Siberian tanks. Many of the American and the pursuing Siberian units were so near one another that even accurate fire from the A-10s’ thirty-millimeter nose cannons, while it would have no doubt set Siberian tanks ablaze, would, through the resultant explosions, have done as much or even more injury to the American ground troops.

  Now and then Thomis could see a bulge of dull orange light in the cotton-wool-like cover of the blizzard, the backflash of Siberian-acquired Aerospatiale, MILAN 2,500-yard and HOT 5,000-yard-range antitank missiles. The few that didn’t hit the American targets failed not because they had encountered the kind of thick, anti-infrared smoke that Minsky’s troops were using as cover, but because the armored U.S. target had crashed through the splitting ice opened up by the pounding of Minsky’s eighteen-gun batteries of amphibious M-1974 122mm howitzers.

  In addition to hearing the howitzers’ distant thumps, Thomis and his buddies could see contrails of the Siberians’ Multiple Rocket launches arcing momentarily above the blizzard. Unleashed in ripple fire sequence, the fifteen-foot-long, three-hundred-kilogram, twenty-four-mile-range HE and fragmentation rockets were being fired from scores of twenty-ton ZIL-135 trucks which, with sixteen missiles apiece, created plotnost, or saturation density, completely devastating a square mile at a time. It was the equivalent of several battalions of field guns sustaining rapid fire for ten minutes, and four times as great as the mind-numbing pounding of Berlin in World War II by the Red Army’s Katusha rockets.

  In addition to this, Yesov’s northern arm, each of his battalions equipped with eighteen mobile trailers of forty B-M21 rocket tube launchers, was unleashing 720-round salvos of the 122mm projectiles screaming down into the American positions. The scarlet trails of the rockets, momentarily visible in the swirling fog and snow, appeared to Thomis and the rest of Charlie Company like hundreds of ribbons before disappearing, the rockets crashing in thunderous unison, momentarily swelling the blizzard in huge blisters of flame.

  “Where in the hell’s our MLRs?” Thomis asked no one in particular as the rumble and crash of the artillery and rocket barrages rolled across the icy plain up through the fog, the broken ice-floe sea beneath. All was quiet for the moment, but the northward storm was rolling ever southward, coming closer, the deceptively lazy orange and green tracer arcing out of the swirling white candy-floss roof above the lake only making the danger more, not less ominous.

  “Coming up from Khabarovsk,” answered Valdez, manning the Squad Automatic Weapon next to him, traversing the SAW left to right so that its arc of fire, should there be an attack from the taiga, would be able to swing through 180 degrees without endangering any of the other men in the foxholes.

  “Anyway,” said another C Company infantryman, “no friggin’ good firing our MLRs into that lot. Take out as many of our boys as they would the Siberians.”

  “Then how about the fucking Siberians?” said Thomis agitatedly. “Their rockets must be hitting their own guys.”

  “Sibirs don’t mind taking out a few of their own.”

  “
Neither does Freeman,” said someone.

  “Bullshit!” snapped a corporal. “He had to do that on Ratmanov, man. Without the air strike, he’d have lost more marines than he saved.”

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t there, were you, Ricky boy?”

  “Knock it off, you guys!” interjected the platoon’s sergeant. “Cut the yap and watch your front.”

  “What the fuck for?” challenged Thomis. “What are we gonna do if armor comes out of those trees, Sarge? Throw fuckin’ snowballs at it?”

  “The Hueys’ll be here by then,” answered the sergeant.

  “Oh yeah?” pressed Thomis. “When?”

  “Soon.”

  But none came. Thomis and his buddies cared nothing about the logistical nightmare that had descended upon Freeman’s headquarters — that was HQ’s problem. All that second platoon, C Company, wanted was “out,” and no amount of explanation by their CO, Major Truet, could make them see that Freeman, as CINCFE — Commander in Chief Far East — had to divide his already overextended chopper forces, especially his Apache gunships, to try to inflict what damage they could west of the lake on Minsky’s airfields while ordering what Chinook and Huey transports he had south to the Chinese border. The simple fact was that Charlie Company, the farthest south of III Corps, was simply too far to reach, given that those choppers not assigned to attack the Siberians’ thrust, now in progress on III Corps’ main front around Port Baikal, were urgently needed to stem the ChiCom breakthrough farther south.