Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  Jonathan pointed to the dead man on the floor. “Be a sport,” he said. “You owe me.”

  A few minutes later, Jonathan and Boxers walked with purpose through the sally port back toward the Batmobile. It was a good bet that people saw them, but no one seemed to notice. There were way more important sights to see than two FBI agents leaving a police station.

  * * *

  Jonathan suspected that he knew details about the horrors of the shooting at Mason’s Corner before the chief of police did. As soon as he and Boxers were back on the road, Venice caught them up on everything that she’d picked up from listening to the radio channels and tracking developments on ICIS.

  Apparently, after firing hundreds of rounds into the crowd, the shooters abandoned their hardware and their police uniforms and blended in with the fleeing victims. The plan was perfect in both its execution and its simplicity. Two of the bad guys had been killed by off duty officers on the scene, but the others were just gone.

  “Not yet, they’re not,” Jonathan said.

  Big Guy looked at him across the center console. “The Moose Lodge?” he asked.

  Jonathan smiled.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  This time, Irene’s security detail parted without comment to let Jonathan enter the Our Lady Chapel. Wolverine wore a wool business suit and seemed engrossed in a sheaf of papers she was reading. He stood still, waiting to be recognized.

  After fifteen seconds or so, she said, “Are you going to take a seat or not?”

  Jonathan helped himself to a chair one row ahead of hers, and he turned sideways, his leg cocked on the adjacent chair. “Am I in trouble?” he asked.

  She had her mad face on. “You’re getting harder and harder to cover for, Digger. And I don’t appreciate you dragging my name into things.”

  “Are we talking about the Braddock County thing?”

  Irene slapped her papers down on the seat next to hers. “Yes, we’re talking about the Braddock County thing. You had no right to bring my name into that.”

  “This would be the same night when Box and I saved a whole bunch of lives?” Jonathan knew that he could do cocky better than most, and he also knew how much it pissed Wolverine off when he played that card.

  “Don’t you even,” she said.

  “I’ve read the news reports,” Jonathan said. “Undercover FBI agents whose names cannot be revealed. I think that sounds pretty strong.”

  “The press is pushing hard.”

  “It’s what they do,” Jonathan said. He was not going to be repentant for having done a very good deed at no small risk to himself. “What about Ethan? Are they still planning on prosecuting him?”

  “No,” Irene said. “But he’s going to a hospital. Inpatient treatment for a while. That young man has issues.”

  “But he has a pass to get out?”

  “When the doctors say he is ready. It won’t be tomorrow or next month, but there’s hope for a good future.”

  It was a better outcome than Jonathan had expected. “So, why don’t you tell me why I’m really here?” he asked.

  “The Moose Lodge,” she said. “Was that you?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jonathan said.

  “Nine dead, zero wounded,” Irene said. “Ring any bells?”

  He looked at the ceiling, pretended to search his memory. “No, I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that.”

  “I understand that it was quite a shootout,” Irene said.

  “Maybe it was street gangs,” Jonathan offered.

  “Pretty high-end ammunition for street gangs.”

  “Well, you know what they say about kids these days,” Jonathan said.

  “Do you still have a heavily modified Hummer?” Irene asked.

  Jonathan didn’t like the way this was going. He watched his poker face. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Look anything like this one?” She pulled a photograph out of an inside pocket and handed it to him. It showed a black Hummer in a body shop with lots of bullet damage in the armored plating and glass. “It’s interesting that this particular vehicle has your fingerprints all over the inside.”

  Jonathan handed the picture back without comment. She’d get to her point soon enough.

  Wolverine put the photo back into her pocket. “Don’t ever forget that we share many of the same clandestine assets,” she said. “The locals are really hot on this one. Nine fatalities in a shoot-out and no leads. That’s the kind of story that has legs for a long time.”

  “Are you coming to a point where you put handcuffs on me or something?” Jonathan asked.

  She scoffed. “You know better than that,” she said. “Just tell me that you’re sure it was them.”

  Jonathan ran his options. Generally, he avoided any form of confession to Irene, but it seemed important to her. “They were the mall shooters,” he said.

  “You’re certain,” she said.

  “One hundred percent.”

  “How can you know that?”

  Jonathan scowled. “That’s a step too far,” he said. “You couldn’t use it if you knew, so there’s no reason for you to know.”

  They sat in silence for nearly thirty seconds. “Did you get all of them?”

  “I can’t say that for certain,” Jonathan said. “We got all who were there, but I don’t know how many I might have missed. So I guess you’ll have to keep looking.”

  “You bet your backside we have to keep looking,” Irene said. “The good news is that we’ve been able to tie three sets of fingerprints to the mall.”

  “What was the final death toll in that?”

  “I thought you said you watched the news.”

  “Twenty-four dead, a hundred twelve wounded,” Jonathan recalled. “Is that a real number?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” she said. “And given some of the wounds on the survivors, I expect the fatality number to grow. The public wants someone to prosecute. They want closure.”

  “They have it,” Jonathan said. “They just don’t know.”

  “Tell me they suffered,” Irene said. “I don’t want to think of those bastards dying easily.”

  “Big Guy and I talked about that,” Jonathan said. “We decided no head shots unless absolutely necessary. They screamed a lot, actually.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s been twenty years since I wrote my first published novel, Nathan’s Run. The world was a very different place in 1995. As a practical matter, the Internet did not yet exist for everyday citizens. Correspondence between writer and agent or writer and publisher depended on telephones, fax machines, and envelopes with stamps affixed. Every new iteration of a manuscript meant physically printing a couple of pounds of paper and FedExing it for $25 a pop. The subject of that first novel, Nathan Bailey, would be thirty-two years old now if he were a real person. It was a thrill to bring him back in Friendly Fire, if only for a short time. It was equally thrilling to spend some time with his adopted father, Warren Michaels, one of the noblest characters I think I ever created.

  For all that change, however, it’s the constants that keep me going. First and always, there’s my lovely bride Joy, still my best friend and still my smartest ally, even after thirty-three years of togetherness. Holy crap, that’s a third of a century! My, how the time flies.

  Then there’s our son, Chris, who somehow will have passed his thirtieth birthday just weeks before this book hits the stands. Keep an eye on that kid. He’s already setting the world on fire. We couldn’t be prouder.

  Once per month, I meet with a group of very talented, very honest authors, and we critique each other’s work in progress. Every get-together is a monthly master class in fiction, and it is one of the events that I look most forward to. Because we meet in my basement—my rumpus room—we call ourselves the Rumpus Writers (Rumpi for short). Those four mentors—Ellen Crosby, Allen Orloff, Art Taylor, and Donna Andrews—do more than they probably know to keep me on the path I need to fol
low to squeeze the best story possible out of the ideas in my head. Thanks also to my buddy Reavis Wortham for giving the manuscript an early read and providing valuable input.

  I’m blessed to have a growing Rolodex filled with subject matter experts who always help me out when I need a solution to a problem. It’s always risky to name a few for fear of missing some, but I’d be remiss if I did not shout out to a few. On things munitions-related, thanks to Chris Grall, Jeff Gonzales, Steve Tarani, Rodney Sanchez, and Barry Witt. On the police procedural side, thanks also to Lee Lofland, Brian Gaynor, and every member of the FDLE SWAT Team that let me observe (and play a little) for three exhausting days. Thanks also to Terri Lynne Coop and Margie Summers for sharing with me their knowledge of chairs.

  Just because mine is the only name on the front of this book, don’t assume for a moment that it is the product of my work alone. I’ve got an impossibly strong team behind me in the form of Kensington Publishing. My editor, Michaela Hamilton, has been a part of the Jonathan Grave series from the very beginning, as has the guy in the big office, Steve Zacharias, whom I’ve known since those first Nathan’s Run days. Filling out the team are Alexandra Nicholajsen (a real-life Venice Alexander), Vida Engstrand, Morgan Elwell, and our publisher, Lynn Cully.

  Finally, there’s my longtime agent and friend, Anne Hawkins, who makes all of this cool stuff possible in the first place.

  Don’t miss John Gilstrap’s next compelling Jonathan Grave thriller

  Final Target

  Coming from Kensington in Summer 2017

  Keep reading to enjoy a sample excerpt . . .

  Chapter One

  Jonathan Grave heard the sounds of ongoing torture a full minute before he arrived on the scene. An approach like this in the middle of the night through the tangled mass of the Mexican jungle was an exercise in patience. He was outnumbered and outgunned, so his only advantage was surprise. Well, that and marksmanship. And night vision.

  Ahead of him, and too far away to be seen through the undergrowth, his teammate and dear friend Brian Van De Muelebroecke (aka Boxers) was likewise closing in on the source of the atrocity.

  The last few yards, the last few minutes, were always the most difficult. Until now, the hostage’s suffering had been an academic exercise, something talked about in briefings. But hearing the agonized cries above the cacophony of the moving foliage and screeching critters of this humidity factory made it all very real. The sense of urgency tempted Jonathan to move faster than that which was prudent. And prudence made the difference between life and death.

  The slow pace of his approach was killing Jonathan. It was 02:15, the night was blacker than black, and that victim who no doubt was praying for death had no idea that he was mere minutes away from relief. All that had to happen was for Jonathan and Boxers to get into position, read the situation for what it was, and then execute the rescue plan. There was nothing terribly elegant about it. They would move in, kill the bad guys who didn’t run away, and they’d pluck their precious cargo—their PC, a DEA agent named Harry Dawkins—to safety. There was a bit of yada yada built into the details, but those were the basics. If past was precedent, the torturers were cartel henchmen.

  But first, Jonathan had to get to the PC, and get eyes on the situation, and he had thousands of years of human evolution working against him. As a species, humans don’t face many natural predators, and as a result, we don’t pay close attention to the danger signs that surround us. Until darkness falls.

  When vision becomes limited, other senses pick up the slack, particularly hearing. As he moved through the tangle of undergrowth and overgrowth, Jonathan was hyperaware of the noises he made. A breaking twig, or the rattle of battle gear, would rise above the natural noises of the environment and alert his prey that something was out of the ordinary. They wouldn’t know necessarily what the sound was, but they would be aware of something.

  Alerted prey was dangerous prey, and Jonathan’s two-man team did not have the manpower necessary to cope with too many departures from the plan.

  Another scream split the night, this time with a slurred plea to stop. “I already told you everything I know,” Dawkins said in heavily accented Spanish. The words sounded slurred. “I don’t know anything more.”

  In time, the magnified light of his night vision goggles, NVGs, began to flare with the light of electric lanterns. “I have eyes on the clearing,” Boxers’ voice said in his right ear. He was barely whispering, but he was audible. “They’re yanking the PC’s teeth. We need to go hot soon.”

  Jonathan responded by pressing the transmit button on his ballistic vest to break squelch a single time. There was no need for an audible answer. By their own SOPs, one click meant yes, two meant no.

  As if to emphasize the horror, another scream rattled the night.

  Jonathan pressed a second transmit button on his vest, activating the radio transceiver in his left ear, the one dedicated to the channel that linked him to his DEA masters. The transceiver in his right ear was reserved for the team he actually trusted. “Air One,” he said over the radio. “Are you set for exfil?”

  “I’m at a high orbit,” a voice replied. “Awaiting instructions.” The voice belonged to a guy named Potter, whom Jonathan didn’t know, and that bothered the hell out of him. The Airdale was cruising the heavens in a Little Bird helicopter that would pluck them from one of three predetermined exfiltration points. He was a gift from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration as an off-the-record contribution to their own employee’s rescue. For reasons that apparently made sense to the folks who plied their trade from offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, this op was too sensitive to assign an FBI or even a US military rescue team, yet somehow it could support a government-paid pilot, and that inconsistency bothered Jonathan. A lot. It was possible, of course, that Potter was every bit as freelance as Jonathan, but that thought wasn’t exactly comforting. All too often, freelancers’ loyalty was as susceptible to high bidders as their skills were.

  “Be advised that we will be going hot soon,” Jonathan whispered.

  “Affirm. Copy that you’re going hot soon. Tell me what you want and I’ll be there.”

  Jonathan keyed the other mike. “Big Guy, are you already in position?”

  Boxers broke squelch once. Yes.

  Jonathan replayed Dawkins’s plea in his head. I already told you everything I know. The fact that the PC had revealed information—even if it wasn’t everything he knew—meant that Jonathan and Boxers were too late to prevent all the damage they had hoped to. Maybe if DEA hadn’t been so slow on the draw, or if the US government in general had reacted faster with resources already owned by Uncle Sam, the bad guys wouldn’t know anything.

  The bud in Jonathan’s left ear popped. “Team Alpha, this is Overwatch. Over.”

  “Go ahead, Overwatch,” Jonathan replied. He thought the “over” suffix was stupid, a throwback to outdated radio protocols.

  “We have thermal signatures on Alpha One and Alpha Two, and we show you approaching a cluster of uniform sierras from roughly the northwest and southeast.”

  Somewhere in the United States, Overwatch—no doubt a teenager judging from his voice—was watching a computer screen with a live view from a satellite a couple hundred miles overhead. As Jonathan wiped a dribble of sweat from his eyes, he wondered if the teenager was wearing a wrap of some kind to keep warm in the air conditioning. “Uniform sierra” was what big boys wrapped in Snoopy blankets called unknown subjects.

  “That would be us, Overwatch,” Jonathan whispered. He and Boxers had attached transponders to their kit to make them discernible to eyes in the sky. Even in a crowd, they’d be the only two guys flashing here-I-am signals to the satellite.

  “Be advised that we count a total of eight uniform sierras in the immediate area. One of them will be your PC. Consider all the others to be hostile.”

  In his right ear, Boxers whispered, “Sentries and torturers are hostile. Check. Moron.”

>   Jonathan suppressed a chuckle as he switched his NVGs from light enhancement to thermal mode and scanned his surroundings. It wasn’t his preferred setting for a firefight because of the loss of visual acuity, but in a jungle environment, even with the advantage of infrared illumination gear, the thick vegetation provided too many shadows to hide in. “How far are the nearest unfriendlies from our locations?” he asked on the government net.

  A few seconds passed in silence. “They appear to have set up sentries on the perimeter,” Overwatch said. “Alpha One, you should have one on your left about twenty yards out, call it your eleven o’clock, and then another at your one, one-thirty, about the same distance. Alpha Two, you are right between two of them at your nine and three. Call it fifteen yards to nine and thirty to three. The others are clustered around a light source in the middle. I believe it’s an electric lantern.”

  Jonathan, Alpha One, found each of the targets nearest to him via their heat signature, and then switched back to light enhancement. Now that he knew where they were, they were easy to see. The concern, always, were the ones you didn’t see.

  As if reading his mind, Venice (Ven-EE-chay) Alexander, aka Mother Hen, spoke through the transceiver in his right ear. “I concur with Overwatch,” she said. The government masters didn’t know that Venice could independently tap into the same signal that they were using for imagery. She was that good at the business of taming electrons. He liked having that second set of eyes. While he knew no reason why Uncle Sam would try to jam him up, there was some history of that, and he knew that Venice always had his best interests at heart.

  On the local net, Jonathan whispered, “Ready, Big Guy?”

  “On your go,” Boxers replied.

  Jonathan raised his suppressed 4.6 millimeter MP7 rifle up to high-ready and pressed the extended buttstock into the soft spot of his shoulder. He verified with his thumb that the selector switch was set to full-auto and settled the infrared laser sight on the first target’s head. He pressed his transmit button with fingers of his left hand and whispered, “Four, three, two . . .”