No mercy

by John Gilstrap

  “Dom!” she shouted. “Is that you?” If nothing else, maybe she could save his life.

  No one responded.

  “Is that the priest’s name?” Charlie asked. “Dom?”

  Venice nodded.

  “Tell him to stay away.”

  She took a breath. “Dom, if that’s you, I don’t have time for you. I’m busy.”

  Again, no reply.

  “Maybe the noise was nothing,” Venice offered. “A picture fell off the wall.”

  Charlie flashed her an angry look. “Pictures don’t scream,” he said. He moved away from her, closer to the door. He adjusted his grip on the pistol. “Whoever it is, is about to be shot.” He placed his hand on the kn›

  Even in the cacophony of the gunfire and above the piercing sounds of Stephenson’s shouting, Gail heard the bullet hit Thomas, a wet snapping sound. They all heard it. Julie screamed, “Oh, my God! Thomas!”

  Stephenson scrambled for the window.

  Gail yelled, “Steve! No! I’ll get him!”

  “He’s my son,” Stephenson said. And that said everything. He heaved himself over the window and onto the porch with a clattering thump.

  Julie reached for his ankle, but he was already gone.

  The volume of fire outside crescendoed. But for the heavy timber walls, they’d have all been torn to pieces.

  Gail started to crawl across the cabin to Stephenson’s window, then realized that a chance to hit a second target at the same spot would spell disaster for her. Acting on pure impulse, she turned and vaulted out of her own window into the tall grass that still rimmed the foundation in the backyard.

  She braced herself for a brutal fusillade.

  Alone now inside the cabin, Julie felt blinded by a terror she’d never known. Thomas and Stephenson both were out there being raked by bullets. She couldn’t lose both of them.

  Where was Scorpion? And his obnoxious sidekick? How could they leave her like this? Even her own family had left her. She didn’t want to die.

  Her gaze fell on the detonators. The clackers. Giant shotguns. Their last resort. Their Alamo position.

  The only way to save her boys’ lives.

  But Scorpion might be out there among the attackers.

  “Don’t do anything unless you hear me say…” Whatever. Something. How was she to know if Scorpion was even alive anymore?

  She didn’t care.

  Dom knew from her voice alone that Venice was in distress. Her message was out of character. She needed him.

  Yet here he stood, paralyzed by indecision. He knew it was a trap. If he walked through that door, God only knew what might come next. He’d get shot, probably. But to stay out here while Venice was in danger in there was… cowardly. How could he The turning doorknob settled it. Dom darted to the hinge side of the door and waited. When the tongue of the latch cleared the strike plate, he launched his full weight against the heavy panel.

  As he’d hoped, his explosive entrance caught the intruder off-balance. He backpedaled to keep from being propelled to the floor, but unlike the man downstairs, this one was agile and light on his feet. As Dom clutched fistfuls of the man’s suit jacket and tried to drive him to the floor, the intruder effortlessly pirouetted free. His hands were empty, though.

  The intruder struck a martial arts pose, and Dom knew right away that he was in trouble. Army training notwithstanding, Dom could not prevail in a hand-to-hand confrontation. He prayed for a weapon, and in that instant saw the intruder’s pistol on the floor. That was his only hope.

  The intruder moved first. He seemed to have read Dom’s mind as he struck like a snake to throw a punch at the left side of the priest’s head-the side closest to the weapon on the floor. Dom dod his knees and sent him tumbling to the floor. He knew without doubt that his jaw had been broken. And he knew that the pistol was still on the floor. He could see it. If his arms were four inches longer, he could have touched it.

  If only he could move. But he had to move. He had to save Venice or die trying. Rolling to his side, he stretched his arm to its full length and beyond, a lunging reach stretched his shoulder nearly to dislocation. He might even have made it but for the kick to his forehead. Lights flashed behind his eyes, and he felt himself balanced in a sickening nether-world between consciousness and coma.

  When his vision cleared, he saw the pistol in the intruder’s hand.

  Then he heard the gunshot.

  The Green Brigade advanced on the lodge. They moved out of the tree line, shooting constantly, laying a deadly volume of fire on the cabin.

  There was nothing nuanced or subtle about Jonathan’s plan. He and Boxers split left and right and came at the line fast and hard from their right flank. Jonathan circled to the left to come in from behind, while Boxers circled to the right to hit them on an oblique angle from the front. If the plan worked, they would close in on the attackers in a quickly advancing V-formation and roll them up to their left.

  He advanced in a walking crouch, his weapon to his shoulder and set to fire three rounds with every trigger pull. When he saw a bad guy, he shot him, center of mass, and moved on to the next. No time to confirm the kill or worry about him hopping up again.

  There are rhythms to war, ebbs and crescendos that no one plans, but that nonetheless give audible clues about what was happening. Presently, as he closed in for his third undetected kill, Jonathan heard a shift in the action, a peak in shooting that seemed less random, more focused. He looked to his right, through the trees, in time to see someone dart out from the cabin, only to be cut down.

  He spat an obscenity and nearly turned back to reacquire a target, when more movement from the front of the cabin triggered an even more intense fusillade. Jesus Christ, one Hughes was trying to save the other.

  Jonathan needed to support them. He brought his rifle to his shoulder, sighted on a muzzle flash, and fired a three-round burst. A weapon spiraled off into the darkness.

  A brilliant flash near the lodge startled him, followed by the distinctive wham of a claymore. Whatever lay in the woods to the left side of the lodge was now torn to bits.

  In his earpiece, Jonathan heard Boxers’ shout, “Who the fuck-”

  The fusillade never came. Even as Gail was airborne, tumbling out of the window, she’d expected to be torn apart by incoming fire, but somehow she was still here.

  She didn’t pause to wonder why, or to thank God, or to even give it much of a thought. One of her team was dead, two were wounded, and she had to bring them to safety. She didn’t think any of these things, she just knew them; sensed them as her duty.

  Gail belly-crawled on elbows and knees to the back corner of the house, and then around to the left-hand side. In the near distance she saw Thomas on the ground writhing in agony, screaming curses to the night while his father covered him with his body. They were alive. Beyond them, she saw the attackers closing in. They were char’d been raining covering fire in the rear to mask the joining of the two skirmish lines.

  But there was even more to it than that, she realized. They were protecting the true target of their assault. “Oh, my God,” she said aloud. “They’re-”

  A blinding, white-hot flash took the world away.

  The echo of the first claymore was still rolling across the yard when a second one erupted, this one on the left side of the front of the house. Ahead of him, through the green light of his NODs, Jonathan saw people and vegetation shredded by the high-velocity pellets as they shrieked through the night, destroying everyone and everything.

  In his three decades as a warrior, he’d never been on this end of a claymore, and it was orders of magnitude louder than he’d expected. If you hear the explosion, you’re okay.

  But not for long. Since he was just outside the arc of that claymore, he could count on being just inside the arc of the next.

  He slapped the transmit button on his chest. “Box, get-”

  The last word was cut off by the explosion.

  Inside the lodge,
Julie had nearly forgotten that it took three clicks to detonate a mine. On her first try, she’d squeezed the initiator only once. When nothing happened, she quickly squeezed it twice more, and was again disappointed. Third time, she squeezed it three times rapidly and screamed as the explosion ripped the night.

  She’d thought it through as best she could. She remembered that the danger zone behind the mines didn’t allow you to be very close. If she didn’t shoot them now, she didn’t know when the attackers would be behind the kill zone or when Steve and Thomas might be in front of it.

  Moving without pause to the second detonator, she did it right on the first try, and this time, the detonation flashed within her peripheral vision: a brilliant light, then a cloud that obscured everything. The punishing concussion came an instant later.

  She moved to the third, wrapped both hands around the clacker and cowered behind the timbers as she squeezed and counted aloud. “One. Two. Th-”

  This blast was a hundred times louder than the first two, but only for an instant before her ears shut down from the pounding. The inside of the lodge erupted in splinters and broken glass.

  Then she felt nothing.

  Dom thought he was dead. He had to be dead. How could the killer have missed? He felt a pair of strong hands on his shoulders, and a vaguely familiar voice saying, “Father? Father! Jesus, are you all right?”

  The voice crystallized before the images did. It was Doug Kramer.

  “I’m alive?” Dom asked.

  “Are you shot?” the chief asked.

  As much as he hurt, he might have been, but he honestly didn’t know. He was on the floor of Venice’s office, on his back, and to his left, he could see the contorted face of his attacker flush with the carpet, twisted in obvious pain. “I can’t feel my legs,” the man cried, but Kramer seemed unmoved. On the far side of the prone intruder, Dom saw that Venice was still bound tightly to her chair.

  “I got your message,” KramerVenice wriggled against her bonds, making her chair jump. “Cut me loose,” she said, and then, as if catching herself, she added, “Please. Digger needs me to be at the computer.”

  Kramer cocked his head, then looked around. “Digger.”

  “You gotta help me,” Charlie whined.

  “Ambulance is on the way,” Kramer said. “Digger’s here?”

  Dom scooted across the floor to tend to Charlie’s injury. He pushed the man’s tie out of the way and ripped open the front of his shirt. He found the exit wound first, just above and to the right of his navel. The entrance wound was square in the spine. “Can you tell them to hurry?” Dom slurred through his fractured jaw. “He’ll bleed out without help.”

  “I can only call ’em, Father. I can’t drive for ’em.” In the distance, sirens grew louder. A lot of them. A shooting in Fisherman’s Cove was the biggest of big deals.

  Kramer pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pants pocket and slit the tape on Venice’s arms first, and then the loops on her ankles.

  She leapt back to her keyboard. “Please let there be something left to do,” she prayed under her breath.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Holy fuck,” Boxers exclaimed over the radio. “They turned the claymore on the cabin! They had sappers!”

  Again, a more advanced, more daring move than Jonathan would have expected. “BDA?” he asked. Boxers would recognize the acronym as Battle Damage Assessment. From Jonathan’s vantage point, the view was still obscured by dust.

  “Heavy to extreme,” he replied in the detached monotone of a warrior. “I’ll get you more in a minute.”

  Heavy to extreme. That said it all, even as it said nothing. And it fit the tableau of destruction that stretched out in front of Jonathan. The night had gone silent again, and as Jonathan advanced on the skirmish line that no longer was, his stomach tightened. In her panic to stop their advance, Julie-and it had to have been Julie-had unwittingly exposed the one critical flaw in Ivan Patrick’s training regimen: the attackers were jammed too close together. It was instinctive among humans to seek community in the presence of mortal danger, an instinct to be overcome on the battlefield. A single claymore had killed or maimed what looked to be over a dozen Brigadiers.

  As his hearing returned to normal, the silence gave way to the agonized cries of the wounded. He saw bodies and parts of bodies everywhere. Where he encountered attackers who were still alive, he disarmed them and let them be. “We’ll get help on the way as soon as we can,” he said, over and over again, even as he walked on. He wasn’t interested in prisoners, and he had neither the time nor the resources to guard them. If they lived, good for them; if they died waiting for help to arrive, such was the price of being a Bad Guy.

  His earpiece crackled as a radio broke squelch, and he heard Venice’s voice. “Scorpion, this is Mother. Do you copy?”

  “Where the hell have you been?” Jonathan growled. ed from wall to wall

  “Julie?” he called. “Julie Hughes! Are you here?”

  He kicked broken furniture and glassware to the side as he walked to the spot where he’d left the initiators. And there she was.

  She lay on her right side facing him, her head oddly skewed by its angle against the timbers of the front wall. A smear of blood masked her ear and matted her hair. He approached quickly, dropped to his knee, and pulled off his Nomex glove to check for a pulse in her neck. He smiled as he felt her carotid artery strumming solidly under his fingers. He pressed his palm to his transmit button.

  “All units, this is Scorpion. I found PC-Three and she seems okay. Unconscious, but a good strong, regular pulse.” Boxers would be able to fill in the blanks, and maybe Venice. Barring an unseen, serious head injury, Precious Cargo Three would be okay. He stood and walked toward the kitchen and noticed the body on the floor in there. Jesus, they’d had themselves a hell of a time. “How’s PC-One?”

  Boxers answered, “He hurts like hell, but his vitals seem strong. Gonna have a leg like mine, though.”

  Jonathan inhaled deeply, held it, and let it go. All things considered, it all went better than “Hey, Scorpion,” Boxers added. “The sheriff is down, too. Unconscious. I don’t know her status.”

  Something moved in the yard out back. Jonathan was certain he’d just seen someone running, from right to left.

  “Big Guy, Scorpion,” he said into his radio, getting Boxers’ attention. “PC One and Two with you?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “You on the black side of the lodge?”

  “Negative. We’re on the green side. Problem I should know about?”

  Jonathan headed for the back window and climbed through. “Thought I saw something out back. Gonna check it out.”

  “Tough for me to join you, boss. I’m still workin’ on the kid.”

  “It’s okay,” Jonathan said. “If you’re not there, I don’t have to worry about shooting the wrong guy.”

  Jonathan dropped to the ground on the other side of the window. He rolled to his feet, in a crouch, and tucked his M4 into his shoulder. He scanned for targets.

  More corpses littered the ground, but nothing moved. He pressed his transmit button and whispered, “Mother, this is Scorpion.”

  “Go ahead,” Venice said.

  “What does your latest satellite image show?”

  A pause. “No change that I can see,” she said. “But with these four-minute updates…”

  She didn’t need to complete the observation. A lot of ground can be traveled in four minutes.

  He ran scenarios through his head. Maybe the guy was just running away, trying to get the hell out. He dismissed it out of hand. First of all, he was running in the wrong direction to escape. Out here, with the narrow yard and the steep, bald embankment, there was precious little cover, and it would be hard as hell to run uphill fast enough to get away from anyone.

  Then he got it. “Big Guy, I think he’s going for the GVX.”

  “Five minutes,” Boxers said. “Give me that and I can join you.�
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  “Maybe it’s Ivan,” Jonathan said.

  “Four minutes, then.”

  Jonathan liked the idea of a one-on-one with

  On the far side of the truck, he heard rustling, the sound of feet moving across the dirt floor. He lowered himself to the ground so he could peer from under the truck. If something moved, he’d shoot it. He waited for a shadow. A noise. Anything.

  Another rustle, this one farther to the left. The shooter was moving toward the pillar that Jonathan had just abandoned. Or maybe he was moving to position himself behind Jonathan. From the direction of the noise travel, either scenario was possible. Jonathan faced a choice: He could remain still or he could reposition himself to better cover on the far side of the truck. The latter would effectively corner him.

  He opted to wait a little longer, hoping not to squander his advantage. He resisted the temptation to shoot at the noise because it would be a rookie mistake. The chances of hitting your target were nil if you couldn’t see what you were shooting, and in trying, you’d announce your location to the world.

  The third time he heard the rustle-it was really more of a scrape this time-it was still farther to the left, well past the location of the pillar. That confirmed that the shooter was moving for position. If Jonathan could remain still enough for long enough A soft pop startled him, and an instant later, a blinding white light consumed the darkness. Jonathan slapped his night vision out of the way, but it was too late. The illumination flare had whited out his NVGs, and the glare dug into his eyes like spikes. Temporarily blinded, and completely vulnerable, he fired the Mossberg in the direction of the last noise, then jacked another round and fired slightly to the left, and then another slightly to the right before scrambling for cover under the truck.

  With his ears and eyes all ruined for the short term, he rolled again to the far side of the vehicle and whatever cover it could provide. He was sickeningly aware that a stray bullet through one of the containers inside the truck would render a gunfight moot. Blinking rapidly, frantically, to erase the white blur on his retinas and regain some semblance of night vision, he moved toward the front of the barn. Until his senses returned, or until he knew where his opponent was, his only chance lay in his ability to keep moving.