Joe Ledger (12 page)

My mouth went dry.

“Jesus Christ, Simon, what did you do?”

There was a sound. It might have been a sob, though it sounded strangely like bubbles escaping through mud. “Look…I was getting tired of waiting…and I knew that you’d be able to handle just about anything. So…I started reaching out to….”

“To
who
?”

“Potential buyers.”

“Oh…Christ….
why?
”

“I wanted to draw them in, just like the FBI said they were going to do. Only the Feds were taking way too much time. I was wasting my life away in this crappy little town.”

“Simon….”

“I offered to sell my plot. I…reached out to several buyers and told them that I had it all written down, and that they had to bring two million in unmarked bills. Don’t worry, I’d have turned over the cash. I just needed it to look and feel real to them. And they bought it, too. They thought I was selling out.”

“Who’s bringing the money, Simon?”

“All of them.”

“What do you mean? Damn it, Simon, how many buyers did you contact?”

“A lot.”

“Simon….”

“Six,” he said in a small and broken voice. “There are six teams of buyers. I told them to meet me at the house. I figured they’d get there and start shooting each other. It would be like a movie. I could sell that scenario. I could make a bestseller out of it…I could make a movie out of it…”

“Simon, when are the shooters expected here?”

“When? Joe…that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. That’s why I was sorry it was just the three of you. They’re already here. I…I didn’t mean to kill you.”

And the windows exploded in under a hail of high-caliber bullets.

Chap. 6

The Safe House

Pine Deep, Pennsylvania

August 16; 6:41 p.m.

I dove for cover behind the couch. It wasn’t a good dive and it wasn’t pretty, but it got me low and out of the line of fire. Then I tried to melt right into the carpet. High-caliber rounds were chewing the couch to splinters and threads. The air above me was filled with thunder. Plaster and chunks of wall lath rained down on me.

The shots seemed continuous, so there had to be multiple shooters. They were firing full auto, and even with a high-capacity magazine it only takes a couple of seconds to burn through the entire clip.

I shimmied sideways, trying to put the edge of the stone fireplace between me and the shooters. I had my Beretta out, but the barrage was so intense that I couldn’t risk a shot.

Then the sound changed. There were new sounds. The hollow
pok-pok-pok
of small-arms fire and the rhythmic
boom
of a shotgun. Those sounds were farther away.

Top and Bunny returning fire.

The automatic gunfire swept away from me and split as the shooters focused on these two new targets. That gave me my moment, and I was up and running, pistol out. There was nothing left of the door except splintered wood and glass through which the fog rolled like a slow-motion tide. I went through it fast, feeling the splinters claw at my sleeves and thighs. I was firing before I set foot outside.

In combat you see more, process more, and all of it happens fast. That’s a skill set you learn quick or you get killed. As I came out of the house I saw five men standing in a loose shooting line in the turnaround. The fog was thick enough to cover them to midthigh. They were dark-skinned. Middle Eastern for sure, though from that distance I couldn’t tell from where. All four of them carried AK47s with banana-clips. Three were facing the garage, firing steadily at it; the other two were standing wide-legged as they leaned back to fire at the second floor.

I emptied my magazine into them. I saw blood puff out in little clouds of red mist as two of them staggered backward and fell, vanishing into the fog. Another one took a round through the cheek. Because he was shouting, the bullet went through both cheeks and left the teeth untouched. He was screaming louder as he wheeled around toward me.

I fired my last two rounds into his chest, and my slide locked back.

The remaining shooters opened up on me, and I dove behind the armored SUV. Their bullets pinged off of the heavy skin and smoked the window before ricocheting high into the sky.

The shooters wanted me so badly they forgot, in that one fatal instant, about Top and Bunny.

Bunny spun out a side door to the garage and fired three rounds with the shotgun, catching the left-hand shooter in the chest and face. Top leaned out of the second floor window and put half a magazine into the last shooter.

As the last one fell I swapped out the magazine in my Beretta and crept to the edge of the car. Simon Burke had said that there were six buyers. Five men lay sprawled on the bloody gravel.

Where was the sixth…?

I tapped my ear bud. “We have one more hostile,” I began, but Top cut me off.

“Negative, Cowboy,” he said, using my combat call sign, “we have multiple hostiles inbound.”

I turned and saw the fog swirling around two cars barreling down the long dirt road. Then there was a roar to my right and I saw another pair of vehicles—ATVs with oversized tires—crashing our way through the cornfields.

“Where’s this fog coming from?” demanded Top. “Can’t see worth a damn?”

“I got a team coming in on foot,” called Bunny. “Behind the house, running along a drainage ditch. Can’t make out numbers with that mist out there. No, wait…there’s a second team farther back in the corner. Damn! A third at nine o’clock to the front door. Four men in black. Geez…Boss…we’re under siege here. We need backup.”

We needed an army, but we weren’t likely to get one. The closest help was the naval airbase in Willow Grove. Half an hour at least.

With a sinking heart I understood the enormity of what Simon Burke had done. Not six buyers. Six teams of buyers. Conservative estimate—twenty men. Depressing estimate—thirty.

Coming straight at us.

Chap. 7

The Safe House

Pine Deep, Pennsylvania

August 16; 6:46 p.m.

We needed five minutes. With five minutes we could have fitted out with Kevlar and ballistic helmets, strapped on vests heavy with fresh magazines, picked optimum shooting positions, and turned the whole farm into a killbox.

We needed five damn minutes.

We had thirty seconds.

“Talk to me, Cowboy,” said Top.

“Sergeant Rock and Jolly Green,” I barked. “Converge on me. Living room. Now.”

I spun around, yanked open the door of the SUV, ground the key in the starter, spun the wheel and stamped down. The big machine took an awkward, ugly lurch, then found footing and rolled heavily away from the house. I went completely around the roundabout, then jerked the wheel over and put the pedal to the floor as I aimed for the front door. The SUV punched a truck-sized hole through the shattered doorway, ripped across the living room floor and slammed into the stairs with enough force to rock the house to its foundations. I hadn’t had time to buckle up for safety, so I bashed forward and backward. I could taste blood in my mouth as I bailed out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back.

“Sergeant Rock, coming in!” yelled Top as he pounded down the stairs. He vaulted the wreckage of the bottom steps, ran across the hood, onto the roof, and dropped with a grunt into a squat next to me. He yelped in pain as his forty-year-old knees took the impact, but he sucked it up and staggered to me as I raised the back hatch.

“Coming in!” yelled Bunny, and then he was there, coming at us from the kitchen.

I clumsied open the gun lockers, and immediately six pairs of hands reached for the toys. I grabbed a bag of loaded magazines and an M4 and peeled away.

“Yo!” Top barked and tossed another bag to me. “Party favors!”

I snatched it out of the air and flashed him a grin. He grinned back. This was a total nightmare scenario, and only an insane oddsmaker would give us one in fifty on getting out of this. So…might as well enjoy it.

“Where, Boss?” asked Bunny.

“Kitchen. The fog might work for us. It’ll confuse everything out there. Go!”

“On it.” He shoved five drum magazines for the shotgun into a bag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he was gone, running to the kitchen.

“Top,” I said, “upstairs.”

“Why you keep making the old guy run up and down stairs?”

We both laughed.

He grabbed his gear and climbed over the wreckage.

I glanced through the broken window. The lead car was almost to the roundabout. It had slowed, though, and I figured that the converging teams were suddenly aware of one another. Who knows, I thought, maybe Burke was right. Maybe they’d slaughter each other while Top, Bunny and I stayed in here and played cribbage.

And maybe tomorrow I’d wake up looking like Brad Pitt. About as much chance of that.

I heard voices shouting and car doors slamming.

Then gunshots.

The first rounds were fired away from us, off to my three o’clock, the direction of the team on ATVs.

Then three other guns opened up on the house.

So much for cribbage.

Chap. 8

The Safe House

Pine Deep, Pennsylvania

August 16; 6:51 p.m.

It became hell.

A swirling surreal white hell, with the red flashes of muzzle fire filtered by thick fog, and all sounds muted to strangeness. Overhead the storm grumbled and growled, but no rain fell.

Maybe one of these days I’ll look back on that ten minutes under the August sun in backwoods Pennsylvania and laugh about it. Maybe it’ll become one of those anecdotes soldiers tell when they want to story-top the last guy. Or, maybe when I think about it I’ll get the shakes and go crawling off to find a bottle.

Everyone was shooting at everyone.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Don’t ever want to see anything like it again.

One team was dead. That left five teams of shooters, sent by God only knows who. Three were Middle Eastern, I could tell that much, and that made sense. Then I heard someone yelling in Russian. Someone else yelling in Spanish.

I was yelling in every language I could curse in…and I am fluent in a long list of languages.

I crouched behind the open door of the SUV, reached around with the M4 and opened fire. I wasn’t aiming. No-damn-body was aiming. But everybody was sure as hell capping off a lot of rounds. My hearing will never be the same. Ditto my nerves.

I think I even screamed for a little bit. I’ll admit it, I’m not proud.

I fired the magazine dry, dropped it, slapped in another, fired, swapped it out, fired. The effort of holding the gun was rattling the bones in my arm to pieces, and I don’t think I hit anything with the first four magazines. The mist was chest high now, and the men out there were crouching. It was like trying to fight in the middle of a blizzard.

So I set down the gun and dug into the bag for one of Top’s ‘party favors.’ An M67 fragmentation grenade.

“Come to papa,” I murmured.

The M67 looks like a dark-green apple, but instead of juicy sweetness the spherical body contains six-and-a-half ounces of composition B explosive. When it goes boom, the body bursts into steel fragments that will forever change the life anything within fifteen meters. I lobbed one out through the hole that had been the front wall of the house. I never heard it bounce, never heard it land.

Everyone heard it when it blew. A loud, muffled
whumph.

And everyone heard the screams that followed.

Another thing I’m not too proud to admit. I enjoyed those screams. Part of me did. The Killer that shares my mind with the Civilized Man and the Cop. That’s the part of me that’s always waiting in the tall grass, face grease-painted green and brown, eyes staring and dead, mouth perpetually caught in a feral smile.

The Killer wanted more, so I popped the pin on two more party treats and threw them out. More bangs, more screams.

Then I was up, laying the M4 over the hinge of the open door. Hot shell casings pinged and whanged off of the SUV’s frame and smoke burned my eyes. All I could taste was blood and gunpowder.

The smoke from the grenades wafted away on a breeze, and I could see one of the cars sitting on flat tires, its sides splashed with blood, windows blasted out. Two ragged red things lay sprawled on the gravel, and a trail of blood led toward the tall corn. The second vehicle was askew in the ditch that lined the driveway, its windshield and driver’s side polka-dotted with hundreds of bullet and pellet holes.

“Hey, Cap’n!” yelled Top from upstairs. “I’m running out of wall to hide behind.”

“I’m open to ideas,” I yelled back.

I think I heard him laugh. Top’s a strange guy. Like Bunny. Like me, too, I suppose. As much as the Civilized Man inside my head was cringing and whimpering, the Killer was totally jazzed. I’m kind of glad I didn’t have Kevlar and a ballistic shield, or I might have done something stupid.

Luckily, someone
else
did something stupid.

No, correct that, a bunch of people did a bunch of stupid things, and that’s why I’m still here to tell you about it.

It spun out this way….

The team that came in on the ATVs were yelling something in Farsi and trying to cut their way to the house. No way to tell if the guys who came in the cars were their enemies or simply business rivals. In either case, the ATV guys came rolling in, firing over the handlebars with their AKs, chopping the cars to pieces and ripping up the last three car guys. If this was a two-way fight, or even a three-way fight, they might have won. They were the biggest team. Eight men on four ATVs.

I leaned out and sighted on them and started to pick them off. I got both men in the lead vehicle with four shots, and the ATV twisted and fell over onto its side, slewing around with one of the men still in the saddle. The second ATV hit that one at about forty miles an hour and the driver and passenger tried to leap to safety.
Tried
wasn’t good enough.

Suddenly a shooter stood up out of the mist and aimed a pump shotgun at me. He caught me flatfooted while I was watching the ATV wreck. He was twenty feet away, right outside the shattered wall, and I saw his face crease into a wicked smile as he raised the barrel.