Last Man Standing (61 page)

Through his NV goggles Web looked around and noted the lights winking through the jumble of trees. These light pulses represented
snipers who were wearing fireflies, infrared glow plugs the size of a cigarette lighter. The flies would blink every two seconds
in a light spectrum visible only with night optics. This way the snipers could keep in touch with one another without giving
away their position. If a target was suspected of having night optics as well, the flies weren’t used, for obvious reasons.
Assaulters never used them. Each wink of light represented a friendly body with a .308 suppressed rifle backing him up. It
was comforting when you weren’t sure whether you were walking into an ice-cream parlor or a hornet’s nest. Web assumed tonight
that it would be the latter.

With a flick of his thumb, Web put the fire selector on his MP-5 to multiple-round bursts and then worked on getting his pulse
rate down to the proper zone. There were the sounds of wildlife all around—squirrels, mostly—and birds flitting from tree
limb to tree limb, disturbed by the men crouched in their space with all this fancy gear. The padding of animal paws and the
flapping of bird wings was somehow comforting, if only to reassure Web that he was still on planet earth, still connected
to living, breathing things, though he had potential killing on his mind.

The plan here was a little dicey. The snipers were not going to open fire on the sentries. Gunning down folks in cold blood
who had yet to be convicted of anything was not something law enforcement types got to do very often; Web certainly never
had. It would take a very high-stakes hostage situation to justify that sort of approval from Washington. The director and
probably the attorney general would have to bless that sort of operation. Here they were going to flank the guards, jump them
and make sure they had no time or opportunity to warn their comrades inside of the coming attack. The assaulters could have
employed a diversionary explosive, or perhaps drawn the guards into the woods somehow to be met by assaulters in Ghillies
waiting to jump them, but the flanking plan had been devised based on prior intelligence gathered on the Frees. That intel
had proved correct in the careless nature of the sentries. It might just work, thought Web.

If the exterior breach points were locked, they would be blown, of course. That would warn the rest of the Frees, but by then
HRT would be inside and the battle would pretty much be over, barring something extraordinary occurring, which Web could no
longer rule out, ever again. Hotel was going to hit from the rear, Gulf from the side, in a very explosive way. Assault teams
always tried to hit from angles, never front-back or side-side, to avoid friendly fire casualties.

Web tensed as Romano asked TOC for compromise authority and quickly got it. Now Web took one last cleansing breath and assumed
the total focus of an assaulter with one of the most elite law enforcement teams ever put together. Pulse at sixty-four, Web
really did just know his body’s inner workings.

Romano gave the high sign and he and Web went to the left and the other two operators slid to the right. A minute later they
were on both flanks of Gameboy, who was still intent on his video screen, apparently having a great time whipping the computer’s
ass. By the time he looked up, there were .45 pistols stuck in both of his ears. Before he even had a chance to say, “Shit,”
he was down on the ground, Peerless cuffs around his hands and ankles, and a plastic chain strap tied the cuffs together so
that he was fully immobilized like a tethered calf during a roping contest. At the same time a strip of adhesive was placed
over his mouth. They took his pistol, cell phone and a knife they found in a sheath tied to his ankle. Web did leave the man
his precious Gameboy.

They passed the living quarters of the group and moved to the crisis site, the exterior rear door of the main building, and
crouched low. Romano touched the door gingerly, then grasped the door handle and tried it. Through his mask, Web could see
him grimace. It was locked. Romano called up the breacher, who quickly moved forward, laid his four-hundred-grain flex linear
charge, rolled out his cable and readied the detonator, while the rest of the team watched his back even as they took cover.

At that point Romano informed TOC that they were at phase line green and Web listened to TOC’s confirmatory response. Thirty
seconds later, members of Gulf did the same thing, so Web knew they had successfully bagged Pale Shaq out front and then gone
to the side of the building for their very special assault. TOC stated that it had control, and the line rankled Web even
more now than it had before.
Yeah, that’s what you said to Charlie, wasn’t it?

Three snipers joined the Gulf boys on the side and Ken McCarthy had come down from his Sierra One position and become an instant
assaulter, along with two other Whiskey snipers who joined Web and Hotel Team. When Ken saw Web, Web couldn’t see the man’s
expression, but Web was sure it was a surprised one. They all took off their NV goggles, since muzzle flashes and explosives
made them useless anyway and would actually leave you blind and defenseless in such a light-filled environment. From here
on, everyone had to simply use their ordinary five senses, and that was okay was Web.

The countdown began. Web’s heartbeat seemed to slow even more with each number. When TOC reached three, Web was fully in the
zone. At the count of two, every HRT operator looked away from the crisis site so that the blast wouldn’t blind them. At the
same moment each man’s fingers also slipped off his weapon’s safety once more; and then index fingers slid to triggers.
Here we go, boys,
Web thought.

The charge blew and the doors fell inward and Web and company roared through.

“Banging,” called out Romano as he drew a flash bang from his stretch cordura holder, pulled the pin and lobbed. Three seconds
later a hundred-and-eighty-decibel explosion screamed through the hallway with a million-candlepower flash in its wake.

Web was to the right of Romano, looking for threats from any source, his gaze going first to distant corners, then pulling
back. There was a small interior room with a hallway heading left off that. Their intelligence, confirmed by their thermal
imagery, had told them that the Frees were gathered in the main room in the left rear of the building. It was a large space,
maybe forty-by-forty, and mostly open, so they didn’t have to worry about lots of nooks and crannies for resistance to hole
up in, but it was still a large space to secure, and there would no doubt be furniture and other equipment to hide behind.
They dropped off one guy to hold the room they had first entered. The rules of engagement were that you never gave back ground
you had taken, and you never allowed yourself to be rear-flanked. The rest of the strike force raced on.

So far, they had seen no one, although there were shouts up ahead. Web and the rest of Hotel flew down the hallway. One more
turn and they’d hit the double doors to the target space.

“Banging,” yelled Web. He pulled the pin, lobbed the flash bang around this last turn. Now anybody looking to ambush them
from up there would have to do so while blind and deaf.

When they reached the double doors, no one bothered to check whether they were locked. Romano quickly placed a slap charge
on the doorjamb. The explosive consisted of a length of tire rubber one inch wide and six inches long with a strip of C4 explosive
called a Detasheet. At the bottom of the device were a shock tube and a blasting cap. The men stood back, and Romano whispered
into his mic. A few seconds went by and the slap charge blew and the doors collapsed inward.

At the exact same moment the side wall of the main room exploded inward and Gulf Team charged through the opening. They had
placed a flex-linear charge—a V-shaped strip of lead and foam, loaded with explosives—around the wall. It had completely taken
out the wall, throwing debris into the room. One of the Frees was already on the floor, holding his bloodied head and screaming.

Hotel charged in from the main doors and blitzed the danger zones that were basically any space where somebody with a gun
could take cover and do HRT harm.

“Banging,” called out Romano as he raced down the right side of the room. The flash bang explosion sounded seconds later.
The room was filled with smoke and blinding light and the shouts and screams were deafening as the Frees fell over each other
trying to escape. However, there were no shots and Web began to think that this might just end peacefully, at least by HRT
standards. Web followed Romano, his gaze sweeping the area, looking to the farthest corners for threats and then reeling back.
He saw both young and old men hiding under overturned chairs, prone on the floor or pushed against the walls, all covering
their eyes and holding their ears, all of them stunned by the carefully crafted assault. The overhead lights had been shot
out by HRT as soon as they entered the room. They were all operating in darkness now except for the occasional flash bang.

“FBI! On the floor. Hands behind your head. Fingers interlocked. Do it!
Now!
Or you’re fucking dead!” Romano screamed all this out in a Brooklyn-accented, staccato roar.

That mouthful even got Web’s attention.

Most of the Frees in Web’s line of sight began to obey the instruction, semi-incapacitated as they were. That’s when he heard
the first shot. And that was followed by another shot that hit the wall right next to Web’s head. From the corner of his eye
Web saw a Free coming up from the floor holding an MP-5 and pointing it his way. Romano must have seen the same thing. They
fired together, both their MP-5s on multiple-round bursts. All eight shots hit the man either in the head or torso and he
and his gun went back down to the floor and stayed there.

The other Frees, blinded and disoriented but also angered by the death of one of their members, pulled their weapons and opened
fire from behind whatever bulwarks they could find. HRT did the same. However, it was pistols, shotguns, flesh and overmatched
men playing soldier against body armor, subguns and men trained for battle and killing. The gunfight did not last very long.
The Frees foolishly looked at the eyes of their opponents. Web and his men calmly keyed on the hands and the weapons held
there as they fired round after round, moving forward, staying on their marks. Aim-point red laser dots from the finders bolted
to their subguns were directly on their targets. They maintained their fields of fire, shooting around and over each other
as though they were performing a superbly choreographed dance. The frantic Frees shot wildly and with no discipline and missed
badly. HRT aimed with precision and scored hit after hit. Twice HRT operators were shot, more out of luck than skill, but
they were torso hits, ordinary pistol ammo running right into the latest-generation Kevlar; and while the impacts of the bullets
stung like a bitch, the only result was a deep bruise. HRT aimed for the head and chest and each time a round impacted, another
Free died.

With the rout clearly on, Web had had enough of this carnage and he flipped his MP-5 to full auto and raked the tops of the
cheap tables and chairs, blowing chips of particle board and wood veneer and strips of metal into the air and filling the
opposite walls with lead as his weapon threw out slugs at the rate of almost nine hundred a minute. HRT did not fire warning
shots, but there was nothing in the manuals or in any other training Web had done that said you had to slaughter an outclassed
enemy for no reason. The remaining Frees were no danger to anyone anymore; they just needed some extra persuasion to officially
give up. Romano did likewise with spray from his gun. The resulting blizzard of destruction had the opposition flat on their
bellies, hands over their heads, their thoughts of fighting and perhaps winning obviously gone. In unison Web and Romano slapped
in fresh ten-millimeter ammo stacks with machinelike movements and speed.

They opened fire again, once more aiming just over the heads of the cowering enemy, and poured it on until the last of the
Frees still alive finally made the only sensible choice. Two crawled out from the debris of dead bodies and destroyed chairs
and tables, their hands in the air, their weapons on the floor. They looked shell-shocked and were sobbing. Another Free just
sat there staring at his hands, bloody from touching a large, seeping wound on his leg, and there was vomit on his shirt.
An operator went over to him, cuffed him and then laid him gently back, slapped on surgical gloves and mask and started ministering
to the wound; a gunman suddenly turned lifesaver of his enemy. Paramedics were called up from the medic truck that accompanied
every HRT assault to tend to the wounded. The guy would probably live, Web concluded, after checking out the bloody leg, if
only to spend the rest of his life in prison.

As Romano and another assaulter cuffed the first two Frees to surrender, several other operators went quickly around the room
making sure that the dead actually were. The men on the floor were just bodies now, Web felt certain. Humans were not built
to withstand one shot to the head, much less half a dozen.

Web finally lowered his gun and took a deep breath. He surveyed the battlefield, looked over the survivors. Some didn’t even
appear old enough to drive, dressed in oversized farm jeans, T-shirts and dirty boots. One of them had a peach-fuzz goatee;
another even had acne. Two of the dead men looked old enough to be grandfathers and maybe had recruited their grandsons to
join the Frees; and die as one. They hardly qualified as worthy opponents. They were just a bunch of stupid people with guns
and screwed-up lives who had run into the realization of their worst nightmares and foolishly chosen the wrong course of action.
Web counted eight dead bodies, the blood flowing thick and absorbing fast into the cheap carpet. And, though the Frees would
contest it, all blood, regardless of ethnic or racial background, flowed red out of the body. At that level, everybody was
the same.