Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

Mason keeps his cool, but Taylor grows enraged. He grabs a subordinate’s night-vision binoculars and looks out at the distant farmhouse.

“I don’t see a damn one of them coming out waving a white flag,” he barks.

Mason is praying tonight ends peacefully and decides it’s worth a bit more breath. He keys the bullhorn radio again, and goes a bit off script.

“We all know how this is going to go down! No mystery about it. All of you on this farm are going to jail for a very long time—for what you’ve done, for the money you’ve stolen, for the people you’ve hurt… for the cowards you’ve been! I’m offering right now a chance for you to be men. Any fool can pick up a gun. It takes real courage …to put one down!”

Mason waits. And holds his breath, praying he got through to them. Even the gruff Taylor gives him a begrudging nod. Well said.

“We’ve got movement!” exclaims Agent Carey.

Mason looks back at the farmhouse. Sure enough, its side door has opened. A figure emerges, holding a rifle above his head…

Then quickly lowers it and opens fire.

“Damn it!” Mason shouts, ducking down behind the vehicle and reaching for his walkie-talkie.

Gunshots pierce the quiet night, ricocheting off the armored car’s metal plates.

“Shots fired, shots fired!” he yells in the radio. “All units, move in!”

The giant armored truck roars to life. Mason, Taylor, Carey, and the dozen agents in their team fall in line behind it as it plows through the wood-and-barbed-wire fence along the farm’s perimeter—and keeps on moving, gunfire still ringing out.

The raid is just beginning.

5 minutes, 15 seconds

A sleepy farm in west Texas has become a brutal battlefield.

It’s been that way for almost an hour.

Mason, his unit, and the other three teams closing in have all been slowly but surely making their way across the few acres of land toward the main farmhouse.

One bloody inch at a time.

Multiple skilled sharpshooters are perched in the second-floor windows of the farmhouse, giving them a scarily good elevated position.

The fighting is slow. Brutal. Hellish.

The Feds, even with all their training and gear and armored vehicles—and outnumbering the suspects at least three to one—are taking nothing for granted.

More than a few agents have already gotten shot and pulled out. None is wounded seriously, but the teams’ numbers are beginning to thin as they get closer.

And now, they’re very close.

The farmhouse is just a few dozen yards away.

“Two o’clock!” Mason yells, spying a crouched shooter leaning out of a prickly sage bush on their flank.

Without waiting for his teammates to react, Mason raises his M4 carbine and fires three rapid, perfectly placed shots—two to the chest, one to the head.

“Neutralized!”

The suspect is dead before he hits the dusty ground—right beside the rusty metal space heater nestled in the brush beside him.

The team keeps moving.

Mason sticks his head up and scans the terrain up ahead. Virtually all that stands between his team and their side of the farmhouse is a small, rickety woodshed.

God only knows what could be inside.

“Form up at the entryway,” Agent Taylor orders, in an urgent whisper. “Two plus one. Cam it and breach, on my go.”

As soon as the armored vehicle gets between it and the farmhouse, four SWAT agents peel off from the team and hurry into position: two on each side of the shack’s closed wooden door.

Mason, Taylor, and the others provide cover as one of the agents slips a tiny, flexible camera—about the shape of a black licorice Twizzler—beneath the door. He rotates it all around, giving a second agent holding a smartphone-size digital monitor a 180-degree night-vision view of the inside.

“Looks clear,” the agent whispers.

So Taylor gives the cue, and a third agent produces a metal crowbar—and wrenches open the door with a wood-splitting crunch .

Mason watches as the four agents burst into the tiny space, the red laser beams atop their guns whipping all around, aiming at every nook and cranny.

Discarded auto repair tools and engine parts line the walls. But otherwise the shed appears empty…

Until a gunman suddenly jumps up from behind a tool chest and unleashes a torrent of gunfire.

The agents inside duck for cover and shoot back, riddling his body with bullets.

But not before one of the Feds on the outside gets hit.

“Goddamnit!” Mason groans, cupping a bloody shoulder.

“That son of a bitch get you?” asks Taylor with concern.

Mason leans his back against the rear side of the armored vehicle for support. He pulls out a flashlight and examines his wound.

His shoulder was only grazed, but it hurts like hell. Mason can feel it, the pain hot and sharp, throbbing in sync with his pulse.

“One of us can escort you back to the perimeter, sir,” offers Agent Carey, the team leader. “Rest of us, we’ll keep on pushing toward the—”

“Hell no,” Mason roars through gritted teeth. “I wanna be there when we breach that damn farmhouse, and see the looks on those bastards’ faces!”

Taylor, Carey, and the other agents are taken aback. They’ve never seen the usually calm and collected Mason so enraged. So primal. It’s scary.

“Jesus, Mason,” says Taylor. “You’re bleedin’ all over the damn place. No one’s been working harder to get these bastards than you have, but—”

Thankfully Mason doesn’t have to argue: his and Taylor’s radios crackle to life.

“Alpha and Charlie teams have reached the farmhouse,” says one of the other teams’ leaders. “Ready to enter.”

“Roger,” responds another agent over the radio. “Delta team closing in.”

That’s great news, and Mason and his men all know it. Two of the four SWAT units are in position outside the house, with the third nearby.

Mason turns his gaze toward the farmhouse. It’s so close. The final stand.

“Bravo Command, copy that,” Mason responds into his walkie, signaling Taylor and the others to get back into formation and keep moving. They obey.

“En route, too. Prepare to breach!”

3 minutes, 45 seconds

Clink…clink, clink…boom!

The entire ramshackle farmhouse gets briefly lit up like a jack-o’-lantern as four flash grenades are thrown and detonated inside simultaneously.

“Go, go, go!”

Mason barks the command at his team and into his radio—and nearly all the remaining agents kick down doors and crash through windows and pour into the home from all sides.

“FBI!” they yell, moving in tight fluid lines from room to room like slithering snakes. “Get on the ground! FBI! Lemme see your hands!”

The pop-pop-pop-pop of gunshots soon rings out from inside as well, followed by exclamations like “Clear!” and “Suspect down!” and even “I’m hit!”

Mason’s focus is so tightly on the farmhouse, he barely notices his wounded shoulder anymore, the black sleeve of his jumpsuit soaked in blood.

“Bravo and Charlie teams, moving upstairs!” comes a voice over the radio.

Mason and Taylor share a look.

This nightmare of a raid is almost over.

But it’s not finished yet.

“We got one!” an agent exclaims over the radio. “In the attic!”

Mason holds his breath and waits. Waiting to hear those magic words…

“Charlie Leader, giving the all clear! Repeat, site is clear and secure!”

Mason pumps his fist in triumph. Taylor claps him on his good shoulder. The agents can finally breathe easy.

“Bravo Command, good copy,” Mason radios back. “All clear and secure. Stand down.”