Stephen Coonts - Combat

I growled, “I’ll give odds those perps are decoys to draw SWAT teams away from here. Bring somebody fast. Strafe the goddamn ship if you have to; I’ll try to delay the load of ether. Am I sanctioned to fire first?”

A two-beat pause. “You know I can’t authorize that. Let me check with our SAC,” she said.

I made a one-word comment, dropped the phone in my pocket, and swung wide to make it through the open gate.

Fifty feet inside was the nose of the Freightliner, and behind it two guys in coveralls and respirator masks stood on its trailer fooling with transfer hoses. A guy in street clothes stood near the gate, jacket over his arm, and it barely registered in my mind that the guy was Ira Meltzer. The yellow-pipe barrier, protection for that long utility shed, ran from beside the rig almost to the gate. I made a decision that I might not have made if I’d had time to think.

My Toyota weighed something over a ton, and was still doing maybe thirty miles an hour. The Freightliner with its load might’ve weighed over twenty tons, but it wasn’t in motion. I figured on moving it a little, probably starting a fire. I popped the lever into neutral as my pickup blew past the openmouthed gate guard, then tried to hit the pavement running. Meanwhile my Toyota screeched headlong down the guide barrier, which kept nudging my vehicle straight ahead. Straight toward the nose of the towering Freightliner.

The scrape of my pickup’s steel fender mixed with shouts from the gate man, and I lost my balance and went over in a shoulder roll. Inertia brought me back to my feet and nearly over again, and I heard a series of reports behind me just before my poor old pickup slammed into the left fender of the Freightliner with an earsplitting wham that was almost an animal scream.

Guttural little whines told me someone’s ricochets were hitting distant metal, and I somehow managed to clear that knee-high barrier of four-inch pipe without slowing. I ducked — actually I tripped and fell — behind the utility shed, and saw the common old lock on its door. I was in full view of the diesel rig and turned toward it, drawing my Glock.

I had expected an instant fireball, but I was wrong. Big rigs have flame-resistant fiberglass fenders these days, and only one fat tire on each side up front. The Toyota’s entire front end was crammed up into the splintered shreds of truck fender, and the cab leaned in the direction of my four-wheeled sacrifice. With a deflated front wheel, that Freightliner wasn’t going anywhere very fast.

And the reason why nobody was shooting at me from the truck was that the Toyota’s impact had shoved the entire rig back, not by much, but enough to crimp the already tight fit of transfer hoses. The guys in respirators were wrestling with a hose and shouting, though I couldn’t understand a word. As I stood unprotected in the shadow of the shed Meltzer pounded up, an Ingram burp gun in hand. I guess he didn’t expect me to be standing so close in plain sight as he rounded the shed.

Because Meltzer was six feet away when he pivoted toward me, it was an execution of sorts. The truth is, we both hesitated; but my earlier suspicions about his dealings with Quent must have given me an edge. Meltzer took my first round in the chest with a jolt that made dust leap from his shirt, and went down backward after my second round into his throat, and I risked darting farther into the open because I needed his weapon.

A burst of three or four rounds grooved the pavement as I leaped back. I saw a familiar face above a black-leather jacket, almost hidden behind the remains of the Freightliner’s fender, holding another of those murderous little Ingrams one-handed. I fired once, but only sent particles of fiberglass flying, and Norm Goldman’s face disappeared.

He called, “Majub!”.

I heard running footsteps, and whirled to the shed’s metal-faced door before they could flank me. With those big red tanks standing nearby I had a good idea what was in the shed, so I put the muzzle of my Glock near the hasp and angled it so it might not send a round flying around inside. The footsteps halted with my first round, maybe because the guy thought I could see him. I had to fire twice more before the hasp’s loop failed, and took some scratches through my glove from shrapnel, but by the time I knew that, I was inside the shed fumbling with two weapons. A drumming rattle on the shed didn’t sound promising.

From behind the Freightliner’s bulk, Norm’s voice: “You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?”

I didn’t answer. I was scanning the shed’s interior, which was lit by a skylight bubble. About half of the machinery there was familiar stuff to me: big battery-powered industrial grinders and drills, a hefty Airco gas-welding outfit, a long worktable with insulated top, a resistance-welding transformer, and tubes with various kinds of wire protruding, welding and brazing rod. Above the table were ranks of wrenches, fittings, bolts, a paint sprayer — the hardware needed to repair or revise an industrial facility.

And I could hear Norm shouting, and voices answering. Simultaneous with gunshots from outside, several sets of holes appeared in both sides of the shed at roughly waist height.

Norm yelled again, this time in English. “Goddammit, Majub, don’t waste it!”

And the response in another slightly familiar voice and genuinely English English: “Sorry, guv. We do have the long magazines.” So Mike Kaplan’s name was also Majub. What’s in a name? Protective coloration, I thought. Noises like the tearing of old canvas came from somewhere near. I squatted and lined up one eye with a bullet hole, but not too near the hole. By moving around, I caught sight of my wrecked Toyota. Norm and a guy in coveralls were ripping the fiberglass away as best they could. It might take them ten minutes to change that tire if I let them.

I darted to the end of the shed nearest the action and put a blind short burst from the Ingram through the wall, with only a fair guess at my targets. Because I stood three feet from the plastic wall, I didn’t get perforated when an answering burst tore a hole the size of my fist in the wall.

I had taken out one man and there were several more. They seemed partial to Ingrams, about thirty rounds apiece, meaning I was in deep shit. And when I heard the hiss of gas under pressure, the hair stood up on my nape. Those big red torpedoes just outside were painted to indicate acetylene. I hadn’t noticed where the oxygen tanks were, but they had to be near because of the long twinned red and black hoses screwed into the welding torch.

And acetylene, escaping inside that shed from a bullet-nicked hose, could blow that entire structure halfway to Sunnyvale the next time I fired, or when an incoming round struck a spark. I darted toward the hiss, wondering if I could repair the damage with tape, and saw that it was the black oxygen hose, not the red one, which had been cut. A slightly oxy-rich atmosphere wasn’t a problem, but if I’d had any idea of using a torch somehow, it was no longer an option.

Outside, angry jabbers and furious pounding suggested that Goldman’s crew was jacking up the Freightliner’s left front for a tire change. It would be only a matter of minutes before they managed it, and another round through the shed reminded me that Kaplan was deployed to keep me busy. From the shafts of sunlight that suddenly appeared inside when he fired, I could tell he was slowly circling the shed, clockwise.

That long workbench with its insulated top must have weighed five hundred pounds, but only its weight anchored it down. If I could tip it over, it should stop anything short of a rifle bullet if and when Kaplan tried to rush the door, and I could fire back from cover. Maybe.