Andrew Britton - The Assassin

Barnes, the youngest of the three and the only one who’d never served time, seemed to catch on too late, but when Powell popped the latches and came up with an olive green tube, his mouth went slack. Backing up, he held up his hands and said, “No, no, we gotta talk to them-”

Mason didn’t hesitate; if the man wasn’t going to contribute, he would only be in the way. Lifting the G36 to his shoulder, he fired a single round, catching Barnes in the base of the throat. The younger man stumbled back over one of the cases and hit the floor hard, his head bouncing on the cement with a wet, sickening crack.

Mason looked to the man left standing. Ronnie Powell had the gaunt, strained features of a man who’d started life with little and had gone downhill from there, the kind of career criminal who could describe — in intricate detail — the accommodations offered by at least five state penitentiaries. They’d once discussed what they would do in this kind of situation and had reached an agreement of sorts. Neither was prepared to finish out his days in a concrete box. “You ready?”

Powell lifted the fiberglass-wrapped tube to his right shoulder, his face tight with resignation and resolve. “Yeah.”

“All units, this is Bravo One. Compromise. I repeat, compromise. We have gunfire inside the building, over.”

Tate immediately looked to his breacher, saw the other man grimace and nod quickly, then keyed his mic and said, “Roger, we’re going now-”

He was instantly cut off as the wall next to his men exploded outward, slinging concrete and the torn remains of four assaulters into the parking area, Tate included. The two surviving agents instinctively ran out to assist the fallen men and were promptly cut down by a hail of automatic fire.

In the CP, all eyes watched in disbelief as the bright flash appeared on the first monitor.

“What the hell was that?” Harrington shouted, inadvertently cutting off part of the next transmission.

“Bravo One! We have agents down! I repeat, we have-”

A second flash on the screen cut off the call, the blast engulfing most of the second team. Grainy black figures could be seen lying amidst the piles of rubble; the two members of Bravo left standing appeared to be running back toward the fence. The chaos seemed to bleed from the screens and into the room; everyone Kealey could see was moving and yelling. Despite the confusion, Dennis Quinn seemed remarkably composed as he tried to gain control of the situation, though he was having a hard time fighting his way through the frantic radio traffic.

“Snipers, Control. What do you got?”

The calls came back in rapid succession. “Control, Sierra One. No shot.”

“This is Sierra Two, no shot.”

“Sierra Three, no shot…”

A sudden movement caught Kealey’s eye, and he turned to see Samantha Crane pushing her way across the room. Harrington was yelling something after her, but she ignored him and kept running forward, stumbling once, then breaking free from the crowd. Flinging open the door, she banged her way down the iron stairs at a dangerous speed, Matt Foster close on her heels.

“Ryan, what are you-”

Kealey didn’t hear the rest as he pulled away from Harper and burst out of the building, hitting the street a moment later. Cars were screeching to a halt behind him on Columbia Street, which had not been closed to through traffic, as people jumped out of their vehicles to get a better look at the rising plume of smoke a block to the east. Turning left, Kealey saw Crane, 40 feet away and gaining ground, her hair streaming behind her in the westbound wind. She was sprinting toward the ongoing battle, Foster running a few feet behind. Screams behind him as shots rang out. Kealey moved after the agents, doing his best to close the distance.

What the hell is she doing? The question kept pounding away at Kealey’s mind. None of it made sense, but one fact cut through the confusion: unless Mason had wired the doors in advance, he must have had access to some type of launcher, and Crane would be hard pressed to compete with the dinky 10mm clipped to her belt.

Of course, Kealey wasn’t faring any better himself in that department. He reached back under his coat, awkwardly because he was still running, and came up with his Beretta. Knowing what he was heading into, the weapon didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but it would have to do.

He kept running hard.

Inside the warehouse, Anthony Mason turned away from the ragged holes in the south wall, choking on the dust and smoke that the twin explosions had thrown into the air. He was completely focused, despite the small, intensely painful hole in his right thigh. Someone had gotten off a lucky shot, but that didn’t matter. He had done more damage than he would have thought possible, and it was all because the Bureau had jumped the gun before discovering what was stored inside the building: a total of 136 M136 man-portable launchers, four to a case.

Better known as the AT4, the shoulder-fired launcher had been readily adopted by the U.S. military in the mid-1980s, and for good reason: the weapon was light, easy to use, and devastatingly effective. The 84mm High Explosive (HE) round it fired was capable of penetrating 14 inches of armor or, as Mason had just discovered, more than 12 inches of reinforced cement. Although each launcher cost just $1,500 to produce, they could easily go for five times that amount on the international market. Although he had moved the AT4 before, this would have been his first sale of this particular weapon in more than two years. While he’d never complete the transaction, there was some satisfaction to be had in the fact that he’d been able to put the launchers to some good use.

Powell was already dead. He’d been standing too close to the south wall when he fired his launcher and was torn apart by the resulting shrapnel. Dropping his own empty tube to the ground, Mason touched the grip of the G36, which was still slung across his chest, then turned and started back up to the second floor, counting on the smoke and confusion to block the snipers’ line of sight. It was a reasonable assumption, as the front of the building was, in fact, partially obscured. When he reached the top of the stairwell, though, he was plainly visible through a south-facing window, and although he appeared for less than two seconds, that was all it took.

On the second floor of the brownstone across the street, Special Agent Kyle Sheppard leaned into the fiberglass stock of his SSG 3000 Sig Sauer rifle, his right eye positioned 2 inches behind a Nikon Tactical mil-dot scope. He was completely focused on his area of responsibility, despite the numerous distractions: the spotter crouched by his side, peering through a tripod-mounted Schmidt-Cassegrain scope; the calls coming loud and fast over the radio; the flash of purple cotton and blond hair in the parking area below.

The radio sputtered. “Sierra teams, I repeat, agents are moving through your fields of fire. Provide cover if necessary.”

The spotter picked up the handset. “Control, Sierra Two. Copy last-”

Sheppard never heard the rest. Finding a target, he squeezed the two-stage trigger much faster than he would have liked. The rifle’s report was impossibly loud in the small room, the. 308 match-grade round well on its way before the spotter could even say, “Subject scoped.”

Mason was turning right at the top of the stairwell when he felt something slam into his left shoulder. Vaguely aware of tinkling glass, he fell to the ground and scurried for cover, which he found behind a series of stacked metal containers. It was only then that he realized he’d been shot a second time, but this was different. When the pain came a split second later, it was intense, unreal — unlike anything he’d ever felt. The bullet had passed through the glenohumeral joint, sending jagged shards of bone tearing through the fragile tendons of the rotator cuff before coming to an abrupt halt in the left side of his clavicle. But he didn’t know any of that. All he knew was that it hurt, and when he tried to lift his arm, he let out a choked scream and nearly passed out from the pain. He looked around wildly, trying to find some way to level the field.