John Gilstrap - No mercy

A brilliant flash near the lodge startled him, followed by the distinctive wham of a claymore. Whatever lay in the woods to the left side of the lodge was now torn to bits.

In his earpiece, Jonathan heard Boxers’ shout, “Who the fuck-”

The fusillade never came. Even as Gail was airborne, tumbling out of the window, she’d expected to be torn apart by incoming fire, but somehow she was still here.

She didn’t pause to wonder why, or to thank God, or to even give it much of a thought. One of her team was dead, two were wounded, and she had to bring them to safety. She didn’t think any of these things, she just knew them; sensed them as her duty.

Gail belly-crawled on elbows and knees to the back corner of the house, and then around to the left-hand side. In the near distance she saw Thomas on the ground writhing in agony, screaming curses to the night while his father covered him with his body. They were alive. Beyond them, she saw the attackers closing in. They were char’d been raining covering fire in the rear to mask the joining of the two skirmish lines.

But there was even more to it than that, she realized. They were protecting the true target of their assault. “Oh, my God,” she said aloud. “They’re-”

A blinding, white-hot flash took the world away.

The echo of the first claymore was still rolling across the yard when a second one erupted, this one on the left side of the front of the house. Ahead of him, through the green light of his NODs, Jonathan saw people and vegetation shredded by the high-velocity pellets as they shrieked through the night, destroying everyone and everything.

In his three decades as a warrior, he’d never been on this end of a claymore, and it was orders of magnitude louder than he’d expected. If you hear the explosion, you’re okay.

But not for long. Since he was just outside the arc of that claymore, he could count on being just inside the arc of the next.

He slapped the transmit button on his chest. “Box, get-”

The last word was cut off by the explosion.

Inside the lodge, Julie had nearly forgotten that it took three clicks to detonate a mine. On her first try, she’d squeezed the initiator only once. When nothing happened, she quickly squeezed it twice more, and was again disappointed. Third time, she squeezed it three times rapidly and screamed as the explosion ripped the night.

She’d thought it through as best she could. She remembered that the danger zone behind the mines didn’t allow you to be very close. If she didn’t shoot them now, she didn’t know when the attackers would be behind the kill zone or when Steve and Thomas might be in front of it.

Moving without pause to the second detonator, she did it right on the first try, and this time, the detonation flashed within her peripheral vision: a brilliant light, then a cloud that obscured everything. The punishing concussion came an instant later.

She moved to the third, wrapped both hands around the clacker and cowered behind the timbers as she squeezed and counted aloud. “One. Two. Th-”

This blast was a hundred times louder than the first two, but only for an instant before her ears shut down from the pounding. The inside of the lodge erupted in splinters and broken glass.

Then she felt nothing.

Dom thought he was dead. He had to be dead. How could the killer have missed? He felt a pair of strong hands on his shoulders, and a vaguely familiar voice saying, “Father? Father! Jesus, are you all right?”

The voice crystallized before the images did. It was Doug Kramer.

“I’m alive?” Dom asked.

“Are you shot?” the chief asked.

As much as he hurt, he might have been, but he honestly didn’t know. He was on the floor of Venice’s office, on his back, and to his left, he could see the contorted face of his attacker flush with the carpet, twisted in obvious pain. “I can’t feel my legs,” the man cried, but Kramer seemed unmoved. On the far side of the prone intruder, Dom saw that Venice was still bound tightly to her chair.

“I got your message,” KramerVenice wriggled against her bonds, making her chair jump. “Cut me loose,” she said, and then, as if catching herself, she added, “Please. Digger needs me to be at the computer.”

Kramer cocked his head, then looked around. “Digger.”

“You gotta help me,” Charlie whined.

“Ambulance is on the way,” Kramer said. “Digger’s here?”

Dom scooted across the floor to tend to Charlie’s injury. He pushed the man’s tie out of the way and ripped open the front of his shirt. He found the exit wound first, just above and to the right of his navel. The entrance wound was square in the spine. “Can you tell them to hurry?” Dom slurred through his fractured jaw. “He’ll bleed out without help.”

“I can only call ’em, Father. I can’t drive for ’em.” In the distance, sirens grew louder. A lot of them. A shooting in Fisherman’s Cove was the biggest of big deals.

Kramer pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pants pocket and slit the tape on Venice’s arms first, and then the loops on her ankles.

She leapt back to her keyboard. “Please let there be something left to do,” she prayed under her breath.

“Holy fuck,” Boxers exclaimed over the radio. “They turned the claymore on the cabin! They had sappers!”

Again, a more advanced, more daring move than Jonathan would have expected. “BDA?” he asked. Boxers would recognize the acronym as Battle Damage Assessment. From Jonathan’s vantage point, the view was still obscured by dust.

“Heavy to extreme,” he replied in the detached monotone of a warrior. “I’ll get you more in a minute.”

Heavy to extreme. That said it all, even as it said nothing. And it fit the tableau of destruction that stretched out in front of Jonathan. The night had gone silent again, and as Jonathan advanced on the skirmish line that no longer was, his stomach tightened. In her panic to stop their advance, Julie-and it had to have been Julie-had unwittingly exposed the one critical flaw in Ivan Patrick’s training regimen: the attackers were jammed too close together. It was instinctive among humans to seek community in the presence of mortal danger, an instinct to be overcome on the battlefield. A single claymore had killed or maimed what looked to be over a dozen Brigadiers.

As his hearing returned to normal, the silence gave way to the agonized cries of the wounded. He saw bodies and parts of bodies everywhere. Where he encountered attackers who were still alive, he disarmed them and let them be. “We’ll get help on the way as soon as we can,” he said, over and over again, even as he walked on. He wasn’t interested in prisoners, and he had neither the time nor the resources to guard them. If they lived, good for them; if they died waiting for help to arrive, such was the price of being a Bad Guy.

His earpiece crackled as a radio broke squelch, and he heard Venice’s voice. “Scorpion, this is Mother. Do you copy?”

“Where the hell have you been?” Jonathan growled. ed from wall to wall

“Julie?” he called. “Julie Hughes! Are you here?”

He kicked broken furniture and glassware to the side as he walked to the spot where he’d left the initiators. And there she was.

She lay on her right side facing him, her head oddly skewed by its angle against the timbers of the front wall. A smear of blood masked her ear and matted her hair. He approached quickly, dropped to his knee, and pulled off his Nomex glove to check for a pulse in her neck. He smiled as he felt her carotid artery strumming solidly under his fingers. He pressed his palm to his transmit button.

“All units, this is Scorpion. I found PC-Three and she seems okay. Unconscious, but a good strong, regular pulse.” Boxers would be able to fill in the blanks, and maybe Venice. Barring an unseen, serious head injury, Precious Cargo Three would be okay. He stood and walked toward the kitchen and noticed the body on the floor in there. Jesus, they’d had themselves a hell of a time. “How’s PC-One?”