John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

It was all Navarro needed. He picked up speed again.

There’s no way to accurately track time in stressful conditions, but in the seconds that separated them from some measure of shelter, the hairs on the back of Gail’s neck went to full attention. Out of sheer instinct, she cut hard to her right, and then back to the left again to ruin any shooter’s aim.

The first bullet didn’t arrive until after they’d crossed into the trees, and at that, it went two feet wide, drilling a pine between the two of them.

Navarro dove to the ground for cover, and Gail was three strides past him before she realized what he’d done. “Bruce!” she yelled. They weren’t deeply enough into the woods yet for adequate cover. Two more rounds screamed in, way too close to him. The shooter was getting better.

“Stay down!” Gail yelled. She took a knee behind a hardwood and brought her rifle to bear, trying her best to stay invisible as she searched the horizon for a target. The hammering sound of the rotors hadn’t lessened a bit, but it seemed to be coming from directly overhead. She didn’t have a clue what the shooters were up to, but she knew that if she couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see her. “Bruce, get up now. Find cover.”

Navarro reacted quickly, again surprising her with his lithe flexibility. He got his feet under him and more sprang than ran to a different tree. “What are they doing?”

The rotor noise had stabilized, as if they’d parked the chopper in the air overhead.

Directly overhead.

“Oh, shit,” Gail breathed. “Run, Bruce!” she yelled. “We’ve got to move. Follow me.”

She took off at a dead run, staying inside the tree line, but running parallel to the clearing, sprinting in the direction she thought they’d least likely anticipate.

Inside ten seconds, the grenades started falling through the canopy of leaves. The explosions were not as loud as she expected them to be-no louder, really, than the flash-bangs she’d used during her HRT days-but the fragmentation damage was staggering, obliterating bushes and smaller trees, and stripping bark and leaves off the larger ones. She knew for a fact that she heard three explosions, but after that it was just a cacophony that reduced their abandoned hiding spot to a lifeless crater. She ignored the two hornet stings in the back of her right leg, which she knew had to be grenade fragments finding their mark.

She drew to a stop behind another tree, the largest one she could find, and Navarro joined her. “Bombs?” he shouted, nearly hysterical. He’d lost his steely calm, and what had replaced it was not at all endearing.

“Hand grenades,” she said. “I suspected they were going to drop something once they moved over the trees, where a sniper would have no shot. Then, when they went into a hover, I knew for sure. Are you okay?”

“They threw hand grenades at me!”

“Are you hurt?”

Navarro shook his head, then grew concerned as his gaze shifted to Gail’s backside. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

“I’m hurting, too,” she said. “Seems only reasonable.” Now that they’d stopped running, she could feel the trails of blood running down the back of her right leg.

“Are you okay?”

“They dropped grenades on me!” Gail tried to match his incredulous tone, and succeeded in eliciting a chuckle. “I think I’m fine.”

She forced herself not to look, deciding that as long as the pain was tolerable, and the flow was a trickle and not a gush, it was a minor wound. To look now and discover otherwise would help no one and change nothing. The bones were intact, and she was alive. In times like these, it pays to take things one step at a time.

The chopper was moving again, circling around to hover over the clearing between the house and the tree line. It was a fairly old-style Bell Jet Ranger, popular among police forces in the 1990s, and it had no markings that showed it to be anything other than a private aircraft. The chopper pivoted in the air, bringing its port side parallel to the trees, its nose pointed directly at Gail and Navarro.

She could see the pilots clearly through the windscreen-so clearly, in fact, that she wondered how they were not seen in return. Then she got it: they were surveying the damage they’d wrought.

Navarro raised his rifle. “Let’s take them out.”

“No!” Gail snapped. Her mind raced to review their options. This was their perfect moment of advantage. The aircraft was completely vulnerable. If they opened fire now, they could knock it out of the sky and neutralize the danger. Except they didn’t have cause. They were not in imminent danger, and every professional law enforcement officer knew that in the absence of immediate threat, deadly force could not be used. It was always a last resort. That’s the way things worked in an ordered, civilized society. There was always another way. Always a better option than killing, right up until the moment that those options proved impossible.

A man with a rifle appeared in the Jet Ranger’s open side door. He raised the weapon to his shoulder and opened fire, blasting bullet after bullet into the smoldering, ravaged remains of what had been their hiding place.

Fuck it.

Gail brought her AR-10 to bear. “You take the pilots,” she said. “I’ll take the shooter.” Without waiting for an answer, she steadied her rifle against the trunk of her sheltering tree and lined up for a slam-dunk fifty-yard sure thing. She double-checked the firing selector to make sure it was set to single-fire, she corrected for the downwash of the rotors, squeezed the trigger and-

Navarro opened up on full-auto, emptying his twenty-round magazine in less than two seconds, and filling the air with twenty deadly projectiles that hit nothing. Nothing! Jesus, how was that even possible?

Gail’s shot went high and right, harmlessly shattering the window of the open sliding door.

The pilot reacted instantly, pouring on power and pitch. The nose dipped dramatically-perilously, Gail thought-as the rotor blades dug deeply into the air and pulled the aircraft up and away with amazing speed. Buffeted by the downwash, she tried to react, shifting her aim to the cockpit, but she wasn’t fast enough. She fired three shots in their direction, but they were wasted. She was reasonably sure that she hit the chopper somewhere, but if she’d done any damage, it would have been from pure luck. As the aircraft pulled up and away, the pilot also slipped it sideways, a combat tactic that made even a relatively slow target like a chopper difficult to hit with ground fire. She considered firing again but decided against it. Chances of a kill shot had dropped to nothing, and even out here, all those bullets had to come down somewhere.

To her right, Navarro finished reloading and shouldered his rifle again.

Gail slapped the muzzle down. “What was that?” she yelled. “How do you miss something that big when it’s that close?”

Navarro’s face glowed an unnatural red as he shouted back, “I was a little stressed, okay? I’ve never tried to shoot anything down before. What about you, Miss Expert? You didn’t do any better. I say we make a run for it.”

“To where?”

“To anywhere. You’ve got your truck, and I’ve got mine. We just get in and drive.”

“Not with them in the air,” Gail said, rejecting the plan out of hand. “Any advantage we have is tied to our mobility. A car is dependent on roads, and roads bring predictability. That’s the last thing we need.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait to see what they’re going to do, and then react.”

She led the way deeper into the woods, and then left, back toward their first hiding place. Drawing on her HRT counter-sniper training, she knew that that people on the move tend to stick to one direction, rarely doubling back.