Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

"Hey, man, come on, ya'll. I ain't carryin' nothin', just like you said, man. How come ya'll bristlin' with your personal shit an' all?"

"We told you we know how to use what we sell," said the dealer, who called himself Freddy. "You do things smooth, they don't come out."

The CI said he was only there to do business and asked to see the merchandise out on the bed. On the video screen the SWAT sergeant watched six handguns and the assault rifle being placed on the mattress. He made a determination that moment: The team was not going to let those weapons back out on the street. That contingency plan had already been set. When the key words came out of the CI's mouth, the team would move simultaneously. Most of the men in the van were holding their breath when the informant said, "OK. This all looks right. I got your money right here."

The sergeant called a "Go" on his radio. Redman already had his scope on the door and even from his distance he heard the whump of the inside suite door as one of the team gave it the shoulder and rushed in on the dealers shouting, "Police, don't move! Police, don't move! Police, don't move."

At the same instant three deputies jumped from the back of the van and headed for the stairs. They were dressed in black with yellow letters across their chests and back: POLICE.

Two team members also burst from the front door of the room next to the dealers' to cover the second-floor walkway. Redman let a breath out and pulled two pounds of pressure on the three-pound trigger. Despite the order not to move, the bad guys did.

The first man out of the dealers' room was a guy with a baseball cap. He instantly wore Redman's crosshairs on his chest. Redman saw that the grip of the man's 9mm was still sticking out of his belt and held off as the deputies on the walkway continued yelling. But Baseball Cap kept going, starting down the outside stairwell as the team had figured, funneling into the hands of the van team. The second man out had his gun in his hand. When he came out the door, Redman put the scope on him. When the guy turned to look at the deputies on the walkway and began to raise his 9mm, Redman fired a.308 WIN boat-tail bullet into the man's chest, one inch below his heart and slightly anterior. It sheared the breastbone as it went in, and the velocity expansion that fans out three inches in diameter around the bullet pulverized the two right chambers of the heart. He was dead within seconds.

That was when Redman heard the reports of the van team's own MP5s. The first man down the stairway had pulled his 9mm from his waistband but did not get the chance to fire. Redman moved the scope down in time to see two blossoms sprout on the man's chest like tiny roses opening in an accelerated-time-flash film.

Voices continued to sound and Redman swung the sights and caught a glimpse of a booted foot leaving the targeting field. He moved his eye from the scope and watched a man leap over the walkway railing and hit the ground. The guy rolled, using his rifle to absorb the shock, and scrambled to his feet: a runner. Up on the walkway, the deputies plowed full into the fourth man who stepped out of the room, tackling him but also losing chase on the runner. Watching the confusion, Redman lifted his rifle, slid on his ass across the top of the dresser and took two steps to the window. From there he had an angle on the runner, who had in his hands the automatic rifle he'd been trying to sell. The parking lot deputies never saw him and Redman called out, "On the fence! On the fence!" as a warning and then swung his scope to the right, steadying the rifle against the window frame. He had a full view of the runner, who had made the chain-link fence and was scrambling up. He watched him throw one leg over and then, straddling the top, sling the rifle up to his shoulder and aim back at the parking lot. Redman's shot was perfect given the circumstances. The boat-tail caught the man just below the left sideburn, half an inch in front of the earhole. He was dead in a millisecond.

In the investigation that follows every time a lawman fires his weapon, the operation came out clean. The SWAT team acted exactly as it had been trained to. They'd done an assessment of the danger and secured the room. They'd assigned adequate overwhelming force. When hostile weapons were identified, and when those weapons became a danger to team members, those members shot to kill. It all went down as it should have under quickly changing circumstances.

Only the media questioned the operation, which, Redman knew, is what the media does. When someone dies by the hand of a cop, journalists seem to be sent out to determine if it was a fair fight. But SWAT officers know it is never a fair fight. It's never supposed to be. It's not a game.

The sheriff was adept at spinning the local media. The public information officers dealt with the reporters they had relationships with. But it had been Redman's fifth killing in the line of duty. The editorial writers, dusty white collars in isolated offices who only watched TV and hadn't been on the streets in years, had their opinions.

Redman could still quote the editorial written in the Daily News only two days after the SWAT shooting: Since all witnesses to the contrary are dead, it may be impossible to know exactly what occurred in the middle of a darkened motel parking lot last Tuesday. Of course the Sheriff's Office has cleared itself-using its own investigators-but a taxpayer-supported agency that is given the mandate to protect and serve does not have a license to kill as if they were some kind of 007 squad. Deputy Redman has fired the fatal shots on five SWAT unit killings in the last seven years. If the man has a quick trigger finger or a questionable lust for the job, he should be arraigned or at least fired. If he has confused his role with that of the Marine sniper he once was in the Gulf War, that mind-set should not be allowed to roam our civilian streets and given a warrior's impunity.

Redman's lieutenant, Steve Canfield, had taken him aside.

"Don't even read it, Mikey. You've saved our asses a dozen times. They don't know shit about it," Canfield said while Redman sat in front of his locker reading the editorial and quietly boiling. "They're opinionist, man. They make up opinions. None of them are there when the shit is flying. They're still watching the Lone Ranger shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand. None of them know how it really works, Mike. You remember that, partner."

But Redman never considered himself the lieutenant's "partner." In the first of his so-called quick-trigger killings, his real partner, Marcus Collie, had been the first one in on a barricaded-man call. Within forty minutes the team had surrounded a dilapidated home in an upscale neighborhood, an eyesore that residents had complained about for years. The owner, the neighbors said, was an oddball who'd taken the place over when his mother died. He hadn't paid the electric or water in several months and threatened every city code officer who'd tried to talk with him. When city officers tried to contact him, he threatened to shoot anyone who crossed his property. SWAT was called in. The guy had painted every window in the house black from the inside. There was no opportunity for sniper work. It had to be close quarters. The cops had bullhorned the guy for hours. All they got were more threats. The team then bashed out all four corner windows, tossed in smoke bombs and waited for the guy to come out coughing and sputtering. Still nothing. Finally an entry team was formed. As usual, Collie was on point. Redman, his partner, was behind him.

They took down the front door with a battering ram and went in low, flashlights mounted on their MP5s. Nothing. They went on a room-by-room search in the dark. The third room they encountered was the master bath. Because of the dark, they did not see the water on the floor at the edge of the door. If they'd noticed, they might have figured the guy had closed himself up in there and used wet towels under the door to keep the smoke out. Instead, Collie kicked in the door and jumped to the right. Redman stayed left. No sound. When Collie brought his gunsight around the doorframe, the guy must have timed the sweep of the flashlight, and fired a twelve-gauge loaded with deer slugs into the doorframe where Collie stood. Almost simultaneously Redman swung around and fired a three-round burst just above the flash of the shotgun and the bullets stitched across the man's neck, nearly separating it from his shoulders. Lucky pattern in the dark. But the suspect had been just as accurate.