Lee Child - The Enemy

The problem was with the holes in the cinder block. In the other three walls. They had looked the size of regular windows. Big enough for a man to climb through. Even a big man like Marshall. He could climb through the west wall and get to his Humvee. Or he could climb through the south wall and get to mine. Military vehicles don’t have ignition keys. They have big red starter buttons precisely so that guys can throw themselves inside in a panic and get themselves the hell out of Dodge. And I couldn’t watch the west wall and the south wall simultaneously. Not from any kind of a position that offered concealment.

Did I need concealment?

Was he armed?

I had an idea about how to find out.

Never trust a weapon that you haven’t personally test-fired.

I aimed at the center of the iron door and pulled the trigger. The Beretta worked. It worked just fine. It flashed and boomed and kicked and there was an enormous clang and the round left a small bright pit in the metal ten yards away.

I let the echoes die.

“Marshall?” I called. “You’re resisting arrest. So I’m going to come around and I’m going to start firing through the window apertures. Either the rounds will kill you or the ricochets will wound you. You want me to stop at any time, you just come on out with your hands on your head.”

I heard a burst of radio static again. Inside the hut.

I moved to the west. Kept low and fast. If he was armed he was going to shoot, but he was going to miss. Give me a choice of who to get shot at by and I’ll pick a pointy-headed strategic planner any day of the week. On the other hand, he hadn’t been completely inept with Carbone or Brubaker. So I widened my radius a little to give myself a chance of getting behind his Humvee. Or behind the old Sheridan tank.

Halfway there I paused and fired. It was no kind of a good system to make a promise and then not keep it. But I aimed high on the inside face of the window reveal so that if the round hit him it would have had to come off two walls and the ceiling first. Most of the energy would be expended and it wouldn’t hurt him much. The nine-millimeter Parabellum was a decent round, but it didn’t have magical properties.

I got behind the hood of his Humvee. Rested my gun hand on the warm metal. The camouflage paint was rough. It felt like it had sand mixed in with it. I aimed up at the hut. I was down in a slight dip now and it was above me. I fired again, high on the other side of the window reveal.

“Marshall?” I called. “You want suicide by cop, that’s OK with me.”

No reply. I was three rounds down. Twelve rounds to go. A smart guy might just lie on the floor and let me blast away. All my trajectories would be upward in relation to him because I was down in a dip. And because of the windowsills. I could try banking rounds off the ceiling and the far wall but ricochets didn’t necessarily work like billiards. They weren’t predictable and they weren’t reliable.

I saw movement at the window.

He was armed.

And not with a handgun either. I saw a big wide shotgun barrel come out at me. Black. It looked about the size of a rainwater pipe. I figured it for an Ithaca Mag- 10. A handsome piece. If you wanted a shotgun, the Mag-10 was about as good as it got. It was nicknamed the Roadblocker because it was effective against soft-skinned vehicles. I ducked backward and put the Humvee’s engine block between myself and the hut. Made myself as small as I could get.

Then I heard the radio again. Inside the hut. It was a very short transmission and faint and full of static and I couldn’t make out any actual words but the rhythm and the inflection of the burst came across like a three-syllable question. Maybe Say again ? It was what you heard after you issued a confusing order.

I heard a repeat transmission. Say again ? Then I heard Marshall’s voice. Barely audible. Four syllables. Fluffy consonants at the beginning. Affirmative , maybe.

Who was he talking to and what was he ordering?

“Give it up, Marshall,” I called. “How much shit do you want to be in?”

It was what a hostage negotiator would have called a pressure question. It was supposed to have a negative psychological effect. But it made no legal sense. If he shot me, he would go to Leavenworth for four hundred years. If he didn’t, he would go for three hundred years. No practical difference. A rational man would ignore it.

He ignored it. He was plenty rational. He ignored it and he fired the big Ithaca instead, which is exactly what I would have done.

In theory it was the moment I was waiting for. Firing a long gun that requires a physical input before it can be fired again leaves the shooter vulnerable after pulling the trigger. I should have come out from cover immediately and returned lethal aimed fire. But the sheer stunning impact of the ten-gauge cartridge slowed me down by half a second. I wasn’t hit. The spray pattern was low and tight and it caught the Humvee’s front wheel. I felt the tire blow and the truck dropped its front corner ten inches into the sand. There was smoke and dust everywhere. When I looked half a second later the shotgun barrel was gone. I fired up at the top of the window reveal. I wanted a tight ricochet that came down vertically and drilled through his head.

I didn’t get one. He called out to me.

“I’m reloading,” he said.

I paused. He probably wasn’t. A Mag-10 holds three rounds. He had only fired one. He probably wanted me to come out of cover and charge his position. Whereupon he would rear up and smile and blow me away. I stayed where I was. I didn’t have the luxury of reloading. I was four down, eleven to go.

I heard the radio again. Brief static, four syllables, a descending scale. Acknowledged, out . Fast and casual, like a piano trill.

Marshall fired again. I saw the black barrel move in the window and there was another loud explosion and the far back corner of the Humvee dropped ten inches. Just dumped itself straight down. I flattened in the dirt for a second and squinted underneath. He was shooting the tires out . A Humvee can run on flat tires. That was part of the design demand. But it can’t run on no tires. And a ten-gauge shotgun doesn’t just flatten a tire. It removes a tire. It tears the rubber right off the rim and leaves little tiny shreds of it all over a twenty-foot radius.

He was disabling his own Humvee and he was going to make a break for mine.

I got up on my knees again and crouched behind the hood. Now I was actually safer than I had been before. The big vehicle was canted right down on the passenger side so that there was a solid angled wedge of metal between me and him all the way to the desert floor. I pressed up against the front fender. Lined myself up with the engine block. Put six hundred pounds of cast iron between me and the gun. I could smell diesel. A fuel line had been hit. It was leaking fast. No tires, nothing in the tank. And no percentage in soaking my shirt with diesel and lighting it and tossing it in the hut. I had no matches. And diesel isn’t flammable the way gasoline is. It’s just a greasy liquid. It needs to be vaporized and put under intense pressure before it explodes. That was why the Humvee was designed with a diesel engine. Safety.

“ Now I’m reloading,” Marshall called.

I waited. Was he or wasn’t he ? He probably was. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to rush him. I had a better idea. I crawled along the Humvee’s tilted flank and stopped at the rear bumper. Looked past it and scoped out my view. To the south I could see my own Humvee. To the north I could see almost all the way to the hut. There was an open space twenty-five yards wide in between. No-man’s-land. Marshall would have to traverse twenty-five continuous yards of open ground to get from the hut to my Humvee. Right through my field of fire. He would probably run backward, shooting as he went. But his weapon packed only three rounds fully loaded. If he spaced them out, he would be firing once every eight yards. If he loosed them all off at the start full blast and unaimed, he would be naked all the rest of the way to the truck. Either option, he was going down. That was for damn sure. I had eleven Parabellums and an accurate pistol and a steel bumper to rest my wrist on.