Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

The button boy slung his weapon over his shoulder and gave the rest of them the all-clear sign. Two of them quickly swapped out clips. They replaced the armor-piercing rounds, to avoid shooting their comrades through the walls of the bus, slapping new clips with hollow points into their rifles. For them, shooting accuracy was no longer an issue. From here on out, everything would be point-blank.

Two of the others quickly took up positions behind the bus, making sure no one came down the ramp behind them. Two others positioned themselves on the freeway side of the bus to watch for any law enforcement that might approach from the highway, while one of them watched Magnolia Avenue from the other side to ensure that their getaway path was clear.

The explosives man took out the shaped charge from his bag. It was a roll of synthetic material that looked and felt like children’s Play-Doh. He had worked it into the shape of a rope about an inch thick and twelve feet long. He started at the foot of the bus door and pressed it against the metal. In less than a minute he’d outlined the entire perimeter of the armored door. He pressed a single detonator cap into the soft plastic and pulled the fuse. As it started to smoke, the men on that side of the bus scattered and took cover. A few seconds later there was a loud explosion and the heavy metal door fell from its frame, the strong inside hinges and all four of the locking bolts severed.

The entry team, the two men with rifles loaded with hollow points, whisked some of the smoke away with a sweep of their hands as they swung the muzzles of their rifles into play once more. One of them grabbed the guard in the stairway and rolled his body out onto the pavement. He reached down to retrieve the officer’s sidearm.

The explosives man asked him for the key to the wire-mesh cage inside.

The kid with the pistol pulled the guard’s keys off his belt. There must have been twenty of them on the ring.

“Forget it,” said the explosives man. He reached into his bag and pulled out another small charge and climbed into the bus. He walked toward the steel-and-wire mesh cage and pressed the malleable explosive charge directly over the round steel disk housing the lock for the gate.

He noticed that the mesh of the cage was severed and mangled, with jagged pieces of wire sticking out in several places directly behind the driver’s seat, where bullets had passed through the cage. The two women in the first seat inside the cage on that side were already dead, their heads thrown back, their eyes and mouths open as blood ran off the seat and covered the rubber floor mat that ran down the aisle. He looked closely through the wire mesh, but neither woman appeared to be either the one in the picture or the other target whose photograph they had memorized.

He worked to flatten the charge against the lock.

There was a lot of crying and whimpering back in the cage. One woman pleaded with him from behind the wire, her hands pressed together in prayer as she begged him not to hurt her.

He finished shaping, pressed a detonator into the charge, and in a fluid motion pulled the fuse.

He stepped off the bus pushing the two button boys ahead of him until they were a few feet away. The sharp crack of the explosion was followed by more screams inside the bus.

The explosives man gestured toward the bus with a wag of his head as he started to close up his bag while smoke billowed from the bus door. “ Rápido , huh!”

The two killers waved away the smoke and climbed the bus steps to finish the job. At first they couldn’t see. A gray white mist filled the front of the bus along with the acrid smell of burnt nitrate. As the smoke began to settle, they could see a large hole in the wire mesh on the gate where the lock had been.

They moved quickly, threw the gate open, and started down the aisle.

The women cowered, some of them down on the floor between the seats, crying.

One of the button boys held the photograph while the other grabbed the women by the hair, one at a time, pulling their heads up so the two men could see their faces. They worked from side to side, first checking seats on the right, then the left, moving toward the rear of the bus.

Halfway down, they stopped. The one holding the photograph held it out right next to the woman’s face. The guy holding her by the hair shook his head.

“ Es ella ,” said the one holding the photo.

“No.” The other one shook his head.

Before he could say another word, the man holding the photograph raised the guard’s pistol and fired a round into the woman’s head. Her blood sprayed the prisoner sitting next to her and the wall of the bus behind her.

The sound of the shot and the arbitrary manner in which it happened took Daniela by surprise.

“What’s happening?” Katia was glued to Daniela by the waist chain that bound them together.

“Just stay down and be quiet.” Daniela pulled the slide back on the Walther and chambered the first round as quietly as she could. The small pistol carried only six shots in the clip. She would have to make them count.

She wanted to try and get the two men closer before she fired. If she could drop them in the aisle a few feet away, she might be able to reach one of the assault rifles slung from their shoulders and fish for extra clips before any of the rest of them could board the bus.

Somewhere off in the distance she could hear the sounds of sirens punctuated by the bleep and blare of their electronics as the police maneuvered through traffic.

After killing the woman, the two button boys continued the process, pulling hair and quickly moving down the aisle. When Daniela peeked around the edge of the seat in front of her, they were just six rows away. Three or four more and she would show them the muzzle of the pistol and take her chances.

Suddenly she heard them talking again. One of them was dressing down the other in street Spanish; “ pendejo ,” calling him a “dumbass.”

Daniela peeked around the edge of the seat again. They had another woman by the hair and were holding the picture up to her face.

“I told you the other one wasn’t her. Pero usted tiene que ser el hombre . But you have to be the man.”

“Okay. Enough!” The other guy, who was closest to Daniela, standing sideways in the aisle, started to raise the pistol toward the woman’s head. In a fluid motion Daniela leaned into the aisle, dragging Katia with her. She raised the Walther in one hand, braced it with the other, and pulled off a round. It caught the man with the pistol in the left temple. His knees buckled and he went to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

As his buddy fell, the other one still had the woman by her hair. His head and eyes snapped toward Daniela. He let go of the hair. The woman started screaming instantly.

The man tried to swing the AK-47, its muzzle hanging down from the sling over his shoulder, up into firing position. His finger had just reached the trigger guard when Daniela fired the second round.

The sound of the shot was swallowed in the frantic screeches of the woman. A tiny speck of red the size of a pinprick appeared on the man’s forehead, above his frozen gaze. An instant later the spot spread to the diameter of a pencil. He toppled over backward, hitting the tubular steel along the top of one of the bench seats. His body spun as he slammed facedown onto the hard steel floor of the aisle.

The woman was still screaming at the top of her lungs, hyperventilating with hysteria and expelling everything.

“Move with me,” Daniela told Katia.

She tried. Katia pulled herself out into the aisle as her foot tugged and strained at the end of the ankle chain.

Daniela crawled forward down the aisle. She gained two or three feet, threw her body flat out on the floor dragging Katia with her. She stretched, reaching for the rifle on the first dead man. But the slack on the chain wasn’t enough. She needed at least another foot. She yanked frantically on the waist chain as Katia tried desperately to pull herself farther out.