James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

She got it ready to fire, then paused. “Question is, once I touch this off, do we head for the stairs and get the fuck out, or do we follow it down the hallway and fight it out? Rocket might kill them all, but it might not.” The Tabs were fifty, maybe sixty feet down the hallway, which with no cover might as well have been a mile. Charging down the hallway, if any of them were still in shape to shoot back, would be close to suicide.

Robbie swallowed again. “You think the rest of the squad is dead?” he asked, his face pale.

“Yeah, I do.”

He scrunched his face up into a red ball. “You shoot, and I’ll run down the hall first. I can run faster than you.” His eyes dipped down to her big chest and back up.

She wasn’t offended. The boy spoke the truth. “Fuck yeah you can. Let’s do this.”

Should she pop her head out once, just to take another look? Probably not, whenever she did that they always fired a few rounds, and probably sat there waiting for her to reappear. Best to catch them by surprise.

Brooke took a deep breath, then another, then told Robbie, “Watch your eyes and ears, this might be messy.” The rocket tube was too long to fit through the door frame sideways, she’d either have to lead with the nose or point it downward as she moved through and then jerk it back up. She depressed the safety, took half a step toward the doorway until her elbow was right there on the threshold, took another breath, then stepped out into the hallway with one foot, raised the rocket, pulled it tight against her shoulder, centered the sights in the middle of the end of the hallway, and pressed the trigger as the Tabs at the end of the hall began firing at her.

The rocket jumped from the launcher with a whooshing clap and the air around her filled with dust and smoke as the end of the hallway convulsed in cloud and fire. She fell on her ass in the middle of the hallway, out of the way, and Robbie came charging through the doorway.

Brooke struggled to her feet, grabbed her rifle, and took off after Robbie as fast as she could. She heard a few shots. By the time she reached the L-corner at the end of the hall Robbie was standing uncontested amidst four bodies and chunks of the wall destroyed by the rocket. She spotted another four Tabs in the side hallway, apparent victims of a firefight with Cambridge East.

“We need to find East, see if they’re still alive,” she panted.

“Yeah,” Robbie said, hoarse and wide-eyed. He then noticed her left arm. “Hey, you okay?”

“I’ve felt better,” she groaned. She leaned against the wall, then slid down it until she was sitting on the floor. She glanced at her arm. The rifle bullet had hit her just above the elbow and nearly ripped her lower arm off. It didn’t really hurt yet, which was the weird part. Blood was pouring out of the ghastly wound. “Do you have a tourniquet? I think I’ve got one in my pack somewhere. Probably need it to keep from dying.”

The wound didn’t hurt at all until he tightened down on the tourniquet, but then it hurt so much she screamed, and passed out.

“Fucking hold them!” Barker shouted down the third-floor hallway. Half his squad was near the middle of the huge building, fighting back Tabs who had tried to sneak up one of those stairways. He and Petal and Bruce were holding the westernmost stairwell. He wasn’t sure how many soldiers were below them, but every time he tried to peek over the railing they blew half a magazine at him on full auto, the bullets bouncing everywhere. Both his arms were bleeding from ricochets, and Petal had a nasty cut on her temple. He’d tossed two grenades down the stairs, without effect. Or maybe they’d done a lot of good, but there were too many Tabs below them holding the second floor. So far Kermit had lost one soldier in the melee, and Barker didn’t want to lose any more.

“How many Goddamn stairwells does this building have?” he swore. It was mostly a rhetorical question; he vaguely remembered from the briefing there were ten. Or maybe it was twelve.

“Too fucking many,” Bruce said, as they heard more shots from the dogsoldiers trying to hold the middle of the building.

“Chan, Chan, where the fuck are you?” Barker spat into his radio. “We’re stuck on three. Repeat, we’re stuck on three.” He waited, but there was no response. They could hear faint shooting from the other end of the building, though, which meant Yosemite was still fighting.

“The longer this takes, the worse it is for us,” Petal growled. Her hair was matted with blood.

“You know they gotta be sending for fucking reinforcements,” Bruce added.

“I know, I know, shit.”

“Should we give up one stairwell and just push down the other in force?” Bruce wondered. “Grenades, whatever? Dropping bombs on ‘em from the rooftops is one thing, but I don’t want to be fighting Toads and IMPs on the street.”

Barker didn’t disagree. Suddenly he spun to the two of them. “Hold these stairs. I just got a really stupid idea.” Then he ran off down the hall toward the center of the building. Petal and Bruce exchanged a look.

Bill and Seattle had personally scouted the building out three weeks previous, during ‘Uncle Charlie’s’ final frantic preparations for the mission. After having spent years working sniper and counter-sniper insurgent operations, neither man could believe the building had actually been left standing. It was too choice of a location for surveillance or sniping, but perhaps because it was in the middle of the supposedly secure ‘Blue Zone’ no one had apparently worried about its potential use by dogsoldiers.

Built in 1920 as the Cadillac LaSalle Sales and Service center, the six-story cube-shaped building was cement and stone, with subdued art deco styling. It sat two blocks north of the I-94 freeway where it cut east-west through the middle of the city. It was the tallest building heading south until you crossed over I-94, and as a result from the sixth floor there was an unobstructed view southwest to almost directly east, to the bridges over the freeway and beyond. They could see every surface street crossing the below-ground I-94 between I-75 and I-10, the Lodge Freeway. Seven streets, seven bridges, from 3 rdAvenue to the west to Beaubien to the east, roughly three-quarters of a mile. From west to east—Beaubien, Brush, John R, Woodward, Cass, 2 ndAvenue and, finally, 3 rdAvenue. They’d memorized the maps, had images of the entire area in their heads.

Cass was the most direct route from the gate of the military base to the New Center area, but Woodward was the widest street. The first force had driven straight up Cass. The next wave of Tabs—and they were all betting there would be, another one—could roll north up any one of those streets, or the Lodge, or all of them all at once, as they all ran straight to West Grand Boulevard and beyond.

There were enough broken windows in the vacant and graffitied office/retail building during that initial scouting trip that busting a few more on the top floor in the middle of the night—part of their prep work for the mission—didn’t draw any unwanted attention. They’d dragged a second desk into the large office which occupied the center of the south side of the building as well.

The two of them entered the building with their handguns out and very cautiously worked their way up to the top floor, but the building still seemed to be empty. After calling out to Morris they sat their gear down by the desks and then quickly boobytrapped all the stairwell doors so no one could approach them without getting a nasty surprise.

The desks were ten feet apart, and set back from the windows, and the men set up their rifles on them angling outward. They’d been trained as snipers first and observers second, and old habits died hard. For this mission they were running DMRs, Designated Marksman Rifles, in this case Lanxang Tactical Cas-22s. While they used the same operating system as an AR-15, these were hand-built and hand-fitted precision battle rifles with stainless fluted 18-inch Lothar Walther barrels that would do groups far better than an inch at one hundred yards. They were tipped with SIG suppressors to help keep their position hidden for as long as possible if they had to shoot.