Corrigan pulled Jeanine closer to him, like a shield.
“You,” he said to the guy on his right, “drag him out of range. We’re going forward.”
“Do you see her?” she asked, over her shoulder.
“No, but I know where her shots are landing,” Corrigan said. “If you let me guide you, we’ll make it to the crates.”
In the future, the night sky to Corrigan’s left lit up suddenly, and Jeanine took a shot in the right shoulder.
“Explosion to my left, Maggie,” he said, while at the same time tugging Jeanine out of the way of the bullet.
“Team one, fall back,” Maggie ordered. She held her breath and waited for the explosion Corrigan just predicted. It happened, but then so did a second explosion on the right. That was where team three was, and they hadn’t been issued a fall-back order.
There were men screaming over the open channel. Maggie switched it off.
“Pilot, we have a sniper on the roof,” she said. “Can you see her?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, calmly. The surface had turned into a war zone a few seconds earlier; the fact that he sounded unfazed was surprisingly reassuring.
“Get in closer,” she said, “if you can.”
She switched the open channel back on.
“Team one, report,” she said.
Static.
“Team one, report,” she repeated.
“This is Phipps, we took a hit.”
Bill Phipps was FBI. Most of the rest of team one was ATF. Maggie hated this piecemeal approach to domestic terrorism solutions, but they had to put this together in an afternoon. It made her wonder if Justin’s let’s-bring-in-the-National Guard idea wasn’t so bad.
“Bill, how bad?”
“The blast was directional. We’re down two. Wounded, not dead, we’re getting ‘em out now.”
“What do you mean, directional?”
“I mean she aimed it at us. How’s three?”
“I don’t know. Team three, can you respond?”
More static.
“This is Carson.” Janet Carson was on team two. She was BPD. “I can spare some guys for a sweep left.”
“Maggie, what’s going on?” Corrigan asked.
The set-up was, Maggie could hear Corrigan and all the teams, but they couldn’t hear him and he couldn’t hear them. She had to toggle between the channels to address them.
“Corrigan, we may have lost your right flank. Team two’s gonna send someone around.”
He didn’t respond immediately, which could indicate he was looking ahead. It could also mean he was out of breath or getting shot at, or just about anything else.
“Corrigan?” she asked.
“Your call,” he said. “If we lost everyone…If we lost everyone, the side’s clear. Might not be any more explosives from that direction.”
“Yeah, I didn’t want to say that either,” she said.
They were still twenty feet from the relative safety of the containers. Sheila had taken five shots at them, in the future, which was enough for Corrigan to be able to narrow down which crate she was on top of. Nobody else could, because she hadn’t actually fired any of the shots.
He needed her on the ground, and was mad at himself for not considering that she might take to the roof.
“I need your gun,” Corrigan said. He had his handgun, which wasn’t as good for range as the semi-automatic rifle his ICE escort carried.
“We’re nearly there,” Jeanine said.
“I’m nearly there. You’re stopping here. When I say go, hand me your weapon and retreat. I’ll cover you.”
“Corrigan, I’m here to keep you upright, not the other way around.”
“I know that’s what you were told.”
Corrigan dropped his handgun, jerked her backwards, yanked the weapon away, and opened fire on his best guess for Sheila’s location. It might have been the wrong roof, but as long as Corrigan was shooting, she didn’t dare take a shot at Jeanine, for fear of exposing herself.
“Get out of range, agent,” Corrigan shouted.
The gun was an M4, and Corrigan had never used one before. It hurt. He braced it against his shoulder, like a person is supposed to, and he was wearing a thick vest that covered that shoulder. Despite that, the shock from the kickback traveled all the way down his body. He couldn’t shoot and move at the same time—he could barely walk and he could barely shoot, so doing both at once was really out of the question—and he was a terrible shot with a rifle.
Sheila was clearly a very good shot with whatever she was using, but, critically, she didn’t come into this already knowing Corrigan had never practiced with a semi-automatic. She’d figure it out as long as he continued to fail to hit her, but not before his ICE escort made it out of range.
Instead of taking a shot, Sheila responded by setting off another explosion. He didn’t see it happening in the future; it was a temporally unscheduled occurrence, just like the one that had taken out team three a minute earlier. It caused the future to blink out of existence for a heartbeat.
Keep that up, Sheila, he thought. You’ll get everyone’s attention.
In time with the new explosion, she got to her feet and jumped from the roof he (correctly) guessed she was on, to the next one over. He took a couple of shots at her in the future, and missed so wildly, she actually stopped where she was to take aim and fire once at him. She hit the ground to his right, but in her case, he was pretty sure she missed on purpose.
Then she pointed the rifle in the air.
“Maggie, pull up!” Corrigan shouted.
“Ma’am, I see her,” the pilot said.
Maggie was sitting behind the pilot. Next to her, in the jump seat, was a sharpshooter attached to the BPD. As soon as the pilot said he’d identified a target, the officer was readying his rifle.
“Say again, Corrigan.”
“I said pull up!”
There was a loud TINK. It sounded like the noise a window makes when a rock hits it, just before the window cracks and shatters.
“We’re under fire,” the pilot said, still quite calm.
“Pull up,” Maggie said. “Get us out.”
“The dome’s bulletproof, ma’am.”
“Swing around, let me get a shot,” the sharpshooter said.
“Not everything on this chopper is bulletproof,” Maggie said. “I said pull…”
She was interrupted by a series of flashing lights and bleeps and bloops coming from the pilot’s dashboard. It looked as if, very suddenly, the helicopter became something difficult to fly.
“Hold tight,” he said. “We’re losing…”
Maggie lost track of what he said next, because he pushed the helicopter forward, as if he had someplace more important to be. They were no longer hovering over the scene; they were racing above it at high speed.
“I need a runway,” he said.
“What happened?” Maggie asked. She had to shout to be heard, between all the noise coming from the dashboard, and the fact that the interior of the helicopter had become a wind tunnel.
“She hit the tail rotor,” he said. “Million-to-one shot.”
“We have to stay up. The whole team is blind if we don’t stay up.”
“Our best chance at survival is putting this down right now, ma’am, and that’s what I’m doing.”
Corrigan saw the whole thing happen, but in a way somewhat different than any of the other witnesses. He got to see Sheila try the shot seven times before getting it right. During that, he tried three times to hit her, and missed all three. She didn’t even need to move out of his way.
Then the chopper was wobbling, and turning in a way the healthy ones aren’t supposed to, and jetting off. It didn’t explode (which was good) and the distraction it provided gave him a window in which to reach the container row (which was also good), but he was pretty sure Maggie was about to crash-land in the harbor…which was bad.
“Hey, Corrigan! Corrigan Bain!”
<
br /> It was Sheila. She was shouting from whatever container roof she’d ended up on. He lost sight of her when he disappeared into the shadows of the container row.
“What?” he shouted back.
“Why don’t you just let me shoot you? Then I can go home, and everyone else can have a nice long life. What do you say?”
“Come on down here, and I’ll tell you why.”
“Nah, I like the view. By the way, the container you’re looking for is right in the middle. Just head to the center and look left.”
Keep talking, he thought. As long as she was talking, he had a chance to figure out where she was. He also needed a way to get up onto the containers, but one thing at a time. He started walking in the direction she recommended, but only because that was getting him closer to her voice.
“Is there something more interesting in the container than you?” he asked. “Because you’re really what I’m here for.”
“That’s so sweet. Whoops.”
A gunshot rang out, and then two more.
“What was that?” he asked.
“One of your boys got fresh is all. I think he’s dead? This is one hell of a plan you put together, I gotta say.”
Maggie was supposed to be telling everyone to fall back once Corrigan reached the crates. That was when the plan made more sense, before they discovered Sheila could shoot a helicopter out of the sky.
“Maggie, what’s going on up there?” he asked.
“Little busy,” she said.
The helicopter didn’t travel far. The pilot appeared to have a location in mind for his crash-landing, and fortunately—probably—that location wasn’t the middle of the water.
The middle section of the container terminal included a long, straight strip that was uninterrupted by any boxes. It wasn’t nearly long enough to land a plane on, but plenty long if one was trying to steer a helicopter that could no longer travel anywhere but forward at a brisk pace.
Maggie only understood a little about the physics behind helicopter travel: not enough to fly one, but enough to know that the tail rotor was there to keep the whole vehicle from spinning in a circle along with the rotors. It appeared to also be true that, when one lost one’s tail rotor, the way to keep from turning with the rotors was to floor it.
That was working out great, except that the pilot was accelerating toward the ground. He cleared the tall fence between the two container lots, and then brought the chopper down to just a few feet above the tarmac. Right when Maggie started to worry that the next thing to happen would be him telling them to jump clear, he pulled back on the stick and killed the engine. The helicopter dropped straight down.
They weren’t on wheels. Maggie didn’t know what to call them—runners, pads, something like that—but they weren’t round and they didn’t roll and they weren’t made of rubber. The whole craft skidded, then, down the makeshift runway. It was tremendously loud, and kicked up enough sparks to blind a person, but there was no ball of fire to speak of, and they didn’t flip over.
“Is everyone okay?” the pilot asked, as soon as they were fully stopped.
Maggie looked at the BPD sharpshooter, who gave her a thumbs-up.
“We’re good,” she said. “Nice landing.”
“Thanks.”
“Maggie,” Corrigan said.
Comms were still up, even if the chopper wasn’t.
“I’m here.”
“Order everyone back. You have to…Oh no.”
“What? What is it, Corrigan?”
“Too late.”
Corrigan had been splitting his attention between pinpointing the sound of Sheila’s voice, and the downing of the helicopter. He wasn’t paying as much attention to the future as he should have been, which was why he didn’t realize Sheila’s voice was leading him somewhere in particular. Not until it was just about too late.
In that future, he turned the corner. The first thing he saw was two officers at the other end of the corridor, running towards him, guns out, shouting something he couldn’t hear.
The second thing he saw, was the stack of C-4.
He never turned that corner. Instead, he spun around and did the thing the doctor told him he should absolutely not do: he ran, as hard as he could.
The explosion sounded like the collision of two freight trains. The fiery blast had only a few places to go before it met with resistance in the form of heavy metal containers, so the impact force took up all the gaps in-between. Corrigan could feel heat on his neck from the fire behind him, while ahead, hot air puffed out of every crack. It was the kind of situation where, if he saw his own death coming up in the next five seconds, there was nothing he could do to change that. Either he outran the blast, or he didn’t.
He did not entirely outrun the blast, but he got far enough from it that when it caught up, the experience wasn’t fatal. He was pushed, like a BB from an air-gun, down the path, at least fifteen feet before skidding to a stop. He ended up on his back, a few paces from the open space that marked the edge of the containers.
His pants leg was on fire. He took a few seconds to put that out, then lay back down again.
He wondered if his side had resumed bleeding, and if so, if it was the only place. He could also be on fire, in a less obvious part of his anatomy, but he was surprisingly unmotivated when it came to checking for that.
Sheila dropped to the ground nearby. He saw her coming.
“Jesus,” she said. She was holding her right shoulder, and looked to have developed a limp. “You are hard to kill, my friend.”
He sat up. It sucked. He didn’t like it at all.
“Get caught in your own explosion?” he asked.
“It was the only way to get you close enough. You were supposed to die in it, though, so imagine my disappointment. Lost my rifle, too. You?”
He looked around. The M4 he’d just been using was nowhere in sight, and the handgun he had before that was lying on the ground thirty yards away. The headset he’d been using to talk to Maggie was a few feet away. It wouldn’t make for a very good weapon, but it was good to know he could get his hands on it if he needed to.
“Looks like we’re down to fists and insults,” he said.
“Not really.”
Sheila pulled a machete from a sheath on her thigh.
“It’s not a gun, but I’m pretty good with it,” she said.
The fear in Corrigan’s voice got Maggie right out of the crippled helicopter. She turned just in time to witness the full glory of a large stack of C-4 erupting in the middle of a jungle of steel. The fireball shot out in all directions. Metal cried. Maggie was blinded, temporarily.
She climbed back into the helicopter and got on the radio.
“Team…anybody. Anybody, who’s still out there?”
All she got was a lot of static. Maggie had no idea if there was such a thing as good static and bad static, but if there was, this was definitely the bad kind.
She looked at the officer who’d ridden down the chopper next to her.
“Hey,” she said, “that explosion’s gonna draw people.”
“You want me to call in?” he asked.
The assault team had a staging area a half a mile away, with emergency units on standby.
“Please. Tell them we’re not done yet. Tell them it’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Just tell them.”
“Hello?” someone said over the comms. “Maggie it’s Jeanine.”
“Jeanine, where are you?”
“Front gate. I see the target.”
“Where?”
“Facing up on Corrigan. They look like they’re gonna fight. We have a shot.”
“Negative, don’t engage, Jeanine. Hold the perimeter. That goes for everyone else on this channel.”
Let’s hope this plan works, Corrigan, she thought. Or we’re all going to look pretty bad here.
“I’m going to make you an offer,” Corrigan said, as he got to h
is feet with tremendous reluctance. “Surrender, and we won’t have to go through with this next part.”
“Aw, come on,” Sheila said, laughing. “You don’t think you can take me straight-up, do you? I’ve been combat training since I was twelve.”
He shrugged.
“Okay.”
She swung the giant knife at his head, a pretty straightforward attack he stepped away from. She saw his evasion in the future, and altered the attack, which he adjusted to as well. She let that one happen.
Sheila stepped back and reassessed.
“You’re moving okay. How’s the stomach?”
“It hurts. I see you’re mostly using your left arm.”
“Yep.”
She attacked again. This time, instead of just stepping aside, he moved up and punched her in the face. She adjusted to that, but he still managed to make contact. It wasn’t the fully impactful blow he planned for it to be, but it didn’t miss entirely.
“Whoa,” she said, staggering backwards. “How’d you move that fast?”
“I’m not telling.”
He charged right at her. She saw it happening and stepped aside, but again he got there faster than she expected him to. He knocked the knife from her hand and rammed her against the steel wall of one of the containers, his hand around her throat.
He had one chance, right then, to press his advantage and end things. He missed the moment.
Corrigan knew this would happen. The problem was that he’d never killed someone with his bare hands, and while he recognized that this was definitely the time to change that, he couldn’t do it.
She rabbit-punched him in the stitches, and he lost his grip. He ended up on his knees a few feet away, while she stayed where she was, against the wall, gasping for breath.
“How the hell are you doing that, Corrigan?” she asked.
“Would you believe I’m just faster than you thought I was?”
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