by Peter Nealen
CUTTING-EDGE MURDER
Letting his MDR hang, he drew his FK BRNO Field Pistol from its holster high on his thigh. The 7.5mm pistol was hideously expensive, and the ammo wasn’t cheap, either, but Flint enjoyed the finer things, and he didn’t want to go through this mission without having had a chance to kill someone with his new toy.
The nearest security guard was flat on the ground, trying to get a call through on his phone. Flint’s first shot went through the tire and punched into the man’s collarbone. The phone clattered to the asphalt as the man screamed. Flint’s double-tap silenced him as he hooked around the hood of the vehicle and scanned for the next target.
He liked the FK BRNO. It felt like shooting a .40, but was packing as much muzzle energy as a .44 Magnum. The workings were smooth and tight. He blasted the next guard, a blond kid in a cheap black suit, in the face. The kid jerked as the bullet punched through his brain, and his head bounced off the pavement as he dropped.
BRANNIGAN’S BLACKHEARTS
ENEMY UNIDENTIFIED
Peter Nealen
This is a work of fiction. Characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Some real locations are used fictitiously, others are entirely fictional. This book is not autobiographical. It is not a true story presented as fiction. It is more exciting than anything 99% of real gunfighters ever experience.
Copyright 2018 Peter Nealen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, to include, but not exclusive to, audio or visual recordings of any description without permission from the author.
Brannigan’s Blackhearts is a trademark of Peter Nealen. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
http://americanpraetorians.com
Chapter 1
Officer Lou Hall had been on the San Diego PD for about a year. He’d just gotten off night shift, and frankly wasn’t sure whether the tradeoff had been worth it. Sure, he got to see the sun a lot more, and with the sun, in San Diego in the summertime—the winter tended to be pretty gray and damp—usually came the California girls, dressed in as little clothing as they could get away with.
But his partner, Fred Dobbs, was a surly, balding cynic, he wasn’t getting paid that much more, and most of those same attractive California girls turned up their noses as soon as they saw his badge. He’d even gotten berated by one for, “just wanting to shoot minorities.” He was half Mexican, himself, so he didn’t know where the hell that had come from.
Then he looked on social media, and didn’t have any more questions.
Dobbs was grumbling, as usual, and Hall had tuned him out after about the first five minutes, as usual. It was always the same thing. Dobbs was in the process of a nasty divorce, and couldn’t talk about anything besides what a bitch his soon-to-be ex-wife was. So, Hall was scanning the sidewalks and trying not to think too hard about how much he hated his life, and really should have applied to El Cajon, or somewhere that actually paid their cops well.
Something caught his attention, and Dobbs’ incessant bitching faded even farther into the background noise. At first he wasn’t sure why he was looking at the parked taxi so intently, then he saw that it was unoccupied.
Taxis parked in Horton Plaza were nothing new. There was always far more traffic than there was available parking, and most people didn’t try to drive to Horton Plaza. But an unattended cab?
Maybe the driver just went to take a piss. Yeah, that was probably it. He knew full well what a full day sitting in a car was like.
He didn’t notice the second cab parked just around the corner; there was no reason to. It wasn’t out of place. But the man sitting behind the wheel certainly noticed the San Diego PD car cruising past the abandoned taxi. He toyed with waiting, but there was a crowd coming out of the Lyceum Theater at the same time. Perfect.
The man ducked down below the dash and touched a remote. The unoccupied taxi exploded, the detonation shattering every window within sight, including the windshield of his own cab. He was showered with fragments of safety glass, as the vehicle rocked on its shocks. He’d parked a little too close; the concussion hammered him into the floor of the cab, and he blacked out for a moment.
When he came to, he had to kick the door open. The Plaza was a nightmare hellscape. Where the taxi had been parked, only a crater filled with twisted, fiercely burning wreckage remained. The cop car was burning, the windows shattered and the side panel crushed in and peppered with shrapnel, both men inside obviously dead. The sidewalk was littered with bodies and parts of bodies. People were screaming, the noise only then managing to register to his deadened hearing. His ears were ringing from the explosion. A young woman staggered away from the crater, bleeding, half of her face flayed away by the blast.
The man staggered out of the cab and joined the mass of screaming, panicking humanity fleeing the blast zone. Wounded people were being trampled. The panicked mob was going to seriously impede the first responders; it was just too cramped in downtown San Diego.
The man felt no particular satisfaction in what he’d done. He’d been well paid for it. It had been a job, nothing more. He blended into the crowd and disappeared.
***
Ann Sumner was bored. And hot. Directing traffic at Phoenix Airport hadn’t been what she’d been expecting when she’d pinned on a badge. Sure, she was there to “protect against terrorism,” but what she mainly ended up doing was either breaking up traffic jams outside the terminal or escorting overly excited passengers away from the desk agents they were berating.
And that was when she wasn’t just standing there somewhere in the terminal, her hands crossed in front of her duty belt, watching people and counting down the seconds until her shift was over. Which was what she was doing right at that moment.
She glanced over as an airport shuttle pulled up to the glass doors. She couldn’t see the hotel logo, but it looked just like any other van full of airline passengers disgorging its human cargo so that they could go stand in line and get treated like cattle.
This assignment is making me way too cynical. She almost had to laugh at the thought; what cop wasn’t cynical about people, at least after the first year or so?
She had dismissed the van as just another part of the scenery even before the side door slid back and the two M240Gs were swung up and opened fire.
The muzzle flashes would have been almost invisible in the Arizona sun, had they not been shielded by the darkness of the inside of the shuttle. The roar of gunfire, the shattering glass, and the screams of people either hit or suddenly panicking as they realized they were unarmed, defenseless, and under machinegun fire, however, was unmissable.
Sumner was mowed down in the first couple of seconds, though not because she’d been targeted. There had been too much glare for the gunners to see who was on the other side of the glass clearly enough to pick out any one figure for their attention. She’d just been near the left-hand limit as the gunner swept his muzzle across the terminal.
Both guns kept up the fire, pouring bullets into the “Arrivals” doors until their belts ran out. Then they hauled the doors shut and yelled at the driver, who floored the pedal and pulled away from the curb.
The shuttle was heavy and sluggish, and took some time to accelerate. A pair of police vehicles were already closing in, lights flashing and sirens wailing, and one of the men, still wearing his balaclava, hastily reloaded, turned his smoking M240 toward the rear, and settled in behind it as the other one kicked the back door open.
&nb
sp; The door swung wide, hitting the end of its hinge and then smacking against another car. It came most of the way closed again before the gunner could open fire, and he swore as his buddy kicked at the door again. This time it stayed mostly open, and he opened up on the two police vehicles.
A line of bullets stitched across the hood and the lower corner of the windshield of the lead car, and the cop suddenly swerved to try to avoid the fire. In so doing, he swung out in front of the second car, and they piled up against the concrete barrier on the side of the road.
Then the shuttle was racing away, the rear door still flapping. The men inside weren’t too worried about it. They’d ditch the van down by the Salt River in a few minutes and be gone.
With what they’d been paid for this one, they could live be living the high life a long, long way away from Phoenix for months.
***
“What the hell is that?”
Border Patrol Agent Jorge Tarrasco looked up, squinting into the West Texas sun. He couldn’t immediately see what the new guy, Ottoman, was looking at.
“What the hell is what?” It was hot, he was getting close to the end of his shift, and he was ready to go home. It was never pleasant, there on the border, with Cuidad Juarez within spitting distance. The violence over there had been overtaken by other cities in Mexico, but that wasn’t saying much, since Mexico had topped even the Syrian Civil War for body count lately. And being Border Patrol, right there in El Paso, meant hours upon hours of just waiting for all hell to break loose. There was enough traffic through the border crossing that somebody was bound to be trying to get across illegally, and quite possibly have enough firepower to object rather…strenuously to being denied.
Ottoman pointed. Tarrasco squinted behind his sunglasses. So help me, if the new guy’s going on about some desert bird or something…
That wasn’t a bird. He wished he had binos, or an RCO optic on his patrol rifle, but he could only shade his eyes and squint. The sun was definitely glinting off of some kind of aircraft. It looked about the size of a small private job, but it was getting way too close to the border crossing, and it was flying low.
He realized that it was even smaller than a crop duster about the time the twin rockets roared off the rails under the wings, arrowing toward the border checkpoint.
There wasn’t time to yell, to duck, or to do anything but stare. The drone had been far closer than Tarrasco had realized, and it took less than a second for the two rockets to hit.
They weren’t Hellfires, not quite. But they were still packing a fifteen-pound warhead apiece, and it was enough. The first rocket hit a truck that was just pulling across the line, coming out from under the overhang that sheltered the Customs and Border Patrol officers from the sun. The truck exploded, fire, smoke and shrapnel rocking the vehicles to either side. The CBP officer who had just waved the truck through was knocked senseless, possibly dead.
The second rocket hit within a yard of Tarrasco himself, punching through the overhang above before detonating, sending fragmentation sleeting through metal and flesh alike. Tarrasco was hammered on his face on the pavement, bleeding profusely from several shrapnel wounds.
The rockets were only the precursors, though. With the muted buzz of its propeller, the drone plunged into the middle of the border crossing before anyone could even react to the rocket impacts.
Loaded with one hundred pounds of high explosives, the drone detonated as soon as it hit the ground. The border crossing, and most of the people within a dozen meters, disappeared in a flash and a billowing cloud of dust and smoke, as the resounding boom rolled off the Franklin Mountains and the Sierra de Juarez.
***
“Time now,” Flint said, checking his watch. “Hit it.”
Beside him, the man known to Flint and the rest of the team only as “Scrap” touched the dial key on his phone. It was a crude, ad hoc way of triggering an IED, but it worked, it wouldn’t point to anyone in particular, and there was exactly zero chance that anyone had phone jammers working in Matamoros, of all places.
Matamoros seemed like a weird place to have a meeting like this, but if Flint had given it thought, he would have figured that the nearness to some of the newly constructed oil platforms off Point Isabel might have something to do with it. He knew that the targets were discussing new exploration and security concerns with the increasing violence in and around Mexico. Beyond that, he really didn’t care. He had his mission, and that was that.
The bomb had been carefully placed well ahead of time. The meeting was going down on the El Saucito Golf Course, just south of Matamoros, and Flint and his team had posed as contract workers to get the charges planted the previous week. It always helped having good intel, and employers who weren’t shy about sharing it. So, there had been nearly twenty pounds of PETN stuffed in a planter just inside the elevators leading into the conference room long before the various VIPs had showed up.
The big glass windows facing the golf course blew out with a shower of shattered glass and ugly black smoke. Fire alarms started going off, and faint screams could be heard from inside.
The security personnel were on point; Flint had to give them that. A dozen vehicles in the parking lot fired up at once, and men started piling out of their cars and running inside, trying to get their charges out. Most of them, thanks to Mexico’s strict gun laws and regulations regarding foreign contractors, were unarmed; their entire job was simply to grab their principal and run away.
Wrong day for that. With Scrap and Gibbet beside him, Flint pulled the van’s door open and piled out, making sure his balaclava was up before the door was all the way open. He brought his MDR to his shoulder and double-tapped the man closest to the resort doors on the run.
The .300 Blackout rounds weren’t suppressed or subsonic. They took the man in the armpit as he reached for the doors, and he dropped like a stone, his heart and lungs destroyed. Flint was already tracking in on the next, even as Scrap dropped the guy right behind the first one, and then Gibbet just started dumping rounds into the security men as fast as he could pull the trigger.
A ripping burst of machinegun fire roared from behind them, as Lunatic and Funnyman opened fire on the vehicles themselves with a pair of MAG 58s. The Belgian machineguns were still some of the best in the world, and Flint had insisted on getting at least a couple of them. His employers hadn’t been happy with the expense, but they’d come through. Hundreds of 7.62 rounds tore through the thin-skinned vehicles, puncturing tires and shattering glass, and Flint shook his head. They hadn’t even bothered with up-armors.
The last of the unarmed and helpless security men had figured out that they were under fire and dove for cover. Unfortunately for them, the only cover in the parking lot was more thin-skinned vehicles, and they didn’t have any way of laying down their own covering fire.
Flint pointed Scrap and Gibbet toward the doors. Their “guests” would be coming out shortly. Villain and Chopper followed, while Psycho and Reaper ran for the far side to make sure none of their targets squirted out through the golf course. They had another team on the far side, just in case, but Flint wanted to have everything tied up in a nice little package, right there in the building.
Letting his MDR hang, he drew his FK BRNO Field Pistol from its holster high on his thigh. The 7.5mm pistol was hideously expensive, and the ammo wasn’t cheap, either, but Flint enjoyed the finer things, and he didn’t want to go through this mission without having had a chance to kill someone with his new toy.
The nearest security guard was flat on the ground, trying to get a call through on his phone. Flint’s first shot went through the tire and punched into the man’s collarbone. The phone clattered to the asphalt as the man screamed. Flint’s double-tap silenced him as he hooked around the hood of the vehicle and scanned for the next target.
He liked the FK BRNO. It felt like shooting a .40, but was packing as much muzzle energy as a .44 Magnum. The workings were smooth and tight. He blasted the next guard, a b
lond kid in a cheap black suit, in the face. The kid jerked as the bullet punched through his brain, and his head bounced off the pavement as he dropped.
There were only four left, and they were scrambling for the trees, trying to stay low and move from vehicle to vehicle. Flint grinned tightly behind his balaclava, lifted his pistol, and shot each one as they showed themselves. The first one went sprawling, keening in pain, while the second one vaulted his body and dashed for a limousine that had already been thoroughly ventilated by either Lunatic or Funnyman. The hood was full of holes and smoking. The fleeing security guard was smashed off his feet by another burst of 7.62.
The last two did not show themselves again, though the bursts of machinegun fire continued for several seconds. Flint reloaded and holstered his FK pistol with a grunt of dissatisfaction. He’d wanted to account for all of them himself, and either Funnyman, Lunatic, or both had robbed him of his score.
Oh well. He turned back toward the doors.
They burst open in almost the same instant, a knot of suited security men leading a clump of obvious VIPs out of the building. The security men stopped dead at the sight of the bodies and the smoking vehicles, but they were too late.
Scrap, Gibbet, Villain, and Chopper opened fire before any of them could react. Hidden from the door, they caught the security guards by surprise, and in moments, the leading elements were dead. The screaming had started anew, and the VIPs were trying desperately to shove their way back inside, against the press of people trying to get out, away from the blast site.
Flint and his team were right on top of them, however, and the security personnel were starting to understand just how badly outmatched they were. Flint cranked three 7.5mm rounds into the ceiling as he advanced on the milling crowd in the lobby.
“Listen up!” he yelled. “You’ve got two choices. You shut up, do what you’re told, and come with us, or we just go ahead and skullfuck all of you, right here, right now. It’s really no nevermind to me, either way. But it’s up to you. Come along with us, or die right here.” He leveled his Field Pistol at the nearest woman’s head. She shrank away from the muzzle, huddling on the floor. Flint smirked, even though his face was covered, and she couldn’t see the expression.