by Peter Nealen
“Don’t tackle ‘em alone,” I told him. “Let Hicks get smoked if you have to. We’re on our way.”
“We may not have much choice—Fuck!” The line went dead.
My blood went cold. Dammit, not Nick and Eric too. Raoul had the engine almost redlining, though he had to slow down to negotiate corners. The dude was a hell of a driver, too.
“Are there any emergency turnouts to cross the freeway,” he asked, “or do I have to go down to the entrance ramp south of ‘em?”
I peered at the map. “No, it looks like there are train tracks between the northbound and southbound lanes,” I said. “I think we’re going to have to go down to South Yosemite.” That was going to make it even longer until we could get on-scene.
Raoul was muttering Spanish profanity, some of which even I hadn’t heard, under his breath. He was thinking the same thing.
He kept to main thoroughfares, weaving in and out of what traffic there was, bouncing over the median once to counter-flow when the traffic going the same direction we were got too thick. Once again, if the cops hadn’t had their hands full in Denver, we’d have been in trouble.
We were a quarter mile from the freeway when the phone buzzed in my hand. I answered it, to hear gunfire in the background.
“We just had to go to ground,” Eric said. “They hit the lead and rear vehicles, hard enough to flip the lead, and they’re suppressing the rear vehicle while they try to pry the principal out of his. You guys might want to hurry up.”
“We’ll be there in two minutes,” I told him. “We’re two miles out.”
“Make it one,” Eric replied. “I don’t think Hicks’ detail has that much time.”
“If they get Hicks and bug out, don’t wait for us,” I said, grabbing the handle next to the door. Raoul had just almost tipped us over making the turn onto the ramp. “Stay on those assholes and do not lose them!”
“Roger that,” Eric replied. “Just hurry up.”
Traffic on the freeway, such as it was, had come to a screeching halt. None of the local drivers wanted to get near the violence up ahead. Unfortunately, that meant a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam across all five lanes. And there was a concrete wall against the side of the ramp.
“Hang on!” Raoul yelled, aimed for the narrow gap of the shoulder between the concrete wall and the outside lane, and floored it.
There was a bang as we clipped another vehicle’s side mirror, and then another as our own got torn off. A horrific scraping sound, followed by a ripping crunch announced the death of the other side mirror, followed by an even louder scrape and buffet as we bounced off the concrete wall. Then we were clear and weaving through the traffic ahead.
“That ain’t gonna buff out,” Bryan commented, raising his voice to be heard over the scream of the engine.
We had to weave through several more vehicles that had turned off to the sides of the freeway, before we were totally in the clear and racing down an all but empty road toward the shitstorm ahead.
The scene looked pretty much the way Eric had described it. Eric’s vehicle was about five hundred meters short, among a few others that had swerved off onto the shoulder, trying to stay clear of the line of fire.
Hicks’ motorcade was made up of three armored Mercedes GL550s. The rear vehicle had been crushed against the median and pinned there by a dump truck. The lead vehicle was visible, on its roof and smoking, blocking two lanes of traffic. And the principal’s vehicle, in the center, was hemmed in by two big F450s.
Two men with Mk48s were in the bed of the rear pickup, pouring fire into the rear vehicle. The armor had to be degrading fast by that point; even Level 7 armor can only take so many bullets before it breaks down. They were blocking the view of the principal vehicle, but they didn’t appear to be taking any fire from Hicks’ detail. They had complete fire superiority, which meant they had complete freedom of action.
Time to change that. “Let’s get some fire on those machine gunners,” I said. “Raoul and Larry are base of fire, Bryan and I will move up, link up with Eric and Nick, and maneuver on ‘em.”
I got terse acknowledgements, and then we were moving, bailing out of the vehicle behind our rifles. I ducked behind the passenger side wheel, putting the engine block of the otherwise paper-thin SUV between me and the enemy, leveled my rifle over the hood, and lined up one of the gunners. I didn’t want to just start spraying rounds; better to knock them both out of the fight with well-placed shots before they even knew we were there.
But just as my finger tightened on the trigger, he went dry and ducked down into the bed to reload, spoiling my shot. I started to shift to his buddy, when the two duallies suddenly surged away from the stricken motorcade, accelerating down the freeway, even as the Mk48 gunners, braced in the bed of the rear vehicle, continued to pour fire at the two Mercedes that were still on their wheels.
“Mount up!” I yelled, suiting actions to words as I yanked the passenger door open again. Raoul was moving; he was already behind the wheel by the time I got my door shut, and he’d had farther to go.
Nick and Eric’s vehicle was starting to roll when Hicks’ Mercedes blew up.
The vehicle momentarily disappeared in an evil black cloud with a bone-jarring wham. The dump truck, which had been left behind, rocked on its shocks, and the pinned rear vehicle was shoved backward a couple of feet. The overpressure hammered us, rocking the SUV on its suspension and shattering the windshield and the driver’s side window. Raoul cursed as broken glass rained down on us, his airbag deployed, and the car alarm started wailing.
My head already aching from the tooth-rattling blast, even attenuated by five hundred meters, I helped Raoul get the airbag out of his face, yelling at him to hit the gas and get us moving. If we lost Daggett then, we’d never catch him.
Hicks was dead; I had no doubts about that. No matter how good his Mercedes’ armor was, that blast had to have turned anyone inside into red mush. The flames that were steadily eating away at the vehicle’s remains would have signed their death warrants even if any of them had survived.
Raoul was still cussing, though his voice sounded thick. His nose was probably broken from the airbag, judging by the blood flowing and bubbling out of it, and he was going to be sporting a couple of good shiners in an hour. But he was hitting the accelerator and moving us forward.
He slowed as we came alongside Eric’s vehicle, even without me saying so, but it was already rolling. Nick looked out his own shattered window, bleeding but apparently coherent.
“I’m all right!” he yelled. “Let’s go!”
Reassured that we had everybody, Raoul stomped on the gas. The engine screamed, and it sounded like all was not well with it after that blast, but he got us around the gaping crater in the asphalt and the fiercely burning funeral pyre that had been Hicks’ vehicle without too much trouble. The engine screamed louder as he got us on open road and after the two duallies.
They were already moving fast, but they were heavy diesels, and presumably weighed down with some armor and reinforcement for the sake of the hit. Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t have been able to block in an armored Mercedes as well as they did. We were in lighter vehicles, which would give us some speed and acceleration advantage, as long as we could keep eyes on them, but would also present some troubles if we started taking fire from those two Mk48s.
With that in mind, I hauled my SOCOM 16 up and laid it over the dash, sweeping the last bits of the shattered windshield out of the way with the barrel.
Not a moment too soon, either. One of the Mk48 gunners noticed us as the two trucks jumped on Highway 83 and headed south. After a moment, I could see the light gray puffs of the gun’s muzzle blast; there’s usually no visible flame in broad daylight. A second later, three rounds hit the SUV’s frame with ear-splitting bangs.
I returned fire immediately, though I had little hope of actually hitting the asshole, given how much both our vehicles were moving. But if I could at least get enough lead flyi
ng at him to keep his head down, he might not core our own vehicle out with that fucking belt-fed.
I had no idea where the first three shots went, but the fourth must have gotten close enough, because he ducked down into the bed. I was somewhat gratified to see, as we closed the distance, that the shot spiderwebbed the back window; the glass, at least, wasn’t armored. That gave me an idea.
Raoul had flinched when I’d fired; he’d caught some of my not-inconsiderable muzzle blast. The SOCOM’s 16-inch barrel didn’t usually burn up all the powder in the 7.62 NATO cartridge, so there was a lot of blast out front of the muzzle. He flinched even more, and so did I, when Larry stuck his FAL between us and opened fire. He was leaning far enough forward that his muzzle brake was ahead of both of us, but not by much.
Still, Raoul flinched away from the bruising overpressure from Larry’s muzzle, jerking the wheel and swerving the SUV halfway across the road. While it spoiled my own aim, it also had the added bonus of getting us out of the line of fire for a moment. Tracers skipped off the road beside us, but missed the SUV altogether.
We were speeding past residential neighborhoods on either side of the highway. We had to end this soon.
Bryan was yelling something behind me, but I couldn’t really hear over the increasingly wounded scream of the engine, which was running rougher by the minute, and the thunder of our own gunfire. Then he was yelling in my ear, “Eddie’s heading for Foxfield, to try to cut them off!”
“Great!” I yelled, but then I had to get back to fighting. Another long burst flailed overhead, a few rounds flying through the non-existent windshield to smack holes through the roof.
There was more traffic on the highway down this way, almost all of it heading south, just like we were, probably made up entirely of people trying to get away from the chaos in Denver. This was not their lucky day. I was taking fewer shots as the traffic got thicker; I didn’t want to scrag some innocent bystander in a Prius, regardless of how stupid they were to keep driving when there was a running firefight in their rear-view.
Our targets didn’t have the same scruples. The lead truck had to slow, as traffic got thicker, and all three lanes were momentarily blocked. In response, the lead driver proceeded to PIT the vehicle ahead of him into the next two lanes.
The Precision Immobilization Technique was developed for cops to end high-speed chases, by striking the rear quarter-panel of a fleeing vehicle, causing the driver to lose control and go into a skid. Done properly, it could stop a vehicle with minimal damage and risk to anyone around.
Daggett’s lead driver wasn’t interested in minimizing risk. He hit the car hard, savagely putting into the next two lanes of traffic. Within moments, there was a multi-car pileup skidding onto the concrete median and into oncoming traffic—not that there was a lot of that, thankfully—with a cacophony of tearing metal and honking horns.
I was pretty sure there were some dead people in that shitstorm, but we had our own targets. And they’d just made our job a little bit easier.
The rear vehicle had had to slow just enough that for a split second, I had a solid shot at the Mk48 gunner who was just bringing his gun back on-line from the last swerve. Leaning into the rifle to mitigate as much of the recoil as possible, I double-tapped him in the face from about a hundred yards.
I’m fairly certain the second shot missed, since he rocked backwards under the hammer blow of the first and vanished into the bottom of the truck’s bed. As he did so, his Mk48 fell against his buddy, who flinched away from the hot barrel. I shifted my aim to him.
Larry and I both hit him within a split second. He went down in a heap, leaving a spray of red droplets across the truck’s rear window.
With the machine guns out of action, Raoul stomped on the gas, trying to close the distance as the two trucks roared down the highway, halfway onto the shoulder. We were almost out of Foxfield already, getting back out into the open. The risk to bystanders was going to be less, but with our SUV sounding increasingly wounded, the risk of losing our quarry was getting higher. From the looks of things, Nick’s and Eric’s wasn’t doing much better; they were lagging behind.
The guys in the cab obviously had figured out that their rear security was gone, and they didn’t fuck around with trying to open the sliding back window. They just smashed the entire rear window out with their rifle barrels.
They didn’t have time to start shooting though, since Larry and I already had a bead on the cab, while they had to turn around. We raked the back of the cab with fire, dumping a mag a piece into the shattered window.
One of us must have hit the driver. The truck suddenly swerved sharply, as if a dead weight had dragged the wheel over, plowed through the guardrail and went down the embankment. It rolled once, then came to a stop on its cab, still partially pointed down the slope.
While I knew that we needed to make sure we accounted for all of them, I also knew we didn’t dare let the pressure off the lead truck to check the one we’d just disabled. It was pulling ahead, almost to the intersection a quarter mile ahead.
Even as I tried to line up a shot, while the SUV’s engine started to emit a loud grinding noise and began to lose power, and smoke started to come from the hood, a long burst of machine gun fire caught the lead truck broadside as it entered the intersection.
Glass shattered, flecks of paint and puffs of dust were blasted off the side by the hammering impacts, and in moments the truck had swerved off the road and plowed into the guardrail. This one didn’t go through, but fetched up against a splintered post and stopped.
I didn’t know how Eddie had caught up, but he had. With his truck providing some cover from oncoming traffic, he and his team advanced on the stricken vehicle, guns up.
Raoul brought the SUV to a stop, only about fifty yards ahead of where the rear truck had gone through the guardrail, and we piled out. None of us looked very good; we’d been hammered by a blast, cut by flying glass, and knocked around by our own muzzle blast. Raoul had blood all over his front. Still, we advanced on the wreck with guns up, spread out into a wedge, while Eric and Nick came down the embankment on the far side of the crashed truck, similarly alert and armed.
The truck was a mess. The dead Mk48 gunners had been thrown clear when it went through the guardrail; I could see one of them lying face down in the field. The cab hadn’t done too well with the rollover, either; they’d been going too fast. It looked like the passenger side had been compressed at least a foot.
A quick check confirmed my initial assessment. No one who might have survived the gunfire had survived the crash. All four men still in the cab were dead.
When we clambered achingly back up the embankment, I noticed quite a few vehicles pulled over on the side of the road, and there were some wide eyes watching us. Probably also more than a few cell phone cameras, too. We needed to get the hell out of there.
Eddie’s two vehicles were rolling back toward us, against the flow of traffic, but any southbound traffic had stopped a few hundred yards back when the shooting had started. None of them appeared all that interested in coming closer, at least at the moment, though I could hear honking, suggesting someone hadn’t gotten the memo and wanted to know why everybody was stopped.
The vehicles stopped even with us, and Eddie leaned out of his window. He drew a finger across his throat. “Nobody left,” he called. He jerked a thumb at the truck bed behind him. “Jump in. It’ll be tight, but it looks like your vehicles have had it.” He peered at the SUV. “Not sure where you got that one, but I don’t think you’re getting the deposit back.”
Looking at the smoking SUV that was noticeably lacking windows, I also noticed just how many bullet holes were in it. We’d gotten lucky. On impulse, I jogged over to it, reached in, and pried open the glove compartment. A little rummaging turned up the registration, which had Fat Lady’s address on it. I stuffed it in a pocket. I’d lean on Renton later to make sure she got the price of a new vehicle. Bad enough we’d traumatized her for life
and stolen her car. I didn’t want to leave her hanging after that. I’m not that much of an asshole.
We clambered into the bed, which was awfully crowded with six of us in there, even with a little guy like Raoul, and then I banged on the roof of the cab. Eddie stuck a thumbs-up out of the window, and we turned around and headed south.
The job was done. It was time to get the fuck out of Dodge. No matter how bad things were in Denver, the local law wasn’t going to be able to ignore this mess.
Chapter 24
I just wanted to sleep for a week. We’d had little time to rest, going after Daggett, and the fight itself, while much of it had been on the move in vehicles, had left us all battered and bruised, ears ringing and heads pounding.
But it wasn’t going to happen. Too much was already going on, and we couldn’t afford to take a week off.
The vehicles were definitely burned, and it took some careful doing and most of the rest of the day to replace them. Most of us had to hang out where we were dumping the old ones, in a gully north of Highway 194, until Johnny, Sid, and Gabriel came with new trucks.
While the vehicles had been burned, the safehouse had not been, as far as we knew. Sure, we were making some of the locals nervous, but there were bigger fish to fry, and we hadn’t done anything to any of them, as opposed to the mob that had left the increasingly hostile-to-everyone zone in downtown Denver to start smashing windows and setting cars on fire as far east as Monaco Parkway. It seemed that everyone was blaming everyone else for the bombing; several militia sites were blaming the POCRF, the POCRF was blaming white people, cops, and militias.
But when the phone rang, half an hour after we got back to the safehouse, it quickly became evident that there was more going on than just clashing mobs in Denver.
It was Mia calling. “I know you guys just got done with one party,” she said, “but something else has come up.”