Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  The door gunner started shooting at the trucks. Fortunately, he wasn’t shooting anything heavy enough to punch through the armor, but one of the gunners went down anyway, his 240 swiveling crazily to point at the sky. The other gunner ducked low and elevated his own gun, leaving the ground targets alone to return fire at the helo. The bird banked away, hard, as the 240 started roaring its own deadly reply.

  The entire luxury compound was now a warzone. Automatic weapons were hammering in multiple directions at once, and I could barely hear myself think over the noise of gunfire and helicopter rotors. I almost missed Tim’s radio call.

  “We’re taking heavy fire from the helos,” he announced. “We’re returning it, but they’re going to get their shooters on the roof. The volume of fire they’re putting on us is just too damned high.”

  I spared a glance over my shoulder to see one of the helos circling out toward the perimeter, presumably attempting to suppress the support by fire positions long enough to insert the hitters onto the roof. We hadn’t humped in anti-air weaponry, so our best bet at that point was just to push through and get to Stavros and his cronies before they did. I turned back to the door, kneed Bryan hard in the ass cheek, and bellowed, “With you!”

  My knee damned near catapulted him through the door, which hadn’t been closed all the way, and was still propped open by a corpse. Actually, it would be more accurate to say it was being propped open by a helmet, which was about the only thing holding the dead man’s skull together.

  The entryway was, fortunately, empty, though we’d been able to see that through the armored glass of the big picture windows facing the jungle. My best guess was that the bulk of the security personnel had gotten their principals to someplace more secure, probably downstairs, while the react force had pushed to the roof and the door that hadn’t been directly exposed, at the time, to machinegun fire.

  We didn’t have any kind of reliable blueprints for the house, so we were going to have to wing it. As soon as we’d fanned out across the entryway, rifle muzzles pointing into any corner and bit of dead space where a straggler might be crouched with a weapon, we started looking for openings.

  The most obvious was the hallway leading out of the center of the room. I checked for any other doors, but there were only two ways in or out of the entryway, and one of them was already behind us and had a pile of bodies in it. I closed on the hallway, gun up and moving quickly, even as the house quivered slightly around us. Somebody had just set off a breaching charge somewhere up above. The structure was so damned heavy that it had only raised a little dust instead of shaking the entire house like it had been hit with a hammer.

  The hallway was dark, though the bright light of the sun shining into the expansive living room on the far end was lighting up some of the shadows. It made for enough contrast that I almost didn’t see the door open ten paces down the hall until a shotgun boomed and I felt a brutal, hammer blow to my chest.

  Only years of training and conditioning kept me on my feet, answering the slug in my chest plate with a rapid series of five shots, pushing through the fiery pain. It felt like I’d been kicked in the sternum by an especially bad-tempered mule. Alek was immediately beside me, dumping more fire at the door. We’d all been trained to be precision shooters, up close and at range, but when somebody’s sticking a shotgun out into the hallway and blasting away at you, it becomes a matter of survival through fire superiority. Precision can come later.

  There was a yell of pain, nearly lost in the ringing in my ears and the general roar of noise, and the shotgun clattered to the floor. Alek got to the door a split second before I did. I kneed him in the thigh, wheezed, “With you!” and we flowed in, with only a bare moment’s hesitation.

  The shotgunner was scrabbling back from the door, holding his shattered hand, which was dripping blood all over the carpet and his cheap security guard uniform. The other guy was standing in the center of the room, his hands reaching for the ceiling as four 7.62mm carbine barrels swiveled to cover him.

  There was no one else in the room. The two men weren’t dressed in the shooter kits that the dead guys outside the entrance had been; they were in black slacks, duty belts, and blue, short-sleeved collared shirts with “Security Guard” badges on them. These had to be Stavros’ regular security personnel, the ones that anyone of the regular public saw when they accidentally pulled up to the gate, or tried to land at the dock at the base of the cliff. One of them had tried to be a hero, and had damned near lost his life because of it.

  “Down on the floor!” Alek bellowed. At the command from the towering Samoan in jungle fatigues, plate carrier, helmet, and camouflage face paint and pointing an OBR at them, both dropped on their faces instantly, the one with the shot-up hand whimpering with the pain as he did so.

  They only had the one shotgun between the two of them, so Nick hastily zip-tied both of them hand and foot, while Eric checked me over. “You all right, bro?” he asked, hastily running a hand over my limbs, looking for bleeds. I was pretty sure that I’d only taken a slug to the plate, but if it had been buckshot, there was still a chance I was leaking from a hole somewhere that I hadn’t noticed yet.

  “Nothing like taking a sledgehammer to the chest to wake you up,” I replied through gritted teeth. It hurt to breathe, but I’d been shot in the plate before. I hated to think that I was getting used to it, but it didn’t seem as bad as the first time or two.

  Eric stepped back, satisfied that I hadn’t sprung a leak. “It’s important not to get shot,” he said. “So sayeth the Nigerian.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” I replied, though the last syllable was drowned out by the hammering of gunfire out in the hallway.

  Bryan and Jack were covered down on the door, with Larry looming behind Bryan’s shoulder. Both Larry and Bryan were shooting out the door, returning fire at whoever had appeared in the hallway.

  “More shooters coming out of the living room!” Larry shouted over the noise. “A lot of ‘em!”

  A moment later, both men were forced back from the door by a withering hail of gunfire that chewed at the jamb and the wall around it. More fire was roaring up and down the hallway, and after a moment, I picked out that Tommy was on the radio.

  “This is Tommy Boy!” he was yelling. “We’re taking heavy fire from the hallway, and can’t push in any farther! We’re pinned in the entryway!”

  A series of heavy thuds shook the building. I was pretty sure that wasn’t us. Whoever had decided to crash the party was using some heavy breaching charges. And meanwhile, we were pinned in a fucking closet with a couple of rent-a-cops.

  We hadn’t brought much in the way of frags; this had been primarily a “Capture” mission, rather than a “Kill” mission. We’d still brought a few, though, because why wouldn’t we? We were Praetorians; we were always ready to wreak more havoc than anyone expected, including our employers. So, I yanked an M67 frag out of my kit, pulled the pin, cooked it for a three-count, and hucked it through the door. Everyone dropped flat.

  There was a yell, a sudden slackening of the fire in the hall, and then the frag detonated with a tooth-rattling thud. My ears were already ringing enough from all the shooting and the low-flying helos that the noise was somewhat deadened, even though the concussion, funneled by the hallway and the door, made the impact of the slug on my chest plate feel like a love-tap.

  “Tommy Boy, Hillbilly,” I called. “We’re coming out, watch your fire down the hallway!” As soon as he acknowledged, I yelled, “Go, go!” We had to get out there and get on top of them while the survivors were still rattled from the blast. With our competition presumably blasting their way through the house as fast as they could, we didn’t have the time to spare to hunker down and play patty-cake with the “Sulla” security.

  We flowed out into the hallway, which was still filled with smoke from the grenade blast. The air was thick with the stink of high explosives, blood, burned meat, and shit.

  Guns up, we pushed int
o the living room. There were still four shooters out there, some wounded, some still crouched behind whatever furniture they’d ducked behind to avoid the blast. One of the wounded tried to lift a pistol and took a round to the dome from Alek. The guy crouched behind the sofa popped up, trying to level his MP-7, and Eric and I shot him in the face within half a second of each other. His helmet, the strap unbuckled, was thrown off as his head snapped back and he collapsed behind the furniture.

  Of the other two, one was too wounded to do anything; I wasn’t sure if he was even entirely cognizant that we were even there. His face was a mask of blood and shredded skin, and he was clutching shaking, bloody hands to his gut beneath his front plate. It didn’t look, at first glance, like he’d been eviscerated, but he was hurting.

  The other one threw his rifle on the floor and dropped on his face with his hands behind his head. Jack closed on him, kicking the rifle away, and zip-tied his hands before retrieving his pistol, unloading it, and chucking it across the room.

  With half a second to observe, I could see that we had at least two different groups of shooters. Several of the dead men and the wounded guy were all in the same Ranger Green as the guys outside. The others were in the newer Storm Gray, which had been advertised primarily for law enforcement. It might have made sense in Honolulu, but out here, surrounded by jungle, I couldn’t help but think that it was of limited utility.

  There was more gunfire coming from downstairs. Heavy stuff, too. Whoever our unknown competitors were, they were not fucking around. We had to move.

  The living room was the last room of that level. The north wall was a wide semi-circle of gigantic picture windows, through which we could see the stair-step construction of the rest of the house spreading out below us, leading toward the pool and the cliff’s edge overlooking the ocean. The wreckage of the shot-down helicopter was now burning fiercely, putting a pall of black smoke over the entire scene, though the smoke was being churned into writhing whorls by the stealth helicopter that was now crouched on the lawn, the rotors still turning. Small figures in Multicam gear and helmets were on the ground, holding security around the bird.

  “We’ve got to get downstairs,” I said, as Tommy rolled into the room behind us. “I think our new friends have lapped us, just judging by the noise.”

  Alek had already been checking doors with Nick. “Stairs over here!” he barked.

  “We’ll take lead,” Tommy told me. He was a beefy former SEAL, one of the few such working for Praetorian. I didn’t know him well; he’d joined up while we’d been in Kurdistan, then gotten out there about the same time that Mike and I had rotated back Stateside with our teams. But he was an older guy, level-headed, and a good shooter, from what I’d seen so far. “You all right?” he asked me, noticing the still-smoking hole in my plate carrier.

  I just nodded. “Took a slug. I’ll be fine. Go.”

  He nodded, punched me on the shoulder, and headed for the stairway.

  Seconds after his team started down, gunfire erupted, echoing up and down the concrete stairwell. I could see Tommy shooting up the stairs, and it sounded like there was more from down below. Our friends had secured the stairwell behind them.

  Tommy suddenly grunted and dropped, his AR-10 clattering against the railing. He left a smear of red on the rail as he slid against it and slumped to the landing.

  Alek ducked into the stairway and sent six fast shots up toward whoever had shot Tommy. His timing must have been good, because there was another clatter of a falling weapon, and the fire from up top ceased.

  Alek pushed onto the landing, keeping his muzzle trained high, stepping over Tommy’s body as he went. A quick glance confirmed that Tommy was dead; he’d been shot just above his plate, at such an angle that he probably didn’t have much of a heart or lungs left.

  The rest of us flowed past Alek, following Tommy’s team down the steps. There was more shooting reverberating up the stairway from below, but it was shortly silenced by the bone-shaking wham of a grenade.

  Then it all went ominously quiet.

  We pushed out onto the next level, past the mangled corpses of the two shooters who had been on stairway security. It wasn’t much larger than the first, and equally empty. The meeting must have been downstairs, or at least the secure room where the meeting attendees had been ushered by their protective details was.

  It took moments to clear that level, and then we were heading down again.

  There was no resistance as we entered the third floor down. But there had been.

  The stairs opened on a round central room, with hallways branching off it. The halls we could see were strewn with bodies, mostly in plain green or gray. Aside from the one we’d killed on the stairway, I hadn’t seen any corpses in Multicam yet. These guys were good. I was getting a sneaking suspicion that I knew who they were, too.

  I found Tommy’s number two, Daley, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Tommy’s down,” I told him. “You’re up.”

  Daley wasn’t a new guy, but he was considerably younger than Tommy, and I saw the brief flash of shock, horror, and sorrow cross his face as what I’d said registered. Then he got his game face back on and nodded. “How do you want to tackle this?” he asked.

  “Split your team into two elements,” I told him. “One goes that way,” I pointed, “the other goes that way. I’ll do the same with the other two hallways. Keep comms up and reconsolidate here, though situation dictates.”

  He nodded again, pointed out four of his guys, and soon they were flowing down the blood-splattered halls.

  “Larry, you take Jack and Nick,” I said. “Alek, Bryan, and Eric are with me.”

  On a hunch, I’d taken the hallway leading toward the back of the house and the view of the ocean. My hunch wasn’t wrong.

  The windows were smaller in the vast room; instead of floor-to-ceiling glass, there was a roughly two-foot, plastered concrete wall at the base. There was a gap in that wall at the center of the great, sweeping curve that faced the ocean, where the pool entered the room. The floor was tiled, and the ceiling was high. Everything was very plush, very expensive, and very modern.

  It was also riddled with bullet holes and blast marks, spattered with blood and offal, and littered with corpses.

  The glass was obviously armored, as the bullet impacts hadn’t shattered it, or even punched all the way through. There weren’t that many impacts, either; most of the shots had gone into people.

  They’d been thorough. This time there weren’t just uniformed and armored security among the bodies, but men and women of various ages, dressed in anything from expensive dresses and suits to bikinis and speedos. Some of the latter were being sported by people who never should have worn such attire.

  They’d all been ruthlessly murdered with tight groups to chests and heads. From the attitudes of a few of the bodies, they’d been shot in the head as they lay there, wounded and dying. The pool water was steadily turning red from the blood of the handful of corpses floating in it.

  Stavros had been sitting in the shallows, clad in the smallest speedo possible, which was not flattering on the fat old man. Even less so was the puckered hole between his eyes and the gaping exit wound spilling blood and brain matter onto the deck behind him. Across from him, I recognized Helen Seminola, another richer-than-Midas business magnate, dressed in a one-piece swimsuit. She’d died clutching a young woman in a thong bikini to her. Both had died within moments of each other. The shooters hadn’t cared who was who; everyone in the room had been marked to die as soon as the helos had landed.

  Jack yelled. Looking up, I followed his eyes and his barrel to see the knot of shooters hustling toward the helo on the lawn. There were stairs leading down to the lawn from poolside, and Jack was already moving toward the door leading to the outside pool deck.

  I sprinted across the room to join him. The shooters were ushering a man in business casual toward the bird. He was apparently unrestrained but tightly surrounded by men obviously ready to sh
oot him if he zigged when he was supposed to zag. I couldn’t recognize him, but whoever he was, we didn’t want them leaving with him.

  Jack yanked the door open and ran out onto the deck. There was a low parapet around the pool deck, presumably to keep drunken partygoers from falling off; the lawn was a full story below. He ran to the parapet, dropped to a knee, leveled his rifle, and started shooting.

  One of the Multicam-clad shooters in the back of the formation staggered as he took a round to the back plate, then dropped as the follow-up shot took him in the base of the skull. Jack shifted targets and dropped another one with three fast shots, just as I skidded to a knee beside him and got behind my own weapon.

  Even before the second guy had hit the ground, the man two paces ahead of him had spun around, fast as a striking snake, whipped his SCAR to his shoulder, and fired. There was a sound like a meat cleaver hitting a melon, and Jack dropped, lifeless, to the deck. His body fell against me and knocked me aside, which probably saved my life, as two more shots cracked painfully next to my ear in the next second. Then a ragged fusillade of fire started chewing up the top of the parapet, and I had to keep my head down.

  But in that split second before Jack had died, I’d recognized Baumgartner as his killer, even from that distance.

  The snarl of rotors began to build behind me, and I risked a glance up to see another faceted helo rising off the roof, pivoting to bring the door gun to bear on me. And I was out in the open, as exposed as a bug on a plate.

  Taking a deep breath, I rolled into the pool, hoping that none of the corpses presently floating in it were carrying anything really serious and infectious. No sooner had I gone under the surface than the door gunner opened fire, blasting pits in the tile and concrete of the deck and further hammering Jack’s corpse to hamburger. Rounds were smacking into the water, but I’d dived deep enough that they were spending their energy on the water, instead of on me.