“Since youngster year, Mr. Security O. Just like I’ve been into the Brigade intranet since youngster year. And the faculty LAN, too. Shit, I had the exams before the head of the department. Then I found that old magazine space, got it set up for my computer lab. Dumb-ass PWC dudes were too scared to go down there. Especially after I showed up one night in the Drac rags and ran off a coupla their guys.”
“They never mentioned that, although you’re right-they weren’t too keen on going down there. But I thought you were a supergeek. What’d you need the exams for?”
“Two reasons. One: to sell them. Oh, that surprises you? Think there might be a little ethics problem out there in the Blue and Gold Brigade?”
“I suppose there are always some rotten apples in the barrel. What was your other reason?”
“I’m a data dink. Couldn’t do bull. They told me it’s a brain thing. The bull department cut me no slack. Always with the fucking essay questions. So I’d get the questions, pay some smart dude to write me up some answers, all hypothetical, and do it that way.”
“And you’re telling me that midshipmen are buying and selling exams?”
“Guys in trouble are. It’s a little like loan-sharking-only guys in trouble come to the Shark. Shit, the rest of these dudes are so square, they’d faint dead away at the thought. Got that honor bug so far up their asses, they can’t walk and fart at the same time.”
“And you got Markham’s father to tutor you in reading?”
Booth’s expression changed slightly, with some of the arrogance draining out of it. “So what if I did?” he said. “I lusted after her sweet ass, figured it wouldn’t be a bad move to get close to her old man. Find out where she went weekends. Where home was. Had a feeling about her, that maybe she wasn’t the straight-arrow chick everybody thought she was.”
“She told us about the UVA meet. The party.”
Booth grinned, back in the driver’s seat again. Jim wanted to look at his watch, but he didn’t dare distract Booth.
“I won everything down there. Clean sweep. I think maybe that’s why she finally came across at that UVA party. Or maybe it was the roofie I put in her drink. Don’t remember. I do remember her, though. Hot and sweet. Did she tell you there was a video? Talk about a starring role.”
“So what the hell was the big deal about Brian Dell?” Jim asked. “Seems like kind of a little guy for someone your size to be running.”
“You go here?” Booth asked. He appeared to be listening. Had he heard the team on the roof? Jim shifted in his chair, which brought Booth’s full concentration back to him.
“Yeah. Then I went Marine option.”
“That was my plan,” Booth said, cupping the barrel of the big. 45 into the palm of his left hand. “Dell? Little shit got on my nerves. He was passive. No balls at all. He was just so fucking weak. Other plebes, you’d run ’em until they finally show a little defiance. But not Dell. I ordered him to wear girls’ panties to his late-night come-arounds, and damned if he didn’t do it. Said he got ’em out of the girls’ locker rooms. Piece a shit faggot plebe. Didn’t belong here.”
“So, tell me: How’d he end up going off that roof? This roof, I guess,” Jim said, gesturing at the window behind him. The moment he moved his hand, the. 45 was pointing straight back across the hall. Booth had the reflexes of a rattlesnake.
“I think he got embarrassed, Hall-Man-Chu. Guy in panties on his knees in your room late at night? You figure it out.”
“Can’t feature you as a gay blade, Mr. Booth. Big strong guy like you. Going Marine option and everything.”
Booth let a triumphant look spread across his face. “You ask Hot Wheels if I’m gay, man. She’ll tell you, and I have the video to prove it. But Dell? Shit. Mouth’s a mouth, man. What the hell did I care?”
“So you’re saying he offed himself? Out of embarrassment?”
“Well, he-”
An imperious and familiar voice from out in the corridor interrupted, demanding to know what the goddamned hell was going on. Jim cringed. The dant had arrived. Booth’s face lost all expression. He got up, came around the desk, pointing the. 45 right at Jim’s chest, and stopped just inside his doorway. Jim half-expected Branner to take him out from across the hall, but then he realized that Branner might be on the roof.
“What is the meaning of this, mister?” Robbins yelled. The big midshipman looked down at him with an expression of such contempt, Jim thought he was going to shoot the commandant right then and there. Robbins was so angry, he was starting the Dant Dance, probably not even realizing he was doing it. His fists were clenched and his face was turning purple.
“You!” Booth shouted at Jim. “Hands on top of your head. Twitch and you’ll have three eyes, understood?”
“Okay, okay,” Jim said hurriedly, clasping his hands on top of his head. “Let’s not get all excited here. Nobody’s going to do anything. Not the captain, not me.” He said that to alert the TAC squad that there was a new complication. He could just see Robbins frozen in place beyond the right side of his door. Booth filled his own doorway. The kid was really big. And pissed off. He leveled the gun, trained it on the commandant, and ordered him to get on his knees. Robbins tried some more bluster, but then Booth thumbed back the hammer and Robbins gulped audibly.
“Get on your fucking knees, dickwad,” Booth spat out.
Robbins, ashen now as he began to appreciate the danger he was in, sank to his knees, his hands held out in front of him as if he didn’t know what to do with them. Jim tried to think of something to say so that the listening cops would know what was going on, but he couldn’t come up with anything there, either.
“Got word you wanted to see me, your highness. So now you can see me, right? Got something to say?”
Robbins swallowed hard, cleared his throat, but nothing came out. Jim could just barely see the commandant’s trembling hands. The captain was clearly terrified now.
“C’mon, Short Round,” Booth taunted. “You’re the big fucking deal in this building. You always have something to say. Spit it out, motherfucker!”
Robbins’s mouth was working, but no words came out. Then Booth fired twice, blasting a pair of those huge slugs on either side of Robbins’s knees. The bullets ricocheted off the floor, one shattering a glass door pane, the other exploding a fluorescent fixture in the ceiling. Booth stepped farther out into the corridor and fired three more rounds at the floor next to the terrified commandant. The rounds went howling down the corridor, smashing windows at the far end. The noise was deafening, and Jim felt his fingers unclasping, but he commanded them not to move, which was a good thing, because now the. 45 was aimed back at him. There was a haze of gun smoke in the hallway. Robbins was prostrate on the floor. Booth was already back inside his doorway.
“Awfully quiet down there, Superman,” Booth said. “Or are you too busy pissing your pants? Goddamn, man, look at that. It’s a fucking lake. You really needed to water your snake, didn’t you? Look at that! Get all those medals and ribbons wet, did you, Dee?”
Robbins, whose eyes were still closed, was making whimpering sounds down on the floor. “C’mon, Booth,” Jim said. “You’ve had your fun. He’s not part of this, is he?”
“He’s probably the biggest part of this there is, Jim. All those ethics and morality sermons he made us sit through? That look like a stand-up guy to you, Hall?”
“Like I said, he’s not part of this, ” Jim said. “This scene right here. This is about you, Mr. Booth. You’re here to pay back Julie Markham, and then you’re going to show us all what you’re made of, right? I mean, shit, it’s not like you’re going anywhere, except maybe out to Leavenworth. You beat up a federal officer so bad, he died. You probably disappeared that Goth freak, Hermione whatever, the one you left behind in the tunnel that night. You personally wrecked the entire underground engineering facilities for this end of the Yard. You’ve cheated your way through school, made a mockery of everything this place stands for. Now you
’ve made the dant piss his pants. You surely don’t think they’re gonna let you throw your hat with the rest of your class, do you?”
Jim stopped, because he saw the look spreading across Booth’s face. The kid’s hand was trembling ever so slightly. Jim tried to remember how many rounds that gun carried. Not that many, not like the nines everybody carried today. He also remembered that the thing was impossibly heavy, even for someone of Booth’s heft. Seven rounds, that was it.
“C’mon, Mr. Booth. Send that pissant back down the hall before he craps and makes the place smell really bad.”
Booth grinned at that and nodded. There was a gleam in the kid’s eyes now that hadn’t been there before. Drugs? Meth? Where was the SWAT team? How would he know when they had Julie? Then he realized something: They might manage to get a line on Julie, but they couldn’t move her until Booth opened that window. Based on what he could see of the extended shade, she was hanging by her knees, literally.
“Get out of here, you fucking worm,” Booth said, waving the gun at Robbins. “Slide on back down the passageway, the way you came. Only now you’ll slide better, all wet like that. Move it, asswipe!”
Robbins didn’t hesitate. He started to get up, but Booth aimed the gun right at his head, and the dant subsided with a squeak. He began to inch his way backward, literally leaving a trail on the polished linoleum. When he’d gone fifty feet back, he turned around, still crawling, and went on hands and knees like a frantic turtle until he disappeared around the corner.
Booth backed into his room, checking to see that the shade was still in place on the window. Then he sat down again, facing Jim.
“So you figured this deal out, huh?” he said. “That why you’re here? You wanna watch?”
“I figured this has been coming for some time, Booth. That you knew you’d probably never make it out of here. I mean, after Dell, there’s been too much heat. And all that shit down in the tunnels? But you nearly succeeded, you know.”
“Yeah. They were gonna sweep it, weren’t they? Until that NCIS bitch got in the way.”
“She’s pushy, I’ll say that,” Jim said, trying to keep it going. Then he saw a shadow flick past the tan shade behind Booth. All right. They were on the roof and they were doing something to retrieve Markham. “So why the hell did you even come here? You don’t believe in any of this honor stuff. You hold the whole program in contempt. You came from nothing. What were you thinking?”
“A full boat to a degree and a commission. What else, man? That’s what everybody here came in for.”
“Not me, Booth. I believed all that stuff about duty, honor, country.”
“Nobody believes that shit, Jim. All we have to do is watch how the Dark Side behaves. Hell, they knew the Dell thing wasn’t right, but they were willing to hold sweepers on it.”
Another shadow. Keep it going. “And you wanted to be a Marine?”
“Damn straight. At least the Marines are up-front about what they’re all about. Shock troops. Stone killers. Kill a Commie for mommy. The light green machine. Pure. Simple. Hell, you know.”
“I know you’d have never made it through Quantico, that’s what I know.”
“The fuck you mean? Look at me, man. I could eat all that platoon commander shit up for breakfast.”
Jim realized that he was approaching the break point here. He needed to get Booth angry enough so that the guy focused exclusively on him, but without getting himself shot. The TAC team could listen to him talking, and hopefully know when to move. “Wrong, Booth, because the Corps’s always on the lookout for psychos like you. For sick puppies who like to dress up and paint their faces. Who get young boys to do nasty things. They’d Section-Eight your ass in a heartbeat.”
“Fuck that noise, man. Nobody here got wise. Why would they catch on now?”
“Because the Marines are the real deal, Booth. The grunts might fancy themselves Hollywood stone killers, but they expect their officers to have some personal standards beyond being physically fit. They’d catch on to you on the first day in the barracks. Hell, troops’d see you do that thing with your teeth and know you were bent.”
“So how come I got through four years here, huh, smart guy?”
“Because they weren’t looking, Booth. That’s the problem when the Navy does social engineering instead of maintaining their standards. I still don’t understand how a whacko like you even got in.”
Booth laughed that nasty laugh again, waving the big pistol around. “Blame it on the nuns, man. They wanted to score an Academy appointment. I was the only dude in the school who could do the math at the eight hundred SAT level.” He turned in his chair to check the bulge under the window shade, then turned back just as another shadow flicked across the shade.
“So what’s the plan, Stan?” Booth asked. “You gonna make a scene, try to keep me from doing what I have to do?”
“Nope,” Jim said. “Markham lied to us from day one. Between you and me, she shouldn’t graduate, either. I assume you’re gonna open the window, drop her ass on the bricks, and then do the right thing?”
“Not quite, smart guy. Julie’s just window dressing, so to speak. But you know, since I’ve got nothing to lose, why not take your ass with me?”
“Because you only have one round left, Booth. Like I said, I’m not going to interfere. Although there may be SWAT snipers up on the seventh wing waiting for you to check the window shade. But me? I’m your testimonial, Booth. I’m going to be the only one knows how you stood up and did it like a man. Because otherwise, the Dark Side here is going to tell a very different story, right?”
Booth looked at him for a long moment. He had the gun pointed in Jim’s general direction. He’s probably counting rounds, Jim thought. At that moment, Booth twitched his right wrist and the magazine dropped out of the. 45; with his left hand, he jammed a new one into the weapon so quickly that Jim almost couldn’t even see it happen. He watched Booth rack the slide back and chamber a fresh round, ejecting the lone remaining round into the room.
“Guess what, Jim?” He said. “Got lots of rounds left now.”
Jim shook his head in wonder. “I have to admit, that was the fastest combat reload I’ve ever seen, Booth. You must have been practicing.” As in, Hello, TAC squad. He’s back in business.
“Betcher ass I practiced. And now,” he said slowly, leveling the big gun at Jim again. “Now I think we’ll see how much of a man you are, Mr. See-cure-it-tee.” Aiming carefully, he fired once, blasting one past Jim’s right ear, so close that he could feel it. The window behind him exploded in a rain of glass. Jim hadn’t moved, not because he was brave, but because it had happened so fast.
“Well, that was close,” Jim said, letting the listeners know he was still alive. And now would be a great time to make your move, guys, he thought.
Booth nodded approvingly and fired again, this time past the other ear. More glass. Jim began to sweat. He tried to calculate how quickly he could duck down behind the desk. Dyle fired again, the shock wave hurting Jim’s ears as the round raised the hair on the top of his head and whacked into the wall behind him, ricocheting around inside the plaster after it hit the granite facade outside.
At that instant, a small dark shape crashed through the window behind Booth, followed by another. There was a blinding flash and a huge booming explosion, at which point Jim submarined in his chair, dropping out of sight behind the steel desk even as another round came howling right through the back of the chair he’d been sitting in, knocking it over. There was a second huge blast from the room across the way as a second flash-bang let go, and then a third. Then a rattling noise, followed by another big blast, but this one out in the passageway, then a howl of pain from the room where the Yard cop had been hiding. Silence ensued, punctuated only by noises from the roof. Jim was barely able to hear anything except the ringing in his ears. The entire area was full of smoke. As he very carefully peered around the corner of the desk, shapes in blue jumpsuits appeared out of the sm
oky gloom across the way, pointing guns at everything, including Jim. Then he thought he heard a couple of shots way down the hall, and another window’s worth of glass crashed into a room. As Jim, still behind the desk, got to his feet, hands in full view, the roar of the . 45 came booming down the hallway, dropping the TAC guys to the deck en masse while bullets whacked all around them.
“The roof! He’s going for the roof,” someone shouted, and Jim whirled, jumped over to the window, and looked outside. To his amazement, there was Booth, about ten windows down the hall, hanging by his fingertips from the fourth-deck ledge. Then he dropped like a cat, landing on the next ledge and grabbing the wall for an instant before letting go again and dropping to the next ledge. A TAC cop brushed Jim aside and leaned out to take a shot, but by then Booth had levered himself through a window on the second deck and disappeared. The TAC cop swore and made his report into a shoulder mike.
Jim brushed himself off, checked to make sure he hadn’t peed his own pants, and went out into the hallway, where everyone was getting back up. It was hard to see or even breathe in all the gun smoke. Shoulder radios were chattering away everywhere. A big cop in full tactical gear, wearing a sergeant’s shield, walked up to Jim.
“Nice going, Mr. Hall. You gave us all the time we needed. Got the girl. She’s up on the roof with Branner.”
“She okay?”
“Yes, sir, she is,” the sergeant said, taking off his face mask and turning down the volume on his tactical radio. The other cops had fanned out down the passageway and were checking rooms. Jim’s Yard cop came out of his room, obviously dazed, bleeding from the ears and nose. The TAC guys got him to sit down on the floor and sent for medical assistance. “One of our flash-bangs went slow fuse on us. Fucker picked it up and threw it back out the window just as we hauled the girl up onto the roof. Scared us all to death. Then he caught the next one, and apparently pitched it out here, got your guy. That’s how he got away.”
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