Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 1)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “Let’s fucking do this thing,” Jonesy said.

  They kicked the back of the van open and poured out.

  Apparently, subterfuge was lost on the hostiles inside the building. No sooner had they stepped from the vehicle than they began to take fire. A nest of snipers on the roof seemed eager to spill blood.

  “Inside—get the fuck inside,” Drew shouted and everyone in the group obeyed without question. They sprinted toward the hangar doors as shots rained from above.

  They made it inside without a casualty. Kristen counted that a huge victory until she realized what they were up against.

  Despite the recent gentrification of the warehouse district, the building they entered was still a crumbling reminder of Detroit’s industrial past. An assembly line of some kind snaked back and across the floor. A conveyer belt at the center of all the machinery made her think the place used to make car parts or shoes or something else relatively small. Every now and then, a workstation broke up the snaking conveyor belt. She didn’t know what any of the machines were exactly, but they looked long-unused and obsolete. A catwalk across the top of the building overlooked the entire operation. The walls were piled high with crates and other stacks dotted the floor, either abandoned there long before or moved there recently.

  She leaned toward the latter because hostile gunfire clattered from all these places. Weapons teams were posted at the assembly line and the machines spaced sporadically around it, on the catwalk above them, and behind the crates spread around the factory floor.

  “Get back outside,” Drew yelled. They had been right about this being a trap.

  The SWAT van exploded before they could even turn to obey.

  “There’s cover.” She pointed to a stack of crates perhaps twenty feet ahead and to the left.

  “Follow Red!” he ordered and she surged forward.

  She sprinted as fast as she could, dove, and connected hard with the concrete floor, but at least it was smooth enough to allow her to slide and crash into the crates.

  Quickly, she looked behind her. Her team, the other SWAT team, and the two police officers followed, but they were slow—too slow. One of the two police officers who’d been in the van with them took a shot in the chest and crumpled. One of the SWAT was hit too but fortunately, he wore Kevlar so he only stumbled, cursed louder than the barrage of gunfire, and pushed on.

  Gunshots nearby were loud enough to almost deafen her. She realized that a hostile used the same stack of crates for cover, albeit on the other side.

  Kristen scurried around the edge of the crates but stopped when she came under fire. The hostiles knew she was there, then.

  She glanced once more at her team.

  The other cop was down too.

  “Goddammit!” she cursed and rage swelled in her chest. She didn’t know either officer personally, but she knew they had friends and family and had died protecting their city from a mob of violent lunatics. No matter what, she couldn’t let their deaths be in vain.

  Fully committed to her course of action, she crouched and leapt up with every ounce of strength she had. She cleared the first crate and hooked her fingers over the top of the second. Quickly, she hauled herself up and peered down at the two hostiles who’d killed two police officers.

  It was a simple fact that she could shoot them and no one would blame her. They were cop-killers, after all, and heavily armed, but she chose not to. She didn’t need to, not yet. If she fired at one of the other assholes who actively tried to eliminate her team and she killed them, fine. This was different. Stupid, maybe, but different because they weren’t actually firing at present. Somehow, that made a difference.

  So, instead of two quick shots, she vaulted off the top of the crate and landed between the two men. Her decision had been made none too soon as the warehouse of criminals seemed to collectively notice she had presented herself as a target when she stood on the crates. Fortunately, she had already begun her descent by the time they tried to respond.

  “What the fuck?” one of the gang members managed to say before she kicked him in the face hard enough to break his nose and knock him unconscious.

  The other man raised his weapon and she grasped the barrel.

  For a moment, intense heat flared in the palm of her hand as she held the burnished steel but the sensation faded quickly. She yanked the weapon from the man’s hands and struck him across the face with it.

  He catapulted away and struck the concrete at an awkward angle. He’d live but he’d also remember the impact for a long time.

  Kristen doubled back to where her team hunkered behind the stack of crates.

  “We have to split up.” Drew had to yell to be heard over the gunfire that kept them all pinned. “We need someone to draw fire—my thought is they make for the assembly line in the middle of the plant—and the other team will use the crates on the side of the warehouse as cover as they work toward the catwalk. If we can get Butters above these fuckers, we’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Beanpole said.

  “Me too,” volunteered the sniper who’d taken the shot from the back of the moving van.

  “I’ll take the assembly line.” Kristen gritted her teeth.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Red, you beat me to it.” Jonesy grinned as if they’d both ordered the same kind of ice cream cone instead of having both agreed to use their bodies as bait.

  “I’ll come with you two as well. Hernandez, Keith—”

  The woman darted out from behind the crates and fired her assault rifle at someone on the catwalk. A scream and crash confirmed that not only had Hernandez hit her target, but she’d knocked him from his post. “Yeah, fucking yeah. We’re right behind you.”

  “That means the rest of you will take the crates to the catwalk.”

  “Yes, sir!” the other members of SWAT replied.

  “Watch how’s it done, Red,” Jonesy said.

  Hernandez, Keith, and Drew each selected a target and laid down cover fire while Jonesy sprinted toward the conveyor belts in the middle of the factory. He made it without taking a bullet from the dozen or so gunman who fired at him and immediately began a retaliatory assault.

  “Keith?” Drew said between rounds of gunfire.

  The other man nodded and raced toward Jonesy. While the sergeant had run in a straight line, he swerved in a zig-zag pattern, hoping to confuse the gunmen.

  It was a bad plan and a burst of red erupted from his left calf. He’d been shot.

  “Rookie!” Jonesy yelled but didn’t move. Too many people had him pinned down.

  Kristen sprang into action. She hurtled across the open floor, caught her teammate by the collar of his Kevlar, and dragged him to their teammate.

  “Holy fuck, Red. You didn’t even slow down.”

  She looked at him in confusion. What he’d said was true, but the floor was smooth and Keith wasn’t that heavy. Really, it was kind of crazy that the man could think about such a dumb thing with lead raining down all around them.

  “Am I gonna die?” Keith asked from under the conveyer belt.

  “For fuck’s sake, rookie.” The sergeant shook his head. “They got you in the damn calf. You might bleed out in maybe nine hours, but we’ll probably all be dead by then.”

  “Ready?” Drew yelled from across the floor.

  Jonesy and Kristen responded by laying down a wide spray of cover fire across the room while their two teammates raced over to join them. As soon as they reached the factory machinery, they turned and joined the barrage against the hostiles.

  She stole a glance at Butters and Beanpole. They’d left the crates and attempted to reach the wall. One of the SWAT team fell when the group made it perhaps halfway.

  Relief that it wasn’t Butters or Beanpole surged briefly but she pushed it back, furious at herself for dismissing another man’s life.

  This had to end.

  “What now, sir?” she yelled at Drew.

  “We keep moving, follo
w this belt, and try to draw their fire and eliminate as many as we can.”

  It seemed clear enough and she didn’t need to be told twice. She crouched under the conveyer and when she realized there wasn’t enough height to even do that, dropped on her belly and army-crawled until she reached the next piece of machinery on the assembly line. She darted out, found a hostile reloading his weapon, and kicked him so hard in the chest that she felt ribs break under her boot.

  “Nice fucking moves, Red.” Jonesy emerged from under the belt and fired at a hidden gunman. Drew and Hernandez followed.

  Their distraction wouldn’t be enough, though. They only had limited space in which to move before they either ran out of cover or had to double back. The plan would only work if Butters, Beanpole, and the other snipers could make it to a proper vantage point.

  Which meant they had to keep the pressure on the enemy.

  Her gaze settled on three men who hid behind a nearby stack of crates.

  “They’re mine,” she told Drew and sprinted toward them.

  Her plan worked. Every eye in the abandoned factory found her and redirected their fire as she left cover.

  Thankfully, they were too slow.

  By the time the barrage started, Kristen had already careened into the stack of crates. They wouldn’t fire on their own men, which meant she could deal with these three in relative safety. Unfortunately, while the logic was sound, the hostiles disregarded what seemed obvious to her.

  A maelstrom of bullets continued relentlessly. She felt something smack her head and realized that if she hadn’t worn a helmet, she’d be dead.

  The men she’d targeted were already dead—killed by their own allies.

  Still, the fusillade continued with no respite.

  Another shot struck in her the back and she was saved again by her armor.

  She couldn’t keep taking that risk, though, so she punched a hole in one of the crates. The wood splintered under her fist and she crawled inside.

  Now in relative safety, she peered out. It was dumb luck that she could see all the way across the floor to where Butters, Beanpole, and the rest of the officers scaled a ladder on their way to the crosswalk.

  She froze, a hand to her mouth as a silver rocket careened overhead and directly toward the group.

  It struck a few rungs below Beanpole, engulfed everyone below him in flames, and shook the ladder hard enough to almost dislodge him.

  Butters—already on the catwalk—turned and caught his teammate, but it was too late for the others. They’d either been obliterated or had fallen more than twenty feet onto a concrete floor. One way or the other, an entire SWAT team had been eliminated from this fight.

  Which meant their plan had gone from stupid to suicidal.

  At least the explosion had distracted most of the warehouse.

  Kristen crawled from the crate and sprinted to her team.

  “With that little stunt, I think we’re down to six hostiles,” Drew said and deliberately didn’t acknowledge that they’d lost so many of their own men. “We can finish this if we keep our heads on straight. The plan’s the same. Keep eyes off Butters and Beanpole.”

  She nodded. They really had no other choice, and the sniper was a good enough shot to take out six men, of that she was certain. They could do this and would mourn the dead when they made it out alive.

  The team froze and looked at one another when tires squealed and vehicles revved outside. She looked through vines that had grown over the windows of the warehouse to see car after car after car come to a halt. Men and women poured out of each one, obviously pissed-off and armed to the teeth. Suddenly, instead of being in a building with six hostiles, they were surrounded by sixty.

  Her jaw clenched. It didn’t take a veteran to realize that things had become a whole shitload worse.

  Chapter Twenty

  Drew instructed them to direct their fire at the entrance to the factory. Kristen reasoned that even this would keep the hostiles already inside sufficiently distracted so Butters could at least eliminate them without taking fire himself, but the plan wasn’t fated to work.

  The problem was that there were multiple entrances to the building and the hostiles knew this. As a result, while Kristen and Jonesy peppered the entrance they’d come through with consistent fire, Drew, Keith, and Hernandez had to try to keep another group from entering the building from the opposite direction.

  That worked for about thirty seconds. There were far too many crates placed around the area. To her, it was obvious that the gangs had repositioned the junk in this abandoned factory to provide maximum advantageous cover. She and the sergeant each managed to shoot an entering gang member, but too many made it behind a pile of crates and immediately returned fire.

  Worse still, Drew was equally unsuccessful, so they went from barely being able to hide from six people around the room to being the targets of closer to fifty.

  “We gotta get the fuck out of here!” Jonesy shouted over the now constant roar of gunfire.

  “All right, here’s the plan—” His words cut off abruptly when another team burst through the door and unleashed a concerted attack on the trapped SWAT team.

  “These assholes are getting close,” Jonesy warned. “That pile of crates we were at—Kristen, watch out!”

  He pounded into her and time seemed to slow.

  One moment, she stood and focused on the enemy.

  In the next, his body shoved her hard and she fell, her gaze locked on his fully extended torso and the grimace of pain on his face.

  The bullet struck him squarely in the chest.

  She was so high on adrenaline that she actually saw a shockwave spread from the point of impact on his chest.

  In the same breath, another bullet struck, followed by another.

  Seven shots in total pummeled the man before he crash-landed, and only five of them had been blocked by the vest.

  “Jonesy!” she screamed as she returned to the regular flow of time. Her gun was up and the man who shot her teammate was dead.

  Kristen dropped to her knees. He looked at her and blood seemed to ooze between his teeth. One of the bullets had grazed his neck and the other under his armpit—or, at least, that was where the most blood seemed to be coming from.

  “He’s going to be okay, right?” she asked and looked at Drew with wild eyes.

  He didn’t answer but he didn’t need to. The set of his jaw and his cold stare told her everything she needed to know.

  “He needs a fucking medic,” Keith shouted and fired at what now seemed like an unending stream of foes.

  “What’s the fucking plan to save Jonesy?” Terror crept into Hernandez’s voice.

  “We crawl under this conveyer belt, get as close to the door as we can, and we run for it. Then, we wait for reinforcements to get here so we can go back in for Butters and Beanpole.”

  “He doesn’t have that kind of time,” she said. “I’m taking him out.”

  “Hall, you’ll never make it,” Drew protested.

  “The fuck I won’t.”

  She had always been athletic and recently, she’d trained damn hard. Not only that, her best friend—for that was what she realized Jonesy had become—was dying. She simply scooped him up in her arms, looked at the exit, and ran.

  The entire factory and the whirlwind of bullets faded to something abstract. All she could hear were her own footsteps, the sound of the bullets that struck the concrete around her feet, and Jonesy, who continued to talk despite the fact that she’d told him to shut the fuck up.

  “You know you’re not supposed to carry victims like this.” He coughed. “I might have a spinal injury.” He laughed.

  “I’ll get you patched up.” She hammered into a pile of crates and felt the other side of them torn to splinters as the hostiles focused their weapons on her.

  “Make sure you tell Hernandez to go fuck herself at least once a day. Otherwise, she doesn’t feel appreciated.”

  “Will yo
u shut up?”

  He nodded and coughed up blood. “That’s good, but you really need a ‘fuck’ in there. Otherwise, she won’t believe it.”

  “You hang on,” she retorted and when there was the briefest lull in the shooting, she sprinted the rest of the way to the door. Something caught her in the back—a bullet, no doubt—but her armor enabled her to continue. Why hadn’t it protected Jonesy? Why had she failed him?

  Finally, they were outside.

  Vehicles of every make and model surrounded the warehouse. There seemed to be an endless variety of old hotrods, tiny street racers, boats of cars with tricked-out suspension, and even pink scooters.

  Kristen wanted to slash the tires of each and every one.

  Instead, she continued to run to the next ring of vehicles—police cars, SWAT vans and—blessedly—a pair of ambulances.

  “We’re almost there, Jonesy. Hold on, please.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  One of the EMTs threw open the back of an ambulance when he saw her race forward with Jonesy in her arms. He directed her to lay him on a stretcher.

  “He was shot!” Kristen shrieked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “In the neck.”

  “We know ma’am,” another EMT said as he dressed the wound on her friend’s neck.

  “And his side.”

  “Ma’am, I need you to step back and let us do our job.”

  “Give ʼem some fucking breathing room, Red, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Sir, please don’t talk.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” He laughed. “See? Like that. You gotta mean it.”

  The EMTs removed his bulletproof vest and shirt to reveal a number of shitty tattoos and a hole in the left side of his body. She almost threw up when she saw the size of the injury and the dark-red blood that oozed out of the wound.

  “That bad, huh?” He grinned.

  One of the EMTs put a bandage over the injury. In moments, it was soaked through with blood.

  “We need an IV,” the man said. “Sir, your blood type?”