Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  There had to be a lot of activity inside the big white block federal government building beside him, he thought, glancing at it out of the corner of his eye.

  But thankfully none of it had reached outside as of yet.

  Through the dust he could see people and traffic were still crossing through the intersection of 20th Street.

  Gannon watched as a bearded pudgy Hispanic man clutching a coffee got out of the driver’s door of a white Ford Focus that was parked by the corner ahead on his right.

  “What’s up? Was it terrorism?” he said. “Man, I heard the bomb. I work at the courthouse, bro. Are we under attack?”

  Gannon ignored him as a pickup turned off 20th onto Champa close by them. The driver was a wide-eyed woman with blond hair, and she slowed her truck as she stared at them and the crash behind him. When the pickup had passed on his left, Gannon glanced across the street.

  Then it was his turn for his eyes to go wide.

  It was one of those moments where everything slowed. The flow of motion. The flow of time.

  Catty-cornered to where they were, a figure stood in the gutter of the street in front of the silver Suburban. It was the broad-shouldered ball-peen-hammer-headed white man, and he was putting a pistol grip shotgun up to his shoulder.

  Gannon grabbed the Hispanic man and rammed him into Kit and the gurney and pushed all of them behind the rear of the parked car as the first explosion of double-aught buck shattered the Ford’s windshield.

  The second shot came as Gannon hauled Kit’s stretcher half up onto the sidewalk behind the car. He was collapsing it down when the next blast disintegrated the driver’s side glass and side view mirror. The left front tire exploded as he grabbed up the carbine beside Kit on the gurney and thumbed it on full auto.

  Gannon knelt in the tight space between the curb and the car as the Hispanic man wisely took off somewhere. When he crawled up a little and peeked out past the Ford’s right front fender, he saw the second one, the black guy in the Tigers cap, out in the open of the crosswalk. He was running full-out for the other side of Champa with his own carbine to flank him.

  The deafening eruption of automatic gunfire that came as Gannon opened up on the running figure with the H&K caught even his breath. The violent deafening pow and pow and snappa pow pow pow pow of the powerful 5.56 rounds crackled off the metal side of the sedan he knelt beside.

  One of his rounds skipped off the asphalt and another hit the front panel of a U-Haul truck parked at the corner, and then Gannon finally tucked in right to left and cut the Tiger fan in two. He put one through the guy’s abdomen right above his groin, then another in his sternum, and then a third that hit him dead in his right cheekbone.

  The guy’s hat went flying and his rifle clattered to the asphalt as he face-planted and came to a skidding stop against the curb.

  Still on his knees, Gannon reared back and changed out the mag as three more blasts of double-aught buckshot ripped into the hood of the Ford from the opposite diagonal corner.

  He waited a second, then quick-peeked and ducked back as another shot came.

  When he looked again, the big hammer-headed white fella’s dropped shotgun was in midair as he went for a sidearm.

  Gannon leaned up against the bumper of the Ford and aimed through the reflex sight.

  Then he opened up and the shooter slid left with his head flung back from the three-round burst Gannon drilled into the T-box of his face and chest.

  77

  Gannon leaped up with his head on a swivel, checking his spots, went back to Kit, popped the stretcher up again, grabbed its back rail and rolled forward.

  Pushing off the corner over the ringing in his ears, he heard the first fluttering squeal of an approaching siren. The traffic had stopped completely by the time he made it halfway across the street.

  Of course it had, Gannon thought.

  With the rifle slung over his shoulder, he looked like the most dangerous crossing guard who’d ever lived.

  Gannon bumped them up over the curb onto the sidewalk at a wheelchair ramp. There was a large open municipal parking lot beyond the sidewalk, and he lowered the rifle as he pushed the stretcher into it along the rows of cars.

  He walked as calmly as he could, not looking behind him. The people with guns would make themselves known in a moment, no doubt. He pushed the stretcher in a zigzag pattern diagonally across the lot toward Stout Street. He kept his eyes leveled forward at the other side of Stout. There was a tire store there where he was planning on acquiring some transport.

  He’d made it near the lot’s southeastern end and was coming along a building wall for the sidewalk when the brick a centimeter above the top of his skull spontaneously disintegrated.

  Gannon recoiled from the explosion. Blinded and blinking at the stone dust, he turned and ducked and collapsed the stretcher again as he retreated back into the lot.

  He searched and searched, and two rows over to his right he found what he was looking for. It was a late 2000s maroon Town & Country minivan, and he shattered its front passenger window with the butt of the carbine and reached in and opened the door. From his just-in-case backpack, he removed the hammer and chisel-like screwdriver he’d bought from Walmart the day before, and he hammered off the ignition cover and rammed the screwdriver in and turned the engine over.

  He unstrapped Kit from the gurney and laid her in the back of the van and closed the door back over her. He’d come around to the driver’s door and was about to get in and tear ass out into the street when he slowed himself down with a breath and assessed the pumpkin-sized hole in the brick wall.

  He looked to the right north up Stout Street where the shot had come from.

  An over watch position, Gannon thought. Somewhere on the opposite side of Stout.

  He’d get a bead on them. Would have at least two shots. With some heavy firepower, too. Turn the van into Swiss cheese, he thought. His noggin, too, probably. Or worse, Kit’s.

  He took out his phone and brought up the Google map of downtown Denver. Right away he saw it. A multilevel parking garage a block back across on the other side of Stout.

  “Shit,” he said.

  78

  Gannon slung the rifle across his back and left Kit where she was in the already running van as he ducked down and headed west along the parked cars. As he approached 20th Street again, he made sure to keep the federal building’s corner between himself and the elevated garage.

  As he hurried forward, he heard the first police car arrive a block to his right. He could see its blue-and-red strobe light on the pale facade of the federal building.

  Ignoring it, he turned up the Motorola’s volume, then keyed in the push-to-talk.

  “Calling asshole,” Gannon said. “Come in, asshole. Over.”

  He smiled at the silence of chatter that followed his announcement.

  That had gotten their attention, hadn’t it? he thought.

  “That was a nice shot, buddy,” Gannon said as he reached the last row of cars.

  He looked left and saw something on the sidewalk corner that just might work.

  “I’m not kidding. Truly a pucker factor of eleven,” Gannon said as he ducked down and slowly began to make his way back toward Stout.

  “You just missed a hair high,” he said. “If I had to guess, your assumed zero is off. You didn’t factor in the elevation change, did you? The air’s thinner up here in the Mile High City, dummy. You forgot to consider the decrease in drop. But I admire the attempt at a head shot. Go for broke or why bother. I’m with you, bro. I’m the same exact way. They must have taken you down from the top of the shelf.”

  There was a pause then.

  “Thanks for the tip,” came a voice.

  It was a foreign voice, Gannon thought as he strapped the gun onto his back and knelt down and began to crawl now behind the row of ca
rs closer to the corner.

  German maybe? he thought as he crawled more slowly now. Some mercenary or something. Were the assholes bringing back the damn Hessians now? The fricking Nazis?

  He stopped as he came past the last car and spotted something on the corner. It was the meter box where drivers paid to park. It was just large enough to scrunch in behind, and on the other side of it, he would have a shot north up Stout.

  “Anytime, stranger,” Gannon said. “I’m full of good advice. Here’s some more. Pack it in. You’re backing the wrong team here. You need to stand down.”

  “Is that right?” the foreigner said in his earbud. “Or what?”

  “Or you’re going to be assuming room temperature like those four little Indians over on the next block,” Gannon said. “You do know how the end of that song goes, right?”

  “You’re some real badass, huh?”

  Gannon got to a crouch and turned the gun around in front of him as he stepped behind the meter box. He got his back on it and edged himself up slowly against it until he had his feet back under him a little better.

  He took out his phone and turned on the video. Quick as a card trick, he stuck it out the other side of the box and back and then smiled as he froze the still.

  Five stories up at the top corner of the garage was a large white van backed up against the edge.

  He studied the phone and put it away. Then he adjusted his weight and got his feet completely right as he tucked the rifle butt high and hard and deep into his shoulder.

  He took a deep breath. He would only have a second, he knew.

  But a second was all he would need.

  “Deep breathing now? Making you nervous, am I?” the foreigner said.

  This is it, kemosabe, Gannon thought to himself. Put the devil in a body bag or die trying. All in with the chips. For all the marbles.

  “I thought you were a badass,” the mercenary taunted.

  “Well, put it this way. I’m not a helpless stripper or even a park ranger,” Gannon finally said as he rose up until his head was just under the metal box’s top.

  “No?”

  “No,” Gannon said as he put the rifle to his cheek and stepped right in a balanced lunge.

  He saw the top of the Mercedes center into his scope pretty as you please just as he came to a solid wide-legged stop.

  “I’m smarter than your average grizzly,” Gannon said as he buried the trigger.

  79

  Westergaard had just caught the firework flash of a muzzle low in the reticle when the van window shattered apart in his face.

  He jolted back as something struck his cheek. As he landed, he hit the joystick at his elbow and the shooting platform canted violently to the right and down, spilling the rifle with a clatter.

  He reached up and felt something warm and wet.

  How? he thought, looking in wonder at his blood there on his fingertips.

  Westergaard patted at his head. A narrow gouge had been stripped across his ear. As he probed the wound, it flapped disgustingly almost in two. The bullet had cut the back end of it above the lobe neatly almost in half.

  He looked down at the rifle where the scope had been destroyed.

  The scope? He’d hit his scope, he realized. How?

  Something strange happened then. A cocktail of feelings he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time pulsed through him.

  Envy mixed with fear.

  “What’s up with your heavy breathing now, buddy?” the American said in his ear. “I know I’m pretty sexy, but I hate to break it to you. I’m just not that kind of guy.”

  Westergaard sat up and looked out the shattered back window. Down the street a block beside the building where he’d just missed the American, he saw a maroon minivan drive out of the parking lot onto Stout.

  “No!” he yelled as he lunged over to his right and grabbed at the rifle. Then he screamed as it wouldn’t budge. It had become stuck somehow in the tilted-over platform.

  “My, my, you sound upset,” the American said. “Let me guess, your little sister won’t lend you her clothes anymore? No wait, one of your girlie man soccer teams lost again?”

  Westergaard gritted his teeth as he screamed again.

  “Yes!” the American said. “That’s a sound I like. Music to my ears. Sounds to me like you’re bleeding. Please tell me I nicked something good. Strike a gusher, did I? Well, I warned you. We have a saying in these here parts. Sometimes the bear gets you.”

  “You’ve made a mistake,” Westergaard said very evenly as he watched the minivan depart. “A grave mistake.”

  “Au contraire,” the American said as a hand shot out the minivan’s driver’s side window, middle finger extended skyward.

  “Drawing your blood is what I call a good start,” he said. “You like round one? Let me assure you, round two is going to be a real Sunday church barbecue. Ta-ta.”

  80

  The forty-five minutes after the shoot-out were the busiest in Dawn Warner’s life. Never had she needed to move so many pieces and to make so many crucial decisions in so little time.

  At thirty minutes post-shooting, the first live-feed Denver newscast began. The optics were not ideal. Helicopter shots showed the cement truck and the crushed ambulance clear as day half sticking out of the destroyed corner of the federal building.

  It was another fifteen minutes after that when Denver SAC Harry Wheaton called.

  She stalled Handsome Harry while they got the last details nailed down. Then she and Fitzgerald and Harris all headed from her office into the main floor conference room, where they had the big board for important interoffice videoconferencing.

  “Harry, how are you? I’m watching the report. Are all your personnel safe?”

  “What in the hell just happened?” Wheaton said.

  “We’re watching it on TV just like you, Harry. We’re trying to put it together ourselves. They said the truck looked like it hit the ambulance deliberately? How can that be right? This couldn’t have been just an accident or something?”

  “An accident? Ten witnesses saw it veer straight for the ambulance the wrong way down a one-way street. The shoot-out on the corner started a minute later after the crash. I’ve got a witness that said one of the participants was the cement truck driver, and he had a fully automatic machine gun.”

  Dawn Warner nodded, her eyes in a half squint as if she were using all of her mental powers to process the information.

  “We’ve got another two shooters, both dead, one with a machine gun and another with a combat shotgun. No ID on them, of course. Then there was more shooting before a van was stolen from the lot across the street. This cement truck driver put Agent Hagen in the back of it, they said.”

  “You’re saying Hagen’s been kidnapped?” Dawn Warner said.

  Wheaton peered at her furiously from the screen.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Wait,” Dawn Warner said. “There was a man with Hagen. An old boyfriend, we think. We’re still trying to nail that down. Maybe it was him?”

  “What are you talking about?” Wheaton said. “She came in alone.”

  “Maybe the boyfriend was waiting outside and overreacted when he realized Kit was being brought to the hospital,” Fitzgerald tossed in.

  “In his cement truck?” Wheaton said. “Armed with a fully automatic weapon?”

  “We don’t have a lead on their whereabouts?” Warner said, turning and giving Fitzgerald a glare to shut his trap.

  “We have an APB on the stolen minivan but so far nothing.”

  Good, Dawn Warner thought. The last thing they needed was for them to be picked up legitimately. They’d get back on track their own way.

  And at least she had Denver snowed on the ambulance thing. The two mercs in the ambulance were still not being scrutinized. She’d al
ready sent in two more of their recon teams and they’d already gotten the bodies out of there.

  “What do I tell the press? They’re already showing the ambulance on the news.”

  She held up a finger and began tapping it to her temple.

  “I think the best play is to simply say there was an accident. We needn’t talk about Hagen. At least not yet.”

  “And the shooting?”

  “So far you think it was a road rage incident involved with the accident. You don’t know fully but will keep them updated. You’re investigating. Stonewall them,” Dawn Warner said.

  81

  Wheaton took a long, loud, deep breath as he leaned back in his office chair.

  “Okay, you’ve had your say, Ms. Warner,” he said.

  He placed his palms flat against the desk in front of him as he suddenly leaned in closer to the camera.

  “Now it’s time for you to listen to me,” he said. “Special Agent Hagen in no way, shape, or form seemed to be anything but completely cognizant when I spoke to her. So don’t even try going there again. Then you send in some so-called experts and it’s Dodge City on my front porch.

  “Now, I know you guys there in Justice sometimes quarterback counter-intel stuff, right? Hagen was in a SCIF. You guys got yourselves some top secret counter-intel troubles over there in Justice? Is that what this is?”

  “Intelligence?” Dawn Warner said, acting confused.

  “Dawn, stop insulting mine by playing dumb, would you please,” Wheaton said. “Be straight with me. Tell me what’s up. Because I’m getting to the bottom of this one way or another.”

  Dawn Warner turned to her left. Through the glass of the door out in the hallway she could see her secretary, Roberta, standing there.

  She gave Roberta a questioning look. Roberta nodded rapidly.

  “Harry, there’s someone here that needs to talk to you.”

  That’s when they brought in their secret weapon, the nuclear option.