Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  Despite the swirl of activity, and the urgency of it all, Ray’s mind recorded it as time slowed to half speed. He sensed that his hearing was better and that his comprehension skills were at their peak. And he knew that when this finally ended, he would be utterly exhausted.

  And fulfilled.

  “Ray!”

  He heard his name shouted from somewhere across the room and his head snapped up from his plan to backfill ambulances. He didn’t know where the shout came from, and frankly, he was annoyed by the violation of protocol. He did not permit shouting in the EOC.

  “Ray!”

  It was Devon Jefferson, a seven-year EOC veteran, and he was waving his hand to get his attention.

  “Pick up two-two-four-four. You need to hear this.”

  It was the kind of request that didn’t happen very often. He fought the urge to ask for an explanation, knowing that the explanation would present itself as soon as he answered the phone.

  “Emergency operations center, Boyd.”

  The female voice on the other end of the phone was both pleasant and businesslike. She spoke in clipped words that projected urgency. “You need to warn the people inside the Braddock County Police Department that an attack force is on the way into their building,” she said.

  * * *

  Jonathan watched the infrared Roxie feed. Heavily armed men, clad all in black, streamed from the car they’d been following and from two more. Call it thirteen, fifteen people. They swarmed toward the front of the police station, weapons up and ready to go, but they moved carefully.

  “Definitely a planned operation,” Jonathan said.

  “If we’re going to engage, let’s engage now,” Boxers said. “Hit them from the rear and then flank them.” As he spoke, he lifted his 7.62 millimeter Heckler & Koch 417 rifle and snapped its lug to his sling.

  Jonathan pointed to the screen, and then looked out through the front windshield. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to have a choice,” he said. Two members of the assault team were heading toward the Batmobile, weapons to their shoulders.

  Jonathan slapped the computer closed to bring blackness to the space, and he rocked his night vision goggles down over his eyes. The four-tube array gave him near panoramic vision. His vision flared a bit from the streetlights, but the additional detail outweighed the inconvenience.

  “Mother Hen, we’re going hot,” Jonathan said. “Big Guy, you’ve got—”

  “The one on the left. Yep.”

  In unison, they threw open their doors. There was no interior light to give them away, but the sound startled the approaching attackers. They stopped and each dropped to a knee.

  Jonathan extended the barrel of his suppressed M27—a Marine Corps variant of the 5.56 millimeter Heckler & Koch Model 416—through the space between his bulletproof windshield and bulletproof door frame. It would not be a fair fight, but Jonathan worked very hard never to participate in a fair fight. To his left, Boxers mirrored Jonathan’s position and stance.

  Jonathan settled his infrared laser sight on his target’s head and fired a single shot at nearly the same instant that Boxers’ suppressor barked a louder and equally deadly report. Both attackers fell in unison. Given the spray of bone and brain, there was no reason to confirm that they were kill shots.

  “Two sleeping,” Jonathan said. That was for Venice’s benefit. On assaults like this, Jonathan never used the body cam. Those were for collecting information they could use, not evidence that could be used against them.

  Up ahead, the sound of unsuppressed rifle fire drew Jonathan’s attention to the front of the police station building, where the invading phalanx of terrorists had ambushed a straggler cop who had exited the doors. The number of gunshots at that range meant certain death. Jonathan’s blood boiled.

  “What are we gonna do, Boss?” Boxers asked over the air. Their radios were set to VOX, which meant that every word they said was transmitted.

  Jonathan’s head raced. He knew they were going to get into the fight, but there was too much distance between himself and the opposition to simply open up from here. Plus, there was the issue of the background. You couldn’t shoot through windows and walls when you knew there were good guys among the bad guys on the other side.

  Jonathan closed his eyes to recall the diagram he’d studied of the layout of the police station. “Mother Hen, the power supply and the backup generator are both on the black side, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct,” Venice said. “In the rear of the building near the right-hand corner.”

  “I copy. Come on, Big Guy. We need to even the odds.”

  “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  “Go.”

  “Be advised, I got through to Braddock County’s nine-one-one system. I told them, but I’m not sure they believed me.”

  * * *

  Ethan kept his eyes on Wendy as he told his story. He didn’t know if a panic attack was an actual thing, but that’s how he described it. He’d been sitting alone in his cell, cross-legged on the padded concrete slab they called a cot, trying to read a novel about dragons and shit he didn’t care about when the reality of his future piled in on him again.

  He’d tried to concentrate on the positive—on the fact that he wasn’t guilty until he’d been proclaimed such, and that there was always a chance that his luck would turn—but then the reality of the discomfort and the stale air and the concrete walls creeped in. He tried to find that damned dock again, the one that his previous shrinks told him would be a sanctuary from the traumas of his past, but it wouldn’t show itself. Perhaps it had been consumed and torn from its moorings by the vines of misery that only grew stouter and stronger.

  His heart raced, his breathing huffed, and as his vision went sparkly, the walls had started to move—literally, they started to move. They closed in tighter and tighter. He couldn’t breathe. He panicked. He pounded on the doors and he screamed, but the assholes wouldn’t let him out. Couldn’t they see that he was going to be crushed?

  “And then when they finally opened the doors, I thought they were letting me out,” he said, recounting the story. “I swear to God that’s what I thought, so I dove out of the door and the struggle started. I couldn’t go back in. I just couldn’t. I tried to make them understand, but they wouldn’t. Hell, maybe they couldn’t. Shit, now that I hear myself telling the story I think I’m bat-shit crazy myself. They tazed me, and here I am.”

  Through the entire telling of his tale, Wendy never once looked up from her notes, never once made eye contact. Ethan didn’t know how to read that. Was she pissed? Was she believing him, or did she think he was bullshitting? Did she even care one way or the other? When he was done, he waited. He had no place to go, and couldn’t go there even if he did. Waiting out her response at least prolonged the time during which he’d have company.

  It took her a while. When she made eye contact, she looked tired. “Ethan,” she said, “you’re not helping yourself with outbursts like this. Pushing aside the physical damage you’re causing to your body and your psyche, there’s the damage you’re doing to your case. Remember that we’re trying to paint a picture of you being a victim forced into an instantaneous rage that could qualify as temporary insanity. In a perfect world, we’ll be able to spin that further into the picture of an innocent young man who merely defended himself after the fact. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know the legal ins and outs, but that’s the gist of it. Antics like the one you pulled tonight do serious harm. The prosecutor is sure to show the video feed to the jury. I haven’t seen it. I don’t know what it looks like, but I know it can’t be good.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Ethan said. He felt tears pressing.

  “Yes, you can,” Wendy said. “You can and you have to. If you hope to avoid a life sentence—or a death sentence—you have to start living a script. Do you understand that?”

  “What kind of a psychiatrist are you? You want me to live a lie?”

  Wendy smacked her no
tepad against the flesh of his bound foot. An act of frustration, not malice. “No, I don’t want you to live a lie. I want you to live to live. You can share your angst with me, and with no one else. Everything you say can and will be used against you. Remember those words? Between now and your trial—and up to and including any appeals if they’re necessary or forthcoming—consider yourself under a microscope. There are levels of honesty which you simply cannot afford. We can agree that it sucks, but that’s the deal. Can you wrap your head around that?”

  Ethan tried to sit up, but the straps wouldn’t permit it. “How am I supposed to do that, Wendy? How am I supposed to keep the walls from closing in?”

  “Coping skills,” she said. “You’ve got them. We’ve talked about them. Use them.”

  “I can’t help what my mind does!”

  “Bullshit, Ethan. Bull, period. Shit, period. You have to find a way out of the spiral of making yourself the victim in your own tragic narrative, and start seeing yourself as the architect of your own future. If that future involves years in prison, then you need to find a way to turn that into something that is not awful. Find God, get a degree, teach people how to sew, or raise a pet bird in your cell. Whatever it is, you have to find it, and you have to look forward to it. That is the only secret to survival in a situation like yours.”

  Ethan’s mind raced. How could he make her understand—

  “And I’m not done yet,” Wendy said. “As you search for your silver lining, you have to stop getting in your own way. These violent outbursts have to stop. That’s not optional. I can’t give you the kinds of drugs in here that will help you do that. On the course you’re tacking now, you’re guaranteed long stretches in isolation, and trust me, young man, that is not a route you want to take.”

  Ethan had never seen this kind of passion from his doctor before. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. On the one hand, her words pissed him off, but the presence of tears in the corners of her eyes did not escape him. “You really do care about me, don’t you?” he said. He winced at the corniness of his words.

  “You’re my patient, and I’m your doctor,” she said, but he read the lack of commitment in her words. “I feel for all of my patients. But some have had a much lousier deal than others.”

  Somewhere in her words and in her eyes, Ethan found a sense of peace, a source of hope. Maybe she was right. If this terrible hand was the one he was destined to be dealt, then maybe he could—

  A series of bangs startled him. He and Wendy jumped together. “Oh, God,” Ethan said. “Were those gunshots?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Warren listened to the words Ray Boyd spoke, but he wasn’t sure he comprehended them. “Who was this person?” he asked.

  “She wouldn’t identify herself,” Boyd explained. “She implied she was with the government—an alphabet agency, I presume—and she stated it as fact. You’re going to be attacked. And she said not to shoot the people in FBI vests.”

  Warren looked to Janey, who of course had no idea what was being said because Warren was on a headset. “Okay,” Warren said into his phone. “Let me know if you hear anything else.”

  He clicked off and shifted his gaze to his computer screen, where he pulled up the extension for Yolanda Pierce, the IT lady who was burning the midnight oil. She answered her phone on the second ring.

  “Yolanda,” Warren said. “Chief Michaels. I need you to do me a favor and I need you to not ask why.”

  “Sure, Chief,” she said.

  “I need you to lock this facility down. Every lock closed, inside and out.”

  “It’s too late,” she said. Was that a smile he heard in her voice? “They’re already here.”

  Through the phone, and through the walls, he heard the sound of gunfire.

  The others in the CTC heard it, too, and in unison they turned to Warren. He didn’t understand the details, but he understood that simultaneous attacks did not happen coincidentally. He spun in his chair and pointed to Janey. “You. Lock this door. Nobody gets in and nobody leaves till I say so. I don’t care if it’s the county executive or the president of the United States, nobody gets through that door.”

  Janey spun out of her swivel chair and dashed to the door, where she typed in the requisite four-digit code. Her body language said it all. Her shoulders sagged as her hands began to shake. She tried the code again.

  “It won’t work, sir,” she said. “I can’t lock the door.”

  Warren rose from his chair to join her at the door. “Do it manually,” he said.

  “We can’t,” Janey declared. “This building is state-of-the-art. Everything’s controlled by electric locks.”

  “There’s no manual override?”

  “There probably is, but I don’t know where or how.” Janey looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Chief, but this has never come up before. Tom Castriotta will probably know. He’s the day shift guy. He gets all the training.”

  “Get him on the phone,” Warren snapped. “Now.”

  More gunfire, this time louder. Closer.

  “Um, Chief?” Janey said. She held the telephone out, as if offering a sacrifice. “The phones are out.”

  * * *

  Jonathan and Boxers moved with practiced speed and agility as they glided across the parking lot as a single entity, a shooter team whose rifles covered every compass point and whose feet never tangled. Jonathan led the way, walking forward and sweeping the forward 180 degrees, and Boxers moved backward, sweeping the six o’clock half of the horizon. The police compound was a sprawling structure, covering what must have been an acre or more of footprint.

  Inside the station, gunfire kicked up. From the rhythm of the shooting, it sounded like a two-sided battle.

  Jonathan picked up his pace. Halfway down the red side of the building—the right-hand side—he saw the big windows for what he knew from the drawings to be the training room. He stopped and grabbed a fistful of Boxers’ vest. “Big Guy, stay here and set a charge that will get us in through that window. I can blow the electricity and the generator. When it’s dark, I’ll come back and we’ll make the breach.”

  He walked away without waiting for a response. He moved faster now, nearly at a run, as he approached the red-black corner.

  He nearly lost his shit when he saw two of the bad guys already back there, finishing work with a pair of wire cutters. His approach was quiet enough that they didn’t see him until he was only a few yards away. They reached for their rifles, and Jonathan killed them both with a single shot apiece.

  “Sitrep,” Boxers demanded over the air. “What the hell was that?”

  “Two more sleeping,” Jonathan said. “Looks like they cut the phone lines.”

  “Were they going for the electricals, too?” Boxers asked.

  “Negative.” That would have been significant if they had. That would mean the bad guys were equipped with night vision, which was the single big advantage Jonathan and Big Guy had over them.

  Jonathan stepped over the bodies and dropped to one knee while unslinging his rucksack. He could have done what was coming blindfolded. He found the GPC among others that he always carried in an outside pocket of his ruck. A general-purpose charge was a premade block of C4 explosive with a tail of detonating cord (literally, a tube stuffed with PETN explosive) and two initiators already taped into place. As imprecise as they were deadly and effective, Jonathan typically used them to make entry, but this one would be more than enough—way, way more than enough—to sever the electrical connections.

  The cool weather worked against him as he did his best to mold the GPC to the electrical feed. When he was done, it was ugly, but it was functional. Boxers had designed the ignition chain himself by taping electric matches to the ends of twenty seconds’ worth of OFF—old-fashioned fuse. Powered by a watch battery, the match leads were separated by a piece of plastic, which, when pulled out of the way, completed a circuit and lit the match, which would in turn light the fuse.

  Timin
g was important now. Once the fuse was lit, a big boom followed. It made sense, then, to kill the back-up generator first. “I’m shooting the generator,” he said for Boxers’ benefit. Then he emptied what was left of his thirty-round magazine of 5.56 millimeter bullets through the metal walls of the generator. Whatever he hit caused a shower of sparks, which in turn triggered a fire. Even if the whole assembly ignited, Jonathan didn’t think the fire could propagate to the building.

  He pivoted and returned his attention to the GPC. “Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole,” he said, almost as one word, and he pulled the pin. He got the spark and the burning fuse he wanted, and it was time to go.

  While the fuse burned, Jonathan ran back to join Boxers, whose posture screamed impatience. He stood off to the side of the window, pressed against the brick. “Aren’t we in a hurry anymore?” he asked.

  Twenty seconds seemed like a very long time.

  The world shook as Jonathan’s charge erupted, plunging their surroundings into darkness.

  Boxers laughed. “Jesus, how much did you use?”

  “A GPC.”

  “For an electrical box? I don’t ever wanna hear crap from you again about me using too much dynamite.” He was amused. “You might want to step a little closer to me,” he added.

  Jonathan got the subtext and pressed against the wall next to Big Guy. Two seconds later, a smaller blast eliminated all of the glass from the window to the training room.

  “Time to go?” Big Guy asked.

  “Tallyho,” Jonathan said. He buttonhooked to the left, heaved himself over the fractured sill, and dropped into the darkness of the police station. He noticed that the shooting had stopped. “I think we got them thinking,” he said.

  * * *

  Pam Hastings felt woefully under-armed, despite the spare magazines she’d found, and the act of ignoring the pained cries of the wounded seeking assistance had begun to eat away at her soul. This was a nightmare, and the shooting continued. She couldn’t begin to imagine how many hundreds or thousands of rounds had been dumped into this crowd of preholiday shoppers. The thought of it sickened her. But it also steeled her for bringing more of these assholes to justice.