The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Everett’s clear!” called out one of the Things. “I don’t see anything. Can you get up on Everett? We’ll block for you if they pursue.”

  Kicky peeled into the intersection in reverse, trying to turn the vehicle around, but she was against the light, and she slammed into a brown UPS delivery truck coming down 13th Avenue, and the heavy armored SUV knocked the top-heavy delivery vehicle over onto its side. The street was full of screaming people, and 13th Avenue was now blocked going both ways by lunch-hour traffic, cars that were simply abandoned and left standing by their drivers who jumped out and fled for cover. The overturned UPS truck blocked the way back down Flanders as well. Behind the brown obstacle one of the vehicles stuck in the jam was the white CNN van. They had lost the police convoy at a light and had been driving around trying to find them again. True to their craft, Cassie Ransome, her cameraman and her driver jumped out and ran toward the intersection where the noise was coming from. The three Volunteers were boxed in, and Wingo could see several heavily armed SWAT team members lumbering out of the APC. From up the street came the first rattle of M-16 fire, bullets slamming into the bulletproof glass of the windshield. “Cat, Kicky, bail! We have to get out of here on foot!” shouted Wingo, leaping out of the passenger side of the Escalade. He snapped out the folding stock on his Kalashnikov, covered behind the door of the SUV, took aim and began firing short, controlled bursts. “I’ll keep their heads down!” he yelled. “You guys beat feet!”

  “I’ll do more than keep their damned heads down, I’ll blow a few of ’em off!” Cat-Eyes Lockhart yelled back. He was out the back of the SUV and he swung himself up onto the roof of the vehicle in one smooth motion, snapped down the bipod on the .50-caliber Barrett, and sighted in. He pulled the trigger, flame vomited from the Barrett’s muzzle, a mighty roar echoed from the buildings, and up the street a SWAT man went flying back through the air, his feet leaving the ground. Lainie Martinez and Jamal Jarvis had struggled into their body armor and were now out on the street. Lainie kneeled and fired her M-16 and Jarvis stood over her, blazing away with his. Chief Linda Hirsch was jumping up and down for a bit, then leveling her Armalite and firing a wild burst, then jumping up and down some more while she screamed dementedly in Yiddish. The street sounded like the inside of a garbage can or a metal locker that was being beaten with sticks by a troop of demented monkeys.

  Kicky pulled out the .38 snub she had been given and was about to exit the passenger side door of the Escalade, when Detective Luis Hermosa leaped at her through the open window of the SUV, screaming obscenities in Spanish, with his Glock in his right hand, trying to shoot Wingo with the pistol while grabbing at Kicky with his left hand. Kicky jammed the .38 into him and fired, but the Mexican’s Second Chance vest stopped the slug even at point blank range, although the impact made him scream with rage and pain. “Puta blanca!” he roared, clubbing at her with the barrel of the automatic, knocking the baseball cap off her head and the sunglasses off her face, holding her hair bunched in his fist and trying to bang her head against the steering wheel. He fired the Glock several times wildly into the seat and through the opposite window, while Kicky screamed and tried to get the .38 up high enough to shoot again, but the steering wheel was in the way and she couldn’t think coherently.

  Special Agent Elliott Weinstein pulled his unmarked FBI car up behind the Rapid Response Team’s APC, parked in the 12th Avenue intersection, and started honking the horn. Farley had finally managed to persuade him that while driving into an NVA firefight it was not a good idea to have the car window with its bulletproofed tinted glass rolled down, but now Weinstein rolled the window down again and leaned out yelling, “Goddamit, what’s going on! Get out of my way! Where is that bitch Linda Hirsch? Farley, can you see anything?”

  “Uh, no,” said Farley, who heard the gunshots and decided he was remarkably uncurious as to what was going on around the corner on Flanders Street. Damn, I need a drink! he thought, with a longing touch of his jacket where he kept the little flask he dared not bring out in Weinstein’s presence.

  “Well, get the hell out and see!” raved Weinstein.

  “Uh, didn’t Chief Hirsch say something about a terrorist on a motorbike?” asked Farley.

  “Yeah. So?” demanded Weinstein. Farley pointed. Weinstein turned to his left and saw a Suzuki bike with a man in leather and denim on it, not two feet away from his face, wearing a closed helmet with the visor down.

  “Package for you,” said the rider. “Sign here, please.” He reached over and flipped a hand grenade into the car; both FBI men could see the spoon pop and twirl away as the grenade rolled under the seat. The biker whirled and tore off back down the sidewalk, bypassing the backed-up traffic. Weinstein screamed like a woman and Farley bellowed mindlessly as both men clawed at their Bureau-mandated seatbelts, trying to get them unbuckled, but the grenade went off with a whump, the car leaped several feet into the air as the armored chassis neatly contained the force of the explosion mostly inside it, and then settled down into a smoldering piece of junk with crimson goo smeared all over the windshield and the interior. Elliott Weinstein’s head was later found in the gutter across the street.

  Back at the Escalade, Kicky was still wrestling frantically with the infuriated Hermosa, but finally she managed to jam the muzzle of the .38 between his frothing lips and clattering teeth and pull the trigger with a kind of mushy sound. Even with all the noise, she could still hear the splatter of his brains and blood as they hit the sidewalk. Hermosa’s Glock dropped into her lap, and he slid down out of sight to the ground beside the driver’s door. Kicky McGee never remembered thereafter what prompted her to do what she then did; it just seemed to happen, with no coherent thought on her part. Without hesitating for a fraction of a second, she leaned her left arm against the side of the driver’s door, jammed the muzzle of the revolver into the flesh beneath her left armpit and pinned down the small metallic lump, the monitoring and tracking device that the FBI had inserted into her body. Then she pulled the trigger, smashing the device into tiny fragments and blowing several ounces of muscle tissue out of her own arm.

  Wingo was concentrating on the enemy in front of him and didn’t see what she had done, and Lockhart was on the roof. Kicky had read somewhere that gunshot wounds were numb at first, and then only started hurting later on. Not this one. Her arm felt like it had been ripped off at the socket, she screamed in agony, and from this point on, she was pretty much insane. She dropped the .38 and she floundered and flopped out the passenger side door, howling, grabbing up the Mexican detective’s Glock pistol in her right hand along the way. She rolled out onto the street and heaved to her feet. The armored door of the SUV gave her some protection from the bullets that slapped all around her, into the door and into the asphalt.

  Wingo had ducked around behind the Escalade for more cover while he slapped another magazine into the Kalashnikov, another of the taped-together clips. He slung the weapon, pulled a hand grenade off his belt, and then winding up like a baseball pitcher he hurled it up the street where it bounced off several car roofs and rolled down into the street, the blast hurling shrapnel and shaking the street. Then he did the same with a second grenade. The police all hit the ground or dove for cover. Wingo then recovered the Kalashnikov and started firing again. On the roof, Cat Lockhart also slammed a new magazine into the .50-cal rifle, rose calmly into a kneeling position oblivious to the police bullets whizzing around him like electrons, and resumed firing. Just then the CNN crew, who had been cowering behind the overturned UPS truck, decided that it was time to do their jobs.

  They ran along Flanders Street and turned right into 13th Avenue, the cameraman braced his camera on top of a parked car, and Cassie Ransome started shouting a disjointed narration into her microphone, trying to explain to the satellite-uplinked studio and worldwide audience what was happening in front of her on a Portland street. The next twenty seconds of film footage eventually won Cassie and the cameraman Pulitzer Prizes. The video clip w
as shown all over the world for weeks, it became an integral part of the visual history of the Northwest War of Independence, and is still shown today in virtually every documentary made on the subject. It requires a bit of explanation, though.

  By this point in time, Cat Lockhart had already shot and killed four Rapid Response Team officers, including the negro Captain Isaiah Robinson, and what with the rain of .50-caliber slugs and Wingo’s hand grenades, the rest were taking the better part of valor and covering down behind parked cars and behind any available cover, including Lainie Martinez and Jamal Jarvis. Linda Hirsch was hiding behind the Oak Harbor moving van, but every few seconds she would lean out, gibber, fire a one-handed burst with her M-16 that she held like a pistol, and vanish again. Lockhart had no idea who the fat babbling target was, but it annoyed him, and he was determined to hit it. The shot was hard, though, since from the intersection Flanders Street sloped slightly upward and to the right, with a lot of car rooftops and trees and other junk in the way. The pale babbling proboscidian blob never showed itself in exactly the same place twice, and then only for a second or two. The rest of the cops were firing blindly, raising their M-16s up over their heads, popping a few rounds on semi or a brief burst on full auto in the general direction of the intersection, not aiming and not hitting anything.

  Kicky McGee was dazed, disoriented, and by now she was completely out of her mind with pain from her wound and from incandescent rage at the destruction of her whole life by these people. She staggered up the street, screaming wordlessly in a hoarse voice, her left arm and side soaked with bright red blood, her honey blonde hair streaming behind her. In her mindless rage she held the Glock pistol at arm’s length in her right hand, firing it blindly in the general direction of her tormentors, hitting nothing. She got in Wingo’s way, and he had to run out from behind the Escalade several feet, He hurled his last grenade, then raised his weapon to his shoulder and fired it in sustained bursts to try and cover Kicky, all the while shouting at her to get down, to get under cover. On the roof of the Escalade, Lockhart knelt and blasted away at Linda Hirsch and anything else he could get in his scope that looked like a cop. The wild shots from the police peppered everything, popping into car windows and the street and the walls. Lockhart ignored them and kept on calmly aiming and firing.

  It was a confused scene, and actually pretty pointless and ineffectual. Nobody was hitting anything, and no one besides Lockhart was even aiming. But it looked cool as hell on TV, and in America, that was what mattered. By sheer fortuitous accident, what the CNN camera caught for twenty seconds—and twenty seconds is a long sound byte on TV news—was a perfectly blocked shot of stunning dramatic impact. In the far center right of the screen Kicky seemed to stalk up the street. She was firing blindly, howling like an animal in an unthinking spasm of rage and madness, but what the world saw was a wounded Valkyrie screaming her war cry and charging the enemy machine guns that splattered in round strikes all around her. In the lower left, Jimmy Wingo hurled his grenade and then stood like a rock, Errol Flynn and Audie Murphy in beard and denim vest and shades, tattoos on bulging arm muscles clearly visible, black cowboy hat tilted back on his head, his Kalashnikov at shoulder height and hammering away, sending a gleaming shower of brass cartridge cases in a high fountain, reversing and reloading the taped magazines in one smooth and swift motion. High in the top center, Cat Lockhart knelt with his mighty rifle, flame spewing from the muzzle with each shot like a thunderbolt from Asgard.

  For possibly ten of the twenty seconds this tableau held. Then there was the sound of an engine roaring and the camera swung left just as the blue Chevy pickup containing Thing One and Thing Two flew by, driving on the sidewalk, and screeched to a halt in the intersection. The shaggy Thing One jumped out of the passenger side, raised a Heckler and Koch submachine gun to his shoulder, and started hammering away in a second rattling fountain of empty cartridge cases. Cat Lockhart fired one last .50-caliber round, the one that smashed Linda Hirsch’s skull to fragments like an exploding melon, and then he whirled and made a spectacular Zorro-like leap from the back of the Escalade into the flatbed of the Chevrolet. Jimmy Wingo ran forward, grabbed the berserk Kicky around her waist and lifted her over his shoulder, then ran back and tossed her into the back of the pickup like a sack of potatoes, before jumping in himself. Thing One leaped back into the cab and the blue Chevy then roared off down Flanders Street on the sidewalk, knocking over sandwich-board shop signs and sending an espresso cart flying. At 14th Avenue they were joined by the Grand Prix, and both vehicles floored it out along Highway 30.

  There was no pursuit. Almost all the mobile police in the city were surrounding Waterfront Park and no one was available or willing to organize any response. No one had even bothered to radio Delta Two team or any other police and tell them what was going on. From the time Kicky McGee slammed the Escalade into Andy McCafferty until the time the blue Chevy pickup departed the area with all five Volunteers, exactly seventy seconds elapsed.

  * * *

  Jimmy wrapped his bandana around Kicky’s arm in the back of a truck and managed to stanch the blood flow. They stopped briefly at a safe house along the way, where Jimmy and Jackson applied a field dressing and alcohol to Kicky’s arm, and changed vehicles. “I’ve called Zack,” Jackson told them. “He’ll meet us up the road here, and he’s bringing Doctor Feelgood.” Oscar and Jackson took a Nissan while Jimmy, Kicky, and Lockhart piled into another SUV. Kicky was hurting and in shock, although not as much as she pretended to be. She simply decided it was better not to speak, not to think. She had no idea what was going to happen now, and she forced herself to simply blank out her mind. Jimmy held her close and kept the bandage tight. “Don’t worry, it’s not that bad,” he assured her. “Doctor Feelgood will fix you right up. He was one of the best corpsmen in Iraq.”

  Ninety minutes later they reached a safe house in Rainier, on the edge of Third Battalion’s turf, and they were met by Zack Hatfield and a team of his men, including a middle-aged man with a kindly face and a medical bag. “Bring her in and just lay her down on the sofa,” he said, gesturing to Kicky. He looked over her injury. “Damn, you’ve got powder burns there. The son of a bitch must have been right on top of you,” he remarked.

  “He was,” said Wingo. “Damned Mexican cop or fed of some kind, plainclothes. I saw him attacking her through the car window, but I couldn’t fire for fear of hitting her. He was trying to strangle her or something.”

  “We were so close and it was so tight neither of us could aim our guns,” said Kicky. “He just kept shooting. I finally stuck mine in his mouth and blew his fucking head off.”

  “Good for you. You’re lucky,” Dr. Feelgood told her. “Missed the artery and the bone, and Jim here seems to have done a good job of stopping the bleeding. You’ll have a hole in your arm there with scar tissue, but you’ll be okay.” He started taking supplies out of his bag.

  Hatfield and Lockhart shook hands. “Good to see you again, Cat,” said Hatfield, who was wearing his trademark feathered hat, duster, and carrying the Winchester .30-30 rifle he had made his signature weapon. “Jesus, you were a wanted man before, but after this fracas today you’re going to be hotter than molten lava! What the hell happened? Somebody said you were trying for the Vice President?”

  “Yeah, we were, but the fuckers ambushed us and we had to bop our way out,” said Lockhart in disgust.

  “So I saw.”

  “You saw?” asked Cat in surprise.

  “You were on live, my man. You’re all over CNN and every other damned channel. I got to tell you, if that little gun bunny in there ever wants a transfer, you send her down our way,” he said admiringly, nodding into the living room toward Kicky. “Looked like she was ready to take on the whole Portland police force single-handedly.”

  Wayne Hill came over to them. “I just spoke to the brigade commander,” he told them. “He’s on his way. He wants a post-mortem.”

  When Tommy Coyle arrived several hours la
ter he spoke to Lockhart, Hill, and Wingo first. He wasted no time. “Talk to me, Cat,” he said. “What the hell happened out there?”

  “They ambushed us on Flanders Street, sir,” said Lockhart. “The whole thing stinks. I think they knew we were coming.”

  “They knew, all right,” said Hill grimly. He turned to Coyle. “With all due respect, sir, do you believe me now?”

  “I guess I have to, Lieutenant,” said Coyle heavily, his voice angry and bitter. “God damn! A rat in my command!”

  “A rat?” said Wingo incredulously. “Bullshit!”

  “There have been other incidents, Jim, and I’ve put together a very ugly pattern,” Hill told him. “I can’t see any other possibility, especially after today.”

  “Who do you suspect?” demanded Wingo roughly, angrily.

  “Not you, don’t worry. Not anybody who was on the tickle, actually. No one had the requisite knowledge beforehand. That’s what I can’t understand.”

  “Hell, the Jodie girl was last minute, and she didn’t even know where she was going or what was going down until I explained it to her in the car on the way in,” said Lockhart.

  “Plus we all passed our bug scans,” added Wingo.

  “Yes,” agreed Hill. “That’s not definitive proof nowadays, since they’ve got all kinds of bugging gear and GPIs and whatnot that can pass a hand scanner, but on the other hand, I can’t see an informer being stupid enough to go into such a trap himself along with the people he was betraying and risk getting himself killed, nor can I see a traitor conducting himself with the courage and gallantry that all of you displayed today. Who knew, what did they know, and when did they know it? I admit, for the moment, I’m stumped. But we’ve got a mouse in the house, gentlemen, make no mistake, and I’ll get him.”

  “Cat, run the whole thing down for me from your viewpoint, from the beginning,” ordered Coyle. Lockhart did so. Coyle rubbed his chin in thought.