Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  Court dove for the hard floor of the kitchen as the pistol cracked loud in the alleyway behind him. The round hit the door three feet above his back.

  He kicked the door shut, then looked around the kitchen, weighing his options. He knew going back out front wouldn’t work; there would be at least two men there armed with submachine guns, possibly already inside the restaurant.

  Court thought it possible the Townsend men would just cordon him off here and wait for the cops to arrive, but he also knew they would all be ex-military and sure of their martial skills. They would take it personally that, in their understanding of events anyway, the man in the McDonald’s kitchen just murdered their employer on their watch, and that would piss them off to no end.

  Court darted back through the kitchen, in the direction of the front counter, and as he did so he noticed a metal ladder fixed to the wall on his right, just next to a walk-in freezer. Looking up, he saw the ladder led to a roof access hatch.

  Court liked having the option of escape from the kitchen, even if he wasn’t quite sure what good this ladder would do him. If he made it onto the roof he’d be even more stuck than he was here, since at least here at ground level he had access to multiple exits.

  Court stopped in the middle of the kitchen, trying to decide his next move. He had exactly five rounds of .380 ammo in his mouse gun. Whether it was the cops or the Townsend boys who eventually kicked in the doors of this Mickey D’s, Court knew he was in serious trouble.

  He looked at the back door again just as it began to open. Court ran around a stainless steel prep table in the middle of the room and slid on his butt along the greasy tile floor next to a row of griddles and three large fry vats, then he crawled forward, out of the line of sight of anyone at the open back door, which was only ten feet from where he knelt. He looked between a low open shelf of metal pots and pans below the prep table, and he saw one of the Townsend men enter, his submachine gun up at his shoulder, scanning for threats.

  Court fired twice between the pots and pans, hitting the operator at the door once in each calf. The man dropped flat on his back, inside the door, screaming in agony.

  Court fired three more times towards the dark opening of the back door, sure another man would be entering just behind his mate, because he couldn’t imagine any scenario that had one guy hitting the building on his own.

  He heard his second shot clang off of metal, and he thought he might have hit the MP5 in the operator’s hand. He knew this would slow the man but not stop him, because the man would simply transition to his pistol and come through the door to the aid of his partner.

  Court’s handgun was empty now.

  Quickly he rolled up to his knees, reached over to the stainless steel counter next to him, grabbed a fist-sized aluminum can, and threw it out onto the darkened loading dock.

  As he did so he shouted, “Frag out!”

  The can banged against the doorjamb, then bounced onto the concrete dock and clanged against a metal garbage can there. If the Townsend operator had military experience, which Court suspected he did, then he would naturally think someone had just tossed a fragmentation grenade just feet away from where he stood.

  Court heard the sound of a man covered in metal and other gear clambering over an iron railing, and then dropping onto the asphalt of the alleyway four feet below with a loud crash.

  On his hands and knees Court crawled to the back door and kicked it shut again, then he crawled over to the injured operator on the floor. The man had rolled up onto his knees, and he reached out for his weapon on the tile, but he sensed movement and he turned, looked up, and saw a man in black flying through the air at him.

  Court tackled the wounded man back to the ground.

  Straddling the security officer now, Court held his empty little pistol against the man’s sweat-covered forehead, and the wounded man went still, his eyes crossed looking at the gun. Court didn’t say a word. Instead he just pulled the Smith and Wesson pistol out of the man’s drop leg holster, flicked off the safety, and fired four rounds into the front wall of the kitchen, hoping to discourage anyone with ideas about rushing into the kitchen.

  Now Court tossed his empty Ruger to the side and shoved the hot Smith into his waistband, along with another handgun magazine pulled from the Townsend man’s load bearing vest. He also removed the three long HK submachine gun magazines from the vest.

  He waved the three mags back and forth over the face of the man lying on his back and bleeding from the calves.

  Court said, “Listen up. I know you’re hurting, but if I were you . . . I’d figure out a way to move.”

  Court stood, turned to his right, and tossed all three magazines, each loaded with thirty rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition, across the room.

  All three plopped into one of the big vats of molten hot fry grease positioned against the wall.

  “No!” the injured man shouted, his eyes wide with disbelief, and then he rolled over on his stomach and began crawling, using only his arms to drag himself across the floor towards the back door.

  Court scrambled across the room to the walk-in freezer, entered, and yanked the door shut behind him.

  —

  It was silent in the kitchen, save for the grunting and groaning of the man on the floor, struggling to pull himself as fast as he could. He had just reached the back door, pulled it open with his arm, and rolled out onto the concrete loading dock when two Townsend operators, moving in a small tactical train, spun into the kitchen from the front counter area.

  Both men covered a different section of the kitchen with their submachine guns. The man on the left traced the front sight of his weapon over the walk-in freezer, the cooler, and the dry storage pantry. The man on the right saw in his sector his wounded comrade rolling out the back door, the wash area for the mops by the door, and the main kitchen prep area with the stainless steel table, the grills, the ovens, and the three big fry vats.

  Left called, “Clear!”

  Right hesitated, then he shouted, “Get down!”

  27

  The operator on the right had seen the bubbling vat of grease spewing, and he sensed trouble, but not in time to avoid it. Just as both men looked to the right, the center vat popped once, spraying red-hot grease into the air. Neither man was hit by either a round or the burning liquid, but a second after this, just as both men turned away to run for cover, the remaining eighty-nine rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition cooked off nearly simultaneously. The cacophonous explosion blew fire, bits of metal, and hot cooking oil in all directions.

  The bullets were not traveling through rifled barrels, so they were nowhere near as deadly as actual gunfire, but they were still capable of causing serious wounds. The brass jacketed projectiles, along with the scalding oil, cartridges, and bits of the metal fry vat itself, slammed into both men as they tried to run, knocking them back through the passageway into the counter area of the restaurant.

  —

  As soon as the boom of the explosion diminished Court exited the door of the walk-in refrigerator, grabbed the metal ladder on the wall next to him, and climbed up. It was hot with fry grease and slippery as hell, but he held on, fighting his way to the ceiling access hatch. He opened the door, rolled out onto the flat roof, and rose to his feet.

  Court ran straight to the front edge of the building, hoping to somehow shimmy down to the parking lot, but when he got there he saw a half dozen police cars rolling into the lot from the intersection, their lights flashing.

  Shit. He turned and raced along the roof in the opposite direction.

  He stopped at the south side of the building now, hoping no one would see him here. He looked over the side, a dozen feet straight down onto asphalt.

  He couldn’t make that drop quickly without running a high risk of hurting a knee or an ankle, which would make his escape nearly impossible.

&n
bsp; Court turned and rushed to the rear of the restaurant now, thinking the loading dock might be high enough for him to drop down onto. But quickly he saw that was no good, either. There were two Townsend men here, and although one man was wounded, both were armed, and the back door to the restaurant was open, allowing anyone inside a view of the loading dock.

  Court ran to the north side, desperate for any option now. And an option presented itself immediately. As he ran he saw a Montgomery County Police Department SUV, its lights and sirens blaring, racing through the parking lot. Court knew where the officer was heading. He would be part of the cordon of the scene, moving to the alleyway to cut off any escape through the back door.

  Court knew that this moving vehicle was his one ticket off the roof of this McDonald’s. He turned and chased after the SUV, running for the back corner of the roof as fast as he could, knowing the vehicle would have to come close to the building here to pull into the alley to seal up the back exit.

  It was all about speed and timing now, and while Court knew he had the speed, he couldn’t see the SUV below the lip of the roof, so he had no idea about the timing. If he jumped too soon he’d land on the asphalt after a twelve-foot leap, and he’d probably also get run over by the officer in his sport utility vehicle. If he was too slow he’d just hit the asphalt behind the vehicle, and no doubt break a leg in the process and lie there till discovered by the cops.

  Using the sound of the siren as his guide he ran on, then stutter-stepped near the edge to buy himself an instant of time. He launched off the roof, windmilled his arms and legs through the air, and pounded down feet first on the roof of the SUV, six feet lower than the roofline. His forward momentum propelled him off the moving vehicle, and the SUV’s forward momentum, as it moved to Court’s left, cartwheeled Court sideways. He spun in the air, tumbling down towards the parking lot. He landed on his feet but immediately crashed to his side, then continued his tumble into a forward roll off his right shoulder.

  Out of the roll he snapped back up to his feet. This propelled him on even faster, and in just a few steps he was back in the air, leaping and then grabbing onto chain-link fence near the top. Hurriedly he climbed the rest of the way over.

  The Montgomery County Police vehicle screeched on its brakes and the driver put the transmission in park and leapt out, but by the time he got around to the other side of his vehicle to pursue the dark figure who had just crashed down on his unit, the fleeing man had dropped on the far side of the back fence and pushed through a high hedge, and he was now running through the dark parking lot of a dentist office.

  The two Townsend men were on the dock, but they’d missed the man leaping from the roof. By the time the uninjured security officer saw what was happening and tried to level his pistol at the movement, two police officers inside the restaurant saw him through the open back door and screamed at him, demanding he drop his weapon and raise his hands.

  The young officer from the SUV watched the fleeing figure clear the hedge on the other side of the fence and run away. He reached for the radio on his shoulder, still not completely sure where the guy came from or whether he was involved in all the gunfire reported inside the building.

  The cops dragged the two dazed and scalded armed men out the front of the smoke-filled McDonald’s, and they found two more men, dressed the same as the others, in the back alley. One had been shot twice in the lower legs and was dazed by shock and blood loss, but the other operator was more coherent than his colleague, so he relayed a version of events that had all the cops at the scene scratching their heads.

  —

  The Washington Post’s lead national security reporter Catherine King reached for the vibrating phone on her bedside table. Looking at the screen, she recognized the number.

  In a sleepy voice she said, “You only call in the middle of the night.”

  Andy Shoal’s voice, in contrast to hers, was alert, almost excited. “Talk to my editor. I only work in the middle of the night.”

  Catherine asked, “What’s up?”

  “Another shooting.”

  She began sitting up. “Where?”

  “Chevy Chase”—he paused—“and Bethesda.”

  Catherine said, “Two shootings, then.”

  “Sort of just one shooting. Picture a dead rich guy in Chevy, with four of the dead rich guy’s security guards chasing the killer a half mile to a McDonald’s in Bethesda.”

  “Wow. Did they get him?”

  “He got away, right under the noses of two dozen cops.”

  “And I guess you are calling me because the CIA is there?”

  “I don’t see anyone who looks like those two from the other night. But the victim is a guy named Leland Babbitt, and on Google it says he is—”

  King interrupted. She was wide-awake now. “I know who Lee Babbitt is. He runs a PMC and investigation firm. Government contracts with the intel community.”

  “Right,” said Andy.

  “And someone murdered him?”

  “Shot him dead and then fled across a golf course. Got in a gunfight with Babbitt’s security men in a McDonald’s and then disappeared. I was wondering if you might be interested in coming over and checking it out. I doubt there’s any relationship to the thing in Washington Highlands the other night, but considering the occupation of the victim, I thought this might be right up your alley.”

  Catherine was already moving towards her closet to get dressed. “I’m coming from Georgetown. Fifteen minutes to Chevy Chase. Text me the address.”

  28

  Court moved calmly through the deep darkness at two a.m., avoiding the glow of streetlamps and the lights shining from porch lights and the occasional passing car. The streets were quiet here, a mile and a half from where the action went down an hour and a half earlier. Though he still heard the thumping of helicopters patrolling to the south, they weren’t close enough to worry him, and he’d neither seen a police car nor heard a siren for the past thirty minutes.

  He wore a different set of clothing now. An hour earlier he’d taken all the clothing he’d worn during the gunfight, every last stitch that had been visible to the shooters, the witnesses, and any security cameras, and he’d shoved them down a drainage culvert. Then he’d pulled a wad of clothing out of his backpack and dressed in a light gray parka, a gray thermal, a pair of black track pants, and a red baseball cap.

  Now he was walking north on Rockville Pike, feeling good about his chances, but questioning just what the hell had happened back at Babbitt’s house. The man had been assassinated, that much was clear, but Court could only make uneducated guesses about who might have been involved.

  From the first moment it happened he felt like it must have been a CIA hit. The Agency knew Court was here in town, they wanted to get rid of Babbitt for some reason, and the symbiosis of these two things resulted in a shooter on a rooftop near Babbitt’s house at the same time Court was ninja-crawling through the man’s backyard.

  Court knew he’d be blamed for the hit. Hell, he would have been blamed even if he hadn’t been on the scene at the time, but the entire chaotic escapade with his exfiltration through the McDonald’s just played even more into the CIA’s plan to pin Babbitt’s assassination on him.

  “This night sucks ass,” he mumbled to himself. He’d accomplished nothing this evening with the exception of getting a crystal clear understanding that the CIA was going to fight his fire with fire of their own, and the objectives of the CIA were even murkier than he’d imagined.

  Why the hell did they kill Babbitt?

  Just ahead was an overpass that ran over the Capital Beltway. On the other side was an apartment complex and, next to this, a bus stop where he could take a bus that ran all night. Court knew this bus followed a route that would drop him within a few blocks of his car, about a mile away. He’d passed this stop this afternoon on a bus that got him closer to
Babbitt’s house, and noted this location as a secondary exfiltration route in case he wasn’t able to make it directly back to his car for some reason.

  His plan for the rest of the evening was simple. Pick up his car, take it back to his storage room, lock it up, then go home to his basement apartment at the Mayberrys’.

  But everything changed suddenly when he scanned to his right. There, parked in the darkness of a private driveway, sat a Metro D.C. police cruiser. The vehicle itself was a little odd, as this was Maryland, after all, but the fact that at least two men sat in the dark car was more suspicious to him.

  D.C. cops usually ride alone in their patrol cars.

  Court began crossing the street, heading away. Behind him he heard the doors of the police cruiser open.

  Court looked to his left and right for a place to run, expecting that at any moment the cops were going to call out to him, or else they were right now radioing for backup and within minutes cruisers, tactical units, and helicopters would surround him.

  He looked on either side of the road and saw rows of adjoining houses. Short of kicking in a door or a window, he had nowhere to run.

  “And this night keeps getting better and better,” Court mumbled to himself.

  Just fifty feet in front of him was the overpass; he knew he’d reach a decision point there. Either he’d turn and run into the neighborhood here, before he got stuck on the overpass; he’d try to run across the overpass and lose the cops on foot over there; or else he would slide down the embankment and into the traffic of the Beltway.

  No option looked like a good one, but while he kept walking he couldn’t help but wonder why the two cops, just fifty feet behind him now, hadn’t challenged him yet.

  The answer presented itself a moment later when two more Metro PD squad cars pulled onto the far end of the overpass and stopped. Car doors opened and four police officers poured out, fanned out away from the vehicles, and drew their pistols.