by Jack Slater
His own finger stroked the trigger. He didn’t have long to wait. A screech split the night, and a streak of light spat into the sky overhead. Trapp saw the movement in his peripheral vision but resisted the urge to follow the second rocket, or the third, or the fourth.
The men below weren’t so disciplined. He saw the two men by the door jerk with confusion, searching for the source of the unexpected wail.
Then there was quiet. Sudden, deathly quiet.
It only lasted for two breaths.
Then the first of the fireworks exploded in the sky overhead. Trapp squeezed his trigger a second later. The rifle in his hands barked, startling a bird that had taken roost somewhere in the abandoned shell of the apartment behind him. The flapping of its wings made Trapp jump and sent the second round he fired splintering through Chino’s front door.
“Crap,” he muttered, re-centering his aim on the crouching man’s head. The mercenary didn’t even seem to realize that his partner was already dead. Instead, his attention was entirely consumed by the display in the sky above.
It was an easy shot at this range.
And yet even as the tendon in Trapp’s index finger began to tighten on the rifle’s trigger, he hesitated. The merc he’d already hit – the man he’d shot – was just barely visible through the scope’s narrow field of view, lying slumped against the house’s white painted walls which were now stained with blood.
But he wasn’t dead.
Not yet, anyway. His hands were clutching his neck, and he was gurgling as his last breath bubbled through the torn mass of nerves, blood vessels and tendons that had once constituted his throat.
It was the sound as much as the sight that numbed Trapp’s body and mind, as precious seconds bled away along with the dying man’s life. A hissing, bubbling cry escaped his lips as his lungs filled with blood and the life was slowly extinguished from his body.
Trapp watched in horrified fascination at the crackle of gunpowder overhead grew fainter and fainter, but still loud enough to mask the mercenary’s screams, even as his life visibly faded away below. This man might not have been the first he had ever killed. But it was the first kill he was certain of.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he mumbled, dragging his attention back away from the body against the house, and focusing back on the second shooter, now rising to his feet and fumbling to bring his rifle to his shoulder.
Somehow, even through the horror of the realization that he was now a killer, Trapp’s training kicked in. He fired again, twice, hitting the second mercenary in the face and the chest. He too slumped to the ground, this time most assuredly dead. Trapp fired one last shot, just to be sure. And two safety rounds.
Still, as he spun the rifle to cover the rear of Chino’s house, he felt like he was operating in slow motion, like a vial of anesthetic had been dumped into his veins. Perhaps it was a natural human response to desecrating creation, or maybe he had just forgotten to breathe. Either way, he was too slow.
The first round impacted the ceiling just above his position before the rifle was done pivoting. Chips of concrete showered down over his hide covering, and dust coated his face and tongue, forming a thick paste in his lungs as he gasped for air.
He had tarried too long. He understood that. The two men at the rear of the house would have heard the first shot. If he’d acted quickly enough, he could have eliminated the second of the two dead mercenaties before their comrades were able to get a fix on his position.
But now they had him pinned.
He pushed the second switch, and the third.
35
The incoming fire was relentless, but haphazardly aimed. Trapp could only see one muzzle flash, but from the volume of reports echoing around the neighborhood, he was certain that both operators were shooting.
The noise was mostly masked by the fireworks display in the sky overhead. He’d rigged the second and third sites with longer lengths of fuse, so a rocket danced into the darkness every 20 seconds or so, meaning there was little time without a screech of ignition, a blast of red and gold and green, or the crackling of spent gunpowder.
Thankfully, the mercenaries didn't seem to know exactly who or what they were firing on. More importantly, they didn’t know precisely where to aim.
Even so, Trapp was forced to keep his head down. When he shot the second operator, the two remaining members of the Odysseus team had roughly triangulated his location on the third floor of the building. At the rate they were burning through magazines, it wouldn’t take long before one of them got lucky.
Thankfully, Trapp had a trump card up his sleeve.
He steadied his breathing, dragging in a huge lungful of air and holding it inside long enough to calm the desperate straining of his chest. He didn’t bother searching for either of the two men he was trying to kill. In the blackness of Chino’s backyard, their dark fatigues would make them almost impossible to spot. Instead, he returned his eye to the scope and found the bottom left of the rear fence.
Using that as a guide, he dragged his aim to the right, until the crosshairs were centered over a single white splotch of paint.
He fired.
At least, he must have, because the makeshift Tannerite explosive flashed in the darkness with the roar of an ice shelf collapsing into the ocean. Trapp squeezed his eyes shut and pictured the wall of death that was now flying toward the rear wall of Chino’s house: hundreds of tiny metal ball bearings. Like buckshot, but thrown with a dozen times more force, they would rip apart whatever they encountered.
The sound of the explosion faded as quickly as it began. Trapp took advantage of the lull in gunfire to place half a dozen rounds of his own into Chino’s backyard, aiming at random to keep them guessing and concentrate their minds on returning fire instead of getting the hell out of Dodge.
But even as the crack of the final round echoed down the street, Trapp was already moving. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, grabbed his backpack, and shoved the bottle of water and a single plastic bottle containing his own urine into the plastic trash bag. The fourth radio switch went into his pocket. He sprinted to the other side of the concrete shell and took the ladder’s rungs four at a time, heat building up in his gloves as he slid the rest of the way down.
Faster.
As the soles of his boots met Mother Earth, Trapp dropped both bags and touched a button on his wristwatch, initializing a countdown timer set to expire in 180 seconds. That was probably already too long, but whatever happened, the second the alarm started chiming, he knew he had to bug out. The fireworks were a good distraction, but he couldn't count on them hiding the sound of this battle forever.
Trapp brought the rifle back up to his shoulder as he ran for the gate, seeing the Corolla’s open trunk out of the corner of his eye. The combination on the padlock was set only one number away from the unlock code, but drunk on adrenaline, he first turned it the wrong way, costing him precious seconds.
“Come on,” he hissed as his numb fingers struggled to input the right combination. A click signaled the job was done, and he pulled the chain free, letting it drop to the ground.
A flurry of gunfire emanating from the rear of Chino’s house momentarily caused him to duck, expecting to be turned into a pincushion at any second. But he heard the rounds impacting his previous position.
Okay, so there’s at least one left.
A metallic click echoed in the darkness, indicating that the shooter’s magazine had run dry. Trapp had to move. His opponent was off balance, probably still stunned from the blast concussion, and was unsure of his position. The ruse wouldn’t last long, but for now it was the only advantage he had.
He sprinted low across the street, hoping that the echo of fireworks in the man’s ears would mask the sound of his footsteps. He resisted the urge to hold himself against the fence and stopped just short of it, the stock of his rifle pressed tight against his shoulder, so forcefully the bone started to ache.
Relax.
; It was impossible. Consciously, Trapp understood that tensing up would only ruin his aim, but he couldn’t help himself. His vision was constricted, and he tasted metal at the back of his tongue. For a second time that night, his lizard brain screamed at him to open fire, to pump lead through the wooden fence until it was nothing more than a splintered mess at his feet.
But he could resist that urge, at least.
A man’s voice rang out, tight and anxious. “Casey! Casey – is that you?”
Trapp froze. He cocked his head silently toward the source of the sound. The Odysseus shooter could be no more than a few yards from his present position. The man’s gun barked again, and again Trapp saw puffs of dust erupt in the darkness where he’d been lying shortly before. He checked his watch. Two minutes remaining.
How did I lose 60 seconds already?
It didn’t matter. He took a step forward, pausing for a heartbeat to determine whether the sound had been noticed. When he wasn’t shot, he decided that it hadn’t been. As he moved, the part of his brain that wasn’t concentrating on staying alive tried to work out the shooter’s position.
It was hard to be certain, for in the night sounds appeared to come from everywhere at once, but he thought the man must be sheltering behind the yard’s rear fence. The first of the shooters must have already made it through the gate when he hit the Tannerite charge. That was the only thing that made sense. If both were in the yard, then they would have suffered the same fate. Another rocket screeched into the sky.
“Casey, buddy, tell me you’re alive. Please…”
Trapp took advantage of the man’s pathetic, plaintive cry to close two more steps on the corner of the fence. He crouched just behind it, certain now that his opponent was only a few feet from him around it.
He tensed every muscle in his body, preparing to surge into action. Every second counted now. A police cruiser could be right around the corner. He waited for the rocket to blow.
Go.
Trapp charged forward as color danced in the sky, skinning the corner post with his shoulder and using it as a pivot to spin him around. On the other side, a third of the fence was simply gone. Most of the concussive power of the explosive blast had been channeled forward, toward Chino’s house, but enough had fed in the opposite direction to pulverize several thick wooden planks.
The shooter was kneeling down, facing upward, his weapon aimed at the apartment complex. In the darkness, it was difficult to make out whether he was African American or had simply layered on the camouflage paint like an old-school mime artist. He was about three feet away, and even as Trapp filled his peripheral vision, he didn’t appear to notice the looming threat.
Trapp launched himself into the air, and the heel of his boot caught the man in the center of his chest, knocking him to the ground with an audible crunch. Even before his forward momentum ceased, he grabbed the rifle from his target’s stunned fingers and ripped it free, tossing it into the darkness and out of sight.
He reversed his own rifle next, acting almost too quickly for his opponent’s wide, dark eyes to comprehend. He drove the butt into the man’s stomach with all his strength, forcing whatever remained of the air in his lungs out in a desperate, squelched gasp.
His weapon completed a 360° rotation, and the stock ended up back at his shoulder. He drove the muzzle in between the mercenary’s teeth, accidentally causing one of them to chip.
“Don’t fucking move,” he yelled, not caring about noise now. “I don’t need you alive, understand? It’s a bonus, but I don’t fucking need it.”
The man was too gone even to nod. Trapp didn’t wait for a response. He roughly flipped his captive over and grabbed a cable tie from his back pocket. He pulled it tight around the man’s wrists, then added another at the elbow, to restrict movement even further.
“Stay there.”
Quickly, and rebuking himself for not clearing the scene already, Trapp raised his rifle back to his shoulder and spun around to take aim at the rear of Chino’s house. He needn’t have. The corpse was lying face down, unmoving. If there was any life left in him, the oozing dark blood that glistened on his back would end it before too long.
Trapp’s watch started beeping. Instead of silencing it, he returned to his bound prisoner, squatted down, and heaved him onto his shoulder just like he’d been taught in basic, placing him in a fireman’s carry. The guy had to weigh close to a couple hundred pounds, but visions of the cops descending on the scene spurred him into a ragged sprint, every step sending a jarring spike of pain up his body, starting at the ankle and ending in the hip.
But if he felt it in the morning, that was fine. Just so long as he made it that far.
“Dude,” his prisoner gasped, still struggling to suck in sufficient oxygen to speak. “Who the hell are you?”
Thankfully, for the time being at least, the man was too weak to resist. It took Trapp about 15 seconds of running to make it through the construction site’s gates, kicking the right one fully open as he passed through.
The second he was standing in front of it, he tipped his shoulder forward and dumped his prisoner into the Corolla’s open trunk. The impact drove the air from the man’s lungs a second time, and if he hadn’t been in such a rush, Trapp might even have felt pity for him.
But the thought failed even to enter his mind. He grabbed the roll of duct tape that was waiting for this very moment and yanked his captive by the helmet, loosening the clip and tossing it into the back of the trunk. Next, he ensured that the man’s lips and mouth were entirely enclosed by layers of the tape, looped around the back of his head for extra security.
He did the same to secure the man’s ankles together, then fed one last rotation through the cable ties around his wrists and attached them to his bound legs.
Before closing the trunk, he grabbed the trash bag and the backpack and tossed them in on top of the prisoner. He shut the trunk and quickly scanned the ground to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. The rifle went in the passenger footwell. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but he couldn’t risk putting it in the trunk with the shooter. The clean license plates were sitting on top of the passenger seat.
He tried to guess what would happen if a cop pulled him over right now.
Nothing good.
Finally, he backed the Toyota out of the construction yard, killing the watch alarm as he did so. The overtime clock read zero +00:00:47.
Not bad.
36
Trapp kept the speedometer indicator resolutely dialed in at 20 mph as he drove through the quiet residential streets of Compton.
His body was still in action mode, and with the adrenaline flowing through his body, every oncoming headlight was almost blinding in its intensity. At a little past three in the morning, the roads were deathly quiet: the few vehicles on the move were delivery trucks or buses ferrying essential workers back home from their late shifts and bringing in the replacements.
His attention was drawn to every car traveling in the opposite direction, neck physically craning as he eyeballed the drivers. Were they undercover cops?
“Chill out,” he mumbled aloud, fingers white-knuckled on the steering wheel as he nudged the Corolla back into its lane after momentarily becoming distracted by a passing Crown Victoria.
He understood – consciously, at least – that the most likely way he would be caught was if he himself screwed up. But it was one thing knowing how he needed to behave, and quite another to actually do it.
The blue and red lights started flashing a couple hundred yards from Trapp’s present lane position and traveling in the opposite direction. Instinctively, his right foot stamped down on the gas pedal, causing the car to lurch forward. Its underpowered engine struggled to process the excess fuel now flowing through it.
Don’t!
Instead, Trapp reached into his pocket and ignited the last set of rockets. He breathed in once, and out, and a comet’s tail sped across the sky.
The cop car pulled a U
-turn in the sparse traffic and turned in Trapp’s direction. He battled to get his speed under control without making it too obvious, but his muscles were solid and clumsy from fatigue and stress when called upon. The car jerked a couple of seconds before the inhabitants of the police cruiser came into focus, and though he swiftly brought the overcorrection under control, a looming sense of catastrophe flashed through his mind.
Had he been overconfident? The city of Compton was no stranger to the sound of gunfire at night. He’d assumed the police response time would buy him a couple more minutes to get away. But right now, he was barely three blocks from the scene of the crime.
Could the dispatcher already have received word of an explosion? Could they have ordered the cops to draw a cordon around the area? And if so, could it have started already?
Acting on instinct, Trapp’s left hand searched for the comfort of the rifle leaning against the passenger seat. He pulled it away as though scalded.
You’re no cop killer.
The cruiser was thirty yards away now. Then twenty, then ten. And the rocket exploded in the sky above. And another, and again, and again. This time the display was lower, and flames and sparks danced across the horizon, showering down over the road and the rows of buildings to either side.
Trapp guided his sedan to the side of the road as the cop cruiser sped past. He couldn’t avoid looking toward the driver’s partner, a heavyset Latino woman with her dark hair curled in a tight bun. She was holding the radio handset over her lips and speaking rapidly into it, her eyes locked on the sky overhead. It was only the briefest of glimpses before she was gone, but it felt like a lifetime.
“Don’t stare, you dumb motherfucker,” he hissed to himself, dragging his attention away. And still the worst case scenarios kept coming. Could he have missed a resident on the street who might have called in the description of his vehicle?
No, he was certain he’d done his research.
Hadn’t he?