by DL Barbur
There was a knot of huddled figures behind the Cascade Aviation van. We passed more bodies on the way, a couple of Cascade Aviation thugs, one more of Bolle’s team. The C-130 was turned broadside to us, still tilted to starboard at a crazy angle. Whoever was inside had managed to crank the rear ramp halfway down and somebody was lying on it, firing quick bursts with what sounded like a submachine gun.
Bolle was hunched behind the van’s engine block, shooting over the hood. His face looked drawn and pale. Another one of his guys was kneeling by the front bumper, gun out.
Also huddled behind the van was a bunch of young women, five, maybe six, I couldn’t tell because they were all huddled together in a pile. They were dressed in disposable coveralls like you give to prison inmates, and had their hands bound in front of them with zip ties. Todd’s shipment.
They were all young, mostly blond, and scared as hell.
One lay curled in a ball, screaming every time a gun would fire. One had a spreading stain on the chest of her coveralls and bloody froth on her lips. Another clutched at blood oozing out of her ankle.
I grabbed Bolle’s arm and spun him toward me. My hand came away wet. He was bleeding from somewhere.
“We need to get them out of here,” I said, pointing at the girls.
“I need to get on that plane,” he screamed back. There was that holy fire in his eyes again. I didn’t like it much.
Off in the distance, I heard sirens, not close, but they were coming. You couldn’t have a full auto gunfight near a medium-sized city without somebody calling the cops.
“Look,” I said. “The local cops are coming. Let’s get the girls out of here and just hold a perimeter. The plane’s not going anywhere.”
He shook his head. “We can’t let the locals get in that plane. They’ll screw up everything.” He turned and squeezed off another burst.
Dammit. I needed to know what his agenda was, but now wasn’t the time to sort it out. One of the last remaining windows in the van blew out, scattering broken glass all over the girls. Big Eddie moved over, squeezed between the girls and the van and knelt so he could shoot through the interior. A couple of the girls were sheltered by his bulk. It was a noble gesture, but it wasn’t going to last for very long.
The guy in the ramp kept firing short bursts. He didn’t seem to be that good of a shot, but he didn’t seem to be running out of ammo.
I opened the driver’s door to the van and leaned in, ignoring the pool of blood all over the driver’s seat. The engine was running and it even sounded healthy, considering the amount of lead that had been pumped into it.
I grabbed Bolle again.
“Look,” I said, and pointed at the guy shooting around the front of the van. “We put him in the driver’s seat, load the girls back in the van. When they’re ready, I’ll throw a flashbang under the plane’s ramp. That will distract the gunner long enough for us to smoke him. The van takes off and we rush the plane.”
Bolle was silent for a second, then nodded. I’m not sure who was the most stupid: me for suggesting the plan or him for agreeing to it. Al heard the plan and just looked at me, his face unreadable.
Bolle’s other shooter practically leaped into the driver’s seat. He seemed pretty steady, but I couldn’t blame him for wanting to leave. That left the girls.
I jerked the closest one to her feet and aimed her at the sliding door on the side of the van. Thankfully it had doors on both sides.
“Get in!” I yelled. “You are all leaving.”
She started to get in, then screamed. Her hands flew to her cheeks and she just stood there. What now?
I looked in the van. Lying on the floor was a young woman, her curly hair matted black with blood. She was dead. I grabbed an ankle and pulled her out of the van, feeling my gorge rise at the limp boneless feel of her as she slid along the floor. I pulled her to the tarmac and left her there.
I all but picked up the other girl and threw her in the van. Eddie was ushering the others along, his voice oddly gentle coming from a guy the size of a refrigerator and dressed in a commando outfit. They climbed over the blood and broken glass and then they were all inside.
I pulled a flashbang out of my vest. There was no time to ask if everybody was ready. I was afraid the guy in the plane would put a burst into the back of the van.
I pulled the pin, let the spoon fly. I really had no idea if I could throw the damn thing far enough to get it to the plane. It looked a long way away. I hurled it as hard as I could and yelled “Banging!” as soon as it left my hand, just like they taught us in the Rangers.
The driver didn’t even wait for the grenade to go off. As soon as I yelled, he stomped on the gas, damn near running over Eddie’s foot as he peeled away. There was a long, stomach curdling moment when we were standing there with nothing between us and incoming fire. I watched the flashbang sail through the air in slow motion, remembering just in time to avert my eyes before it went off.
My throw was pretty good. Just before I closed my eyes, the grenade looked like it was going to land right by the ramp. When it went off, I saw the hot white flash even through my closed eyes. The bang was like an ice pick to the ear. After a while, your ears got numb to the sound of the gunfire, but the flashbang cut through.
It was my turn to lead the way. As soon as the bang detonated, I took off running for the ramp. I emptied the M-16 as I ran. It was a lousy way to hit anything, but I wanted to give the guy on the ramp every incentive not to shoot back. I figured if the guy could hit me after being flash banged and while I was emptying my rifle at him, it was just my day to die.
The carbine clicked empty a dozen feet from the ramp and I let it drop. I hadn’t grabbed another extra magazine from Mickey. Besides, for close work, I really liked shotguns.
The ramp was down to almost waist level and tilted at a crazy angle. I pulled the shotgun up and turned on the light mounted on the forearm. The gunner was dressed in a flight suit and helmet. He was sitting there pawing at his eyes. There was a little German submachine gun slung around his neck.
He dropped a hand away from his eyes and grabbed for the grip of the sub gun. I put the dot on the shotgun’s front sight over his face and pulled the trigger.
I stood there for a second, taking a breath and making a point of not looking down at what I’d done. I needed a few seconds to let my brain catch up to events.
I couldn’t see much inside the plane and was unwilling to stick my head in the opening. I turned to Big Eddie.
“Bang it.”
He nodded, plucked a flashbang out of his harness. The rest of us moved up the fuselage of the plane so we were forward of the ramp and stacked up in a line.
Eddie pulled the pin and flicked the grenade through the opening. We waited a long, breathless couple of seconds. Someone inside the plane yelled, loud enough for us to hear through the skin and then the grenade detonated. It wasn’t as loud since it was inside, but the ramp opening was outlined in the bright actinic light for a fraction of a second, then we were moving and scrambling inside.
I had to press myself up over the edge of the ramp. It only took a second or two, but I felt incredibly vulnerable scrambling up with the shotgun slung over my back. Then I was up. The inside of the plane was chaos.
There were a few red lights on, but no other illumination, other than the lights under our gun barrels. Two guys in flight suits were pawing at their eyes over by a door on the starboard side of the plane. One had a crash ax in his hands.
I slid and nearly fell. The stink of hydraulic fluid was heavy in the air, and I realized there was a big puddle of it all over the back half of the plane.
I started wondering if the flash bang grenade had been a good idea after all. There was a big scorch mark along one side of the plane where the grenade had detonated, and the nylon webbing of the seats was starting to smolder and burn.
I saw a bunch of dark-skinned men on the deck, dressed in the same disposable coveralls the girls had been wearing. Th
ey were all in a pile where the floor and the starboard side of the plane met. It looked like they had slid there when the plane leaned over. Their hands were zip-tied in front of them. It took me a second to realize there was a third man in a flight suit underneath them and they were beating him. He must have been the crew chief. He was wearing a headset with a microphone, and a pistol in a holster strapped to his thigh. He wasn’t fighting back, just holding on to the butt of the pistol for dear life, to keep it from being snatched away from him.
Bolle, Eddie, Al and I all started screaming at once, telling everyone to put their hands up. The two men in flight suits by the door complied at once, putting their hands up. The guys on the floor looked at us for a second and went back to beating the other aircrewman.
We all moved forward towards the pile on the floor. There was a hollow boom from the front of the plane and I felt a bullet whiz over my head, couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches away.
I jerked my shotgun up and in the light from under the barrel, I saw a man standing in the stairwell leading up to the flight deck. He was wearing a flight suit and had a big shiny pistol shoved out in front of him in a perfect Weaver stance. All four of us fired at the same time. Under the fire from a shotgun and three rifles, the guy just about came apart.
“Bolle, Eddie. Get those two.” I jerked my head towards the other two flight crew members. They both had pistols strapped to their thighs but showed little inclination to use them. That might not last forever.
“Al, cover the flight deck.” Somehow I’d become the de facto leader of this little dog and pony show. I wasn’t sure how that had happened, but for now, I was happy to go along with it.
I moved forward, towards the pile of men fighting on the floor. I was beginning to feel like we could pull this off. If we could just get the men on the floor under control, we’d have everyone at gunpoint.
You can do a dozen things right in a fight, but it’s the one thing you do wrong that always bites you.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I moved forward towards the knot of men on the floor with no clear plan, and I got too close. I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe that if they didn’t knock it the hell off, I’d just empty the shotgun in the whole mess and sort it out from there.
I never saw the knife before I got cut, but I heard the click of the blade snapping into place, even over the noise of the other guys screaming.
The guy on top of the crew chief, a little wiry guy with an olive complexion and a nose like a ski slope, stood up, grabbed the muzzle of my shotgun with his left hand and shoved it to my right. I jerked the trigger instinctively, succeeding only in blowing a hole in the side of the plane. His right hand was a blur, whipping out and back, and suddenly my left forearm felt very cold.
Then I saw the knife, a little thing, maybe a three or four-inch blade. He must have pulled it out of the pocket of the crew chief on the ground. In that peculiar clarity of imminent death, I saw that he had the remnants of a zip tie on each wrist and his left hand was bleeding. He must have cut himself when he severed the zip tie.
I swung the shotgun around with my right hand. It was awkward and had little power, but it deflected his knife jab away from my throat. The blade glanced off the barrel of the shotgun and raked along the front of my body armor instead. The blade got fouled up on something, maybe some ammo, or maybe the body of one of the flash bangs I still had, and it delayed him from whipping back for another strike. That probably saved my life.
I was much bigger than the guy, a foot taller, and probably twice his weight. I put the receiver of the shotgun against his chest and just drove forward, using my legs and mass. He went ass over tea kettle over the knot of guys still fighting on the floor. I gained a few feet of distance with that move. I fought to bring the shotgun back around to point it at him.
The back of his head exploded in a big inky cloud and he hit the ground in a boneless heap. Al was standing only a couple of feet from me when he triggered his rifle.
I finally got the shotgun under control and pointed it at the guys on the floor.
“Put your hands up!” I figured even if they didn’t speak English, having a gun pointed at you was sort of a universal language.
In reply one of them screamed something I didn’t understand. He finally succeeded in jerking the gun out of the crew chief’s holster and started to raise it. Al squeezed down on his trigger, letting half a magazine go at once, blowing the guy with the gun away, putting rounds into the men on either side of him. Having their buddies’ insides splashed all over them seemed to calm down the guys that were left.
“You ok?” I heard Al ask over the ringing in my ears. I held my left arm up in front of me. A big droplet of blood fell off the end of my pinky. It was hard to make my fingers move, they felt like they were far away, like my arm had somehow grown longer. My hand felt weak. It still didn’t hurt. It just felt cold.
“I think so,” I said and coughed. I realized it was getting hard to breathe. I looked over Al’s shoulder. The fire had spread. Now half a dozen seats were burning. The flames were several inches high and giving off thick greasy smoke. As I watched, a big flaming gobbet of molten nylon dropped off the frame, right into a puddle of hydraulic fluid.
“Oh, shit,” was all I had time to say. Then the puddle caught fire.
The floor in the whole back third of the plane was on fire in seconds. It started creeping up the starboard side of the plane, where the fluid had soaked the insulation. More seats started catching.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, at least at first. The coveralls I was wearing were Nomex and the boots were heavy leather. The guys on the floor screamed. The disposable coveralls were no protection. I turned away, there was nothing I could do other than shooting them.
I looked towards the rear of the plane. Eddie and Bolle each pulled one of the handcuffed crewmen up off the floor. They were screaming, but they were wearing Nomex just like we were. The coveralls weren’t supposed to keep you alive for sustained periods in a fire, just keep you from burning to death, long enough to escape, which was what we needed to do now.
The fire was worse back near the ramp. Other stuff was catching and burning as I watched, wiring, more seats. I ran up to the door on the starboard side and tried to throw the handle with my right hand. It moved a little then stopped. I guessed the fuselage of the plane had warped a little when it tipped over. I could see shiny marks on the locking bar where the crew had been going at it with the crash ax.
I had something better. I pulled a slug out of the stock of the shotgun and promptly dropped it. I realized my hands were shaking. The heat on the back of my neck was getting unbearable. I took a deep breath, tried not to think about the fact that I’d dropped a live shotgun round into the flames at my feet, and pulled another round off my vest.
I fed it into the magazine, managed to make my left hand rack the bolt handle, bringing the slug up to the chamber.
“Watch your eyes,” I yelled. I put the muzzle of the shotgun against the bar and pulled the trigger. It blew the bar almost in two. I backed up, aimed a leg and threw a kick. I figured I’d either open the door or break my foot.
When it popped open, I almost fell out. I grabbed the door frame with both hands, stepped out, and hit the ground rolling in a perfect parachute landing fall. It’s amazing what you don’t forget.
I scrambled to all fours, wanting to get out of the way before Eddie and the others came piling out. The ground underneath was wet. At first, I thought it was just from the rain, then I realized my nose was full of the smell of aviation fuel. I looked towards the front of the plane. When the wing had struck the ground, it had bent upwards at a crazy angle. Aviation fuel was pouring out of rent in the aluminum skin.
I took off running, hoping the others would have the good sense to follow me. I could see the airport fence. I lowered my head and charged. The soles of my boots felt oddly soft under my feet and I realized they must have partially melted
back on the plane.
I made it fifty yards or so, just out of the puddle of fuel, when everything blew up. There was a surprisingly gentle push at my back, just enough to knock me forward, and then a hot wind blew over me that stank of burnt hydrocarbons. Then the air was surprisingly still for a fraction of a second before I felt a cool wind blowing back the other way. It was air being sucked into the fire.
I stood and my shadow in front of me was as long and well-defined as if it had been cast by the setting sun. I turned and looked. The outline of the C-130 was lost in the giant fireball. It had to be several stories tall. I had to look away. If it hadn’t been for the balaclava and the goggles over my face, I probably would have lost my eyebrows, even at that distance.
I looked around for Al and the others and saw nothing but fire and burning pieces of airplane. I heard sirens in the distance.
It was time to leave.
I pulled the shotgun sling loose, let it fall to the ground and ran for the fence.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I hit the fence line and stopped to catch my breath. The Albany airport didn’t have an extremely secure perimeter. The weeds had been allowed to grow knee high up to the fence on both sides and there was no lighting. I sat down in the shadows and tried to think like a cop for a couple of seconds.
The Albany police department was medium-sized. They had maybe five or six people on at this hour. More could be drafted to help from the county and state police. A sergeant, or at best a lieutenant, would be running the show, responding to calls about some kind of gunfight on an isolated corner of the airport. It would sound like a small scale war, hundreds of shots, full auto, and now it was punctuated by a hundred-foot fireball.
The person in charge wouldn’t be in a big hurry to go rushing in. That was a sure way to get his people killed. He’d set up a perimeter, try to keep things contained while more and more resources showed up: SWAT teams, fire trucks, more officers, and hopefully somebody higher up in the food chain to take over the whole mess.