Dead or Alive (15 page)

The problem with the Hollywood model of gun handling was twofold: site picture and ambush. Real-world combat hand-gunning was about shooting straight and true under pressure, and that, in turn, was all about mind-set and site picture. The former was about conditioning; the latter, mechanics. It was a lot easier and a lot more effective to bring a weapon up, get a good site picture of the target, and snap off a shot than it was doing it in the reverse. The other factor—the ambush—was all about what happens when you turn a corner to find yourself face-to-face with a bad guy. Do you want your gun up, by your face, or do you want it down where you might, just might, have a chance to snap off a shot into the guy’s legs before he tackles you and the situation devolves into a no-holds-barred wrestling match? That didn’t happen very often, of course, but as far as Jack was concerned, and as far as real shooters were concerned, it was much better to be wrestling a bad guy who had a 9-millimeter slug or two in his leg than not.

Theory, Jack,
he reminded himself, returning to the here and now. Theories are for the classroom, not the real world.

Where the hell was Dominic? They’d separated at the front door, Dominic moving right to take the house’s back rooms—the potentially more “heavy” rooms—Jack to the left, heading for the more open kitchen and living room.
Don’t worry about Dominic, worry about you.
His cousin was FBI—at least officially—so he needed no lessons on this stuff.

Jack changed the gun to his left hand, dried his palm on his pants leg, then changed it back again. He took a breath, took a short step back, then peeked his head around the corner. Kitchen. Refrigerator to the right; avocado-green counter, stainless-steel sink, and desktop microwave to the left; dining table and chairs down a ways, past the end of the counter, beside the back door.

Jack scanned for movement but saw nothing, so he stepped out, gun raised to near shoulder height, eyes scanning, gun barrel following, then crept into the kitchen. Ahead and to the right was an archway, this one leading to the living room, he assumed, picturing the layout in his head. Dominic should be coming through the other room on the right to link up with him—

“Jack, rear bedroom window!” Dominic shouted from somewhere deeper inside the house. “Got a runner! Out the side window! White male, red jacket, armed . . . I’m on him!”

Jack resisted the impulse to charge ahead, instead moving slow and steady, clearing the remainder of the kitchen, then peeking around the corner into the living room. Clear. He stepped to the patio door, body aligned to the left of the doorjamb and hopefully behind the wooden 2×4 studs under the drywall that would, in theory, stop or slow down any bullets meant for him, then ducked down to peer out the porthole-style window into the alley beyond. To his right he saw a figure moving down the alley: blue windbreaker, yellow letters. Dominic’s FBI windbreaker. Jack opened the door, looked again, then pushed open the screen door. Directly across from him was a darkened doorway in the brick wall; to his left a green Dumpster. He moved that way, gun up, tracking for targets. He saw a shadow moving in the doorway and pivoted in time to see a man-shaped silhouette appear on the threshold.

“Freeze! Don’t move, don’t move!” he shouted, but the figure kept moving, left arm coming into the light, hand holding a revolver. “Drop it!” Jack shouted again, gave him another beat, then fired twice, both shots striking center mass. The figure fell back into the doorway. Jack turned again, back toward the Dumpster, moving until he could see around its corner, looking for—

And then something slammed into his back, between the shoulder blades, and he staggered forward. He felt the blood rush to his head and thought,
Ah, shit, goddamn it . . .
He bounced against the Dumpster, left shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, and tried to pivot on his heel toward the source of the gunfire. . . . He felt another round slam into his side, just below his armpit, and knew it was too late.

“Hold!” a voice shouted over a bullhorn, followed by three rapid whistle blasts that echoed down the alley. “Cease exercise, cease exercise!”

“Ah, man ...” Jack muttered, then leaned back against the Dumpster and exhaled heavily.

The man who’d just shot him—Special Agent Walt Brandeis—stepped out of the doorway and shook his head sadly. “My God. To die like that, son, with a green paint splatter in the middle of your back ...” Jack could see the half-smile playing across Brandeis’s lips as he looked Jack up and down, then clicked his tongue. “It’s just a plain shame, that’s what it is.”

Down the alley, Dominic came jogging around the corner and stopped in his tracks, then said, “Again?”

 

 

 

H
ere’s the problem, Jack: You were—”

“Hurrying, I know.”

“No, not this time. It’s more than that. Hurrying wasn’t your real problem—it was part of it but not really what got you killed. Care to take a guess?”

Jack Junior thought it over a moment. “I assumed.”

“Damn right you assumed. You assumed the target you saw in that door was the only one in there. You assumed you’d put him down, then stopped worrying about it. It’s what I call Ambush Relief Syndrome. You won’t find it in the textbooks, but it goes like this: You survived an ambush, a real near thing, and you feel like you’re golden. In your head you subconsciously relabeled that door and the room inside from ‘uncleared’ to ‘cleared.’ Now, if this was real life and there had been two of them in there, your average dumb criminal probably would’ve opened up on you the moment his partner did, but there are always exceptions out there—like that rare creature, a smart bad guy—and exceptions get you killed.”

“You’re right,” Jack muttered, taking a sip of Diet Coke. “Damn.”

Along with Brian, who’d sat out the last exercise, he and Dominic had regrouped in the break room after being debriefed by Brandeis, who hadn’t pulled any punches, former President’s son or not. He’d told Jack basically the same thing Dominic was saying, only in a more entertaining fashion. Brandeis, a native Mississippian, had an aw-shucks, Will Rogers way about him that took some sting out of the criticism. Some, but not all of it.
What’d you think, Jack, that you’d come here and walk out an expert?

Like much of the FBI’s Quantico urban tactical training facility known affectionately as Hogan’s Alley, the break room was a Spartan affair, with plywood walls and floors, and Formica tables that looked like they’d been beaten with hammers. The course itself was anything but slapdash, though, right down to its bank, post office, barbershop, and pool hall.
And dark doorways,
Jack thought. That sure as hell felt real, as had the paint-ball pellet he’d caught between the shoulder blades. It still itched, and he suspected he’d see a good-sized welt later in the shower. But pellet or not, dead was dead. He suspected they’d used paintballs for his benefit. Depending on the scenario being run and the agents running it, Hogan’s Alley could be a lot louder and a lot hairier. Jack had even heard rumors that the HRT—the Hostage Rescue Team—sometimes went live fire. But then again, those guys were the best of the best.

“What about you? You don’t pile on?” Jack asked Brian, who sat slumped in his chair, rocking on two legs. “Might as well get the full lecture.”

Brian shook his head and smiled, nodding at his brother. “His turf, cuz, not mine. You come out to Twenty-nine Palms and we’ll talk.” The Marines had their own frighteningly realistic urban combat training center called MOUT—Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. “Till then, I’ll keep my mouth shut, thank you very much.”

Dominic rapped a knuckle on the table before Jack. “Cuz, goddamn it, you asked us to bring you here, right?”

The steel in Dominic’s voice was unmistakable, and Jack was momentarily taken aback.
What is going on?
he wondered. “Right.”

“You wanted to feel what it’s really like, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then stop acting like a little boy who got caught cheating on the spelling bee. This ain’t about lectures. Nobody gives a shit who you are, or whether you made some rookie mistake your third time out. Hell, the first ten times I ran this course I caught a bullet. That doorway you missed? They almost named that damned thing after me, the number of shots I took there.”

Jack believed him. Hogan’s had been training FBI agents for twenty-plus years, and the only ones who shot it perfectly were the ones who’d run it so much they saw it in their dreams. That was the way of everything, Jack knew. Practice makes perfect was not a cliché but in fact an axiom, especially in the military and in law enforcement. Practice cut new grooves into your mental wiring while your body developed muscle memory—performing the same action over and over until muscle and synapse worked in unison and thinking was erased from the equation.
How long does that kind of thing take?
he wondered.

“Come on. ...” Jack said.

“Nope. Ask Brandeis. He’ll be happy to tell you. I took plenty of his bullets. Shit, the first two times I walked right by that door and got killed for it. Look, I’m not all that keen on telling you this, but the truth is you did damned good your first time out. Scary good. Hell, who would’ve figured it . . . My brainiac cousin a gen-u-ine gunslinger.”

“Now you’re humoring me.”

“No, I’m not. Really, man. Jump in, Brian. Tell him.”

“He’s right, Jack. You’re really rough around the edges—hell, you crossed Dom twice in the Laundromat—”

“Crossed?”

“When you’re stacked up outside a room, you know, just before you go in, and then you split up inside, one group moving to the heavy side, the other to the light side—”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“In the Laundromat you sidestepped and tracked your gun outside your zone. Your barrel crossed me—right across the back of the head, in fact. A real no-no.”

“Okay, so lesson number one: Don’t point your gun at your friends.”

Brian laughed. “That’s a way of putting it, yeah. Like I was saying . . . you’re rough around the edges, but you’ve got great instincts. What, you been holding out on us? Do some training with the Secret Service when you were a kid? Maybe a few vacations with Clark and Chavez?”

Jack shook his head. “No, none of that. I mean, yeah, I shot some guns but nothing like this. I don’t know. . . . It just seemed to play out in my head before it was happening. ...” Jack shrugged, then smiled. “Maybe got a little of Dad’s Marine DNA. Hell, who knows, maybe I’ve just watched
Die Hard
too many times.”

“Somehow I don’t think so,” Brian replied. “Well, whatever it is, I wouldn’t mind having you on my six.”

“I’ll second that.”

They raised their cans of Diet Coke and clunked them together.

“About that, guys ...” Jack said tentatively. “You remember that thing last year . . . in Italy?”

Brian and Dominic exchanged glances. “We remember,” Dom said. “Hell of a deal, that.”

“Yeah, well, I was thinking I wouldn’t mind doing some more of it—not that exactly, maybe, but something like it.”

Brian said, “Jesus, cuz, are you talking about unplugging from your keyboard and living in the real world? I can see the devil lacing up his ice skates as we speak.”

“Very funny. No, I like what I do, I know it makes a difference, but that stuff is so intangible. What you guys do—what we did in Italy—that’s the real deal. Hands on, you know? You can see the results with your own eyes.”

“Now that you’ve brought it up,” Dominic said, “I’ve always meant to ask you: Did any of that bother you afterward—not that it should have, necessarily, but let’s face it: You were kind of dumped ass-backward into a shitty situation—if you’ll pardon the pun.”

Jack considered this. “What do you want me to say? That it bothered me? Well, it didn’t. Not really. Sure, I was nervous, and there was a quarter-second just before it happened where I thought,
What the hell am I doing?
But then it was gone, and it was just me and him, and I just did it. To answer the question I think you’re trying to ask—no, I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over it. You think I should have?”

“Shit, no.” Brian looked around to make sure they were alone, then leaned in close, forearms on the table. “There’s no should about it, Jack. You either do or you don’t. You don’t, and that’s okay. The asshole deserved it. First time I popped a guy, Jack, he had me dead to rights. It was kill or be killed. I put him down, and I knew it was the right thing. Still had a few night-mares, though. Right or wrong, whether he deserves it or not, killing a man ain’t a pleasant thing. Anybody who thinks it is is a little touched in the head. All that gung-ho stuff ain’t really about killing; it’s about doing the job you’ve trained your ass off to be good at, taking care of the guys to your left and right, and coming out the other side with all your fingers and toes.”

“Besides, Jack,” Dominic added, “that guy in Italy, he wouldn’t have just up and quit one day. He would’ve cost a lot of people their lives before somebody sent him on his way. For me, that’s the deal-breaker. A bad guy deserving what he gets is all well and good, but what we’re doing—what this whole thing is about—isn’t revenge, at least not for its own sake. Playing it that way is sort of like shutting the barn door after horses get out. Me, I’d much rather stop the guy who’s planning on opening the barn door in the first place.”

Brian stared hard at his twin brother for a couple of beats and then shook his head and grinned. “I’ll be damned. Mom always said you were the philosopher of the family. I just never believed her till now.”

“Yeah, yeah ...” Dominic muttered. “Not so much philosophy as math. Kill one, save hundreds or thousands. If we were talking about decent, law-abiding folks, that’d be a harder equation, but they’re not.”

“I agree with him, Jack,” said Brian. “We’ve got a chance to do some real good here. But if you’re thinking about doing this kind of stuff because you think revenge is the answer, or that it’s all James Bond shit—”