Friendly Fire (31 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

B
edlam reigned in the basement holding area of the police station. Uniformed officers swarmed everywhere out in the hallway. “Lock us down!” someone yelled. “Lock us down! Lock us down!”

“Unlock the guns, for God's sake,” someone else shouted.

Ethan felt the panic rising again, and he struggled against the shackles that held him to his bed. “Let me out! I don't want to die like this.”

“Nobody's going to die,” Wendy said, and she winced at the stupidity of her own words. Of course people were going to die. They were dying right now. People were shooting and yelling and dying. “I think we're safe,” she said. “There's a lot of security down here. A lot of doors.” She knew, though, that she looked every bit as terrified as she felt.

“The doors won't lock!” a voice yelled from the hallway.

The gunfire edged closer.

Ethan rattled his bonds. “Let me out of these!” Everything held fast. “Please!”

An explosion rocked the building and the lights went out. Only the dim glow of emergency lights remained.

An instant later, a second explosion might have actually moved the foundation. The shooting stopped for a bit, maybe ten seconds. When it resumed, it did so with double the ferocity.

* * *

Spike and his team had been able to fight their way into the middle of the police station with relatively little resistance. It helped immeasurably that so many of the cops were on the road heading toward the shopping mall, which by now should be empty of assaulters if Drew was able to hold to the plan. The operation was going perfectly. In just a few hours, they would all have shit pots of tax-free money, and the United States would be a different place.

They'd entered through the front doors and moved all the way down the front hallway, engaging only three officers along the way, not counting the one they killed on the front sidewalk. They'd driven down to the chief's office, only to be disappointed that no one was there.

“Did anybody see the chief leave?” he asked the assembled group.

“He's downstairs,” said a female voice from down the hall.

Ten rifles shifted toward her simultaneously.

“No!” she said. “I'm Yolanda! Yolanda Pierce. I'm working with Sergeant Dale. The command staff is either all downstairs in the CTC, or they're on their way to the mall.”

“The CTC?” Spike asked.

“It means Crisis Tactical Center.”

“The jail cells are downstairs, too, aren't they?”

Yolanda pointed behind her, toward a big metal door. “It's down there. I've disabled the locks. Every lock in the building is out of service”

“You did that?” Spike asked.

She beamed.

“Why?”

“We have to take our country back from the police,” she said. “I only work here to do as much harm as I can from the inside. Sergeant Dale and I have been working on this for months.”

“Is Sergeant Dale here?” Spike asked.

“No, he went home. He didn't want to risk being here.” Yolanda seemed proud of her bravery.

“When you think about it,” Spike said, “that was probably a good move.” He raised his rifle to arm's length, holding it like a pistol, and fired a single round through Yolanda's chest.

“Jesus!” someone yelled.

“No choice,” Spike said. “If she'll betray her boss, she'll betray us, too. There's no better way to keep a secret than to kill the bitch who holds it.”

Others on his team seemed shocked.

“Hey, it's war,” Spike said. “People die in war.”

An explosion shook the building, followed a few seconds later by a second one. Bathed in instant darkness, someone yelled, “What the hell was that?”

Spike didn't know for a fact, but he had his suspicions. The cops were somehow mounting a counterassault. “Light!” he shouted. “Give me light!” He twisted his muzzle light to life, and the rest of his team followed suit, their white beams cutting wedges through the dust that had been knocked free by the blasts.

The blasts came from the red side of the building. Spike worked the problem in his head in seconds. There was only one reasonable path of access from there. The counterassault had to come from the front hallway.

“I want a defensive line halfway down this hallway,” he said, indicating the green-side hallway with the beam of his light. “Four people. Haddon, you choose. I don't care. Move quickly. The rest of you on me. We're going to raise some hell downstairs.”

The words had barely cleared his throat when someone opened up on them from the far end of the green-side hallway.

* * *

Jonathan didn't move from his low crouch until he was certain that Big Guy was with him. Movement was awkward thanks to the weight of their firearms, ammunition, and ballistic armor. They went full-soldier, as Jonathan called it, which meant Kevlar lids and plates in their armor that would stop rifle bullets up to 5.56 millimeter.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice said over the radio. “Be advised that with the power down, I'm blind here. I can't help you.”

“Understood,” Jonathan said. “Keep the channel clear, please.”

With his NVGs in place, the darkness looked like green daylight. To increase their advantage, he and Big Guy had each outfitted their long guns with infrared muzzle lights, which worked just like any other flashlight, but with a beam that was visible only to those wearing night vision.

“Moving,” Jonathan said, and he duck-walked to the door that led to the hallway. Each step of the way, he felt Boxers' enormous frame in physical contact with him.

“Covering right,” Jonathan said.

“Covering left.”

“Two, one, now.” With his rifle pressed to his shoulder, Jonathan swept out into the hallway and broke right, while Boxers mirrored his motion to the left.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“I think the action is on the white and green sides, Boss,” Boxers said.

For sure, that was where the shooting was coming from. Jonathan scooted past Big Guy to lead the way. As the shorter man, it made no sense for Jonathan to be in the rear. He led the way to the corner of the front hallway, where he shifted his rifle to his left hand, and peeked around. He saw two bodies on the floor, the warmth of their blood glistening a brighter green in the infrared image, but no one was moving.

“Big Guy, we've got a shitload of offices between us and the green-side hallway where the action is. I say we don't bother to clear them. The bad guys are making an assault, and the only people we'll find hiding are good guys. You concur?”

“So long as they don't shoot at me, we'll be fine.”

Jonathan started down the front hallway. “Watch for cops,” he said. “We're not shooting those.”

“No kiddin'.”

As they got closer to the battle, the concussions of the gunfire grew steadily louder. “The war's around the next corner,” Jonathan said. “Remember we're feds. When we turn the corner, I want to bang 'em. Anybody not in a police uniform but holding a gun gets one chance to drop, and then we kill him.”

A flashbang grenade was a tube of explosive that was designed as a distraction device. As the name implied, a flashbang launched no shrapnel, but it created a blinding flash and a teeth-rattling bang, the combined effects of which generally scared the shit out of everybody in the vicinity. He pulled one from the pouch on the right side of his vest and let his M27 fall against its sling.

They arrived at the white-green corner, and Jonathan could see the strobes of muzzle flashes reflected off of the recently painted walls of the brand-new building. “Okay, here we go,” Jonathan said. “Flashbang away.” He pulled the pin, peeked around the corner to make sure it wasn't going to land in some innocent's lap, and was startled to see that the bad guys had formed a skirmish line across the hallway. More accurately, they were still in the process of forming, dragging desks across the tile to provide themselves with cover. These guys knew what they were doing, and that was never a good sign. They worked in the dark with flashlights, and two shooters already had sights downrange. They lit up Jonathan, flaring his NVGs.

They yelled. Jonathan heard two shots.

* * *

The darkness in the CTC was absolute. Warren heard the breath catch in Janey's throat, and he knew he needed to act quickly to keep her from crossing over into panic. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and swiped it open. It wasn't a lot of light, but it was enough to illuminate the way to the door and pull it open, introducing the dim glow of the battery-powered emergency lights.

Out here, chaos reigned as cops and civilians alike tried to make sense of events. “Everybody calm down!” Warren shouted.

His words seemed to have no impact. People swarmed and swirled in the darkness. They shouted at one another, but no one was listening.

“Hey!” Warren bellowed, and this time people stopped. “This is Chief Michaels, and I want everyone to calm the hell down! Who's the night shift commander down here? I want a status report!”

“Computer controls have all been overridden,” said a voice from the dark. “Every door in the place is unlocked.”

“Is that Sergeant Tobin?” Warren asked. “Everyone else shut up!” He walked toward the source of the voice.

“Yes, sir, this is Tobin.” Neither short nor tall, Tobin had been with the department longer than Warren. He sported a giant gray walrus mustache.

“How many prisoners do we have in custody?” Now that they faced each other, they could speak at a conversational level.

“Just three. Two DUIs and the kid we have to keep long-term. Are we under attack, Chief?”

Upstairs, he heard a gunshot. And then a lot of gunshots.

“It would seem so,” Warren said. “Cut the DUIs loose. Keep an eye on the Falk kid. What is our status on weapons?”

“Weapons lockers are locked shut,” Tobin said. “No one is allowed in here armed, and now we can't get access to the guns officers brought in with them. What few remain, anyway. Most of them are out on the Mason's Corner thing.”

Warren surveyed the area and ran through his options.

“So, you're telling me that my gun is the only firearm down here?”

“Oh, we've got plenty of guns.”

“But the lockers are locked.”

He didn't need an answer from Tobin. “Well, shit,” Warren said.

* * *

Blinded by the flare of his NVGs, Jonathan jumped back as the skirmishers fired. Their rounds went wide, but now they knew where he was, and these walls wouldn't provide any protection against a rifle bullet.

“Full-auto,” he said to Boxers, and then he lobbed his flashbang grenade down the hall without exposing himself.

The confined space of the hallway compounded the loudness of the explosion as sound waves hit solid surfaces and reflected back. When dealing with untrained, unprepared bad guys, the effects of a flashbang could last for twenty, thirty seconds as people struggled to figure out what had just ripped their world apart mid-seam. Against professionals, the disorientation was measured on a far shorter scale, and that time marked the period of Jonathan's maximum advantage.

“Now!” Jonathan said, and he and Big Guy rolled out of concealment and into the hall. They shot the guys with the flashlights first, dropping them both in the first two seconds of the firefight. With the lights out of play, and darkness back on their side, they swept the hall with their IR flashlights and laser sights, and two more men with guns died with a three-round burst.

Less than ten seconds into the fight, the keepers of the barricade were all dead. Jonathan wasn't sure that any of them fired a defensive shot. But past the dead men, Jonathan saw someone duck behind a door. If he remembered the floor plan correctly, that was the door to the secure areas of the basement.

“FBI!” Jonathan bellowed. “Everybody down! Show me your hands!” It was the ruse that would, in theory, keep them from getting nailed by the good guys. He and Big Guy advanced in unison, guns up and ready.

“FBI! Don't move!”

Ahead on the right, the heavy door to the basement had been propped open. As he approached, Jonathan sensed movement from offices on either side of the hall, but all he could afford was a casual glance to see if they were friends or foes. None of them made threatening movements, so he left them alone.

The decision not to confront the occupants and secure them was a huge departure from tactical doctrine. Any one of them could be a bad guy, after all, and if so, all he would have to do was wait till Jonathan and Boxers passed and then step out and whack them from behind. Jonathan hoped that the fact that he was on the side of the angels would work to his benefit with whoever ran God's luck department, and he'd get a break.

“Don't any of you shoot me in the back,” Big Guy shouted, “or I swear to God I will tear you in half and sell you for parts!” Leave it to Boxers to take a more direct approach.

When they arrived at the heavy door, Jonathan opened it a little wider, and dared a peek. “We've got two more shooters at the bottom of the steps. They're waiting for us.”

* * *

Warren realized that his options had boiled down to one. “Sergeant Tobin,” he said, “I want everyone out of here.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Out,” Warren said. “Cut the prisoners loose, and get everybody else outside to safety. Go out through the sally port.”

When Tobin didn't respond in half a second, Warren announced his decision to everyone else. “Everybody out! Right now! I want this station cleared of all personnel, cops and civilians alike.” It was the smart play, perhaps the only one. Bad guys taking over the police station was bad press no matter how you cut it. But fear of bad PR was no reason to let innocents die.