Last Man Standing (5 page)

The man continued. “London’s got a hell of a lot of explaining to do. And we’re going into this investigation with our eyes
wide
open, a lot more wide open than last night. Last night was a disgrace. Last night will never, ever happen again. Not on my
watch.” He stared hard at Bates and then said with sarcasm driven home with a sledgehammer, “Give London my best.” With that,
Buck Winters, head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, stalked off, followed by his two robotic escorts.

Bates gazed with loathing at the man’s back. Buck Winters had been one of the principal frontline supervisors at Waco and
had, in Bates’s opinion, contributed to the eventual carnage with his ineptness. Then, in the funny way of big organizations,
Winters had received promotion after promotion for his incompetence until he had reached the top of WFO. Maybe the Bureau
was just unwilling to admit it had messed up and believed that promoting from the ranks of the leadership of the Waco fiasco
was a strong message to the world that the Bureau considered itself blameless. Eventually, many heads had rolled because of
the flameout of David Koresh in Texas, but Buck Winters’s head was still firmly attached to his shoulders. For Percy Bates,
Buck Winters represented much that was wrong with the FBI.

Bates leaned against the wall, crossed his arms and chewed his Wrigley’s so hard his teeth hurt. He was certain that old Buck
would be running off to confer with the FBI director, the attorney general, probably even the President. Well, let him, so
long as they all kept out of Percy Bates’s way.

The group of men slithered away singly and in pairs until just Bates and the uniformed guard remained. Finally Bates moved
off too, hands in his pockets, gaze fixed on nothing. On the way out he spit his gum into the trash can. “Assholes and idiots,”
he said. “Assholes and idiots.”

W
eb, dressed in a set of blue surgery scrubs, carried a bag with his personal belongings and stared at the sunlit sky that
filled the window of his hospital room. The layers of gauze around his wounded hand were irritating; he felt like he was wearing
a boxing glove.

He was about to open the door to leave when it opened all by itself. At least that’s what Web thought until the man appeared
there.

“What are you doing here, Romano?” said Web in surprise.

The man didn’t acknowledge Web right away. He was just under six feet tall, about one-eighty, very powerful-looking in a wiry
way. He had dark wavy hair and wore an old leather jacket, a Yankees baseball cap and jeans. His FBI shield was pinned to
his belt; the grip of a pistol poked out from its clip holster.

Romano looked Web up and down until his gaze came to rest on the man’s bandaged hand. He pointed at it. “Is that it? Is that
your damn
wound
?”

Web looked at his hand and then back at Romano. “Would it make you happier if the hole was in my head?”

Paul Romano was an assaulter assigned to Hotel Team. He was one very intimidating guy among many such folks and you always
knew where you stood with the man, which was usually nowhere good. He and Web had never been close—principally, Web thought,
because Web had been shot up more than he had, and Romano strongly resented the perception that Web was more heroic or tougher.

“I’m only going to ask you this once, Web, and I want it straight, man. You bullshit me and I’ll pop you myself.”

Web looked down at the guy and stepped a bit closer so that his height advantage was even more evident. He knew this ticked
off Romano too. “Gee, Paulie, did you bring me some candy and flowers too?”

“Just give it to me straight, Web.” He paused and then asked, “Did you wimp out?”

“Yeah, Paulie, those guns somehow shot themselves all up.”

“I know about that. I meant before that. When Charlie Team went down. You weren’t with them. Why?”

Web felt his face growing warm and he hated himself for it. Romano usually couldn’t get to him. Yet the truth was, Web didn’t
know what to tell the man.

“Something happened, Paulie, in my head. I don’t know exactly what. But I didn’t have anything to do with the ambush, in case
you suddenly lost your mind and were thinking that.”

Romano shook his head. “I wasn’t thinking you turned traitor, Web, just that you turned chickenshit.”

“If that’s all you came to tell me, then you can go on and get the hell out now.”

Romano looked him up and down again and Web felt like less and less of a man with each pronounced glare. Without a word, Romano
turned and left. Web would have preferred the man had exited on the heel of another insult rather than silence.

Web waited another few minutes and then opened the door.

“What are you doing up?” asked the surprised guard.

“Docs discharged me, didn’t they tell you?”

“Nobody told me anything like that.”

Web held up his bandaged hand. “Government isn’t paying for another night on account of a scratched hand. And damn if I’m
paying the difference on my paycheck.” Web didn’t know the guard, but he seemed like the type to be sympathetic to such a
commonsense plea. Web didn’t wait to get an answer but just walked off. He knew the guard had no grounds to stop him. All
he would do was communicate this development to his superiors, which he was assuredly doing right now.

Web ducked out a side exit, found a phone, called a buddy and an hour later he was inside his split-level thirty-year-old
rancher in a quiet Woodbridge, Virginia, suburb. He changed into jeans, loafers and a navy blue sweatshirt, ripped off the
gauze and replaced it with a single Band-Aid of blazing symbolism. He wanted no pity from anyone, not with six of his closest
friends right now lying in the morgue.

He checked his messages. There weren’t any of importance, yet he knew that would change. He unlocked a firebox, pulled out
his spare nine-millimeter and thrust it into his belt holster. Although he had not technically shot anyone, this was still
an SRB—or Shooting Review Board—matter now, since Web had most definitely fired his weapons. They had confiscated his guns,
which was akin to taking his hands. Next, they had advised him of his rights and he had given them a statement. It was all
standard, by-the-books practice and yet it still made him feel like a criminal. Well, he wasn’t about to walk around without
hardware. He was paranoid by nature, and the massacre of his team had made him a walking schizoid, capable of seeing real
threats in babies and bunnies.

He went out to the garage, cranked up his 1978 coal-black Ford Mach One and headed out.

Web had two vehicles: the Mach, and an ancient and iron-gutted Suburban that had carried him and his Charlie Team to many
Redskin football games, to the beaches in Virginia and Maryland, to beer-drinking outings and on assorted other manly campaigns
up and down the East Coast. Each guy had had his own assigned seat in the Suburban, based on seniority and ability, which
was the way everything was divvied up where Web worked. What outstanding times they had had in the big machine. Now Web wondered
how much cash he could get for the Suburban, because he didn’t see himself driving the beast anymore.

He jumped on Interstate 95, headed north and fought through the obstacle course that was the Springfield Interchange, which
apparently had been designed by a highway engineer strung out on cocaine. Now that it was undergoing a major overhaul scheduled
to last at least ten years, the driver navigating it each day had the option of laughing or crying as years of his life slipped
by while the traffic’s progress was measured in inches. Web sailed over the Fourteenth Street Bridge, cleared the Northwest
quadrant where all the major monuments and tourist dollars were kept and was quickly in a not-so-nice part of town.

Web was an FBI special agent, but he did not see himself as such. First and foremost he was a Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) operator,
the Bureau’s elite crisis response group. He didn’t dress in suits. He didn’t spend much time with fellow agents outside HRT.
He didn’t arrive on the crime scene after all the bullets had stopped flying. He was usually there from the get-go, running,
dodging, firing, wounding and occasionally killing. There were only fifty HRT operators, because the selection process was
so grueling. The average time at HRT was five years. Web had bucked that trend and was going on his eighth year of duty. It
seemed that HRT was being called upon a lot more often these days and to hot spots all over the world, with HRT’s unwritten
policy of being wheels up in four hours from Andrews Air Force Base. Well, the curtain had fallen on his part of that show.
Web was teamless now.

It had never occurred to Web that he would be the sole survivor of anything. It just didn’t seem in his nature. They all had
joked about it, even had morbid betting pools on who would die one moonless night. Web had almost always been first on the
list, because he always seemed to be first in the line of fire. Now it was torturing Web, though, not knowing what had gotten
between him and the seventh coffin. And the only thing worse than the guilt was the shame.

He pulled the Mach to the curb and got out at the barricade. He showed his ID to the men posted there, who were all stunned
to see him. Web ducked down the alley before the army of reporters could glom on to him. They had been reporting live here
since the massacre from their tall-mast satellite broadcast trucks. Web had caught some of the news from the hospital. They
were feeding the public the same facts over and over, using their little charts and pictures, and sporting their little dour
expressions, and saying things like, “That’s all we know right now. But stay with us, I’m certain we’ll have more later, even
if we have to make the shit up. Back to you, Sue.” Web jogged down the alley.

Last night’s storm had long since blown itself into the Atlantic. The air pushing behind it was cooler than the city had had
in a while. Built on a swamp, Washington, D.C., handled heat and humidity better than cold and snow. When the snow fell, the
only street likely to be cleared was the one in your dreams.

He ran into Bates halfway down the alley.

“What in the hell are you doing here?” Bates said.

“You said you wanted my take on things, so I’m here to give it to you.” Bates glanced at Web’s hand. “Let’s get going, Perce.
Every minute counts.”

From the exact spot where the Chevy had dropped them off, Web retraced the steps of his squad. With every stride Web took
toward the target, he could feel both his anger and his fear swell. The bodies were gone; the blood was not. Even the hard
rain apparently was incapable of clearing it all away. In his mind, Web blitzed through every move he had made, every emotion
he had felt.

The ruined machine gun nests were being dismantled and examined by a team of people who consistently pulled legal convictions
out of microscopic scraps. Others walked the square courtyard kneeling, stooping, tagging things, probing and basically looking
for answers from objects that did not appear willing to give any. Watching them, Web was not confident. It was highly unlikely
that crystal-clear tented arches and plain whorls were just waiting around on the guns to be plucked by the fingerprint techs.
Whoever had planned this intricate ambush wouldn’t be that careless. He stepped between the bloodstains like he was tiptoeing
around a graveyard, and wasn’t he really?

“Windows were painted black so the guns couldn’t be spotted until they started firing. No light reflections off barrels, no
nothing,” said Bates.

“Nice to know we were done in by professionals,” replied Web bitterly.

“You did a number on the fifties.” Bates pointed to one of the ruined weapons.

“An SR75 will do that for you.”

“They’re mini-guns, military design. Six-barrel Gatling style, tripod-mounted with the pods bolted to the floor so the firing
position wouldn’t deviate. There were feeder box and conveyor belt attachments and four thousand linked rounds per gun. Firing
rates were set at four hundred a minute, though its maximum setting is eight thousand.”

“Four hundred was plenty. And there were eight guns. That’s thirty-two hundred slugs flying at you every sixty seconds. I
know because all except one ricochet missed me by a few inches.”

“With that low firing rate those guns could shoot a long time.” “They did.”

“Power drive was electric, and they were chambering armor-piercing rounds.”

Web just shook his head. “Did you find what tripped them?”

Bates led him over to a brick wall on the side farthest from the alley Web had come down. It was part of the building perpendicularly
placed to the targeted abandoned tenement house and the source of one-half of the firing arc that had wiped out Charlie, save
Web. What was invisible in the dark was only a bit more apparent in the daylight.

Web knelt down and looked at what he recognized as a laser device. A small hole had been punched in the brick and the laser
point and power pack inserted into it. The hole was deeper than the power pack so that once inside the hole, it was pretty
much invisible. The snipers wouldn’t have been able to ID it from where they had their posts set up, even if they had been
looking for such a thing, and their intelligence had given them no indication of it, as far as Web knew. The path of the laser
was knee height and the invisible light stream no doubt had run across the courtyard when activated.

“Beam breaks, firing starts and doesn’t stop except for a few seconds’ pause after each cycle until the ammo’s gone.” He looked
around in bewilderment. “What if a dog or cat or somebody just strolling by here tripped the laser before we got there?”

From Bates’s expression, it was clear he had already considered this possibility. “I’m thinking people were discreetly warned
to stay away. Animals are another issue. So I’m thinking the laser was armed via remote.”

Web rose. “So they waited until we were just about there before activating the laser. That means the person would have to
be reasonably close by.”