Killer Instincts v5 (31 page)

 This was probably the most awful thing I’d ever seen, more horrible and grotesque than the damage my shotgun had done to the men inside the Cadillac. That, at least, had been over in a couple of seconds. This struggle seemed to last forever, but I thought at least we’d managed to kill the guard quietly, until his flailing foot made contact with the coffee table. With a loud
thunk
, the table flipped over, the remote controls clattering onto the hardwood floor, the pump shotgun making a racket as it landed and slid several inches.

Almost immediately, I heard a creak from the second floor, and a bedroom door opened. A voice boomed down the stairs.

“Hey Marco, you fucking asshole! I don’t care if you’re jerking off to your titty teevee, but I’m trying to fucking sleep up here! Stop knocking shit around!”

I poked my head around and looked at Jamie, who was wiping his knife on the sofa and keeping the guard still while the man made his last feeble movements, the pulsing blood now slowed to a trickle. Marco’s shirt, shorts, and most of the sofa were soaked with dark crimson. The odor of hot, freshly-spilled blood finally hit me, and I clamped my jaw against the reflexive desire to gag from the smell.

Jamie’s eyes darted to the stairs, and he pointed up with his knife and jerked it in the air several times, mimicking gunfire.

“Hey, Marco? What the fuck, asshole. You finished whacking off? I need to take a piss, and I don’t want to see your teenie weenie waving around when I come down there.”

I heard a couple of footsteps. A stair creaked, then another.

“Marco? You in the shitter now?”

I felt the fire selector with my thumb, making sure it was set to full-auto. Then I stepped back from the stairs, brought the Uzi up and pointed in the right direction, and shifted my position half a foot to my right. The moment I laid eyes on the man up the stairs my gun was already on target. He was another big guy, shorter and paunchier than the man on the couch, but strong-looking, with powerful muscles under a layer of middle-aged fat. During his prime, he was probably a terror in a back-alley scrap, but now he was about to become dog meat.

I squeezed the Uzi’s trigger and stitched him with a half-dozen slugs from crotch to throat. Even suppressed, the Uzi’s roar was still surprisingly loud in the confined staircase. The man jerked from the impacts and collapsed, tumbling down the stairs like a bag of bowling balls until he sprawled across the floor at my feet, twitching and bleeding out. I brought the Uzi around and fired a burst of three slugs through the back of his head, fragments of skull and flesh scattering across the hardwood floor.

Jamie looked at me from across the two dead bodies.

“I think you got him, killer.”

“You can never be sure,” I replied.

We stood there, stock-still and silent, for two solid minutes, listening and waiting. Just because our intelligence had told us there were only two men in the cottage at any one time, that didn’t necessarily mean it was true tonight.

Finally Jamie looked at me and nodded.

“I think we’re clear here. Someone would have made a move by now.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

Jamie took his hand off the face of the dead man on the couch, wiping his hand across a clean patch of sofa fabric to clean some of the blood from his glove, then sheathing his fighting knife with the other hand.

“Now, we set up the RF scrambler, and make our move.”

I unslung the heavy case from my shoulder and set it on the kitchen table next to all the security monitors and VHS decks. Jamie opened the case. The controls seemed simple; a timer, a duration counter, and an activation switch.

“I’m not going to bother setting a delay. We’ll just fire it up and let it run until it drains the battery.”

“I’m sure it’ll help some, but isn’t this going to be a valuable piece of evidence when the police finally come along?” I asked.

Jamie smiled and flipped the case over. There was a panel on the bottom, which he popped open. A rectangular metal object was fitted into the base of the scrambler, a pin fitted through a gap had a pull-ring at the end.

“That looks like a grenade pin,” I said.

“Because that’s sort of what it is,” Jamie said. He pulled the pin and I heard a ping from inside the metal object.

“What did you just do?” I asked, suddenly nervous.

“Armed a thermite charge. When the battery winds itself down in roughly an hour, it won’t be able to keep a pair of contacts apart, and when the circuit closes, that charge will ignite. This thing will be a puddle of molten metal twenty seconds later.”

“I’m guessing anything around it...”

“Yeah, it’ll burn this fucker to the ground. So long incriminating evidence. This bastard burns at a couple thousand degrees. They aren’t getting shit outta this place.”

Jamie extended the antenna from the scrambler and flipped it on. Immediately, the monitors all went slightly fuzzy, the electromagnetic interference so strong this close that even wired electronics were being affected. Jamie took the scrambler and set it behind the table, tucked inconspicuously away where no one would pay it any attention.

“Will it knock out their cameras?” I asked.

“No, they might get a little snowy. Probably not enough to help us.”

“So what do we do?”

Jamie smiled, unslinging his Uzi and bringing it up in both hands.

“As they used to say, ‘hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle’.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“William, with the two of us on point, they don’t have a fucking chance.”

TWENTY-THREE

We walked out of the house and began to move up the drive, a distance of five feet between us to keep from advancing too close together. Jamie swapped out his partially-emptied magazine for a fresh one, and I did the same.

As we moved through the darkness, Jamie spoke to me in a hushed tone, his eyes gleaming in the starlight.

“In 1970, I was twenty-one when I went into Laos as the second in command of a SOG recon team. We hunted the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, in a country that denied they existed there. When we found them, we would call in airstrikes, or Hatchet Force assault teams, whole platoons or companies of Green Berets and Montagnard tribesmen; those little guys were some of the most fearless motherfuckers you’d ever see.

“This time, a team of us, three Green Berets and five ‘Yards, we choppered into Laos, hunting for the enemy. Twelve minutes after we hit the ground we found ‘em, a whole battalion of NVA, probably expecting us. Army intelligence was so riddled with South Vietnamese who were paid off or North Vietnamese agents who’d slipped in, the NVA often knew where the recon teams were going before we did.

“Within the first thirty seconds, two of us were dead and two more hit so badly I knew they weren’t making it out alive. I was the only Beret still standing, so we tried to drag our wounded with one hand while laying down fire with the other, our rifles smoking and steaming as we burned ammo. Both wounded caught lead as we tried to make it out, almost a relief since if we had kept trying to get them out, we’d all have been killed.

“So we ran, and fought, and ran some more. Twelve hours, and by the end I was left with half a mag and my pistol was dry, and we scrambled onto a Huey that took so many hits getting us out, it crash landed in South Vietnam, so we had to be picked up by another slick. All that was left of the recon team was me and one wounded ‘Yard, and I had taken a bullet fragment through my calf that bled like a bitch.“

Jamie stopped walking, then he turned and looked at me. His features were alive, more alive than I’ve ever seen him before in my life.

“But we fucking made it out, the two of us against five hundred men. That shit was the stuff of legends: fucking Thermopylae, Agincourt, Antietam, Bastogne, all rolled into one. I know for a fact I killed thirty-two men that day, wounds they couldn’t walk away from. Who knows how many more that I didn’t know for sure.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“That was my zenith, my greatest battle. I fought men before and after that day, but nothing will compare to what we did during those hours in the jungle. I have always looked back and relived that moment in my mind, countless times, and secretly I wished I could go back in time and fight that day again, over and over like my own Valhalla, fighting all day and drinking all night until the end of time.”

A chill of fear ran up my spine. Had Jamie finally cracked after all these years? He stepped over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and looked me in the eye.

“Well, that was then. But what we do tonight, it makes all that pale. We are avenging our family, just like you wanted, like I wanted to do, but I couldn’t face that truth. I had been through so much war and death, I was a goddamned coward. But you, so young and innocent, you were more than ready to leap right into the mouth of Hell, and in the end I knew I couldn’t live with myself even if you came through it alive. So we do this together, the last of our family. I’m proud to be here with you at the end.”

I could feel the tears in my eyes, and I saw them run down Jamie’s own face.

I moved to embrace my uncle when I heard a door slam open. We turned in the direction of the mansion, perhaps sixty feet away, and saw the front door wide open, a man standing on the porch, a shotgun in his hands. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing slacks and shoes but only a t-shirt, he was obviously one of the Paggiano’s security guards.

“Hey, who the fuck are you?” he shouted, racking the shotgun’s slide but failing to bring his weapon to bear.

Big fucking mistake.

Jamie winked at me, then turned to face the man.

“Hey, don’t worry, we’re the travel agency!” Jamie shouted back.

“The fuck you talking about, travel agency?” the man hollered, taking two steps down from the porch.

I brought the Uzi up. The man gawked. His shotgun moved, far too slow. A three-round burst knocked him back, sent him sliding down the steps to the granite walkway below.

We sprinted the distance, guns up, scanning the windows and the doorway for any threat. By the time we reached the foot of the porch, the man had managed to prop himself up on an elbow, his white shirt soaked in blood, dark foam bubbling from his lips. I could see the question in his eyes. I leveled the submachine gun in his face.

“We’re sending you all to Hell.”

The Uzi snarled.

There were footsteps coming from inside the front door, shoes slapping against a hardwood floor. Muzzle blasts disintegrated the cut and frosted glass windows that decorated either side of the doorway. Pistol fire sent slugs whining past us, fanning the air so close I thought I could feel it. Jamie and I threw ourselves out of the way, each of us jumping in a different direction. I rolled across the dew-wet grass, brought the Uzi up, and riddled the front of the porch with two dozen slugs. Paint chips, splintered wood, and shattered glass went spinning through the air. I made out a man’s holler of pain and somewhere more distant, I heard a woman’s scream from deep within the house.

I got to one knee and fumbled for a full magazine, drawing it from my vest, slapping it home, and racking back the bolt. Jamie was on his feet, putting burst after burst of auto-fire through the doorway.

“Into the breach!” he shouted at me.

I scrambled to my feet. There was movement at the doorway, but I couldn’t make out what was going on. We moved up the porch, one of us on either side, weapons at the ready. Jamie glanced through and fired a long burst diagonally across the doorway. I heard a thump, a cough, and a gurgle.

“Left side clear,” he announced.

I looked through the doorway from behind the cover of the exterior wall. There was a hallway leading into the house, with a sitting room a short distance inside. Narrow hallways led away from the left and right side of the front entrance. The right hand hallway was empty. I nodded to Jamie.

“Clear on the right,” I said.

“In we go,” Jamie said, and stepped through the doorway, Uzi up and moving everywhere he looked.

I followed him in, a step behind and to the left, my own weapon up and following my eye-line. I saw a younger man, probably in his early 30s, sprawled in the left-hand corridor, a stainless steel automatic next to his hand. He had two bullet wounds in his left thigh, and most of his face and upper chest were shot away. From up above, we could hear shouting and running footsteps, doors slamming and heavy objects dragging across hardwood floors.

“They’re barricading themselves into a room,” I said.

Jamie shook his head. “Only the women and children. The rest are going to come for us. They can’t button up. Even these chatterboxes will shoot right through interior walls. We’d just dump a few mags in and rip them apart.”

We advanced through the short hallway and into the beautifully furnished parlor at the end. To our left, I could see the grand staircase leading up to the second floor. Light was coming from silver wall sconces and a crystal chandelier illuminating the whole room. I felt awkward and exposed. Reaching ahead of me, I turned off the parlor lights with a nearby wall switch.

The deafening boom of a shotgun came from the top of the stairs, ripping through the wall right above the light switch. If I hadn’t reached out, and instead stood in front of the switch, the buckshot would have ripped out my throat.

“They know where all the light switches are,” Jamie said. “This is their house, remember that. Indian territory.”

I crouched down low, edged an eye around the wall. I saw a man in a bathrobe kneeling at the top of the stairs, a riot-style pump shotgun in his hands. The muzzle flashed and buckshot shot tore up the hardwood floor an inch from my knee, the muzzle blast so loud I could feel the air buffet my face like a hurled pillow. I rolled back out of the way a second before another load of buckshot punched a fist-sized hole in the wall.

Jamie waited until the next shot came, then he stepped out and calmly ripped two quick bursts into the man in the bathrobe before he could rack the shotgun’s slide. The pump-gun clattered down the stairs, the action left open. The man had flopped backwards, slipper-shod feet hanging over the top steps. Jamie reloaded his Uzi and motioned me forward.