Hostage Zero

The chopper was moving again, circling around to hover over the clearing between the house and the tree line. It was a fairly old-style Bell Jet Ranger, popular among police forces in the 1990s, and it had no markings that showed it to be anything other than a private aircraft. The chopper pivoted in the air, bringing its port side parallel to the trees, its nose pointed directly at Gail and Navarro.

She could see the pilots clearly through the windscreen-so clearly, in fact, that she wondered how they were not seen in return. Then she got it: they were surveying the damage they’d wrought.

Navarro raised his rifle. “Let’s take them out.”

“No!” Gail snapped. Her mind raced to review their options. This was their perfect moment of advantage. The aircraft was completely vulnerable. If they opened fire now, they could knock it out of the sky and neutralize the danger. Except they didn’t have cause. They were not in imminent danger, and every professional law enforcement officer knew that in the absence of immediate threat, deadly force could not be used. It was always a last resort. That’s the way things worked in an ordered, civilized society. There was always another way. Always a better option than killing, right up until the moment that those options proved impossible.

A man with a rifle appeared in the Jet Ranger’s open side door. He raised the weapon to his shoulder and opened fire, blasting bullet after bullet into the smoldering, ravaged remains of what had been their hiding place.

Fuck it.

Gail brought her AR-10 to bear. “You take the pilots,” she said. “I’ll take the shooter.” Without waiting for an answer, she steadied her rifle against the trunk of her sheltering tree and lined up for a slam-dunk fifty-yard sure thing. She double-checked the firing selector to make sure it was set to single-fire, she corrected for the downwash of the rotors, squeezed the trigger and-

Navarro opened up on full-auto, emptying his twenty-round magazine in less than two seconds, and filling the air with twenty deadly projectiles that hit nothing. Nothing! Jesus, how was that even possible?

Gail’s shot went high and right, harmlessly shattering the window of the open sliding door.

The pilot reacted instantly, pouring on power and pitch. The nose dipped dramatically-perilously, Gail thought-as the rotor blades dug deeply into the air and pulled the aircraft up and away with amazing speed. Buffeted by the downwash, she tried to react, shifting her aim to the cockpit, but she wasn’t fast enough. She fired three shots in their direction, but they were wasted. She was reasonably sure that she hit the chopper somewhere, but if she’d done any damage, it would have been from pure luck. As the aircraft pulled up and away, the pilot also slipped it sideways, a combat tactic that made even a relatively slow target like a chopper difficult to hit with ground fire. She considered firing again but decided against it. Chances of a kill shot had dropped to nothing, and even out here, all those bullets had to come down somewhere.

To her right, Navarro finished reloading and shouldered his rifle again.

Gail slapped the muzzle down. “What was that?” she yelled. “How do you miss something that big when it’s that close?”

Navarro’s face glowed an unnatural red as he shouted back, “I was a little stressed, okay? I’ve never tried to shoot anything down before. What about you, Miss Expert? You didn’t do any better. I say we make a run for it.”

“To where?”

“To anywhere. You’ve got your truck, and I’ve got mine. We just get in and drive.”

“Not with them in the air,” Gail said, rejecting the plan out of hand. “Any advantage we have is tied to our mobility. A car is dependent on roads, and roads bring predictability. That’s the last thing we need.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait to see what they’re going to do, and then react.”

She led the way deeper into the woods, and then left, back toward their first hiding place. Drawing on her HRT counter-sniper training, she knew that that people on the move tend to stick to one direction, rarely doubling back.

“Why are we going back this way?” Navarro asked.

“Because we are,” she said. Sometimes the simplest answers were the best ones.

They both paused and gasped in unison as they passed by the ravaged section of woods that had been ground zero for the grenade attack. The earth had been ripped open, and tree roots avulsed from the dark soil. Hundreds of white gashes showed the tearing force of the fragmentation explosives against the tree trunks. Looking at the damage made her leg hurt even more. It had gone from a searing sting to a dull vibrant ache. Almost without thinking, she dared to touch the fabric of her denim jeans, but regretted it when she saw her wet, red fingertips.

“We’re not there yet,” she said, and she nudged Navarro on with a gentle push on his shoulder.

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll know it when we see it,” she lied. What she meant was, Anywhere but here.