The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Coke loaded a fresh magazine. He was shifting his aim to the third office when a figure ran out of the burning center cubicle. He swung the heavy muzzle back as his finger took up slack on the powergun’s trigger.

A woman, stark naked and screaming. She held a bandeau top in her left hand. No threat, no danger.

Coke aimed past her at the remaining office. He stroked his trigger twice to flush out anyone hiding there.

Niko Daun stepped alongside his commander. He fired at least half his sub-machine gun’s magazine into the screaming woman. Gobbets of flesh and bone spewed away like wood chipped by the teeth of a router. She spun back into the flames of the office from which she’d fled.

“I got him!” Niko shouted. “I got him!”

The lead truck hit the opening hard enough to jounce the double doors nearly open. The driver managed not to stall his motor. He backed a few meters and accelerated again, cutting his wheels to slide the left door back against its stops.

Nobody else came out of the offices. A body lay in the corner away from the cubicles. As Vierziger entered the building, he’d dropped the fellow. Coke hadn’t noticed him before.

Sprinklers opened above the burning offices. They were fed by standpipes in the roof, even though the pumped water system went off when the power did. Coke surveyed the ceiling, then put a bolt into the end of each standpipe where it joined the front wall of the warehouse. He fired until he’d emptied the 2-cm weapon’s magazine, then reloaded again. Water gushed down the inner wall and splashed across the concrete floor. There it could do nothing to affect the flames.

“All clear in back!” Vierziger reported over channel three. Several quick bursts of sub-machine gun fire snarled from the rear of the warehouse. “All clear in back!” Vierziger repeated, simultaneous with another burst.

Steam and smoke billowed from the burning office cubicles. Another Astra truck drove into the warehouse. Its headlights brightened the gray mist but did little to illuminate the building’s interior. The Astra gunmen didn’t have night vision equipment. They shouted to one another in anger and confusion.

The gage was in double-walled 150-liter plastic drums. For shipment, the drug was dissolved in a matrix of ethyl alcohol. Because Coke knew what to look for, he could already see the fires started at the back of the warehouse where Vierziger had raked pallets with his sub-machine gun.

“I’m coming out!” Vierziger called over the unit push. “Do not shoot, I’m coming out!”

Coke grabbed the foregrip of Niko Daun’s sub-machine gun and lifted the muzzle high. The sensor tech might not have heard the warning, might not have understood it—might have dropped his gun on the concrete and triggered a shot wholly by accident. Firefights weren’t Daun’s proper job, so it was the commander’s duty to see that no accidents occurred.

Adolpho Peres swung down from the cab of the second truck. He wore body armor and a helmet that must have weighed nearly ten kilos. “Start loading the gage!” he bellowed. “We can’t wait around here long!”

The gigolo waved his machine pistol. He turned his head as he spoke. Coke stepped toward him, releasing Daun.

Peres saw the motion past the edge of the helmet’s cheek plate. He must have thought he was being attacked, because he tried to swing the gun onto the Frisian.

“I’m a friend!” Coke shouted as he lunged forward. Instead of directing the weapon upward as he’d done with his own trooper, he jerked the machine pistol out of Peres’ hand. “We’ve killed them all for you!”

The office cubicles were fully involved by now, hammering the men in the front of the warehouse. The right side of the ram-equipped truck was only a few meters from the fire. The plastic body panels started to soften; bubbles appeared on the front fender.

“Who?” Peres shouted. “Coke, is that you? Manuel!”

The last call was for the gigolo’s bodyguard, a man nearly as tall as Sten Moden and broad in proportion. Coke saw Manuel’s vast, weapon-festooned bulk several meters away, groping in what was for him a gray fog. Vierziger’s assessment of the big man was that a gun-jeep had more brain cells and could carry even more weapons—but that choice was for Peres to worry about.

Johann Vierziger stepped up on the Astra leader’s other side. “I’m here, Matthew,” he said. “Now let’s get out of these gentlemen’s way, shall we?”

“Peres, we’ll leave you to load the gage,” Coke shouted in the gigolo’s ear. “We’ll meet you tomorrow morning to arrange contract terms!”

The warehouse had become a steambath because the heat boiled water off the concrete. The flow from the sprinklers had decayed to irregular dribbles, noticeable only if a drop happened to splash you from above.

“Yes, of course,” Peres replied. He snatched his helmet off in frustration at its weight and the degree to which it limited his range of vision—not that he was going to be able to see much more without it. “Manuel! Sanjulio!”