Gun Work

Five deadbolts threw back and a squeaky latch was undogged.

At the first crack of dim light from within, several things happened simultaneously. Barney hit the door full force, wedging the briefcase into the crack and prying a foot of open space. Karlov and Armand were already behind him, guns up. Sirius barreled through last, making Barney’s impact with the door and his own into one sustained breach. The bandana-wearing creep inside the door was propelled against the far wall in a narrow corridor, and was already bringing a nasty-looking .45 revolver into play. Sirius was quicker with his own .45, a Para-Ordnance Tac-Five LDA from which Karlov had removed the grip safety. He had two of them. Sirius dealt the slide to the guy’s skull, a left-right combo that rocked him like a bobble-head doll and rolled his eyeballs up into nighty-night.

They were bulling right into a range instructor’s nightmare: Unknown space in hallways always constituted a kill zone, and this one went in two directions, making a linear entry per the designates of close-quarter combat impossible. The goal is always to “collapse” the space — that is, mass your fire and visually pick up threats as fast as possible.

Barney had gone low to cover right while Armand slipped behind Sirius to cover left. Karlov backed through last, covering their backsides, stepping over the unconscious mug on the floor, as both ends of the hallway began to fill with armed men shouting alarm.

This was what Barney’s team had come for. Hitting a paper target is one thing. Winning a combat competition on a freestyle range against plywood jump-up assailants is another. Stalking and shooting a game animal, same-same. Hitting a moving target in gunfire and chaos, a target that is shooting back at you, is quite a different thing altogether, a biochemical state of mind/body fusion that cannot be simulated, at least not in the ways that count.

Each man was fit enough to recover solid shooting positions multiple times during an engagement, therefore healthy enough to affect quicker healing if hit. You don’t rely on the weapon to solve all your problems; you need strength, stamina, endurance, speed and the ability to “see before shooting” — that is, process threat information faster than your opponent — as well as the golden rule of servicing a bad guy: Shoot until they drop. This was the difference between live-fire training and real life; between a shooting and a gunfight. A shooting is unidirectional. A gunfight happens when the thing you are shooting at has the ability to shoot back.

A slug from a pocket pistol zinged off the wall near Sirius’ head as Karlov slammed and latched the door. Barney already had the shooter so framed he did not need his sights, put two in his chest from the SIG, and watched the man’s flung pistol bounce off the ceiling as his buddies hared back to cover. Armand did not wait to be shot at, and emptied the cylinder of his behemoth Ruger at the far end of his zone in a circular pattern that convinced a lot of people to be somewhere else. Through the gunsmoke Barney picked out an arm hit, a leg hit, and another uncertain — three down from the destructive power of a full-charge .44 Magnum cartridge meant three that would not come back into gunplay.

They moved as a group toward the Barney side of the hall with hard practical cover in all directions. Armand ejected his spent brass and nearly fumbled his speedloader. His hands were shaking, not with fear or incompetence, but excitement.

The initial response group, ragged and disorganized, was mostly retreating across a large interior atrium, just the sort of open space Barney had predicted the building would have. Sporadic gunfire came back at them, but it was unaimed, over-the-shoulder stuff. Barney popped one guy’s hogleg right out of his hand, then looked up to witness the spectacle of Karlov, arms extended, firing in two directions at once with his twin nine-millimeters — back the way they came and ahead of them, and scoring crippling hits both ways. A bouncing piece of hot brass jabbed Barney’s cheek.

Then somebody opened up on them from the second floor with more serious artillery, a full-sized Uzi carbine from the sound and delivery. Apparently the shooter did not care that Uzis tend to pull up and to the right on full-auto fire, and a double tap from Sirius’ .45 put the man away before he could correct his aim.

Karlov took two more stragglers from a kneeling position as Sirius fired over his head. Barney indicated a stairway to the second floor, and Sirius moved on it, Armand second. Incoming fire was light and undisciplined. Somehow Barney had expected these guys to be better shots, but then he remembered how they had handled machine guns at the bridge.