True Faith and Allegiance

Jack raised the Romanian pistol as the first man came around the back of the van, lined the front sight up with his target’s center mass, and opened fire. His weapon, in contrast to the one wielded by the armed man in the trees, was not suppressed. It exploded in the night, but he struck home with both shots of his double tap, and the armed man staggered back and fell onto his back in the road.

The second man fired reactively in Jack’s direction, but missed wide with both shots. Jack returned fire at the flash, but did so as he was crouching lower, and his shots shattered the windshield of the police car behind the van.

Suddenly cracks of gunfire came from the Romanian police, but Jack could not tell if they were shooting at him or at the bad guys. The situation had to be confusing for them, Jack understood, as they probably didn’t even know their colleagues had been killed on the far side of the van.

Jack scrambled back behind the trees, totally covering himself from all angles. “Ding, I need help!”

The reply came instantly. “Engaging hostiles now.”

59

As the van raced through the park toward the gunfight, Midas opened the door on the left side of the minivan, just behind Felix. He stood on the floorboard and leaned out, holding on to the back of the driver’s seat to steady himself with his left hand.

In the front passenger seat Chavez held his gun out the window, and he leaned out behind it to get his eyes on the weapon’s sights. Within a half-second of each other, he and Midas both opened fire. Chavez shot at the figure who had just killed the two cops, now kneeling beside a tree at the edge of the woods. Midas, on the opposite side of the minivan, engaged the men left standing on the far side of the parked police cruiser.

Chavez struck his target, but another figure revealed himself deeper in the trees with a muzzle flash and the sound of a bullet striking the grille of the minivan. Chavez assumed both these men had climbed out of the van back where Jack had said Dalca had jumped the fence to get into the park.

Another round struck Chavez’s vehicle, this time in the windshield. Felix shouted out with pain, and instantly the minivan began to veer sharply to the left.

Chavez kept firing at the second figure, even though he was certain the vehicle he was riding in was seconds from either rear-ending the police car or crashing into the trees.

* * *

Jack could see no more targets from his position, so he reloaded quickly and looked around toward the second police car on the scene. To his shock the officer near him lay crumpled on his back in the street, his weapon several feet away. When Jack couldn’t see the cop on the far side of the vehicle, he worried that the driver of the van might have shot them both. Jack had been so occupied firing at the two men at the back of the van, and trying to get an angle on the men a few dozen yards down the wood line to the west, he’d not engaged the driver, leaving him for the cops to deal with.

He saw no one behind the wheel of the van now, which meant the driver was dead or had debussed during the fight. That he could see no bullet strikes on the windshield worried him the latter was the case.

Just then he saw the lights of his team’s vehicle veer off to the left, and he heard the sound of cracking tree branches and breaking glass on the far side of the van.

Jack ran up onto the road and toward the police car nearest him, his weapon sweeping for targets. He dropped to his knees by the driver’s-side door to look through the vehicle, hoping to see the cop on the other side. He halfway worried the officer would shoot at him if he saw him, but he was more worried the man was already dead.

He saw no one, so he stayed in a low crouch and began to move around the back of the police car, his pistol still up in front of him.

As he swung around the back, he was surprised to see a man doing the same thing from the far side. Jack realized this man was not in a police uniform, and the man was swinging his gun up to fire. Jack and the dark figure both fired their pistols at the same time from point-blank range.

The men were almost touching, but their extended gun arms were both off target, so they fired by each other. Jack threw his right elbow up into the man’s face, but the instant he struck, the man swept back with his pistol and knocked Jack’s gun from his hand.

Both handguns clanked along the darkened park road.

Jack could see his opponent was Asian with a larger-than-average frame, and Jack’s elbow had not knocked the man down, so he instinctively tried to tackle the man and put him on his back. But as he threw himself into the figure at the back of the squad car, the man stepped to the side, sending Jack slamming hard against the trunk. The impact hurt, but Jack anticipated a blow from behind, so he spun around with his arm up to parry an attack. A left punch was on the way; Jack took it in the upper arm, then threw his own left jab that struck the man square in the jaw.