“Del! Wake up, man, SRT is on deck!”
I groaned, struggling to extricate myself from an incredibly vivid dream involving single malt scotch and hot blondes.
“You’re shitting me, Tim,” I grunted out. “I just got to sleep. Can’t you guys handle this one without me?”
“Up and at ‘em, Sleeping Beauty!” Tim said, but his words were clipped and the tone of his voice was anything but playful.
That snapped my consciousness fully awake and into the present better than the sudden removal of the blankets from my cot. I bolted upright and swung my legs around, my feet gliding directly into my open and un-laced boots, which were sitting at the ready next to my bed.
“What have we got?” I asked, as my hands started lacing up my combat boots.
“Sounds like a hostage situation. The little I heard come in over the scanner makes me think a turf war got out of control, and someone took some bystanders hostage. LT is pretty fired up. We need to move!”
I was on my feet the next instant, and the two of us were sprinting for the squad room. When we arrived, the rest of the team was already on site and grabbing gear. Tim and I quickly donned our kit, then headed out past the armory for weapons issue. Being on the SRT came with some perks, including personal choice of primary weapon and sidearm. I quickly snapped my preferred Sig Sauer P320 into its thigh holster, then tossed the sling of my M4 over my shoulder, cinched the weapon tight to my chest rig, and ran for the motor pool.
Our team’s Lenco BearCat was already warming up with the back doors open, and guys were piling inside. Tim and I broke off toward one of the up-armored Suburbans a short way away, and we quickly clambered in. The motor pool was chaos to the outside observer—shouted commands, guys running every which way, loaded vehicles peeling out of their bays with a squeal of tires—but it to us, it was just another day at the office. We’d done this drill countless times in training, and more times than I’d like under live calls. Everybody knew exactly where they were supposed to be and what their job was, and goddamn, did it get the blood pumping.
Our team leader briefed us on the ride to the location. Like Tim had said, a couple of gangs had gotten into a turf war, but this one had escalated in a flash. Command suspected that one of the major cartels was involved, and we were probably looking at a drug war that’d bubbled up to the surface. At least five hostages had been taken—including a mother and her two children that some thugs ripped out of their car at gunpoint, when the first patrol car pulled onto the scene. The fuckers had barricaded themselves in a condemned apartment building, and SRT had been called in for search and rescue.
The morning sun was already high enough that it cleared the distant skyline of downtown Detroit, and we were looking at a picture perfect fall day as we raced toward the scene. A few of the guys cracked some jokes to help relieve the tension. Mostly, though, we rode in silence and listened to the radio chatter, trying to make sense of the various call outs to help form a picture in our minds of exactly what we’d find when our boots hit the ground.
I stole a glance over at Tim. We’d known each other for twenty years by this point. We’d enlisted in the Marines together, though the nature of the service prevented us from serving with each other. We signed our DD-214s within days of each other, after more than a decade of fighting overseas. Then, we’d come home to Detroit.
Neither of us had been able to get rid of that itch though—the one you get after your body gets hooked on the adrenaline dump only something like a gunfight can provide. Going into law enforcement had been the obvious choice, and our skill sets put us both on the fast track to the SRT, where we’d both been assigned to the 5th Precinct.
…But that wasn’t right, was it?
I squeezed my eyes shut as something like an out-of-body déjà vu on steroids slammed into me. I shook my head, trying to clear the mess of muddled thoughts. Something felt so very wrong—like my entire life was a living, breathing lie.
“Hey, man, you good?”
I opened my eyes to see Tim looking at me with a worried expression on his face. “Uh, yeah,” I stammered. “Just had a weird feeling hit me. Probably just something left over from the dream I was having when you kicked my ass out of bed.”
“You sure, Del?” Tim asked, brow furrowing in concern. “You went white as a sheet there, for a minute.”
I nodded, then smacked the side of my helmeted head a few times. “I’m good, brother. The moment’s past, now.”
Tim held out a fist, and I bumped it. My heart was still racing, but at least the overwhelming feeling of wrongness was receding.
Fucking weird.
“Two minutes!”
The call came over the team channel, and everyone in the ‘Burb reached for their weapons and loaded up. Magazines were slammed home, bolt carriers cycled, and safeties were double checked as we performed one last gear check in preparation for getting dropped into the shit.
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“All units, be advised SRT is arriving on scene. Fifth Precinct supervisors have established a perimeter. EMS and Detroit Fire are instructed to stage beyond the established perimeter and hold until the scene is cleared by SWAT—Battalion Chief Six has incident response for DFD.”
It was go time.
Our ride came to a stop, and we all piled out. Our CO jogged off to meet with the on-site precinct supervisor while the rest of us began forming up. Before long, word came down that the BearCat would be used to breach a chain link fence behind the target, and then we’d go room by room, floor by floor as we cleared the building and tracked down the hostages. Normally, negotiation was the way to go for something like this, but the on-site supervisor had been trying to establish a line of communication with the bad guys for almost an hour, but no joy. It looked like the baddies wanted to do this one the dumb way.
We geared up on our respective rides and made ready to breach. The Suburban Tim and I were on was the third vehicle in line, and my squad was tasked with making entry through the fire escape on the east end of the target building. Other teams would go through the front and rear entrances, which was going to be a royal pain in the ass.
Something most people don’t think about when it comes to clearing a building is that bullets have a bad habit of blowing right through interior walls. If you’re going in one side while your buddy goes in through the other, you have to be damn sure that any shot you take doesn’t pose a danger to him. We had a plan in place to minimize that risk—each team would split up and take different floors, and we’d constantly be in comms with each other—but it was just one more thing we constantly had to think about.
The ‘Burb accelerated as we came around the final corner. Team One in the BearCat was a few car lengths in front of us, charging hard at the chained up fence gate separating the small parking lot at the back of the building from the street. The armored truck smashed through it like a sprinter punching through tape at the finish line of a race, and within a few seconds, we were all dismounted and heading for our assigned points of entry.
I heard the crash of the first team breaching the rear entrance just as my team stacked up outside the fire escape on the east side. After a quick status check, our team lead called, “Breacher up.”
Benitez stepped forward, Benelli M1 at the ready. Once in position, he called out that he was ready to breach, and our team lead gave the command.
“Breach!”
Benitez put a breaching round through the lock, then stepped back. Carson, our team leader, yanked the door open, and Tim was Johnny-on-the-spot with the flashbang.
“Flashbang out!”
We all averted our gaze and braced for the overpressure wave. A thunderclap rattled the fillings in my teeth and my earpro briefly cut off external sound in a vain attempt to save what little was left of my hearing.
Then we were flowing through the door. As the last man in the stack, I was in the tail-end Charlie position, so the stairway had already been called clear before I made entry. We quickly made our way up the stairs of the fire escape, heading for the second floor, which was where we would begin our search. After stacking up outside the second floor fire door, we breached it in the same order as before and started the deadly work of clearing each unit individually.
We’d just made entry into the third of six units on the floor when we heard gunshots ring out from somewhere else in the building. The radio came to life with calls of shots fired, but that was a concern for the other teams at the moment; we had our own work to do.
“Living room clear!” Benitez yelled, and Tim and I leapfrogged him and proceeded over the mildewed carpet and into the dingy hallway beyond.
There was no power to the building, and the light that filtered in through the grime-covered windows wasn’t enough to allow us good visibility into all the nooks and crannies of the space. Our weapon-mounted lights strobed as we made our way down the hall, thumbing the momentary switch for our beams anytime we needed the extra light. The small bathroom in the middle of the hall was also clear, and, up to that point, I hadn’t seen any sign that someone had been in that particular unit–at least, not recently. We stacked up outside the single bedroom door, then Tim made entry.
I wasn’t more than a half-step behind him when a bright light strobed from around the corner…
Auditory exclusion is a strange phenomenon. The gunshot should have been deafening in the confined space, but I didn’t hear a thing. It was like the whole world had suddenly gone completely silent.
One minute, Tim was right in front of me, curling left around the door to sweep the far corner, and the next, he was crumpling to the floor.
“Contact!”
I don’t remember who called it out. I just remember bringing the muzzle of my weapon around, and the tatted face of some punk snarling back at me over the sights of a pistol as I strafed sideways, out of his line of fire.
His muzzle flashed again, and my finger snapped down to the trigger of my carbine.
My first shot took him in the upper chest, and he jerked back, which threw off the aim of his next shot. My second round punched through his throat, and then the third went in his left cheek and blew out a chunk of the back of his skull.
I’ll never forget the instant I saw the lights snap off behind his eyes, but, no matter how many times I replay that moment over in my head, I’m never fast enough.
The rest of my team rushed in, hot on my heels, and we quickly finished clearing the room. Carson, toggled the radio on and made the call that no one ever wants to hear.
“Shots fired! Officer down! Officer down!”
I dropped to my knees by Tim’s side and began checking him over.
“Tim!” I shouted, rolling him over so I could see his face and try to assess his wound. “Talk to me, buddy! Where are you hit?”
But he didn’t respond. His face was ashen and screwed up in pain. Pink bubbles welled up from his lips, and a moment later, he coughed up a mouthful of blood. I frantically looked for the entrance wound. He’d clearly been lungshot, and if we were going to have any chance of saving him, I needed access to where he’d been hit. His hand came up and weakly waved in the air in front of me, and his eyes met mine.
He knew. I could see it in his eyes… he knew he was done.
I gripped his hand in mine and squeezed for all I was worth as tears stung the corners of my eyes. Time came to a crawl around us, and my mind shut out everything except his gaze on mine.
Then the life faded from his eyes, and a stabbing pain ripped through my heart.