No Man's Land

45

IN SOME WAYS it could have been a street in Tikrit or Mosul.

Gunfire, smoke, screams, the darkness broken by the bursts of fired rounds. The only thing missing was the earsplitting bang and concussive punch of an IED.

Puller came around the corner and immediately narrowed his target silhouette by shifting to the right. He also kept low, gripping his M11 with both hands. He did arcs with his weapon, looking for targets and trying to discern who was dangerous and who was a victim.

There were people lying in the street.

He stopped, took cover, and punched in 911. He identified himself to the dispatcher, taking only two short sentences to report who he was and what he was seeing. She told him to stay safe and that reinforcements were on the way.

She had obviously never been in the military. Staying safe was not in the job description. Quite the reverse, actually.

People were running past him, away from the gunfire. Puller checked each one to see if they had a weapon. None did. They were obviously frightened and simply trying to get away alive. Mass shootings had seemingly become ubiquitous in America, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with when you happened to be smack in the middle of one.

Puller drew closer to the entrance to the bar, which appeared to be the epicenter of the gunfire. As he went he passed figures on the ground, knelt, checked pulses, and kept going.

Some were alive; some were dead. He had nothing to triage the living. His only plan was to try to prevent any more dead or wounded.

He saw the flash of movement to his right a split second too late.

The gun was kicked out of his hands.

He turned to see the knife coming at his throat.

Anyone else would have simply been killed.

Puller blocked the blade by gripping his attacker’s forearm, then sliding his hand down to the elbow and cranking the limb inward, against the body and not in the direction an elbow was designed to go.

The man screamed and his knife clattered to the pavement.

The guy was Puller’s size. He kicked out at Puller and caught him in the oblique. It hurt like hell, and he staggered back, but the blow didn’t stop Puller from executing his plan.

Puller lunged forward and drove his elbow straight into the guy’s face. The man screamed again and grabbed his face with his one good arm, an arm that was about to be rendered not so good.

Puller ripped the arm up, bent it against the joint’s natural range of motion and jerked it behind the man’s back, torquing the limb past its breaking point.

He hooked an ankle around the man’s right foot at the same time as he slammed his knee into the guy’s spine. The man tripped over the foot, and with his left arm bound behind him and his right arm useless from Puller’s elbow twist, he hit face first with Puller’s weight full on top of him, his knee still at the base of his spine.

He was down for the count. Still breathing but bloodied and unconscious and missing several teeth. Puller rose, found his gun, and kept moving forward.

The door to the bar was wide open. Paul, the bouncer, wasn’t anywhere that Puller could see.

He kept sweeping his weapon and listening for sirens.

More gunfire was coming from inside the bar.

He reached the doorway and looked inside. His training allowed him to size up stressful and violent situations quickly.

He could observe, by quick count, about thirty people inside. Four men were on the floor. What their status was, he couldn’t tell. Three were young. One was a big guy dressed all in black and with what looked to be splints on one hand. He was older, as evidenced by his white hair.

As Puller gazed more closely he could see the man was dead, his eyes wide and glassy under the harsh lights of the bar. The other men’s backs were to him. He didn’t know if they were dead or simply injured.

Paul the bouncer was in the process of disarming one guy who was far bigger and younger than he was. As Puller watched, Paul whipped the guy around, clamped two hands around his neck, and jerked to the right. Puller could imagine the neck snapping cleanly in two with the move.

The man died without making a sound. Paul let him go and the man slumped to the floor.

Puller stepped into the doorway, pointed his gun, and fired two rounds crisply at the man who had his gun pointed at the bouncer’s head. The man caught both rounds in the torso and fell forward, as dead as the other guy, only with a lot more blood.

Rogers stared over at Puller and then turned to see the dead guy, his gun still in hand.

Puller called out, “Any others?”

Rogers shook his head. “Don’t think so. Four in here and three outside.”

Another shot rang out a moment later. Puller whipped his gun in the direction. Rogers ducked down and looked that way too.

A man fell forward, the pistol still clenched in his hand.

Behind him was Suzanne Davis. She lowered the gun she’d just used to kill the man.

Rogers slowly rose.

“You owe me,” said Davis.

“Yes, I do,” said Rogers. He jerked a thumb at Puller. “I owe him too.”

Puller kept his weapon out and looked around at the others. They were young, drunk, puking, crying, some bawling. All on the floor, the living shit scared out of all of them.

Only he, Davis, and Rogers were standing.

“I’m Suzanne Davis.”

Puller nodded and introduced himself. “You handle your weapon well.”

Puller suddenly saw a flash of movement behind the bar and swung his gun that way.

Helen Myers emerged from under the bar, shaky and pale.

Puller lowered his weapon.

They could all hear the sirens now.

“What the hell happened?” said Puller.

Myers came around the corner of the bar. “These men came here…” She looked down at the body of the big man with the white hair.

“That’s Karl,” she mumbled. “He’s my head of security. Was my head of security.” She fell silent and covered her face with her hands.

Puller looked over at Rogers questioningly as Davis came to stand next to him. She put the gun away in her purse and slung it over her shoulder.

Rogers touched the body of one dead man with his foot. “These guys were professionals.”

Puller had already come to the same conclusion.

“And Karl?”

Rogers cocked his head and listened intently as the sirens drew closer. He looked back at Puller, the muscles tight around his neck. “Two of these guys burst in with Karl between them. I went to help him and they shot him right in front of me.”

Myers said, “Karl called. He was coming in late tonight. I think…I think he must have run into these guys maybe in the parking lot. Maybe he tried to stop them.”

“Wrong place, wrong time,” commented Davis.

Rogers looked at her. “Where’d you learn to shoot?”

“Same place you learned to fight, school of hard knocks.”

Rogers nodded, his eyes once more looking over Puller’s shoulder, in the direction of the sirens.

Puller slowly lowered his weapon. “So you took out…six armed men with just your hands?” he asked Rogers.

“I got lucky.”

Puller looked at Rogers’s arm. “You’re bleeding.”

Rogers didn’t even look at the wound. “It’s fine.”

The door from the upstairs room opened and Josh Quentin cautiously peered out, his face ashen. “Is it…is it over?”

Puller looked up at him and then saw the women crowding in behind, all looking disoriented.

“Who are you?” asked Puller, though he knew the answer.

Myers answered. “That’s Josh Quentin, a customer.”

“You better get down here,” said Puller. “The police will want to talk to all of you.”

“Oh, shit, the police?” said Quentin.

Rogers looked over at Davis in time to see her do an eye roll at Quentin’s comment.

Outside, Puller heard the racking of automatic weapons, and the thick pounding of combat boots on pavement. He put his gun away before the cops accidentally shot him. He moved toward the door to face them.

The lead assaulter poked his shielded head around the edge of the door.

Puller had his badge out and loudly identified himself. “We’ve got wounded people outside and in here. You’re going to need multiple ambulances.”

The assault team, ten strong, swept into the room and quickly secured it. Josh Quentin and his group, once drunk, now stone cold sober, were quickly escorted downstairs.

Those not wounded were sequestered and the initial interview process begun. The dead were identified by IDs in their wallets and purses. The shriek of ambulance sirens filtered into the bar.

The team turned to triage as they moved among the wounded, while others checked that the shooters really were dead and that there were no more of them lurking around.

Puller helped with this, and when the ambulances arrived he assisted in lifting the wounded onto gurneys and then into the waiting rescue vehicles.

Homicide detectives showed up about twenty minutes later and started to officially process the scene. Puller offered to help, but they politely declined.

Sitting on a stool at the bar, he also provided as much information as he could about what had happened.

The detective said, “There’s no ID on any of these guys. They look Eastern European if you ask me. I’ve looked at some of their weapons and the serial numbers have been professionally removed. These guys are pros. Some kind of criminal hit team.”

“Why would a professional hit team from Eastern Europe attack a bar?”

The detective shrugged. “Right now, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe because it’s a military hangout?”

Puller leaned back in his barstool and stared off, thinking about this.

The detective’s words brought him out of these thoughts. “I guess it was lucky you were here, Agent Puller.”

“I really didn’t do that much. The guy you really want to talk to is-”

Puller looked around the room for Rogers.

The man had disappeared.

Puller looked over at Josh Quentin and his party. And then at Helen Myers, who was being questioned by another detective.

And Davis was nowhere to be seen.

“What was that?” said the detective, who had been distracted by his partner’s calling out to him about a piece of bagged evidence.

Puller said slowly, “It was nothing. It’ll keep.”

He walked over to the bodies of the men inside the bar. The ME was examining one of them.

Puller showed her his badge and said, “You got a cause of death yet?”

The woman nodded and pointed to the two men lying next to the one she was examining. “The guy on the left has a crushed carotid. The guy on the right has a fractured windpipe. The guy over there had his skull cracked.”

Puller considered this and said, “The shooters outside?”

“Same sort of crushing injuries. Don’t know what sort of weapon was used.”

“I don’t think you’re going to find a weapon,” said Puller.

“Why’s that?” she asked.

Because the weapon is gone, thought Puller.