Step On A Crack

Chapter 64

I REARED BACK from the chimney. I tore off my night-vision goggles. Bullets pocked holes in the concrete floor as gunfire rained down into the cramped slot.

It was a miracle I wasn’t hit as I pulled the jumping, falling, and sliding members of the retreating tactical team away from the kill-zone base of the ladder.

The blue-white flashes from the continuing gunfire pulsed like strobe lights as team members performed CPR on their fallen brothers.

I heard Oakley swearing and counting heads as I flicked my MP5 to auto and jogged back to the chimney.

Then I shoved the machine gun up into the hole beside the ladder, one-handed, and pulled the trigger. The MP5 jumped like a jackhammer in my hand until I heard a click. I didn’t know if I’d hit anything, but it seemed to momentarily stop the attack.

A second later, there was a loud, whistling clang, and a smoking canister landed at the base of the ladder. Then another. I pulled my Windbreaker up around my face as acrid smoke burned my eyes and lungs.

“Tear gas!” I shouted. “Fall back!”

I almost tripped on a fallen cop behind me. “Hit,” he said in a whisper. I lifted him up into a fireman’s carry and headed back for the door we’d come in through. I banged one of my shins on a stair of the spiral staircase and felt blood seep down into my boot.

I nearly brained myself, and the cop I was carrying, when I ran into one of the iron ducts near the tunnel entrance.

It was surreal back out in the corridor of the mall. Under the blinking red and green holiday lights and sappy Christmas Muzak, the blood and filth on our guys looked like makeup.

I laid the man I had carried out onto the polished marble floor of the concourse. Then I gasped as I stared into his lifeless blue eyes. He was a burly, black-haired NYPD ESU cop, no more than twenty-five.

Now he was dead, gone while I’d tried to carry him to safety.

Oakley was putting a helmet over the face of a fallen FBI commando to my left.

What had happened? Two good men, good cops. Down.

I looked around, stunned. There was an advertisement for a clothing store through the plate glass above the cop’s corpse. Some laughing teenage blonde in a Santa hat and red cat suit sandwiched between a couple of shirtless male models on the hood of a vintage car.

That absurd tableau, coupled with my shock, snapped something inside of me. A rattling burglar alarm went off as I shattered the store window into a million pieces with the butt of my MP5.

I slid down the wall into the puddle of green broken-glass diamonds. I bit my lip as I looked back at the black hellhole we’d just climbed out of.

God help us, I thought. And then-How do they know so much about St. Patrick’s? How do they know so much about us?