Last Man Standing
By David Baldacci
Warner Books
Copyright © 2001
David Baldacci
All right reserved.
ISBN: 044667883X
Chapter One
Web London held a semiautomatic SR75 rifle custom built for him by a
legendary gunsmith. The SR didn't stop at merely wounding flesh and
bone; it disintegrated them. Web would never leave home without this
high chieftain of muscle guns, for he was a man steeped in violence.
He was always prepared to kill, to do so efficiently and without
error. Lord, if he ever took a life by mistake he might as well have
eaten the bullet himself, for all the misery it would cause him. Web
just had that complex way of earning his daily bread. He couldn't
say he loved his job, but he did excel at it.
Despite having a gun welded to his hand virtually every waking
moment of his life, Web was not one to coddle his weapons. While he
never called a pistol his friend or gave it a slick name, weapons
were still an important part of Web's life, though like wild animals
guns were not things easily tamed. Even trained lawmen missed their
targets and everything else eight out of ten times. To Web, not only
was that unacceptable, it was also suicidal. He had many peculiar
qualities, but a death wish was not one of them. Web had plenty of
people looking to kill him as it was, and once they had nearly
gotten their man.
About five years prior he had come within a liter or two of spilled
blood of checking out on the floor of a school gymnasium strewn with
other men already dead or dying. After he had triumphed over his
wounds and stunned the doctors tending him, Web started carrying the0
SR instead of the submachine gun his comrades-in-arms toted. It
resembled an M16, chambered a big .308 bullet, and was an excellent
choice if intimidation was your goal. The SR made everyone want to
be your friend.
Through the smoked-out window of the Suburban, Web eyed each fluid
knot of people along the corners and suspicious clumps of humanity
lurking in darkened alleys. As they moved farther into hostile
territory, Web's gaze returned to the street, where he knew every
vehicle could be a gun cruiser in disguise. He was looking for any
drifting eye, nod of head or fingers slyly tapping on cell phones in
an attempt to do serious harm to old Web.
The Suburban turned the corner and stopped. Web glanced at the six
other men huddled with him. He knew they were contemplating the same
things he was: Get out fast and clean, move to cover positions,
maintain fields of fire. Fear did not really enter into the
equation; nerves, however, were another matter. High-octane
adrenaline was not his friend; in fact, it could very easily get him
killed.
Web took a deep, calming breath. He needed his pulse rate to be
between sixty and seventy. At eighty-five beats your gun would
tremble against your torso; at ninety ticks you couldn't work the
trigger, as blood occlusion in veins and constricted nerves in
shoulders and arms combined to guarantee that you would fail to
perform at an acceptable level. At over one hundred pops a minute
you lost your fine motor skills entirely and wouldn't be able to hit
an elephant with a damn cannon at three feet; you might as well slap
a sign on your forehead that read KILL ME QUICK, because that
undoubtedly would be your fate.
Web pushed out the juice, drew in the peace and for him there was
calm to be distilled from brewing chaos.
The Suburban started moving, turned one more corner and stopped. For
the last time, Web knew. Radio squelch was broken when Teddy Riner
spoke into his bone microphone or "mic." Riner said, "Charlie to
TOC, request compromise authority and permission to move to yellow."
Through Web's mic he heard TOC's, or Tactical Operations Center's,
terse response, "Copy, Charlie One, stand by." In Web's Crayola
world, "yellow" was the last position of concealment and cover.
Green was the crisis site, the moment of truth: the breach.
Navigating the hallowed piece of earth that stretched between the
relative safety and comfort of yellow and the moment of truth green
could be quite eventful. "Compromise authority"-Web said the words
to himself. It was just a way of asking for the okay to gun down
people if necessary and making it sound like you were merely getting
permission from your boss to cut a few bucks off the price of a used
car. Radio squelch was broken again as TOC said, "TOC to all units:
You have compromise authority and permission to move to yellow."
Thank you so very much, TOC. Web edged closer to the cargo doors of
the Suburban. He was point and Roger McCallam had the rear. Tim
Davies was the breecher and Riner was the team leader. Big Cal
Plummer and the other two assaulters, Lou Patterson and Danny
Garcia, stood ready with MP-5 machine guns and flash bangs and
.45-caliber pistols, and their calm demeanors. As soon as the doors
opened, they would fan out into a rolling mass looking for threats
from all directions. They would move toes first, then heels, knees
bent to absorb recoil in case they had to fire. Web's face mask
shrunk his field of vision to a modest viewing area: his miniature
Broadway for the coming real-life mayhem, no expensive ticket or
fancy suit required. Hand signals would suffice from now on. When
bullets were flying at you, you tended to get a bit of cotton mouth
anyway. Web never talked much at work.
He watched as Danny Garcia crossed himself, just like he did every
time. And Web said what he always said when Garcia crossed himself
before the Chevy doors popped open. "God's too smart to come 'round
here, Danny boy. We're on our own." Web always said this in a
jesting way, but he was not joking.
Five seconds later the cargo doors burst open and the team piled out
too far away from ground zero. Normally they liked to drive right up
to their final destination and go knock-knock-boom with their
two-by-four explosive, yet the logistics here were a little tricky.
Abandoned cars, tossed refrigerators and other bulky objects
conveniently blocked the road to the target.
Radio squelch broke again as snipers from X-Ray Team called in.
There were men in the alley up ahead, X-Ray reported, but not part
of the group Web was hunting. At least the snipers didn't think so.
As one, Web and his Charlie Team rose and hurtled down the alley.
The seven members of their Hotel Team counterparts had been dropped
off by another Suburban on the far side of the block to attack the
target from the left rear side. The grand plan had Charlie and Hotel
meeting somewhere in the middle of this combat zone masquerading as
a neighborhood.
Web and company were heading east now, an approaching storm right on
their butts. Lightning, thunder, wind and horizontal rain tended to
screw up ground communications, tactical positioning and men's
nerves, usually at the critical time when all of them needed to
operate perfectly. With all their technological wizardry, the only
available response to Mother Nature's temper and the poor ground
logistics was simply to run faster. They chugged down the alley, a
narrow strip of potholed, trash-littered asphalt. There were
buildings close on either side of them, the brick veneer blistered
by decades of gun battles. Some had been between good and bad, but
most involved young men taking out their brethren over drug turf,
women or just because. Here, a gun made you a man, though you might
really only be a child, running outside after watching your Saturday
morning cartoons, convinced that if you blew a large hole in
someone, he might actually get back up and keep playing with you.
They came upon the group the snipers had identified: clusters of
blacks, Latinos and Asians wheeling and dealing drugs. Apparently,
potent highs and the promise of an uncomplicated cash-and-carry
business cut through all troublesome issues of race, creed, color or
political affiliation. To Web most of these folks looked a single
snort, needle nick or popped pill from the grave. He marveled that
this pathetic assemblage of veteran paint hackers even had the
energy or clarity of thought to consummate the simple transaction of
cash for little bags of brain inferno barely disguised as feel-good
potion, and only then the first time you drove the poison into your
body.
In the face of Charlie's intimidating wall of guns and Kevlar, all
but one of the druggies dropped to their knees and begged not to be
killed or indicted. Web focused on the one young man who remained
standing. His head was swathed in a red do-rag symbolizing some gang
allegiance. The kid had a toothpick waist and barbell shoulders;
ratty gym shorts hung down past his butt crack and a tank shirt rode
lopsided across his muscular torso. He also had an attitude several
miles long riding on his features, the kind that said,
I'm smarter,
tougher and will outlive you. Web had to admit, though, the guy
carried the rag-look well.
It took all of thirty seconds to determine that all but Bandanna Boy
were looped out of their minds and that none of the druggies were
carrying guns-or cell phones that could be used to call up the
target and warn them. Bandanna Boy did have a knife, yet knives had
no chance against Kevlar and submachine guns. The team let him keep
it. But as Charlie Team moved on, Cal Plummer ran with them
backward, his MP-5 trained on the young back-alley entrepreneur,
just in case.
Bandanna Boy did call after Web, something about admiring Web's
rifle and wanting to buy it. He'd give him a sweet deal, he yelled
after Web, and then said he'd shoot Web and everyone else dead with
it. HA-HA! Web glanced to the rooftops, where he knew members of
Whiskey Team and X-Ray were in their forward firing positions with
rounds seated and lethal beads drawn on the brain stems of this
gaggle of losers. The snipers were Web's best friends. He understood
exactly how they approached their work, because for years he had
been one of them.
For months at a time Web had lain in steamy swamps with pissed-off
water moccasins crawling over him. Or else been wedged into
wind-gusted clefts of frigid mountains with the custom-built rifle
stock's leather cheek pad next to his own as he sighted through his
scope and provided cover and intelligence for the assault teams. As
a sniper he had developed many important skills, such as learning
how to very quietly pee into a jug. Other lessons included packing
his food in precise clusters so he could carbo-load by touch in
pitch-darkness, and arranging his bullets for optimal reloading,
working off a strict military model that had proved its worth time
and time again. Not that he could easily transfer any of these
unique talents to the private sector, but Web didn't see that
happening anyway.
The life of a sniper lurched from one numbing extreme to another.
Your job was to achieve the best firing position with the least
amount of personal exposure and oftentimes those twin goals were
simply incompatible. You just did the best you could. Hours, days,
weeks, even months of nothing except tedium that tended to erode
morale and core skills would be sliced wide open by moments of
gut-wrenching fury that usually came at you in a rush of gunfire and
mass confusion. And your decision to shoot meant someone would die,
and you were never clear whether your own death would be included in
the equation or not.
Web could always conjure up these images in a flash, so vivid were
they in his memory. A quintuplet of match-grade hollow points would
be lined up in a spring-loaded magazine waiting to rip into an
adversary at twice the speed of sound once Web's finger pulled the
jeweled trigger, which would break ever so sweetly at precisely
two-point-five pounds of pressure. As soon as someone stepped into
his kill zone, Web would fire and a human being would suddenly
become a corpse crumbling to the earth. Yet the most important shots
Web handled as a sniper were the ones he
hadn't taken. It was just
that kind of a gig. It was not for the faint-hearted, the stupid or
even those of average intelligence.
Web said a silent thank-you to the snipers overhead and raced on
down the alley.
They next came upon a child, maybe all of nine, sitting shirtless on
a hunk of concrete, and not an adult in sight. The approaching storm
had knocked at least twenty degrees off the thermometer and the
mercury was still falling. And still the boy had no shirt on. Had he
ever had a shirt on? Web wondered. He had seen many examples of
impoverished children. While Web didn't consider himself a cynic, he
was a realist. He felt sorry for these kids, but there wasn't much
he could do to help them. And yet threats could come from anywhere
these days, so his gaze automatically went from the boy's head to
his feet, looking for weapons. Fortunately, he saw none; Web had no
desire to fire upon a child.
The boy looked directly at him. Under the illuminated arc of the one
flickering alley lamp that somehow had not been shot out, the
child's features were outlined vividly. Web noted the too-lean body
and the muscles in shoulders and arms already hard and clustering
around the protrusion of ribs, as a tree grows bark cords over a
wound. A knife slash ran across the boy's forehead. A puckered,
blistered hole on the child's left cheek was the unmistakable tag of
a bullet, Web knew.
"Damn to hell," said the child in a weary voice, and then he laughed
or, more accurately, cackled. The boy's words and that laugh rang
like cymbals in Web's head, and he had no idea why; his skin was
actually tingling. He had seen hopeless kids like this before, they
were everywhere around here, and yet something was going on in Web's
head that he couldn't quite figure. Maybe he'd been doing this too
long, and wasn't it a hell of a time to start thinking that?
Web's finger hovered near his rifle's trigger, and he moved farther
in front with graceful strides even as he tried to rid himself of
the boy's image. Though very lean himself and lacking showy muscles,
Web had enormous leverage in his long arms, and strong fingers, and
there was deceptive power in his naturally broad shoulders. And he
was by far the fastest man on the team and also possessed great
endurance. Web could run six-mile relays all day. He would take
speed, quickness and stamina over bulging muscles any day. Bullets
tore through muscle as easily as they did fat. Yet the lead couldn't
hurt you if it couldn't hit you.
Most people would describe Web London, with his broad shoulders and
standing six-foot-two, as a big man. Usually, though, people focused
on the condition of the left side of his face, or what remained of
it. Web had to grudgingly admit that it was amazing, the
reconstruction they could do these days with destroyed flesh and
bone. In just the right light, meaning hardly any at all, one almost
wouldn't notice the old crater, the new rise of cheek and the
delicate grafting of transplanted bone and skin. Truly remarkable,
all had said. All except Web, that is.
At the end of the alley they stopped once more, all crouching low.
At Web's elbow was Teddy Riner.
Continues...
Continues...
Excerpted from Last Man Standing
by David Baldacci
Copyright © 2001 by David Baldacci.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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