He looked down and saw it, right in front of him, and he hefted it with his right hand.
And then the pain under his right ear began anew.
Aiming the pistol up the incline and at the street—the Audi was thirty feet out of sight on his left on the other side of the ramp wall—he searched for a target while at the same time evaluating his injury.
He knew he’d been shot in the neck, and that was never good news, but he wasn’t dead, and his body seemed to be working, as evidenced by the fact that he was able to wield the pistol. There was blood, of course; no one gets shot in the neck without bleeding. He felt it on the pistol, he felt it running down his upper arm and dripping from his elbow, his forearm, and he worried that fighting with his right hand, swinging his arm around and snapping off rounds with moderate recoil, just might turn a damagedartery into a severed artery. If that happened, he’d bleed out in moments; he knew this, but he also knew he had a job to do.
He reached up with his left hand, put as much pressure as he possibly could on a jagged wound two inches below his ear, and felt blood seep between his fingers.
Chris Travers had been in the Airborne, he’d been in U.S. Army Special Forces, and he’d served in a CIA paramilitary unit, so he knew all about gunshot wounds. The blood he felt was annoying, slightly worrisome because it was coming from his own body, but—in the short term, anyhow—it wasn’t life-threatening.
The blood from the wound was not spraying, it wasn’t under pressure, and that meant he was still in this fight; he just knew he had to do whatever he could to hasten the end of this fight and get treatment.
He took stock of his physical surroundings now; he had decent coverage here from the little wall between himself and the Audi, but he knew he couldn’t hide here, because if at least one of the Gauntlet men was still alive up on the street, and they had an incentive to keep the fight going, it would take just seconds for them to come around from his left, gun or guns barking and belching out lead towards the only tiny piece of cover in the area.
Heavy gunfire continued from Hightower’s scene to the east, and Chris wondered how much ammo Zack had with him.
He heard voices off to his left now; this told him both his enemies were still alive, and they were plotting his demise.
Suddenly, a sense of anger welled up in him. He rose from his knees to his feet, the pistol still straight out ahead, and he saw motion now, in the darkness on L Street. A man shifted into view from his left; Chris must have had himself in darkness because the man didn’t immediately see him, but when Travers saw the gun in the man’s hand begin to swing into the tight corner here, he fired three rounds in rapid succession.
The man buckled, shuffled back a few steps, then dropped dead in the street.
Travers knew there was only one more man from the Audi, and he thought there was a chance the man had been injured in that first close-in volley, just as Travers himself had been. He began creeping forward, readyto engage the man if he was still somewhere by the car on the left, but then he heard the engine of the German sedan fire and the tires squeal as the vehicle began to race off.
For one complete second, Travers thought about letting the Gauntlet man drive away, but then it occurred to him that the Audi driver just might be on his way to go help his teammates up the street in their fight with Zack.
Travers clutched his neck even harder now as he staggered up the ramp, then into the darkened street. Traffic had been incredibly light in the five minutes since he’d come out of the hotel, mercifully so, in fact, but now a single vehicle appeared, slammed on its brakes behind him.
He saw a delivery van, the driver’s eyes wide and terrified, and Travers knew this man was no threat.
Turning back towards the danger, he knew he had other things to worry about. Hightower was somewhere beyond his field of view, but he was potentially not out of his field of fire. The black Expedition was two blocks beyond where Travers’s gun was aimed, so he knew he had to be careful with his shots.
He ignored the vehicle behind him, kept the pressure up with his left hand on the right side of his neck, and felt himself stumble a little as he slowed to turn, then raised his small pistol with his right hand. He aimed carefully at the Audi heading east on L Street and fired one round directly into the back of the head of the driver at a range of eighty feet.
He did not fire again, did not want to send more bullets downrange, potentially into Hightower’s position.
The Audi veered sharply to the right, then crashed into a building on 22nd Street and came to an abrupt stop.
Travers took a few steps in the direction of the continued noise coming from Zack’s firefight, then slowed, then stopped. Zack was maybe sixty yards away, but if Travers ran to him, he might well bleed out on the way. He dropped to his knees on the sidewalk and spoke into his mic now.
“This is Teddy. I’m hit.”
Matt Hanley responded immediately. “On the way to your poz at this time. Be there in two mikes. Hang on.”
“Go help Night Train. I’m good here,” he said, and then he sat down, quickly pulled off his jacket, and used it as a larger compress on his neck.
It did not occur to him that Hanley, Jill, and Arnold had no weapons with which they could help Zack. Chris Travers was out of the fight, and Zack Hightower was on his own.
—
Hightower knelt in the street by the right rear tire of the minivan, and he looked over his right shoulder in time to see the gray sedan crash into the building a block away on his right. He hoped that meant the Gauntlet assholes who’d been in the car and fighting with Travers were dead or otherwise disabled, but he gave little thought to the matter, because just then he heard the sound of a pistol magazine clanging to the street on the other side of his vehicle, telling him one of the two enemy he knew were still up was in the process of reloading.
Zack pushed all other thoughts out of his mind, rolled out from the rear of the minivan, and double-tapped his target just as the Gauntlet man knelt at the rear of the Expedition to reload. The American contractor fell onto his back on the sidewalk; Zack rose to a standing position and shot the man twice more.
There was one more Gauntlet man unaccounted for, so Zack dropped back to his knees at the rear of his vehicle and tuned his ringing ears into the scene, listening for clues. Soon he heard a shuffling on his right. Uncertain if the man approaching up the side of the van had his weapon in position and the skill to use it faster than Zack did his, Zack moved his thumb over on his firing hand, put it on the magazine ejection button, and pressed down.
The half-full Glock mag dropped to the concrete and skittered at his feet.
