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“Love you too.”
“Jesus,” Chas whispered off-mike beside him. “You guys sound like you’re getting ready to charge over the rocks and go out in a blaze of glory.”
Gunner risked turning away from his weapon sight long enough to smile ruefully at Chas. “Guess you were right. We should have found another way to handle this besides shooting it out.”
Chas leaned over and grabbed the front of his shirt. “Don’t you give up on me, Gunner Vance. Poppy and I are depending on you. Be the warrior you were trained to be, dammit.”
He stared, stunned. “You mean it?”
“I’m not ready to die, and she sure as hell isn’t. You fight for us.”
“But I’m killing people. Loads of them.”
Grim desperation vibrated in Chas’s voice. “Poppy deserves to grow up. You and I deserve a shot at happiness. You do whatever it takes to give us all a future. You hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“You were right. You kill whoever you have to. And stay alive, dammit.”
He nodded and turned back to his sight. Huh. Chas finally got it. Funny how staring down death at close range could change a person’s opinions about the whole kill-or-be-killed thing.
If he, Spencer, and Drago rotated shooting so that they never shot at the same target, they could still take out a fair number of hostiles.
He transmitted, “Let’s rotate shots. Call your targets. Single shots only at close range.”
“You sure?” Spencer asked.
“I’m not ready to go just yet.”
“You heard the man,” Spencer murmured.
Gunner settled in, readying himself to shoot like he’d never shot before. He reviewed the basics as he always did. He felt the calm washing over him. There it was. The kill zone.
A heat signature moved up the path toward them. “Mine,” he said coldly. He pulled the trigger and the hostile’s head evaporated.Thirty-one rounds left.
When the bad guys were coming in slowly enough, he took two shots to every one of Spencer’s and Drago’s to even out the ammo count. He was at fourteen, which meant Spencer and Drago were down to around six each, when he heard something from below.
A muffled bang.
Another one.
Several heat signatures lit up on the trail… but heading away from their position.
“What the hell is that noise?” Drago asked.
“Sounds like weapon fire,” Spencer said wonderingly. “Muffled by the jungle. Hold your positions.”
Gunner stayed at his weapon, poised to shoot anyone who came up the trail at them, but over the next ten minutes or so, not a single person charged their position. Sounds of weapon fire came from both ends of the valley and seemed to be converging toward the middle of it.
“Come look at this,” Spencer said over his radio.
Shocked, Gunner left his weapon and moved over behind his boss, who was peering around the left end of the rocky outcrop. The entire hillside below them was lit up with muzzle flashes—two large groups of them, one coming in from their left and another group from the right. And between them, the Oshiro gang was slowly being crushed, rather like a nut in the jaws of a lethal nutcracker. For all the world, it looked like a military force executing a clearing maneuver on a battlefield.
“What the hell?” Drago muttered.
Even Chas poked his head around the rock to stare. “What is that?” he asked.
Gunner’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he pulled it out. “Go ahead,” he murmured at Charles Favian.