Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

ROOKIE BY JOE McKINNEY

Takes one to know one, right?

That’s what all the kids say.

Well, I used to be a Ranger, and the guy who walked into the D. B. Grocery that night, he was a Ranger.

He had Fort Benning written all over him.

“Pay attention,” my close-quarters combat instructors used to say. “It don’t cost nothing.”

For Rangers and cops alike, that’s the mantra. Pay attention. Head on a swivel. If you get surprised, it’s your own damn fault.

Don’t ever let it be your fault.

Good words to live by.

So I was over by the freezers, trying to figure out which TV dinner was going to keep me company that night, when I heard the door chime and saw movement out of the corner of my eye.

I pay attention.

Naturally, I turned that way.

The light from the corner lamppost poured in, framing a tall white guy in a dirty yellow halogen stain, as if he were stepping out of an old sepia photograph. He was built trim, like a swimmer. I’d guess six three, maybe 180 pounds. He had a surfer’s haircut, blond and shaggy, but the rest of him looked like a killing machine. His chin looked as though it had been carved out of stone and in his icy gaze I saw the reflection of all the crap I’d seen back in my time with the teams. If he’d been dressed in BDUs and a boonie hat, his face painted green and black, rather than a T-shirt and jeans, he’d have been a ready-made recruitment poster for the Rangers.

That is, if they had recruitment posters.

And trust me, they don’t.

He stopped in the doorway, made a long, slow scan of the store, skipping over Jun Kwai, the shop’s owner, and then lingered for a bit on me, summing me up, before taking in the rest of the place.

Only then did he walk in.

I let out a sigh. I knew the guy was trouble. When you see someone like that, a full-boat military bad boy, in the middle of one of the rowdiest neighborhoods in West Baltimore, you just know something’s wrong. I’d been a Baltimore police officer for something like seven months at that point, but even a rookie cop like me could have told you the guy didn’t belong there. West Baltimore is almost all black, and a white guy with a surfer haircut and a Ranger stare just doesn’t fit with the general population.

Was I racially profiling him?

Yeah, maybe.

But the guy didn’t fit the neighborhood, and any cop worth his or her salt will tell you that is what the FBI calls a clue that something bad is about to happen.

Plus, the guy had a fine sheen of sweat on his face.

And he was out of breath.

Just a little.

He might have looked normal to anyone else, but like I said, I used to be an operator. I know the breathing drills they teach you. I know how they teach you to step outside of your own OODA loop, how to master it. How to stay glassy calm, no matter what you’re dealing with. How to work the problem. He was pulling himself together right in front of me. Something had happened, and this guy was trying to stay on top of it.

But whatever his problem was, it was my problem now.

I put the milk down on the shelf and steadied my breathing with the same technique Grunt Boy had just used. My hand moved to my sidearm and I thumbed down the holster’s hood. Nice and slow, nice and quiet. Grunt Boy was on full alert. No need to agitate him further. Still, I wanted to be ready. If my instincts were right, and they always are, this guy had a trailer full of trouble dragging along behind him. I wasn’t going to be surprised. I wasn’t going to be last on the draw.

Grunt Boy glanced over his shoulder, just once, and so discreetly someone else might not have noticed it, and then headed toward the back of the store. The bathrooms were back there. I thought maybe he’d lock himself in.

Maybe, I thought, he was a junkie.

That’s becoming more common these days, even in the Ranger community. All that time in the Sandbox has left a lot of guys with some serious hurt, both inside and out, and sometimes, when you come back home and find the world tells you they love you, but shows you nothing but hate and indifference, the needle and the spoon can make that hurt seem a million miles away.

For a little while, at least.

Maybe, I thought, that was this guy’s deal. It would explain the furtive glance over his shoulder. The brief spark of worry that lit his eyes when he saw me. The sweat on his brow.

Maybe.

I looked at Jun Kwai. He answered me with a shrug. This shop was a regular stop for me on my way home from work. Jun Kwai had run this business for twenty years. He’d seen three riots and more robberies than most of the cops I knew, and all of it had given him a sort of Zenlike calm in the face of the weird. Not much of anything fazed him.

It was then I spotted the trucks outside.

Two FedEx trucks pulling up to the curb across the street. Like I said, I was pretty new to the Baltimore Police Department, but I’d worked this neighborhood long enough to know that FedEx rarely puts in an appearance around here, and never at two in the morning.

Much less two trucks at once.

Behind the cash register, even Jun Kwai was starting to get nervous. I saw him fidgeting out of the corner of my eye. I knew from previous experience — actually, a lot of people knew from previous experience — that he kept a Ruger Super Redhawk revolver under the counter. It was an obscenely huge handgun, way too big for him. He was reaching for it now.

I shook my head, gave him a hard look. Don’t do it. Not yet. I had a feeling things were about to get out of hand, and I didn’t want any unintended collateral damage.

Out on the street, the back end of one of the trucks rolled open and a team of soldiers in black BDUs jumped out. They moved quickly and efficiently, a well-oiled machine.

And they were armed to the teeth.

I checked out the other FedEx truck and saw the same scene repeated.

The two teams rolled out, then melted into a dark, vacant lot at the corner.

They were pros. That much was obvious. Who they were I had no way of knowing, but I had a pretty good idea of who they were looking for.

“Keep that pistol out of sight,” I told Jun Kwai.

“You got it, boss. You sure you don’t need any help?”

“You want to help?” I asked. “Keep your finger on the phone. Get ready to call 911.”

“I’ll call right now.”

“No,” I said. I knew my fellow cops. I also knew the kind of men recruited into special teams like the ones I’d seen off-load from the FedEx trucks. If I called in backup without knowing exactly what was going on, somebody was going to get shot, and good men would probably die. I wasn’t ready to let that happen. I’ve been to enough funerals. “Not yet. Let me figure who the players are first.”

“You got it, boss.”

I went to the bathrooms at the back of the store. I drew my weapon and set up next to the men’s room door. Just outside of the kill funnel that would form if the guy decided to start shooting at the door.

The door was the kind that opened outward, so I grabbed the handle and pulled it hard.

Unlocked door.

My first clue.

A junkie would have locked it while he shot up.

I quickly scanned the visible half of the bathroom, then threw my shoulder into the open door and leveled my weapon on the other half.

Empty.

Filthy, covered in graffiti, and stinking of piss, but still empty.

I repeated the drill at the women’s restroom. Same thing. A busted crack pipe and some scorched Brillo pads on the floor, but otherwise empty.

I stepped into the hallway and looked to the only other place Grunt Boy could have gone.

Jun Kwai’s office.

I’d watched about a million store surveillance videos on the TV in there, and I knew he kept it locked.

Always.

But the door was open by a crack. The lock had a few fresh tool marks on it, and it occurred to me that nowhere in my Ranger training had I ever been taught to pick a commercial dead-bolt lock. Blow them with det cord, sure, but not pick them.

Who, exactly, was I dealing with here?

Jun Kwai’s office was tiny. It was shaped like an L, with the small part of the room wrapping around behind the coolers. He kept it packed to the gills with boxes of inventory records and old surveillance tapes and all the other odds and ends he’d accumulated from twenty years of running a busy grocery store. In the cramped little space left over he had crammed an old schoolteacher’s desk and a battered chair. There was hardly enough room to breathe in there, and if I was going to have to fight an operator in a space like that, it was going to be interesting, to say the least.

But hesitating gets you killed, so I threw open the door and leveled my gun on the darkness inside the office.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness in time to see one of Grunt Boy’s sneakers disappearing into the ceiling. He’d pushed back one of the sectioned tiles that hid all the plumbing, and in another five seconds, he’d have been completely out of sight.

I didn’t give him the chance to slip away.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I called out to him.

The foot hung there for a second. It was all the chance I needed.

I jumped onto the desk and grabbed hold of his leg. I felt him flinch, and then start to buck and kick. His leg slipped from my hands, and when I reached back to grab him, he kicked at my face.

I was ready for him, though. I leaned right just enough to let the kick go by, and at the same time threw a block that caught him just above the ball of his ankle. I heard him grunt in unexpected pain, and that was all the encouragement I needed. I grabbed his leg again and jumped from the desk. My body weight pulled him straight through the ceiling tiles, and he came crashing down in a shower of crumbled ceiling panel dust.

He crashed down on the desk with a loud thud. Papers and old VHS cassettes slid to the floor. Grunt Boy let out a noise somewhere between surprise and pain, and for a moment, I thought I had him.

He was fast.

Before I could even climb to my feet, he’d jumped from the desk and kicked the chair out of the way.

I found myself nose to nose with him, the two of us standing in a space no bigger than a bathroom stall. He threw a quick jab with his right. I tried to move, but he was fast. He caught the side of my jaw and left me with a ringing in my ears.

I didn’t let him follow up, though. Before he could pull the punch back and strike with a backhand, I snaked my right arm over his wrist and shot my hand up behind his shoulder, putting him off balance. I jammed my knee into his thigh, causing him to snarl in pain.

I raised my boot to bring it down on the back of his knee, but he was ready for that. He took all the weight off his left leg and knelt down.

It was a basic move, but it was perfectly executed, and with him gone as my support, I rolled over the top of him and landed in the chair.

He was on me before I could get up. He snapped a front kick right at my chin. I managed to deflect it with my hands. Grunt Boy followed it up with another front kick, and I blocked that one, too. When I was first learning how to fight, my sensei told me that one day my techniques would be so finely honed I could fight in a phone booth, and I learned my lessons well. Grunt Boy sure seemed surprised.

He tried the front right kick a third time, but I was ready for it. I caught his heel with my left wrist and pushed up on his calf with my right. With his leg still in the air I lunged toward his other knee with a side kick and caught him just below the joint. He fell forward, hard, and landed facedown on the desk.

When we stood up to face each other again, his lip was busted up and leaking blood all down his chin.

“I bet that hurt,” I said.

That got him mad, but rather than try to hit me again, he just wiped away the blood. “You need to let me go,” he said.

“Yeah, the chances of that happening are hovering right about zero,” I said. “How about you turn around and put your hands behind your back. That way I won’t have to bust that other lip.”

He glanced down at my nameplate. “Look, Officer Ledger, you have no idea what’s going on here.”

“You just described most of my life, buddy. Why don’t you explain it to me after we put these cuffs on you?”

“There’s no time for that.”

“Oh we got—”

I didn’t get the rest of the sentence out. Before I knew it, he’d kicked a broom leaning up against the wall, making it flip in midair. He caught it and swept at my knees the next instant, leaving my calf muscles screaming from the sudden pain. I staggered a bit and lurched forward — right into the business end of the broom. He brought it up under my chin and shoved upward, causing me to rock back on my heels. The last place I wanted to be.

Grunt Boy could have slapped my temples and laid me out, but he didn’t follow through. Instead, he backed off. I heard boots hitting the floor outside the office door, and then the sounds of men barking fast, clipped commands.

So they weren’t worried about us hearing them.

Not a good sign.

“There’s no time to explain,” he said. “I have to get out of here. You should, too. You don’t want to be here when those guys come through that door.”

“Who are they?”

“Sorry,” he said, and tossed the broom aside. “That’s classified.”

He put his hands on the table and was about to jump onto it when the door burst open. He was caught in a bad spot, but Grunt Boy moved fast, I had to give him that. He spun around and kicked the door back into the soldier’s face.

“You’re gonna want to move,” he said, and grabbed the front of my uniform. He pulled me toward the wall next to the door and threw his arm across my chest, as if I were some kid in the front seat and he was my mom trying to keep me from going through the windshield.

The next instant I heard the rattle of a fully automatic rifle and the door exploded into splinters.

Grunt Boy stayed frosty.

Two of the soldiers came running through the door. Grunt Boy kicked the second one in the back, just below his body armor. The man crumpled to the floor. The lead man turned, and even through his gas mask, I could see the surprise in his eyes. He tried to bring his rifle up, but Grunt Boy was on him. He knocked the rifle to one side and got in close enough to throw one arm around his neck. He snaked his other hand under the man’s chin, and kept up steady pressure until the man’s neck snapped like a twig.

Grunt Boy had the pistol out of the dead man’s holster even before the body hit the ground.

He kicked the second man’s helmet, exposing a portion of the back of his head, then shot him twice.

“Whoa!” I said.

I looked down at the dead man. His gear was state of the art, but there wasn’t a single piece of insignia on it. It didn’t look like American gear, though. Russian, maybe. Maybe even Israeli.

“Who are these guys?” I demanded.

“I told you,” he said as he scooped up the rifle. “That’s classified.”

“You just shot a man in front of a Baltimore police officer. You’re gonna need to do a whole hell of a lot better than that.”

“Look,” he said. “All you need to know is that these guys are part of a team, and here in about five seconds, all their friends are going to come running through that front door.”

He walked out the office door and into the bright lights of the store.

I keyed my lapel-mic and said, “Bravo 16–20.”

Nothing.

Grunt Boy glanced at me over his shoulder. “That’s not gonna work.”

“Bravo 16–20,” I said again.

Still nothing.

I hit the red emergency button on the top of my radio. It should have given me dedicated access to the airwaves. Hit that tone and nobody hears anything but you.

“Bravo 16–20,” I said. “Bravo 16–20.”

But I got silence.

“What the hell’s going on?” I asked him.

“They’re jamming us. You won’t be able to talk with anyone until this is all over. That is, if you’re still alive.”

Before I could answer, gas canisters came flying through the windows, spewing OC. It spread across the ceiling and then started to seep its way down between the rows of shelves. I felt the familiar bite in my nostrils and the fullness in the back of my throat, but I held back the coughing. At Fort Benning I spent more time in the gashouse than most soldiers spent in the latrine. OC and I were old friends.

“Better get ready,” Grunt Boy said. He crouched down near one of the endcaps, his stolen rifle at the ready.

Hesitation kills, but I hesitated anyway. That man had saved my life back in the office, but I still had no idea who he was. I didn’t know who the men he’d killed were, either. They were wearing foreign-made gear, but that didn’t mean they weren’t U.S. military. Back in my time in the Sandbox, at one time or another, I wore everything from a burka to a fine Italian suit to full-on BDUs and body armor. It just depended on the mission.

“Get down!” Grunt Boy barked at me. “They’re coming through the door.”

I crouched down just as a team came crashing through the windows. Grunt Boy returned fire, dropping two of the soldiers before they even cleared the rack of girlie mags next to the door.

I pulled my pistol and peered around the opposite end of the shelf.

One of the soldiers fired at me, hitting the bags of chips on the endcap and showering me in Pringles and Lay’s.

I ducked back behind the row. “Damn it.”

“Hey!”

It was Grunt Boy. He was nodding toward Jun Kwai over at the register. The poor man’s normal glassy calm was gone. He looked like a deer in headlights. He just stood there, staring at the men chewing his store up with bullets. He was holding his Ruger Super Redhawk, though.

“What’s wrong with your friend?” Grunt Boy said. “He’s gonna get himself killed.”

I had to hand it to Grunt Boy. No hesitation. He laid down a steady line of fire as he ran from cover over to the register. I saw him grab Jun Kwai by the shoulders and turn him around, away from the door. It looked as if he were smoothing the man’s shirt. With more of the soldiers charging through the door, Grunt Boy pulled Jun Kwai from behind the registers and pushed him toward the office.

I watched Jun Kwai stumble by me, looking like a sleepwalker. There was snot running out his nose and he was crying like a baby, but he hardly seemed to notice. He just made his way to the office in a haze.

“Behind you!” Grunt Boy said.

I spun around just as one of the soldiers came around the corner. His face was lost behind a gas mask, but I knew he saw my uniform. He saw my police uniform and raised his rifle to kill me anyway.

Before the soldier could fire, Grunt Boy got the jump on him. He came around from behind the man and hit him in the back of the head with the butt of his rifle.

Once the man was down, Grunt Boy shot him.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he said to me. “Pay attention.”

By way of an answer I raised my pistol and fired at the two soldiers who had come up behind him.

Both dropped like a bag of rocks.

Grunt Boy’s eyes went wide. He stared at the business end of my pistol for just a second, then glanced over his shoulder at the two dead soldiers.

“Pay attention,” I said. “It don’t cost nothing.”

His eyes went even wider. “Fort Benning?”

“You guessed it.”

“I should’ve known.”

“Shoulda but didna.”

He reached down to the corpse at his feet and relieved it of its machine gun. He slid it over to me.

“I guess you know how to use that, then?”

It was a Heckler & Koch MP5, 9 mm. Fantastic weapon. Not my preferred platform, but still a beauty. I scooped it up, ejected the magazine to make sure it was functional, and then slammed it back home.

“I’ve seen the training films,” I said.

He chuckled, then turned back to the front door. Two of the remaining soldiers were moving to the register counter for better cover.

He smoked them both.

I had no idea how many men they had left, but I could tell, at that moment, that we had them scared. They weren’t popping their heads up, and they weren’t putting down suppression fire. When you stop taking the fight to your enemy, you know you pretty much have given up.

Knowing that, I actually cracked a smile. I’d gone from wondering what in the hell was going on to actually feeling like I had a handle on this thing.

Crazy how that happens.

I made hand signals to him that I was going around the other way so we could put channel fire their way.

He nodded, and I moved out. I went down to the end of the row, near the coolers, nearly all of which were shot to hell, with waterfalls of beer and soda and milk running into lakes on the floor. There was a little bit of glass still hanging from a corner of the store’s front window, and in it I could see the reflection of one of the soldiers. I could tell at a glance how scared the man was, and it occurred to me at that moment that we weren’t dealing with soldiers at all, but mercenaries.

Well-equipped mercenaries, but still mercenaries.

A man who fights for money has no cause, and a man who fights without a cause can never win.

I genuinely believe that.

You either believe in what you do, or you fail.

And when you play the kind of game we were playing, that means you die.

Still, it made me wonder what Grunt Boy was fighting for.

I took a deep breath and got ready to charge the man. He was armed with a full-auto MP5, but so was I, and I knew at that moment that I could take him. This would be over in four seconds.

But just as I was tensing to strike, I heard a familiar noise.

Helicopters.

I stopped and picked apart the noise in my head. Two of them. Sounded like Black Hawks. As they got closer, I could feel the thropping of their rotors beating against my chest, and the Warrior part of my mind hardened and took over.

How well I remembered that sound, that feeling.

At first I thought it was more mercenaries, but one look in the broken window dispelled that. The mercenary was frantically trying to call into the mic built into his wrist-comm system and obviously getting nothing.

His backup must have abandoned him.

Outside the window, a dozen or more ropes hit the street.

Within seconds, U.S. Army troops were fast-roping down to the pavement. They moved toward the store with guns blazing, mowing down the mercenary I’d been watching, plus four more I hadn’t seen.

I stood up just as one of them came around the corner.

He leveled his machine gun at my chest as a reflex when he saw me, paused for a second, then lowered it.

I did the same with my MP5.

He took off his gas mask, and I was shocked to see my old friend Mark Roberts. We’d served in the Rangers together, and from the looks of things, he was still with the teams.

Only now, judging from the insignia on his chest, he was a command sergeant major.

“Joe?” he said. “What the hell?”

“Command Sergeant Major?” I countered. “They just giving that rank away now?”

“Screw you.”

“Yeah? Only if you kiss me first.”

“In your dreams, you skanky little whore.” He threw his arms wide. “Come to papa.”

We man-hugged.

“You guys really tore this place a new one,” he said.

I looked around. He was right. Grunt Boy and I had pretty much leveled Jun Kwai’s shop. There wasn’t a shelf, a drink display, a magazine rack, a cooler door, or a wall of cigarettes that didn’t have a bullet hole in it. The flood of spilled soft drinks and beer and milk and orange juice was an inch deep on my boots.

Not to mention the spilled ice.

And the Skittles and the M&M’s all over the place.

And, of course, the dead mercenaries.

“The cleaners are going to have a bitch of a time with this place,” Mark said.

“You’re using cleaners?” Cleaners were our support staff, the guys who came in and erased all evidence that the team had been there. They weren’t used that often, but when they were, they were a wonder to watch. They could make evidence of a firefight disappear in a moment’s notice.

“Actually,” Mark said, “that’s classified.”

“I’ve heard that word a lot tonight,” I said. “What gives?”

“What gives is it’s classified.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Seriously. You really stepped into the shit tonight, Joe. You gotta stop doing that.”

Seriously, I thought. I used to be one of these guys. I hold a top-secret clearance, even now. I looked around and realized that, at one point or another, I had been to a school with every single one of the guys in Mark Roberts’s team. They couldn’t tell me what was going on?

But of course they couldn’t.

I knew that.

I was once part of the team. I was on the outside now.

I was what the guys affectionately called a FAG. A former action guy. A friend of the team, but no longer one of the team.

“Let me take you outside, okay?” he said.

I knew the drill. Mark and I were friends. Had been for a long time. But he had a job to do, and part of that job was evacuating those who had no business knowing what his job was.

That meant me.

“Sure,” I said.

I followed him out to the street. As I stepped onto the sidewalk I heard glass crunching behind me. I turned and saw Grunt Boy walk up to a team member who had Jun Kwai firmly in tow. He put his hands on Jun Kwai’s shoulders, just as he’d done when he’d saved the man’s life earlier in the evening, and seemed to straighten his shirt. Only this time I saw him remove a long blue vial, about the size of a cigar, from Jun Kwai’s inner pocket. He checked it, I guess to make sure it was still intact, then caught me looking at him.

He held up the vial. “Trust me,” he said. “This right here. Everything that happened here. This was worth it.”

With that, Mark led me away from the building.

We headed over to an unmarked ambulance and he asked me if I needed anything.

I told him I was good.

“Cool,” he said. Then he looked me in the eye. “In just a bit we’re going to release your radio so you can call in the fire. Cool?”

“What fire?”

“Cleaners, remember?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, right.”

“And this is classified.”

My turn to look him in the eye. “Screw you, Command Sergeant Major.”

And we both laughed.

Nick Stewart carried the vial back into the store. It’d been a hell of a week, but they had the formula at last.

He found Mr. Church standing in front of the cookie aisle. The man was tearing into a bag of Oreos.

“Here it is,” Nick said, and put it on the shelf in front of Mr. Church.

“That’s excellent,” the older man said, though how much older Nick could never tell. The man could have been forty-five or maybe sixty-five. There was just no way of telling. He was one of those people who defied description.

“Anything else?” Nick asked.

“You had help, I see.”

“That cop, yeah. Former Ranger, I’m pretty sure of it.”

“He handled himself well?”

“Very well.”

“Oh. That’s excellent.” Mr. Church twisted open an Oreo cookie and ate the filling first. “Someone we should keep an eye on, perhaps?”

“I think so, yeah.”

Mr. Church finished off the rest of his Oreo, apparently lost in thought.

Nick knew better than to fill up the silence with small talk. With nothing more to say, he quietly bled back into the night.

Joe McKinney has his feet in several different worlds. In his day job, he has worked as a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a DWI enforcement officer, a disaster mitigation specialist, a homicide detective, the director of the city of San Antonio’s 911 call center, and a patrol supervisor. He played college baseball for Trinity University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in American history, and went on to earn a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was the manager of a Barnes & Noble for a while, where he indulged a lifelong obsession with books. He published his first novel, Dead City, in 2006, a book that has since been recognized as a seminal work in the zombie genre. Since then, he has gone on to win two Bram Stoker Awards and expanded his oeuvre to cover everything from true crime and writings on police procedure to science fiction to cooking to Texas history. The author of more than twenty books, he is a frequent guest at horror and mystery conventions. Joe and his wife, Tina, have two lovely daughters and make their home in a little town just outside of San Antonio, where he pursues his passion for cooking and makes what some consider to be the finest batch of chili in Texas. You can keep up with all of Joe’s latest releases by friending him on Facebook.