• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Sergeant King entered at a jog. On seeing the fully covered body on the examination table, he froze. “Damn it,” he said to himself.

Hidden by the portion of the blanket hanging from the examination table, Drummond slowly opened the crash cart’s drawers fractions of an inch at a time, searching for succinylcholine, the swift-acting neuromuscular blocker used to facilitate endotracheal intubation. Drummond intended to use a small dose of the drug to temporarily paralyze King.

The sergeant wandered toward the table. “Ginny?” he asked at a whisper, as if worried about disturbing the corpse. “Where’d you go?”

Drummond found three pencil-sized preloaded succinylcholine syringes, each packing an eighteen-gauge needle.

Warily, King peeled the blanket from the head of the examination table. He recoiled, drawing his gun and shouting, “Flint!”

Drummond reached beneath the table and slung the needle sidearm into King’s calf. The sergeant looked down in mystification—he probably felt no more pain than if he’d been stung by an insect. Drummond sprang, hitting the floor on a roll, then reached and tapped the plunger, driving succinylcholine into King’s muscle.

King twisted away with such force that the needle jerked free and flew across the infirmary. It struck a cabinet on the far wall, lodging there like a dart.

Flint ran in, gun drawn. King pointed, superfluously, to Drummond, then crumpled to the floor, where he lay, unmoving.

Glad of the diversion, Drummond dove back behind the crash cart.

Flint pivoted on his heels, firing. Strips of linoleum slapped Drummond. The air clouded with sawdust that had been a chunk of the examination table.

From his knees, Drummond shoved the red cart at Flint.

The marine spun, shooting and ringing the face of it. The bullet exited through the uppermost drawer, whistling past Drummond’s ear, followed by a spray of glass and a milky white substance that smelled of alcohol.

Pushing the cart ahead of himself, Drummond picked up the gun King had dropped.

Another bullet pounded into the cart.

Drummond said, “I have a clean shot at you, son. Neither of us wants me to take it. So, slowly, set your sidearm down on the floor and kick it toward me.”

“Mr. Clark, sir, there is no chance whatsoever that you can get out of here, so—”

Drummond fired, aiming to Flint’s right. The wall a few inches from Flint’s right ear exploded into plaster dust. The man dropped to the floor.

Drummond tracked him through the gunsight. “We’re making progress. Now, all you have to do is surrender your weapon.”

Ashen, independent of the haze of plaster dust, the marine complied.

As Drummond reached for the weapon, something hard slammed into the back of his head. He fell against the crash cart, toppling it. As he hit the floor, he saw the metal bed rail swung like a cricket bat by Geneviève.

Meanwhile the crash cart’s five metal drawers dropped open and pounded him, the sharp corner of one ripping through his shirt and slicing into his chest. All manner of medical supplies rained onto him.

He implored himself to maintain focus; he had one last play in mind.

White light devoured his consciousness.

Snipers aim for the “apricot,” better known as the medulla oblongata, the part of the brainstem that controls the heart and lungs. To reach Charlie Clark’s, Gretchen Lanier needed to fire from the barely opened window of the third-floor hotel room, across and through more than three hundred yards of parkland, and into the barred detention rooms.

If only every job were so simple, she thought. A year ago in Afghanistan, she’d recorded a kill from 2,267 yards away, or 1.29 miles, on icy and mountainous terrain.

She dropped to a kneeling position at the foot of the bed. In her year and a half of sniper school, her instructors had placed almost as much emphasis on proficiency in camouflage and concealment as on marksmanship. More often than not it involved wearing a ghillie suit in order to pass for a bush or clump of weeds. Tonight’s camo involved surrounding