I hosed them with armor-piercing rounds. I emptied an entire magazine into them. You burn through a mag pretty fast. The tungsten-core cartridges didn’t give a wet shit about Kevlar body armor. Not generally, and not at that range.
Then I was up and moving, hurling a flash-bang out the window because I didn’t want to kill Gunter. I went out the window, tucked, rolled, and came up with my rifle, but damn it if one of the Silentium assholes wasn’t down on the deck. The other shooter was. How the last man evaded the flash-bang is something I’ll never know. He was three feet in front of me and tried to shoot me in the face, but he wasn’t set for it. He fired a heartbeat too soon and the world seemed to explode inside my head. His own accidental version of a flash and bang. But I was already moving, bringing my gun up to try to stitch him from balls to brains. He swung at my gun with his own, which was not the brightest move in the world. He managed to knock my gun away, but the swing moved his barrel too far, so when he fired again he missed. Again.
Then we were chest to chest, our long guns too clumsy for that kind of fight.
In movies these fight scenes go on and on. Not in combat. You either end the bad guy or you get ended yourself.
I released my rifle and struck him in the throat with the open Y formed between the stiffened index finger and thumb. Before he could even react I kicked his knee and blew it apart. He dropped and I clubbed him down to the dirt with a pile-driver punch between his shoulder blades. Even through the body armor I could feel bones break. My rifle had slewed around on its strap, so I drew my sidearm and shot him in the back of his right shoulder and the back of his left thigh. Then I pivoted toward the other shooter, who was trying to get to his feet while shaking off the effects of the flash-bang. I had a clear head shot, but I needed to ask some questions. So, for the same reason I didn’t kill the guy I’d just shot, I didn’t kill this asshole, either.
He was nine feet away and I’m a good shot. I shot him in that gap between the protective thigh pads and the hard-plastic kneecap. Aim at the center of the leg and you explode the base of each femur. Which I damn well did.
Top and Bunny came running around the building and into the driveway.
But our slice of the war with the Silentium was over.
Almost.
We took the weapons away from the two screaming men.
We even put field dressings around their wounds. Didn’t want them to bleed out. This was in no way a kindness.
Bunny took Gunter into the building, and he kept the Lab crew away from the windows. Top and I dragged the surviving cultists around behind the lead Humvee. We used our knives to cut away their body armor. I heard the TV go on. Some kind of science fiction movie with loud dinosaur roars. The volume went all the way up. Bunny understood.
The wounded men were terrified. They were in agony. They cursed at us. They spat at us.
I knelt in front of the one I’d shot first. He was a white guy. Big and tough. His face was running with greasy sweat, and his eyes were jumping with pain.
“Silentium,” I said.
I saw what that word did to his eyes. They widened. They shifted away. And I knew I was right.
“Do you speak English?” I asked mildly.
“Go . . . fuck yourself . . .” he growled. His accent was pure New Jersey. Fair enough.
“This is going to make it easy,” I said. “I’ve got a whole bunch of questions, and I bet you know a whole bunch of really useful stuff. Names. Locations. Timetables. Stuff like that.”