Free 30 Pieces of Silver by Carolyn McCray

his profile. He really wasn’t in the mood to take a stray bullet.
    “ Lopez? Svengurd?”
    Checking his radio, Brandt cursed as static answered. They were still being jammed. Another peppering of fire upward. Brandt used another five bullets to close him down. Lopez or Svengurd must have done the same to the third assailant because the hangar was suddenly devoid of gunfire. Only the roar of the oil-fueled fire filled the empty space.
    Brandt continued his northern progress, using the only real advantage he had—the knowledge of the labyrinth-like pattern of the fire. And now that the fuckers couldn’t track his team, Brandt felt he had truly evened the odds.
    Before he could figure out how to turn this into an advantage, a gunman stumbled into view as he backed from a burst of flame. Three bullets later, he was down. Brandt kicked the gun from the assailant’s hand. Blood trickled from the man’s lips. Another shot to the forehead.
    For just a moment, the sergeant hesitated. He only had thirty-one bullets left. Another twelve in the small caliber handgun tucked into his boot. Given that he had just spent over three hundred rounds in the last five minutes, forty-three bullets wasn’t going to get him very far. Still, he put another one in the bastard’s chest. He had to be sure.
    Brandt patted the man down. Sure enough, he found a PDA showing the blurry infrared feed of the hangar. He pocketed the device for the techies back home when he realized that the PDA was heavier than it should have been. Dropping it like the hissing snake, Brandt threw himself backward, but the explosion still knocked him onto his ass.
    The damn thing must have been equipped with a fingerprint-sensitive dead-man’s switch, loaded with just enough C-4 to blow a hole the size of a watermelon in the man’s chest. Which would have been Brandt’s heart if he hadn’t caught a clue. These bastards were not only well armed, but extremely well financed. Maybe so, but the fuckers were also whittled from nine to three, maybe even down to two.
    Turns out money couldn’t buy everything.
     
    * * *
     
    Rebecca half-dragged, half-carried Davidson toward the hole blasted into the roof by the missile attack. Was it a bad sign that she missed the RPGs? Because right now they were in danger of dying from either smoke inhalation, blood loss from their injuries, or taking a ricochet to the back.
    Heat-seeking missiles just did not seem like such a big deal anymore.
    “ Let me up,” Davidson complained, but she ignored him, again.
    Besides his shoulder, the private had taken a bullet to his abdomen and another to his right calf. Not that she was much better. At this point, Rebecca didn’t know what was shrapnel, wood fragments, or bullet wounds. And at this point she didn’t care. She could see open sky through a thick veil of black clogging smoke.
    Oxygen. Sweet, sweet oxygen.
    Her nose, mouth, and lungs were filled with the oily, syrup-thick smoke. The only benefit to the choke-inducing soot was the fact it shrouded them in darkness again. Their position was well hidden, but toxic. The private’s body shook with a raspy cough to prove her point.
    They had to get out of here, like now .
    Rebecca made her way to the blown-out roof. The rafters extended to the edge of their escape hatch, but the metal had a ragged edge. Beyond the danger of getting the private over the sharp ledge, the opening was a good three feet above her head. Rebecca tested the catwalk to make sure it wasn’t damaged in the blast. It could support her weight, but both of theirs?
    A moister-than-normal cough brought her attention back to the injured private. She rubbed his back as he wretched out blackened sputum. What else could she do? Rebecca was the wrong kind of doctor to help with smoke inhalation.
    Feeling helpless, she kept murmuring that he was going to be okay as Davidson gagged and gagged some more. He finally coughed up blackish blood, then leaned against the beam.
    “