Free The Gamma Option by Jon Land Page B

feeling for one of the pistols in a drawer that had been open through the course of their conversation. “Take this.”
    She was by his side when they re-entered the store, pressing a gun into his hand. Panicked bystanders rushed by outside, colliding with displays that had been set up on the sidewalk. Blaine and Evira stayed pinned behind the doorway and peered out. Beyond, all was chaos. A small group of gunmen dressed as merchants were firing upon two jeeploads of uniformed soldiers. The soldiers’ bullets cut indiscriminate lines through the crowd, their fire slowed only when sniper bullets rained on them from the roof of the building across the street.
    “Yours?” Blaine asked.
    “No! I don’t know who they are! I swear it! Let’s get out of here!”
    Pistols in hand they ducked out the doorway to be swept away by the crowd rushing from the area.
    Colonel Ben-Neser wasn’t thinking anymore, simply watching and reacting. He had drawn his pistol and rushed from the cover of the warehouse onto the sidewalk. He had seen at least three of the enemy’s number fall to the fire of his riflemen on the roof. But the fake soldiers had retreated behind the cover of their jeeps and were concentrating their fire upward in an incessant hail. After Ari, he had watched his aproned commando fall to a second barrage that commenced as soon as Ben-Neser had given the order to move in. He felt himself struck each time a bullet found one of his men. This was his fault, damn it, his fault!
    Above him, one of the marksmen found a clear bead on another of the soldiers, but the others honed savagely in on his position and blasted away. The man was pitched backward while the second marksman seized what he thought would be the advantage and showed himself long enough to aim. But the soldiers’ fire never let up. Bullets punched into the second man and sent his body headlong from the roof on to the street a dozen yards in front of Ben-Neser.
    “Bastards,” he moaned.
    The surge of the crowd reached him then and Ben-Neser was tossed about like a puppet in their midst. A hard smack to his arm tore the pistol from his grip and he lowered himself to feel for it amidst the sea of thrashing feet.
    The drop was what saved his life.
    The fake soldiers had turned to spray the crowd. The butchers! Of course, with the marksmen neutralized the only shots aimed their way were coming from figures disguised within the crowd. So they had taken the most obvious, and most barbaric, action. They must have come to protect Evira, he theorized with a guilty chill. And he had handed his team to them on a silver platter by having Ari approach.
    Bodies toppled over him while more of the panicked crowd struggled to flee. Two of his remaining men posted in the square, meanwhile, saw the direction the fake soldiers’ firings were taking. To save whatever lives they could, they broke off from the crowd and rushed into the center of the square to draw the bullets to themselves.
    Ben-Neser saw this just as he recovered his pistol and pushed himself on his elbows over a pair of fallen tourists, both near death. He fired a full clip in the time it took the imposters to cut down these two men and a third who had circled in from around the corner, leaving him as the last.
    “You fuckers!” Ben-Neser screamed as he lurched to his feet with a fresh clip snapped home. He was charging now, charging through the remnants of the crowd with pistol burning in his hand.
    He felt the hot gush of pain to his armless shoulder, and for that instant he was back in the West Bank the day he had lost the limb. The phantom itching was replaced by the same fiery agony he had felt when the grenade blew into him, and once again he was melting into nothingness, this time with nothing to pull him out.
    Evira and Blaine’s original aim had been to swing left outside the shop and rush away amidst the chaos. But their turn had brought them almost face-to-face with a pistol-wielding man shoving