Last Man Standing by David Baldacci Read Free Book Online

we’ll have more later, even
     if we have to make the shit up. Back to you, Sue.” Web jogged down the alley.
    Last night’s storm had long since blown itself into the Atlantic. The air pushing behind it was cooler than the city had had
     in a while. Built on a swamp, Washington, D.C., handled heat and humidity better than cold and snow. When the snow fell, the
     only street likely to be cleared was the one in your dreams.
    He ran into Bates halfway down the alley.
    “What in the hell are you doing here?” Bates said.
    “You said you wanted my take on things, so I’m here to give it to you.” Bates glanced at Web’s hand. “Let’s get going, Perce.
     Every minute counts.”
    From the exact spot where the Chevy had dropped them off, Web retraced the steps of his squad. With every stride Web took
     toward the target, he could feel both his anger and his fear swell. The bodies were gone; the blood was not. Even the hard
     rain apparently was incapable of clearing it all away. In his mind, Web blitzed through every move he had made, every emotion
     he had felt.
    The ruined machine gun nests were being dismantled and examined by a team of people who consistently pulled legal convictions
     out of microscopic scraps. Others walked the square courtyard kneeling, stooping, tagging things, probing and basically looking
     for answers from objects that did not appear willing to give any. Watching them, Web was not confident. It was highly unlikely
     that crystal-clear tented arches and plain whorls were just waiting around on the guns to be plucked by the fingerprint techs.
     Whoever had planned this intricate ambush wouldn’t be that careless. He stepped between the bloodstains like he was tiptoeing
     around a graveyard, and wasn’t he really?
    “Windows were painted black so the guns couldn’t be spotted until they started firing. No light reflections off barrels, no
     nothing,” said Bates.
    “Nice to know we were done in by professionals,” replied Web bitterly.
    “You did a number on the fifties.” Bates pointed to one of the ruined weapons.
    “An SR75 will do that for you.”
    “They’re mini-guns, military design. Six-barrel Gatling style, tripod-mounted with the pods bolted to the floor so the firing
     position wouldn’t deviate. There were feeder box and conveyor belt attachments and four thousand linked rounds per gun. Firing
     rates were set at four hundred a minute, though its maximum setting is eight thousand.”
    “Four hundred was plenty. And there were eight guns. That’s thirty-two hundred slugs flying at you every sixty seconds. I
     know because all except one ricochet missed me by a few inches.”
    “With that low firing rate those guns could shoot a long time.” “They did.”
    “Power drive was electric, and they were chambering armor-piercing rounds.”
    Web just shook his head. “Did you find what tripped them?”
    Bates led him over to a brick wall on the side farthest from the alley Web had come down. It was part of the building perpendicularly
     placed to the targeted abandoned tenement house and the source of one-half of the firing arc that had wiped out Charlie, save
     Web. What was invisible in the dark was only a bit more apparent in the daylight.
    Web knelt down and looked at what he recognized as a laser device. A small hole had been punched in the brick and the laser
     point and power pack inserted into it. The hole was deeper than the power pack so that once inside the hole, it was pretty
     much invisible. The snipers wouldn’t have been able to ID it from where they had their posts set up, even if they had been
     looking for such a thing, and their intelligence had given them no indication of it, as far as Web knew. The path of the laser
     was knee height and the invisible light stream no doubt had run across the courtyard when activated.
    “Beam breaks, firing starts and doesn’t stop except for a few seconds’ pause after each cycle until the ammo’s gone.” He