Free Fire Zone by Rod Carstens

Author:Rod Carstens [Carstens, Rod]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Resource Security Force

Team Sixteen

Rally Point Fourteen

2015 hours

Rally Point Fourteen was an old police substation. With concrete walls and cleared fields of fire it made an ideal rendezvous point for a team in trouble. These designated Rally Points were determined by each team prior to their insertion into an area, so it would be difficult for this Special Action Team leader to figure out exactly which one they would use.

Tanner paused on a mound of rubble just a block away. He waited and searched the street and storefronts before he silently moved in a crouch across the open ground around the station. Then he saw a figure standing still just outside the rear entrance. He threw himself into cover and waited for the firing to start, only to recognize his attacker as a mound of bricks. He had not put his night-visions back on after he had taken them off to ambush the tiltrotor. He slipped in the front door, worked his way past the booby traps to the top floor. Always the high ground.

He paused in the hall outside the room Cat and Matos were in and called out, “Cat it’s me.” If he hadn’t, with things going the way they were, she might have shot first and asked questions later.

“Come on in,” Cat replied.

She was working on Matos in the light of her headlamp. He was propped against the wall, apparently asleep. IVs were in both arms. His breathing was normal. Cat was injecting wound sealer directly into a gaping hole in his thigh. The sealant filled the wound and stopped the bleeding, and the antibiotics began to treat any contamination. She started bandaging the wound and Tanner looked around the room for the first time. It was starkly empty and dirty with years of accumulated trash from teams that had used the Rally Point. It struck Tanner how much like his own life the room was in many respects, with Cat and Matos as the only two good, decent things left in an existence where there were only dirty and empty things left. He felt closer to them now than ever before.

“How’s Matos?”

When Cat turned to answer him, she saw his arm and crude bandage. “What the fuck?” she said, rushing to him.

As she was taking off the bandage Tanner had put on, he said, “I had a run-in with two gang types.”

“This is a pretty good laceration. Let me clean it and re-bandage it.” Cat pulled the bandage off, cleaned the wound up, then injected it with wound sealer and re-bandaged it so it was done right. “Did you get any painkillers on board?”

“Yeah, one local and then the big one.”

Cat frowned and injected his arm with another local. “That should hold you for most of the night. I can’t leave you alone for five minutes without you getting into trouble.”

“You know me, always looking for a party,” Tanner said. “How’s Matos?”

“Sleeping now. The round blew a bloody great hole in his thigh but somehow missed his femur and femoral artery, so I was able to control the bleeding.

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