Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

eways and crunching him against the opposite, closed door of the train.

Brian shook off his shock and ran forward as Marvin straddled Big Flicka and started pounding him, screaming and screeching like a wild animal as he clubbed the drug dealer again and again in the face.

Brian spotted the pistol on the scuffed train floor beside them, and he kicked it out of the door of the train, and then gloriously joined in on the beating of Big Flicka, kicking at the guy’s long legs, his stomach, the side of his head. More passengers arrived out of nowhere, yelling and screaming as the three gasped and growled as they fought for their lives there on the dirty train floor.

Then suddenly, after he didn’t know how long—a minute, an hour—a big uniformed cop was pulling Brian from the back, up onto his feet, and he was outside on the platform getting handcuffed.

A second later, Marvin was handcuffed beside him, and they both watched as Big Flicka was dragged out.

Brian couldn’t believe the state of him. There was blood pouring out of his broken nose and out of a huge gash on the side of his head, which was swelled up like a pumpkin.

He was out cold, or maybe dead, hopefully, Brian thought as he realized he was crying.

He wasn’t the only one, he saw, as he turned to Marvin. Big Marv was flat out bawling on the platform next to him, just helplessly weeping. Brian leaned over and nudged him with his cuffed hands.

“It’s over, Marvin. It’s okay, dude. It’s over. We got him. You saved me, man. You saved me.”

That’s when it really hit Brian. When he looked at the number of cops around them. The crowd of commuters standing outside the stopped train. The EMTs rattling a stretcher over the platform’s cement.

How close they had come to not making it.

“No, man,” Marvin said in an almost whisper through his weeping. “You did it. You saved me, bro. It was you.”

Chapter 86

Yellow and white sparks pinwheeled off the Black Hawk helicopter’s windshield glass as we ascended out of the shadow of the Chrysler Building, into the bright, late morning sunlight above the canyons of midtown Manhattan.

From my perch on a none-too-comfortable bench in the rear of the FBI’s big black military-style helicopter, I stared out a side door window at midtown Manhattan’s east side. Next to me was CIA sniper Matthew Leroux, and we, along with another helicopter team that was now hovering over the East River near the UN, had been assigned countersniper air cover for Buckland’s motorcade.

I had tried to beg off being Leroux’s spotter several times as we rolled into the city behind the motorcade in the MRAP. I’d cited my lack of qualifications, that it had been years since I’d held a spotting scope.

Leroux had ended the discussion at the 59th Street heliport, where the FBI Black Hawks were waiting, by holding up some fingers.

“How many you see, Mike?” he had said.

“Two,” I told him.

“Then by the powers vested in me by the gods of war, I here now dub you officially qualified,” he had said. “Stop worrying. I got you covered. It’s just like riding a bike.”

Some bike, I thought, feeling the hard, high turbine thrum of the five-ton military aircraft through my back and butt and shoe soles.

Leroux was busy kneeling on the deck of the cabin, putting the final touches on some bulky piece of military hardware called a gyroscopic shooting platform. It was a gun bench, an extremely expensive, high-tech, rotating adjustable gun sling that was underhung with the same pill-shaped gyroscopic motors that Hollywood steady cams use to counter vibration.

But instead of a camera chocked into the gyroscopic mount, there was a huge bolt-action sniper rifle called a CheyTac M300 Intervention. Leroux had explained to me that the long, futuristic-looking steel and carbon fiber gun could actually shoot sub–minute of angle. Sub–minute of angle precision basically meant the big rifle could consistently put bullet after bullet into a circle the size of a human head at preposterous distances.

And what a bullet it shot. Leroux had said its .408 CheyTac round, though smaller and lighter than a .50 BMG, could easily drop personnel targets at two miles. That kind of range in narrow Manhattan was actually very comforting. It meant we were providing air cover from the East River to the Hudson at any given point.

Leroux had been throwing around tons of superassassin lingo from the moment I’d decided to be his spotter. He spoke of yaw and linear air drag and spin rates and ballistic coefficients. Speed and altitude and angular motion of the aircraft. Slant distances.

Since it was all pretty much Greek to me, I just nodded along. He was Jordan Spieth getting his game face on. I was just his caddy.

Actually, as we were strapping into the aircraft twenty minutes before, at the heliport, I’d learned that we’d caught somewhat of a break in the case.

Doyle, who was working the Pavel Levkov murder, had sent me a text. He said a witness from one of the houses near the drop site in Yonkers had come forward. The witness had said he saw our departed Russian friend dumped by two men in a large black SUV. Apparently, the witness even got a partial on the plate that Doyle was frantically trying to run down.

Since we already knew that Levkov was the liaison who had hired the Brit, a line on whoever had killed him would point us directly to whoever the hell was behind all this.

At long last, it looked like we might finally have a substantial lead.