CROSSHAIR

The warehouse in question was a low structure of corrugated steel, pockmarked concrete and chipped paint largely identical to its neighbors. At the end of a yard, empty save for scattered litter, its ribbed cargo doors were shut. 

Wolf advanced through the open danger area. No gunfire reached out to catch him, and his dash carried him quickly to the far side of the building, to a smaller side entrance.

He bent down to inspect the gap below where the white door met the threshold. Detecting no tripwires, no booby traps, he tried for the knob and was rewarded with a click as the aluminum door cracked open. Wolf backed up with baited breath as he waited for the doorway to get filled with outgoing lead-

No shots.

Whatever they were up to inside, nobody had thought to lock the doors, nor cover the obvious access point with fire. Panicky amateurs? That was a good sign. Or they had something more urgent to deal with. Could also be a bad one. 

Wolf swiveled on the door's edge to "pie" the view behind, one slice at a time. He kept low, resting his pistol on the door frame, and scanned the scene that opened up to him: a single drab hallway lined with a few doors to either side, it looked to be the office annex to the actual warehouse. 

There were five doors in total: three on the left, two on the right, staggered so that none of them faced the other. That wasn't counting an open doorframe on the far right. From somewhere inside, a fan chugged away in tune with the hum of fluorescent overheads.

Confirming the immediate sector all-clear, Wolf rose to a better firing stance and elbowed the door before the return arm could bring it back, slipping into the building and leaving an empty bottle he found lying just outside as a doorstop. Moving at a dogtrot, he followed along one side of the hallway, careful to not stick too close to the walls.

First door on the left.

It was closed, and Wolf had to do the whole check-and-test shebang again. Clear. He turned the door handle, charged straight into the room as soon as it creaked open, gun up, scanning for threats – nothing. Nothing but storage room. 

He did this one room at a time, again and again.

Door check, center check, check deep, flow into the room. Again and again, the first few rooms were empty office space, and all he’d managed so far was burn daylight.

Damn it, there was nobody to hold the hallway, and the seconds it took to recheck it every time he went in and out of a room were adding up.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast my ass.

He approached the fourth door, and suddenly there was a thump, and another. Something–someone falling, followed by an exchange of distressed voices coming muffled through the wall. Wolf smelled blood. Doing away with the check, he thundered past the fourth door and into the room– check center, check right–

Bingo. 

Right through his sights, there were two males deep into the room.
Male One of them was holding Male Two in a chokehold and pointing a gun squarely to his friend's head, completing the hostage-taker image by waving his arms wildly and screaming threats.

It was a difficult situation; he had no clear shot at Male One's T-box, to drop him without his spasms squeezing the trigger. If he shot at the hostage-taker now, Male Two was just as dead. 

Wolf shot Male Two.

He hit him the shoulder– at getting shot, Male Two's body locked up, jerked itself free and Wolf now had a clear shot. 

He took advantage of the wannabe hostage-taker’s shock to put two in him center mass. Wolf raised his pistol to put one up top, but Male One was already down. The twin click-booms resounded in the cramped space and pounded eardrums. Shuffling across the room to stand over Male One, Wolf finished him with one shot to the head. 

Wolf turned back to Male Two, the apparent hostage. He was on the floor, cussing and wailing, and Wolf rendered aid with a plunging hook that knocked the man out cold. Crouching down, he tied the man's hands to a pipe running along the wall, and gave him a pat down. 

Nothing suspect on his person, and the shot that hit him was a grazer, a flesh wound at worst. He’ll live, if he really was innocent. Wolf made to get up.

Then a new round of gunfire stitched a ragged line of holes along the wall where he had just been standing, peppering his back with bits of plaster. The rounds that didn’t punch right through into the hall still had enough energy to ricochet. One missed his face by an inch.

Shit. Either these walls are made of papier-mâché...

Or these guys are rocking something heavy.

The fire was coming from warehouse-side, and that was where Wolf needed to be. He kept his head down as he scurried out of the room.

He wasn’t the only one that got spooked. As he pied his way back into the hall, the fifth door– the last one he was yet to check– flew open, and a guy sprang like a flushed rabbit for the open doorframe. Point shooting, Wolf pumped him with nine millimeter until he dropped in a heap and the Hi-Power’s slide locked back.

Vented pistol smoke lingered over his sight picture. The runner’s torso stirred with ragged breathing, even as bloodstains bloomed against the man’s clothes. Turning to cover the opening, Wolf reached for a fresh magazine on his vest, deftly slipping another mag home and releasing the slide forward with twin snaps. He replaced the now-empty pouch with the spent magazine.

Quickly checking the last room and finding it clear, he stepped over to the twitching runner to finish this one before an idea bubbled up in Wolf's head. 

The open doorframe was the one way into the warehouse itself, and something about that burst of heavy fire told Wolf that this access point was going to be covered. The guys watching it would probably getting real antsy just about now.

Manhandling the groaning runner to the entryway, Wolf stopped short of the threshold, and shoved him round the corner.

He didn't go very far. The watcher's nerves were on a hair trigger alright; they opened fire on the first thing that came through the portal, and chopped their erstwhile comrade up into a bloody mess. 

Wolf low-ran right through the wake of the now thoroughly-dead runner, button-hooking around the corpse and scraping by the withering hail of chancy-close fire; gun up and firing snapshots at muzzle flashes. 

He caught glimpses of shipping crates, corrugated boxes, and overhang lights– before sliding for the nearest cover, a set of barrels on a pallet half-covered in tarp.

It worked!

A body wasn’t ever going to stop fire from punching straight through, but it did give them something else to shoot at.

Suddenly a bullet punched straight through thin barrel metal and whizzed by Wolf’s ear, bullets tearing gnarled holes on the wrong side– concealment is NOT cover, and Wolf had to frantically drag his ass, rounds missing him by inches, to a pair of crates which held up better against the onslaught of lead.

Wolf settled behind them with an audible phew.

Now, behind actual cover, Wolf finally had time to assess the situation.
They were on the raised part of the warehouse, next to the smaller loading bay where the trucks, three of them, were parked. Looks like he’d caught these guys in the middle of unloading, with a mess of crates, containers and equipment scattered around.

He could tell two separate sources of fire from the far end of the warehouse, adding up with the twin blurs of muzzle flash he fired at when he dashed into the room. One was a ways closer, and clearly firing something heavier.

Wolf designated the two hostiles Submachine Gun and Rifle.

Submachine Gun was holed up behind a loaded trolley, and Rifle was firing from a bipod on a stack of pallets next to one of the trucks. They had him in a textbook crossfire, and he was on the wrong side of fire superiority.

At least they couldn’t hit for shit, firing in cyclic. These guys were amateurs, alright.

If they were trained for anything, Submachine Gun would be maneuvering on him with Rifle firing, and would've ruined his day by now. Between bursts, Wolf could hear the two argue between themselves to get at him, but neither of them were moving just yet. 

He was still in a tight spot, stuck between two automatics with just a pistol. For all his training, there was only so much one man can do to clear a whole building of alert and uncooperative characters with heavy firepower.

One last trick up the sleeve, then.

Wolf reached for the flashbang on his vest. After a certain incident, he never left home without one. He hadn’t counted on using it today– alleged DHS agents didn’t carry one of these around for kicks. Pull the pin, let the lever go, arc the banger over the crates. Wolf waited for the tell-tale flash–
and BANG.

He went over the top and levelled his Hi-Power on the bigger threat to his right. 
With Rifle stunned, clutching at his burst eardrums with one hand and refusing to let go of his weapon with the other, Wolf easily lined up the shot and put one right between the eyes.
Rifle slumped back out of sight, leaving his weapon rested on the stack of pallets.

Wolf shifted targets, expecting to find another one to the left– no joy.
He’d nailed the other guy, but Submachine Gun apparently had the mind to shelter behind his trolley. Wolf rushed to get an angle on, but it was too far and he wasn’t going to make it before the bastard recovered–

He dove behind another set of crates just as Submachine Gun sprayed blind-fire over his trolley.
More out of frustration than anything, Wolf leaned out of cover to let loose a few shots, but was only rewarded with a return hail of bullets and splinters. 

Submachine Gun had gotten his wits back. Can’t expect too much from a flashbang in a semi-open space. As Wolf changed magazines, a curious sound other than gunfire began to echo inside the warehouse. It was laughter.

This amateur’s laughing. This bastard’s laughing.

Wolf felt his gorge rise. Inexplicably, he also found himself thinking back to one of the Unit’s movie nights, to chisel-jawed action heroes charging in with guns akimbo and all kinds of acrobatics in slow motion. Normally, that was a good way of getting yourself killed.

But normally, you’d take a building like this with a squad of ten guys, not one with just a sidearm. And if you didn’t have to worry about civilians, you’d just make your own breach point and chuck frag grenades into every nook and corner.

He’d already had to get creative just to reach this point, and now it looked like he’d have to get crazy.

Screw it. It's just a couple meters to the damn thing.

Wolf broke away from cover. In a maneuver that could only be described as a sideways dolphin dive, he fired his single pistol all the way down as he slammed into the floor. Remotely, he heard something crack. 

Submachine Gun was evidently taken aback. Wolf could leap up to his feet unmolested, but shots still nipped at his heels as he sprinted the last leg to his goal; then he was there on one side of the pallets; pulling the rifle– a RPK– muzzle-first and down behind cover; no time to grab any mags off the dead guy on the other side before the fire caught up to him, splinters and sparks flying; mag check–

Topped up, lucky!

Wolf flipped the fire selector, pointed the business end downrange, and popped up to return fire with single shots, sending Submachine Gun scrambling back behind cover and firing blind.

Wolf let the bipod settle to brace against recoil and adjusted his point of aim, before switching to full auto and emptying the magazine in one long burst. The light machine gun bucked like a bronco as it went cyclic. Raging licks of flame shot out of its muzzle, and a hail of lead smashed into the plastic storage boxes on the trolley in quick succession, slicing right through its innards to smack against the soft meat on the other side. Concealment is not cover. Not against the intermediate caliber.

At the same time, two of Submachine Gun’s wild shots finally found their target. Wolf got the wind knocked out of him in rapid succession, first from the twin impacts, and second when he crashed to the floor ass-first.

Wedging his fingers behind his carrier, he felt around his chest for any bleeders. Everything dry and intact, as expected. It was going to take more than a pistol to get through XSAPI plate.

Definitely would’ve gotten smoked by the old man for pulling that stunt.

Then Wolf felt a sting, but not anywhere near he expected.
Strangely, it was accompanied by a crackling when he moved his leg. He realized then that something had been digging into his thigh in the heat of the action, and he had just now noticed. Wolf reached into his right pocket, dredging up shards of plastic and glass. It was the pieces of the burner phone Maho gave him.

Shit.