Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

mental pressure was piling up. In Air Force special tactics training we had learned about decision-making loops. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. The OODA doctrine is straight out of fighter plane dog fights in the Korean War.

The point is to get inside the other guy’s OODA loop. I had already observed, oriented, and decided. Now I was in the middle of the last phase, action, already at the end of my loop by the time the guy started his up. He made a deadly error by switching tactics suddenly and abandoned the plan of getting his good shooting hand inside that trigger guard. The shooter picked up the gun clumsily with his left hand and tried to get the barrel up.

I was way ahead of him. Already deep inside a second decision-making loop, cognizant of the other guy who had come with him, probably around the side of the house, creeping in the back. Maybe already in the house. What I didn’t want was this shooter to make a sound. So, I came at him full speed and put a knee into the side of his head.

Something came loose in there, like a clicking sound and a soft thunk as his skull whipped sideways with the impact. The killer crumpled and the pistol fell with him, clinking onto the gravel. I spun around and was controlling him before he had a chance to regain his bearings. I took his head in my hands from behind. Chin grasped in my left palm, my fingers dug into the side of his mouth. My right arm was wrapped around his crown gripping his left ear between fingers and thumb. My forefinger was embedded in his ear canal for a better grip. I twisted hard and fast and in a slight diagonal, pulling up. His neck broke with a sharp crack and that was it.

By the time the guy hit the gravel and started convulsing, I had his pistol in my hand and was moving into the kitchen. The door hinges squeaked. Helen’s body lay at an awkward angle, her face made blank with holes where the eyes should have been. The third shot had entered under her nose, above the mouth. Like a third nostril.

Twenty-Seven

I moved from the kitchen into the living room. The gun was a Browning Buck Mark .22 caliber. Semi-automatic. The gasses released by the third shot into Helen had chambered a round, sitting there waiting to be fired. Small and unassuming, but deadly in the right hands.

Which got me thinking about Hank. I was not sure which room he was in. And there was another shooter at large, possibly in the house now. I was in the hallway, going toward Hank’s room on the other side of the house. There was a bedroom off to the right, which I figured would have been Helen’s bedroom. The door was open, and on the other side of a neatly made bed was a double window looking out to the woods in back.

I moved inside the room, around the bed to the side of the window. I peered one way. Ducked under the window, peered the other way. Nothing and nobody. I went back out to the hallway. Dark and unlit. Another room up ahead to the right again, this time the door was closed. I toed the door open.

A utility room, tools and cleaning items neatly organized on shelves. To the right side, a worktable with a grinder and a clamp. The left side, a gun cabinet with Hank standing looking into it. He didn’t notice me. He was leaning inside, fiddling with the combination lock of a safe. I figured he was trying to get to the ammunition, kept sensibly locked away. Sensibly that is, if you didn’t expect to actually need a weapon to defend against a home invasion.

On the other side of Hank was the window. Hank sensed me entering the room. He took a step backward, framing himself perfectly in the window. At the same time, I saw movement outside, behind him. He looked at me and started to speak. But I spoke first. I said, “Step to your right. Now.”

Hank swallowed and stepped to his right, my left, and back to the gun cabinet. The second guy was outside, behind Hank, with a pistol up obscuring his face. I didn’t know why he hadn’t fired yet. I suppose he was caught in a decision loop.

I fired through the window and the glass splintered around a tiny hole, which had the effect of disturbing the transparency of the glass for a fraction of a second before it spidered. I saw a dark blur of movement from the guy. I was not sure if I had hit him or not. But he was moving, so I got moving.

The back of my mind had registered the ammunition capacity of the Buck Mark .22, four rounds fired, six or seven left.

I went through the window after him, exploding through the remaining glass. I felt something sting my left cheek. Thought, maybe a shot, maybe the glass. Whatever, I was through and out behind the house. I heard something crashing loudly through the woods—the guy was trying to get away. Wrong move again. Bad decision, he should have gone to ground immediately and picked me off when I cowboyed out the window. I went after him, fast. I ran hard for about twenty seconds and saw the guy as he broke out of the trees. Running as fast as he could, but not fast enough.

He was a good runner. Younger than his buddy, and in shape. He had long blond hair tied back in a pony tail. Maybe not a murder artist, maybe just backup. The guy had entered a clearing in the woods, with a little pond right in the middle of it. So, he was forced to carve around the pond, like an athlete around the track. As fast as he was, and as slow as a .22 caliber