The Jungle

“Allahu Akbar,” the man shrieked.

Juan put a bullet down his open throat, and the man fell back like a marionette with its strings cut.

The first gunman had blood sheeting down his face and was staggering backward, dazed by the .380 caliber bullet that had gauged a trench through the top of his skull. He’d dropped his machine pistol down onto its sling and was fumbling in his coat pocket.

Juan couldn’t get a clear shot at him as people continued to streak past, not realizing they were blundering into the middle of the gunfight. He knew this first guy was probably also packing a vest and made the decision that hitting one of the civilians with a stray bullet was preferable to dozens of them getting mowed down in an explosion.

A hotel guard finally arrived. He’d been on the far side of the platform and hadn’t seen a thing. He noticed the one man down on the ground in a pool of his own blood, paid no attention to the guy with blood on his face, and instead trained his attention on Cabrillo, an obviously armed target.

He started to raise his pistol and nearly had it centered on Cabrillo when Max threw himself across the intervening ten yards and hit him like a linebacker. They crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs, bowling over another man in the process.

Juan took a chance and fired again. He hit the bomber in the chest, but the man merely staggered back from the impact. The bullet had hit one of the bags of nails, which stopped it like body armor. The Kel-Tec’s slide was locked back over an empty chamber.

Cabrillo flipped himself around so that his foot was pointing toward the gunman. The barrel of the .44 caliber pistol hidden inside his prosthetic leg made up its central support strut to give it as much length, and thus accuracy, as possible. There was only one round, so essentially the weapon was just a tube with a dual-trigger firing mechanism that ensured it couldn’t accidentally discharge.

When he hit the second trigger, it felt like someone had slammed the bottom of his stump with a sledgehammer. The round punched through the sole of his shoe, and the recoil almost knocked him off his perch. The heavy 300-grain bullet entered the bomber’s body in the abdomen, its kinetic energy lifting him off his feet like he’d been jerked from behind.

He hit the pool, his body parting the water, and sank from sight when the vest detonated. Water geysered in a solid white column that rose forty feet over the deck before crashing back like a torrential rain. The blast had been big enough and close enough to blow out part of the pool’s steel side. Water gushed through the opening, dancing and twisting as it fell over the side of the building on its long journey to the ground. The once-bucolic swimming pool had become one of the tallest waterfalls in the world.

There was nothing left of the bomber, and with the pool absorbing so much of the explosive force and the shrapnel, it didn’t appear that anyone had been injured, at least seriously.

Cabrillo’s hearing was just returning after the sonic assault of the blast. More people were screaming now, ru

There was a little boy still in the pool, his arms supported by plastic water wings. He’d been in the shallow end, playing by himself, when all the adults had scrambled from the water at the opening salvos of the attacks, and apparently his parents hadn’t had the time to rescue him.

As the water drained through the twisted opening, sucked through it like it was a high-speed pump, the floating child was being drawn inexorably toward the shattered metal.

Juan leapt off the eight-foot retaining wall and sprinted across the deck. He threw himself into a perfect dive that would have gotten applause from Olympic judges and struck out for the boy. He could feel the current pulling on his body. It was like trying to fight a riptide. He had been a strong swimmer his entire life and had been able to stroke his way out of some pretty dangerous situations, but nothing had prepared him for the raw power of the pool draining through its blown-out side. The hole was at least four feet in diameter.

He reached the child when they still had about ten feet to go before he would be sucked through. The kid flailed his arms, crying beyond all reason. Juan grabbed him by the hair to get out of the reach of his thrashing arms and tried to tow him clear, but the surge was simply too much to fight one-handed. He looked around in desperation. No one had seen what he was doing.

The hole was a bright spot near the bottom of the pool where sunlight illuminated the eddies and whirlpools that formed and dissolved as the water poured into infinity.

Cabrillo put on a burst of speed, his legs pistoning and his free arm hauling back with everything he had. For every foot he gained, the pool took back two. The vortex was just too strong. He had seconds before he was pulled through the rent in the side of the pool. He did the only thing open to him.

He stopped swimming.

And then twisted around so that he was facing the gaping tear. As they were drawn closer he held the child up in his arms. He would have one shot, one instant, when he could make this happen and save them both. If not, he and the boy would be sucked out of the pool and sent plummeting a thousand feet to their deaths.

They were less than two feet away. The water was still too deep to stand, so Cabrillo kicked hard, raising his upper body out of the water. He threw the boy at the ledge surrounding the swimming pool, sank down to the bottom, and sprang up again. He launched himself partially out of the water and hit the side of the pool directly over the tear in its side. The relentless pull sucked at his dangling legs and nearly drew him back in again before he managed to get a better grip on the cement and haul himself completely free. He looked to his side. The boy was just pulling himself upright, tears cutting through the water on his face, his right elbow bent as he examined the scrape he’d gotten when he hit the deck. Only when he saw that it was begi

Juan got to his feet and snatched up the kid so he wouldn’t fall in again. He hooked up with Max, dumped the sniveling boy next to a potted palm, and joined the frenzied exodus off the SkyPark.

Ten minutes later, just as police were starting to arrive at the resort en masse, they hit the lobby. Any attempt at a security cordon at this point was never going to happen, and the cops seemed to realize it. People streamed out of the building like a herd of frightened animals. Cabrillo and Hanley allowed themselves to be borne along with the tide of humanity. Once out of the building, they made their way down to the far end of a line of taxis and hopped into the last cab in the string.

The driver was about to protest that he couldn’t take fares until it was his turn but stopped himself when he saw the three hundred Singapore dollar bills in Cabrillo’s hand.

He didn’t even care that they were wet.

7

MAX BROKE THE MINUTES-LONG SILENCE. IT HAD TAKEN him that long to get his breathing under control and for his normally florid complexion to return from the far end of the crimson color palette. “Mind telling me what just happened back there?”

Juan didn’t respond right away. Instead, he reached into his pocket for his phone, saw that it had been ruined by his time in the pool, and shoved it back in his pocket. Hanley handed over his undamaged cell. Cabrillo punched in a memorized number. On these disposable phones they never preprogrammed the extensions of other team members in case they were ever confiscated.