Branson had no idea what he’d find once he was out of the mess tent. From the sounds of confused voices and scrambling feet all around him, he knew things were bad. He had already figured out that the fire raking the area was coming from somewhere outside their perimeter, not from within. He also realized that there was no return fire, which indicated that whoever was firing the machine gun had the upper hand. That meant that whatever it was they wanted to do, they were probably doing it. Branson was just turning his mind to figuring out what he would do, running for all he was worth toward the ops center as he did so, when his feet snagged on something in his path. With his mind distracted and the forward momentum of his own body too great to arrest, Branson flew headlong through the air.
The impact brought him, and all organized thoughts he had, to an abrupt end. Despite the fact that he didn’t normally curse, Branson let loose a string of oaths as he struggled to push himself up out of the mud in which he had landed face first. Though it hurt to do so, he lifted himself up on his hands and twisted his body to see what he had stumbled on. Still night blind, it took Branson several seconds to realized that the mound his feet and legs were draped over was the body of one of Millner’s marshals. This revelation came as something of a shock. His men, men he was responsible for, were being cut down. And there he was, flat on his face doing nothing.
On the other side of the perimeter, where Osborn had chosen to make his penetration, things were going far better than he could have ever hoped. The two brothers, in particular, had been lucky. Just as Osborn had predicted, two heads popped up out of the pit when Lou’s first burst ripped through the still night. Delighted with this, both brothers grinned at each other before laying their cheeks against the stocks of their rifles and letting fly with a withering hail of gunfire. A scream, sounding more like a dog’s yelp than a human’s cry of pain, told them that at least one of their marks had been tagged.
“All right!” Rob yelled as he let up on his trigger, looked up over the sights of his rifle. When he saw no sign of their victim or any motion coming from the direction of the Feds’ hole, he reached up, switched his rate of fire selector from full automatic to semiautomatic, then took up a good firing position again. As he had in their rehearsals, once their initial volley had achieved its desired effect, Rob kept up a steady fire in order to pin the Feds down.
In the pit designated Alpha by Osborn and Number Three by Ben Branson, a very confused and frightened FBI agent crouched low and pressed up against the wall of sandbags that surrounded him. Though he could hear the sound of bullets whining overhead, and occasionally smacking against one of the exposed sandbags that ringed the pit, Special Agent Anthony Hope paid them no heed. His whole attention was riveted on the body of his partner, Special Agent Elizabeth Shoeman. In the faint light thrown off by the half moon, Hope could see the streams of blood running from the hole one of their assailants’ bullets had drilled neatly into the side of her head. While uninjured in any way himself, the sight of a fellow agent dead at his feet was all that was necessary to take him out of this fight.