The screams of the dying and the mangled among Reyland’s party were lost in the banging as pipe upon pipe rained down mercilessly onto the sidewalk and asphalt seventy feet below.

Along with the pipes, lethal arrows of rebar, pallets of bricks, and boards flew down by the dozens. A falling construction dumpster went through the roof of a street-parked Mercedes like a knife through warm butter as half a dozen fifty-pound bags of concrete shattered off Upper Belgrave street all around in reverberating, bursting clouds of gray dust.

The critically collapsed scaffolding was still clanging and splintering and exploding into the narrow street even as Gannon pulled himself up out of the knocked-over truck’s passenger-side window.

He hopped down into the street over the hood of the cab and looked around and saw that he had come to a stop in the street almost directly in front of the Chilean embassy’s wrought iron gate. As he leaped down off the toppled truck, he saw the embassy front door open and some confused-looking men emerge from it.

“What happened? Are you okay?” one of them yelled as Gannon headed into the cloud of silvery dust that now almost completely obscured Upper Belgrave on the other side of Wilton Street.

The first human he came across in the thick mist was one of Reyland’s commandos. He was on one knee, coughing. Gannon saw the machine gun on a strap at his back and lifted a broken two-by-four up off the asphalt as he came in behind him, brought it down with a bonk over the guy’s head and took his gun.

A moment later, there was the rev of an engine through the dust, and Gannon walked toward it.

“Hey, hey, hey! Over here, Reyland!” called out a man’s voice with a British accent. “Where are you? Where is everyone? What bloody happened?”

As Gannon got closer, he could see the man, some stick figure–skinny English guy. He was standing beside the open door of an idling black Range Rover.

Gannon put the bead of the Heckler & Koch between the guy’s suddenly hugely wide eyes as he approached.

“Get away from the car!” Gannon yelled then let off a clacking burst at the guy’s feet to give him some incentive.

Gannon found Reyland thirty seconds later ten feet from the Range Rover.

He was under a sheet of plywood between a couple of parked cars, and as he stood over him, the FBI agent moaned sorrowfully.

Then Gannon saw why.

There was a pole sticking out of him. It was a piece of galvanized steel pipe about three feet long and it was jutting from his torso just below his chest. It had sliced cleanly through his windbreaker, which was now completely drenched in blood.

Ouch, Gannon thought when he saw the rest of the galvanized pipe sticking out of Reyland’s back. The pipe he was skewered with was actually leaning sideways against one of the parked cars, and it was kind of propping him up in a seated position as he sat there in the gutter.