“Hey, where the fuck is Jamie?”
“Having a fuckin’ smoke, remember? Mi stai sul cazzo!”
“Vaffanculo! It takes nine minutes to smoke a cigarette?”
“Maybe he had to take a piss too.”
“Takes nine minutes for a piss and a smoke?”
“Fottiti, so he took a shit, who gives a fuck?”
“Out in the woods? They got bathrooms in this joint, don’t they?”
Frank sat against the brick chimney, listening to their words drift up to him, gripping his G36 tight. The only expression he allowed himself was to bare his teeth, pinch his lips over them, then bare his teeth again. He could see through the skylight as the restauranter dithered. Turning left, then right, face slack with indecision. Then he moved. Going to the waitress, taking her by the arm, leading her to the freezer as he whispered something…
“I’m gonna go find him.”
“Ay, let me know if he’s jerking off, capiche?”
Frank had no more time to wait. He unslung his pack, took out the block of C4. He’d already thumbed in all the nails, screws, tacks, and loose change he’d kept jarred for this particular trick. Now he attached the detonator, powered it on, arrowed the timer up to ten seconds.
“Hey Jamie, you back here? Where the fuck you get to, coglione?” The voice was now coming from the side of the building, sweeping by Frank as it approached the corner his friend had bled on.
Frank set the charge, dropped it down the chimney, and rolled away.
“Tone, get the hell over here, he’s not fucking breathing!”
***
The blast punched out of the brick oven like a heavyweight boxer fisting through a paper bag. Two of the Scagliones had been drawn over by the sound of the C4 dropping into the bricks. When it went off, the shockwave threw them backwards, organs liquidities. They were only two of many missiles thrown: the bricks that had made up the oven, the shrapnel plugged into the plastique, shards of glass and metal and wood from the various fixtures that the explosion demolished. The effect was like a machine gun spraying in all directions at once.
Chunks of brick bludgeoned like hammers, cracking bones and stoving in skin wherever they landed. A Scaglione button had his face become a sucking hole wrapped around a piece of masonry the size of a softball. Another spat out a hail of teeth as his jaw was rearranged to stick out of the right side of his face instead of being front and center.
The shrapnel was worse. It flew in flocks, scalpeling into whoever was in its path, cutting into them until it was buried. One screw didn't stop until it had splintered a belucci man's rib. The loose chunk of bone floated freely in the man's chest cavity, politely divergent of the tumbling flight the shockwave carried him through, until he hit the wall and, like a passenger in a crashing car, the broken rib shot through his chest to pin itself to the wall.
Then there was the flaming firewood, burning whatever it touched. Those who were blasted off their feet, left broken and bleeding, now found themselves alight. They ripped open their small entry wounds attempting to put themselves out.
Blood bathed the floors. It pumped out in quarts to seep between the floorboards and morass below, a sewer of boiling and polluted human life.
The furniture got off light. It was simply rent into pieces, reduced to detritus in a heartbeat. It burned as a matter of course; there was nothing else it was good for.
In a split second, the mafia's genteel meeting became a slaughterhouse on fire.
As a farewell, the blast kicked out the Sicilian window in front. The glass went to a million million pieces, some large, some small, and so many cleaving and burrowing into the guards who'd grouped in front of the window. They were pincushions now: blood red icicles grew out of their bodies. Glass dust tattooed their skin.
The only one to be spared was Lorenzo Rocoli, returning from attending to the car alarm. Seeing the explosion that flashed the Trattoria into a flaming ruin and consumed all his friends, he turned and ran for the car he had just silenced.
Frank dropped him at forty yards with a round from his g36. The experience was little different from what his compatriots had felt. The bullet knocked him to his belly, where his momentum carried him forward. Raking his face over the parking lot gravel in the moments before he died.
It would be a sin in war. But this wasn’t a warrior. It was a mad dog being put down.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” The cry came up from the back corner of the building, where the one mafioso had found his dead, cigarette smoking buddy and called over another companion. The blast hadn't claimed them.
Frank ran to the edge of the rooftop, dropping down and sliding on his hip to reach his destination in a crouch. He saw the two unharmed soldiers backing up, gaping at the destruction. His rifle came up smoothly, the stock meeting his shoulder, the scope embracing his eye. A minute adjustment put the reticle dead center on one of them. Frank squeezed the trigger. A storm of bullets entered the man in a cloudburst of blood. He went down, chest blown open and back hollowed out.
Frank moved the scope to the next man. Fingered the trigger. An impotent click replaced the roar he expected. A jam!
The man next to him, tone, saw his friend ventilated but couldn't tell that the barrage had come from above. He jerked up his shotgun and fired into the Trattoria. One explosive crash, then another.
Frank took advantage of the misdirected fire. He drew his pistol, sighted and shot.
Even as he did, tone was already flying back, blood ripping free of his sternum.
Insight struck Frank. Someone was alive inside the restaurant. They had clocked tones fire and responded. But had they heard his last shot, giving away his position above?
A three-bullet burst ripped through the ceiling at his feet. Bullets whistled by his face, stirred his hair. Frank threw himself into a roll. The shooter fired at the thump he made hitting the roof. More bullets punched through the space he’d vacated, one scratching along his ribs to call up blood and leave pain needled into his side.
Frank couldn’t fight like this. His pistol couldn’t match an automatic weapon; each shot would give away his position.
His eyes flew to the skylight, miraculously unharmed from the blast below. He dove for it, pivoting as he flowed through the air, hitting the glass on his side and breaking through it.
As he fell, time crystallized for a moment. He flung his gun hand out in the direction he knew the shots had come from. In the split-second the fall gave him between the ceiling and the floor, he aligned sights with target. His finger pumped the trigger. One bullet was dislodged from the G40 before he landed.
It was a painful, bone-jarring impact. Frank rolled up onto one knee, wincing with pain. This time, the target past his sights greeted him with red.