S.W.A.T. [Mass Market Paperback]

Diane Carey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2003

For over a generation, the Los Angeles Police Department's S.W.A.T. unit has been one of the premiere law-enforcement units in the United States. An elite squadron of expertly trained tactical assault specialists, S.W.A.T. goes into action whenever a crisis calls for their unique talents. But now they face their greatest challenge. A vicious drug kingpin has offered $100 million to anyone who can free him from police custody, and it's up to a newly formed S.W.A.T. team, led by Lieutenant Dan "Hondo" Harrelson, to successfully transfer the cocky felon out of Los Angeles and into the hands of the Feds. With practically the entire city gunning for the drug lord's reward, S.W.A.T. must complete an all-but-impossible mission -- or die trying!

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Chapter One

"Officer down! My partner's hit! Shotzzzzzztttzz zzzzomatic gunfire! Suspects have AK-47s and body armor! Nothing we're shooting can stop them! Send S.W.A.T.! Senzzzztzzzzttt -- "

THE LOS ANGELES BASIN

Noise, noise, noise. Most days, the city could almost be described as quiet. Brown smog loitered against the white and pink downtown buildings, crawling up toward the hollywood sign with its crooked letters against the scruffy hillside, a now-timeless emblem of glitz, struggle, hope, dismay, fame, and ruin. Quiet hope, quiet ruin.

Not today.

Men in sniper gear peppered the streetscape, tucked into the city's cracks. Flak vests, black caps, weapons, shields. Bright daylight and neon signs sprinkled glitter across the pavement and rows of stores and businesses. The empty sidewalk glittered too, but with splinters of valueless shattered glass.

Shots fired. Shots fired. Shots fired.

Terrible words to any police officer's ear.

Police cars lay in a pretense of repose all over the street, both sides. Hazard lights flashed and there was a cop behind every door. They'd managed to yellow-tape two ends of the boulevard, then fell into that eerie silence that seizes up the middle part of any hostage situation. It was the waiting that's not the same as real waiting.

The drama unfolding here had been seen before, but no one could predict the ending and few tried. A news helicopter banked over the city so frantically that its rotors made a painful whine. Police transmissions were laced with gunfire and panic. The chopper picked up the trouble on its scanner, and now the whole city knew something god-awful was happening.

No, not one chopper...there were a half dozen now, swirling wildly in 3-D. News choppers, traffic choppers -- the skies were full of dragonflies jockeying for position over a war zone. Just a bank, really, most days, but today the hub of a storm. Gunfire blew out the shimmer of Southern California's air just as the first news chopper cleared the hills and raced over the big white w into the stretching valley below. The chopper swerving like a bug toward the bank parking lot, where its occupants got a shock -- the barrel of a machine gun pointed right at them and the flares of fire burping from it.

Whether they could hear the sharp brrrrrddddt of the AK-47 over the scream of their own noise, none of the choppers' occupants would ever remember. All they saw was the gunfire and only then realized that this wasn't exactly television, where things could be edited out. These were real bullets and they might themselves become the vultures' favorite footage. But that's why they were here, wasn't it? To get those incredible shots?

Shots -- rapid, ripping machine-gun fire, cracking the morning air, flung from the weapon of a criminal in bulky black clothing as he ducked behind cars in the bank parking lot. He had successfully caused the helicopters to fly into a frenzy, first avoiding bullets, then avoiding one another.

Two robbers now. They moved through the parking lot, the second being covered by the machine gun of the first. This was a planned event, pretty clearly, a revelation suddenly bright to the cops who were seizing into a hasty perimeter of black-and-whites around the center of action. Sirens cleaved the air as more black-and-whites screamed into place, skidding gracelessly into a weird puzzle. The two robbers kept coming.

Bullets thunked into the heavy police cars. The cops, body armor or not, ducked for cover and stayed ducked. Whoever these guys were, they weren't afraid of dying, or of killing.

Patrolman Rudy Tinewood saw all this from the wildest vantage point -- his patrol Harley. He skidded into the scene knowing -- who could miss it? -- that something was up, but he didn't know what, exactly, and took the motions of two fellow cops to get the hell off his bike and down on the ground as damned fair advice. He hit the pavement, using his motor as cover, and looked between the Harley's tires at the movements of the two bads.

"Get down!" Officer Skip Michaels called to him from the crook of his patrol car's door, where he and his partner huddled together. "We got two suspects inside with hostages! Two just left the bank in head-to-toe armor!"

"S.W.A.T. on the way?" Tinewood barked back, careful not to yell.

"Damned straight!"

That's when Tinewood felt the hard pok of force against his pelvis. He was rolling. Rolling...the pavement changed color under him, white, then red. His brain registered excitement at all that sudden brightness and splashy change, like a scene from Devan's favorite video game, the one he always played with that goofy best friend of his with the rattail, the champ of the fourth grade. Special effects. Computer blood.

Wasn't it?

They might as well have been riding in the back of a pickup truck, like teenagers enjoying a day playing hooky. This job was just too much fun sometimes. "Fun" included helicopter rides.

Jim Street loved helicopter rides.

He leaned back in the cramped area behind the pilot, forcing his shoulder muscles to relax, and rearranged his elbow from where it had been gouging his partner's ribs.

Beside him, Brian Gamble was less jovial, somewhere between grim and bored.

Street raised his voice over the chopper's roar. "The lieutenant asked me to give some speech at this high school in Whittier. Can you sub for me?"

"No chance," Gamble bluntly said. "You do it."

"If I get in front of more than five people, I totally freeze up, start sweating like a pig!"

"It's a bunch of sixteen-year-old girls. Don't be such a pussy."

"Who's the pussy I have to cuff to the dentist's chair just to get a cavity filled?"

"Fear of dentists' drills is a perfectly acceptable phobia. Fear of high school assemblies isn't."

"Fine," Street said. "Next time, you give the speech and I'll ge the root canal."

"Fine."

The pilot turned and yelled. "Thirty seconds out, boys!"

Street's smile dissolved. He and Gamble pulled on black helmets and each swatted the other on the back of the head for luck and vow -- I'll watch your back.

"Time to party," Gamble spoke to the wind.

Two blocks down, close enough to see what was going on but far enough to move around, Martin Comstock leaned on the counter of his gun store's front aisle and watched the events unfold on a wall-mounted TV set, every now and then glancing down the street and into the sky to catch a bit of the real thing. No way was he going out there, like the jerks streaking past his store for a firsthand look. Morons. Who runs toward a gunfight?

At the front door there was a clatter. He recognized it after ten years and two months in the business. Heavy boots, the creak in the door that only happened when it was wrenched open by a strong arm, the gush of body odor. Men. In a fleeting thought he chided himself for not locking the door. Gunfights could shift location. A gun store could become a target.

Or not. What the hell. Gotta take a chance in life now and then. He forced himself away from his TV set and turned to meet the customers.

What faced him weren't sportsmen or home-defense buffs, but two uniformed L.A.P.D. cops, both breathless and flush-faced.

"You got anything that'll penetrate body armor?" the smaller of the cops demanded. He had a high voice but forceful eyes.

"I'm not allowed by law to sell those kinds of weapons," Comstock told him, repeating a well-rehearsed sentence.

The second cop, the bigger one, huffed and put his hands on his hips. The first cop got squeakier. "What do you got in the back?"

They were serious. They wanted in on that action outside. This wasn't a bust. Comstock glanced at the carnage on the TV screen. Freewheeling crooks with body armor and high-powered automatic weapons. Had one of those weapons arrived at this day's activity in a roundabout route from Comstock's own back room? He tried to be careful who his customers were, but there was nothing he could do about his customers' bad judgment when the guns left their hands. There were guns everywhere, all over the world. There always had been. He remembered his days in grade school back in Idaho. All the boys had rifles in their lockers. There was a hunt club after school every Tuesday and Thursday. Even all these years later he remembered the lessons in firearms safety that took place right in the hallway outside the principal's office. Back then every kid had a gun and every house had one or two. It wasn't the guns that had changed in America. It was something else.

Oh, what the double hell.

He ducked into his back room and came out with a cache of the kinds of weapons he would choose himself if he were one of the cops. Automatic weapons, machine guns, sweet to the hand, firm recoil, true aim, completely illegal to sell. Perfect.

What else were cops supposed to use to return fire when these things were shooting at them? Rubber bands?

"How do you plan on paying for these?" Comstock asked. Might as well lay everything on the line, right?

The squeaky cop barked, "The city'll reimburse you," and held his hand out for the box of ammunition.

Comstock plunked the box into the man's rosy hand. "For illegal weapons from the back of my shop?"

Just then there was a roar outside, real low, real close. They looked at the ten-foot-tall tempered windows in time to see an L.A.P.D. helicopter swoop low over the Jiffy Lube across the street, heading for the action even as three other choppers raced away.

The two cops glanced at each other. The big one took out his wallet.

"You take Mastercard?"

The L.A.P.D. helicopter was black and glossy, proud of itself. It came with built-in attitude. If the chopper found itself called into action, there was probably a good reason to look racy. The pilots liked the tight feeling of this particular unit. She was a spry young whipper and she liked her job. All the pilots wanted her.

Today she was loaded for bear, hungry for action, and up to the gills with firepower, but not with mounted weaponry. She wasn't a fighter jet. She was a warhorse with soldiers aboard. She peeled in, made one graceful spin, leveled off, and hovered with style -- a helicopter's best trick -- over the flat-roofed two-story bank. The two hatches opened in her sides, and out sprang four men, fast-roping down like spiders fleeing the wind. Their boots hit the tar-paper roof at almost the same instant. They disengaged from the drop lines and were running within the first two seconds. The helicopter wheeled overhead and roared away, leaving the four Special Weapons and Tactics officers on their own. No backup was in any S.W.A.T. plan. They were one another's backup, and everybody else's.

Jim Street kept repeating that to himself as he and partner Brian Gamble split off from the other two team officers, who had taken up cover positions. Street and Gamble went straight to the roof hatch that would get them down to where the gunfire was going on. They could hear it, short and shitty and coming in burps below. As Gamble jammed his breaching gun into the hatch's locking mechanism and set the charge, Street let his opinion, and some of the emotion behind it, out.

"I hate AKs," he said, squinting against the bright sunlight. He felt his teeth grind a little. Keep control...

"They're shooting cops," Gamble said. "We should be down there."

"Bank full of hostages says otherwise."

Gamble didn't answer, but pushed Street back a couple of steps and ticked off seconds under his breath.

The hatch exploded with a severe POP. "Me first," Street claimed.

"You were first last time," Gamble protested.

"Don't make me smack you."

"Get in the hole." Gamble actually smiled as he waved to the other two S.W.A.T. officers, motioning them to follow as Street disappeared into the bank's ductwork.

Two, three, four -- they followed into the darkness, with the sounds of tack tack tack tack tack gunfire chasing them all the way.

"Got a visual."

Lieutenant Gregory Velasquez huddled in a quickie command post set up behind a police truck kitty-corner from a gun shop in a strip mall. From here, just with his naked eyes, he could see the little black heads of at least two bad guys shuttling in and out of parked cars next to the bank. The red-alert lights of a half dozen black-and-whites -- at least that's how many he could see from here -- flashed frantically and added an urgent drama to the sound of those AKs. He got the crawlies as he saw the bodies of several downed cops, not moving, at least six more taking cover, and two uniforms just now running out of the gun shop with high-powered weapons in their hands. Where did those two jokers think they were going?

He ignored them and concentrated on his own officers and the rough plan he had in his head.

"Is everyone in position?" he asked the technical specialist at his side as they watched the skittish closed-circuit monitor with the visual of the crime scene.

"Almost," the sergeant responded.

"We cut off their phones?"

"Yes, sir."

"Send in the secure phone."

"Understood."

Velasquez paused as his order was followed. He wanted to keep talking -- it helped -- but he knew he had to clam up every few seconds just to keep a clear head and understand what was happening. He glanced at the strip mall's roof, just over the gun shop. He could just see the top of Paul Alvarez's head, and the head and shoulders of Alvy's spotter, a ruddy burly mick named Taylor. Taylor had binoculars up to his eyes and was scanning the action, spotting for Alvarez, who was staring with that Zen-thing snipers get.

Velasquez tried to think like them. Targets on foot...behind a car...some reflection on the windshields...

"Don't let 'em get in a car, boys," Velasquez murmured.

"Sir?" the tech sergeant looked up at him, squinting into the sun behind Velasquez.

"Nothing, not you. Just communicating telepathically with the sniper. We've got four bad guys, we think, with two of them moving around in that parking lot. If Alvy can take one down, it cuts the chances of escape and reduces our targets by one quarter. Problem is, the parking lot's crowded with cops. If one of those cops jumps at the wrong moment, Alvy could cap him without -- hey, hey, they're getting into a car! Sierra One, Sierra One, do not let them get mobile! You copy?"

In his mind he calculated what was happening on the roof. He used to be a sniper's spotter himself and hadn't lost the tricks. Wind at Alvarez's back, three miles an hour...distance...angle...there was a car moving in the bank parking lot!

"Fire," he whispered. "Fire, fire, fire -- "

"Driver's been neutralized."

Jim Street heard the encouraging report on the faint radio connection in his ear. There wasn't much chatter going on, luckily. When cops chattered over the airways, he felt compromised.

Maybe this was good news, or maybe it wasn't. One of the robbers was down -- good -- but that could make the others desperate and more unpredictable. Either way, it set him on edge. The situation had just changed, and he was in here with no way to measure the dynamics of the change.

He had no idea how this would end. He'd given up trying to map out the end of this musical he'd been rehearsing for ever since he was a kid making sticks into guns in his mind, or using his hands if he didn't have sticks. Anything could be a gun. The trick -- the test of character for any kid -- came in choosing whether your stick was the criminal's gun or the cop's gun. The world really was made up of good guys and bad guys, a lesson Street had learned early.

Now the boulevard out there bristled with guns good and bad, and everybody was waiting for the next change. Every crack was a sniper's nest with a gleaming black barrel poking from it, leading down the black tunnel to ballistics and aching to blow. Street counted off the seconds in a time schedule of his own choosing, judging the voice of the barricaded criminals and the mellow counterpoint of the police negotiator.

He flexed his shoulders and adjusted his earpiece and throat mike. He felt hot. No way around that. This was L.A., the land of sun and more sun. Try dressing in layers of Kevlar, skid gear, combat boots, radio equipment, and a helmet and be Sam Suave at the same time. Funny how your body could adjust, though. He was lucky to have the frame of a skateboarder instead of a wrestler, like Gamble did. He glanced at his partner and noticed that Brian was sweating at the temples.

He pressed his shoulder to the wall and reminded himself of his privilege to be here, with Brian and these other cops on the force, each a world-class athlete at the top of his game.

When they got to the bank's equipment room, Brian Gamble stopped to assemble their cutting torch, and Street motioned to the other two team officers to cover the hallway, then hit his radio's mike. "We're at the equipment room. All set for diversion fire."

"All right," Greg Velasquez responded. "Stand by for diversion fire. Five, four -- "

Gamble handed the cutting torch to Street. He was closer to the part of the floor they had targeted to be cut away. Below them was the room with the hostages.

" -- three, two -- "

Street and Gamble connected looks for a moment, then listened to the burst of gunfire outside. Street snapped the igniter. Muffled by the street battle outside, he cut into the sheet metal between them and the real action. He cut fast, as fast as science let him.

Below him were a handful of robbers, four in all, if surveillance was right, and an unknown number of hostages. A bank robbery gone wrong. Now one robber was killed and the stakes were ratcheted up. The bad guys knew the cops would do whatever they had to do, and that made the bads angry on top of desperate. They hadn't come here to die, but to steal, and yet dying had to be on the list for anyone who came to a crime scene with body armor on. Street had no apologies to make. Not yet, anyway.

Pok pok pok!

"Flashbang grenades," he murmured to Gamble. "Lieutenant's keeping them distracted."

"Hurry up."

"Yeah, yeah, hurrying -- "

"We got a view, boys," Velasquez offered over the noise of grenades and gunfire.

Street didn't stop cutting. "Let's hear what you got."

"I got distraction devices going off all around the guy in the parking lot....He's running....Four S.W.A.T.'s rushing him with M-4 carbines...Oh, shit, he's down! That's two! The perps inside are gonna be pissed, betcha."

"Roger that," Street grumbled.

"Keep cutting, man," Gamble suggested, twitching.

Outside they heard the muffled poom poom poom of grenades exploding, and the sounds came from different directions. Together Street and Gamble cut the sheet metal studs with aviation snippers, then Gamble peeled back the plaster in one fast crunch. Street winced, hoping the crunch was hidden inside a poom, then flinched again when Lieutenant Velasquez's voice broke in their microphones again, seeming as if it came over a loudspeaker.

Street could imagine the kind of conversation the negotiator was trying to get rolling. Chatter, just chatter. Criminals who had these kinds of weapons wouldn't let the fear show in their voices, if they had sense to have fear. They were impossible to negotiate with, he knew.

Still, no hostage situation was routine. You could see the same scenario two hundred times, and the two hundred first would blast away complacency. No point letting things come to that.

Even if Street and the other cops had been through this, and even if the criminals had, he could be sure it was the first time for the hostages.

"Okay, we got three of our guys moving in with bulletproof shields....Almost to the front door...They're coming in with a remote phone for these jokers. Almost there...Shit, the bad guys inside just saw the getaway driver's body. They're not gonna be happy."

"Yeah, but I am," Street muttered. Carefully he fed a snake camera into the room below.

Gamble arranged a tiny monitor screen that showed them what was happening in the room down there. The two watched as Street manipulated the camera's eye.

There were the hostages, laid out on the floor, some of them sobbing. Stay cool, folks, help's a-coming.

"How the hell are we gonna get out of here!" one of the two remaining bank robbers wailed. He had a rasping voice, like sandpaper, like maybe there was something wrong with his throat, maybe a childhood disease or somebody hit him in the neck and it healed wrong.

Everything fell eerily silent. The grenades stopped popping, the gunfire ceased, the noise outside went away.

Then, a voice.

"We're just bringing in a phone! No shots!"

"Boys, when they get that phone inside, I'm ordering our wounded to be pulled out of the lines of fire. Keep an eye on the perps and tell me what's happening inside."

"Will do," Street acknowledged. "They're at the door." He whispered, careful now to keep his voice down. The slightest shuffle, now that the plaster and steel had been pulled back, could be fatal -- for somebody else. There were S.W.A.T. officers at the front door of the bank. If the robbers found out he and Gamble were here, they might feel cornered.

"Put it inside the door and bug your asses away from here!"

This second robber's voice was clear and deep, almost like a radio announcer, but with some kind of accent. Jamaican, Mexican -- Street couldn't identify it. Just a little bit -- maybe some people wouldn't even hear it at all.

His stomach contracted. If the kidnappers heard so much as a scuff, those hostages were all done and this entire operation could turn into a free-for-all that would fill up the morgue. He hoped there were no squirrels on the roof. He willed himself not to breathe -- well, to breathe slowly. If he held his breath, he'd start to gasp.

He tried to iron out the psychology in his mind. He knew there were at least three hostage takers in there, and they would kill cops on sight. He tried to stage the scene in his mind, to have some idea of where they might be standing, how they would have to twist to aim at him or anyone else, where the windows were and other possible exits.

On the monitor, tilted really crooked, Street and Gamble watched a skittish blue-and-white view of the front door as two S.W.A.T. men behind a shield awkwardly pulled the bank's glass door open and pushed in a portable short-range direct-line phone. Then the men simply shut the door and backed away as instructed. Good. No cowboys. Of course, the others knew Street and Gamble were in place. Who needed cowboys when the cavalry was already here?

The other robber, not Rasp, snatched up the phone. The leader, obviously.

"I'm controlling this situation! You hear me?"

"We can get to the lobby," Street murmured, under cover of the perp's own loud voice.

"Ten-David, Street, hold your position. CNT has them on the phone. Stand by."

Just beyond the hole in the wall, innocent hostages whimpered and gasped, sobbed and feared. Street could feel their terror. How many of them were already dead? How many wounded? Were they frail or young or sick? They needed help. He and Gamble were right here. Why wait?

"Ten-David wants us to hold."

Gamble's strong features crumpled. "We hold, they die."

With that, and no other announcement, Brian Gamble simply slipped through the hole into the critical area.

"Guess we're not holding," Street blurted. He murmured a few more selective curses about Gamble's gambling, then skittered through the hole too.

Copyright © 2003 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Star; Film and TV tie-in ed edition (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074346771X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743467711
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,222,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better Then Than The Movie!!!! I would give it 10 stars!!!, September 2, 2003

By 

Ben (Bartlett, Tn USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: S.W.A.T. (Mass Market Paperback)

First off, if you haven't seen this movie, go! Now! It is easily, besides the matrix trilogy, the best movie out there. Action, Thirller, Mystery, Humor, Everything. Then, you can buy this book, which is probably, besides the lord of the rings trilogy, the best movie book ever made. By far. This has even more suspense than the movie. The author did a supurb job at describing the action. You can thank me later. Have fun. :-D

5.0 out of 5 stars AMAZING, March 20, 2005

By 

J.C. - See all my reviews

This review is from: S.W.A.T. (Mass Market Paperback)

S.W.A.T. by Diane Cary is a thrilling book that keeps its reader constantly on the edge of their seat. The author makes sure to always keep the reader interested. I couldn't put this book down and read its 276 pages in 2 days. You are actually placed into this book as Jim Street, the main character. This was a good book. It was well written so that you knew what was happening around the characters. "He walked to the Crown Victoria and got in-to find that Hondo was already inside, lounging back in the passenger seat, shuffling through seven or eight personal files." The words that the author has chosen were specific but understandable. "Street stood there alone. He'd pleaded, hoped, mourned, fought for this moment. Now that it was here, he actually wasn't sure what to do. If he showed up at seven o'clock in the morning, he could just as easily be shot down in front of all the other officers chosen for this team." The dialauge was always enjoyable, weather it was serious, or hilarious. ""She's like, how's she gonna take care of the kids if something happens to me, right? So I call State Farm, looking for some extra life insurance, and when I tell the sister I work S.W.A.T., guess what she does."
"Laughs?" T.J. suggested.
"Hangs up?" Boxer threw in.
"The woman laughs her ass off, then she hangs up on me!""