Read About Barry's Brother, and New Author Mark Ozeroff "Charged with adrenaline, Return Fire is a high-speed police thriller that never lets you off the edge of your seat. Equal parts mystery and action thriller, Return Fire is page-turning fiction at its very best." --the American Author's Association (www.americanauthorsassociation.com/) "RETURN FIRE leaps off the page, and hits the reader between the eyes like a high-powered rifle bullet. Barry Ozeroff's writing is gritty, hard-edged, and utterly compelling. This book has bestseller written all over it." --Jeff Edwards, Award-Winning Author of TORPEDO, and THE SEVENTH ANGEL Gresham Author's First Novel a Winner: His debut effort is a potent tale that drips with authenticity. Chock full of authentic detail and action, 'Sniper Shot' is a first-class police procedural. The plot moves at breakneck speed, but with a certainty that permits readers to vicariously walk in Geller's [the protagonist's] shoes. Ozeroff's finale leaves many questions unanswered, making a sequel likely. That's a welcome pleasure to look forward to. -The Cannon Beach (OR) Gazette, 12/15/05 A Good Inflight Read Sniper Shot will keep you at the edge of your seat at 30,000 feet ...the high-adrenaline suspense novel is as accessible as any mystery or thriller. If you're looking for quality distraction during the upcoming holiday traveling season, Sniper Shot is for you. -- The Source Weekly (Bend, OR)

RETURN FIRE
by Barry W. Ozeroff, 2007

Chapter 1

The lights of the Christmas tree cast a soft glow about the living room. Sharon, my wife, puts on the Peanuts Christmas CD, and we listen to their version of the traditional carols. My daughter Leah, now eight, dances the silly dance of the cartoon characters to the jazz song Linus and Lucy, which is my favorite.

Red and green lights blink softly on and off, presents line the floor around the tree, and the living room smells of natural pine. Like roughly a third of American Jews, we celebrate Christmas, minus the Christ part. I just can't bring myself to deny Leah the experience of it all. Tonight is Christmas Eve 2007, and all seems right with the world.

I am Officer Benjamin Geller, a nineteen-year veteran of the Stratton, Oregon police department; a former corporate tax attorney who left the good life to fulfill a boyhood dream of becoming a police officer. Well, we all live by the choices we make.

I am a sniper on our Special Emergency Response Team, or SERT. I am also somewhat famous of late in our neck of the Pacific Northwest, because a year-and-a-half ago I shot another police officer a total of four times with my .308 sniper rifle from a distance of about 120 yards, smashing his legs and hips like so many dry twigs. He shot himself in the mouth after I was done with him, but I don't even like to think about that let alone talk about it, and so I won't, at least for now.

It is raining outside, and the forecast calls for snow. Snow is a rare treat in Stratton, which is only about fifteen miles east of Portland, but a white Christmas... Well that's almost unheard of.

I am lucky to have the holiday off. My normal days off are Sunday and Monday, and Christmas happened to fall on Monday this year. This means I will also get New Year's Eve off.

It is going on ten thirty p.m., and Leah is fading fast. She doesn't believe in Santa Claus, or anything she can't see, touch, or otherwise experience; a characteristic she has learned from me. Nevertheless, she has made it a goal to stay up until midnight, just in case. She will not make it.

Sharon is baking cookies. Not Christmas sugar cookies, but real, gooey chocolate chip ones. Is there another kind? The first batch is due out of the oven in four minutes.

And now, as if preordained by some cosmic wrecker of holiday cheer, my department Nextel phone vibrates against my hip, and I roll my eyes. Guys with families like to be with them on holidays, so there's almost always a last-minute outbreak of “Christmas flu” about this time every year. Still, the department has to maintain minimum shift staffing, even on the major holidays. So when I happen to be off duty on Christmas, I get called first, because I'm the Stratton Police Department's token Jew, which is supposed to mean I don't mind coming in. Well, tonight they will be surely disappointed.

Sharon sees me go for the phone and says, “Ben, you're going to tell them no, aren't you?”

“Of course I am, honey,” I say, opening the phone and revealing the little color screen.

But rather than a sergeant calling me in for overtime, it says I have a priority message holding. This generally means only one thing.

I open the file, and immediately see that I am right. In an instant, I know that Christmas, for mine and probably twenty other families, has just been ruined.

SERT callout. Barricaded suspect holding his family hostage. Charges are attempted murder, assault, and kidnapping. Command post Rockledge Pizza Hut. Safe approach from the south.

“Christ,” I mutter.

Sharon, who knows I don't pray, looks at me and says, “Is it a SERT callout?”

I can tell what's coming. Still, I can't just not go, simply because it's Christmas.

“Yes.”

“Ben, it's—”

“Shar,” I interrupt, cutting her off. “There are seventeen other guys on the team who really do celebrate this holiday. They have to leave their families and go, just like me. I'm sorry, but it's not like I have a choice.”

Sharon slams the oven door open and proclaims, “Merry friggin' Christmas, world!” This is real profanity for her, a sign she is truly angry.

Leah is crying now. She cries whenever Sharon and I fight, because one of the things she remembers most vividly is me living apart from her and Sharon, back when we were separated, when it was going on.

“Daddy, you're not going away, are you?” she asks. Before I can answer, her head jerks violently to the right, narrowly missing the wall.

Still suffering from residual effects of anoxic-ischemic encephalopathy—a form of brain damage—Leah undergoes occasional random spasmodic muscle contractions that make her jerk like a marionette at the hands of a drugged-out puppeteer. This, along with occasional holes in her memory, are the only reminders of the time when she and Sharon were kidnapped and buried alive without sufficient oxygen, and I had to use my .308 to torture their location out of the renegade officer who had kidnapped them. But as I said before, I don't like to talk about that.

“Yeah, baby, Daddy has to take off for a while.”

I belatedly realize she interprets this as me going away to live in a trailer, like I did when her mother caught me screwing a female officer just before the aforementioned incident, and I hastily add, “But I'll be back before you get up in the morning, Princess, and we'll open all the presents together. I'm not moving out again.”

She visibly relaxes, and I go into the bedroom to change. I keep a pair of camouflage BDUs and some cold-weather gear at home. Because I live close to the police station, I am almost always among the first to arrive at the SERT van when the team gets called out.

Ten minutes later, bearing a Tupperware container of steaming cookies for the team, I am racing toward the Stratton police station. There is no traffic, and I am able to make the two-mile trip in record time. After all, 'tis the night before Christmas, and all through the city, not a creature is stirring, except for a guy in Rockledge who is holding his family hostage after trying to kill one of them. Hell, that’s not that big a deal for that part of town; around the precinct, it’s called Rockledge foreplay.

I arrive to find the parking lot empty and quiet. Buzzing myself into the portion of the building housing the fire department, I open the fourth bay, revealing the big, midnight blue SERT van. I unplug the 220 umbilical, toss it into an exterior cabinet, and climb aboard. Removing the key from the ashtray, I start the big Caterpillar diesel and pull the rig out onto the tarmac, then start the generator, and turn on the red, night vision-preserving interior lighting. Next, I light up the rig's various computers, then go to the back and begin gathering my gear.

Within moments, my teammates begin to arrive. Carlos “Backflip” Vega is first, smelling a little like beer, which I pretend not to notice. Hugh “Baby Hughie” Wilkes is next, wearing a Santa cap, which he will likely try to wear in his place in the entry team “conga line.” Next is Ray “Oy Vey” Schmeer, my sniper partner. We are close personal friends, unlike my last sniper partner, Bob Slater, whom I shot to pieces.

“Happy Chanukah, Helen,” says Ray.

“Sieg heil!” I bark in return. He knows I hate the nickname Helen, which stems from a day I shot so poorly someone remarked that my target looked as if Helen Keller had shot it. Helen Geller, get it? Ray's team-issued nickname is Pap, but I call him Oy Vey, because coupled with his last name, it fit so closely to the Yiddish expression “Oy vey ist mir,” which means, “Oh, woe is me.” There is nothing remotely Jewish about Ray, who is a blond-haired, blue-eyed German. I tell everyone we meet that he is Jewish, which used to piss him off, but which he now finds funny.

He clicks his heels together and spews in flawless German, “Kuchen meiner Muttis sind immer ausgezeichnet!” It sounds like a phrase recorded from one of Hitler's speeches, but in fact means 'My mommy's cakes always taste great,' and is the only thing he knows how to say in that guttural language.

Now that five of us are here, I send a page that the van will be leaving in ten minutes. It is team policy that the van leaves as soon as the first five to respond are dressed out and fully prepared. That way, we have a ready-made hasty team to conduct whatever type of immediate operation that might be called for immediately—downed officer rescue, delivery of medical supplies, hostage extraction, an emergency hot entry, or anything else that may be required. Even we snipers are cross-trained for such a possibility.

Quickly, the men dress and get their gear ready. Most everyone keeps everything he (or she, as in the case of Ellen “Hair-do” Fitzsimons, Stratton's first female SERT member) needs in the van. That way, he/she can dress out as the van is rolling, or meet up with the van at the scene and prepare there.

Ellen, not one to worry about modesty, arrives before the van leaves, doffs her uniform and dons her BDUs without regard for our seeing her in her underwear. Too bad she's built like a Russian Olympic diver, but it is also a good thing. Not a month ago, I was attacked by a man whose wife I had just arrested for beating him up, and Ellen was my cover officer. She damn near wiped the floor with the guy. Not only is she willing to give one hundred percent in a fight, but she is more capable of laying a major hurtin' on someone than are half the men in this outfit.

Less than twenty minutes after my arrival it is time to get under way. Vega gets on the computer and sends a page that the van is leaving. Wilkes has been our driver since he came on the team two years ago, and he gets the van rolling. Team leader Stan “Housing Authority” Hauser and Fitzsimmons drive the chase cars, one in front, and one behind the van. As we roll out the back gate, we slow briefly and I extend an arm, hooking Brian “Armpit” Pole, the assistant team leader, into the van.

Surfing the floor against the motion of the van, I make my way to the weapons locker and carefully extract my rifle. It is a highly customized Remington 700 with a beautiful Dedal DayVision/NightVision interchangeable starlight scope. This rifle was once used to score third place in the National High-powered shooting competition at Camp Perry, Ohio. Its previous owner and the holder of that title was Bob Slater, my late former partner, of whom I spoke earlier.

After the matter of my little disagreement with Slater over the kidnapping of my family was adjudicated to my favor in court, Slater's parents donated the rifle to the police department for use on the SERT team. Being the primary sniper, it fell to me. We share some significant history, this rifle and I, and we have grown fond of one another.

Lovingly, I load three .308 cartridges into the magazine. The second one is in case I have two bad guys to kill, and the third is in case one of the first two is a dud. It doesn't take more than one of these to kill a man with this baby. Unless, of course, you're only torturing him.

Gustavo “Mini Me” Oronco, a jovial 5'3” Hispanic entry team member who is bald as a cue ball and is considered by all to be one tough hombre, just came from the call, and has a lot of information it. He tells us that it is the Hicks family, and that Delray has stabbed his wife. He said the ambulance crew told him it doesn't look as if she's going to be celebrating Christmas this year, or ever again, for that matter.

I am well acquainted with Delray Hicks and his wife Denise, who weighs in at about two bucks fifty if an ounce, and their kids, as is just about every officer in Stratton. We have been dealing with the Hicks' for years. They have two children, a teenage girl and a younger boy, neither of whom stand a chance of making it in the real world.

Oronco tells us Christmas Eve got underway in the Hicks' trailer when, during an argument, Delray beat all but Jesus out of his wife in front of the children and she returned the favor by smashing a beer bottle over his head. Either the nasty cut he received, the loss of the beer, or both, pissed him off, and he sank a ten-inch butcher knife into her right kidney

When the first officers to arrive made initial contact, Delray threatened to kill them through the door, and has since reaffirmed these threats. Specifically, he says he will gut the first honkey-ass muthafucka who tries to take him out of there. Fortunately, he has no guns that we know of.

This is exactly the sort of thing our hostage negotiators live for. It is their philosophy to take as much time as is needed to listen to the bad guy, sympathize, empathize, and build a rapport with him, feel his pain, offer him milk, cookies, and a hug, then have him come out once they gain his trust. It generally works, but can take hours and hours, which is fine with them. We're the police, after all; we have all the time in the world for this.

Of course, the hostage negotiating team, or HNT, doesn't have to sit outside in 35 degree weather while it pours on them for six hours, either. Oh well, that's what they pay us the big bucks (an extra three percent) for.

I paint my face a frightening combination of green and black, making myself look like a Navy SEAL in a foreign jungle. I hate the paint, but I like the look. I put on my fleece-lined Gore-Tex woodland camo Army jacket, very nice and warm, and my dirty, floppy boonie hat. Over my long underwear is a pair of lightweight rain pants, over which my BDU pants go. The idea is that my BDUs can get soaked, but my legs will stay dry. It rarely works like that.

A pair of camouflage green hunting gloves with a slit for my trigger finger, and my ensemble is complete. I attach a remote transmit button to the outside of my left index finger by means of a Velcro strip and place my radio headset on. Switching over to the proper frequency on my portable radio, I do a radio check. Finally, I jump up and down, and hearing no jingling or other unusual noises, I pronounce myself fully prepared.

I have a backpack containing water, energy bars, fresh gloves, binoculars, wire cutters, notepad, space pen that writes on wet paper, and a host of other equipment, which I throw across my back. I insert my rifle into a Gore-Tex drag bag, also woodland camo, and wait for the van to stop rolling.

I know this trailer park well; particularly number 18, the Hicks' trailer. The park itself is situated on a main road, but number 18 is in the back, which faces railroad tracks, a wastewater treatment plant that always smells like a wastewater treatment plant, and a large, tree-covered hillside.

We all knew that one day there would be a SERT callout at Delray Hicks' trailer, from the day he got out of prison where he had spent the last seven years on a charge of manslaughter. I first arrested him twelve years ago, when he was nineteen, for beating a neighbor's teenager with a metal pipe. The DA dropped the Assault I charge in exchange for his pleading guilty to an Assault IV with a minimum of six months, and which he did locally. He was just small-time then. Delray Hicks has spent over half his adult life in either prison or jail.

Stan Hauser goes to a filing cabinet and removes a file marked “Hicks.” It is a site survey of Hicks' trailer—a detailed plan for rapid deployment of the team in the event of a callout there. It covers most of the logistical aspects of deployment and operation, such as the best routes of approach, the best staging areas for the command post and hostage negotiation team, and suggested locations for inner perimeter team members and snipers. Also covered in the site survey are detailed drawings and measurements of the building and its interior, evacuation routes, the gas plans, entry plans, LifeFlight landing zones, medical staging areas, the nearest schools, etc. There are similar plans for every hospital, school, government building, and trouble spot in our area of operations, which includes all of Multnomah County with the exception of the city of Portland, which has its own SWAT team. We update this file regularly, whenever new potential trouble spots are identified.

Studying the plan, I see that if I choose the predetermined one-side primary sniper location, I will have cover of heavy brush and a straight, 105-yard shot into Hicks' front door and living room window. My partner will be lucky; his best position is from a neighbor's trailer directly behind Hicks'. While I'm freezing my ass off lying in a puddle and getting rained on, some old lady will be serving Ray Schmeer coffee and cake while bending his ear about her grandchildren. Oy vey ist mir.

The van slows, and the siren is silenced. As the van slows and the cacophony around me quiets, it is time again to wonder if this will be another day I have to kill a man. Tonight, though, it is different. I still wonder, only I no longer experience dread at the thought. I have already bloodied my hands in this job, and whereas I don't want to have to do it any more, I know that it is not so bad. Sometimes I am amazed at how I can so flippantly consider the killing of another human being. The case of Delray Hicks, however, is what we generally refer to as AVANHI, which stands for asshole versus asshole, no humans involved. As shallow as that seems it does make considering his death much easier to stomach.

The van comes to a complete stop, and I throw the pack across my back and grab the drag bag containing my rifle. Shouldering past everyone, I position myself at the rear door. Ray comes up behind me. Since we're the first to be deployed, we like to be the first out of the van.

Our job is not so much to shoot the bad guy as it is to make detailed observations of everything that is going on at the target location, filter that information, and report it and its meaning to the command post. Our role on the team is commonly referred to as primary and secondary sniper (primary on side one, or the front of the target location, and secondary on side three—the rear; the sides being numbered clockwise from the front of the building), but technically we are sniper/observers. Observing is by far the majority of what we do.

It was all we did up until May 24, 2005. That was the night Hugo Route tried to kill his infant daughter, and I took him out as he placed a .357 Magnum to the baby’s neck. My shot, which should have been taken by my then-partner Slater, passed through his wife's bicep on the way, severing her brachial artery and nearly causing her to bleed out. The wife, Pammi, later conspired with Slater to lie in her testimony to say her husband was not holding a gun at the time of the shooting, and was caught in her lie, but the police department still had to pay her ten thousand dollars.

The ruling in favor of Pammi Route was not because I shot and she got hit, but rather because Slater hadn't taken the shot he should have, which forced me to shoot from an impossible angle. The original ruling was for forty thousand, but the jury ordered that thirty thousand of it had to be donated back to the police department, earmarked specifically for sniper training.

Because of that “donation,” I went to a Special Forces Advanced Urban Sniper School in Maryland, and they brought Ray on the team, sending him to the beginner, intermediate, and advanced sniper schools within six months of each other. The deal pretty much hosed Pammi Route, considering that her lawyer bills were about eight grand, leaving her with approximately two thousand bucks. I heard she bough a used car with her share. Drive safely, Mrs. Route.

The van comes to a stop, and Ray and I jump out the back, ready to do Christmas battle.

BarryOzeroff.Com Oregon, USA E-mail: readermail@barryozeroff.com