Maybe that meant they had found somewhere safe to wait out the attack. Of course, if the terrorists maintained control of the hotel for any length of time, there would be no safe places.
And the terrorists had clearly taken both towers at the same time. He’d seen the ones in the east tower. Were there other attackers still here?
Conley got his answer when a man with an assault rifle slung across his shoulder rounded a corner and stepped right in front of him.
The man’s face registered surprise. By the time he was able to fumble for his weapon, Conley’s Glock was pointed at his chest and firing. The impact knocked him back to the floor.
Conley noticed that the man was Asian, but he appeared more Chinese, which set him apart from the attackers in the east tower, who were clearly Filipino—and probably MILF. This man, apparently, was neither. And unlike the gunmen in the east tower, he wasn’t wearing black but a green camouflage uniform.
Before Conley could even consider what that meant, he heard shouting and running. Then at least six more figures wearing similar green camo were racing across the lobby toward their position, guns out.
Then the guns were firing.
Conley returned fire and was pleased to see one of the men fall. Clearly, they were used to shooting unarmed civilians. Unarmed civilians on vacation.
As a result, it hadn’t even occurred to the terrorists to take cover yet. Amado’s weapon dropped another attacker as the remaining men (five now, by Conley’s count) scattered, looking for cover.
From their covered positions, the gunmen kept up a steady stream of fire. Conley and Amado were forced to duck completely behind their cover. However, it was just a matter of time before the terrorists found a good angle on the two men.
Conley and Amado had to find a better position.
And then a bullet pinged over his head.
That was it. They had to get out of here, now!
“This way,” Amado tugged at Conley and the two men sprinted toward the nearest solid cover—a recessed elevator bank. Before Conley could complain, bullets started flying over their heads.
They dashed inside. It was a two-elevator bank with a sign that said Express to Skybridge in Filipino and English.
The wall in front of him was solid and had a good four feet of cover. Conley’s Glock was out and firing as Amado slapped the call button for the elevator. Conley considered switching to the AK-47, but to aim effectively he’d have to expose his shoulder and more of his body to enemy fire.
The elevator pinged and Amado called to him.
Conley stopped firing but didn’t move. He waited a count of five and was rewarded when two of the terrorists left their cover and moved toward his position. Two shots later, the men went down.
Conley spun and dashed into the elevator, with Amado right behind him. The older man hit a button and then drew his shotgun pistol.
“Find Ms. Dani,” Amado said.
“What are you going to do?” Conley said, not liking where this was going.
“My job, Mr. Peter,” Amado said and then he slipped out the closing doors, shotgun in hand.
Conley dashed across the elevator to reach for the door open button, but the elevator was moving before he could hit it and it carried him upward. Even if Conley could get back down after he reached the skybridge level, Amado’s fight would likely be over—one way or the other—when he got there.
Unslinging his AK-47, Conley said a quiet thanks to his new friend and hoped Amado would make it. Then he resolved to follow the guard’s instructions and find Dani.
The skybridge would take him back to the east tower, where he would have the best chance of finding her. The minister’s security would most likely shelter the team in place.
With luck, the terrorists would have to go room to room to find them. They’d likely be starting at the bottom. Conley would start at the top and hope for the best. It wasn’t much of a plan, but he and Morgan had worked with worse.
Half a minute later, the doors opened, and bullets rained into the elevator.
This is why I hate elevators in a firefight, Conley thought as his body hugged the elevator wall.
Chapter 28
Alex couldn’t bring herself to eat any cereal before the Chechens herded them into the sleeping area. Watching the boy getting dragged away and shot had been the end of her appetite.
“Go to sleep. We expect results in the lab tomorrow,” Kattab shouted.
It sounded like a threat, but everything he said sounded like a threat—even more so a few hours after he had killed the second student in cold blood.
Karen was quiet, which was normal enough. But, remarkably, she was also nervous—which was as far from normal as anything on this mission.
Alex wondered if she was thinking about Shepard. That made sense. Was she more afraid of not seeing him again than of death? Alex thought so. She remembered watching Karen saying good-bye to Shepard and later talking to him on the phone. Alex realized what was odd about those images: Karen had resembled a smitten high school girl.
The funny thing was that Alex would have bet good money that Karen had never had that look while she was actually in high school. Alex knew she herself had never had that look.
Oddly, she had seen that look on her mother’s face. And the reverse on her father’s. It was at odd times, when they had been apart for a while, or when they laughed at a secret joke. Or for some reason Alex couldn’t see.
Maybe that was what love did, make you look like a smitten high school kid.
Alex thought she would like to find out. However, she knew that didn’t seem very likely.
Her primary mission was stopping the terrorists from getting any usable virus. Her secondary mission was to protect as many civilians as possible. However, the best-case scenario involved explosions and gunfire. She had no illusions about whether or not there would be civilian casualties.
But it was neither necessary nor likely that she would survive, even if the operation was successful. If she did her job well, most of the gunfire would be directed at her.
Alex noted that a few of the students were talking quietly, some sitting together on their cots. The Chechens didn’t seem to mind as long as the students didn’t move around or try to leave the sleeping area.
Kattab, she realized, was gone—along with two of the others. They had disappeared behind one of the doors on the far wall of the warehouse floor.
Alex heard movement behind her. She turned just as Jason slipped onto the bed behind her.
“Hey,” he whispered, keeping a respectful distance. “Want some company?”
“What about the guards?” she asked.
“What are they going to do, shoot me?”
“Yes!” she whispered as harshly as she could.
To this he laughed quietly.
She said, “You’re crazy.”
“I was never insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched,” he said quietly.
Alex liked that but she wouldn’t let herself think about what it meant.
“Look, Alex could we talk about something?”
“Okay,” she said tentatively.
“Well, I…” he said. Clearly, whatever he was going to say was hard for him.
“What is it?”
“I don’t want you to think I was following you. I mean, I was, but not in a creepy way,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, genuinely confused.
“When you got on the bus,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I just don’t want you to think I’m some kind of a crazy stalker,” he said.
“That is what you’re worried about? Now?”
He ignored the question. “I went to pick you up after your meeting and you were already getting int
o the bus. I got a weird feeling and decided to follow. I texted you, and then called you. When you didn’t answer I told myself that maybe you’d forgotten our date and I thought I’d catch up with you and we could…reschedule. Then the bus got on the highway and I just kept going. I had a feeling that something might be wrong, but I didn’t want to call the police because nothing really suspicious had happened. Then we all stopped for traffic and I thought I’d check it out.”
“Really, don’t worry about it. You know what’s happening tomorrow, right?”
“That’s why I wanted to talk about it. On the off chance we survive this whole thing, I didn’t want to think I’d blown it with you.”
There was something hopeful and sweet in worrying about things like that.
“Don’t leave me hanging here. Say something,” he said.
“I’m trying to figure out if you’re weird or cute,” she said.
“Well?”
“I’ll let you know when this is over,” she said.
Jason brought his hand down on her shoulder; she grasped it and used it to pull him closer to her—putting even less distance between them.
He brought his arm around her stomach and held her tightly with a touch that told her that everything was going to be fine. It was an illusion, she knew, but a good one and she was glad to have it.
Reality would come soon enough in the morning.
* * * *
Conley couldn’t even guess how many shooters there were. At least a few, he guessed, as round after round slammed through the stainless steel rear wall of the elevator. He remembered another thing he hated about elevators.
There was a trap door leading to the roof of the elevator but it was nearly at the center of the car, so far from the cover of the partial wall on each side of the elevator doors that it might as well have been in the terrorists’ laps.
There was only one way out and it was forward. Conley reached into his fanny pack and pulled out a fresh clip. It would help, but he had no illusions that it would be enough. The terrorists shooting at him had a direct line of fire and automatic weapons.
Conley decided to skip the frontal assault. Instead he hit the close door button. He could take the elevator back down to the ground level. Though there was a better than even chance that there would be more gunmen waiting for him, he could hit the stop button and scramble up and through the trap door on the ceiling of the car.
Once he was in the elevator shaft, he would have some options—certainly better ones than he had now. The door seemed to take forever to start closing—another thing he hated about elevators.
Was the close door button even connected to anything?
Finally, it moved a few inches, and stopped. This happened at exactly the same moment that the lights went out. The power outage was the first lucky break he’d gotten since he and Amado had run into the second group of terrorists in the lobby of the west tower.
For a second, the bullets stopped flying into the elevator car. Before that had fully registered, Conley had reached around with his Glock and fired two shots straight ahead, chest level, before he even checked the hallway.
He leaned his head out a split second later and fired as soon as he saw the targets: two men in green camo. One was already falling, hit by one of his blind shots. Conley put another round into the man as he fell. The second man was watching and had only started to swivel his head back to Conley when he took two rounds in the chest and fell backward.
It wasn’t just luck that had saved Conley. Too often terrorists’ training and experience was oriented towards shooting unarmed and unsuspecting people—like hotel guests. Most terrorists weren’t used to enemies who shot back. And experience under fire taught you to react immediately to any changes in your situation. Well, these two would never learn that lesson.
He wondered how many innocent hotel guests they and their group had killed today. And then he thought of Amado, the friendly man who had clearly seen a few things in his time but greeted everyone he saw with a smile. He knew Amado had a wife, though the older man had never mentioned children. He was a good man; Conley had sensed that from the beginning.
Plus, he was able to hit multiple targets center mass in a chaotic, active-fire situation, and because of that he had saved Conley’s life.
Conley hoped his friend had made it somehow. He left the elevator alcove and heard running footsteps.
Damn, he barely had time to think before he saw several men in green camo running down the hallway toward him. He had maybe a second before the bullets started flying again, but before that could happen he had turned the corner and sprinted for the skyway.
He flew through the hallway that seemed to hang in the air. It was maybe fifty yards, and took him only seconds to cross—though the trip seemed endless.
Counting himself lucky that the terrorists hadn’t been able to get off any rounds when he was in the open, Conley threw himself to the side as soon as he hit the hallway of the east tower.
He rested against the wall and thought about just shooting at the terrorists as they charged through. There were at least six, and he doubted he would be able to get them all before one of them hit him.
The sound of their footsteps told Conley that they were in the skyway now and then Conley saw that his salvation was literally at his feet. He said a silent thanks to Dan Morgan as he reached down and pulled out the rubber doorstop that was holding one of the steel double doors open and against the corridor wall. He pushed it closed, jammed the doorstop in place, and then dashed across the small opening to repeat the operation on the other double door.
The doors were designed to shut this end of the skyway but they couldn’t be locked from the outside—presumably to prevent anyone from getting stuck inside.
He heard shouting from inside the skyway and then he heard at least one body hurl itself against the doors, which barely budged. The great thing about the little rubber triangles was that the harder you pushed against them, the more they dug in—a lot like the man who had introduced them to Conley.
Maybe the six men in the skyway would eventually figure out how to get through, but Conley planned to be long gone by that time. He headed down the hallway where he could see the six gunmen through the window.
They were at the end of the skyway pounding on the door, enraged. Then one of them dropped to the floor. Conley couldn’t figure out why. Then he saw a hole had been punched in the glass wall of the skyway.
Conley couldn’t see the sharpshooter and neither, apparently, could the terrorists as they flailed around desperately. The fact was that they were surrounded on three sides by glass. They were literally sitting ducks.
By the time another terrorist fell, the remaining four were pointing their rifles in seemingly random directions. Then another went down, and another.
Conley had seen that these terrorists did poorly when fighting enemies who actually shot back. Turns out they did even worse against snipers.
The last two started moving and raced toward the far end of the skyway to escape through the only open doors. One of the terrorists only made it three strides before he fell. The other made it almost halfway across the skyway and then he went down.
Conley was pleased that the local authorities were in the game. Maybe there was some hope. If the minister’s security could keep Dani and her group safe, Conley might be able to make it to them. With any luck, he’d have some backup from outside.
Chapter 29
The rooms for the minister, Dani, and their colleagues were on the top floor. There was very little chance that they would be there, but it was a place to start.
Out of habit, he tried his phone again. Still no signal.
He was stuck on the fact that this operation involved more than one terror organization. He was almost certain that the terrorists he’d faced in the beginning were MILF, a separatist organization who wa
nted religious rule over some territory in the southern Philippines.
In China, most terror attacks were the work of Uyghur groups, and they had similar demands for an independent territory in western China.
The problem was that the Moro and the Uyghurs had never worked together. And they were not unique in this regard. Terror leaders almost never did—even when they shared a religion and had similar goals, as with these two.
That, however, was a problem for another day. Right now he had more immediate concerns. First, he had to get to Dani. Then he would deal with the terrorists.
Conley took the stairs, though with the power out he couldn’t take the elevator even if he he’d wanted to. The stairwell was nearly dark, lit only by the dim red glow of the emergency lights.
It was also eerily silent, more so even than the rest of the hotel where guests were hiding in their rooms, staying quiet, and hoping for the best. Here, his footsteps echoed up and down the stairwell, announcing that he was there.
At every floor he would stop before he stepped onto a landing and listen for any sign of people above him. Each time he was greeted by silence and moved on.
Even moving relatively slowly and quietly, he was at the twelfth floor in less than ten minutes. He waited at the door to the hallway for nearly a full minute, listening for activity outside.
As soon as he opened the door he would be exposed.
No guts no glory, he thought as he pulled the door open and jumped into the hallway with his AK-47 leading the way.
No one was there.
The hallway was marginally better lit, simply because it had more emergency lights and exit signs that operated on battery power. There were also windows at the end of the hallway that let in some daylight.
Conley headed toward the light. Dani’s room and all of the suites for the Chinese minister’s delegation were at the end of the hall. The hallway was empty and quiet. He found her room open. In fact, all of the rooms assigned to the Minister’s delegation were open.
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