Shot Clock

by Mark Parragh

  Return fire was immediate. He saw the flashes lighting up the dark and heard bullets drill through the air nearby. But the shots were wild. He thought at least one of them realized where he was heading, but others were still firing toward the rock.

  Crane didn’t slow down; he ran at top speed straight to the wall. At the last moment, he let the MP7 dangle from its sling and spun, slamming his back into the wall with a grunt, and slapped both arms against the brick to absorb the impact. Then he dropped into a crouch with his back to the wall and ejected the empty magazine. He slid the last full magazine into the gun as he moved quickly along the wall toward the corner and the shattered doorway.

  He heard shouts as he slipped back through the wreckage of the doors and crouched behind the edge of the wall. They’d figured out that he’d moved, and there was only one logical place for him to go. The maneuver hadn’t bought as much time as he’d hoped. He readied the weapon, glanced around the edge of the wall, and identified a figure moving through the murk and rain. He fired a short burst and dropped back.

  This time, however, the expected burst of return fire didn’t come. Instead, Crane heard the soft whump of grenade launchers firing, first one, and then another. One smashed through one of the few unbroken panes of glass, and the second flew low through the doorway and clattered past him along the floor.

  Crane was moving almost before he’d identified the sound. He sprinted across the food court, past tables and chairs, past Redpoll’s abandoned wheelchair, and dove over the snack bar counter as the first grenade went off.

  A huge roar echoed as Crane hit the floor and slid against a refrigerated cabinet. The second explosion was barely distinguishable from the first. They merged into a long roar that threw pieces of shattered tables over the counter and set off the fire suppression system. Crane crouched behind the counter as water cascaded down from sprinkler nozzles in the ceiling. He ignored it. He was already soaked and covered in wet grass.

  They’d be moving into the building soon. He was in better shape than they’d expected, and he had cover. But he was outnumbered and outgunned. Crane moved quickly around the kitchen, turning things on. There was a deep fryer, gas ranges, a grill top, a countertop crepe maker. He noted tagged gas lines of flexible stainless steel, coated in bright PVC and connected to brass safety valves. All of it was dangerous enough under the right circumstances, but they were all coming up from room temperature. It would take time to get the cooking surfaces heated up, especially with all the cold water cascading from the sprinklers. Crane didn’t think he had that much time.

  Confirmation came a moment later when someone began laying down suppressive fire from the doorway. Bullets ricocheted off the snack bar walls. In the gift shop, expensive jackets blew apart into clouds of down. The shooter was firing blind, filling the air with bullets to keep Crane down while his comrades moved up. But that was enough. They were here.

  Crane leaned out over the counter and fired back into the doorway. Again, he didn’t think he hit anything, but perhaps he would keep them pinned down a few moments longer. He ducked back behind the counter as a burst shredded the facing on the front of the counter. Then, again, he heard the whump of a grenade launcher. Crane sprinted toward the rear of the kitchen as the grenade hit the refrigerators with a loud clang and ricocheted across the prep counter. The explosion rocked the kitchen and blew shredded food from the prep bays into the air. Crane was crouched behind a rack of metal storage shelves. Cans rained down on him, and the rack itself tilted over and would have fallen on him if the wall hadn’t stopped it.

  Crane took a breath and crawled out from under the pile of cans. He checked himself and decided he was unhurt. But he couldn’t keep dodging grenades all night. The bad guys never seemed to have any shortage of ordnance.

  Then he glanced up and realized he was crouched beneath the shutoff controls for the sprinklers. Pipes ran by above him with signage and a manual valve, padlocked so it couldn’t be turned off accidentally. And there was the key taped to the wall where the staff could quickly find it in an emergency. Crane ripped the key from the wall, opened the lock, and shut down the valve. The sprinklers ran dry within seconds and dripped quietly.

  With the sound of the sprinklers gone, Crane heard someone say, “Delta left.” Then he noticed the soft hiss of escaping gas. The grenade had wrecked one of the ovens. Gas would be filling the space along the floor. Perhaps he could speed that process a bit.

  Crane hurried down the row, opening safety valves and uncoupling lines wherever he found them. Gas hissed into the room. Now he needed them to come closer. He reached up onto a counter and found a large metal spoon and a wind-up kitchen timer. He tossed the spoon across the kitchen and heard it clatter off metal. A moment later, someone hissed, “One three, cover.”

  A figure moved slowly in the gloom. It ducked beneath the pass-through at the end of the counter and came into the kitchen. Crane smelled gas as the figure moved cautiously past a rack of condiment packets and silverware. He heard the deep fryer starting to tick as it warmed up, and the crepe maker gave off a dim orange glow. There wasn’t enough time for those. The gas would have to be his weapon.

  He looked around for the door to the storage room and found it behind him, at the end of the counter. Crane thought for a moment and then scooped up the kitchen timer and edged back down the space between the counter on one side and the grill and cooktops on the other. As he neared the corner, he saw the door to the storage room leaning partway open. He twisted the timer around to thirty seconds and leaned over to set it on the counter. Then he quietly edged around the door and slipped into the storage room.

  It had been gloomy enough in the main part of the building, but here, the darkness was nearly complete. Blind, Crane felt his way to the steel door at the back of the room where the stairs led down into the access tunnels. He bumped into something metallic and swore under his breath. Swift had said that she’d blocked the door. Apparently she’d done it by propping a heavy steel shelving unit against it. It had probably seemed like a good idea at the time, keeping any soldiers searching the tunnel network from coming up behind them. But now it was a problem.

  He felt around the edges of the shelf, tried tentatively pushing it to one side. It resisted and then loudly scraped against the cement floor. Crane froze at the sound. He listened but didn’t hear a reaction. There were maybe ten seconds left on the timer now. Crane felt for a shelf around waist level, thinking perhaps he could lift it. But his hand hit a heavy cardboard box. She’d loaded the thing down to increase the weight against the door. He removed the box, turned and set it down behind him. He found a second box on the next shelf down and moved that.

  Then he was out of time.

  The kitchen timer went off with a loud, jangling bell. As Crane had hoped, there was an immediate burst of gunfire, and then the sound of gas igniting and a panicked cry. There was no more time for caution.

  Crane threw his weight against the shelves and hurled them to one side with a loud crash. He could see brightness framing the doorway to the kitchen now, and he heard screams.

  He threw the door open and dove down the stairs into the darkness. Behind him, he heard the explosion. The building shook, and the blast slammed the door behind him just as he cleared it. He tumbled down the stairs and landed hard on cement. He was in the small chamber at the end of the access tunnel. The darkness was so complete here that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. He’d taken a flashlight from the gift shop, but when he took it out of his pocket, he realized he’d just smashed it in the fall down the stairs.

  He decided it was just as well. He could follow the wall in the darkness, and it would take him back to the lit main tunnel. Here, a light would just give him away.

  From the sound of things above, the fire had caught and was spreading. He’d disabled the sprinklers. It would quickly engulf the building and draw the attention of pretty much everyone on the hotel grounds.

  It was time to get out of
here.

  Chapter 30

  Shani Abera stood behind the glass walls of the Summer Pavilion and watched as flames consumed the gift shop and snack bar. There was chatter from the other teams on her ATAK—the fire lit up the night and was visible from across the valley—but she’d stopped asking for reports. All the ATAK had to offer was confusion and more questions. Nobody knew what had happened. Paul’s tracker showed him nearby, but she couldn’t raise him.

  Behind her, the guests on the Protected List looked on nervously and murmured among themselves while a couple of her men watched them. She wasn’t exactly sure when it had happened, but it was becoming clear to her that somewhere in the past few hours, a line had been crossed. This was no longer a successful mission, even if they confirmed Redpoll dead and got away clean. Too much had gone wrong now. It was too much of a mess. She’d lost too many people and taken too long to do what she’d come to do. She’d invested nearly two years in this mission, and she’d expected success to raise her reputation, and that of her team, to a whole new level. But it was too late for that now.

  No matter what happened by dawn, Turnstone would not be impressed. That opportunity was lost.

  And she couldn’t raise Paul.

  She turned as the outside door opened and Bako and two of his men brought in a civilian. He was a man in a bloody shirt, and he struggled in the grip of Bako’s two soldiers.

  “Scott Dauman,” said Bako, “Protected List.”

  The man, Dauman, looked up at her in anger. “Who the hell are you people? What do you mean ‘Protected List?’ Why am I on it?”

  “I guess Turnstone wants you alive for some reason,” she said, her irritation growing. “I don’t know why. I didn’t write the lists. But there are only two lists,” she added, her voice cold and sharp. “Just be grateful you’re on this one.”

  Dauman fell silent, and the soldiers took him to the center of the pavilion with the other protected figures.

  “What’s going on, Captain?” Bako asked quietly. He was Nigerian. He’d been in the middle of one insurgency or another since he was a boy. She knew she could rely on him, and it took a lot to rattle him. But she could tell he didn’t like this. That was fair enough. She didn’t like it, either.

  Then a new channel opened on her ATAK, and her heart leaped. It was Paul’s unit, near the burning gift shop. But all she heard was screaming, an ongoing, wet wail of a scream that ended only long enough for a gulping, hoarse intake of air before it began again. It was an eerie, inhuman scream that reminded her of ghost stories her father had told her as a girl. She fought to keep from trembling at the sound of it.

  “Report!” she snapped instead. “What the hell’s going on out there?”

  A moment later, a voice came on, not Paul’s, and obviously not replying to her. “I don’t know, the fucker’s half melted. Command! Command, can you hear me? Medevac! We need medevac!”

  “Who is this?” she shouted. “What’s going on?”

  But the voice just kept going, with the horrible screams behind it. “We’re at the fire! Goddamn it, I know you can see that! We need a chopper now! Command!”

  She turned to Bako as the voice on the ATAK kept screaming for a medic. There was no question of evacuating someone by helicopter. Not from here, not under the circumstances. Her soldiers had all known that going in. Bako’s eyes met hers, and a look passed between them. Things were getting worse with every moment.

  “Go, Bako,” she said quietly. “Find out what’s happening out there.”

  It meant a great deal more than that, of course, but Bako simply nodded. “Yes, Captain.”

  When he was gone, she lowered the volume on her ATAK. She told herself it was because the screams and the incoherent cries for help were disturbing the civilians. But she knew the truth was something different. The real reason was that she knew whose voice was producing those interminable animal screams, and she couldn’t bear to listen to it any longer.

  For a few minutes, she watched the building burn down to a shell of charred brick in the distance. She noticed with dismay that the channel was on wideband. They were transmitting to everyone. All the teams in the hotel were hearing this. The drone pilots in the ski lodge. Everyone was hearing it. She could imagine the impact it was having on the rest of her troops.

  Finally, she heard Bako on his own channel. “Approaching, Captain,” he said.

  A moment later, she heard the voice on the open channel say, “Who’s there? Medic! We need a medic!”

  Then she heard Bako swearing loudly in Igbo. “Fucking idiot!” he said, switching suddenly to English. Then there was a single gunshot, and the screaming finally, mercifully stopped, and her heart seemed to stop with it.

  “Jesus!” said the first voice, and then she heard the sound of someone being hit.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Bako’s voice. Then the open channel went dead, and Paul’s ATAK disappeared from her screen.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Bako said on their private channel. “Paul didn’t make it.”

  “Thank you, Bako,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Return to base.”

  Then she simply shut down. She didn’t know how much time passed while she stood at the glass wall, watching the fire burn down in the distance. She thought of the dreams she’d crafted for the future, felt them slipping away. It was time to run away again, just like her family had fled Ethiopia when she was a girl for a new, totally different life in Israel. The bugout packs with their money and passports were still out there beneath the rock, even if Paul would never use his.

  It would be best if she didn’t fly out with the rest of the team. She would disappear, let them think she’d been killed in action, let Bako take over command. If Turnstone’s anger fell on a dead commander, that might help protect the others. And she would vanish into a new life, with a new name and a new purpose. If she ever found one.

  But there was something she had to do first. No, she told herself. Two things.

  First, she needed to see Redpoll dead. Even if she never planned to lead her team of mercenaries again, she would complete the mission as a point of pride. Second, someone had made a hash of a mission she’d invested two years of her life setting up. She wasn’t incompetent, and neither were the troops she led. Things didn’t go this wrong without help. Someone out there was helping hide Redpoll, harassing her men, setting traps for her people to set off. That person had now cost her everything that mattered to her. She was increasingly convinced that person was John Crane.

  She would confirm Redpoll’s death, and she would find John Crane and kill him. Then the mission would be over and she could disappear. But not before.

  Chapter 31

  Crane found the others crossing the rough, marshy ground near the end of the lake. They were bent low, moving cautiously through the gloom and the last of the rain. He let out a low whistle from about fifty yards away, and they stopped to let him catch up.

  They didn’t look happy, he saw as he approached. They hadn’t covered nearly as much distance as he would have expected. Josh in particular looked bedraggled, his hair plastered to the sides of his face and his glasses dripping. Redpoll lay on the stretcher they carried, tossing his head from side to side and muttering in delirium. Swift alone seemed to be holding up. Crane remembered some of his own Hurricane Group training. It had gotten a lot worse than this, and he assumed Swift’s experience had been much the same.

  She’d taken one hand off the stretcher to grab her MP7 when she saw him. Now that she had recognized him, she let the gun fall back and dangle at her side, and caught the other stretcher pole again. She nodded back toward the fire at the gift shop, still smoldering in the rain.

  “I figured that was you,” she said. “You really are a firebug, aren’t you? Did you have to see a therapist when you were a kid? Did you get caught burning down the neighbors’ shed, or trying to set your middle school on fire?”

  Crane smiled. “I never got caught.”


  She smiled back and then nodded to him. “I’m glad you’re okay. I was worried.”

  “Can we move?” Josh said, irritation obvious in his voice. “He’s not getting any lighter standing here.”

  Crane moved over and took the end of the stretcher from him. Josh let out a long sigh and windmilled his arms a few times. Then they started forward again. The rain was just a light sprinkle now, tossed into random spatters by the wind. But the ground was a cold, clinging muck that sucked jealously at Crane’s boots every time he lifted a foot. He could see why they hadn’t made better time.

  “What do you say we cut over to the trail?” he said.

  “You were the one who said we should stay off it,” Swift said in annoyance.

  It was true that they were more likely to run into someone along the trail. But on the other hand, there was no cover out there. The longer they stayed out in the open, the more likely they were to be spotted, either by ground forces or one of the drones if they were still flying. Maybe it was best to just get where they were going quickly.

  “I think the fire’s got their attention,” he said.

  Swift paused for a moment, looked up into the dark clouds, and then sighed and turned toward the trail. “Better hope you’re right.”

  As they walked, Crane got a better look at Redpoll. Once again, he marveled that the man was still alive. He lay strapped to the makeshift stretcher, covered in blankets soaked by rain. He shivered and murmured in what Crane recognized as Pashto, though he couldn’t follow it. His head lolled back and forth with the steady movement of the stretcher, and his eyes seemed unfocused, looking past Crane at something only he could see in the dark.

  Then, somehow, he seemed to come back. He focused on Crane and took a moment to recognize him.