by Tom Clancy
Adara lowered her tone to a soft whisper. “Midas, target is four blocks from the Metro and heading in that direction.”
Midas replied, “Roger that. The three unsubs are not looking at you at all. I do believe all three are focused on our target.”
“So weird. Could this be unrelated to the exercise?”
“I have no idea,” Midas said. He had purposely narrowed the distance a little between himself and the two in front of him, and this helped him get a better angle on the face of the man across the street. Even from this distance he could see the man’s hard, determined countenance as he walked forward, his eyes almost never wavering from the direction of the white-haired man.
Midas said, “I don’t like this. I don’t like their attitudes, I don’t like their proximity to you and our target, and I don’t like the two backpacks the duo in front of me are carrying. I’m going to call Clark. I’ll take the hit if I fail today’s course.”
Adara said, “Negative. We are in this together, pass or fail. Plus, my phone is already out. I’ll call him. I want you watching these guys. Call me back if anything changes.”
“Copy that.”
She hung up the phone and dialed Clark’s number.
—
Saleh answered his cell phone when it buzzed in his pocket. “Yeah?”
It was Badr, behind the wheel of the Nissan Pathfinder, which had been circling the neighborhood to the west, hunting for a place to wait before rushing in to pick up Saleh, Chakir, and Mehdi in case they found a good opportunity to kill Eddie Laird.
He said, “There is a Metro station right here. Three blocks in front of where Laird is walking. What if he is heading there?”
Saleh knew he’d have to improvise. They couldn’t lose this man for an entire day, and they couldn’t follow him onto the trains without losing their getaway vehicle. On top of this, Mohammed and Omar forbade them from going into D.C.
Saleh said, “You park there and keep an eye out for us. We will take him at the station if that is his destination.”
He quickly hung up and dialed Chakir across the street.
—
John Clark was a dozen blocks away, leaving La Madeleine and heading back to his Range Rover, parked near the market. He felt like he’d given his two trainees enough time to identify their target and settle into their coverage. Now he’d make it tougher. He reached for his phone to call Eddie to tell him to begin an SDR as well as to begin actively searching for his surveillance, but his phone chirped as soon as he started to dial.
“Yeah?”
“John, it’s Adara. We really hope we’re wrong here, but Midas and I think there is someone else tailing our target. Can you confirm you aren’t training anybody else or—”
“Just tell me what’s going on.”
Clark began hurrying back to his SUV.
“Three males, all in their twenties. I am between them and the white-haired gentleman, and Midas is behind with eyes on all three unknowns. First we thought they were with you, just tailing me, but now we are worried they might be doing a foot-follow on the unsub. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to us.”
Clark’s tone was as urgent as Adara had ever heard from him. “Those are most definitely not my guys. Where are you?”
“The target is entering the parking lot in front of the King Street Metro. What do you want me to—”
“I’ll call nine-one-one, and I’m on the way. Your target’s name is Eddie Laird. Get on him, and get him inside the station. There will be armed transit police there.”
Adara was confused. “Why do you think—”
Clark said, “He’s ex-Agency, senior staff. Get him!”
Adara just gasped into the phone. “Jesus. I’ll grab him now.”
The phone went dead and she picked up the pace, closing on Laird now as she reconnected with Midas.
—
Midas was only one hundred feet behind the men now, but one of the two stepped into traffic suddenly in front of the Hilton and crossed to the other side, joining up with the man in the untucked shirt. Just as this happened, Midas’s earpiece chirped.
He answered to hear Adara’s intense but in-control voice. “John says these three aren’t his, and our target, Laird, is now our principal. He’s ex–senior staff at Langley. We are to move him to the Metro and get him surrounded by armed transit cops.”
Midas said, “Roger that. Be advised, you’ve got two directly behind you now. There is one in front of me, crossing the street into the parking lot. I don’t think they like the idea of him getting out of here on a train.”
Adara said, “The hell with this, I’m running for Laird.”
“Do it!”
—
Eddie Laird’s phone rang and Adara closed even faster on him while he stopped to answer it. She wanted him inside the station, where at least there would be options for cover and likely some sort of police presence, but instead he started to sit down on a bench outside.
She hadn’t turned back around to look at the approaching men, so she was thankful when Midas gave her an update, although the news itself was bad.
“Packs are off their shoulders, they’ve separated, two have moved wide on your left, one on your right. These boys are gonna fuckin’ hit. I’m running for the guy on your right. If he has a weapon I’ll try to take it to engage the others.”
By now Adara had made it up to Laird, and as he rejected the telemarketing call and stood back up from the bench, she got right in front of him.
“Mr. Laird?”
Eddie Laird looked up now. “Well . . . if you’re one of Clark’s students, then that’s a definite fail.”
She took him by the arm and started leading him toward the large opening to the King Street Metro, one story below the tracks above.
“John will call when he can, but there are three men trailing you right now. Not with us. He wants you inside the station.”
Laird seemed surprised but not panicked. “Okay. Do these knuckleheads look like they mean business?”
“My colleague is behind them and in my ear. Midas?”
Midas replied, “They slowed when you made contact with Laird. They’re trying to figure out who you are and what you are doing. Still, they are squaring off for an altercation. Keep moving into the station.”
Adara just picked up the pace with her arm around the older man’s waist now. “This could get ugly,” she said.
“You armed?” he asked.
At the entrance to the station they moved through a thick crowd of tourists, just down the escalator from the tracks above the station concourse. “No,” she replied. “We can’t carry legally in D.C., and we didn’t know if you’d head into the District. You?”
Laird lifted the front of his shirt and Adara could see the butt of a small revolver.
“You’re my kind of guy, Mr. Laird.”
He said, “Never even drew my piece in Kabul. Would be ironic to get my ass in a shoot-out right here.”
33
Midas was at a full run now, heading toward the single man on the right side of the parking lot. At fifty feet away he pulled out his karambit knife and held it down by his side.
Just then the man’s backpack dropped to the ground, and a black Uzi sub gun remained in his hand. As soon as Midas saw the weapon appear, he whispered urgently, “Guns are out, Adara. Get to cover.”
—
Chakir never got a shot off. He stopped in the parking lot in front of a parked Metro bus, leveled his weapon toward the white-haired man just entering the station, and he felt a presence on top of him. A hooked knife blade appeared in front of his face, then it was dragged back, plunging into his throat.
At the same time a large man crushed him in a tight grasp from behind, then pushed him down to his knees. Blood shot onto the hot sidewalk in front of him a
nd screams of shock and panic erupted in all directions.
Chakir fell face-first in a splashing pool of his own blood as the big man behind him let go.
—
Through her earpiece Adara heard Midas grunt with effort as he took out one gunman in the parking lot behind her on her right. She and Eddie broke into a full sprint when the screams erupted in the relative quiet of the morning. Eddie reached under his shirt while he ran, but just as they neared a large support column in the rear of the cavernous station hall, fully automatic gunfire exploded directly behind them. Adara grabbed Eddie by the shirt and tried to pull him around to cover, but lost her grip when the seventy-year-old spun and dropped to one knee, raising his pistol toward the threats.
Two submachine guns tore into the tile flooring in front of Eddie and Adara, and Adara whirled her body behind the heavy column. Still, she reached out for Laird, trying to take hold of her principal to yank him out of the line of fire.
But she couldn’t reach Eddie, and as he returned fire on the two men at the entrance to the station, he winced in pain and doubled forward, dropping his pistol and crumpling down beside it.
—
In the parking lot Midas yanked the Uzi away from the man with the spurting carotid artery, who lay facedown, and tried to spin to engage the other shooters, fifty yards away and just inside the wide entrance to the dark lower level of the station. But dozens of screaming and fleeing civilians blocked his path, and before he could level the weapon, out of the corner of his left eye he saw a huge black form barreling down on him.
Midas tried to leap forward, but he took a glancing blow from the left front quarter-panel of the speeding Nissan Pathfinder and it spun him through the air. He landed hard on the hot pavement, knocking the Uzi out of his hands and the earpiece from his ear.
If the driver slammed on his brakes then and there he could have shot Midas dead before he recovered from the impact, but the Pathfinder sped on across the parking lot, bouncing over a grassy median and into the bus lane, then back up on the sidewalk, racing toward the entrance to the Metro station.
—
Adara dove out into the line of fire, lifted Eddie’s revolver with one hand while she grabbed him by the wrist with the other hand, trying to heave him to cover behind the column near the southwest corner of the big open hall.
As she pulled on the wounded man she aimed in the direction of the gunfire and instantly saw that one of the men was down on his back, writhing in obvious agony. She assumed Laird had hit him, and adjusted her aim to the second shooter. He was firing a pistol blind into the station, missing her by ten yards but sending nine-millimeter rounds just over the heads of terrified Metro passengers lying flat on the floor.
Adara watched while the second attacker’s hand reached out and pulled the Uzi away from the wounded man. She tucked tighter behind the column as fully automatic fire rang out again and more dust and debris flew around her on all sides.
—
Saleh dumped the full magazine of Mehdi’s Uzi, then pulled it back around his column, crouched down, and leaned his back against the hard cover. The Language School operatives had been taught to tape magazines together, side by side, separating them by small pieces of wood so they would seat easily in the magazine well of the weapons. By this method they didn’t have to fish around in their pockets for a second magazine, and they could carry sixty-one nine-millimeter rounds on their fully loaded weapons, instead of just thirty-one.
While Saleh snapped the second magazine into position he looked next to him and saw Mehdi rolling around in pain, blood smearing on his clothes and the tile floor.
Saleh now looked to where Chakir had been positioned, wondering why he wasn’t hearing any gunfire from over there, but instead he saw Badr racing the Pathfinder across the wide pedestrian zone right toward Saleh and Mehdi’s position. Good. Saleh had no idea where Chakir had gone, but he was reasonably certain he’d shot Edward Laird, and now all he had to do was get the hell out of here in one piece.
—
Adara did not have a decent shot at the gunman still in the fight inside the station, especially not while multitasking trying to yank a man to safety, because the gunman was crouched behind a column just inside the wide entrance. But to buy herself some time, she fired at the column, breaking off chunks of concrete and letting the would-be assassin know she was armed and in the fight. The revolver held only five rounds, however, so she clicked on an empty chamber after two shots.
Damn it, she thought. She’d just emptied her only real weapon.
Adara saw the Pathfinder just as she pulled Laird farther behind her column. It screeched to a stop inside the station, and a pair of transit police came running down the escalator, some forty or fifty yards off Adara’s left shoulder, and immediately fired at the vehicle. The driver dumped a burst from his full-auto Uzi at Adara’s position behind her column, and all she could do was throw herself over the form of Eddie Laird and wait out the fusillade.
She looked over the older man and saw that he’d been shot in the chest, and again in the stomach. She tried to render first aid, but he pushed her hand back, then reached down into his pocket, pulled something out, and folded it into her right hand.
She didn’t know what he was trying to give her at first, but when she looked at it, she saw it was a speed loader, a cylindrical disk-shaped device with five .357 Magnum shells in it, used to load a revolver more quickly than one could by using loose bullets. It was covered with Eddie’s blood, but she didn’t bother wiping it off. As the gunfire on the far side of the column continued, she ejected the spent brass from the stubby Smith & Wesson and slid in the five fresh rounds.
Now she returned her attention to Laird, but she could see from his open, vacant eyes that he was dead.
“Shit!” she screamed. “Principal’s down! Midas? Where are you?”
—
When Badr slammed on his brakes inside the station hall, the Pathfinder skidded to a stop right at the edge of the column Saleh was using for cover. He then lifted his Uzi and, blasting through the closed passenger window by one-handing his Uzi across the front seat, engaged the woman and Laird, who were tucked behind the column closer to the back wall. While he did this Saleh stood up behind the column and focused his fire on the several transit police on the other side of the turnstiles near the escalators. He poured round after round at the cluster of four or five men and women, hoping to get them to go for cover so he could dive into the Nissan and make his escape.
He had no idea if young Mehdi was alive or not, because he could not see over the hood of the Pathfinder to where he’d last seen the eighteen-year-old rolling in pain, but Mehdi would have to save himself. Saleh wasn’t going to vault the hood and scoop the kid up, exposing himself to gunfire from two directions. No, Saleh fired the last round of the Uzi and raced past the driver’s-side door, then opened the door to the backseat. Just as he tucked his head in, however, glass all around him shattered, and he took a blast from a D.C. transit officer’s SIG Sauer P226, right in the neck.
He fell onto his back on the far side of the Nissan from the cops, and dropped his empty submachine gun, while he held pressure on his bloody wound.
He sat back up, looked up at Badr behind the wheel of the Pathfinder, while Badr looked down at him.
But only for a second. Then Badr put his SUV in reverse.
“Istanna!” Saleh yelled—Wait!—then he reached for his Glock tucked in his pants.
—
Midas knew he had to be careful rushing up into the gunfight, because from the sound of it, there were several unknown shooters, probably cops, banging it out with the two terrorists inside the station and the guy behind the wheel of the Nissan, who’d just driven right up to the scene. But Midas was back on his feet, with the Uzi from the dead man in his hands, and he knew both Adara and Laird were somewhere inside.
He
’d lost his earpiece when he’d been hit by the car, and he wondered how badly he’d been hurt, but his arms and legs were moving for now, and right now was all that mattered.
He ran as fast as he could past the row of newspaper stands, dodged some more civilians trying to escape the raging battle around them, and then, when the group in front of him scattered out of the way, he saw an injured man sitting on the ground outside the Nissan, holding a neck wound with his left hand and pulling a Glock out from under his shirt with his right.
At the same time this happened, the Nissan launched backward on screaming and smoking tires, right toward Midas.
Oh, God, not again.
Midas was one hundred feet behind the vehicle, and the Nissan would run him down in less than four seconds. He remained calm, leveled the Uzi, lined the bladed front sight up on the back of the head of the driver of the black SUV, and fired a single nine-millimeter bullet from the ten-inch barrel.
The driver’s head lolled forward, and instantly the rear of the vehicle swerved to Midas’s right. It crashed into iron gates at the edge of the station entrance at speed, so hard and fast it spun 180 degrees, and then began rolling forward again across the pedestrian zone, with a dead man slumped behind the wheel.
But Midas wasn’t looking anymore, because he knew he had to stop the man sitting on the ground before he opened up with the Glock.
He swiveled his sights back to the wounded terrorist just in time to see the man’s gun arm extended toward him with the barrel pointing his way.
A shot rang out, then a second, a third, and a fourth.
The terrorist jolted forward as if shot in the back, and Adara Sherman appeared behind him. She came running around the column ten feet away from where the terrorist had been sitting, and Midas saw she had a small revolver extended in her hand, pointed at the now prostrate man with the Glock lying next to him.
The other terrorist was lying facedown in a pool of blood just feet away.