by Chase Austin
The shots from the bend had started again, hitting the concrete wall but this time Blake and his men had a different strategy. Their weapons were reloaded, and they waited patiently amidst the falling concrete, for the enemy to appear in sight.
The absence of response from the Marines gave the two terrorist teams, in the hallway and inside the room, a false sense of security. And then they made their first two mistakes in quick succession.
The first mistake was that the two terrorists across the bend decided to venture away from their cover positions. In their over-confidence, one of the two in the hallway left his cover and ventured out, looking for the Marines. Behind him was his partner. The lobby still had almost no visibility.
The two Marines in their crouched positions saw the two silhouettes appearing in the open and pressed their triggers. Headshots. Both. Two bodies hit the floor in quick successions. Silence followed.
The three terrorists in the room looked at each other, surprised at the sudden burst of firing. As if someone had pulled the plug from a heavy metal concert. They waited for any retaliatory fire.
In the ballroom, Shahrukh felt as if the tremors had stopped. He spoke to the terrorist holed up inside the room. “Nawaz, what’s the situation?”
“I don’t know. There isn’t any fire from the commandos.”
“Are they dead?”
“Not sure. We are inside the room. Outside visibility is almost non-existent.” Nawaz was telling the truth.
“What about Aslam and Mir?” Shahrukh asked, referring to the two terrorists who had been shooting from behind the bend.
“I’m not sure. They might be injured. Not able to contact them.”
“Wait for a few minutes, let the dust settle and then look out for them.”
“Okay.”
Ten more minutes. Nothing happened. No movement in the lobby. Blake and his men had now retreated in the hallway. If anyone ventured out, the first impression he would get would be a vacant hallway peppered with dead Marines all around. The terrorists didn’t know how many Marines were in the hallway initially, so Blake’s team had the element of surprise with them now. They waited.
Everyone in the Situation Room was waiting too.
Inside the room, the silence was turning unbearable for the three terrorists. Blake and his team were suddenly playing with the terrorist’s fear of inaction. Nawaz eventually signaled the other two terrorists to check the lobby but not from the main door. Every suite in the Onyx had two doors. In the case of this room, both doors opened in the same lobby but were at the two ends.
The terrorists were talking about taking the second exit. The three of them moved in tandem towards the door, two at the front and Nawaz at the back. The important thing was to open the door noiselessly. The doorknob rotated clockwise and freed the door.
Blake heard the click sound first and saw the wooden door moving. The surprise of finding another exit was soon overcome by the thought that the terrorists have decided to take this exit. He touched the shoulders of the Marine standing next to him to let him know about the new development. Slowly the five Marines positioned themselves around the door, their backs against the wall.
The door opened and the first terrorist ventured out, followed closely by the second. The first terrorist turned to his right and found a man in a black helmet staring at him, his MP5 pointing at his abdomen region. The second terrorist saw it a second late and tried to get back into the room, but two MP5s roared and bullets pierced through the bodies of the two terrorists at supersonic speed. The two of them fumbled while trying to get back in but their bodies refused to go anywhere.
Nawaz, who was just behind the two, saw his people going down and started firing blindly. His AK-47 peppered the small entry point with bullets. The Marines had expected this and had already taken cover.
In his fearful rage Nawaz had forgotten that even the AK-47 needs a reload. As soon as he paused, Blake and his men stormed inside the room, their MP5s trained in Nawaz’s direction and firing. Nawaz was in the middle of reloading his weapon when the bullets met him. He was dead before he hit the floor. The three un-injured Marines quickly got in the suite to check for any other terrorists.
They found one more militant’s dead body near the bed.
“Mac, can you check the status on the second floor?” Wick asked.
“I’m not sure how. The CCTVs can only be navigated by getting into the control room that is somewhere on the first or second floor. Hacking it will take more time.”
“It’s better if we ask Helms to get the updates from the Situation Room.” Wick told Jessica.
“Okay, let me talk to him.” Jessica offered.
In the Situation Room, several eyes smiled as their best men finally won a hard-fought battle. But this victory came with the price of losing eleven of them. A medic team was on his way in the hotel with Ted’s help to tend to the injured Marines.
General Shelton and General Neller looked dumbfounded and angry at the same time. They had not expected the terrorists to be so well-trained. They were just mercenaries and against them were America’s best men. It was unprecedented in the history of the MARSOC teams. Never had they faced such an adversary where this team had to face this kind of resistance. But that day, many things had happened that no one had expected to happen.
Chapter 51
Onyx Hotel, The Marina, Houston
Helms’ source told him about the six dead terrorists on the second floor and about the eleven martyred Marines. Reinforcement would take time and a new strategy had to be formulated now.
Jessica relayed this information to everyone else.
As per the estimate, Onyx housed eight to ten terrorists. As per Jessica and Wick’s evaluation, the remaining terrorists would try to fortify their positions, maybe by using hostages.
Onyx had thirty numbered floors but in reality, it only had twenty-nine floors. This was because like most hotels, Onyx didn’t have a thirteenth floor. The building had three entry or exit points. These were at the lobby level, at the pool level, and a route that not many knew – from the second basement all up to the thirtieth floor, used for maintenance. The team hoped that the terrorists were only aware of the lobby and the pool stairs and not the one used for maintenance. If that was the case, then this was the only route to find them and kill them.
“What’s the plan?” Landon asked. They were on the twenty-eighth floor right then.
“We need to get to the floor where the remaining terrorists are holding up.” Jessica said.
“That means checking each room on each floor,” said Wick. There wasn’t any other option.
Jessica, MP5 in her right hand, gingerly opened the door of the faintly lit stairwell. The hotel’s emergency fire exit spiraled down to the second basement. Behind her was Wick. Landon and Eddie followed.
They were still not sure if they would find any terrorist on this route, but it was the best option they had. They had switched off their earphones for the time being to do away with any distractions.
Jessica and Wick moved down, holding one side of the stairs, and covering the corridor with their weapons. Then, Landon and Eddie leapfrogged them.
The fire-escape door on the twenty-seventh floor had push bars, which meant that it could be opened only from the hotel corridor, and not from the fire escape. A force sneaking up the fire escape would have no option but to break the door down and give itself away. They decided to try the next floor.
Finally, on the twentieth floor, they saw a crack in the fire escape door. It was slightly ajar, wide enough to stick a knife blade in.
In the lobby, a macabre trail led them to the spot of a fresh slaughter. Scattered bullet holes on the ceiling of the stairs. Then, a pair of broken spectacles. A shoe. A lady’s slipper. A silk scarf leading them to the upstairs. The four of them slowed down, then stopped altogether when they looked up. A bloodied hand hung limply from the staircase.
The twentieth floor also opened to a two-level eleva
tor machinery room. The stairs telescoped into an iron ladder barely four feet wide and six feet long. There were rivulets of blood running down from the stairs above. Six bodies were heaped on top of each other. The terrorists had executed their hostages at point-blank range. There were bullet holes on the wall, and bullets had knocked the light bulb out. The door was locked. There was no point in blasting the door down. It was a dead end.
They decided to try another route. Finally, they found the spot from where they could see the complete cavernous polygonal atrium of the Onyx. Over thirty rooms per floor were wrapped around this vertiginous space. The fiberglass skylight was letting the moonlight into the atrium. Standing there, the layout of the hotel became clearer to the team. If you treated the atrium as the face of a clock, there were three entry points onto each floor: fire exit stairs at five and ten o’clock and a set of service stairs behind the elevators at eight o’clock. They had entered on to the twentieth floor from the fire escape at ten o’clock. Now they moved clockwise around the corridor and circled the atrium as they headed for the service stairs at eight o’clock that led straight to the next floor.
There was an eerie, muffled silence in the atrium, the silence that terror and the fear of death will bring. Nothing else was out of place. All the polished brown doors that led to the rooms were shut. Each floor had a three-foot-high wall that ran around the central space, made alternately of brick and glass partitions, the latter having tubular brass balustrades.
They four of them looked across the floor where they could see most of the rooms on their level and below. In a tactical situation, such a commanding view leveled the playing field between them and the terrorists. The black figures filed quietly along on the red-carpeted floor, briefly merging with the black granite cladding of the elevator area.
And then Wick saw Shahrukh, hastily walking near the pool with an AK-47 in his hand. He was looking up.
“Fall back,” Wick hissed and all of them simultaneously reacted.
Shahrukh pushed the two hostages inside the room. Yakub checked the lobby on the seventh floor and closed the door from inside.
“Sit!” Yakub ordered the two Americans who were already too scared to protest.
They had chosen two people from the ballroom hostages whom they felt could be easily handled and were less of a flight risk. One was a young girl of roughly the same age as Shahrukh and Yakub, in her early twenties, and other was a middle-aged man. Both were injured and that was why they were not a flight risk and posed a lesser threat to Yakub and Shahrukh. They had found the girl in the second floor’s ballroom, hiding among the dead. Her name was Olivia and she was a hotel employee. The other hostage was Peter Jacob, who worked in a multinational firm and was staying in the hotel for the last two days for business meetings. They both looked shell-shocked.
The death of six of their colleagues had shaken Shahrukh and Yakub too from inside. The two of them now had to stay together to remain alive.
Five minutes later, Shahrukh got a call from the handler. “How are things?”
“Only Yakub and I are alive,” Shahrukh said.
“Where are you both?”
“In room 0724 with two hostages.”
The handler thought for a moment about the situation. “What are their names?” he asked.
“Olivia Helms and Peter Jacob,” Shahrukh responded.
“They will send reinforcements, but it will take some time. Keep in mind that the hostages are of use only as long as you don’t come under fire, because America weighs their safety more. If your lives are threatened, then don’t saddle yourself with the burden of the hostages. Immediately shoot them.”
“We understand.”
“Remember, every nation prefers to claim that no hostages were harmed during their operations. That everyone was saved. So, use their weakness to your advantage. And stay alert.”
“We will.”
And the line was disconnected.
Chapter 52
Onyx Hotel, The Marina, Houston
“Mac, which floor has the pool?” Wick asked as soon his comms were switched on.
“Seventh,” Mac said.
“There is a shooter near the pool. We need to move fast.” Wick instructed the others.
They nodded. They walked in pairs, in the narrow passage behind the elevators on the nineteenth floor. At the beginning of the eighteenth floor, they discovered the bodies of three women hostages laid out in a triangular formation. They did not move the bodies for fear of booby traps, and just crossed over them carefully.
As they kept moving down, sweeping every floor for terrorists, their movements soon were fine-tuned to drill-like perfection. For opening any door, they used the master key given to them by Mac. As soon as the LED in the automatic lock beeped green, the first person would shove the door wide open and point his weapon ahead into the room. This move would startle anyone hiding behind the door.
Room 0724, like any other room, had a brown wooden door with an oval brass number plate. It stood at the head of a narrow passage that led to five other rooms – 0721 through the 0725 – that were hidden from view behind the guest elevators.
Wick drew the master key out of his pocket and inserted it into the key slot. The tiny LED light on the door lock blinked, turned green and beeped. He then shoved the door forward.
Crack! Crack!
A burst of two AK-47 bullets hammered the bottom of the door. Shahrukh had been standing behind the door, his rifle ready and cocked. Wick had startled him. As Shahrukh fell back, his bullets punched and splintered the door. A bullet grazed Wick’s right arm. He quickly backed off and took cover with his back pressed to the wall.
The sound of the shots ripped across the atrium. Shahrukh and Yakub kept up the intensity, and the shooting continued.
Instinctively, the others spread out. The four of them covered various parts of the polygonal floor. Jessica covered the area closest to the bank of elevators near the room; Eddie stood in the corridor to the right; Landon covered the corridor across the atrium. Wick was still the one closest to the room. All their weapons pointed at Room 0724.
Shahrukh and Yakub’s bullets whistled and cracked across the corridor as they broke the sound barrier. Across the atrium, Landon took shelter behind a four-foot-high wooden table used to hold flowers. Intermittently, he raised his head to fire a few shots at the room. Just then, he heard the crack of a bullet as it whizzed past and felt the sensation of a hard slap. The bullet had split his ear in two. His ear went numb. Blood poured onto his black t-shirt. He cupped his left hand over his ear… it was filled with blood.
“Fuck,” Eddie shouted, “You are bleeding.”
“You expected water?” Landon said dryly. With that, he pulled out a white field-dressing pack out of his pocket and put it on his ear. The white bandages quickly turned red.
Meanwhile, the fusillade of bullets from the room had bent the brass balustrade and shattered the glass below it. The terrorists were cornered, but they would not go down without a fight. They opened the door of the room to fire and tossed grenades at the enemy. Their ‘fire discipline’ surprised Wick and others. The two men inside fired only single shots, and they kept jockeying their firing position. Any two shots rarely came from the same location. Their room was a defender’s delight, a natural pillbox that had evidently been chosen with care. It was set in the corner of a corridor, protected by the bulge of the elevators on the right. The door was set at least four feet inside the wall, protected by the rooms on the left.
Wick and others, on the other hand, had a restricted field of fire. That was why the terrorists had chosen the Onyx and not any other location for the siege. The Onyx, with its atrium and multiple exits, offered them many more options to battle it out. It was indeed a very well-thought-out operation.
Chapter 53
Irfan-Ul-Haque – the Great Cleric – relayed the information he had received from Shahrukh’s handler to the Professor who was in constant touch with him via a secu
re line.
“Who are the hostages?” Professor asked.
“Peter Jacobs and Olivia Helms,” the Cleric told him.
“Kill them.”
“But they might be helpful in making the siege longer.” The Cleric was surprised.
“I will not repeat myself.”
The Cleric didn’t respond this time. He knew he had no other options than to comply.
The handler called Shahrukh again. “What’s the situation?” he asked.
“There is already a team outside the room, firing at us. We are outnumbered.”
“Get rid of the hostages.”