I turned toward the window. “Half Pint, you hear that? We’re moving.”
HP’s voice came through loud and clear. “Roger that.”
“How’s the other location?”
“Quiet. Haven’t even sighted our guys yet.”
How could they be that far behind schedule? Maybe the Centurions offices had better locks than Jones-Hamilton. Probably did. Probably had intrusion devices, motion sensors—the works. I chuckled to think of Pick and Cherry locked out of their target. I’d rag their asses when we caught up with them.
Half Pint’s voice crackled in my left ear. “I’ve—” There was a break in the transmission.
“HP.”
Another static crackle. “Can’t—”
Damn—the fucking radios were fritzing. I moved to the window. The black Hughes 500 swooped low above Half Pint’s location. They were probably filming. “You’re gonna be in pictures,” I told him. He answered, but his signal broke up. “Say again. Say again.”
“—broken … window, Skipper.”
Duck Foot and Nasty were stuffing papers in their combat vests. They stopped when they heard Half Pint’s transmissions. Duck Foot saw the look on my face. “Skipper?”
I didn’t know what the hell was happening. I couldn’t see. I hoped he was shooting or doing something. “Get off the roof. Get off the roof. Get down. Link up outside the Towers. We’re on our way.”
Time to move. “Cherry.”
There was no answer.
“Cherry—Pick—Wynken.”
Silence. Static. “Blynken—Nod. Goddammit.” Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. Feverishly, I started to put Grant Griffith’s office back the way we’d found it. But there was no time for that. “Get the hell outta here—to the Centurions offices. This is turning into a clusterfuck.”
They were in the service stairwell on the thirty-third floor, coming up as we were coming down. I almost took a round in the face. Somehow, I got out of the way. That’s the way it’s always been with me. In Vietnam, I remember stepping on a land mine. Nothing happened. The guy behind me put his foot in the same place—he lost his leg. Once I ran through a minefield barefoot. I could feel the detonators between my toes. Nothing exploded. The ARVNs behind me were cut to pieces.
North of Chau Doc, on the Cambodian border, the night before Tet, 1968,I was on patrol with my wonderful gang of shooters, Eighth Platoon. It was after midnight and I was on point. I’d stopped. Every molecule of my body was tensed and alert. My nose twitched like a bloodhound’s, searching for the VCs’ distinctive body odor, accentuated by the nuc mam they poured on everything they ate.
I knew there was something out there—I could fucking feel it. And then—I don’t know what made me do it—I just dropped like a goddamn stone. At the instant I did, the muzzle blast of an AK-47 came straight at me from no more than ten feet away.
If I’d dropped half a second later, I would have been dead.
What made me drop? I don’t know.
Now, the same thing happened in the stairwell. I stopped. And I dropped. As I did, a bullet struck the cinder-block wall where my face had been a quarter second before. A shard of concrete cut my cheek.
There’d been no warning. The only sound was a chuuuunk as the goddamn thing thwocked. It was a fucking hush puppy—a suppressed pistol.
I flipped the fire selector switch on my silenced MP5 submachine gun to full auto and dropped over the steel-pipe stair rail, rolling toward the outside, the rough concrete wall to my back, firing three fast two-round bursts as I came, ducking as the rounds ricocheted off the concrete and the stair rails.
From below, somebody shot back, silenced rounds caroming off the walls and stairs.
We sucked concrete, rolled toward what cover we could find, and returned fire. For about fifteen seconds, the stairway became a goddamn shooting gallery, with hot brass flying everywhere and bullets coming from strange angles.
We poured it on—I used two of my three mags, then flipped the HK over my shoulder, drew the Glock, and fired an entire extended mag down the stairwell. The fucking explosions deafened me—and probably everybody else, too. Until now, all the fire had been from suppressed weapons—there’d been a lot of ambient noise from bullets hitting concrete and steel, but now I’d opened up with a fucking Austrian jackhammer and it was loud.
I dropped the mag, loaded a second, and fired six more rapid shots. When the echoes cleared, there was silence.
My antennae went up. I moved cautiously. Nothing. I stuck my nose over the edge of the stairwell. Silence. It was over as abruptly as it had started.
Nasty and I moved cautiously around the corner leading to the thirtieth floor, his MP5 and my Glock ready. We peered down. Empty. No sounds except for the spent casings that rolled everywhere, jingling as they fell into the stairwell.
“Everybody alive?” I looked them over quickly. Nasty had a ricochet cut on his face. Duck Foot’s ear had been nicked. There was blood on the back of my hand, and I could feel wetness on my neck—but nobody’d been hit.
I pointed to the next floor. “Come on.”
We ran to the twenty-ninth floor and changed stairwells. We were sweating when we got to the Centurions offices on twenty-four. The door was ajar. We went through in the approved manner I’d designed at SEAL Team Six. Nasty went first, HK ready. I went second, my Glock covering the opposite field of fire, and Duck Foot brought up the rear, his back to mine.
We swept office to office in total darkness, our flashlights probing the corners. The windows were blacked out—except for one office in the rear. When I knew we were clear, I turned the light switches. Nothing came on. I ripped the black plastic sheeting off the windows so we could see what the hell was happening. We found Wynken in what must have been Buckshot’s office. He was lying in a puddle of blood staring at the ceiling, his throat slit deep across the carotid artery. From the position of his body and the depth of the wound, he’d been killed from behind.
Blynken was in the next room—the one with the broken window. He’d been shot in the head from close enough to leave a powder burn on his neck. Weasel Walker lay on the floor six feet away. Bullets had shattered the night-vision goggles he was wearing. The back of his head was blown off. At least my guys had got one of ’em.
Noise outside. We deployed, guns ready, and almost shot Pick, Nod, and Cherry.
“What the fuck—” Then I saw that Cherry was hurt—a lot of blood on his arm. Pick was dinged, too.
“Sorry, Skipper.” Cherry collapsed on the rug, his back against the wall. “They were waiting inside—they’d blacked the windows. They must have had night vision. It was a clusterfuck.”
“How many of them were there?”
Nod shook his head. “Don’t know—four, maybe five. I’m guessing. They made it real hard to get in—goddamn electronic locks and cyphers—then they rolled over us from two directions.”
“We regrouped, then followed ’em as they headed for you—caught ’em from behind,” said Pick, pulling a first-aid kit from his vest.
So the bad guys thought they’d been caught in a pincer. That was why the gunfight in the stairwell had stopped as quickly as it had started. “Then why the hell didn’t we sandwich ’em and finish ’em off?”
“We ran out of ammo, boss,” Nod said. “They didn’t know it, but we were dry. Then Cherry got hit.”
Cherry winced as Pick applied first aid to his arm and stabbed him with a morphine ampoule. “I took one round—just about the last fucking shot they fired before they bugged out. It went through clean, but goddamn it hurts.”
I watched in silence. There was nothing to say. We’d been worked over by a bunch of pros. I’d probably been spotted during the sneak-and-peek I took with Mike Regan. Or maybe they noticed my men as they did the recon. However it had happened, we’d been sandbagged. The fuckers had shot up my secondary and had been on their way to get Nasty, Duck Foot, and me when we’d collided in the stairwell. Now, the bad guys were outside—
waiting, armed and dangerous. We were in here—with casualties.
Instinct took over. My mission was the computer disk that was in my pocket and the pictures in the Minox. This was all secondary. Still, the place had to be cleaned out. Our KIAs had to be moved. No SEAL has ever been left on the field of battle, and I wasn’t about to break the tradition now.
I snatched a trash liner from a wastebasket. Nasty did the same. We wrapped the corpses as best we could. No need to leave a trail of blood, and there was a lot of blood, believe me.
We worked without talking. Nasty draped Cherry over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I took Wynken’s body—damn he was heavy. Duck Foot grabbed Blynken and we headed for the hills—or more precisely, the stairwells.
I am not used to losing men in battle. In more than thirty years of active duty I lost only one. This made three. To make matters worse, they’d died on a mission the Navy wouldn’t recognize—a black-bag job that had been my harebrained idea in the first place—which meant no benefits to their families. But I had more immediate concerns than survivor benefits right now. I had to get us out without taking any further casualties. I had to get the bodies into Mike Regan’s Range Rover without anybody seeing them. We had to find Half Pint.
And then, once we’d regrouped and I’d put the disk and pictures in a safe place, we could start killing the people who’d been killing us. And kill them we would. The anger that burned inside me was brutal, white-hot, and violent. I’d felt similar rages before—and whenever I had, my enemies had died.
I punched Mike on the cellular and told him to cruise by for a pickup. He knew where to show up. I didn’t mention the casualties—if Buckshot was waiting for us, then he damn well knew how to crack our communications. Maybe he even had the same NIS equipment as I did—courtesy of Grant Griffith and Pinky da Turd—so I wasn’t about to say anything I didn’t have to.
We made our way down the final three flights of stairs and waited inside, the door cracked. As soon as I saw Mike, we rushed the Range Rover and tossed the bodies and our knapsacks inside. I motioned to Cherry, Nod, and Pick to climb in, too. They hesitated, but I wasn’t in the mood for backtalk, and when they saw the look on my face, they did as ordered. Mike’s eyes went wide when he saw the corpses. “What happened?”
“No time to talk now. Cherry, Pick, and Nod’ll give you a dump—just get to the boat fast and load up.”
“Huh?”
What the fuck was he, dense? “Get moving. The boat. The rest of us’ll see you at Zuma Beach in six hours. Light Cyalumes—we’ll swim out. Keep these guys cool, Mike, and check your six regular because there are some real bad characters out and about.”
I didn’t give him a chance to say anything else. “Just go-go-go, goddammit. Get the fuck out of here.”
Chapter 18
I DIDN’T SHOW IT BUT I WAS FRANTIC. I’D JUST LOST TWO OF MY men, I was missing another, and an unknown number of bad guys were out there. My tactical experience told me the only recourse was attack. SEALs don’t retreat very well.
But my strategic sensibilities, not my tactical ones, took over. My mission wasn’t shooting and looting. It was protecting the data I had in my pocket. Revenge would have to wait. Right now I had to find Half Pint and get the hell out of Dodge.
We locked and loaded, removed our surgical gloves, and moved out onto Constellation Avenue. As we rounded the corner on Century Park West, it was like we’d walked into Mardi Gras. The crowds had thinned in the cool California night, but there was lots of activity. The lights had all been turned on, and as the few hundred hardy spectators watched, the director marshaled his troops into action.
To our right, a path had been cleared so that two police cars could drive south from Santa Monica Boulevard, jump the curb, and come to a screeching stop in front of the main entrance of the hijacked skyscraper. Three Stuntmen were pacing off the yardage. Beyond them, on the western side of the street, a knot of SWAT teamers stood next to an armored personnel carrier with the word POLICE stenciled on the side in foot-high letters. I scanned the SWATniks. I picked out Half Pint and his sniper-rifle case hunkering in the middle trying not to attract attention. I pressed the transmit button on my lip mike.
“HP from silver bullet.”
He looked around and came back immediately. “HP.”
I told him where we were. He peered toward me and made me out. Even at that distance I could see something was wrong. “Three o’clock, Skipper.”
I swiveled right and scanned the area. Beyond him, in the shadows where the light started to fall off, I saw Manny Tanto. He was dressed in the same kind of SWAT uniform Half Pint wore, and he carried a silenced MP5 submachine gun. Behind him I saw another familiar face. Sally Stallion. They were both wearing lip mikes and headsets similar to ours.
I used hand signals. I pointed at Nicky and Duck Foot and told them, “Enemy—three o’clock.” They looked. They saw. They signaled back, “forming skirmish line,” and moved out to my flank, using the sparse crowd as cover.
I gave Half Pint a high sign that moved him to his right—away from Manny and Stallion. He nodded and started to shift. If he could make it across eight lanes of Century Park West where the shot was being rehearsed, he’d be able to form up with us.
I shouldered my way through, up to the police line. Now, Half Pint was standing directly opposite me, one hundred and fifty yards away. I waved him on. “C’mon, dammit.”
Carrying the Pelikan sniper’s case, he vaulted over the barrier and got about ten feet, then he was stopped by a crew member carrying a walkie-talkie who stuck a hand in his chest.
I wasn’t close enough to hear what was going on, but I could tell from the body English and gesticulating that the guy was saying something like, “You extras aren’t supposed to be in this shot—go back and wait by the APC.”
Half Pint just straight-armed the asshole, sending him butt-first onto the pavement.
That didn’t deter Mr. Efficiency. He scrambled to his feet and set out in pursuit, shouting, “Hey—where do you think you’re goin’?”
By now they were in the middle of the avenue, and I could see the face of the crewman trying to stop Half Pint. It was a face I knew—Biker Jordan’s face.
I tried to catch Half Pint’s attention, but he was intent on getting across the street. Now Jordan was right behind him, his hand dropping into the pocket of his windbreaker.
He must not have been paying attention because Half Pint caught him with an elbow in the solar plexus and dropped him like a hot brick. Then my little pocket rocket turned on the afterburners and sprinted the rest of the way across the street. He tossed me the Pelikan case and then vaulted the barrier.
Now Manny and the others were moving, too. I saw Buckshot. He was on the same side of the street as I was, perhaps a hundred yards away, dressed in a suit, pointing toward us and gesticulating to three men in LAPD uniforms. Were they real or were they Memorex? It didn’t matter. Real or bogus, they were still trouble.
The cops began to walk in our direction. We had to move. My instinct was to steal a vehicle—there were certainly enough of them around—and head to Zuma. I signaled Nasty and Duck Foot to go west. They began to shoulder their way along the sidewalk. I backed away from the barrier, carrying the Pelikan case. “Rear-guard me,” I told Half Pint.
“Aye, aye, Skipper.” He dropped back, walking parallel to me about five yards behind. A familiar figure caught my peripheral vision as I made my way through the crowd. Melissa Gold saw me and walked over. “Hi again, Dick.”
“Hi, Gold. How’re you doing?”
“I’d be better if we could get this shot over with. Then we break for the night. How’re you?”
“I’ve been better.” I introduced Half Pint. She looked at his uniform. “You with us?”
“No, I’m with him.”
She tapped the Pelikan. “What’s in the case?”
“My dirty laundry.”
She started to ask something, but thought bett
er of it. There was an awkward pause while she looked at me intently. “Are you sure we haven’t met before? I never forget a face.”
“Well—maybe it was my book jacket you remember.”
“Book?”
“Rogue Warrior.”
Her face brightened. “That’s it—I read it last month. You’re Dick Marchenko.”
“Marcinko.” People are always doing that.
“You were a SEAL.”
“Still am.”
“No shit. I loved the book. Did you really do all that stuff?”
“Thanks—and yes.” I looked down the street. The cops were watching us intently now. I had no idea where Manny and the rest of the Centurions goons were. It was time to go for it. “Melissa.…”
“Yeah?”
“Look—this is awkward, but I need some help—real bad.”
“What kind of help?”
“I’ve got Half Pint here, and two other guys, and we all have to get to Zuma Beach.”
“Zuma Beach.”
“Roger.”
“When do you have to be there? I could take you as soon as we’re done here—one last big shot tonight. I’ve got a Jimmy that’ll hold us all.”
I looked at the cops. They hadn’t moved. That told me they were bogus because they weren’t willing to come up to Melissa, explain what they wanted, cuff us, and take us away. That worked in our favor—but only if we acted right now. “That might not be soon enough.”
She folded her arms and pondered what I’d said. Then she asked, “Is this official? I mean—are you guys working for the Navy?”
Well, we were, sort of. I nodded. “Yup.”
“Can I ask what you’re doing?”
“Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” She looked at me very strangely right then. I realized she’d taken me seriously. “That was a joke, Gold. But it’s better for you if you don’t know.”
She looked at me again and pursed her lips. “Come with me.”
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