“Eight minutes.”
Jon saw movement behind the second jeep he’d taken out. The engine on that one had broken out in flames and he held the scope on the burning wreck. The soldiers were pulling something from the back.
• • •
Elham saw the soldiers pulling out a large crate. Idiots. He pointed violently at the intersection ten feet away. “Move up on the side streets,” he yelled. But the men refused to listen. At least the fools would serve as a distraction. The Iranian threw open the cargo door to his own dead car and pulled out his rifle case. He dropped it on the ground, threw the locks, and raised the lid.
The Americans weren’t the only ones who could hit a target at this range.
• • •
“You see that?” Kyra asked.
“Yeah, I’ve got it,” Jon assured her. He lined up the crosshairs where the soldier seemed likely to stand.
The Venezuelan soldier stepped out from cover, the RPG-7 launcher on his shoulder. It would be a thousand-foot shot, well within the effective range of the weapon if he had the time to fire. Jon refused to give it to him. He pulled the Barrett trigger and the bullet tore a large chunk out of the concrete wall behind the man. He dropped the RPG and fled for cover.
Jon ejected the Barrett’s empty clip and reached for his satchel to pull out another—
• • •
Elham locked the bipod on the Steyr and set it on the side of the jeep. The angle on the Americans’ position was poor. The shooter was in an elevated position, giving him a low profile. Elham would get one shot at best and that would be hurried. His opponent would see him, line up, and Elham would have to get his shot off first.
He reached for a bullet tucked into his vest, this one an armor-piercing round. He slid the black-tipped slug into the ejection port and pushed the bolt forward. A regular round would probably have done the job, but he saw no point in being stingy. He pulled the cap off the Leupold Ultra M3A scope mounted on the rail above the Steyr barrel.
• • •
“Jon! One o’clock!”
He moved the rifle to the position Kyra had called out and saw the soldier lining them up with a long-barreled rifle. Sniper, Jon thought. That’s no good. “Back! Get back!” he yelled. He needed two more seconds to reload the Barrett and he didn’t have them.
• • •
The Steyr’s barrel spewed fire. The Iranian’s .50 round hit the roof just below the edge where the American rifleman was crouched. The bullet blew through the concrete with a hideous crunching sound that Kyra had never heard before.
• • •
Elham swore. He’d never fired at an elevated angle so steep and had underestimated the drop rate of the bullet. He looked through the scope . . . he hadn’t hit the Americans, of course, but they were out of firing position. He pulled back on the bolt, ejected the spent casing, and loaded another round.
• • •
Jon pushed the Barrett clip into the rifle and loaded the first round. “You got him?” he called to Kyra.
“Yeah, I saw where he’s set up.”
“You think you can get his attention with that thing?” He nodded at her HK.
“How far is it?”
“Seven hundred feet?” John guessed.
“At that range, getting his attention is about all I can do with this,” she said. “She’s not a long-range gun.”
“Don’t need you to hit him,” Jon told her. “Wait until he shoots again, then put a few in the asphalt close enough to make him think about it.”
• • •
One of the Americans turkey-peeked over the edge. Elham’s shoulder took the hit as the Steyr sounded again, and the round punched into the lip of the roof for a second time. He waved the Venezuelans forward. A few refused, two others nodded and began to run.
Elham turned back, put his eye to the scope—one of the Americans, the woman, was firing in his direction. He heard metal rounds hit the jeep over the noise of Ahmadi yelling in fear, heard sharp pops as the slugs buried themselves in the frame, and he saw a few puffs of dust kick up from the building walls nearby, nothing too close. Seven hundred feet was a difficult shot under these conditions for anything other than a long-range gun with a good optic mounted on the rail. Still, given the range, the woman had done as well as her weapon would allow—
The jeep’s rear tire blew out and the exploding rubber that decompressed less than five feet from Elham’s head sounded for all the world like a mortar shell to his ears. His eyes shut involuntarily against the blast of dirty, stale air that struck his face, blinding him. On pure instinct, he grabbed the Steyr and rolled back to his right. Two degrees farther left and the American’s shot would’ve ripped his brain out of his skull. Praise Allah. Still, the American had him targeted, while Elham’s own sight picture had been destroyed. By the time he could line up again, the CIA officer would put the next round through his head.
• • •
“You shoulda blown his stinkin’ head off,” Kyra observed. Jon wasn’t shooting to kill and she knew why. She prayed that shooting to scare would be enough.
“No thanks,” he said. “Check the side streets and get ready to pop smoke,” he ordered. Kyra ran to the north side of the roof and saw a dozen Venezuelan soldiers running up the street toward them. She knelt down, raised the HK, and pulled the trigger. Three rounds of fifteen hit the lead soldier, one in the hip, two in the legs, and he tumbled onto the street.
Jon heard her firing. “How we doing?” he yelled.
Kyra shook her head and ran for the roof’s east end.
Over the Atlantic
Marisa covered the microphone with her hand. “How long?” she asked. The pilot held up three fingers.
“Arrowhead, Quiver. We are ETA three minutes. Can you hold?” Marisa asked, trying not to yell into her mic.
“Quiver, Arrowhead. LZ is not secure, repeat, not secure. We have a convoy of hostiles pinned down to the west, but there are more coming from the other three directions. Our position is about to be surrounded and we cannot retreat.”
“Say again, you have a convoy pinned down?” Marisa asked.
“Roger that, Quiver.”
Go Jon, go, Marisa thought. The pilot turned back to her and covered his mic with a glove. “How many on your team?” he called back.
“Two,” Marisa replied. The pilot uttered a curse of approval and awe.
“Arrowhead, do you want us to clean up the LZ a bit before we set down? We’ve got some presents ready for your hosts.”
“Negative, Quiver. Bad guys will be coming up inside the building by the time you show up—” Marisa heard the line go dead.
“Arrowhead? Arrowhead?!” Hurry up!
“Feet dry,” the pilot announced. Marisa looked down and saw the blue water of the Atlantic meet the sand of a Venezuelan beach.
Morón, Venezuela
Jon picked up the Barrett and moved away from the edge of the roof. There was no point in sniping now. He ran to the radio and checked the display as Kyra ran back and joined him by the stairwell entrance. “They’re inside,” he told her. “And I saw a few running into some other buildings. They get on those roofs and we aren’t going to have any cover.”
“Radio’s dead,” Kyra told him. “Out of power. Helo is two minutes out.”
“You keep them from coming up the stairs,” Jon ordered. “I’ll cover the other rooftops if anyone comes out.”
Kyra stepped inside the tiny shack, looked down over the railing, and heard boots on metal. The stairwell wrapped around in a circular fashion, leaving a hole in the center all the way to the bottom. She could see movement, bits of dark uniforms five stories down. She held the HK over the rails and sent the rest of her clip down the stairs. Men yelled and she heard the rhythm of heavy feet on the steps turn to a clatter of men diving for cover. So
meone returned fire and Kyra jerked back as the bullets buried themselves in the shack’s plaster ceiling. She swapped out the empty clip for a full one, racked the slide, then pointed her gun down again and let the soldier know she was still there.
Outside, Jon reached into his pack and pulled out two M18 smoke grenades, olive drab with bright red tops. “Kyra!” he yelled. She stuck her head out and he tossed one to her. He pulled the pin on the other, released the spoon, and tossed the device toward the center of the roof. Red smoke began to pour out in a thick cloud.
Inside, Kyra did the same and dropped the grenade down the stairwell’s center hole. It fell four stories before finally hitting a railing, metal on metal, green smoke rolling out and shrouding the narrow climb in a dark fog within a few seconds. Kyra followed the grenade with more rounds from the HK.
• • •
“LZ in sight,” the pilot said. Marisa looked ahead of the Seahawk and saw the red cloud growing on a building rooftop. On the street below, soldiers were moving through the streets toward the apartment complex.
The door gunner saw the dead trucks and jeeps littering one of the streets to the west. “Your people do good work, ma’am!” he yelled.
Marisa grinned back at the young man, sending a thrill up his spine.
• • •
“There!” Jon pointed north. Kyra followed his arm and saw the Seahawk boring straight for the building faster than she had thought a helo could go. She turned back to the stairs. The smoke had filled the entire stairwell now down to the floor, but the sound of the boots on the metal steps were closer, maybe three stories below. She fired the HK over the railing again until it ran dry, trying to buy a few more seconds, and the men below scattered again.
• • •
The Seahawk pilot pulled up the nose and dumped speed so fast that Marisa felt her stomach throw itself against her ribs. The helo dipped, then swung sideways and came down on the roof, landing hard, the rotors blowing the smoke away in a whirlwind, the door gunner facing the stairwell entrance.
• • •
Kyra didn’t wait for the order. She turned and ran for the helicopter, Jon behind her by two steps. She reached the door—
—and found Marisa’s outstretched hand. The woman pulled her in onto the metal floor. Jon pulled himself aboard behind her, tossing the Barrett onto the floor.
Bullets struck the steel door behind the older woman . . . someone was firing up at the helicopter from the ground. “Go! Go! Go!” the door gunner yelled.
The pilot pulled back on the collective, then forward on the stick before the Seahawk was ten feet off the roof. The helicopter surged forward and began a turn back north—
“RPG!” the door gunner called out. Kyra looked out the open door as she fumbled with her seat harness and saw the contrail rising up from behind one of the trucks Jon had killed. The helo lurched hard as the pilot dove underneath the rocket-propelled grenade and it sailed over their heads, missing the metal bird by a dozen feet. The pilot pressed the stick forward hard, diving between a pair of higher buildings. The Seahawk was running a hundred miles an hour and accelerating when it cleared them.
“You okay?” Jon yelled at Kyra. The young woman nodded. He turned to Marisa. “It’s about time—” He stopped midsentence.
Marisa was on her knees, blood staining her T-shirt in a spreading pool on her left side. “Jon—? I’m sorry . . .” She toppled forward into his arms.
He stared down at her in shock. “Get me a blowout bag! NOW!”
• • •
Elham lowered the Steyr and watched the American helicopter race off into the northern sky. He gotten off one shot at the moving Seahawk and hit it too high. “So much for catching your spies,” he told Carreño.
The Venezuelan cursed in disgust. “Someone get me a jeep!”
White House Situation Room
“It survived?” Rostow practically yelled the question at his national security adviser.
“Yes, sir, it did,” Cooke confirmed. “The MOP took out the entire CAVIM site, the convoy, and everyone inside the blast radius, but the nuke was in some kind of hardened transport crate already being moved out.” She didn’t point out that the MOP had almost taken out Jon and Kyra. She was sure that Rostow had never been worried about that. “One of our officers managed to get in close enough after detonation to confirm visually that the warhead survived.”
The DNI’s jaw dropped. “She was that close?” Marshall asked.
Cooke nodded. “She got inside the back of the cargo truck that was transporting it. She says the transport crate had been cracked open but there was no way to recover the warhead before reinforcements were going to arrive. Carreño’s people have since loaded it into another truck and it’s on the move.”
“Great. Just great,” Rostow groused. “We’ve lost it.”
“No, sir, we haven’t,” Cooke said. “Our officer hid a phone inside the transport crate. Once she was able to tell us that, we started tracking it. The signal is intermittent and not terribly precise. We think the crate is interfering, but we do know that the warhead is on its way back to Caracas. But we’ll lose the signal for good once the battery dies.”
“How long?” Feldman asked. The national security adviser sounded desperate.
“Eight hours if we’re very lucky,” Cooke estimated. “Probably less.”
“We’ve got to kill it,” Rostow said. “Gerry, call the SecDef. I want another air strike—”
“Mr. President, I don’t think we can target the warhead precisely enough for an air strike,” Cooke told him. “It would be a very messy operation—”
“I don’t care about the mess!” Rostow yelled. “I’m not going to tell the American people that we had a chance to take out a nuclear warhead in our hemisphere and missed!”
“Dan, wait a second,” Feldman said, his voice surprisingly quiet to Cooke’s ears. “She’s probably right—”
“What, you’re listening to her now?” Rostow demanded.
“Yeah, I am,” Feldman said. “This whole thing has been a mess from the start and Kathy’s the one who’s been keeping this disaster from falling completely apart with duct tape and prayer. If she’s got an idea of how to get out of this a little more gracefully than using an F-35 to turn a nuke into a dirty bomb in the middle of Caracas, I think we should hear her out.”
Rostow looked at his adviser, then to the DNI, who nodded. “Fine,” the president said, clearly not thinking so. “What do you suggest?”
“Sir, this is Marcus Holland,” Cooke said, extending her hand toward the analyst. Holland had been sitting in the row of chairs along the Situation Room wall, desperately trying not to be noticed. “He’s one of the analysts who’s been working on our task force since this all began. I think you should take five minutes and listen to what he has to say.”
The president glowered at the young man and Holland tried very hard not to shrink into his chair. “Well?”
USS Vicksburg
11°22' North 67°49' West
75 miles north of the Venezuelan coast
Vicksburg had turned to put the wind twenty degrees on the port bow, making the Seahawk pilot’s life a little easier. He hovered the helicopter over the flight deck, the wind minimized to prevent the rotors from producing more lift, and he pushed down on the collective as fast as he dared. Kyra felt the helo’s rubber tires touch down, the pilot killed the engine, and she saw a small group of sailors in coveralls and helmets shuffle out, bent over to keep their heads well below the spinning rotors. They secured the Seahawk, rolled open the doors, and the medical team ran out.
Marisa was stretched out on the helo’s metal floor, Jon leaning over her, his bloody hand pressed against the bloody stain on her shirt. “Gunshot wound to the chest, upper right quadrant,” he yelled as they climbed in and lifted her onto the stretcher. “We treated w
ith Celox for bleeding. She developed a tension pneumothorax and we aspirated with a fourteen-gauge needle and applied a HALO chest seal . . .”
“You treated for shock?” one of the corpsmen yelled.
“Yes!” Jon replied.
The corpsmen lifted the stretcher board and started to run as fast as they could together, two men on either side of her.
Kyra jumped out of the Seahawk, her boots set down on metal and she closed her eyes, tried to suck in a deep breath of Atlantic air, and tasted jet fuel in the small hurricane whipped up by the rotor wash. Jon was running behind the medics and Kyra chased them down.
The corpsmen were yelling at the sailors in the passageways, who flattened themselves against the bulkheads to make room. Kyra lost track of the minutes it took to reach sick bay. Jon tried to follow but one of the corpsmen put a hand to his chest and backed him out. “Out here, sir.”
“No, I—”
“In the passageway or in the brig, sir. Doesn’t matter to me.”
Jon stood still, saying nothing as the corpsman closed the hatch. Kyra looked at her partner but didn’t speak until the metallic echo created by the metal door closing faded into silence. “Is she going to make it?” Kyra asked.
“Blood loss and tension pneumothorax are the primary causes of ninety-three percent of all battlefield deaths,” he said, his voice flat. “I treated those. So it depends on what kind of damage the shot did inside her chest cavity.” He stared at the closed hatch.
“Jon, if you want to stay here until—” Kyra started.
“Mills!” The CIA officers turned their heads to the master chief, who was making his way toward them.
“She was injured during the operation,” Kyra yelled.
“Then who’s your senior officer?”
“That would be me,” Jon said. There was no emotion in his voice.
“You’ve got a message from Langley,” LeJeune yelled back. “Looks like you might be getting back in the air pretty quick.”
Palacio de Miraflores
Caracas, Venezuela
Avila had never tasted better rum. His predecessor gave him the bottle of Black 33 after choosing him for the presidency. With the Bolivarians counting the votes, the election had been a formality staged for the benefit of foreign observers. Avila had always intended to break open this particular bottle on his last day in office and share it with whomever he chose to follow him. Now that seemed more unlikely by the hour.
Cold Shot: A Novel Page 34