Blowback
Page 21
But he froze when he spotted the dark armored Range Rover inching down the street toward the shop. The privileged head of MI5 getting door-to-door service, and she and her bodyguard had slowed and were now waiting inside the shelter of the shop and out of his clear sight.
He almost stopped breathing while the vehicle approached the doorway. But the Range Rover slowed a good five meters before the shop. Pauk felt eyes on him, believed he’d been made by the driver. He raised his rifle swiftly through the front slit of his coat to his shoulder—heard someone cry out, “Gun!”—and he fired through the windshield of the Rover and into the driver’s head.
• • •
Vanessa was closing the distance—only twenty-five meters more—at the same time she noticed the black Range Rover advancing slowly through the rain toward the shop. And then she saw movement in her periphery and turned just as the Chechen raised his rifle through the front of his coat.
“Gun!” Vanessa shouted, flinching at the sharp sound of gunfire. The Range Rover’s windshield exploded.
As the Chechen sighted on the doorway of the shop for his next shot, Vanessa made a dash to reach the cover of the still rolling Range Rover. Because the Dragunov was a semiautomatic, the Chechen had no need to shift position and he could fire continuously until he used up his magazine.
Crouched and moving with the car, she peered around the rear wheel and caught a glimpse of Hall’s bodyguard in the doorway as he pushed the director of MI5 down to the floor with one arm—the map sliding from one end of the document tube in Hall’s hands.
When she looked back to the street she saw the Chechen’s rifle gleaming in the rain. And about twenty meters beyond him, Chris crouched behind a wall. Trying to catch the fully armed Chechen off guard and from behind. As Vanessa watched, he managed to close the distance by a few steps. What he was trying to do was insanely risky. If the Chechen spotted Chris, he could slice him to pieces in a matter of seconds.
The Chechen fired again, and Hall’s bodyguard groaned, falling back into the doorway, hit. Vanessa stayed low, lunging around the inside of the still coasting Range Rover, hunching as she moved with the vehicle, shielded by the front-left tire. As far as she could tell, the Chechen had his focus on the wounded bodyguard and hadn’t seen her yet. The bodyguard was down, but he still seemed capable of firing his weapon—as soon as the panicked clutch of pedestrians cleared enough so he could fire without collateral damage.
Vanessa pressed her shoulder against the car and gripped the rain-slicked latch. Her fingers slipped off. Was it locked? She tried again, and this time the latch gave. Apparently the MI5 driver, a member of Hall’s security team, or Protection Command, had unlocked it in preparation to pick Hall up in the rain.
Vanessa opened the door and leaned her body into the Range Rover, stretching the short length of the front seat to reach the driver.
Slumped behind the wheel of the idling vehicle, his foot still resting against the pedal, he was obviously dead. She slid one hand under the lapel of his jacket, around his left ribs. Her fingers closed around the butt of the weapon in his shoulder holster.
A Glock 19 high-capacity 9-millimeter pistol with a round in the chamber and a full thirty-magazine of Plus-P cartridges. The driver never even had a chance to fire. But she thanked God the Protection Command used high-performance ammunition. It would make up for the 9-millimeter’s slow ballistics. It gave her a lethal range of one hundred meters—a fighting chance.
A gunshot echoed outside—the bodyguard’s Glock.
Vanessa flinched at the unmistakable report of the Chechen’s rifle as he returned fire. She raised her head just enough to look out at a blurry world through the shattered, rain-soaked windshield. Fuck. She’d never see anything if she didn’t leave the shelter of the Range Rover. But she had to get closer to the Chechen before she could take a shot.
The Range Rover’s engine hummed softly. Vanessa shook her head—what the hell, she would drive. She took a deep breath, waiting, sweat pouring off her now. She knew what she had to do. She wiped her hands dry as best she could, silently apologizing to the dead driver for the use of his jacket.
Peering out just above the dashboard, she pressed down on the dead officer’s boot. She kept the pressure light and nothing happened at first. Then the Range Rover began to move again, very, very slowly.
She tried to count seconds and factor distance. She guessed she had only moments before the Chechen focused on the vehicle and mowed it to pieces with his Dragunov.
She released her hand from the dead officer’s boot, and the Range Rover slowed to a stop.
If she had all the luck in the world she had only one chance to make her shot. Had she closed the distance enough so her target was within range? The momentary silence outside spooked her.
She slid back toward the door and readied herself to exit quickly. She almost sensed it was coming—another round from the bodyguard, who was a distance behind her now and apparently still trapped and injured in the shop doorway.
The Chechen fired.
And that’s when Vanessa moved—propelling herself out of the Rover, crouching again just long enough to orient herself, the Glock gripped in both hands.
The Chechen had changed position, advancing another ten meters or so toward the map shop. He was within Vanessa’s range, and she locked his forehead in her sights. She slowed her breathing, readying to stand and leverage herself against the vehicle and fire—all within a second or two. With the faint hope the element of surprise would work in her favor.
Without taking her eyes from the Chechen, Vanessa sensed Chris making his move. But if he tried to get closer, he would be completely exposed.
Vanessa saw the slight slackening of the Chechen’s body and knew he’d sensed Chris. She stood to full height—aware of the gleam of the Chechen’s rifle as he turned and fired at Chris. Then swung the rifle at her.
Almost at the same instant, she took her shot.
And missed.
Unconsciously, she braced for the impact of his bullets—
But nothing happened.
It took a very long moment to register—her bullet had struck the Dragunov’s gas tube just above the barrel.
• • •
Just as the Chechen felt someone behind him and twisted seventy-five degrees, the woman rose to standing next to the black Rover. He recognized her even with the hat and the rain slicker—her weapon raised and ready.
In that instant, he hesitated just a fraction of a second before firing at the man.
Just as he turned back to her, he felt the impact of her first shot. It missed him but hit his rifle.
Incredibly, she’d disabled the Dragunov’s semiautomatic operating system. He could not fire without manually resetting the bolt’s operating lever.
For those moments it seemed they were locked together, staring outside of normal time, each finally looking into the eyes of the other.
He saw the muzzle of her weapon flash. Heard her second shot. Felt nothing at all as her bullet entered his brain.
• • •
Vanessa slumped against the Rover, but she had to move, had to get to Chris where he’d fallen. Was he alive?
She barely registered Alexandra Hall pulling her bleeding bodyguard back into the safety of the shop doorway.
“You okay?” she tried to call out to Hall. Her voice seemed trapped in her throat.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Hall answered in a stunned sort of way. “But you’re bleeding.”
Vanessa refocused on Chris and crossed the distance toward him. She glanced at the Chechen—he was dead.
When she reached Chris, his eyes were open and he seemed alert. The blood seeped from his shoulder, turning his light gray rain slicker black.
“You got him,” Chris whispered as Vanessa knelt beside him. “And you’re hit, you’re bleeding.”
“No, Chris, that’s your blood, but you’ll be okay. We killed the bastard.”
A siren rose up sudden and sharp in the distance.
After what seemed like a very long time, she saw black leather boots. Shit—her left arm was beginning to burn like hell. Beneath her jacket her skin felt warm and wet. Best she could tell, she’d managed to reopen the gunshot wound from the Chechen’s bullet on Cyprus.
“Stay down, we’ll get you to hospital,” a male and very British voice commanded sharply. “You’re okay, we’ve got you.”
The nightmare invaded her sleep again—the Kurdish children and their kitten sprawled dead where they had fallen after the cloud of white poison drifted from the sky. She wanted to save them. Still, the toxic snow drifted down, and Vanessa tasted the ripe sweet death on her tongue, felt the heat singe her skin. She dropped to her knees, crawling forward.
But the nightmare shifted to a familiar darkened hall filled with shadows and the murmur of voices. The soft, occasional croon of her mother, but mostly the harsh, broken whisper that she barely recognized as her father. Home again to the base after one of his endless tours of duty.
Vanessa didn’t call out—“Daddy!”—she knew instinctively that she wasn’t supposed to overhear what he was telling her mother. So she crouched low, her fingers gripping her flannel PJs, making herself tiny in the hallway outside the door of her parents’ bedroom. And she heard his words, and something terrifying in his voice she had never heard before: helplessness.
“—we saw so many bodies—children, women and the babies, old people—some of them frozen as if they’d died in the middle of a gesture or a word, others contorted, agonized, covered with their own vomit, men and women who died trying to shelter their children, their tiny babies. My God, Lois, some children were still alive, and we tried to help but it was too late—”
Her father broke off, and Vanessa heard the sound of choking and she pulled into a ball, wondering if her father was dying, too?
Now, these many years later, she knew it was the only time she’d heard her father weep.
Vanessa opened her eyes to find she was reclining inside the dimly lit cream-colored cabin of a Gulfstream IV, one of a fleet belonging to the British government. Outside the porthole windows, the jet raced across pale dawn skies over a bank of soot-gray clouds.
“Apparently you needed sleep.”
Vanessa looked toward the deep, female voice to see Alexandra Hall seated across from her in a beige leather VIP chair. “Madame Director.” She began to pull her body up to a seated position and almost instantly a steward appeared in the aisle to adjust her bed back to a chair. “Thanks,” Vanessa murmured, stifling a yawn and pressing her fingers deep into the buttery soft leather.
“An upgrade from travel in a C-17, isn’t it?” Hall smiled, the skin around her eyes creasing, her mouth turning up slightly higher on the left side.
“How long was I out?” Vanessa asked, looking uneasily at her watch—but her wrist was bare.
“Forty-five minutes, give or take.” The director of MI5 glanced at her wristwatch. “At the hospital I believe they stored your personal items safely in a pouch, and that’s probably in your carry-on. It’s 0500 hours, and we’ll begin the approach to D.C. within minutes.”
“It’s Saturday—the twenty-seventh—”
“Going on two in the afternoon in Iran,” Hall said. “Operation Ghost Hunt is under way so I suggest you enjoy a good cup of coffee while you still have time.” Her focus shifted to the aisle behind Vanessa.
Turning, Vanessa nodded gratefully at a second steward, who offered her very hot coffee in a porcelain mug. “Thanks,” Vanessa said, taking her first sip. As the steward served tea from a translucent bone china pot to Alexandra Hall, Vanessa took a moment to gaze around the jet’s interior. She and the director occupied the back cabin, and a bank of three monitors were set between windows on the other side of the aisle, one tuned to BBC news—where they were packaging yesterday’s Portobello Road shooting as a domestic dispute—and one other to CNN, where a well-known political correspondent told her story from in front of the U.S. Capitol. The volume down, Vanessa read the choppy thread of closed-captioned narrative: “. . . with mounting tensions and pressure from conservatives to take military action against Iran—not a new story, Wolf, but one to watch . . .”
Satisfied she hadn’t missed any breaking news while she slept, Vanessa pivoted now, the seat spinning with her, to see into the middle cabin. Two men and one very serious-looking woman, all in black suits, occupied three of the four seats. Chris was seated on a couch, propped against several pillows, staring intently at the screen of his laptop. Last night, while they were being patched up at the hospital, he’d found the heart and the moment to ease a small bit of her misery around Khoury. “David knows about this,” he told her quietly. “We got word to him that you’re safe.” She didn’t have to ask her next question, because Chris kept going. “He wants you to know that, considering the circumstances, he’s all right.” Vanessa didn’t dare ask for more information, and, anyway, she didn’t believe Chris knew anything more than he’d shared. “Thanks,” she said, touching his left arm lightly.
Now, illuminated by the first light through the G4’s windows, he had his jacket off, and the hospital bandage protecting the wound in his right shoulder made him look asymmetrical. Hard to believe that it had been only fourteen hours since she’d shot the Chechen. Instinctively, Vanessa’s fingers slid up her arm to her rebandaged biceps, and she sucked in a breath in reaction to the sting of pain. We make a pair, she thought, and, as if he heard her words, he glanced up, tipping his head in a quizzical nod.
She raised her eyebrows and puffed out her cheeks, more than ready for an update on Operation Ghost Hunt, but he wagged one index finger and shook his head. She took a breath and told herself they would be on the ground soon, in gear, and catching up on the operation’s latest developments. The thought of returning to Headquarters triggered a montage of images, most of them disturbing: her last encounter with Khoury, the resulting confrontation with Chris, the session with the OMD psychologist. Dr. Wright, with her sanctimonious insight—It’s not your job to save the world alone, Vanessa. Now Vanessa’s mouth pulled taut as she caught the vivid image of the Chechen lying dead in the rain. Not the whole world, no . . . but I can do my best to keep a small part of it safer.
“Your military has begun tracking an unidentified jet flying in Iranian airspace,” Alexandra Hall said.
And Vanessa jerked around in her seat abruptly. “For how long—where is it now?”
“Flying over southern Iran.” Hall took a sip of tea.
Vanessa frowned in sudden frustration. “Where in southern Iran—that’s an area of about three hundred thousand square miles.”
“Southeastern Iran.”
“Bhoot?” Vanessa’s spine stiffened. “Heading toward the facility?”
Hall arched her brows. “In the past thirty minutes, our SAT analysts have isolated what appears to be a rudimentary airfield roughly one hundred fifty kilometers due west of the facility. Other sources are leading us to believe retired Iranian general Abbas Nazemi may be on his way there, traveling by land.”
“Shit,” Vanessa murmured. “It’s happening.” And just then she felt the first pull of the jet’s descent.
“It may well be,” Hall said. “I’m sorry I can’t stay and play—but I will be following events closely.”
Vanessa saw an expression of genuine if fleeting regret on Alexandra Hall’s face, pushed away so quickly by her customary mask of fierce intelligence that Vanessa almost doubted she’d seen the deeper emotional layer.
“Seat belts, please,” a passing steward said. “We’ll be landing shortly.”
Her thoughts racing now, Vanessa tightened her seat belt gingerly. When she looked up, she met Alexandra Hall’s gaze and held it. She sensed Hall’s curio
sity, and she almost expected a question and yet the silence between them lengthened.
“You said you knew my father,” Vanessa said finally, surprising herself with the prompt.
“I said I worked with him.” Hall nodded. “He wasn’t an easy man to know. But he was certainly one of the toughest SOBs I’ve ever met. Stubborn as hell and driven.”
Vanessa looked away from Hall to focus on the yellowy-gray clouds pressing against the windows. Butterflies took off in her belly—the shift in cabin pressure and the pre-mission jitters. She heard Hall’s matter-of-fact words. “He was also one of the best officers I’ve come across.”
The plane dipped below the clouds, and sudden swaths of ocean, earth, and city seemed to press up toward the sky. Vanessa turned back to Alexandra Hall and began to speak quietly.
“If the mission fails somehow—if we don’t get Bhoot or even if we do—I need to find out if there’s a breach, a mole, and I need to deal with him or her.”
“Yes, you do.” Hall’s mouth pursed, and her focus shifted to some point in the near distance. “I told you I owed your father a favor.” She refocused on Vanessa, and her brows pulled together, eyes narrowing. “It now seems I’m in your debt. Call on me when you need to.”
There was barely time for the briefing in CPD’s makeshift war room. The lead-up to Operation Ghost Hunt was over, and all teams were about to go live. They had one small window to review the impending operational sequence—even while they all knew anything could and might end up FUBAR.
From her perch on the edge of a cluttered conference table, Vanessa watched as Chris covered ground as quickly as possible. “The goals of this operation are twofold. Capture or kill the black-market nuclear arms dealer we call Bhoot. Disable the secret underground facility and set back any nuclear ambitions in the real world. After that we see what we have—gathering any and all intel in all the ways we know how. Operation Ghost Hunt is ambitious, and that’s an understatement. There has already been intense pressure to proceed with military options. But we in the intelligence community know the real value is taking down Bhoot, preferably alive, at the same time we sabotage their ability to produce anything resembling a nuclear weapon at this facility. We clear on that?”