Hostile Intent

by Michael Walsh

  He flash-memorized the layout, every detail, then rose, ready to act…

  What was that?

  Out on the school grounds, somebody’s cell phone was getting a call. Which meant it was punching back GPS coordinates. A parent. An idiot. A hero?

  No time to lose. The cell-phone bubble would be in place soon. And then all communications would be cut off, to give Devlin and his men complete communications command of the battlefield.

  Most civilians didn’t realize this, but their cell phones were the government’s best friends. Without any coercion whatsoever, nearly the entire American population had been persuaded to carry around a locating device. You didn’t even have to be using your cell phone for someone to track you; it just had to be switched on, sending out those little locating beeps that futzed with your radio if you left it on your bedside table at night, beep-beeping your location to anyone who cared to notice. Might as well wear an ankle bracelet, then paint a bull’s eye on your ass.

  Devlin fed in the cell phone’s information, uplinked, and got back the name of the subscriber: Mrs. Hope Gardner.

  He flipped open what looked like a hooded BlackBerry but was in actuality a motion-capture videophone that worked like a TiVo; he could “rewind” to any point in the past hour to see whatever the naked eye had missed: using the field of coverage provided by the school’s hidden motion detectors—all newly built schools had them since Beslan, although the public knew nothing about them—he could observe the entire perimeter. He went visual. There:

  He could barely make out the blur, but he knew at once it was a human figure, female. Around the back, near the electrical shed. On her hands and knees, disappearing from view just as the chopper settled on the roof. Unfortunately, the video was not real time. The United States had not yet fully descended into Big Brother country, where everything you did was on a live feed, but it was only a matter of time.

  He checked the timediv>

  Chapter Twenty

  EDWARDSVILLE—JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL

  Charles Augustus Milverton was sleeping. No, not sleeping—half asleep, almost dreaming. In that special state between wakefulness and slumber, when the mind races, leaps, and makes unique connections between different and disparate people, places, and things. The gym bench was hard, but somehow he managed.

  Children. That was the key. Childhood. Think back.

  The north of England. Geordie country, Tyneside. The Borders, with the heathen Scots just a stone’s throw away. And him a vicar’s son. The only son, the eldest child, with one sister, so beautiful, so weak, so helpless in the face of Fate.

  Anglo-Catholic. The worst kind. Higher than C of E, lower than the Whore of Rome. All the strictures of the Church of England, but without divorce. No way out. One sin, unconfessed and unrequited, and you were damned to Hell for all eternity. It focused the mind even as it corroded the soul.

  The sermons. The lectures, unending. The history lessons, that went on forever. What did he care about history? About England? He had better and bigger places to go. England was nothing to him, a place, a climate, a series of vaguely related accents, a semishared history of conquest and kings. Although sometimes, standing here, near Hadrian’s Wall, he could feel himself as one with the Romans and their Anglo-Saxon successors, nervously eyeing the Picts to the north, spears and shields at the ready.

  Who dares, wins. That was his motto. Perhaps history had a useful lesson or two after all. That was what his father had tried to impress upon him, anyway. One of the few times in the vicar’s life that he had not been cowed by ritual and superstition.

  Under normal circumstances, he never would have let that raghead hit him. A savage from the outer limits of Europe, a country so weak it has been easily conquered by Islam and, worse, had stayed conquered. Not like France, under Charles Martel. Not like Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, who had chucked out the Muslims and the Jews, for good measure, and then had sent Columbus packing across the Atlantic Ocean, pretty much in a single inning. Not like Austria, with Sobieski defending the gates of Vienna.

  That Europe was gone now. Even England no longer had to worry about the Picts and the Scots and Irish. There were mosques in Newcastle, and in Leeds, and in York, and in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and London. England was finished.

  And without a fight. That was the bit that still surprised him. When Rhodesia went, he could understand it; Cecil Rhodes was Colonel Blimp, and Ian Smith was a giant pantomime horse for the Fleet Street johnnies of their day, riding high atop their moral dudgeon. He could have sworn South Africa would put up a fight, especially given their nuclear alliance with Israel, but at the end of the day, Johannesburg to reclaim not the White Man’s Burden but the White Man’s Gold; half a century after the end of colonialism, Africa was sliding back into savagery, its infrastructure failing, its farms collapsing, its education and political systems in tatters. And now it, and Britain’s former colonies in the Middle East and “Asia”—India and Pakistan—were taking their well-deserved revenge on the Mother Country, exporting their charming native pathologies back to Birmingham and Sheffield and Manchester and Newcastle: female circumcision, “honour killings,” stoning homosexuals, subway bombings, the lot.

  He hated them all. He hated them for what they had done to his childhood views of Empire, but most of all he hated them for the lie they had given to what his father had taught him.

  And yet he also admired them. Admired them for their audacity to challenge civilization and dare it to defend itself and its so-called “superiority.” Theirs was the rule of the AK-47, not of Article 3, Section 1; the rule of the id, not of the superego. Theirs was the will to power, whether they knew Schopenhauer or not.

  And that was the flaw in his father’s belief: that he could stand there, watching the oncoming blue-painted Picts and Celts, bones in their noses and the flesh of their enemies between their teeth, with equanimity, and see souls to be saved. Even when his sister had died, screaming in pain from a ruptured appendix, begging for help that had never come because their father had had to attend to his superstition, minister to his flock, while she writhed and bled and died, the lesson had not changed. It was God’s will…and there yet remained souls to be saved.

  Whereas Milverton saw not souls but enemies to be slaughtered before they breached the Wall. His father’s church was an imaginary refuge, a false castle, a hive of fairy tales about Jesus, the Apostles, the Crusades, Urban II, Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Malachy and his prophecies, St. Louis. The Middle Ages was a nightmare, the Renaissance but a dream, a brief respite before Europe too succumbed and slid back into that endless night that had followed the fall of Rome.

  That was why he had joined SAS, the 22s, as soon as he was legally able, that was why he had pushed himself, that was why he had passed all the tests, risen through the ranks, punished England’s enemies both at home and abroad, taken the fight to the IRA in Belfast and Gibraltar; and after that operation had gone tits up thanks to the gutter press, had moved into the private sector, working across Europe, Africa, and Asia and now in America. It was hard work but it was good work and it paid very well. In fact, it paid top dollar, as well it should: pound for pound, he was best fighter on the planet.

  It was the sound of a female voice that woke him from his reverie. The sound of a little girl screaming. The one sound in the world he could not abide.

  Milverton shot off the bench. If he had to break character, if he was no longer “Charles” the teacher, so be it.

  Upright now, he tensed for trouble. This hadn’t been part of the plan, and he had no idea how the men in the balaclavas were going to react, especially with Drusovic out of the gym.

  He walked slowly, unthreateningly, through the ranks of the captive kids and teachers. With the example of Nurse Haskell fresh in everyone’s mind, no one dared move his or her head to follow him as he went. Still, Milverton could feel the eyes of the boy, Roer, but in for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Charles,” wh
ispered Rory as he walked by him. “He took my sister. He took Emma.”

  He kept his voice low. “Don’t worry, Rory,” he said, a thought occurring to him. “I’ll make sure she’s safe.”

  Rory managed a very small smile. “Who dares, wins, right?” the kid asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  Now he noticed the smell. Fear had a stench all its own, and the bodily function by-products were just that, manifestations of the state of mind. He’d had plenty of men beg for their lives before he neutralized them, but this was different. These were children. Not that he cared one way or the other about their fate, but he knew that America was a sentimental country, especially about its kids, and if anything happened to any of them—or worse, a lot of them—the response would be more than they’d bargained for at this point in the operation. The kids were supposed to be very potent and photogenic hostages, nothing more.

  That’s why he was angry at Drusovic. It was time to sort the bloody fucker out.

  And then he heard the girl, Emma, scream again.

  The lift shuddered to a stop. Even with no light, Hope more or less knew where she was. Moving carefully so as not to knock anything over, bark her shins, or skin her knees any worse than they already were, she felt her way down the long, rectangular supply room, past the copy machines and the boxes of paper, past the supplies, her eyes and ears straining into the darkness and the silence.

  Her heart was pounding. She’d always thought that expression was literary license, but now that it was happening to her, rocketing, sending shock waves soaring throughout the building, she knew it was for real. Breath short, sweat glands fully engaged. But hearing preternatural. Sight, even in this Stygian darkness, supernatural. With her children in danger, Hope Gardner was Superwoman.

  A door was just up ahead. In her excitement and confusion, Hope ma was.

  Hope dropped to her hands and knees, creeping through the darkness. The lights were on in the gym, casting a small patch of light on the hallway floor via the windows. She would have to go right past it.

  In the distance, the sound of violence, a body falling. She moved faster, nearing the gym now.

  She knew she shouldn’t look, shouldn’t risk it, but she had to look. Swiftly, she crossed the hall, sidling up to the gym doors, straightening her legs, rising.

  She glanced, catching only a glimpse. But what she saw almost made her throw up.

  Children, bound; teachers, with guns trained on them. And explosives everywhere. If the cops or the FBI or whoever tried to rush the school, everyone would die. And Rory was in there, somewhere.

  She ducked back down and kept moving.

  It didn’t take long for Milverton to find Drusovic and Emma. Under any rational circumstance, he’d never take a bollocks crew like this one into battle, but that was the whole point of the exercise: they were all chattel, born to die and, as far he was now concerned, the sooner the better. Well, he could help move the timetable along.

  He ripped open the door. Drusovic was where he had expected to find him, on top of the girl. Milverton’s left hand shot out, grabbing the Albanian by the scruff of his neck and yanking him backward. As Drusovic fell, Milverton delivered a punch to the man’s right cheekbone; a little higher, on the temple, and it would have killed him, but Milverton needed to keep him alive for the moment. A kick to the groin put Drusovic on the floor.

  Milverton turned to Emma. Luckily, the savage hadn’t tried to undress her; quickly, he restored some semblance of order to her disheveled clothing and looked into her eyes to see if she was all right. The girl was speechless, her eyes wide and her mouth trying to move, but no sound emerging. Milverton swept her up in his arms, carrying her effortlessly under one arm.

  With his free hand, he hoisted Drusovic back to his feet. “You sodding arsehole,” he said, “I ought to rip your fucking balls off and feed them to the nearest pig. And then you can explain to Allah why you won’t be shagging any more virgins.” Since he was, in fact, holding Drusovic’s balls in his hand, this was not an idle threat. “Now pull your pants up and let’s get on with it.”

  Milverton carried the girl into the darkened hallway. She had fainted, which was good. He opened the door to one of the classrooms and laid her down on a bench. There was a quilt nearby, so he threw it over her. Then he stepped back into the hallway.

  Hope saw the door at the far end of the hall open, and she almost screamed when she saw a man emerge with a girl under his arm. Her girl. Her Emma. Unconscious, or…

  Don’t think about it. Calm down. The man carrying Emma was wearing a suit. He wasn’t one of them. As she watched, they disappeared into a classroom.

  She had to get closer. She rose to her feet—

  And then Revolution, we were back to square one as far as tactics were concerned. True, the Redcoats didn’t come marching down the middle of the field in serried ranks any more, but in many ways the terrorists were their functional equivalent; what they considered hostages, Devlin and his men thought of as anchors that destroyed their mobility and distracted their attention. You couldn’t shoot a hostage and defend yourself at the same time, assuming you even had the time to choose.

  Terrorists never really changed their methods. By keeping their hostages down, immobilized, they thought they could prevent communication and mutiny. What they were really doing, however, was protecting their captives, keeping them alive during the only moments that mattered, the moments of rescue and revenge.

  It was all about the OODA Loop. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Rinse, and repeat, until the other guy was dead. About getting inside your opponent’s decision loop, staying at least one beat ahead of him, as if you were inside his head. Which is where one or more of Devlin’s bullets soon would be. The Barrett fired both the .416 and the .50-caliber round, but he preferred the 400-grain .416 round; wherever he put his shot, the man was going to be very, spectacularly dead.

  He checked the computer, streaming the coverage. With GPS coordinates superimposed over the grid, he hardly needed a scope, since he could train on what he was seeing on the screen and calibrate accordingly. But even at this distance, it was more sporting to shoot a man while looking at him.

  Via the infrared scans and rad sensors, he’d also located the bomb control—a laptop computer that would sequence the bomb explosions. Like a cell phone, a computer announces its presence through mild radiation and wireless signaling. Taking it out would be a tougher shot, because his second round would have to follow the first by less than a second and he had to hope like hell nobody would touch the machine in the meantime. But, if everything went right, from the same angle he could take out Drusovic and then punch a round through the computer before the terrorists could react. And by then, they’d all be dead.

  What about the Gardner woman? He’d almost forgotten about her.

  Suddenly the news crews’ lights grew brighter. Devlin glanced down at the screen. Someone was coming out, Drusovic probably, to make another statement. Terrorists loved a stage. No time to worry about the woman now.

  There were dozens of reporters on the scene. Their trucks kept their distance, but the standup artists were primping and the print johnnies were inching forward, notepads in hand. As he watched, a taxi pulled up on the perimeter, and a man got out. Another civilian, most likely a parent. Just what he needed, another wild card. He lost sight of the man as he was swallowed up by the crowd of cops, firemen, EMS workers, and FBI agents.

  Devlin’s videophone leapt to life. His heart sank. He was inside the Oval Office, looking at Army Seelye and Secretary Rubin. This was such a breach of security protocol that he wanted to shoot Army on the spot. “Listen up,” said his boss. “The president’s about to make a statement.”

  Tyler was sitting behind his desk. “I speak now to Suleyman Drusovic. Yes, we know who you are. And know this as well—we will not let you harm our at the computer in the gym, obliterated the machine, punched through the rear wall of the school, demolished the windshield of a parked c
ar, ricocheted, and killed a cow a half-mile away.

  Then the gym walls exploded, punched out with Semtex A and RPGs. The terrorists tried to react, but the firing lines coordinated into a killing zone from which no target could escape. Firing on fully automatic, the AA-12 shotguns armed with Frag-12 armor-piercing rounds hit the terrorists at the rate of 120 per minute, and cut them down like God’s own scythes.

  From the time Devlin squeezed the trigger to the extinction of the terrorists, less than ten seconds had elapsed.

  Devlin had no time to celebrate. The instant he fired his second shot, he set the charge on the computer and grabbed the Barrett and took aim at the helicopter.

  So he missed Rory, rushing back into the school to find his sister.

  The chopper was rising, its rope ladder dangling. Devlin knew he had to take it down before Milverton could clamber aboard. He took aim—

  Fire from an AK-47 kicked up all around him. Instinctively, Devlin dropped. He felt like Cary Grant in North by Northwest: a sitting duck, except not quite so good looking.

  He rolled, trying to regain the initiative. But the Barrett was a big gun and not easily swung; by the time he got it righted, the helicopter had gained altitude, still spitting fire at him. The rope ladder was no longer dangling. Damn!

  Devlin came out of his roll prone, both elbows on the ground. He elevated the barrel. The helicopter was fast but the Barrett was faster.