Glancing neither left nor right, his eyes on the stairway a few yards in front of him, Kealey still managed to scan both sides of the mezzanine with his peripheral vision and caught glimpses of the horrible scene down in the exhibition hall: fallen debris, blasted plywood booths, toppled signs, broken glass, bodies everywhere. Those still alive and able to move appeared to have been herded toward separate ends of the hall; Kealey supposed their captors’ next step would be to gather them into conference rooms with the other hostages or massacre them right there on the spot, an undeniable possibility.
It won’t come to that, Kealey thought. He wouldn’t let it.
They dashed across the last few feet to the stairs. Kealey figured they would need less than thirty seconds to make their way through the open mezzanine, and hoped the gunmen downstairs would be too preoccupied with the prisoner roundup and Colin’s cell phone to spot them immediately.
Reaching the stairs, they bounded up them, taking them as quickly as possible. They had gotten to within four steps of the mid-floor landing when Allison produced a kind of clipped, horrified gasp. They both snatched hold of the handrail as their feet nearly slipped on the blood. Slick and dark, it was everywhere, reflecting the overhead lights and streaming down the risers to puddle on the flat marble treads.
She could not help but stare up at the body, even as Kealey pulled her around it. Riddled with bullets, one leg dangling loosely over the edge of the landing, it belonged to a young man about Colin’s age. Kealey had noticed the momentary dread that passed over Allison’s face before she focused on the bloodied clothes plastering him. They weren’t Colin’s. There would have been no way to tell his identity from his features; the shots that had torn into his skull had left the victim badly disfigured.
Kealey squeezed her hand as they hurried up the remaining stairs to the third-floor hallway.
On the wall to Kealey’s right were signs for the conference rooms, and past them the large glass door to the corridor. He raised his weapon slightly as they drew closer, and that was when he saw the masked man in the slight recess leading toward the door, guarding it there on the mezzanine. The man saw them, too, and his submachine gun came up quickly.
Kealey caught him with a 3-round burst at close to point-blank range, then instantly triggered a second burst. The man dropped without firing a single round, blood erupting from his chest, hitting the floor with a soft smack as his weapon went twirling from his grasp like a flung baton.
“Come on,” Kealey grunted, leaping over the man’s body and pushing through the door into the corridor. He immediately saw four black-clad men outside a room up ahead to the left, maybe 20 feet up the corridor. They had started turning toward him, toward the sound of the gunfire. Kealey cut them down as he simultaneously pulled Allison directly behind him. It was an easy strike; the masked men were all in a row, one behind the other, all but the first man blocked from firing at him by the man in front of him. And that first man never got a chance to do anything but die.
The fact that the men were clustered around the door, not fully turned toward the corridor, showed that his plan had worked. They had been facing the room, waiting to see who had managed to get a cell phone inside. That had bought him the seconds he needed to cross the walkway after shooting the guard.
As soon as the four men went down, Kealey stiff-armed Allison across the chest, pushing her back toward the wall and following her up against it. He waited. He did not think that whoever was inside the room would strafe the corridor without first making sure the four guards were down.
A masked forehead poked out, one eye looking down the corridor. The side of the man’s face evaporated in blood. The head dropped.
“Down!” Kealey hissed to Allison, simultaneously pulling her and dropping. He held his firearm in front of him, arms extended, hands cradling the weapon. He might have only a second to fire.
Someone else inside stuck his automatic out and fired chest high down the corridor—just as Kealey had expected. He saw the black glove and ignored the flashing gunfire, which chewed ceramic projectiles from the wall and painfully peppered his head and cheek. He found the hand with the nub on the barrel and destroyed it with a three-shot burst. The man yelped, dropped the gun, and withdrew his hand.
Though his ears were singing from the gunfire, Kealey had long ago trained himself to filter sounds through the hum. It was like listening underwater: the activity was there, but at a different pitch and volume. Fortunately, the enemy usually suffered from the same disability without Kealey’s training.
There were no sounds from inside the room. The hostages hadn’t been emboldened to take him out, which meant he had another weapon or there were still other gunmen inside. The fact that killers had not emerged from any other locations suggested they assumed this was just another mass murder of hostages. Still, it wouldn’t be long before some centralized control checked in. There had to be a unit leader. The room had to be taken before then.
He turned to Allison. She was breathing like a rabbit.
“As soon as I take off, I want you to count to thirty Mississippi,” Kealey said. “When you’re done, call Colin’s number.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t seen his cell phone anywhere,” Kealey told her. “One or two thugs may still be among the hostages. I’ll try and use my target as a shield, tag whoever’s left. But if more of these guys come down the hall from ahead, get out the way we came. Fast.”
She was processing the information, nodding numbly.
“Stay strong,” he said. “I think reinforcements are on the way.”
She shot him a questioning look, but he did not elaborate.
Kealey let his weapon hang from its strap. He got his feet under him, reached into his jacket, and withdrew his balisong. A flick of his wrist and the double-handled knife snapped open, its six-inch stainless-steel blade locking with a soft click, coldly mirroring Kealey’s eyes as they stared ahead.
Taking a breath and exhaling, he took three charging steps forward. Kealey swung into the open door like a bull, low with his hands in front like horns. He saw the man with the wounded hand kneeling. He was snarling in the ear of a blond woman, his gun at her head. Her hands were raised, and she was sobbing, shaking her head, but she was rising just the same. The gunman was getting up with her. He obviously intended to use her as a human shield. The wounded man turned just in time to be hit, full on, by Kealey.
The American locked his left hand around the wrist with the gun, pointing the weapon up. With his right hand he sank the blade into the hollow of the man’s throat, a quarter inch above the collarbone. The blonde shrieked and dropped and covered her head with her fingers, still screaming. The man gurgled and thrashed, hot blood brewing from the wound, his hands clutching at Kealey’s, trying to pull it away from him, pull the knife from his throat. But Kealey thrust it in deeper, angling the blade up toward the subclavian and giving it a hard, sharp twist to completely sever the artery and finish him.
All the while Kealey held the man up by his forearm and the blade, keeping him between himself and the hostages—and any potential attacker.
His knuckles wet and slick around the knife, he felt the man go limp. Kealey was carrying his deadweight now and went to his knees. It was quiet enough for Kealey to hear the splash of the man’s blood as it hit the floor around him.
No one fired at him, but that didn’t mean anything. Kealey had a dead man for protection and an assault rifle on his shoulder. He was still a formidable enemy.
The phone sounded. Someone barked with surprise, threw it with a grunt. The phone cracked on the floor.
The voice had come from the corner ahead and to Kealey’s left. Kealey glanced under the dead man’s armpit. He saw a gunman rise from the back of the crowd, pulling Colin Dearborn with him. He had the young man by the collar, the bore of his assault rifle pushing into the soft flesh under his chin. Kealey guessed the man had heard him talking to Allison or had simply assumed there were others
out there, possibly an entire unit. He couldn’t know for sure, and there had been enough shooting to create that impression.
Which is probably the reason no one from the other rooms has attacked, Kealey thought. He had a good idea the bad guys hadn’t been able to confirm anything with video surveillance. Someone on the outside had seen Allison’s tweet. Somewhere, someone had either cut the trunk line that ran the system or had gotten into the security center. That could also have fueled the idea that they were under siege.
This ape was supposed to find that out. He had a Bluetooth in his ear, like the others. He was going to try to hostage his way into the corridor, see what was up, let the others know. Kealey hadn’t slipped on one of the headsets he’d confiscated, because he hadn’t wanted to be distracted.
The man stood behind Colin, his back to the floor-to-ceiling window, one arm locked around Colin’s throat. The rest of the frightened, wide-eyed hostages had begun sliding to the other side of the room, creating a clear path between the man and Kealey.
“Jebem ti mater!” the gunman husked through his mask. “Vi ete ga gledati umreti.”
Kealey regarded him without expression. Still on his knees, he simultaneously hefted the dead man to his right and swung his own firearm around. He felt as if he’d been kicked through a dark, spiraling time warp. His lack of visible emotion gave no hint of his surprise and puzzlement. It had been over a decade since he’d heard Serbian spoken by a native, but he’d recognized it now, remembered the dialect from down in southern Kosovo, and understood the coarse profanity followed by an invitation to watch Colin die. No doubt the man hadn’t expected Kealey to understand. It was just one of those spit-in-your-eye gestures so common to Eastern European insurgents. What was stranger, though, was that in the corridor minutes ago, when the other hostage takers had been shouting excitedly to one another, they had been speaking some other language entirely.
A moment passed. Another. Kealey stood there, pulling the long-unused vocabulary from his memory, giving its particular syntax a moment to click into place.
“Steta ga i ... da e ... biti ubi Jeni,” he said at last. He was warning the man that he would also wind up dead if he tried anything. “Ja u te ubiti ... sebe.” Kealey was promising that he would make sure of it, would kill the man himself.
The man snorted. “Yawa zhaba heskla bus nada!”
Kealey didn’t respond. That had not been Serbian. It was the same language he’d heard from the others out in the corridor. Pashto, he thought.
What the hell is this? A convention of anti-American terrorists? Someone at Immigration and Naturalization was going to have a lot of explaining to do when, dead or alive, the gunmen were all ID’d.
Kealey kept staring into the room. Behind the gunman, the window shimmered a little as the lights of a hovering helicopter bounced off its tinted laminated glass, coming in almost horizontally over the church across the street. For a moment, the hostage taker and Colin were in stark silhouette. The helicopter was far enough away, at least a half mile, so that the sound did not intrude. Their gun-muffled hearing also worked to conceal its presence.
Shifting his gaze to Colin, Kealey was able to hear his rasping intakes of air. He looked at the weapon under Colin’s chin, at the hand in the fingerless shooter’s glove clenched around its stippled grip.
“I didn’t come to play games,” Kealey said at last. “What do you want with these people?”
The gunman laughed, shifting to English. “They say the more languages one speaks, the better one can know other men.”
Kealey looked at him. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Who are you?” the man asked. “You do not seem FBI.”
“I’m the janitor,” Kealey said flatly.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” the man snapped. Without warning, he tightened his choke hold around Colin’s neck, pushing his head up higher with the assault rifle. Colin gagged audibly, a sound like water draining through a clogged pipe.
“Who is out there? How many of you?” the man demanded.
“What’s it matter?” Kealey asked. “You’ve lost.”
“I have won!” he roared. “I enter your house to kill as many as I can, to send your people to the grave one after another.”
There were muffled sobs from different places around the room.
“Even if it means joining them?” Kealey asked.
“If I accomplish my goal, yes.”
Kealey felt his stomach wring tight with anger, but he just kept staring at him, his face a shield of calm. He needed to stall. Help was coming, but he had to make sure it came soon enough to save Colin.
“I remember Cuska after the massacre,” Kealey said. “I saw what the Sakali did to the villagers. Do you know what I said to one of the killers?”
The man did not respond. Obviously, Kealey was not FBI. The references had caught him off guard.
“I told him that he would die in torment if he harmed anyone else.” Kealey’s voice dropped as he said, “I told him, ‘Al sizvul.’ ” He had chosen his words carefully, using the idiomatic Serbian phrase for “blood oath.” “I say that now to you,” Kealey went on, “and to whoever is working with you, and to whoever you leave behind. I will find them and make it my business to kill them. Or we can stop this now.”
“You think I fear you?” the gunman yelled.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kealey said. “It’s over.”
They looked at each other, Colin between them. Kealey kept his eyes steady, appearing to stare at the man while again letting his gaze travel past him to the window. Outside, the spotlight from the helicopter seemed to coat the church towers with molten gold as it washed over their high, curved roofs before splashing brightly up against the smooth glass wall of the convention center. But it was no longer shining on the window behind the gunman. And there was a good reason for that.
Recon was over.
Suddenly, the gunman’s patience appeared to run out. The man jerked the arm he’d clamped around Colin’s neck up with a sudden violent motion that audibly stopped his breath. The hostage taker began moving forward with the young man, who was gagging as he tried to walk on his toes.
Kealey felt his stomach constrict. He wished to hell he knew what was going on outside this room. Because the only option he seemed to have left was to take a shot at the man, drawing his fire and hoping he could kill the son of a bitch before he himself went down.
Chandra knelt on the wooden boards of the bell platform, the barrel of a Heckler & Koch PSG-1 sniper rifle cradled in his left hand, his right wrapped lightly around its grip, his elbows carefully balanced on the sill beneath the tower’s window arch. Inhaling, exhaling, getting into the right breathing tempo, he peered through the weapon’s powerful 6x42 telescopic sight, studying his target through the third-floor window of the convention center across the street.
There were good shooters, and there were snipers. There were methods and formations that could make ordinary shooters better—by making a “figure eight” rotation with the barrel and firing at the peak of the second circle, or by firing in between breaths, but not actually holding your breath—but just how fast and how accurate a shooter was at making the calls and the shots, estimating a long-range target’s distance, adjusting for conditions, stalking the prey to the point of invisibility, learning to live with discomfort in even the most serene terrains, and disguising himself to adapt to the most hell-sucking surroundings, anywhere and nowhere, and all while never existing in the enemy’s eye, that was what demarcated a sniper. A sniper was as stealthy as his rifle was deadly.
Chandra was a city boy, recognized by his comrades more for his precision than his trail-hunting abilities; country boys were better known for tracking. But in either battlefield setting, it was imperative that scopes and muzzles remained invisible. If they couldn’t see you, they couldn’t hit you. Luckily for Chandra, urban environments were filled with glinting metal structures and flickering lights and window
s. Perfect cover for a sniper rifle.
Beside him, in a nearly identical firing position, Alterman held a rifle of the same make and model, which gave them almost thirty thousand dollars’ worth of precision ordnance to match the twenty years of training and experience between them here in the church tower. Both agents, in addition, wore tactical vests and black unis with the circular black and silver patch of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team sewn onto their shoulders, though only Alterman, the pair’s senior member, had on amber shooter’s glasses.
In his flippant moments—and this was anything but one—the Indonesian-born Darma Chandra joked that the glasses were a sign of the other man’s advancing decrepitude, Alterman being forty-three years old in comparison to his thirty. But Chandra knew his partner was the most capable and seasoned marksman in the unit, having been certified at the U.S. Marines Corps’ 4th MEB antiterrorism school at Camp Lejeune, having done advanced recon in northern Afghanistan, then having been selected for diplomatic and embassy security in Kabul back in the days when Taliban assassins were a common roadside presence in and around the city.
Chandra didn’t have quite as colorful a background, having spent his entire career stateside since joining the FBI fresh out of college—and with new citizenship. And while his top gun rating in the SWAT and sniper courses gave him cred among his peers, he willingly bowed to Alterman’s expertise. After the president’s executive ARI order had been received—All Resources In, overriding the allocation of sectors and jurisdictional red tape, and triggering the FBI-led assault—there had been not a word of discussion about who would execute the takeout. Alterman was boss all the way.
The BPD chopper had lighted the target before withdrawing, allowing their helmet cameras to grab an image for reference. The radio-linked gun laser locked on the target selected by the heads-up displays in the sharpshooters’ glasses. The laser did not determine the actual trajectory; that was in the hands of the marksman. It simply created a circle, about the size of a wedding band, for aiming. The target discs were far more diffuse than the old single-point laser beams. It was unlikely that anyone inside the kill zone would see the circle unless they were looking.
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