And divert it he had.
As he dove for cover, the woods erupted in muzzle flashes, hundreds of lethal fireflies unleashing a swarm of projectiles that shredded the undergrowth.
In a flash of inspiration that might have been madness, David rationalized that the shooters were likewise blinded by their muzzle flashes, so he decided to capitalize on it. He threw himself on the ground and scrambled like a lizard on his stomach to displace himself by as far as possible from the spot where they’d last seen him. That meant arcing around to their left, his right, more or less following the shoreline.
He couldn’t imagine the number of shots they’d fired—it had to be hundreds—but by the time they ceased firing, David was easily forty feet away from where they imagined the kill zone to be. When the shooting stopped, so did David. In a stroke of great good fortune, he found himself at the base of a substantial tree, its trunk easily thick enough to conceal him from view.
The chatter among the men who were hunting him had morphed to shouting, and while he still couldn’t make out words, he didn’t think they were speaking English anymore. They sounded angry, and at least one voice among them sounded anguished. Did that mean his shot had hit its mark?
Instinctively, he knew it had, and intuitively he knew that he should feel terrible about it. But he didn’t. Instead, he felt fulfilled—satisfied that no matter what else happened in the next few minutes, the murder of a good cop and decent man named DeShawn Lincoln had been avenged.
Until that moment—until that thought floated through his mind—David hadn’t realized how important revenge was. DeShawn had been killed for doing the job he’d been hired to do. They’d murdered him because he was a good cop, and they’d tried to murder David because the good cop had a friend. The guy David had shot might not be the same man, but he was part of the same team, and for now, that was good enough.
David hid with his back pressed tightly against the tree, his legs stretched out straight, so as to be an invisible silhouette against the white background. It felt like the safest position for about five seconds, until he realized that he couldn’t see what was going on.
The chatter died suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped. In the silence that followed, he could hear movement in the dry and crunchy underbrush. They were coming for him. More precisely, they were searching for his body.
And when they didn’t find it, they would start hunting him again.
Since he’d shot one of theirs, they were as intent on retribution as he was, and with focused intent came focused effort. If he couldn’t see where they were and what they were doing, he was defenseless. If he merely hid in the shadows until they finally stumbled upon him, he’d be defenseless. That weird hive vibe meant that it would be many against him, and he’d die. Merely hiding was not a viable option.
They wouldn’t stop searching until they found him.
He needed to stack some odds in his favor. Drawing his legs up to achieve a kind of squat, he pushed himself to a standing position, his back never leaving the scouring surface of the tree trunk. He kept his rifle in front, parallel to the lines of his body, within its shadow. When he was fully standing, he rolled slowly to his left, at first exposing only his right eye to the downrange threat.
The hunters moved cautiously, two at a time, advancing from tree to tree. Two moved ahead and took cover, and then the two behind them moved ahead farther and took cover. There were indeed only four of them now. Their movement brought to mind a human inchworm that advanced maybe ten feet with each flex. As David watched, they were thirty feet away, and each of them presented their left profiles as they looked entirely in the wrong direction.
David moved slowly to bring his rifle horizontal and pressed the stock into his shoulder. He watched two of them advance and followed them with his sight. They were still merely black splotches against a white background, but the angles could not have been more perfect. When they took cover, they presented unobstructed profiles. As two of them waited for their teammates to leapfrog past, their heads were only a two-inch pivot for David’s sights.
He practiced the pivot twice, then decided to go for it. He settled himself with a deep breath. The first shot was taken with care, but the second one was all muscle memory and hope.
When the second bullet was away, he dove again for the ground. It took a few seconds for them to react, but when they did, it was just like the previous fusillade, their bullets tearing up the forest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The carnage at the base of the barracks stairway was unlike anything Len had ever seen. There had to be seven or eight men dead, twice that many wounded, some of them seriously.
Gregory met him in the hallway, on this side of the carnage. His hands and his shirt and the front of his pants were slick and shiny with blood. Dazed and frightened men gathered behind him, all of them armed with rifles and most of them still in underwear from having been rousted from bed.
“Are you hurt?” Len asked.
“No,” he replied. “But so many are. What is happening?”
“We are under attack,” Len explained. “But it is not for the weapons. It is for—”
He saw the shutter flash of light first, followed an instant later by the pulse of air pressure that fractured the stone walls and floor and knocked him to his knees. The sound of the explosion registered more as a vacuum of silence than noise as the pressure wave—alternately reduced and magnified by outside and inside corners—hammered his eardrums.
In that instant, he knew that they’d lost everything. Anyone who was standing in the hallway outside the chapel was dead. That meant Dmitri. Whoever had been standing inside the chapel had been reduced to vapor.
Nothing would be left of the Movement after tonight. There’d be no humiliation of America, no return to Soviet principles based upon his heroic deeds. The hopes and plans of two decades had been destroyed in ten minutes. All that was left for Len was vengeance.
That alone was something to live for.
The terrible irony—so clear to him now—was that the weapons had never been the focus of the invaders. He didn’t know how he was so certain but he knew without doubt that the explosion was merely a diversion to allow the invaders to liberate the prisoners in cell block six, the ones who never should have been brought here in the first place.
The Americans had discovered the whereabouts of the Mishins, and they had mobilized their Navy SEAL teams or their Delta Force. This was an unconscionable violation of his agreement with the White House, yet he’d understood, as he could never make Dmitri understand, that there were some lines in life that should never be crossed.
He could not let the Americans escape the island alive. To stop them, though, he needed to move quickly to stem the panic that the explosion had solidified among his troops.
“Listen to me!” he shouted in Russian. “Stop shouting! Get ahold of yourselves!”
Others in the crowd took up the request for him, and soon silence washed over the men like a wave.
“Our mission is in crisis,” Len said. “We have been crippled by American soldiers who want to humiliate us. We must stop them. If this must be our final battle, let us make it a costly one for the invaders. If we must die, let us die for the dream that is so much larger than any one of us.”
He watched the faces of the men as they processed his words. These men were not weaklings—far from it—but many of them paled at their impending mortality. For a moment, Len feared that he would lose them entirely. Had it not been for the smallest man in the crowd, that might have happened.
Geoffrey stepped forward. At five-five, maybe one hundred twenty pounds, Geoffrey looked more like a boy than a man, but had always held sway over the others. “Let’s go,” he said. His AK looked comically large in his hands, but he handled the weapon as if it weighed nothing. “We’re all with you.”
Somehow, that sealed it. As Len led the procession down the Area Four corridor, he counted at least fifteen people behind h
im. Whatever the final number was, he hoped he wasn’t hopelessly outnumbered.
Joey screamed. That’s the only way to describe the terrible sound that launched from his throat and his gut. A brilliant white light came first, followed just an instant later by a sharp explosion that seemed to make the stones move—to make the whole building move. And the sound continued to rumble on and on. He’d never heard anything so loud, and his scream escaped before he could stifle it.
Now that it had started, he didn’t know if he could stop it. It was as if his fear had sharp claws and was trying to tear itself out of his body. He felt his dad reach for him, but Joey wanted none of that. He didn’t need any more I’ll make it betters or I won’t let them hurt yous. People were shooting and blowing things up, and there was nothing Dad or anybody but God almighty could do to stop it. Most terrifying of all, God had seemed to be really distracted these past couple of days.
They were going to die here. And Joey would never even know why.
The initial flash turned the night to day. David’s eyes happened to be focused at exactly the right point in space to see one of his hunters as clearly as if it were stop-action photography. The image persisted on his retinas long enough for him to shoot at the lingering outline, but the sound of his shot was completely lost in the roar of the explosion. The fact that he’d been expecting the explosion didn’t take anything away from the gut fear that it invoked.
The enormous boom seemed to split the world, as if it sucked all the air out of the atmosphere, and then reinjected with the gain turned up full. The noise hit with a physical force, like a hammer blow to his chest that knocked him off balance.
The hunters first jumped, then scattered in the seconds that followed. In the space of a blink, they seemed to realize together that the explosion was a distant event, separate and apart from their confrontation with the single person who was tearing them up with gunfire. In the confusion, and blessed with the infusion of new light, David took a bead on one of the attackers—there were still three of them, so clearly one of his bullets had missed—and squeezed off a shot. He watched the target’s head erupt in mist.
Down to two. And they were truly, deeply pissed. They opened fire again, spraying wildly, apparently still with no strong notion of where he was.
Using the noise of the gunfire as cover, David lurched out of his hiding place and dropped to one knee. He chose one of the remaining silhouettes and fired eight or nine bullets in that direction. Someone yelled out in pain, and then someone unleashed what had to be a full magazine of ammunition in his direction. These shots landed much nearer than any of the others. The surviving guy was beginning to adapt.
Now it was down to one on one.
“Holy shit,” Jonathan said. “How much C4 did you use?” They’d just been knocked to the floor by the force of the pressure wave.
“Told you there was a lot of shit in there,” Big Guy said with a grin. “I think we might have forced them back a few notches in their terrorist dreams.”
“Are you okay, Yelena?”
She nodded. Her eyes seemed bigger than her face.
“Yeah, I’m good, too, Boss,” Boxers said.
Jonathan stayed focused on the First Lady. “Ma’am, things are going to move quickly now. You’ve got to keep up.”
He didn’t wait for a response. With his rifle at his shoulder, Jonathan led the team to the end of the hallway, where he encountered a locked heavy wooden door, the hinges for which were on his side. Letting his MP7 fall against its sling, he raised the Mossberg from under his armpit and racked a round into the chamber. “Going hot,” he said. “Yelena, look away.” In her haste to jump onto the boat, she hadn’t donned eye protection.
He pressed the vented muzzle against the top hinge and pulled the trigger. The Mossberg boomed and the hinge disintegrated. He shucked the forestock to chamber a new round, pressed the muzzle against the bottom hinge, and fired. The door hung awkwardly from its lock now, and Jonathan used his shoulder to crash it open.
The door gave, but not all the way, hanging up against the bolt that extended deeply into the jamb on the other side. “Big Guy, give me a hand.”
Boxers grabbed the back of his ruck, pulled him out of the way, and demonstrated Newton’s Second Law of Motion: force equals mass times acceleration. He put everything he had into the shoulder-blow to open the door. The door never had a chance. It swung open and half-collapsed, still hung up on its bolt, but with enough space for people to slip through.
With the Mossberg back at rest, and his MP7 back against his shoulder, Jonathan led the way. He squirted through the opening and took a couple of steps to leave room for the rest of the team. Then he took a knee and surveyed the interior of the cell block. He faced an interior alley with at least twenty cells on a side, for a total of at least forty cells on this floor. Looking up, he saw a ceiling constructed of iron grating that served as the hallway floor for the rank of cells above, and so it continued upward for another three floors.
“Nicholas Mishin!” Jonathan yelled. “Josef Mishin! Shout out! We’re here to bring you home.”
A burst of gunfire from behind made Jonathan jump and whirl. He saw Boxers with his H&K 417 at his shoulder, firing down the length of hallway they’d just traveled.
“They’re on us,” Big Guy said, and he fired another long burst.
This was bad. There were too many moving parts between now and all they needed to do to have OpFor nipping at their heels. Jonathan said over the net, “Take out every light you see and go to night vision.” He started things off by shooting the five bare lightbulbs that illuminated the first floor of the cell block. Though suppressed, the sharp pops of the MP7 still rattled the senses inside this stone canyon.
The darkness was refreshing, but far from complete as light from the floors above still shone down through the metal floors, creating a spiderweb of shadows. It would have been nice to kill those lights as well, but there was no clean shot through the steel grates.
Behind and to his left, he heard Boxers firing single rounds, and when that hallway went dark, they regained some measure of advantage.
“Yelena,” Jonathan said. In the green hue of the NVGs, he saw that she’d drifted somewhere in her head. He took a step closer and smacked her helmet to get her attention. “Yelena!”
She jumped, nearly brought her rifle to bear on him.
He caught the barrel with his palm. “Get your head in the game, ma’am. Be scared and distracted on your own time.”
Boxers fired another burst, this one shorter. “Hey!” he shouted. “Can we get some work done here?”
Jonathan said, “Yelena, go find your family. Floor to floor, door to door. When you find them, get on the radio and tell us where they are. We’ll be there as soon as we can. You just wait.”
She looked horrified. “Where will you be?”
“Buying time,” he said. “Go. And once you go up a level do not come down again for any reason, understand? You can move up and out, but never down. Got it?”
She nodded.
“Say it.”
“Once up, never come down.”
Boxers unleashed again.
“Go. We’re almost to the goal line. Don’t drop the ball.”
Jonathan turned his back on the First Lady and joined Boxers. He put a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. “I’ll take over here,” he said. “Set some charges we can hold the stairs with.”
Big Guy smiled. “Roger that.” He peeled away, and Jonathan slipped into his spot in the gap in the door. Peering down the corridor, he counted three bodies on the floor, all of them clustered at the far end. Jonathan scanned for targets with his infrared laser. For the time being, the attackers were all hidden away. He’d like to think that they had run away, but that kind of luck ran counter to what they’d been experiencing.
A more reasonable conclusion was that they’d been spooked. Or they’d found another way.
Shit. They’d found another way.
>
Josef’s eyes grew huge at the sound of their names being called. Nicholas didn’t know whether to be elated or terrified. The extended burst of machine gun fire that came immediately after tilted things more toward terror.
“Are they coming for us?” Josef asked.
They’d shed their blankets and stood, instinctively moving farther away from the door. “I think so,” Nicholas said.
“Do they want to save us or hurt us?”
Now, that was the million-dollar question. Nicholas tried to make sense of it. If Tony Darmond had had them kidnapped in the first place, what was the likelihood that he would authorize a mission to rescue them? But someone was clearly attacking this place—whatever this place was—and who else but the American military would have the resources to do that?
We’re here to take you home.
That’s what the voice had said. That could be a trap, he supposed, but wouldn’t their enemies—presumably the ones who had brought them here in the first place—know where they’d put them? Why would they need to shout their names to confirm their location?
More gunfire.
Nicholas sank to one knee and took his son’s shoulders in his hands. “Look at me,” he said.
In the light that spilled into their cell from the high window, the eyes that looked back at him were wet, with irises so brown as to be black. They were the eyes of a boy who would become a handsome man if he ever got the chance.
“I don’t know what’s about to happen,” Nicholas said, “but I think it’s going to be big. I need you to be brave.”
“Are we going to die?”
Nicholas started to answer with a reflexive no, but stopped himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “But if we are, let’s both die bravely.”
There were in fact two entrances to every floor to Building Delta. That meant two additional levels from Building Echo whose corridor he was now covering, and three from Building Charlie on the east side.
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