They were to enter the third cell. As his hand passed along the door to the second cell, he wondered how they could be sure that the doors were even unlocked. This was a prison, after all. Yet it was unoccupied. He supposed they’d just have to take their chances. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of alternatives.
“Howya doing, Joey?” he whispered.
“What’s that horrible smell?” the boy asked. “Smells like somebody took a shit in here.”
That was exactly what it smelled like, but with the addition of burned hair. It was nauseating. Terrifying.
“We’re here,” Yelena said, and as she pushed open the door, he was grateful to see the wash of some light, even if it clearly came from the fires that raged out there in the night. She led the way, and Nicholas ushered Josef in next.
As Nicholas stepped across the threshold, something hit him hard from behind, and a hot pain engulfed him like a searing girdle, an agonizing jolt that exploded back to front. It buckled his knees and as he sank to the wooden floor, he more felt than saw a man step past him, deeper into the cell.
A rifle dangled from the man’s shoulder, and a knife blade gleamed from his fist. As Nicholas clutched at the agony in his back, he felt the wetness of his own blood, and he knew that he’d been stabbed.
The man went right for Josef, grabbing him from behind and hoisting him with an arm wrapped around the boy’s shoulder and throat.
Yelena whirled with her gun up and ready to shoot, but it was too late. He’d lifted Joey high enough that in the limited light, there was no way to shoot the man without shooting the boy.
“Put the rifle down, Yelena,” the man said. He brandished his knife blade and pressed it against Joey’s throat.
Yelena’s eyes widened as her jaw dropped open. “Alexei,” she said.
“It’s been a very long time. The gun, Yelena. Put it down. I won’t hesitate to kill him. You know that.”
Nicholas tried to find his feet to rush this man, but every move was excruciating, each flex of a muscle another jolt of searing pain.
“Please don’t do this,” she said.
“You should not have come,” Alexei said.
“You took my children.”
“And that one,” Alexei said, tossing his head toward Nicholas. “He looks so like his father.” He pressed the knife point deeper into the soft flesh under Joey’s chin.
“Ow!” Joey cried. “Ow, please.”
“Your choice, Yelena. Do you really want a little boy to die for you?”
Yelena lifted the sling from around her shoulder and lowered her rifle to the ground.
“Why?” she said as she stood. “Why my family?”
“Because it was easy,” Alexei said. “Their father still loves them so.”
“Their father is dead,” Yelena said, but through his pain, Nicholas detected something wrong in her tone.
“We both know that that’s not true, don’t we, Yelena?”
“I’ve done what you asked,” Yelena said. “Let Josef go.”
“How many others are there?” Alexei asked. “How many Secret Service or soldiers?”
“Ten,” she said, but again, her eyes betrayed the lie.
Alexei squeezed Josef tighter. “How about you tell me, Josef Nikolayevich? How many attackers are here?”
With his feet dangling just off the floor, Josef had to hang onto Alexei’s forearms with both hands to keep from strangling. Tears streaked his face in the yellow light of the fires.
“Must I cut your throat?” Alexei asked softly.
“Ten.” His voice squeaked.
Alexei gave a dramatic sigh. “It’s such a shame—”
Josef shrieked, “Scorpion! Help!”
“Fire in the hole,” Big Guy said, and he touched the lighter to the fuse. “Now, let’s get the hell—”
The boy’s scream for help echoed through the prison.
Jonathan and Boxers pivoted in unison, weapons up, and headed for the door.
Nicholas had never seen anyone move as fast as his mother did after Josef screamed. She lowered her head and charged Alexei like a bull, driving both the man and the boy into the stone wall. They hit hard, and in the impact, Alexei lost his grip on Joey, who fell to the floor and scrambled out of the way to join his father.
It was hard to see the details in the dim light, but Yelena seemed to be in a rage that was beyond anger. After the initial impact, she drove her forehead into the bridge of Alexei’s nose. His knees sagged and he dropped his knife. As he slid to the floor, Yelena gripped his hair or maybe his ears and drove the back of his head over and over again into the stone. The vibrations of the impact reverberated through the floor.
She was going to kill him. And Nicholas was fine with that.
With his NVGs down and in place, Jonathan slid the turn into the cell with his weapon up and ready to shoot. It took a few seconds to process what he saw. PCs One and Two were together on the floor near the door, while Yelena struggled with a man in the far corner. Her rifle lay on the floor five feet away as she smashed the guy’s head repeatedly against the wall. Even if Jonathan had had a shot, there’d be no need to take it.
“Yelena!” he yelled. “Stop!”
She was beyond listening to instruction. She’d entered the realm of murderous frenzy.
“Hey!” He yelled it louder this time, but she still didn’t respond. Jonathan crossed the cell in three long strides, and pulled her away from the unconscious man by the collar of her vest.
Yelena whirled on him, spun up to do battle with whomever she saw. She threw a punch, but he blocked it and grabbed her shoulders. “Stop,” he said. “He’s out cold. No need to kill him.”
“Bullshit! He tried to kill me. To kill us.”
Jonathan glanced over to Nicholas and the blood he saw on the floor near him, and put that picture together with the knife that lay on the floor. Well, shit. At least they were still alive.
Big Guy was already stepping over everybody, with a zip tie in his hands for the guy Yelena had been beating up on.
“We’ll take him with us,” Jonathan said. “We’ll squeeze him for intel, and then Wolverine can do with him whatever she wants. For now, plug your ears and—”
The explosion was epic.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Becky was horrified. She was looking right at the prison compound when a chunk of the building erupted in a blast of flame and flying debris.
“Holy shit!” David yelled over the intercom. “Did you see that?”
“Looks like the boys just cut themselves an exit door,” Striker said. As he spoke, the nose of the helicopter dipped, and the engine noise crescendoed. “Yee-hah.”
He said that last part—“Yee-hah”—in a normal conversational tone, and if she read his body language correctly, he was laughing. Laughing! What was wrong with these people? They pretended that this was somehow fun. It was a sickness. People were dying, and they were laughing about it.
The helicopter dropped quickly, like a roller coaster. As they closed to within a hundred feet of the hole in the stone, and then fifty and then ten feet, Becky saw the details of the wound that had been avulsed from the building. At first, the view was dominated by smoke. Or maybe it was dust. An opaque cloud that rendered details undetectable. As it cleared, she saw that the entire wall was gone, and that the roof had collapsed on an angle.
Tink. Tink-tink.
“We can’t stay here,” Striker said over the intercom. “Rooster, take that bag of rope on the floor there and get out on the roof and help them out.”
“What?” David looked terrified. “You mean outside?”
“Yep. And quickly. Before we get shot down.”
Tink-tink.
“Now! Chickadee and I are going to fly cover for you.”
David looked to Becky for advice. “No,” she said. “It’s crazy.”
He nodded. Then he unclasped his harness, grabbed the bag, and jumped.
The instant David cle
ared the skid, Striker poured on the power and tore away from the building. “We can’t just leave them!” Becky yelled.
“We’re not leaving anybody. Now do me a favor and shoot back.”
She looked out the door at the ground. It was chaos, a mass of people running and shooting. “I don’t know who to shoot at,” she said.
“It’s easy,” Striker said. “If they’re on the ground and they’re not next to a cop car, shoot them.”
The blast launched the cell door across the hall with such force that the heavy wooden door was reduced to shards and splinters.
“Listen up,” Jonathan said. “This is the last step in the mission. If we screw it up, we’re dead.” He paused for a beat to make sure they were all listening. “Follow me, do precisely what you’re told, and we’ll have you out of here in the next couple of minutes. Give me a thumbs-up if you understand that.”
It was important that hostages were actually dialed into what was going on, and there was no better way than to elicit an affirmative action like a thumbs-up. He got three of them. Perfect.
“Big Guy, leave the rucks,” Jonathan instructed as he shrugged out of his own. There was nothing in them that couldn’t be replaced, and perhaps more important, there was nothing in there that would trace back to them. “How many claymores did you set?”
Boxers held up two fingers.
With Jonathan’s two, that made four, and he’d definitely heard four explosions, so they were good to go. If that were not the case, since the next people to pass in front of the motion triggers would likely be good guys, he’d have had to manually trigger them before they left.
Without waiting for instruction, Boxers lifted Nicholas into a one-shoulder fireman’s carry on one side, and held Josef’s hand with his other as he led the way to the ruined cell. Yelena followed, leaving Jonathan to carry the still-unconscious Alexei.
Shattered stone and wood littered the corridor, making footing treacherous. It didn’t help having to negotiate the route with an unconscious man on your back. Lingering smoke and dust stung his eyes.
Jonathan turned the corner into the blasted cell and saw that the explosion had done its job and then some. The wall was gone, but so was half the floor, creating a chasm that dropped to the level below. The roof had partially collapsed as well, creating a cantilevered section of timber that tilted into the cell and presented a kind of ramp that started six feet off the floor and sloped at a steep angle to the roof. Beyond that, they had a clear view of the night sky, marred as it was by flames and roiling smoke.
He laid Alexei onto the floor.
“Now what do we do?” Yelena asked.
Outside, the shooting continued. Rounds weren’t impacting close to him or his team, so Jonathan ignored them.
“We’ve got to get up there,” Jonathan said.
“On the roof?”
“Then Striker will bring the chopper around and we’ll climb aboard.”
Yelena looked at the distance to the edge of the cantilevered ramp, then shook her head. “I can’t reach that.”
“That’s where having Big Guy along becomes a big advant—”
Movement on the roof caught Jonathan’s attention. It was a face, and Jonathan reacted instantly, pushing Yelena away and stepping in front of her as he shouldered his MP7.
“Jesus, no!” the face yelled. “It’s me. David. Christ, don’t shoot.”
“How the hell did you get on the roof?” Jonathan yelled in anger. David would never know how close he came to having his head blown off.
“Striker dropped me off. I’ve got rope.” He displayed a hundred-fifty-foot drop bag of climbing rope.
“There’s a tail of rope sticking out of the end of that bag,” Jonathan said. “See it?”
David looked, then nodded. “Got it.”
“Okay, hang onto that tail and drop the bag down here.”
David dropped the bag, and a length of rope unspooled as it crashed to the shattered wooden floor.
“If I remember my sat photo right,” Jonathan said, “there’s a chimney coming through the roof about a hundred feet behind you.”
David craned his neck and then nodded. “Yes.”
“Take the end of that rope—take as much rope as you need—and tie it around the chimney. Then come back and tell me you’ve done that.”
“I don’t know knots.”
“I don’t care. I give not a shit. Any knot will do.”
David disappeared from view, and the rope continued to unspool. If it came to the point where the end of the rope emerged from the bag, Jonathan would grab it and pull. Otherwise, they only needed enough to climb ten feet.
He figured it couldn’t take more than a few minutes.
Becky didn’t realize that Striker was intentionally trying to draw gunfire away from the roof of the prison until five or six bullets pierced the floor of the helicopter within eighteen inches of her foot.
“You need to shoot back,” Striker told her through the intercom. “Otherwise, we’re just a target in a shooting gallery. Make ’em pay for that shit.”
Becky pointed her rifle out the door and pulled the trigger, launching a string of bullets that may or may not have hit anything. Striker said to shoot, and so she shot. That didn’t mean that she had to intentionally kill. Those people down there were every bit as frightened as she was. From their perspective, they were defending themselves from an attack. And from their perspective, she was the attacker.
Who was she to pass judgment on their lives from three hundred feet above their heads?
Her magazine went dry and she dropped it out, replacing it just as she’d been taught. This one, too, would be sprayed into the night. She couldn’t imagine living with the knowledge that she’d taken another person’s life. Think of the children they’d never have. Of the grandchild—
A bullet passed within an inch of her head, shattering the earphone on her left side. It was a bone-jarring noise, loud enough that it might have deafened her. And as luck would have it, she’d seen the muzzle flash of the gun that had sent it her way.
Using all the lessons she’d been taught from Big Guy, she settled her sights on the spot where that shot had come from, and she emptied a thirty-round magazine into that space.
The monster of a man—they called him Big Guy—lifted Joey under the arms and put him onto the slanting bit of roof that he said led to safety. “Just go to the top,” the man said, “then lie flat against the roof until someone tells you that it’s safe to move.”
Big Guy said that as if it were easy as pie. In reality, there was nothing to hang on to. Big Guy lifted him onto this sagging slab of roof, but after that, it was all about not losing your grip as you did a lizard crawl up to the point where the roof flattened out.
Joey forced himself not to think about the cold or about the noise or about the fires that burned all around him. He forced himself not to think about the stink of what he knew had to be dead bodies.
The men who came to save him had apparently killed a lot of people to deliver him from danger. He decided not to think about that, either, but to concentrate on the fact that he was this close to being out of this terrible place.
He belly-crawled up the incline of the collapsed roof until it flattened out. When he got to that point, a guy he hadn’t seen before put a hand on his shoulder.
“Hi,” the guy said. “I’m David. You’re almost home.”
Within a few seconds, Josef’s grandmother was next to him on the roof. She reached out with both arms to embrace him in a hug. “Josef,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. We’ll be safe in a few minutes.”
God, I hope that’s true, Joey thought. Because for right now, everything pretty much sucked.
“You’re next,” Jonathan said to Boxers.
The next step was an engineering challenge. Even though Boxers could easily carry Nicholas on his back to make the climb, there was no guarantee that Nicholas would have the strength to hang on. And the penalty for lo
sing his grip was death.
“You make your way to the top,” Jonathan said, “and I’ll tie the PC into a rescue knot. Once you’re in position, haul him up and send the rope back down for our Russian friend. I’ll bring up the rear.”
Big Guy didn’t respond, but rather eased Nicholas onto the floor and started to climb toward the roof. From a distant part in his brain, Jonathan wondered if the cantilevered roof flap had the strength to hold Boxers, but he realized it didn’t matter. They’d all know at the same time in just a minute or so.
He stooped to go eye to eye with Nicholas. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m hurt,” Nicholas said. “Badly. I think he might have gotten a kidney.”
Jonathan gathered the rope. “Don’t worry too much,” he said. “You’ve got two. That’s a hundred percent overkill.” He’d meant it as a joke, but Nicholas was either not in the mood, or in too much pain. Maybe just plain scared.
The rescue knot is a complex bit of ropesmanship, starting with a bowline on a bite for the legs, and then evolving into an elaborate knot around the chest. It took time, and that was the one commodity of which they were quickly running out. He aborted fancy in favor of simple.
“Listen up, Nicholas,” Jonathan said. “I’m going to slip a rope over your head and under your arms, and then Big Guy is going to lift you to the roof. Do you have the strength to keep your arms crossed under the knot so you don’t slip out?”
“Sounds like I don’t have a choice.”
“Oh, you have a choice,” Jonathan said with a smile. “But the alternatives all suck.” It was nowhere near as secure as the correct knot, but sometimes you just had to take chances. Jonathan tied a simple slipknot into the end of the rope and he slipped it into place around Nicholas’s body. A glance toward the roof delivered a thumbs-up from Boxers, and it was time to go. Within seconds, Nicholas was airborne, his feet dangling as he was hoisted up.
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