by Jon Land
Which left the one poised behind the candy counter, assault rifle now protruding from the cracked glass, muzzle just starting to flare when McCracken hit the display case with the full force of his hose. He was ready with his pistol in the next instant, ready to fire. But the force of the water not only obliterated the remainder of the display case, it concentrated the collection of ruptured, nail-sized shards of glass into a single storm of deadly sharpness that obliterated the man’s face like a million needles pricking at once.
The final man, meanwhile, jerked the collapsed shelving from him and, covered in red sauce, lurched upright to steady himself anew. McCracken had already dropped the hose by then, SIG held in its place. He pulled the trigger and felt bullets pouring out the barrel until the slide locked open, the magazine now expended and the sauce mixing with even darker blood as the terrorist slumped down the wall against which he’d slammed.
McCracken swung toward the door, where Quincy Market was still emptying in a steady stream. Bodies littered the clearing floor like stray clumps, several writhing and moaning, the awful carnage still only a fraction of what it could and would have been. He heard sirens wailing, the exaggerated nature of his immediate senses dissipating now, normal operation slowly being restored.
Then he spotted the juggler, the mime, and the balloon hat maker sprinting for one of several huge black SUVs that had made a parking lane for themselves on Congress Street.
McCracken sprinted for the door, bursting out into the unseasonably warm sunlight just as Johnny Wareagle rounded the corner through another exit door and the lead SUV tore out into traffic. The whole thing felt surreal, but in a nightmarish way. The spill of bodies everywhere was being tended to by brave bystanders with the approach of real help still minutes away. The air seemed to smell of gun oil and smoke, but McCracken knew this to be an illusion fostered by the scents now embedded in his nostrils. The scent of blood was real enough, strong and distinct, the stench of it evoking memories of both victories and defeats, of life and death.
Never pretty, McCracken knew, but this was about as ugly as it got. His rough estimate had the total number of dead at twenty, maybe, with somewhere around three or four times that number wounded. All in the space of little more than two minutes from start to finish—that was it, in stark contrast to the false assumption that bloody battles like this went on and on. Far from it. The worst and deadliest firefights often lasted even less.
“We’re not alone, Blainey,” Wareagle said, drawing even with him.
“Figured that out all by myself, Indian.”
“Zarrin… . I recognized her.”
They both heard the blare of a horn that sounded like a duck quacking and swung their gazes from the escaping SUVs to an awning strung over the street that read BOSTON DUCK TOURS, just as one of the boat-shaped vehicles tore toward them across the promenade with Zarrin behind the wheel.
CHAPTER 57
Boston, Massachusetts
“Hold on!” she yelled to McCracken and Wareagle after they’d climbed on board, voice raised about the wail of the approaching sirens.
Then Zarrin twisted the tour vehicle with BEANTOWN BETTY stenciled across its side into traffic, impervious to the squeal of brakes and grinding screech of metal on metal as vehicles swerved and braked to avoid it. Few realized these touristy amphibious vehicles, that normally included a cruise down the nearby Charles River as part of the attraction, actually enjoyed a rich military history going back to World War II. A vehicle that was half boat and half truck that could run on land and water. “Betty” herself was the first “DUCK,” purchased twenty years ago without the expectation of being pressed back into this kind of service.
“Notice I haven’t asked what you’re doing here,” McCracken said back to her, holding on to the rail separating him from Zarrin in the driver’s seat.
“I was supposed to kill you.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“You should be happy I’m here.”
“I’m sure you had your reasons.”
“We’re both being set up, McCracken. That means we’re on the same side.”
He looked toward Wareagle. “Lucky us, Indian.”
Which drew a disapproving glance from Zarrin. “Why do you call him that?”
“Oh, jeez,” McCracken muttered, shaking his head as Beantown Betty, a seventy-foot, open-air vehicle with seating for upwards of forty, barreled down Congress Street after the convoy of SUVs.
Zarrin’s driving wasn’t subtle, crashing the old girl through vehicles placed inconveniently between her and the fleeing SUVs containing the surviving makers of a massacre.
“Someone offered me a fortune to kill you,” she resumed.
“Don’t tell me; the Iranians.”
“They tend to hold a grudge when you destroy their dreams.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Nothing. I never had any intention of trying to kill you. But had I refused the assignment, Colonel Kosh would’ve sent someone else.”
“Kosh? That little shit?”
“None other.”
“So why go through all this trouble to save my life?” Blaine asked her.
Zarrin kept her eyes focused on the road ahead. “Because I owe you a debt I’ve been waiting to pay for years.”
“Debt? We’ve never even met before.”
“No, but our paths have crossed, McCracken. Once.”
“Where?”
“The Palestinian refugee camp where I grew up, when I returned from training with the KBG.” She finally looked from the road to McCracken, matching his face to the man she’d taken for al-Asi’s bodyguard all those years ago. “The day you wiped out the gang and terrorist leader who killed my piano teacher.”
Beantown Betty slammed through orange barrels laid before a construction site and surged on.
CHAPTER 58
Boston, Massachusetts
“I remember now, a favor for Colonel al-Asi …”
“I saw you that day, McCracken. I knew you were the man who did it as soon as the colonel told me someone had done my work for me. I didn’t know who you were then; I didn’t learn that until years later. But you saved my career before it even began.”
“Hope that means I did you a favor too, Zarrin.”
Zarrin ignored a red light, slamming a pair of vehicles from Beantown Betty’s path, pinballing them aside. The SUV convoy dipped and darted along the Boston side streets approaching the revamped Southeast Expressway to avoid traffic congestion that had sprouted up out of nowhere. The loop took them down Milk Street and then veered Betty onto the much narrower India Street that left her scraping off side mirrors and ping-ponging off fenders with shaved and dented steel left in her wake.
If McCracken had his bearings right, the loop was taking them all the way around the rear of Faneuil Hall, the fleeing SUVs trying to avoid the patches of traffic further snarled by rescue and police vehicles tearing toward the complex from all directions. They trailed the SUVs down what had once been called Surface Road when it provided access to the Route 93 ramps, and was now a dug-out route perpetually under construction.
That road spilled out onto a fork breaking toward traffic stalls in both directions, the SUVs having squeezed their way to the front of the pack and just turning onto yet another street where movement came only in maddening fits and starts.
“We’re gonna lose them,” McCracken said, angling himself closer to the driver’s seat as if intending to seize the wheel.
“No, we’re not,” Zarrin told him and twisted Beantown Betty up onto a sidewalk construction zone, squeezing her between a row of mothballed parking meters and a fenced construction site for a building waylaid by the stalled economy.
The move ended at a row of Jersey barriers lined to further cordon off the construction zone. No way Betty could find a way around those
, but the SUVs were snared in an interminable traffic jam on the connecting street running perpendicular to this one.
“Indian,” McCracken called.
“With you, Blainey,” Wareagle said, already positioning himself to leap down from Beantown Betty.
“I know; don’t call him that,” McCracken said to Zarrin. “We’ll be right back.”
Zarrin watched them, the impossible unfolding, two men who were legends within the world she was lucky enough to still inhabit. Her own mind registered the logistical limitations, the absurdity of attacking through stalled traffic with no room to maneuver and minimal space to negotiate. Space was the actual key in such deadly encounters, something only those seasoned enough to have survived this long realized. Because, in a confined area lacking such space, even the best could find themselves trapped and vulnerable. Might as well be in closet.
Don’t do it, Zarrin willed.
As if they could hear her thoughts, McCracken and Wareagle leaped atop vehicles as soon as they swung on to the adjoining street, one in each lane, and began charging toward the stalled SUVs, jumping from hood to trunk to roof in a crazed rhythm. The blaring of horns intensified, slammed by drivers perhaps jealous of the fact these men were moving.
When they were halfway to the SUVs, doors opened and gunmen spilled out. The mime and the juggler looked absurd with weapons blasting away in their hands, the balloon hat maker only slightly less so. The SUVs’ drivers were firing as well, errant shots spider-webbing windshields with telltale pings or clanging off steel. Terrorists used to slaying innocents, their sensibilities softened by the ease of such kills in comparison to taking on professionals who’d been here before.
McCracken and Wareagle both fired as they dipped, darted, and leaped. Pistols flared in their hands, muzzle flashes incredibly flat and uniform, no different from firing from stationary positions. Their bullets dinged steel and showered glass up into the opposing force’s eyes, making Zarrin wonder if that had been the purpose of the shots. Either way, their next twin volleys spun the enemy gunmen about, seeming to corkscrew them into the pavement. Zarrin’s precise mind tried to impose order onto the sight, but chaos had seized her thinking along with the street now filled with panicked passengers and drivers fleeing their cars, a few holding cell phones at their ears or out to record what they were too afraid to stay and watch themselves.
For the last stretch, McCracken and Wareagle looked like dancers, floating through the refuse of their gun smoke. They seemed to move in slow motion in direct counterpoint to the ugly, dented roofs and hoods they left behind. Zarrin didn’t know when the last enemy gunman fell, only that no more were standing, a realization accompanied by her hands twitching and spasming on Beantown Betty’s wheel. No more fooling or tricking her body, which had turned on her once again.
She worked to relax them, but her fingers locked up solid on the steering wheel, betraying her as well.
McCracken and Wareagle landed on the pavement in unison amid the panic of feet churning away from the area. Pistols trained downward now, since all members of the opposition were either dead on the pavement or soon would be. Several were propped up against a fender, bumper, or tire. A few still seemed to be breathing, but none were moving or brandishing weapons.
Blaine noticed the eyes of the terrorist disguised as the white-faced mime fidgeting wildly and crouched even with him, while Johnny checked the interior of the vehicles for a shooter potentially laying in wait.
“Do you speak English?”
Bloody froth bubbled from the man’s mouth. He began quivering, shock setting in as a precursor to death.
“Talk to me and I’ll save you!” McCracken followed, making a show of tearing the man’s shirt open, as if he were about to commence CPR. “Talk to me and—”
Too late. A flood of air-rich froth from a lung hit dribbled between the man’s lips, his eyes locking open and sightless. He slumped over to the left, exposing the shoulder that McCracken had already bared and the small but distinguishable tattoo all but lost to the blood.
75th …
It couldn’t be, yet it was.
And it all made perfect sense.
CHAPTER 59
Boston, Massachusetts
The Seventy-Fifth, McCracken thought, charging back toward Beantown Betty.
As in the famed Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. As in headquartered at Fort Benning, Georgia. As in a crucial expeditionary force for J-SOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, former American soldiers in the guise of terrorists.
As in exactly what Blaine had expected as soon as Folsom had explained the message his undercover agent had left for them.
“Take the wheel!” Zarrin implored McCracken, as he and Wareagle lunged back upon Beantown Betty. “Listen to me, the terrorists, they’re—”
“Americans,” Blaine completed for her. “I figured that out all by myself.”
He watched her fingers finally releasing their grasp, exertion tightening across her features, her hands looking like frozen claws when she finally got them free. He didn’t argue, just replaced Zarrin behind the wheel and twisted Betty’s nose toward a gap between two parked cars parked on either side of the corner.
The gap proved slighter than he’d estimated, forcing Beantown Betty to slap the cars aside to slide between them in search of a hole in the stalled traffic. Word of the link behind what had just transpired here and what the attack at Faneuil Hall sent massive numbers of fresh police and National Guard vehicles converging on the area. McCracken knew their only chance for escape was a mere football field’s length away, within clear sight if not reach.
So he steamed Betty forward diagonally across the street, snowplowing traffic-snarled vehicles out of his way, while the sirens grew louder and flashing lights clearer from all directions. A pair of police cars screeched to a halt nose to nose to block his path, but McCracken slammed right through them, too, the waters of the Charles River glimmering straight before him.
McCracken knew he needed a ramp to assure a smooth entry for Beantown Betty, but, short of that, braked the old girl and pulled back just as her nose crested over some barrier fencing. Over she went on a ten-foot drop, nose handling the rattling impact with surprising ease. The old girl leveled out quickly with barely a rattle, her engine sputtering before catching again, alone in the river waters.
McCracken drove Beantown Betty up on the meager shoreline on the other side of the Charles River, tapping the old girl’s dashboard fondly before climbing up to street level with Zarrin and Johnny Wareagle. There, they melted into the pedestrian traffic crowding the sidewalk amid the parking lot of vehicles lining the Cambridge side of the river as well.
Everywhere, people’s attention was riveted to their smartphones, following the news that continued to break in real time just across the Charles. McCracken separated himself from a throng and was searching for clearest route out when he collided with a Boston policeman.
The man recoiled, eyes meeting Blaine’s as he jerked a hand for his gun belt. McCracken moved in, a single lunge, ready to stop him from drawing his pistol, when the cop drew a smartphone from his pocket instead.
“Can you believe this?” the cop asked him, flicking the screen to life.
Leaving McCracken to shake his head. “What’s the goddamn world coming to?”
CHAPTER 60
Washington, DC
“It’s a goddamn mess is what it is,” Robert Carroll said to Colonel Alvin Turwell, who was seated stiffly next to him on a bench on the outskirts of the deserted mall.
“We both lost men, good men,” Turwell told him. “Now we need to get past it.”
“Am I missing something here or are you not getting that this whole mission of yours has gone to shit?”
Carroll was a bullet-shaped man whose narrow head, sitting atop a wide, thick frame, seemed to come to a peak. When he was angry—common
place in a career spent mostly in hallways walked by few others, where fates and futures were determined—he arched his neck in a way that made the peak seem higher. “An even dozen casualties on that goddamn island and they’re still adding up the tally in Boston. Cat’s about to be let out of the bag, Colonel. That means it’s getting close to the time to head for the hills.”
“Boston’s been contained.”
“And I’m supposed to take your word for that?”
“Make the calls yourself. Bodies will be in friendly hands before anyone can get a whiff of something off.”
“As in the truth, as in you trying to tread water in a shit storm.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re Homeland Security.”
“I run the Gap,” Carroll said in a slow southern drawl. “Security arm of Homeland that this rogue bastard McCracken you’ve unleashed used to work for.”
“I unleashed him for a purpose. Seized an opportunity. It’s called a mission protocol.”
“But that purpose didn’t pan out, did it? In fact, you even fucked that up royally and put our entire end game in jeopardy,” Carroll said, making sure to stare Turwell right in the eye.
“I respectfully disagree,” Turwell responded, trying not to sound as defensive as he felt. “It was just a setback and a minor one at that.”
“Setback? Minor?” Carroll folded his arms, thick overcoat bagging at the sleeves. “McCracken’s been pulling off shit like this since Vietnam. I imagine you’ve heard of that war, right?”
“Enough to know the rules of engagement beat what I experienced in Afghanistan,” Turwell said, not bothering to disguise his bitterness.
Carroll shook his head. “Man, you are just full of all them fancy West Point terms, aren’t you? Thing is, there’s not a hard drive in the world that can hold all of McCracken’s and his Indian buddy’s exploits. Thanks to them, you got shit backing up in your toilet, and I’m the man with the plunger.”