by Brad Thor
The safe house was where Heger and his men planned their operations and stored their weapons, vehicles, cash, and other items. Standard operating procedure was to evacuate to that location and wait twenty-four hours for the surviving team members to assemble. Anyone who did not make it would be presumed dead or in custody.
Skovajsa confirmed they would not go looking for any bodies in Zbiroh, at least not right away. It was pointless to go looking while it was dark. What’s more, they had no idea who they were up against or if those same people would be waiting for them to come back and pick up their dead.
That gave the Athena Team an even greater sense of urgency. They needed to hit Heger tonight, while it was still dark and before he realized that Pavel Skovajsa had been taken prisoner.
Based on the information Skovajsa gave them, the team put together an operations plan detailing their plan of attack. To say they were going to be winging it was an understatement. The way these things normally worked was that they first gathered extensive information about the neighborhood, the building they’d be taking down, the strength of forces at the objective, and so on. It was all about compiling the most complete profile possible and then rehearsing till they could do the entire operation in their sleep. That was not going to happen tonight, though.
The plan was something Casey liked to refer to as CBS—cute but stupid. Vlcek made sure they had all the gear they needed. He even provided them with a lower-profile car with Czech plates so that they didn’t have to drive the same vehicle they had been using in Zbiroh.
They changed into their evening wear once again and headed outside to the car. As much as Vlcek wanted to go with them, someone had to stay behind and keep an eye on Skovajsa. The last thing they needed was him getting loose and warning his boss that the team was coming.
Kladno was about twenty-five kilometers north-northwest of Prague and known for its drugs, its gangs, and its rave parties. When the four very attractive women rolled through in their beat-up VW Passat, anyone who saw them would figure they were on their way to a party or to score illicit substances. No one would figure they were there for a fight.
Using Google Earth, Julie Ericsson had mapped out their entry route as well as multiple exits. Without driving by Heger’s safe house, she took a quick spin of the surrounding area just to familiarize herself with it. Rhodes was sitting next to her with a fake rave flyer they had put together on Vlcek’s computer. Cooper and Casey sat in the back seat.
Once she was confident she had a good enough feel for the area, Ericsson said, “Let’s go find ourselves a party.”
They drove two blocks and then turned onto Heger’s street. His safe house was a defunct steel forge that sat among a string of decrepit factories and warehouses along both sides of the street.
The women had to give Heger credit. Most thugs would have had two slabs of beef standing around outside in leather jackets looking imposing. Not him. There was no visible security presence whatsoever. Had they not been given the address, they would have driven right by it.
Ericsson pulled over to the curb and the women all got out. This time, they really were dressed to kill. In addition to the short dresses they had been wearing when they’d left the hotel in Zbiroh, they now had their backpacks with them—a fashion staple for many female rave goers—and a perfect place to conceal their weapons. They had also ditched their high heels and were wearing the boots they’d worn while exploring the Kammler complex. As they had overdone their makeup to top things off, no one would doubt that they were on their way to an underground rave party.
Looking at Cooper, Casey said, “I want everyone to remember to smile. Okay?”
“Why do you always look at me when you say that?”
Rhodes jabbed Alex in the ribs and replied, “Because the I’m a tough bitch don’t bother me face just isn’t in this season.”
“You really think that’s the way I look?”
Ericsson put her arm around her. “You’re just so damn serious all the time, Coop. You need to lighten up.”
Alex looked around. “You realize where we are and what we’re about to do, right?”
Casey wanted to get the team moving. “It’s called acting. Sometimes you’ve got to fake it until you make it. Are we all ready?”
The women nodded, and this time it was Casey who took the lead. Navigating a narrow gangway that led to the entrance of the old forge building, she kept her eyes peeled for security cameras. The team made sure to look as if they were having a good time. They laughed and weaved a little, as if they’d been drinking.
At a heavy iron door, the women adjusted themselves and took a deep breath. The key to success in any operation of this kind was speed, surprise, and overwhelming violence of action.
When she was sure her team was ready, Casey pounded three times on the door and stepped back. Seconds later, a slot opened and a man’s eyes looked out. Casey smiled and tilted her head to the side, her hair spilling over her shoulder.
The man didn’t say anything, but he didn’t retreat inside and close the slot either. Casey raised her eyebrows suggestively and lifted a bottle of slivovitz, a strong Czech liquor made from plums. The man behind the door said something in Czech.
“We’re here for the party,” said Casey.
“Fuck off,” the man said in halting English, before slamming the viewport closed.
“Get a load of the mouth on that guy,” said Rhodes.
Casey walked back up to the door, pounded again, and stood back. Several moments went by.
“These guys have got to be spooked,” said Ericsson. “Four hot chicks and a bottle of booze, but nobody’s opening the door?”
Casey took the rave flyer from Rhodes and pounded on the door again. She didn’t stop pounding till the slot opened and they could see the man’s eyes again. She held up the flyer. “We’re here for the party,” she repeated.
“No party here,” the man replied before slamming the slot closed.
“Everyone get ready,” Casey said quietly. She then wound up and began pounding on the door with a vengeance.
After a minute and a half of her thundering assault, locks could be heard from inside rapidly being thrown back. Cute, but stupid. It worked every time. It also helped that Heger and his men were trying to lie low and didn’t need a bunch of drunk women outside their safe house making a racket.
When the door opened, the very large man on the other side was not happy.
Stepping onto the threshold he spat, “I say you to fuck off. Now fuck off.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Casey slammed the bottle against the side of his head. The man stumbled backward as she delivered two punches, one to his windpipe and one to his solar plexus, driving him the rest of the way inside.
CHAPTER 30
Two men inside the building immediately raced for their weapons. Their sawed-off shotguns would have been devastating had Alex Cooper and Julie Ericsson not shot them both first.
The team was no longer simply carrying “company guns,” as Vlcek called the CZ pistols given to them earlier. Cooper and Ericsson were carrying extremely quiet, .22 caliber suppressed SIG Mosquito pistols, while Casey and Rhodes had suppressed Uzi 9 mms.
Rhodes pulled out a roll of duct tape and bound and gagged the man who had opened the door. He had one hell of a gash across his forehead, but he was alive, which was more than could be said for his two partners. She left him hog-tied, facedown on the ground, and then got back up and joined her teammates.
According to Skovajsa, Heger would be holed up in an office converted into a makeshift apartment near the rear of the building.
The walls of the entrance area where the two thugs lay dead and the other bleeding were covered with posters depicting scantily clad women hoisting mugs of Czech beer. There was a tattered couch, a couple of crummy folding chairs, and a cheap coffee table. Directly across was a very large and no doubt very expensive flatscreen television.
Priorities, thought C
asey to herself as she led her team deeper into the building.
A door at the rear of the reception room opened onto a loading bay area. There were crates and pallets stacked everywhere. Computers, stereos, televisions; Heger seemed to have a little bit of everything. In the corner, parked next to a yellow forklift, were two Kawasaki Ninja motorcycles that probably belonged to the guards. Beyond that were several pumps, hoses, and an array of marine salvage equipment, which had most likely been used to drain the water from the Kammler complex back in Zbiroh.
On the opposite wall were the building’s circuit breakers. It had been decided that Cooper would stay back to shut the power down when she got the signal. Casey had not intended the assignment to be a punishment for what had happened outside the bunker. In fact, it was just the opposite. She was sending the message that what had happened at Zbiroh was water under the bridge and that she still trusted Cooper to watch their backs.
For her part, Cooper didn’t know what to think of the assignment. She knew Gretchen well enough to know that she didn’t do things out of spite, but she felt as if she was being left out of the actual takedown of Heger and, right or wrong, that bothered her.
Clipping their radios to the outside of their packs, the women slid their NVGs, then their headsets on and tested their gear. When everyone was good to go, Casey gave the order to move out.
From the loading bay, Casey, Ericsson, and Rhodes slipped into the main part of the building. It was a large, wide-open space with a glass-paned skylight that ran down the center of the roof. Several of the panes were broken and there were puddles in different spots across the dirty concrete floor.
At some point, a bulldozer appeared to have been brought in to push debris into six or seven large piles. Some of the refuse, like old department store mannequins and broken carousel horses, seemed oddly out of place.
They moved through the building’s cavernous interior like ghosts, remaining in the shadows and not making sound. When they neared the last pile of rubble, they could make out several parked cars, including Heger’s black Range Rover.
To the right of the cars was the collection of offices Skovajsa said Heger had retrofitted. Casey powered up her NVGs and signaled for Ericsson and Rhodes to do the same.
They crept as close to the offices as they could and then Casey radioed Cooper to kill the power. Seconds later, all the lights in the entire building went out and Casey, Rhodes, and Ericsson burst through the main office door. It was then that they realized Skovajsa had lied to them.
There was a desk and a couple of file cabinets, but other than that, the room was completely empty except for a heavily fortified door at the other end. Casey didn’t waste any time. She charged right at it. Ericsson and Rhodes followed.
The three operators were halfway across the room when bullets began coming through the drywall. While Rhodes and Ericsson took cover, Casey went for the door and tried to kick it in. It didn’t work.
With bullets popping and snapping all around her, Casey suddenly thought of the sawed-off shotguns up front and wished they had brought one with them. The subsonic 9 mm ammunition she and Rhodes were using wasn’t going to help much with the hinges on the fortified door.
They had lost the element of surprise and they were taking withering fire. Pinned down at the door, Casey waited for a lull in the shooting and then ran for one of the filing cabinets.
When she got there, she hailed Alex again over the radio.
“Where are you?”
“I’m halfway to your position,” Cooper replied.
“We need you to go back and grab those shotguns from up front. Hurry!”
“Roger that,” replied Alex, who turned around and ran back toward the front of the building.
“When we get back to Prague, Skovajsa is a dead man,” Rhodes said.
Before Casey could respond, the shooting started up again.
“There’s got to be another way in,” yelled Ericsson.
Casey judged the distance to the door they had come in from and then replied, “When I say now, I want you two to make a break for it. I’ll try to keep them pinned down.”
Ericsson and Rhodes nodded.
Casey waited for another lull and when it came, she said “Now!” and began shooting. She put her shots high so as not to accidentally kill Heger. They needed him alive.
As Ericsson and Rhodes tumbled out the door, they were greeted with more gunfire, this time coming from the direction of the cars. With no other choice, they scrambled back inside.
“There are two more shooters outside,” said Rhodes. “By the cars.”
Casey squeezed herself up against the filing cabinet as another round of gunfire tore through the room. “They’re going to make a run for it!”
The bullets came in wave after wave, pinning them down. When they finally stopped, there was the sound of squealing tires outside.
“They’re running,” yelled Casey. “Go! Go! Go!”
Ericsson and Rhodes leaped up from behind the desk and took off with Casey right behind.
When Rhodes peeked out the door, there was a quick burst of fire and then silence as Heger’s last shooter hopped into a car and sped out of a rolling garage door that had been opened.
They had taken two vehicles: Heger’s black Range Rover and a yellow Porsche 911.
Rhodes fired at the vehicles even though she knew they were out of range. Casey was in the process of telling her to cease fire when the trio heard a high-pitched whine quickly approaching.
When Alex Cooper sped by them on one of the Kawasakis from the loading bay, she had to be doing at least sixty miles an hour. By the time she hit the street outside, she was up to seventy-five.
CHAPTER 31
Neither Heger’s supercharged Range Rover nor the Porsche were any match for the racing-inspired motorcycle Cooper was piloting. There was no way they could outrun her, but they could run her off the road. And that’s exactly what the driver in the Porsche tried to do.
Had the driver been thinking, he would have realized that he would be better off keeping his vehicle steady so his passenger could lean out the window and try to shoot her. Twice she saw the passenger begin to poke his head out, but twice he was forced back inside by the driver’s overly aggressive maneuvers.
As the Porsche slowed, Cooper had no choice but to slow down as well. The streets were too narrow to try to pass. One wrong move and that would be it. And while she had slipped on a helmet sitting near the bikes, at these speeds it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
They took three turns, and each time the driver of the Porsche tried to slam on his brakes to cause her to crash, but each time Cooper was ready for him. The only problem, though, was that she was losing sight of Heger and the Range Rover. She was going to have to do something about this Porsche.
At the next intersection, as the driver slowed down and she saw the passenger attempting to come out of his window yet again with his weapon, she decided to make a very bold move. Instead of slowing down, she gunned it.
With oncoming traffic there was not enough room to pass the Porsche, at least not on the street, so Cooper leaped the motorcycle up onto the sidewalk. If one person stepped out in front of her, it would be all over.
She pressed herself tighter against the bike and gave it even more gas. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the yellow Porsche keeping right up with her on the street. It was time to lose them.
An intersection was coming up. She prayed to God that it would be clear. Flying off the curb at over eighty miles an hour, she shot right through it against the light.
There was the screech of tires and the wailing of car horns as drivers slammed on their brakes and twisted their steering wheels to avoid hitting her. But as they swerved to avoid Cooper on her Kawasaki, what they never saw was the yellow Porsche 911 that was speeding right up the street behind her.
The driver of the 911 tried to steer around the roiling mayhem of the intersection and ended up hitting a blue
Smart car. Whether it was the Porsche’s speed, the angle at which it hit, or most likely both, the 911 was sent airborne and slammed into two parked cars and a tree. Both the driver and the passenger were probably killed on impact.
Her head down, Alex Cooper raced after Heger’s Range Rover. She picked up sight of it again, just as it was entering the highway headed west out of town.
At first she had no idea if the Range Rover knew she was back on their tail, but her question was quickly answered as the driver punched the accelerator and picked up speed.
Unlike the team in the Porsche, the men in the Range Rover had a much better plan for handling her. It began with shooting out their own back window. Sitting in the cargo area was a man with two pistols. Taking aim at Cooper, he began firing.
Bullets pinged off the road and two even struck the front fairing of her motorcycle. She swerved back and forth as best she could to avoid being shot.
When the man stopped to reload, she flipped on her high beam and aimed the motorcycle right for him.
It seemed to do the trick, as the man instantly stopped what he was doing and raised his arm to shield his eyes. She knew the ploy would work only once. Rolling the throttle down, Cooper hung on as the bike raced forward.
Nearing the Range Rover, she swung to the left, shooting the beam from the headlight into the driver’s-side mirror so he would be unable see where she was and run her off the road.
With her heart pounding in her throat, Cooper pulled one of the sawed-off shotguns from her backpack, pointed it at a rear tire of the Range Rover, and fired.
The tire exploded in a maelstrom of smoke and black rubber, but it kept going.
Heger’s luxury SUV had run-flat tires. But that didn’t mean he could run forever, especially at these speeds. The question was, who would be forced to stop first? Cooper was determined it would be Heger. And there was only one way to make that happen. She said another prayer, this time that Heger was wearing his seatbelt.