by Tom Clancy
His blood ran cold, but he began moving up the hall with the knife at the ready.
He heard the man questioning his wife in the bedroom now. He spoke English, asking, not for the first time, apparently, where her husband had gone. He sounded frustrated, nearly desperate, and the crack of an open hand across flesh and a cry from his wife told Yacoby the intruder wasn’t getting any answers from Hanna.
Arik again checked the light in the bathroom for signs of a presence there, but still there was no movement. He had to clear the two rooms on his left before making it down the hall, but just as he began moving to check his office, a man appeared out of the black, stepping into the hallway. He wore a black ski mask and was several inches taller than Yacoby. Their eyes met for an instant, Arik sensed a weapon in the man’s hand, but he didn’t take time to focus on it. Instead, his own hand shot out like a piston, he stabbed the man in the arm but lost his grip as his victim spun away. Yacoby recovered by lunging forward with the dexterity and skill of a Krav Maga master. He pushed the slung machine pistol away from the masked man, then ripped it out of his hands and turned it around, pointing it high in his adversary’s face. The masked terrorist tried to raise his hands to defend himself, but Yacoby thrust the short-barreled rifle forward, shoving the flash hider into the man’s eye socket, knocking his head back again. As the gunman stumbled back into the bedroom the Israeli leapt on him, covered his mouth with his hand, and flipped him around on the floor. He snapped the man’s neck with a wrenching twist, severing his spinal cord.
The Israeli lowered the body the rest of the way to the floor, then quickly unfastened the Uzi from its sling and turned to check the room for other threats.
The office stood empty, but when he looked back up the hallway a figure appeared in the doorway to the master bedroom. Arik could barely make it out in the moonlight, but it was clearly an adult male, and he saw the man’s arm rise quickly in front of him.
In that instant Arik knew he’d have to fire the Uzi, and this would alert every one of the armed men on his property. He aimed and squeezed off a single round, and the armed intruder in the doorway spun away with a cry and grabbed his neck as he fell.
Arik began running up the hallway now, knowing he was racing against time to get to his family. He held the smoking Uzi out in front of him as he spun toward the last darkened doorway on the left, checking for any movement. This was his children’s room, and he was glad to find it empty. That they weren’t here meant to Arik his wife had had time to move them into the bathroom off the master bedroom.
He had just started to turn back to check the hall bathroom behind him when he heard a man scream. Before he could turn around, a figure flew out of the bathroom, crashed onto his back, and pitched him forward, slamming him into the wall of the hallway.
The machine pistol spilled out of his hands as he went down. . . .
DOM ASSUMED THE GUNSHOT above would bring at least some of the men from outside into the house, but he had no idea which door they would come through. His eyes shifted back and forth between the kitchen door and the front door down the hall, certain he was about to engage the enemy, but not quite sure how he would go about it.
It was quiet for only a couple seconds, and then came a wild scream and the crashing thuds of men slamming into one another in the hallway directly above him.
As Dom kept an eye toward the living room, the front door flew open and a man burst through. Dom could see little more than a single figure; he didn’t have time to register if the man was carrying a weapon, but he wasn’t going to take that chance.
He threw the paring knife in his right hand overhand as hard as he could, aiming high at the man’s face, because he knew a thirty-foot throw would take a lot of power off the strike.
The steel blade buried itself into the intruder’s torso, just below the collarbone, and the man stumbled back, out through the doorway. Dom saw him collapse in a heap in the front yard before the door shut on its springs.
Now the kitchen door creaked behind him. Dom had just turned to the noise, ready to check this attacker for a weapon, but a burst of automatic fire settled the question for him. Dom dropped low to the ground, dove behind the island in the middle of the kitchen, and then he crawled across the floor, trying to keep the island between himself and the man in the doorway.
Another long burst of gunfire told him the intruder had not moved from the doorway, so Caruso stayed low, came around the island to the man’s left, and then rose with the carving knife in his right hand. He covered the last five feet in a headlong dive, plunged the blade handle-deep into the man’s side, burying it between two floating ribs, and he body-checked the armed man into the open pantry by the door, using his hip and arm to keep the Uzi directed away from him.
The man cried out in pain; as Dom’s face pressed against his nylon mask, he could smell the fear and the sweat, and he thought he could smell the sea in the fabric of his clothing. Almost instantly, Dom felt the taught muscular body begin to soften as the armed attacker’s brain went into shock. Dom knew the blood loss would take some time to kill the masked intruder, but already he was able to pull the Uzi out of his weakening hands. The gun was slung around the man’s neck, however, and Dom had just begun to unfasten it when the kitchen door opened again, less than five feet behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw a man in the doorway silhouetted by the moonlight. He held an Uzi high in front of him toward the room and was clearly surprised to find a target just feet away on his right. He swung his gun in Dom’s direction.
Dom gave up on getting the Uzi off the man he’d stabbed; there was no time. He reached back behind him for something he could throw. This was his training taking over. He had been studying Krav Maga, living it for the past month, and he’d learned from Arik to use whatever tools he had at his disposal to disable an imminent threat.
Krav Maga is not a classically attractive martial art, but its beauty lies in its cold efficiency.
Caruso was hoping to get his hand on a knife. Instead, his fingers closed on the rim of a metal pot, and he swung it around, threw it through the air, striking the Uzi and the hand holding it and knocking the shooter off target.
He rushed to the attacker, drove a fist to the man’s midsection, and then tried an elbow to the face that glanced off and did no damage.
The armed man tried to back away to raise his gun again, but he was blocked by the island in the middle of the room.
Dom threw another punch at the man’s torso. It connected, but now the attacker managed to get around the edge of the island and back up and away.
Caruso flung a rolling pin from the island at the figure in the dark, striking him in the chest and knocking him back on his heels into the refrigerator on the far side of the room.
He knew he’d bought himself no more than a second, so he fell back into the pantry now, onto the man with the knife in his ribs. Dom grabbed the Uzi, spun it around, pulling the dying man by the sling around his neck, managing to get the gun out in front of him at hip level. He squeezed the trigger. Flame filled the pantry and the kitchen as he fired fully automatic, a long burst toward the space the armed man by the refrigerator occupied. Sizzling ejected cartridges bounced off cans of vegetables in the pantry and then rained back down on Caruso, singeing his bare torso, but he kept firing. He’d spent the past two hours in near total darkness, so the sustained flash of the short-barreled weapon felt to his eyes as if he had been enveloped by the sun. He could see nothing of his target, so he kept the gun up and the trigger pressed and the bullets spraying until the weapon emptied.
Dom’s eyes were completely whited out by the muzzle flash, he rubbed them with his free hand, and he shook his head in a futile attempt to battle the ringing in his ears. It took him a moment to find the target through his burning pupils, but he was happy to see the masked man lying dead on his back on the floor.
Dom knew he had to get upstairs to help Arik, and he also knew he needed a loaded firearm to do it, so he started
to kneel down to take the Uzi from the dead man, but just as he did so, another man burst through the kitchen door.
This man wore no mask, he was clean-shaven, young, and he looked wild-eyed and terrified. But he was close, contact distance to Caruso, who was kneeling with his back against the kitchen counter.
Caruso rose and punched the man in the midsection with his empty hand, and his fist slammed into a surprising hardness there. It felt like the intruder was wearing a chest rig of ammunition for a rifle under his jacket, presumably as a way to keep it hidden from view.
Dom punched again with his other fist, but he didn’t make the same mistake twice. This time he went for the young man’s face, striking him in the jaw and knocking him back onto the island in the center of the little kitchen.
Dom knelt quickly, scooped up the Uzi, and fired a single round into the forehead of the man lying on the island. The machine pistol barked in his hand and the room lit with the flash, then all was dark and silent again. He started to run for the hallway to the staircase, but he stopped himself, turned, and looked back at the dead man.
It only now just registered. This man had carried no weapon, but he’d worn something heavy and solid on his chest.
Why the hell would he have a chest rack full of Uzi mags if he didn’t have an Uzi?
Dom rushed back to the body, ripped open the zipped windbreaker, and then backed away suddenly, slamming his hips into the kitchen counter behind him.
In front of him in the dim light lay a dead man wearing a suicide vest. Long, fat rows of explosives had been stitched into gray canvas. Loose wires crisscrossed the entire apparatus.
A gasp passed Caruso’s lips. “Arik.”
WHILE DOMINIC HAD BEEN fighting for his life downstairs, Arik Yacoby had been doing exactly the same in the upstairs hallway. The man who’d jumped him from behind was now dead, his neck, jaw, and skull a wreck of shattered bones. Yacoby was hurt, too, his lips and nose dripped blood, but he pushed away the pain and exertion of the fight in the tight
space, and he felt around to find the Uzi in the dark. He grabbed it with his left hand.
Behind him, his wife screamed in Hebrew. “Arik! Neshek!” Gun!
Yacoby dove to the floor of the hallway, spinning as he dropped, and he landed on his back as a burst of fire from his bedroom sent supersonic lead up the hall in his direction. The rounds went over him, he was flat on his back holding the tiny machine pistol pointed between his bare feet and up the hall. He focused on the flash and, careful to fire only aimed semiautomatic rounds from the fully automatic weapon to avoid hitting his family, he shot at the light.
He felt his own Uzi being ripped out of his hands, and realized a round from the gunman up the hall had struck his weapon and knocked it away, probably damaging it as well. But the gunfire from his bedroom ceased and, through the ringing in his ears, Arik thought he heard the unmistakable sound of a micro-Uzi hitting and bouncing on the wooden floor.
Below him, he heard ferocious fighting. A long spray of automatic rounds, the cries of a man and the crash of bodies, but his mind was on his bedroom and what he would find there.
He leapt to his feet and ran for his family.
DOMINIC CARUSO SPRINTED INTO the living room, heading for the stairs. As he passed the open front door he looked to the ground, expecting to see the first man he’d taken down in the engagement with the thrown paring knife. But the ground in front of the door was empty. Caruso spun into the stairwell, hoping against hope the man with the knife in his chest was not now heading upstairs, and wearing a suicide vest.
The stairwell was clear. Dom began taking the steps three at a time. As he climbed he shouted, “Arik! Bomb vest!”
YACOBY HAD MADE IT into his bedroom, where he found his wife tied to a chair in the center of the room, her tousled hair hanging into her face. She looked up at him in the dark.
“The kids are hiding in the linen closet. They’re fine.” She gestured with her head toward the en suite bathroom near where he stood.
Arik was relieved that his family was alive, but he needed to get downstairs to help his student. He knelt down to grab the micro-Uzi on the floor next to the dead man.
As he knelt he heard a noise behind him. He looked over his shoulder up the dim hallway, and saw a young, clean-shaven man staggering toward him. Through the faint glow from the moonlight coming from the bathroom, Arik could see a knife protruding from the man’s upper-left chest, but still he managed to move quickly. Arik spun toward the man, raising his gun as he did so.
From the staircase behind the man he heard a scream from D, his American student: “Arik! Bomb vest!”
Yacoby had put the sights on the center of the man’s chest, but knowing he was wearing a vest changed everything. He shifted his aim to the man’s head as fast as he could and, while doing so, he shouted, “Hanna!”
DOMINIC HAD ALMOST MADE it up to the second floor when a wave of light and heat engulfed him from above. His brain registered the fact he was airborne, he felt weightless for a moment, and now the incredible noise overtook him. He knew he was falling backward; his bare back made glancing contact with the wooden staircase and his legs flew up above him, and he did a reverse somersault and continued his roll all the way down, crashing chest-first through the wooden banister and then flipping to the ground floor, where the back of his head slammed down on the teak floorboards.
Stunned by the impact, it took him seconds to regain an understanding of where he was and what was happening. He choked on smoke and his eyes burned, but he pushed away the pain and focused on getting back in the fight.
He squinted in the thickening black air and pulled himself up to his feet, then moved toward the staircase again, but his legs gave out and he dropped onto the lower steps. As he tried to pull himself upward by his arms he looked up and saw roaring flames pouring out of the first floor, and above the flames, the night sky.
It looked as if the entire roof of the stairwell and hallway had been blown from the bungalow in the explosion.
Dom slid back to the floor, collapsed unconscious onto his back, fingers of black smoke enveloping his prostrate body.
3
CARUSO AWOKE TO JOLTS of pain and waves of nausea, convincing him only after significant delay that he had not burned to death.
He opened his eyes, looked down, and found himself in a hospital bed. This wasn’t the first time he’d regained consciousness since passing out in Arik Yacoby’s burning home, but each time he only managed to lift his head, to catch a quick glimpse of the ambulance or the hospital hallway or the room he was in, and then drop his head back before drifting off again.
He didn’t know if this process had been going on for a couple hours or for a couple weeks.
As his eyes cleared a little more he realized a doctor was standing at his bedside. A dark-skinned Indian with gray hair and a youthful face, the doctor wore scrubs, not a white coat. He took Dom’s pulse, placing his fingers on Dom’s left wrist while he checked his watch. When he finished he looked up at Dom’s face and seemed surprised to find his patient looking back at him.
“Well, hello, sir. I’m surprised to see you awake. You are still under sedation.”
To Dom, the doctor’s lilt sounded almost musical, but he wondered if this was just the effect of the drugs in his system.
The Indian began listing a litany of injuries. “You have suffered a slight concussion. Not serious, but expect headaches for a few days. Maybe weeks.” He looked down at his clipboard. “Otherwise, bruises and cuts, mostly. A few significant. Eleven stitches on your forearm. A small piece of shrapnel from the bomb, we suspect, but it passed all the way through, so we don’t know for sure. A puncture to your right pectoral. It was a metal screw. We got it out. Not deep. We’ve cleaned you up, shouldn’t be an infection, but you’ll want to watch those injuries. There is significant bruising across your—”
The patient interrupted the doctor. “The Yacobys?”
The doctor did not answ
er him directly. He only stepped to the side, revealing to Dominic the presence of another man in the room, sitting on a cheap recliner by the door with his legs crossed. He was middle-aged, with slicked-back black hair and a full mustache, and he wore a dark suit and tie.
“Hello, John.”
Caruso did not reply.
“John Doe. That is your name.” He eyed the American with an expressionless, almost tired face. “Unless you would like to give me another. No? John Rambo, perhaps?”
“Who are you?”
“I am Detective Constable Naidu.” He stood up. “And I am here to ask you some questions.”
“The Yacobys?”
Naibu shook his head back and forth; there was an obvious lack of sensitivity in the gesture. “Dead.”
Dom closed his eyes and shook his head. “No.”
“Yes,” he corrected. “All four of them. Along with seven others at the scene. Nearly a dozen dead bodies, and you, my young American friend, were the only survivor.” He leaned forward with eyebrows raised. “Miraculous, wouldn’t you agree?”
Dominic didn’t answer. His mind was on the Yacobys. Dar. Moshe.
“You were pulled out of the burning building by neighbors, at great personal risk to themselves. You did not ask who saved you, but I thought you would care to know.”
Caruso stared off into space. Arik. Hanna.
“We know from the neighbors you were a guest in the home of the Yacobys, they saw you coming and going, but you had no identification on you when you were found. They said they thought you were American, and by your accent, I agree. But that is all I have. If there was anything in the home . . . passport, visa, U.S. driver’s license. It was burned in the fire.”
Caruso fought the images in his head, did his best to push them away just as he did his best to ignore the pounding headache that grew with each word out of Naidu’s mouth. The sedation seemed to be wearing off by the second.