Her heart was pounding. She’d always thought that expression was literary license, but now that it was happening to her, rocketing, sending shock waves soaring throughout the building, she knew it was for real. Breath short, sweat glands fully engaged. But hearing preternatural. Sight, even in this Stygian darkness, supernatural. With her children in danger, Hope Gardner was Superwoman.
A door was just up ahead. In her excitement and confusion, Hope wasn’t exactly sure where it led to, but she didn’t care. Gingerly, she opened it onto a storage room, which she knew led out into a secondary hallway near the back of the school, one that made a T-intersection with the main hall. The gym was nearby.
She reached for the hallway door, praying that it wouldn’t make a sound, that there would be nobody on the other side, that…
Then she heard the screams. And she knew, in an instant, the way mothers always do, that it was the voice of her daughter.
The hell with what was on the other side.
The hallway was dark and empty. Only the soft glow of the emergency lights kept it from being completely pitch black. In the distance, at the other end of the long central hallway, she could hear the sound of running footsteps.
Hope hugged the wall as she crept forward. She wanted to run, she wanted to cry out, to tell Emma that Mommy was coming for her, that everything was going to be all right, but she knew a single word from her would probably mean both their deaths.
There were voices, shouting loudly, somewhere beyond the gym. That must be where Emma was.
Hope dropped to her hands and knees, creeping through the darkness. The lights were on in the gym, casting a small patch of light on the hallway floor via the windows. She would have to go right past it.
In the distance, the sound of violence, a body falling. She moved faster, nearing the gym now.
She knew she shouldn’t look, shouldn’t risk it, but she had to look. Swiftly, she crossed the hall, sidling up to the gym doors, straightening her legs, rising.
She glanced, catching only a glimpse. But what she saw almost made her throw up.
Children, bound; teachers, with guns trained on them. And explosives everywhere. If the cops or the FBI or whoever tried to rush the school, everyone would die. And Rory was in there, somewhere.
She ducked back down and kept moving.
It didn’t take long for Milverton to find Drusovic and Emma. Under any rational circumstance, he’d never take a bollocks crew like this one into battle, but that was the whole point of the exercise: they were all chattel, born to die and, as far he was now concerned, the sooner the better. Well, he could help move the timetable along.
He ripped open the door. Drusovic was where he had expected to find him, on top of the girl. Milverton’s left hand shot out, grabbing the Albanian by the scruff of his neck and yanking him backward. As Drusovic fell, Milverton delivered a punch to the man’s right cheekbone; a little higher, on the temple, and it would have killed him, but Milverton needed to keep him alive for the moment. A kick to the groin put Drusovic on the floor.
Milverton turned to Emma. Luckily, the savage hadn’t tried to undress her; quickly, he restored some semblance of order to her disheveled clothing and looked into her eyes to see if she was all right. The girl was speechless, her eyes wide and her mouth trying to move, but no sound emerging. Milverton swept her up in his arms, carrying her effortlessly under one arm.
With his free hand, he hoisted Drusovic back to his feet. “You sodding arsehole,” he said, “I ought to rip your fucking balls off and feed them to the nearest pig. And then you can explain to Allah why you won’t be shagging any more virgins.” Since he was, in fact, holding Drusovic’s balls in his hand, this was not an idle threat. “Now pull your pants up and let’s get on with it.”
Milverton carried the girl into the darkened hallway. She had fainted, which was good. He opened the door to one of the classrooms and laid her down on a bench. There was a quilt nearby, so he threw it over her. Then he stepped back into the hallway.
Hope saw the door at the far end of the hall open, and she almost screamed when she saw a man emerge with a girl under his arm. Her girl. Her Emma. Unconscious, or…
Don’t think about it. Calm down. The man carrying Emma was wearing a suit. He wasn’t one of them. As she watched, they disappeared into a classroom.
She had to get closer. She rose to her feet—
And then the same door opened again and another man tottered out. From the way he was moving, she thought he might be drunk. There was a small alcove with a couple of public telephones in it; she ducked into it, sliding down and beneath the phones. Nobody used them any more—everybody had cell phones now—but no one had gotten around to removing them yet. Thank God.
The man staggered past her, oblivious. She thought she could hear him muttering something, but it was a language she couldn’t remotely understand. Hope watched him as he went back into the gym.
Now!
Hope had no idea what she was going to do. She had trusted in God and luck, and so far neither of them had let her down.
She was at the door now, her ear pressed up against it, desperately trying to catch some sort of sound that might tell her that her daughter was still alive, was okay. Nothing. She pressed a little closer, a little harder, straining…straining…
The door opened so fast she almost fell over.
Hope cursed herself for a fool who thought she could somehow make a difference. She should have listened to her inner voices of reason, the ones who were always telling her that violence never solved anything, that all we had to do to get along was to just give up. It was that simple.
Instead, she had listened to just one inner voice. The voice of Emma and Rory’s mother. The voice that understood innately that, no, it was not just that simple.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m a teacher.”
“So am I,” a man said. The voice wasn’t familiar. She peered through the darkness, but couldn’t make out his features. Then it hit her—it was the man she’d seen that morning. The “substitute.”
“Oh, thank God,” she started to say and then his hand was over her mouth and he was lifting her up as if she were made of balsa wood.
“They’re my children,” she said.
“I know they are,” he said.
“What about Emma?”
“She’ll be just fine, I promise.”
That was when she noticed that he had a gun.
Hope supposed—but not being a firearms expert, didn’t really know—that she’d catch the flash of the bullet’s charge a nanosecond before it blew through her skull. She wondered whether her last vision would be of her life, or of her children’s unlived lives. And suddenly, passionately, she wanted to know. Whatever was going to happen, she wanted to witness it. Life or death, win or lose, she wanted to be there, with her children, when it happened.
He pushed her back toward the gym, whose doors she could discern ahead of her in the dim illumination of the emergency lights. From the gym doors, it was a straight shot to the front doors of the building, the doors she had seen this morning and eons ago close behind her two children.
The gym doors opening…the noise.
It took her several seconds before she realized it was herself making all the noise. Screaming.
A blow at the back of her head sent her sprawling toward the center of the gym floor. She skidded across something wet and sticky, then realized it was blood. Still viscous and nasty, it clung to her hands and, when she involuntarily wiped her face, to her cheeks. She felt a trickle of something liquid at the base of her skull and didn’t have to touch it to know what it was.
She rolled over on her back, uncaring about the blood that was mingling with whatever was on the floor. Almost immediately, her maternal radar located her son. Rory was bound, eyes wide in horror.
“Charles,” he shouted, “that’s my mom.”
“I know,” said Milverton. Then he turned to the staggering man, the one Ho
pe had seen coming out of the closet. “It’s showtime.”
Chapter Twenty-one
EDWARDSVILLE
Up on the roof of the Community Christian Church, Devlin assembled the gift that Bartlett had planted for him. It was a bolt-action, single shot Barrett Model 99, chambering a round that flew from the aluminum alloy barrel at 3,250 feet per second. If your enemy was nicely lined up in a row, you could put a single round through twenty skulls seriatim, which is what Devlin called firing for effect.
You could take out a given target from the distance of more than a mile, and put the bullet right on his nose. Even at that distance, the target’s head would atomize, which was exactly the point. Better yet, it could punch through a concrete wall three feet thick and kill whoever or whatever was on the other side.
Something was happening at the school. Movement at the front doors. In their heedless lust to cover the story, no matter the consequences, the news crews jostled forward, lights blazing. What did they care if their pressure resulted in more deaths? It all made great video. At least for once they were making themselves useful, because with that much light between him and his targets, there was zero chance he’d be spotted.
Bartlett’s men, he knew, would be disguised among them at this point, fanning out, surrounding the building, applying their explosives. As the Israelis had learned at Entebbe and the Germans at Mogadishu, surprise was the attacker’s best friend, which meant that in less than ten seconds they would have to blow out the walls and lay down a withering enfilade as the other Xe ops came in with concussion grenades and small arms. Sure, some kids’ ear drums would pop, but if all else went well that would be the extent of the injuries. Because, by now, using wall-penetrating radar and the real-time imaging from NSA overflights at 40,000 feet, they would know where every terrorist was.
The bombs didn’t worry him much. The Russians had made the mistake of panicking, then charging, giving the Chechens plenty of warning. With nothing to lose, they had popped the bombs and shot the children as they tried to flee. It was a clusterfuck that didn’t have to happen; you could take the Russian Federation out of the Soviet Union, but you couldn’t take the Soviet mind-set out of the Russian. What had worked for Zhukov in Berlin—raw, brutal power—didn’t work in asymmetric warfare.
It was funny, he mused as he took up his firing position: two hundred-plus years after the American Revolution, we were back to square one as far as tactics were concerned. True, the Redcoats didn’t come marching down the middle of the field in serried ranks any more, but in many ways the terrorists were their functional equivalent; what they considered hostages, Devlin and his men thought of as anchors that destroyed their mobility and distracted their attention. You couldn’t shoot a hostage and defend yourself at the same time, assuming you even had the time to choose.
Terrorists never really changed their methods. By keeping their hostages down, immobilized, they thought they could prevent communication and mutiny. What they were really doing, however, was protecting their captives, keeping them alive during the only moments that mattered, the moments of rescue and revenge.
It was all about the OODA Loop. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Rinse, and repeat, until the other guy was dead. About getting inside your opponent’s decision loop, staying at least one beat ahead of him, as if you were inside his head. Which is where one or more of Devlin’s bullets soon would be. The Barrett fired both the .416 and the .50-caliber round, but he preferred the 400-grain .416 round; wherever he put his shot, the man was going to be very, spectacularly dead.
He checked the computer, streaming the coverage. With GPS coordinates superimposed over the grid, he hardly needed a scope, since he could train on what he was seeing on the screen and calibrate accordingly. But even at this distance, it was more sporting to shoot a man while looking at him.
Via the infrared scans and rad sensors, he’d also located the bomb control—a laptop computer that would sequence the bomb explosions. Like a cell phone, a computer announces its presence through mild radiation and wireless signaling. Taking it out would be a tougher shot, because his second round would have to follow the first by less than a second and he had to hope like hell nobody would touch the machine in the meantime. But, if everything went right, from the same angle he could take out Drusovic and then punch a round through the computer before the terrorists could react. And by then, they’d all be dead.
What about the Gardner woman? He’d almost forgotten about her.
Suddenly the news crews’ lights grew brighter. Devlin glanced down at the screen. Someone was coming out, Drusovic probably, to make another statement. Terrorists loved a stage. No time to worry about the woman now.
There were dozens of reporters on the scene. Their trucks kept their distance, but the standup artists were primping and the print johnnies were inching forward, notepads in hand. As he watched, a taxi pulled up on the perimeter, and a man got out. Another civilian, most likely a parent. Just what he needed, another wild card. He lost sight of the man as he was swallowed up by the crowd of cops, firemen, EMS workers, and FBI agents.
Devlin’s videophone leapt to life. His heart sank. He was inside the Oval Office, looking at Army Seelye and Secretary Rubin. This was such a breach of security protocol that he wanted to shoot Army on the spot. “Listen up,” said his boss. “The president’s about to make a statement.”
Tyler was sitting behind his desk. “I speak now to Suleyman Drusovic. Yes, we know who you are. And know this as well—we will not let you harm our children.”
Devlin closed his eyes so as to skip the look of satisfaction he knew would be on the president’s face. He opened them again as Tyler continued. “In our pluralistic society, there is room for all religions—and, indeed, for no religion at all. Therefore, in the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful—”
Devlin couldn’t believe his ears. Couldn’t believe the president was actually mouthing these words. Couldn’t believe that Seelye and Rubin would stand there, letting him say the Muslim incantation.
“Let it be known that, as president of the United States, I would welcome the visit of an Imam of your choice, here, in Washington, to discuss our differences and hopefully find a way to bridge them. But you must release the innocent hostages at Jefferson School immediately, board your helicopter, and be on your way. You have five minutes.”
That’s really telling him, thought Devlin. He put down the videophone, picked up the rifle, and looked through the sight.
Drusovic was emerging from the school, with a smirk of triumph on his face. He had heard, and he knew what he had heard: the president of the United States starting to heed the call to Islam. The Infidel-in-Chief of the Great Satan.
Drusovic surveyed the assembled media horde, his satisfaction obvious. Then he clapped his hands. The school doors opened and there was Hope Gardner, a bomb strapped to her body. Drusovic was holding the detonator in the firing position; if he took him out now, the bomb would explode the instant it slipped from his dead hand.
“In the name of Allah and the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, I welcome the president’s statement. Nevertheless, this unclean woman is an intolerable provocation.”
Hope stood there, blinking in the lights. She knew what was happening, and had lost all fear for her own life. But what she had witnessed in the gym cried out to be made public. She could not speak, and she could not move, but she knew inside that she had to warn the president, the country, the world, before anything else happened.
“This spy”—Drusovic shook Hope roughly—“is a pawn in the service of the United States government. She cannot be acting alone. Therefore, she will meet the fate of all spies under international law and the Geneva Convention. She will be executed.”
With a single squeeze of his right index finger, Devlin could blow the man’s head off. But Hope had injected a note of instability into his perfect closed system; rather than being inside the terrorists’ OODA loop, she had forced him out
of his.
And where the hell was Milverton?
Bartlett’s voice was soft in his earpiece: “You got him?”
Devlin’s reply was a purr. “She’s wired. He’ll blow her away.”
A puzzled pause. “So what? We’re good to go.”
“Hold off a sec’. Something’s happening.”
The doors were opening again. At first no one appeared, and then a boy was thrust forward so hard he went sprawling, picked himself up and rushed toward the woman. It was Rory.
Hope turned, instinctively. Rory tried to throw his arms around his mother, but Drusovic shoved him roughly away.
“Come on, Tom.” Bartlett’s voice.
“She’ll take the kid with her.”
“But the rest live. I make that trade any day.”
The memories were raging in his head. Of a little boy having to watch his mother die. “Let’s hope you never have to.”
Drusovic was in the middle of a rant now, working himself up into a photogenic lather. “For too long we have watched our brothers die under the yoke of the Zionist entity. For too long, we have tolerated the intolerable. Let the world know henceforth our tolerance of tolerance is at an end.”
“Hurry the fuck up…”
“Wait—” said Devlin. Little Rory, dusting himself off, was doing something remarkable.
He was attacking the terrorist.
Rory hit Drusovic from behind, punching, scratching, clawing, and kicking. With the detonator in one hand and Rhonda Gaines-Solomon’s mic in the other, Drusovic tried to kick Rory away, but the little kid wouldn’t stop even when one of the kicks landed square in his belly.
“Son of a bitch,” whispered Eddie. “That kid’s got balls.”
Devlin saw his play. “Sure your guys can take ’em all?”
“Locked on with penetrating radar. They’ll be dead before they can fart.”
Michael Walsh Bundle Page 11