by A. J Tata
He saw fingers curl around the door, envisioned a man’s arm, its length, the shoulder to which it was attached, and the body and head locations based upon that calculus. As the man began to move the door, he nosed his MP5 around the corner, which was when Mahegan fired two rounds through the door. It was a cheap pressed-paper door, which was no kind of door for securing living quarters from a basement. Mahegan had backed away from it, because it afforded no protection, only concealment.
The MP5 flipped end over end like a football during a kickoff and actually bounced against Mahegan’s leg. He fully expected the next and last shooter to begin spraying and praying into the stairwell, so he snagged the MP5 and leapt to the basement floor, turned the corner, and felt the turbulence as bullets whipped into the basement.
The man most likely knew he was a lone gunman now and had neighbors and cell phones to worry about, as well. As Mahegan was moving toward the basement exterior door, a hand grabbed his ankle.
A voice whispered something, which was drowned out by the fusillade.
He said nothing and hoped she would get the message that talking was not the best option at the moment. Bullets continued to rain down the funnel of the stairwell, ricocheting off the steps and the floor. He was hopeful that they would not need the computer equipment for anything else, as it was taking a beating.
He felt the hand around his ankle tighten, perhaps with fear, perhaps as a result of injury and pain. He was at a disadvantage being right-handed and using the left side of the stairwell for cover. Instead of being able to aim from a protected position, he would have to expose more of his body if he wanted to take a measured shot that would count. He had fired seven of his ten rounds, and even though he had the MP5 slung across his shoulder, he didn’t like firing a weapon he hadn’t previously shot. As it was, the Tribal felt light in his hand, its magazine nearly empty. The MP5 probably wasn’t in much better condition.
He heard the slightest ping, which would have been unrecognizable to 99 percent of the people in the world. It was a middle or high C pitch, but nothing musical would follow. It was the sound of the spoon releasing from the body of an M84 stun grenade. He had about three seconds to find cover for whoever had her hand wrapped around his ankle and for himself. He knelt and followed the hand, which was connected to a body beneath the stairwell. The gap was just large enough for him to fit into, because De La Cruz was slender. He smelled her perfume and heard the accented voice.
“I’ve been trying to get you under here,” she said.
He wedged his body up against hers and said in a hoarse whisper, “Close your eyes and cover your ears—”
He had put his pistol on the concrete by his chest and had fingers stuffed into both ears. The flashbang, or stun grenade, was famous for its ability to immobilize people for minutes. The grenade was designed to blind and deafen, creating a tactical gap for rapid entry by assault forces. Its steel body had holes cut into it to allow the sound and light from the explosives out while keeping the grenade from creating shrapnel. There was not much anyone could do but to protect against what it was designed to do, if you knew it was coming.
He felt the whump of the grenade course through his body, as if he was standing next to a building falling in on itself from demolition. The stairwell absorbed much of the concussive force, which was a shock wave that blew two of the wooden staircase treads upward. By closing his eyes, he prevented the flash of the grenade from blinding him. And he could handle the smell. The only question was, would the grenade create a fire? He had used the flashbang hundreds of times, and on rare occasions fires had started simply because of the proximity of the blast to something flammable, like a wooden staircase.
He didn’t smell a fire, and he didn’t hear anyone coming down the steps just yet. He opened his eyes and noticed that one of the treads was clean off the supporting risers. He could see and shoot through the gap.
He saw a flashlight arcing back and forth through the wafting smoke. De La Cruz was trying to struggle against him, but he forced his body into her, pushing her against the wall, trying to make her shut up.
He heard the first footfall, then the next. The flashlight was focused outward, looking for a shooter in the distance. The purr of the MP5 sang out, and he heard bullets raking the computer equipment and the far wall.
Two more steps and another burst of MP5 ammunition shattered the far window next to the door. He began to wonder where Layne Constance was. As if he had summoned her, she appeared at the bottom of the stairs, walking slowly, staring up at the man with the gun, whose feet were on the stairs just above his head. Layne’s face was ashen in the glow of the flashlight, like a horror mask. The MP5 or the stun grenade had wounded her. His guess was the random fire had found her.
“Please forgive me,” she whispered. “Beso. Beso de la muerte.”
Mahegan looked at her face, and she was not looking up at the shooter, but directly at him. Her face was eye level with Mahegan’s a short ten feet away. The shooter’s flashlight left her face and then focused on the open plank of the stairway.
She had just muttered the phrase “Kiss of death” in Spanish. For what was she seeking forgiveness? he wondered. Her unwitting divulging of information to Franco?
The wood was too thick to shoot through, but he placed the pistol against the step he thought the shooter was on and fired two rounds, saving his last bullet for a clear shot.
The shooter stumbled and leapt from the stair to the basement floor and landed atop the wounded Layne Constance. After rolling off of her, he spun to one knee, the other splayed out, as if he couldn’t lift it.
One of the rounds must have caught him in the leg, but he appeared to be a fighter, as his aim was directly at Mahegan’s face until Mahegan pushed off the wall and slid onto the concrete basement floor. When Mahegan stopped sliding, the shooter’s ability to track his MP5 to his large body mass was not as good as Mahegan’s ability to put the last bullet in the shooter’s head.
He fell forward onto Layne, who was lying on her back, as if waiting for the crime-scene chalk fairy to come and draw an outline. Mahegan wasn’t convinced she was dead, but she didn’t have much time if she was alive.
De La Cruz peeked her head out of the cubby beneath the stairwell that had been their saving grace.
“Let’s move now,” he said.
He flipped the Iranian terrorist off of Layne and found the pulse in her neck.
De La Cruz was moving toward the door when he said, “Not so fast.” He wanted to be the first one out the door. He had pocketed his empty Tribal but still had the MP5. Carrying Layne in his arms, he could see where she had been gut shot. A bullet could do too much damage down there, making it challenging to repair everything to stop the bleeding.
Stepping into the night air, he sucked in the fresh breeze, trying to get the cordite and smoke out of his lungs. Despite the fact that no fire had caught yet, the smoke had been significant. He backtracked the way Misha had led him in, through the Daniels’ backyard, and they came out onto the street precisely where Casey Livingstone was parked.
He saw Misha’s face pressed against the window and was glad to see that she was wearing her glasses. He reached forward and secured the strap to her sweatshirt. She recognized her mother in his arms, and she turned away as he approached.
Casey popped the rear door of her SUV and helped him slide Layne into the back.
“First-aid kit?” he asked.
“Here,” Casey said, handing him a small white box with a red cross on it. “It came with the vehicle. Probably not much you can use on her.”
“Drive to the hospital, please.”
“On it.”
De La Cruz got in the backseat with him. He leaned over the seat and began to work on Layne Constance as her daughter, Misha, sat in the front seat, staring straight out the window. Layne was shot in the side. Blood was slowly oozing from the wound. He applied pressure with a wadded-up bunch of gauze pads from the first-aid kit.
&nbs
p; He heard Misha speak in the slightest whisper as she looked at the floorboard.
“Hope she’s dead.”
CHAPTER 20
DARIUS MIRZA
MIRZA CAME TO AMERICA WITH THIRTY MEN, AND NOW HIS TEAM consisted of fewer than twenty trained fighters.
One man was responsible for this: Jake Mahegan. He now had a full dossier on the man. He had been ejected from military service for killing a Taliban fighter who was in handcuffs. His country still kept him on “gray list” status, meaning that law enforcement agencies should watch him carefully.
They wouldn’t need to worry about that much longer.
So he had his cybersecurity experts hack into the Department of Homeland Security database and elevate Mahegan to “black list” status, meaning that law enforcement agencies should apprehend him on sight and use all necessary force to do so.
As he watched the nightmare unfold at the Constance household through the team leader’s camera mount on his tactical vest, he watched his leader get shot twice and then a third time, most likely by Mahegan, in the doorway. The rest of the team was dispatched in short order, and he knew they were not dealing with some average vigilante but with a professional soldier.
He had his assistant, Fazir, make the emergency phone call to the police about a gun battle at the Constance address. The law enforcement was late, though, as he used the Fasr satellite to watch the building. He saw Mahegan and the two women run through the backyard of a neighboring house and then get into the nurse’s car. He already had a full dossier on her, as well, and knew where she lived and worked.
As a backup to the raid at the Constance house, Mirza had ordered two men to raid the nurse’s home and be prepared for when they returned. Mirza’s mind filled with hope. With the arrival of the vehicle, perhaps he could talk to Bouseh face-to-face? Or maybe he would just have his men kill her, if she wasn’t already dead.
He switched to another monitor as he watched his raid team park their SUV across the street, near a supermarket, and then gain access to the nurse’s town house. His lead man on this team switched on his camera, and Mirza could see inside the garage. The woman appeared to have an appetite for wave riding, as he saw the flashlight shine on the many surfboards hanging on the wall.
He switched the satellite back to the Constance house to see if the police could catch Mahegan. Fazir called in a new spot report to the police that an SUV had picked up the shooter at the house and the SUV was heading toward Wrightsville Beach.
His team was inside the nurse’s house and was stationed with good fields of fire on the door leading to the garage, as well as the front door.
He securely texted the team lead. Do not kill Bouseh. Bring her to me.
Understand.
With all his chess pieces in place, he put down the phone and went to the mounds again. His excitement was palpable as he sucked in the warm night air. He used the bolt cutters himself. Of the five captives being held in the mounds, he had looked most forward to killing this one.
“Yes,” he said to the young female college student clawing her way along the dirty cement floor to the back of the old ammunition bunker. “Perfect.”
When she finally could go no farther, Mirza used the blade of his knife under her chin.
“Naked.”
Shaking, the girl refused, so Mirza smacked her and then used his free hand to rip the flimsy shirt and shorts from her body. Then he abused her in every way possible, slaking his perverse desires, before he slit her throat.
He turned her beautiful cheek to the side, and her blond hair fell across his wrist as he carved his Z.
CHAPTER 21
JAKE MAHEGAN
CASEY LIVINGSTONE PULLED AWAY FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD QUICKLY. She mentioned that she had gone back to her house during work and had taken the hour round-trip ride with a friend to Carolina Beach State Park, where she had left her car as they had escaped across Snow’s Cut. She had retrieved her vehicle and asked him what his was doing there in the same parking lot. He told her he would explain later, not wanting to get into the specifics of his swim across the river last night. The state department of transportation had closed the road to one lane of traffic, Casey told him, and while it was a long wait, she had been able to get to her SUV.
She turned onto the road leading to the hospital, and Mahegan immediately saw two black SUVs parked at the emergency room entrance and exit.
“Turn around,” he said. “Enemy at ten o’clock and two o’clock.”
“Damn it,” Casey muttered as she turned onto a side road.
“They could already be watching the hospital. Any ideas?” he asked her, not knowing the city as well as she did.
“I’ve got a lot of supplies at my house. I’m a surgical nurse. I can stitch her up.”
“Your house might be compromised,” he said.
“Might be. But it’s our best shot, or she dies in less than an hour.”
He could hear the tension in her voice.
“Okay. Let’s go by, and I’ll check it out.”
She took shortcuts toward her condo complex. They pulled up to the remotely controlled garage door of her condominium next to the Intracoastal Waterway. She began to press the button on her visor to lift the garage door, but he stopped her hand.
“Wait here,” he said. “Turn around and pull up about twenty yards, just in case.”
He stepped out of the SUV and walked to the side of her condo. Hers was an end unit. She drove the SUV away and idled the vehicle in the alley between the condos.
He had no ammunition left in his pistol or the MP5. He had his knife strapped to his ankle, but little good that would do him with the force that they were fighting. He looked through the gap in the curtain covering the living room window. He saw an anomaly, a dark shadow in the kitchen. It was a man holding a weapon. He eased away from the window, feeling the dilemma of wanting to kill him and his partner, as he was sure there were two of them, and making a clean escape with Misha and her dying mother.
He opted to try to get the women to safety.
As he was returning to the car, the garage door cranked up slowly and loudly. Either Casey had punched the button or the men in the house were curious. The garage door was a newer brand and hummed with efficiency, but it was loud enough to cover any noise from inside the house. He stood with his back to the wall of the garage and leaned in to watch the door leading to Casey’s mudroom and home interior.
The door opened. Two men, dark figures in the black void of the garage, stood and raised weapons, ready to fire.
He withdrew his knife from its scabbard and waited while one of the men walked with his weapon up toward the garage door opening. One man remained at the hallway, covering the other. The mobile enemy commando was scanning the garage with his eyes, looking right and then left. Mahegan detected his rhythm. Right, then left. Right, then left.
One more sequence and the commando would see Mahegan to his left.
The man looked right as he stepped to the edge of the garage. Before he could look left, Mahegan took two long strides and stuck the man in the neck with his knife. The dying man’s MP5 sprayed, and Mahegan turned the man toward his covering partner, who filled his body with lead. The low-velocity bullets didn’t penetrate all the way through. Good for Mahegan, bad for the Persian.
Mahegan grabbed the MP5 from his victim and sprayed bullets at the shooter, causing him to take cover. There was silence for about five seconds, and then he heard a noise from the living room. Then the next thing Mahegan heard was the ping of another stun grenade rolling in his direction. He leapt around the side of the building, with his weapon up.
The commando had opened the window and was leaning out, anticipating his maneuver to get away from the grenade. Mahegan had heard the window latch opening, so he rolled on the ground and came up shooting, shattering glass and maybe hitting the assailant.
He didn’t wait around to find out.
Casey backed up the car, and he dove into the
open back door. Misha was in the front seat, and he leaned forward and covered her with his body as De La Cruz ducked behind Casey’s seat. Casey saw the attacker and sped out of the condominium driveway. The g-forces pulled him against the backseat as bullets began to snap through the rear windshield. He had not killed the man in the window.
Glass rained down on him as he tried to crawl into the back to administer first aid to Layne. He covered her with a beach towel that Casey had crumpled in the back corner of her car. He was mostly worried about glass cutting her face or landing in her eyes if she decided to open them however slightly.
“Eyes closed,” he said to Layne. He wasn’t sure if she was conscious until she slowly closed her eyelids.
Casey’s driving skills moved them quickly out of range of the MP5. De La Cruz was freaking out, perhaps never having been shot at before tonight.
“What the hell is going on?” she shouted from her protected cubby on the floor of the SUV. “Why is this happening?”
Casey ignored her and said, “There’s another clinic about five miles from here. I can work on her there.”
Misha leaned through the two bucket seats and reached with her hand toward Mahegan, the signal for him to give her the burner smartphone.
We should go to Miss Hallowell’s house. It has a big fence. She held the phone out and stared out the window in complacent sanctuary as he read her message. Perhaps it was a part of her autism, or maybe she was in shock.
“Where is Miss Hallowell’s house?” he asked.
She typed the address as if she had accessed a file room in her mind and retrieved the information. He read it aloud.
“I know where that is,” Casey said. “It backs up to Masonboro Inlet. Miss Hallowell must have bucks.”
After twenty more minutes of driving, Casey said, “This must be it.”