Smith fired a round into his chest as he sprinted away from the warehouse and toward the water. The man went down hard but immediately started to get back to his feet. The body armor that was beneath his black sweater wasn’t as effective at stopping the close-range round that Smith pumped into his face when he ran past.
Another bolt released behind him and he instinctively went into a crouch, hearing it hiss by just to his right. Too close. It was another fifteen yards to the edge of the water and the chance of him making it alive was starting to look remote.
He abruptly cut left and sprinted toward an open fishing boat pulled halfway onto the sand, diving headfirst into it. The brief illusion of safety, though, exploded in the crack of shattering wood and a powerful impact to his right shoulder blade. There was a stainless steel cooler in front of him and he crawled behind it, aware of the strength draining from his limbs. As he rolled painfully onto his side, he heard the crossbow bolt jutting from his back scrape against the bottom of the boat.
A few lights had snapped on in the buildings around the shore, and the shadows were dissipating at about the same rate as the adrenaline that was keeping him going. He could hear cautious footsteps moving toward him in the sand and he unscrewed the suppressor from his gun, firing a few blind rounds in the general direction of his attackers.
The unsilenced Glock would be enough to wake the rest of the town, but probably not in time to scare off the men who were about to kill him. The water was clearly his best chance for survival.
The briefcase was too heavy to swim with so he pressed his thumb against a hidden screen behind the handle and was surprised when the locks actually popped open. Klein had redeemed himself.
Smith wasn’t sure what he was going to find, but a ziplock bag full of what looked like garbage wasn’t high on his list. An odd thing to die for, he mused as he stuffed the bag into a pocket in his cargo pants and fired a few more noisy rounds over the cooler.
The pain in his back was becoming debilitating and it took him more than five seconds to slither to the back of the boat. Gritting his teeth, he grabbed hold of the outboard motor and used the leverage to throw himself over the stern.
The water was deeper than he anticipated—good for cover, bad for drowning—but the pain was so intense that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to swim. Finally, he forced himself to start kicking and managed to pull with the arm that would still move. The gun dropped from his hand as he tried to parallel the surface, not sure how deep he was but hearing impacts in the water. Crossbow bolts at the very least, but probably also bullets now. Stealth had been lost and there was no reason for the men hunting him to be bashful.
He went deeper. Or at least he thought he did. His sense of direction was being swallowed by blood loss, pain, and lack of oxygen. When his head started to spin, he followed the bubbles up, breaking the surface only with his mouth as he gulped desperately at the sea air. When his mind started to clear, he brought his head far enough above the surface to look back in the direction of the beach. Three men. All wading in after him.
Smith dived again, swimming awkwardly and trying to ignore the drag from the bolt in his back as it carved into muscle and bone. He came up only when he began to feel consciousness slipping away and to make sure that he was still heading in the right direction. Unfortunately, that direction was out to sea.
He had no idea how long he’d been in the water when he finally had to admit that he couldn’t go any farther. Surfacing, he rolled onto his back and bobbed helplessly in the swells. Based on the lights that were still coming to life on shore, he’d only made it about four hundred yards. The silhouettes of people coming out of their homes were easily discernible, but all he could hear was the hypnotic whisper of the water.
A quiet grunt brought Smith back to alertness and he swam away from it, using a modified sidestroke with his right arm floating uselessly below the surface. He was barely moving, though, and it was only a few seconds before a hand closed around his ankle.
Smith flipped onto his back in time to see an arm burst from the water, knife in hand. He kicked at his attacker’s head, connecting solidly enough to make the man miss but not enough to do any damage. With no other option, Smith took a deep breath and grabbed the man’s knife hand. Then he dragged him under.
The man started to fight, but Smith was too weak to do anything but try to control the knife. He wrapped his legs around the man’s waist, their proximity and the density of the water taking the sting out of the blows he was absorbing.
The advantage Smith was counting on was that he had been floating motionless for some time while his opponent had been swimming as hard as he could in pursuit. The hope was that he’d already been in oxygen debt when they’d gone under.
His lungs started to burn, melding with the rest of the pain racking his body, and he looked in the direction he thought was up to see only blackness. Eventually, the pain started to fade and he felt an unfamiliar sense of peace taking hold of him.
The air was bubbling slowly from his mouth when he became aware that the man had stopped fighting. What did that mean again? What was he supposed to do?
Primal instinct more than anything prompted him to push the limp body away and kick. He felt himself floating gently upward toward…what?
The air flooding back into his lungs was accompanied by the return of the unbearable pain in his back and the reality of the hopelessness of his situation. The silhouetted crowd on the bank had grown, but there were still two men in the water coming toward him. Neither seemed to be as good a swimmer as their friend whom he’d sent to the bottom, though.
Smith rolled onto his side again, moving away from shore and into the darkness.
When he couldn’t go on anymore, the lights from shore had disappeared—either turned off or lost in the swells. He floated on his back, feeling the crossbow bolt being tugged by the current. The pain had faded. Like everything else. Blood loss, most likely. His head felt like it was full of gauze, and he was having a hard time remembering where he was. In the ocean, but which one? Or was it a sea? What was the difference between the two again?
A sudden burst of light appeared in front of him and he squinted into it. Not particularly bright, but startling in the complete darkness. Voices. The lapping of water against a wooden hull.
A final, weak burst of adrenaline brought him momentarily back to the present. The contents of the briefcase were still in his pocket and he had no idea what they were or of their importance. No idea what kind of threat they could pose in the wrong hands. But the fact that he’d been sent, that Klein was involved, suggested that capture wasn’t an option.
He had no strength left to escape the boat or to fight the men in it. And that left him very few alternatives.
Smith exhaled, reducing his buoyancy, and felt the water close in on top of him.
One mission too many.
2
al Qababt
Egypt
The street market was packed with people, jostling, laughing, and haggling for everything from rugs to Tupperware to stuffed animals. It was late morning and the heat of the day was already descending, mixing the stench of sweat with the aroma of spices and cooking meat to create an atmosphere that felt oddly comfortable to Randi Russell.
It was ironic that Muslim countries had become the easiest environments for her to operate in. Covered head to toe in a hijab, surrounded by the constant roar of Middle Eastern life, she could move around with almost ghostlike anonymity. For all the chauvinistic morons looking right through her knew, she could have a rocket launcher strapped to her back. But why would they worry? What could they possibly have to fear from a woman?
“Okay, Randi. He’s right in front of you. No more than four or five yards.”
She acknowledged the voice in her earpiece with a short nod, though she wasn’t sure it would be visible from her teammates’ position in a multistory hotel to the east.
She felt sweat break across her forehead, but it wasn’
t from the sun beating on her black headgear. It was a mouth-drying, heart-pounding sense of childlike excitement. Four or five yards. She’d started to doubt whether she’d ever get this close.
Charles Hashem had grown into a top al-Qaeda operative whose evil was matched only by his infuriating competence. It had taken the CIA two years even to place him in Egypt and her another five grueling months to find her way to this particular market on this particular morning.
“Got him.”
His gray shirt, sunglasses, and average-length black hair didn’t provide much to differentiate him from any other man in the street, but she’d had every existing photo of him stuck to her wall for the last year and a half. Oddly similar to her bedroom as an early teenager except that fantasies of being whisked away by Luke Perry on horseback had been replaced with dreams of ending the life of the man hurrying toward a narrow souq in front of her.
It was a shame she didn’t actually have that rocket launcher. Seeing his burning body parts cartwheeling down the cobblestones would have been one of the happiest moments of her life. And she had her camera phone with her. Best CIA Christmas card photo ever.
“Can we get him to a viable extraction point?” the voice in her ear said. An unwelcome reminder that her mission was significantly different from her fantasy.
“Are you kidding?” Randi mumbled, counting on her throat mike to pick it up. “Look around me. Eight hundred people would see us toss him in the van and then where would we go? Traffic’s moving slower than I am.”
She lost sight of him and panicked for a moment, pushing ineffectually through the unbroken mass of people ahead. She was stronger and faster than most men, but her 125 pounds just didn’t provide sufficient inertia to penetrate.
A man whose coffee she jostled looked down at the stain on his shirt and grabbed her arm. A moment later he found himself falling backward over an enormous bag of pistachios with that hot coffee now in his face. She slipped away in the commotion, knowing that no one would ever think a woman could have done such a thing to a big strong Muslim man.
“Damn it! Where is he, Bill? Talk to me!”
“Don’t get your panties bunched up, Randi. He went under the awnings to your left while you were screwing around with that guy at the nut stand. We’re temporarily blind, so get your ass in there. If we lose him after getting this close, we’re going to be the ones getting water boarded.”
Again she felt the panic rising in her. Hashem was not only brilliant at staying out of America’s crosshairs, he had a master’s in biology from Stanford, where he’d graduated with a 3.95 average. Losing him was not an option.
A familiar profile flashed into view behind a pile of colorful scarves and she had her target again. “I see him. Moving in.”
“To do what?” The wariness was audible in Bill’s voice amid the static. “Like you said, we have no shot at an extraction here. You’re just going to have to stay with him until we get to a workable location.”
Despite the fact that there were numerous women on the street who were utterly indistinguishable from her, Hashem was eventually going to figure out that he was being followed. And when he did, his six-foot, two-hundred-pound frame was going to cut through the crowd at a speed she simply couldn’t match.
“Come on, Bill. You know as well—”
Randi fell silent when a powerful hand clamped onto her arm and spun her violently around. She went reflexively for a knife hidden beneath her hijab, but then recognized the coffee-stained shirt and burned cheeks. Pistachio man.
Normally she’d have used her considerable language skills and a little groveling to quietly extricate herself from the situation, but today she just didn’t have time to screw around.
In a smooth motion not quite fast enough to look unnatural, she grabbed one of the fingers wrapped around her upper arm and broke it. The man howled in pain and dropped to one knee, cradling his mangled digit.
“Someone help!” Randi shouted in Arabic. “I think he’s having a heart attack!”
People surged in, once again ignoring her and allowing her to back away.
“Where is he?” Randi said when she broke free. Ahead of her the souq split. “Which way?”
The fact that there was no immediate reply was understandable. An assassination had specifically not been authorized, for two reasons. The first was hard to argue with: an opportunity for an extended interrogation would likely turn up all kinds of interesting information. The second, though, was more bureaucratic. Charles Hashem was an American citizen.
And not just some disaffected naturalized immigrant. He’d been born in Cleveland to a nice Persian couple who were grateful as hell to America for giving them the opportunity to escape Iran. In fact they were the ones who had originally tipped off the government about their son’s increasingly radical political and religious leanings.
The next words she heard were muffled, as though Bill was talking to his partner. “No, no. About an hour from now.”
Randi smiled. An hour from now would be 11:00 a.m. Hashem was at her eleven o’clock.
She weaved gracefully, using skill to make up for her lack of heft, until she was right behind him. In place of the RPG she was sadly lacking, she retrieved a pen from her pocket and clicked the top, making sure to keep it pointed away from the innocent people jostling by.
Hashem jerked at the sudden sting in his lower back but by the time he looked back, Randi had put two people between them and was heading for a stand lined with barrels of olives.
The pain would subside in a few seconds and the tiny red mark in a few minutes. The microscopic pellet, though, would be slowly dissolving in his bloodstream. When it finally broke down it would release a poison that would cause what she had been assured was an extremely unpleasant death.
Word was that the whole thing was based on some kind of ocean-dwelling predatory snail. What would those guys at Langley think of next?
3
Northeastern Japan
White.
The color of heaven, right?
If so, Jon Smith could come to only two possible conclusions: either he was still alive or God had made a serious clerical error.
His vision came into focus slowly, but it didn’t take him long to realize that the second hypothesis was correct. No angelic choirs. Just a ceiling.
Smith tried to sit up but the throb in his back became an excruciating dagger, forcing him to ease back onto the mattress. His torso seemed to move more or less the way it was supposed to, and after a quick evaluation he confirmed that his fingers and toes did the same. No paralysis. He carefully rotated his head through the few degrees it would move, taking in his surroundings and trying to get a read on his injuries from the nature and severity of the pain.
His new home wasn’t a hospital room. Too nice. Gracefully curved and scrupulously finished wood beams framed a modern take on Japanese paper screens, the expensive contemporary furniture was tastefully sparse, and the artwork was bright and incomprehensible. There were no windows to tell him if it was day or night and little sound but the humming of the machines to his left.
He squinted at the monitor next to his bed and noted the heart rate and blood pressure numbers. Neither was great, but neither suggested he was flirting with death.
Smith closed his eyes for a moment and then tried to take a deep breath, hardly getting any air in at all before the pain forced him to stop. So he could add a few shattered ribs and possibly a broken scapula to the crossbow-bolt-size puncture wound in his back.
As his mind continued to sharpen, he examined the IV running into his arm and tried unsuccessfully to read the label on the bag. Antibiotics, fluids, and probably an opiate-based painkiller judging from the familiar nausea he was feeling. More concerning was the tube inserted between his ribs and draining into a jar on the floor. Collapsed lung. Outstanding.
He reached weakly for a stethoscope hanging from the IV stand and put it in his ears. Steeling himself for the pain, he forced himself to
take a moderate breath with the instrument pressed to his side. It sounded like the lung was inflating. Not exactly news worth celebrating, but better than the alternative.
He’d given up his job as a MASH doctor in favor of microbiology a long time ago, but they weren’t skills that faded easily. Given the facts, his prognosis was solid. With a lot of time, a lot of rest, and proper care, he could potentially make a full recovery. The fact that he wasn’t in a hospital, though, made him doubt he’d ever get those things.
There was a rustling on the other side of the only door to the room and Smith watched it slide open. He considered feigning unconsciousness, but it seemed likely that he was being monitored by video and that his mysterious benefactor wouldn’t be so easily fooled. Besides, what was the point? Daring escapes were pretty much off the table—he’d be lucky to crawl out of there in his condition. Better to figure out where he stood than to lie there and wonder.
The Japanese man who entered was in his midforties with a compact frame, intermittent gray hair, and a waistline barely being held in check. His suit and haircut were both extremely expensive but neither looked natural on him. Even through a morphine fog, Smith could see that this guy hadn’t been a beneficiary of the prep school and private university upbringing he was trying to project. More likely, he’d risen to the top the old-fashioned way: by killing his competitors.
“Who are you?” Smith said. His voice came out little more than a croak and the man picked up a cup, holding it while Smith sucked on the straw.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
His English was better than expected. Maybe he’d actually outsmarted a few of those competitors after all.
Smith eased himself back into the pillows, letting the pain play out on his face to provide an excuse not to volunteer information.
The Patriot Attack Page 2