Double Crossfire

by Anthony J. Tata

  There were two women walking quickly, almost like Stepford Wives, their heads turning slowly in unison, searching . . . hunting. They were about a hundred meters away on the other side of the fence that cordoned off the park.

  A minute later, Jermaine was back with a steel rebar rod and a bike lock.

  “This may not fit, but it doubles as a weapon,” Jermaine said. Voices floated upward from the tunnel. They were close. To emphasize that point, the blue dots reappeared on the BLEP, nearly overlapping their position.

  They nudged the manhole cover back into place as a shot pinged off the heavy metal.

  “Hurry,” Cassie said.

  More shots peppered the circular shield, feeling like drumbeats. One bullet escaped from the narrowing gap, whizzing past Cassie’s arm. The plate set in the rim as Jermaine tried to loop the bike lock through the hasp. He nearly had it when the cover thumped upward and rested above the rim. Two of the attackers below had to be pushing up. Cassie forced the cover back onto the rim against constant pressure from below.

  Jermaine slid the lock through the hasp on one side and then the other, snapping it shut. Still, the manhole cover rattled, allowing a gap for pistols to snake through. Cassie kicked at them and then jammed her pistol into the opening, firing five muffled shots that echoed through the tunnel.

  The pressure on the cover ebbed. Her BLEPs still showed blue dots. Maybe it took a while for them to turn red or maybe no one was killed. Either way, Cassie pulled Jermaine to the other side of the brick building. Open fields in each direction. She changed magazines, clicking one out and one in with a magician’s sleight of hand. A playground with swings and slides was behind them. The women at the Metro had stopped and were pressing their hands to their ears.

  Communicating.

  “Listen, Jermaine, you’ve been a huge help. Please go home or wherever is safest for you, because this is about to get really ugly,” Cassie said.

  “Like that was beautiful?”

  If she wasn’t out of time, she would have laughed and hugged him, but the women at the Metro snapped their heads up, looked in their direction, and began running.

  “Go. Now!” Cassie hissed.

  Jermaine saw the women running toward the fence and ran in the opposite direction, toward the playground.

  Cassie edged behind the building. If they enveloped her, there would be little chance of surviving. She needed to pick one off at a distance and deal with the other, however she presented herself.

  Two of the three blue dots in her heads-up display turned red. One was still alive. With each train entering the station, there was a rumble beneath her feet. Nosing around the brick building, she aimed. One woman was on a knee aiming in her direction, covering the woman climbing the fence. At one hundred meters, it was a low-percentage shot. But Cassie was good and she had refreshed her training at the VTC, moving from ten to twenty-five to fifty and then seventy-five meters. She had scored above 90 percent on those ranges, while the instructors yelled at her.

  Cassie waited until the woman had her back exposed to her. The fence climber was about to flip over when her shirt got caught on an exposed twist of chain link. Cassie fired twice and retreated behind the restroom, barely in enough time. Two bullets chipped dusty brick into her face.

  Cassie came around the other side to do battle damage assessment. It took her opponent a second to fire two more rounds at her. The shots sang through the night. Would residents consider this another typical DC gunfight or something different? There was a lump at the bottom of the fence. She’d hit her target. But still, the two blue dots remained. If she could hit at one hundred yards with her pistol, then she might as well try it again. She spun behind the building, this time coming back out the same side. The woman had stayed in the same spot on one knee, her pistol through the chain-link diamond.

  Cassie popped off another two-round burst and spun behind the building. Three shots sprayed the edge of the restroom. Sirens began to wail in the distance. Apparently, not another typical DC evening. She couldn’t continue to trade fire, especially with the one blue dot backing out of the tunnel, and another two blue dots moving quickly down from Congress Heights Metro Station. Four attackers coming at her from three directions.

  The one advantage she had was that she could see their positions, yet they ostensibly could not see her location. Thankfully, Rax had helped her remove the chip, which had seemed like a lifetime ago. Her back stung at the thought, the retrieval incision still fresh. With sirens becoming louder, Cassie had limited options. She was pinned from the east, north, and south by women wanting to kill her. The police would be on the scene in minutes, if not seconds.

  The manhole cover with the bike lock through it loomed large in front of her. Though the blue dot had faded, the attacker from the north was most likely still in the tunnel. If moving at the same rate Cassie had moved, the woman would be out shortly. She would come out of the ramshackle row houses near the back stoop where Cassie had killed the single attacker who had entered through the stairwell.

  Her best play was to reenter the tunnel and backtrack through the tenement. She would still have the river to contend with, but night had fallen, making it much easier to blend into the mayhem as she moved through Ward 8. Retrieving her Leatherman, she low-crawled over the stench and detritus to the manhole cover. She snuck a peek at the fence where the shooter had been; Cassie didn’t see her. Either she had relocated, or Cassie had scored a hit. One dot near the fence was still blue in her heads-up display, while the one climbing the fence had turned red.

  A kill probably registered when the body temperature fell below a specific threshold, Cassie figured. She had the wire cutter function gnawing at the bike lock. She only needed one side free so that she could lift it against the other hasp, which would act like a hinge. There was an audible click when the wire cutters snipped through the bike lock’s twisted metal. Looping a finger through the released hasp, she tried to lift, but it barely budged.

  She grabbed the rebar, which Jermaine had left behind, and braced it against her thigh to lift the heavy plate. After getting it a few inches off the rim, she slid her backpack under it, dropped the rebar, and pried back the heavy lid until it clanked backward.

  The sirens whooped directly across the street. Blue lights bounced off the glass dome of the Metro, refracting into the sky. Distracted by that and the BLEP appearance of another blue dot directly on top of her location, Cassie hustled into the hole.

  “Hey, bitch,” a woman said in the darkness.

  Cassie pressed her body to the side as four shots sparked off the metal ladder from no more than five feet away. She returned fire, but the woman rushed her, knife at the ready. Cassie ducked, barely escaping the powerful thrust. She tackled the woman with a forward lunge, but not without exposing her back to the hammering knife blade. She felt repeated punches into her backpack until she had the woman on her side and the knife hand was coming at her face.

  Parrying the thrust, Cassie grabbed the powerful forearm of the woman. She was close enough now to smell the foul breath and see the clenched teeth. Eyes wild with fury, fueled no doubt by Zara’s concoction. Hisses and quick breaths. Claustrophobia closing in. Pain in her back. Blood oozing down and pooling at her waist.

  She repeatedly slammed the attacker’s knife hand against the dirt wall until it fell to the floor. Cassie quickly slipped her Blackhawk knife from its sheath and sliced upward across the woman’s face, then drove it into her heart.

  Footsteps above. No time. Blood curling over her hands. She retrieved her knife with a wet sucking sound, collapsed the blade, and slid it back into the sheath. As she stepped over the dying woman, there was a small rucksack tucked against the wall.

  Must be this dead assassin’s bag.

  She grabbed that and lowered into a fast crawl in the opposite direction, away from the manhole cover. Before long, she lost wireless connection through her BLEPs, one rucksack on her back and one in her hands.

  She
was making decent progress when she noticed a reflection off her BLEPs. The yellow glow of a flashlight glinted off the polycarbonate lens. She was almost at the mouth where she and Jermaine had entered earlier.

  “Down here. In this room. She’s got to be here somewhere,” a woman’s voice said.

  She stopped, took a sharp breath. The flashlight continued its awkward arc. The voice was louder.

  “Somewhere in here. That’s where the others went.”

  The sole person who could expose the conspiracy—had seen it all first hand and could testify to Zara’s and Jamie’s crimes—Cassie knew she needed to survive. Both the police and Jamie Carter probably had shoot-to-kill orders on her. She was trapped.

  There was only one way out.

  She opened the rucksack of the woman she had just killed and scrounged through it, finding used syringes.

  “C’mon, damnit,” she hissed. A junkie needing a fix. She unzipped an inner pouch padded with foam on either side. “Yes.”

  She retrieved the remaining two vials of DHT-and-Flakka mix, placing one in her rucksack and using her teeth to pull the protective plastic nose off the other. She retrieved her Maglite, running out of precious seconds, spit out the plastic, and clenched the flashlight in her teeth. She rolled up her sleeve, tightening it around her bicep to make her vein pop, found the vein, and slipped the needle in.

  Pushing the plunger with her thumb, she felt the fire spread through her veins. Her mind gained clarity like an evaporating California marine layer suddenly giving way to the stark clarity of the unmitigated sun.

  She was going to kill her way out of this tunnel and then, if necessary, kill the president of the United States.

  CHAPTER 19

  MAHEGAN EXITED THE VEHICLE WITH HOBART AND VAN DREEVES on his flanks. They boarded an MH-6 Little Bird helicopter with canvas wing seats. He checked his phone and saw that Cassie’s icon had disappeared.

  Probably in the tunnel.

  There were more red dots than blue dots on the app O’Malley had loaded into his phone. He had been able to mirror the communications and tracking data emanating from Zara’s condo at the Wharf.

  They took off from a soccer field a mile from the safe house. General Savage had repositioned aviation assets last week in preparation for clandestine operations. The blades whispered overhead as they lifted off and flew low along the Washington Channel, the black helicopter blending with the dark water. The musty smell of the water wafted upward as if pulled in by the rotors. Mahegan rode alone on the starboard side, with Hobart and Van Dreeves on port. Their approach to the penthouse apartment would put them on the roof, from which they planned to scale down onto the terrace.

  They passed the Nationals baseball stadium and Fort McNair, the general’s massive brick mansions lining the riverfront. The helicopter lifted from the river and tilted between two high rises at the Wharf, then powered straight up to the roof of the target building.

  “Ready,” Mahegan said.

  “Roger,” Hobart replied.

  “Standing by,” Van Dreeves said.

  They were each wearing the new Band-Aid communications system that allowed them to operate hands free. The helicopter alighted on the roof like a dragonfly on a grass blade. Mahegan and team were off in less than a second, and the helicopter was away into the night.

  And, in fact, they were on grass blades. The roof was one of those green spaces, a park on top of the building. Kneeling on the grassy rectangle nearly twenty meters long and wide, Mahegan studied the rooftop. Low boxwood shrubs hemmed in the lawn. Beyond that were other squares of grass, punctuated by ventilation stacks, fireplace chimneys, HVAC systems, and a satellite dish. Van Dreeves had a 120-foot nylon rope coiled across his chest. They each carried silenced pistols, Mahegan his trusty Sig Sauer Tribal with suppressor. As they moved, the dirt and grass insulated the sound of their steps.

  “Status,” O’Malley said into Mahegan’s earpiece.

  “Green,” Mahegan replied, confirming they had made rooftop landing.

  On such short notice, they’d had little time to study the apartment other than a layout from the condominium website. Given Zara Perro’s level of preparation for this coup, Mahegan was assuming the floor-to-ceiling windows were bulletproof and that the two-story penthouse condominium had a server room for all of the high-tech computing that O’Malley had discovered.

  The terrace was wide and surrounded the condo on three sides. To the right, or south, was the largest section with a Jacuzzi, small infinity pool, and barbecue grill. The east-facing terrace would catch the sun rising over the Potomac River. A sofa framed by two chairs seemed positioned to take advantage of that feature. The north terrace provided a view of Capitol Hill and the Mall. More chairs and a hammock secured between two metal poles dotted the stone inlay decking.

  The question had been, do they penetrate as a team at one point, or individually from two or three points? Not knowing what was inside, Mahegan preferred to have mass and brutality of action. He had opted for the brute-force method of mass penetration at a single point. Hobart was the explosives expert in the group and had two blocks of C-4, detonation cord, and blasting caps. He also carried three smoke grenades.

  “Check the chimney,” Mahegan said.

  Hobart walked carefully to the rectangular metal stack, peered over, quickly shone a flashlight down the hole, and took a knee. Looking over his shoulder, he flashed a thumbs-up, which meant the flue was open and they could drop a smoke grenade, if it came to that. He had the pin pulled.

  Mahegan considered his options and still preferred the three-on-two odds, provided there were only Zara and her FBI accomplice inside. He didn’t like the idea of smoke confusing the situation and providing a slight warning to Zara Perro and whoever was in there with her.

  Normally, they would do a recon, but they had operational intelligence and Mahegan knew the information was perishable—that they needed to act now even if it meant not having a fully developed intelligence picture. They had confirmation that the directives were emanating from the condominium directly below them. A quick search of the records had shown Perro Enterprises as the owner of the condo. She either had not thought much about disguising her digital footprint or she had cleverly set a trap.

  Either way, they were going in.

  “Sean, any change?”

  “Steady output of comms from the satellite dish you’re standing next to,” O’Malley said.

  “We’re on top of correct unit?”

  “Yes,” O’Malley said.

  The Band-Aid communications devices also doubled as a soldier-monitoring system. Body temperature, location, hydration status, sleep cycle, pulse, and other key information fed to O’Malley’s data collection efforts.

  Van Dreeves had moved to the lip of the roof that ended just above the north patio. He held up his hand and made a fist: don’t move.

  Voices floated up toward them through an open window or balcony door.

  “I can’t believe that we’ve lost that many,” Zara Perro said. Mahegan clearly recognized the lyrical voice with a hint of Hispanic accent.

  “All we can do is continue,” a man’s voice said. He didn’t recognize it, but by the cadence of their conversation, they seemed to be the only two in the apartment. There was no Hey, let’s step outside, or whispering voices. Just normal conversation, as if they were on a Netflix and chill date.

  Mahegan held up his fist so that Hobart could see it. He had begun to step and laid his foot softly on the gravel roof, next to the chimney about ten meters from the grass square where Mahegan was standing. The night was still. Revelers from the Wharf twenty-five stories below hooted at something. An airplane circled in for a landing at Reagan National. Cars honked and crept along I-395 in both directions. The lights from the Jefferson Memorial cast an upward glow against the thin layer of clouds that had crept in.

  Frozen in time.

  Mahegan saw Van Dreeves lower himself and immediately knew why. A man walked to the
edge of the balcony. The top of his head was visible. The old Army mantra rolled through Mahegan’s mind: What could be seen could be hit. What could be hit could be killed.

  But there was no confirmation that this man had anything to do with Cassie or the Coup Assassinations.

  “I’ll tell you what, gorgeous,” he said. He could be any man trying to get laid. Using his best lines, being what they were. “You’ve got a great view up here. This place had to run you, what, five million? I’m wondering if I should have the FBI investigate your financial background.”

  FBI. We’re in the right place.

  “Wouldn’t do you any good. All of my money comes from the Chinese in the form of bribes for classified information. That wouldn’t be of any interest to the chief of counterintelligence, would it?”

  “Nope. We pass that stuff up to focus on important things, like presidential elections when one party isn’t happy with the result.”

  Zara laughed. “Well, she should be happy enough tonight.”

  “She should be, but this thing is far from over. You have to know that.”

  The man was quick with his pistol. He spun, had it up, and was firing at the rooftop near Van Dreeves. Mahegan rolled forward and pumped two rounds at him, but the man had cleverly run into the dead space beneath the overhang. Zara appeared on the opposite side, pistol up and firing. They were pinned on the roof, a small patch of grass their only safe haven.

  “Smoke now!”

  Hobart tossed a smoke grenade on either side of them, obscuring their positions, then one down the smokestack. Bullets snapped through the developing fog.

  Then Van Dreeves, who never said much, shouted, “I’m hit!”

  Mahegan low-crawled to him, the smoke beginning to provide sufficient screen. Hobart returned fire against Zara on the south, while Mahegan fired two blind shots over the lip of the roof to the north. He kept his pistol angled almost at ninety degrees to prevent from firing wildly over the railing into the civilian population that might be on the street twenty-five stories below.