Commander-In-Chief (56 page)

Two more masked gunmen climbed through the hole, then used the cinder-block wall as cover so they could engage the three men armed with pistols who’d surprised them in the hotel suite and forced their early attack.

D
ing Chavez had used the cover of the dust and smoke cloud to enter the suite. He rushed left, all the way to the bathroom, where the older man with the wound to his shoulder had entered a minute earlier.

When he entered the bathroom he found the man lying by the toilet. A detonator lay on the marble floor next to him, and blood smears were all over the toilet, the white marble floor, and the wall. He’d been in the process of tying off his injury with a towel when Chavez surprised him.

The man reached for the blood-covered handgun next to him.

Ding shouted, “No!”

But the man lifted it anyway, and Ding shot him in the face.

Outside in the suite, two gunmen with AKs crouched low over the lower edge of the hole in the wall. They held their weapons over the side and fired in at the doorway where Dom and Jack were. Ding saw what they were doing, realized they hadn’t seen him enter, so he moved out of the bathroom and made his way to the back wall.

He stood here for a moment, out of sight of the men firing through the jagged cinder-block hole from the Congress Center side. They were twenty feet away, but before he got any closer to engage them, he wanted to make sure his two teammates knew what he was doing.

Ding wasn’t about to rush the hole in the wall and attack the men there as long as there was a chance Caruso or Jack Junior was going to stick a compact pistol around the corner and open fire.

Just then Jack leaned out through the doorway to take aim at the threats. He looked up to see Ding in the far left corner of the room. Jack nodded to him, then raised his pistol at the hole just as both gunmen stood up with their AKs at the ready.

Jack fired three rounds, hitting one of the men in the hand, then ducked away as the other returned fire.

This was Chavez’s opportunity. He holstered his pistol, went low against the wall, and crawled on his hands and knees across the floor. Just under the hole in the wall he rolled onto his back, drew his pistol again, and waited.

In seconds he saw the barrel of an AK jut through the big hole, just three feet from his face.

He pulled his watch cap off his head, used it as an oven mitt on his left hand, then reached up and yanked the hot barrel of the gun forward, pulling the user off balance. He sat up as he controlled the weapon, used his right hand to aim his little pistol at point-blank range under the chin of the astonished man.

Ding blew the top of the terrorist’s head off with a single hollow-point round.

He ripped the gun away.

Back at the door to the hall, Dom yelled, “You’re clear!”

All three Americans began rushing toward the hole in the wall. Dom and Jack vaulted the cinder blocks, and here Jack saw the man
he’d injured in the hand as he sat cross-legged, trying in vain to switch his slung rifle to his off hand.

Jack shot him twice more with his pistol, emptying his magazine with the final shot.

Dom raced by next to him. “Take his AK, but give me your spare mags.”

Jack scooped up the Kalashnikov and ran alongside his cousin. He had only one spare to his pistol remaining, but he pulled it out from under his shirt and tossed it to Dom as he ran through the big conference hall, heading toward the sounds of gunfire just beyond the exit to the atrium. Dom reloaded and ran along, leaving Chavez behind.

•   •   •

T
wenty-five-year-old Spaniard Nuria Méndez was the leader of the Earth Movement. Today’s attack was to be the culmination of her life’s work against the oil and gas industry, larger than the attack in Lithuania just two and a half weeks earlier.

As in Lithuania, her heart pounded with pride, so honored was she to be taking part in this event, even though this was not her plan. As in Klaipėda, her Russian benefactor had arranged everything down to the last detail; he’d even found other members to join her. Some of the men in this group—actually all of them, she realized—were not environmentalists at all. They were just some sort of gunmen from somewhere in Eastern Europe, taking orders from the Russians.

Nuria didn’t care in the least, she was happy to have them. The end result would mean those who controlled European oil pipelines that were destroying the earth’s natural habitat would suffer and die today, and she would make deals with the devil for this opportunity.

She ran along the atrium and shot at a man as he ran up a
hallway, missing just over his head. She was no seasoned terrorist herself, but she was smart enough to know the promises the Russian benefactor had made to her about today had been lies. There were not three hundred men and women sitting “like sheep for the slaughter.” Instead she now ran down an escalator, far beyond the nearly empty conference room where all the killing was to take place, doing her best to control the recoil of the big and unfamiliar weapon. At most she’d actually hit only four people—a far cry from the shooting gallery she’d been promised.

She hoped the men from Eastern Europe were somewhere else in this big complex exacting a huge toll on the evil men and women all around.

Just then she looked to her left and saw the glass doors leading to the courtyard. Out there, from what she could see from the escalator to the first floor, were dozens and dozens of men and women trapped in a small area.

She turned and ran back up the escalator, hoping to fire down on them all.

•   •   •

J
ack Ryan, Jr., ran down a hallway on the third floor of the conference center, waving along the men and women who came rushing toward him, their eyes wide with shock. Jack carried the same weapon as all the terrorists killing people here in the building, but he wasn’t wearing a mask, so few seemed to notice the rifle in his hands.

He was halfway up the hall when a door to the side opened and a portly man with silver hair and a gray suit rushed out and then lurched forward, slamming face-first into the wall opposite the door. The booming gunfire told Jack the man had just been dropped with an AK.

He knelt down, aimed at the doorway, and watched a masked woman in a red skirt and white blouse step out, turn the other way, and then take aim on a middle-aged woman who had peeked out the door of an administrative office. Jack shot the female terrorist in the left side of her rib cage before she could fire; she pitched to the side and fell to the ground, her weapon cartwheeling away from her.

Jack stood back up and raced on, pushing through more civilians, some wailing, some screaming, and many near catatonic as they moved through the hallway.

•   •   •

D
om Caruso scored himself an AK after he shot a masked man in the back of the head, stepping out of a coffee shop. When Dom scooped up the weapon next to the body, he looked into the little shop and realized he’d been too late. There were five people inside, and they all appeared to be dead.

Suddenly he heard more gunfire right outside the shop, and he looked out. A female terrorist toppled to the ground, and in seconds she was passed over by Belgian police, who raced through the first floor now with guns high.

Dom put his AK back where he found it, uninterested in getting shot by the good guys today.

•   •   •

D
omingo Chavez made it down to the ground floor faster than his two teammates had, by chasing a terrorist into a stairwell off the atrium. As soon as he entered he heard gunfire, so he took cover for a moment, but when he started down again he saw a man and a woman, both wounded in the arms and legs. He passed
them with a promise to send help, then descended another floor after hearing another shot. Here Ding saw a dead man lying on the stairs; next to him was the terrorist’s Kalashnikov. Chavez picked it up, expecting to find it empty, but the magazine was half full.

He was confused for a moment, but then he realized the dead man lying next to the gun wasn’t wearing his neck badge.

Instantly, Chavez understood. The terrorists were dumping their guns and their masks, then taking ID badges to melt into the crowd of escaping conference-goers.

Chavez dropped the rifle back on the stairwell and holstered his pistol, then ran down the stairs as fast as he could.

•   •   •

C
havez stood at the bottom of the escalator a minute later, looking up at dozens of men and women rushing down. Gunfire continued upstairs. His eyes settled on a woman in a blue blazer and a blue skirt as she descended with the others, packed tightly in the middle of the conference attendees making their escape past the now huge police response.

Ding could see the neck tag around her neck, but it was facing in, not out.

She reached the bottom of the escalator and started toward the exit.

Ding began to follow her out onto the street. Something about her demeanor got his attention; she was just a little too casual compared with the others around her. He couldn’t say he remembered her outfit from the hotel room at the Sofitel, but he also could not rule it out.

As he walked he noticed the woman continued past where many
of the conference-goers were milling around. She took the sidewalk all the way past the entrance to the Sofitel and onto the Place Jourdan, then she turned and looked back.

Ding stared right at her, just seventy-five feet away.

She turned away quickly, and he knew she recognized him.

She was one of the terrorists, he had no doubt.

He closed on her as she reached the end of the square and made a left turn.

Once she left his sight, Ding began to run toward the corner, afraid she would climb into a vehicle and make her escape. As he came around the corner, however, she was standing right there, a short knife in her hand. She swung it up as Ding passed, slashing at his throat, but he caught her little wrist easily, wrenched her hand behind her back, and yanked up. She let go of the weapon before he dislocated her shoulder, but when she cried out, screaming in French for someone to help her, Ding threw a shoulder into her back and knocked her, forehead-first, into the brick wall of a bistro.

She dropped to the sidewalk, dazed, and he scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder.

T
he
Spinnaker II
had spent the last two days anchored off Salt Island in a remote cove. The six-man security team watching over Kate and Noah Walker had seen no threats to their operation whatsoever, and they’d reported the lack of action to their employer, the Russian who called himself Popov.

Still, Popov told them to keep their guard up, so to this end one of the Steel Securitas men was positioned on the flying bridge at all times with a pair of binoculars in his hand. A second lookout remained on shore, high on a hill overlooking the cove.

As far as they were concerned, the measures they had taken were already an absurd overkill. Yes, they’d killed the old man following them around the islands, but since then their jobs had given them plenty of time to work on their tans.

Be that as it may, Popov had informed the men the night before that the following day the Dutch couple who’d been involved in the original kidnapping would return to add another layer to the security.

The South African in charge of the operation pointed out to the
Russian that there was no place for two more people to sleep on the boat, but he was informed they would stay on their own boat, nearby but out of sight, and they would be used in case of any new threats.

Now it was six a.m., and only a faint glow above the hills over Salt Island revealed the morning. The South African was in his bunk, as were the German, the Chilean, and the Romanian.

The American was on watch on the flying bridge, and the Cuban was up on the hill overlooking the bay. Both sentries were awake, but neither was quite alert.

After all, there was nothing to worry about.

•   •   •

J
ohn Clark ascended the last few feet under the dark water; then he placed his hand on the bottom rung of the ladder next to the sea stairs on the bow of the
Spinnaker II
. He took a moment to listen to the noises of the boat here, checking for the sound of any voices.

When Adara found the cobalt-gray catamaran the afternoon before, she’d also noticed the man sitting on the hill above it. She’d taken pictures of the entire scene, and from these Clark had confirmed this man was one of the mercenaries taking part in Kozlov’s operation, so he knew he’d have to board on the far side of the boat from the island.

This, he saw, wasn’t going to be a problem. The catamaran had swung around with the morning tides to the point that Clark could ascend the sea stairs without fear of being seen by the man onshore.

He wasn’t so sure about the man on the flying bridge, however.

Once he climbed onto the ladder he let his scuba gear sink to the bottom. It was only thirty feet deep here in the bay, so he could
retrieve it if he had to, but for now he wanted to leave no hint that he was on board until he was ready to reveal it for himself.

He wore a shorty wetsuit and this he peeled off to reveal black cargo shorts and brown T-shirt. He’d kept his dive knife strapped to his ankle, and Adara had given him her compact Glock-26, which he’d just tucked into a side pocket of his shorts. He rose from the water and crouched low behind a dinghy suspended at the back of the boat, and he looked to the flying bridge ahead and above.

He could just barely make out the top of a man’s head there, but from what he could see, the moment Clark stood up, the sentry would see him easily.

Shit,
Clark thought. He considered slipping back into the water to try to climb up at another part of the hull, but the gunwales were higher on the side, and there were no ropes or ladders.

If he were twenty-five years old he could board this damn boat fifty different ways, but those days were behind him.

He sat tight, watching the sky get lighter as he willed the man above him to turn around.

At six a.m. he got his wish. The sentry on the flying bridge stood up, stretched, and gave a quick wave to the man a hundred yards away on the hill. Clark couldn’t see if the wave was returned, but soon the lookout climbed down from the bridge and disappeared into the cockpit.

Clark couldn’t believe his luck. He drew his pistol, remained low, but rose to a crouch and then headed toward the cockpit behind the sentry, his back aching from the wounds he’d received three days earlier.

It was darker in the cockpit than it was on deck, but Clark realized the man he’d seen above had climbed down into the saloon.
Clark trained his weapon on the space, then made his way over to the helm. Quickly he looked over at the controls, determining in just seconds that he’d have no trouble piloting the boat.

He heard noise on the stairs and he stood there in the half-light calmly.

Clark recognized the American who’d called himself Joe. Along with the South African he had come aboard Clark’s Irwin the other day to threaten him. Now Joe had a cup of coffee in his hand, and he was moving carefully so he would not spill it.

He was all the way up the stairs in front of Clark before he looked up and saw him.

Clark spoke softly. “Put the coffee on the table. Raise your hands.”

The man did as he was told, but he raised his hands only to chest level. “What do you want?”

Clark smiled a little. “How about we start with my pistol?”

The American looked down to the waistband of his board shorts and saw what Clark was referring to. The grip of the big SIG Sauer handgun he’d taken from the sinking boat the night he left the man in front of him there to die jutted out of his pants.

There was no way the man who called himself Joe could deny he’d been on board when the man was attacked, and that meant, to the American mercenary, anyway, that he was going to have to make a play for the pistol.

“Look, sir,” the American said, playing for time, hoping to find an opening.

Clark said, “You going to tell me you were out for a swim when two pounds of steel floated by?”

“No, sir.” Clark could tell the man was thinking about a move.

Clark said, “If you give me the gun, and you tell me where the Walkers are, without raising your voice, I will let you live.”

The man said nothing.

“Or don’t. You can guess what happens then.”

The American seemed to relax a little. Clark saw him glance back down at the full cup of coffee on his right. “You won’t shoot. It will make too much noise.”

“I’ll shoot. Then I’ll hang out up here with my gun on the companionway, drop the next asshole that comes through.”

The American shook his head. Still weighing the situation. “They’ll kill the hostages.”

“No,” Clark replied calmly. “Only an idiot would do that, give up their one bargaining chip, knowing a killer is waiting up here with a tactical advantage. They might be that stupid, but I’m going to guess that you are the idiot on this crew.”

“What makes you say that?” Before he finished speaking the man’s right hand went for the coffee mug, he got his hand on it, and started to fling it up toward the man by the helm.

Clark shot the man in the forehead. His head snapped back and he dropped to the floor of the cockpit.

“The first guy to die usually is.”

The sixty-seven-year-old man moved quickly now, rushing to the dead man on his back, pulling the SIG from his waistband and the radio from his front pocket. He then returned to the helm and began to flip switches, powering the navigation aids, starting the engine.

A second man appeared at the companionway stairs. Clark shot him dead before he could even focus on the situation.

He heard shouting from the hill now, and then over the radio a man with a Hispanic accent called for a status report.

Clark crouched behind the helm, pointed his gun at the entrance down to the saloon, and keyed the radio.

“I want to see guns tossed up out of the saloon. A
lot
of guns.
Then I want you up here one at a time, hands high. I have a feeling you boys are working for a paycheck. Trust me, now that I’m on your boat, you aren’t getting paid enough for this shit, so I’m going to let you quit.”

He doubted he’d get the response he wanted, but he waited for a moment. Then he heard a woman scream.

•   •   •

B
raam and Martina Jaeger stood at the Beef Island/Tortola heliport, watching the pilot of the Robinson helicopter conduct his preflight walk-around of his aircraft. The Dutch brother and sister yawned and stretched their arms; it had been a long flight in the rented Falcon from Amsterdam.

Braam’s mobile began ringing. “Hello?”

“It’s Popov! Listen carefully! The boat is under attack!”

“Where?”

“I’ll send coordinates to your phone. The crew is under fire. They have control of the hostages but haven’t been able to remove the threat. Get there and fix it.”

Braam hung up the phone and took Martina a few feet away from the pilot. Seconds later, both came back to him.

Martina asked, “Where can we get parachutes?”

The pilot seemed surprised by the question, but he said, “There’s a skydiving club here. Their shack is over by the terminal, but it won’t be open today till eight.”

Martina turned and headed for the terminal.

Five minutes later she returned with two packed chutes. The pilot said, “What the hell? Did you steal them?”

Braam produced a Steyr handgun from inside his luggage. He leveled it at the pilot. “Take us here.” He held up his phone with his other hand, showing a spot on a digital map next to Salt Island.

•   •   •

J
ohn Clark watched the head of Kate Walker appear up the companionway stairs. Just as he expected, there was a pistol jammed against her throat. Behind her, Clark recognized the South African, struggling to keep as much of himself hidden as possible.

When they were at the top of the stairs, the mercenary said, “Drop your fucking gun or I’ll shoot this bitch.”

Clark rose up behind the helm and took careful aim.

“No you won’t,” he replied.

“The
hell
I won’t, man. I’ll shoot her!”

Tears rolled down Kate’s face. Clark saw this and said, “Ms. Walker, don’t worry. He’s not going to shoot you. He’s going to get himself in what he thinks is a better position, then he’s going to turn the pistol on me and use you as a shield. When he moves the barrel of the gun off of you . . . I’ll take him, and this will all be over.”

The South African said, “You’re fucking crazy, man! I’ve got three more men who aren’t going to let you out of here.”

Clark said, “They can’t wait for you to die so they can get away from this fucked-up mission. C’mon, asshole. Go ahead. Turn your gun on me.”

Clark wasn’t focusing on the man’s eyes, he was just looking at the front sight of his weapon, making sure it was centered on the little piece of forehead he could target to the right of Kate Walker. But he knew what he’d have seen in the man’s eyes. Panic, indecision, and then . . . slowly . . . determination.

The barrel of the man’s pistol shot out toward Clark. Clark fired a single round, and the man lurched back, tumbling backward down the companionway.

Kate Walker collapsed.

Seconds later, pistols began flying up out of the saloon and dropping on the deck at Clark’s feet.

Five minutes later the two surviving mercenaries on the boat had tossed the bodies of their three mates overboard, raised the anchor, and then themselves leapt off over the gunwale into the bay. Clark turned the boat around expertly and pushed the throttle forward, moving the powerful engines up to full power, and leaving the three mercenaries behind on the deserted island.

Kate went downstairs to untie Noah, and Clark called Adara Sherman to let her know he’d be at the marina in Tortola in just over an hour. He then called Gerry and gave him the news. Gerry told Clark the other operatives were on their way back from Belgium on a U.S. government Learjet, after capturing a terrorist tied to Russian intelligence.

Clark said, “And I thought I was the one having all the fun.”

Gerry laughed and hung up.

Soon Kate was back on deck with Clark. “Noah will be up in a minute, but first I have questions.”

“I can imagine.”

“What do I call you?”

“Call me John.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of your husband.”

“My husband doesn’t have friends like you.” She said it flatly. A challenge to Clark.

He did not disagree with her. Instead, he said, “It’s not too late to change that. He’s been dealing with some dangerous people, but the people who took you did so because he wanted nothing to do with them. He can help us out now that you are safe, and he has promised to do so. I just have to get you out of here, then we just have to get Terry away from his captors.”

She looked him over for a long time. Clark had a feeling he knew what she was thinking, and when she spoke, she confirmed his suspicion.

“By yourself?”

Clark looked out to the open water in front of him as he manned the helm. “God, I
hope
not.”

•   •   •

T
wenty minutes later, Kate brought John a cup of coffee and then she and Noah went back down below. Clark sipped slowly while focusing on getting as much out of the engines as he possibly could. His speedometer on the multifunction display of the boat read thirty knots, two and a half times faster than the top speed of the Irwin he’d sailed around the BVIs earlier in the week. It was an impressive machine, Clark thought, except for some blood on the floor and the pervasive scent of a half-dozen mercenaries.