The Fall (40 page)

Instincts took over.

Jack grabbed the biker by the waist and yanked him down to the deck as a round splintered a post, followed by another one hammering the steps leading to the sand.

Jack stayed low, reaching the door, crawling in, dragging Dago behind him as the biker groaned, a hand on his wound, his face twisted in pain.

Angela looked up from the table. “What the hell?”

“Pack up everything,” he said, turning off the lights in the living room, before scrambling to his feet. “Hurry.”

“Why? What's going—”

“Now, Angie,” he said, reaching in one of the duffel bags and extracting a field dressing before kneeling by Dago and tearing off the vest with the SOG knife.

“Don't move,” he hissed, pressing it hard into the wound to stanch the blood, before securing it just as he had done countless times in places he'd rather forget.

“It went through clean, man. You're lucky,” he added.

“Th—thanks,” Dago replied, breathing heavily, clenching his jaw, taking the pain.

Jack turned to Angela and said, “Put everything in the back of the truck but do
not
open the garage door.”

She stood there, in apparent shock at Dago getting shot as Jack helped him to his feet.

“Angie! Now! Everything! Except for my bags and the battle dress.”

 

14

RISKS AND COSTS

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.

—John F. Kennedy

He never liked surprises, especially coming from his primary contact in the Department of the Treasury, who was approached discreetly by the vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve system making an unofficial inquiry about a set of large deposits made from numbered bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Switzerland, and Russia.

The accounts could never be traced back to him, according to his financial team, who had set them up to belong to front companies that didn't exist beyond brick-and-mortar facades—companies that were erased from the face of the planet an hour ago.

Hastings hung up the phone after spending thirty minutes trying to calm down his Treasury associate, assuring him that those accounts and their respective foreign corporations were dissolved the moment they were breached, and no amount of probing would yield anything.

He then returned to the more pressing matter of covering that loss. Services had been rendered by dozens of suppliers and payments were expected.

On time. No excuses.

Hastings spent the next hour in a meeting in the rear of his C-17 with his financial and IT wizards, trying to unravel what had happened. He remained calm, though he knew this had to be the work of Dr. Taylor and her hacker friends. She had managed to change the descent profile, hijacked his phone, hacked into SkyLeap, and did who-knew-what to Salazar's facility.

She was brilliant indeed, and quite the fighter, certainly possessing the genetic makeup to enhance the Hastings family tree.

But she also needs to be stopped.

Although this was nothing more than an annoyance for Hastings, whose team discussed options and solutions that would have the problem solved within the hour, Dr. Taylor and her little scruffy—though highly effective—team were starting to get too deep into his business, into his master plan. Today she had scratched him. Tomorrow she could deliver a fatal blow to his operation.

As his people worked the problem, he decided that the time had come to activate a new option—one he had been unwilling to trigger because of undesirable side effects. But given the circumstances, he saw no other alternative. His security continued to come short every time they dealt with her, even after the FBI tip, missing her by what appeared to be a few minutes. On top of that, he'd just gotten word that Riggs's family had vanished from protected custody in Atlanta, and that Olivia's daughter had disappeared from school.

That had been the final motivating factor.

He walked away from his team and dialed a number he had committed to memory long ago.

The general had used him in the beginning, when Hastings had needed his help to break in, recruit, train, and establish a beachhead.

Over the years, the general had repeatedly engaged his services whenever a problem came up that required skills beyond the reach of his operatives, from incentivizing—or eliminating—certain figures in cartels, organized crime, and foreign governments, to motivating the occasional Washington politician who couldn't be persuaded to bend through conventional means.

But Hastings hated using him simply because he didn't own him.

No one did.

Meaning he couldn't be fully controlled.

And Hastings hated not having full control.

But at the moment, it came down to choosing the lesser of the evils, selecting this option and its associated costs and risks for the sake of eliminating a much larger risk.

“
Gener
a
l?
” the man's deep voice said at the other end in a thick Latin American accent, also pronouncing the
G
as an
H.
“It has been a very long time, my friend.”

“It certainly has, Javier,” Hastings replied, closing his eyes. “It most certainly has.”

*   *   *

Jack had to assume that the threat would come from all angles and in larger numbers than the last time.

Pete wouldn't make the same mistake again.

And that meant Jack would need a new approach, a different way to counterattack.

“Front still looks clear,” Angela said inside the dark house, peeking through the blinds in the foyer. Dago was already in the truck, happily sucking on a Fentanyl lollipop.

“Trust me. They're out there,” Jack said, reloading the M32 grenade launcher with a mix of armor-piercing and incendiary rounds, strapping it across his back before loading backup rounds on the utility belt around his waist.

“Looks like a lot of firepower.”

“That's because it is,” he said, latching a twenty-round box magazine to the MK11 sniper rifle and chambering a round before securing two backup boxes to the Velcro straps on his abdomen, right above the belt, and hauling the rest of the gear into the back of the truck.

“All right,” he said. “Get in and wait for my signal.”

She hesitated, before opening the door and looking at him.

“
Wait
for my signal,” he repeated. “No matter what you hear out there.”

“Jack,” she started, putting a hand to his face.

“I know,” he replied, closing the door before rushing to the rear door, the place where no one would be expecting him after that initial attack. That yacht was the flush team, working the rear to force him to the front, where he knew would be an even larger force waiting for him.

But he couldn't get out through the back just yet, not while that vessel had at least one sniper trained on the rear porch, ready to put a bullet in his head.

Jack needed a distraction, a way to even out the playing field long enough for him to reach the sand, to get himself away from the house and blend with the dunes leading to the ocean.

The answer was the MK79 Mod 0 flare gun.

Jack slowly inched open one of the living room windows just enough to squeeze the hot end of the cylindrical signaling device through, angling it toward the vessel, now visible beyond the break, a long shape swaying in the waves.

The snipers had to be using nightscopes to have any chance at accuracy in the darkness separating them from the beach house, which Jack estimated to be around five hundred feet—give or take. And that meant someone looking through a device that magnified the amount of photons from all natural sources, like moonlight or starlight.

But like anything else, night-vision scopes had a weakness. A sudden increase in light, such as an incendiary grenade or a flare gun—or even a fork of lightning—had the nasty effect of flashing right into the user's pupils, momentarily killing night vision.

Jack adjusted the MK79, before firing the flare, which arced over the railing and the beach, detonating high above the surf, over the boat.

He rolled away from the window and pushed through the door in a deep crouch, the MK11 leading the way, scrambling down the steps, the spring-action soles of the battle dress pointing his momentum toward the safety of the sand, below the immediate line of sight from snipers he knew would be rubbing their eyes right about now, as the flare hovered above them.

Jack felt the sand beneath him as he zigzagged, dropping in front of two low dunes, placing the long barrel in between them, resting it on the Harris swivel-based bipod.

He trained the crosshairs on the vessel, painted in flickering hues of crimson and yellow-gold by the suspended pyrotechnic.

Jack used the Leupold rifle scope to locate the three figures on the top deck, aligning the crosshairs with the closest one, and exhaling while pressing the trigger.

The bullet found its mark an instant later, and the figure dropped from sight just as his companions turned to look in their fallen comrade's direction.

Jack used that distraction to switch targets, scoring a second hit before the vessel's captain gunned the engines, accelerating into the night, cruising away from the vanishing red glow.

Jack watched its silvery trail on the water before rising to his feet, blending with the surroundings, dashing around the back of the property, moving swiftly but measuring his strides, remaining within the obscure confines of the corridor-like path between the houses, scanning his narrow field of view but not in a single sweep.

Aware that the human eye had surprisingly low acuity in any part of the visual field not at the very center, Jack shifted his eyes by just ten degrees every five seconds, allowing the center of his gaze, the fovea, to pierce the darkness, letting the high density of cones in the retina do the heavy lifting, letting the millions of receptive fields in the ganglion cells search for any shapes that didn't belong, any movement that would telegraph the presence of more—

There.

At his ten o'clock.

Protruding through a row of waist-high bushes across the street, under the shadow of a towering magnolia, protected from the glowing streetlights, Jack spotted two barrels, long, with bulky silencers screwed at the end.

I see you.

He dropped to the ground slowly, remaining in the shadowed recess by the front corner of the building, systematically probing his surroundings one narrow arc at a time, spotting a third operative on the roof across the street, his high-powered rifle trained on the garage doors.

This time around Pete wasn't bringing a boatload of soldiers but had chosen to take them covertly, to keep this from the authorities, to avoid another public Charlie Foxtrot, military-speak for a clusterfuck.

And that played in Jack's favor as he surveyed the street once more, finding only three marks, and looking up and down the street yielded no additional targets. He spotted no parked vehicles that suggested additional mercenaries.

But this can't be it,
he thought, especially after the way he had disabled so many soldiers at the—

The answer came a moment later, when a vehicle turned onto the street, headlights off, driving slowly toward them. A large black van with dark windows, followed by a second matching vehicle.

That's more like it.

But it really didn't matter.

There was a reason why only a microscopic percentage of U.S. fighting forces made the cut to be a SEAL. It was a hard thing to explain, but somewhere along the way during those weeks of unparalleled training, during the inhumane drilling, the mental abuse, the unprecedented harsh treatment, and the even more brutal missions, the world suddenly seemed slower to a SEAL. Everyone else appeared to move in slow motion, in ways that made their actions predictable, easy to counterattack.

And it was happening now. As Jack watched the incoming threat, as the vans made their way toward the house, everything suddenly slowed to a crawl.

Except for Jack, who reached for his M32 grenade launcher, his eyes on the approaching vehicles, lining them up in the reflex scope, before releasing two armor-piercing rounds in rapid succession, one per vehicle.

Switching targets, he popped one more at the shrubs with the barrels and a fourth one on the roof across the street.

BOHICA,
he thought, shrinking back in the recesses, the age-old acronym echoing in his mind: Bend Over Here It Comes Again.

The first two ear-piercing blasts boomed in rapid succession, one after the other, deafening, lighting up the street, shaking the ground, shattering windows.

The vans turned, crashing into trees, catching fire as the well-placed rounds punctured the frame before magnesium cores incinerated anything in a five-foot radius.

Occupants screamed, some jumping out, their clothes on fire as they rolled on the grass as a third explosion tossed bodies in the air across the street along with rifles, just as a fourth detonation on the roof disintegrated the sniper in a ball of flames, and debris running down onto the pavement.

Jack followed that with four smoke grenades, which he tossed at twenty-foot intervals starting right in front of the house and continuing down the street to cover their escape.

“Now, Angie,” he spoke into his voice-activated throat mike as blue smoke filled the street, diffusing the pulsating flames, mixing with smoke boiling from the vans, from the charred corpses littering the street.

He rose to his feet, the M32 in his hands housing his last two rounds, the smell of burnt flesh assaulting his nostrils, bringing him back to Afghanistan and Colombia, his fallen comrades, the death and destruction marking so much of his military career.

The garage door opened and the truck leaped onto the driveway, fishtailing as she turned left, toward him, driving through the smoke like a black ghost.