Under Siege (54 page)

“I got it, Frog. What’s your hometown?”

“Intercourse, Pennsylvania.”

“Dry up, you two,” Jake Grafton said, and held the walkie-talkie to his ear.

He was going to have to mention this little arrangement to General Land at t ” he first opportunity. But he thought the general would approve. Just this afternoon the subject of the presidential commission had arisen, forced to the fore by a request from Congresswoman Strader for a military district headquarters pass, which was granted. The career officers who had been watching Ms. Strader’s act for years suspected that she would be diligently searching for butts to kick at a postmortem later on, when both she and her colleagues

would have the luxury of hindsight to enhance their wisdom. Alas, being second-pessed by Monday-morning quarterbacks went with the job.

When he saw Jack Yocke jumping up and down on the sidewalk, it occurred to Jake Grafton that it just might help to have an independent observer keep Ms. Strader
et al.
from playing fast and loose with the facts.

Jack Yocke was young and brash, but Jake Grafton had been reading the articles on Cuba and he was impressed. Yocke was a good reporter. He was observant and cared about people, and he could express himself well. He just needed seasoning. And a good reporter, Jake believed, would know a fact when he tripped over one. Yocke would do nicely.

These thoughts occupied Jake Grafton for about ten seconds, then he returned to the business at hand, a terrorist incident at a subway station. The general in charge was giving orders on the radio to the officer at the scene to storm the place as soon as possible. That struck Jake Grafton as logical. If these were suicide commandos like those who had shot up the Capitol building, the sooner they were killed the fewer the number of innocent people who would die.

The driver brought the car to a halt outside the main entrance to L’Enfant Plaza and the occupants jumped out and trotted toward a huddle of soldiers by the doors. The major general, Myles Greer, was conferring with a major. Jake could hear the sound of gunshots through the door, the ripping of automatic weapons fire. “How long?” General Greer asked.

“Another two minutes. I’ve got three men at the west entrance and I want ten there.”

General Greer glanced at Grafton, who met his eyes. Greer had a tough decision to make and Jake Grafton knew it. And he was not about to use his position as General Land’s liaison to influence that decision. The choice was simple and brutal: more soldiers meant more firepower, and the more firepower one accumulated, the fewer soldiers one was likely to lose. On the other hand, the shots they were

ng were being fired by the terrorists at unarmed ilians, and every second of delay meant that more of civilians would die.

It took Greer about three seconds. “Let’s go now,” he said. The major gestured to the army lieutenant in battle dress and used the walkie-talkie.

Grafton spoke to the general, a question so soft that Jack Yocke almost missed it. “You got the subways stopped?”

Apparently satisfied with the answer, Grafton turned to two soldiers who were standing to one side. “You guys going to guard the doors?” “Yessir.”

“Gimme your rifle.” The young enlisted man looked toward his sergeant, who nodded. Toad Tarkington relieved another man of his weapon.

“I’m going with you,” Yocke said.

Grafton didn’t argue. The soldiers were moving out, the lieutenant in the lead. “Stay between me and Toad,” Grafton said over his shoulder to Yocke as he trotted after them.

The men ran along a corridor of shops empty of people. The Army had already evacuated them. The corridor twisted and made several ninety-degree bends. The running men spread out, their weapons at the ready.

The sounds of gunfire were louder. As the corridor came to another bend the men came upon a soldier lying prone, his rifle covering the blind corner.

The lieutenant used hand signals. When his men were. ready he leaped around the corner and two men followed him. Then the others, cautiously.

They were facing an open double door, and beyond it, escalators down. The popping of gunfire was louder, made painful by the echos from the concrete walls.

At the head of the escalator the sergeant opened fire on an unseen target below. He was firing single shots. A spray of bullets from below showered sparks off the overhead and shattered one of the neon lights.

The sergeant fired a fully automatic burst, then charged down the escalator. Two men followed.

The lieutenant eased up, took a quick look, andwitha gesture to the men behind him, followed.

Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington, with Yocke between them, followed the soldiers.

The first dead gunman lay twenty feet beyond the end of the escalator. An Uzi lay beside him. Around him were seven more bodies. Jack Yocke paused and watched as Jake Grafton went from body to body, checking for signs of life. Three men and four women. Several lay in little pools of blood. One of them had crawled for ten or twelve feet, leaving a bloody streak. As Grafton felt for the pulse of the last person he shook his head, then went off after the soldiers, keeping low. Yocke followed.

They were on a wide pedestrian walkway now, with the ceiling arching high overhead.

The walkway ended in a T-intersection, with walkways going right and left. The soldiers split up, running both ways. Jake Grafton looked over the edge, then ducked as bullets spanged pieces out of the chipped concrete.

Jack Yocke fell flat right where he was. The gunfire rose to a crescendo, then ceased. Yocke lay still in the sudden silence, waiting, his heart hammering.

Finally the reporter looked around. Toad was squatting nearby with his rifle at the ready. He was listening. Grafton was nowhere in sight.

Toad began to move.

Yocke followed him. They went to the rail and cautiously looked over. Gra n was below on one o the station platforms, listening to the Army lieutenant talk on the radio. Bodies lay scattered about. As they stood there looking at the carnage, Yocke heard the pounding of running feet behind him.

He dropped flat. Then he looked. Medics wearing white armbands displaying a red cross ran by carrying stretchers. “Let’s go down there,” Yocke suggested. Toad shrugged. Jake Grafton was sitting on the concrete with his back to a

ar, his rifle across his lap. If he noticed Yocke he gave no

Any of your guys hurt?” Yocke asked the lieutenant, who was assembling his men. “One. Flesh wound. But two National Guardsmen charged in when the shooting first started and they got zapped.”

“How many gunmen were there?”

“Five, I think.”

“And the civilians?”

“Seven wounded, forty-two dead.”

Yocke was poised to ask another question when the walkie-talkie squawked to life and the lieutenant walked away with the device to his ear.

The reporter looked around helplessly. Twisted and bloody bodies lay everywhere. Packages and attached cases scattered about, here and there a shopping bag. He walked over to one woman and carefully picked up the wrapped Christmas presents that lay strewn randomly around her. There must be something, some gesture he could make to the arbiter of man’s fate that would commend this woman’s humanity. A prayer? But the grim god already knew. He placed the packages in a neat, pathetic pile beside the slack body.

She had been shot in the back, apparently as she tried to run from the obscene horror behind her.

Forty-two! My God!

Where will it end? Yocke wondered gloomily as a wave of revulsion and loathing swept over him. He averted his eyes and turned away.

Henry Charon stood in an empty third-floor office on L Street and scanned the traffic on the street below yet again. From where he stood he had an excellent view of the streetlight and the cars queuing there waiting for the light to turn green. And he could see the drivers.

The drivers sat behind the wheels of their vehicles waiting for the light to change with the look of distracted impatience

that indelibly marked those who endured life in the big city. Some of them fiddled with their radios, but most just sat staring at the brake lights on the car ahead and occasionally glancing at the stoplight hanging above the intersection. When the light turned green they crept across . the intersection and joined the block-long queue for the next light.

This was a good place. Excellent. A stand, like that one above the red-rock canyon where he had killed seven elk over the years. The elk would come up through the canyon from the aspen groves every evening about the same time.

He would be along soon. He was a creature of habit, like the elk. Regardless of traffic or weather, he always came this way. Or he had on the four evenings in the past that Henry Charon had watched. Yet even if he chose another route this evening-there was a chance that would happen, although slim-sooner or later he would again come this way. That was inevitable, like the evening habits of the deer and elk and bear. Beside Charon was the rifle. This one was less than perfect; no doubt the stock was poorly bedded. But it would do. This would not be a long shot. No more than sixty yards.

A round was chambered in the rifle and the magazine contained three more. Henry Charon rarely needed more than one shot but he was ready, just in case. Although the habits of living things were predictable, random events happened to us all.

Henry Charon didn’t move and he didn’t fidget. He stood easily, almost immobile, watching. His ability to wait was one of his best qualities. Not waiting like the urban commuters, impatiently, distractedly, but waiting like the lion or the fox-silent, still, ever alert, always ready.

His eyes left the cars and went across the pedestrians and the people looking at headlines and making purchases at the sidewalk newsstand on the far corner beside the entrance to the Metro station. The vendor was warmly dressed and wore a Cossack that with the muff down over his ears. His breath made great steaming clouds in the gloomy evening. Charon’s restless eyes scanned the cars yet again, then

them creep across the intersection. One man the crosswalk with his car when the light changed him and he sat unperturbed staring straight ahead as pedestrians walked around the car, front and back, and glared at him. Now he saw it-the car he was waiting for. Henry Charon lifted the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. Yes. It was him.

Charon looked at the cars ahead of his man with a practiced eye, estimating how many would get through the next green light. About six. That would bring this car down to third in line. Perfect.

Henry Charon laid the binoculars down and picked up the rifle. He checked the safety. Still on.

He looked again at the pedestrians, at the other cars, at the bag lady on the far side of the street rooting through a trash can.

The light changed and the traffic moved. One, two, three … six! Yes. The car he wanted was right there, third one back.

Henry Charon raised the rifle to his shoulder as he thumbed off the safety. The crosshairs came immediately into his line of vision without his even tilting his head. He put them on the driver, on his head, on his ear. Automatically Charon breathed deeply and exhaled. He was squeezing the trigger even before all the air had left his lungs.

The report and recoil came almost immediately. Charon brought the scope back into line and looked.

Good shot!

He laid the rifle down and walked briskly to the door, pulled it open and closed it behind him, making sure it locked. He passed the elevator and took the stairs downward two at a time.

Out onto the street-around the corner from where the victim sat dead in his car-and away at a diagonal. Charon stripped off the latex gloves from his hands and thrust them into the first trash can he came to. His car was in a garage five blocks away. He walked briskly, unhurriedly, scanning

the faces of the people on the sidewalk with his practiced hunter’s eye.

With all of the wounded and most of the dead removed from the underground Metro station, Jake Grafton, Yocke, and Tarkington went back the way they had come in. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hayden Land, was standing with the major general in the middle of a knot of people in uniform by the main entrance.

Grafton went over to the group and stood where General Land could see him and he could hear everything that was said.

Toad Tarkington stood near the door to the mall. He pointed the rifle he was carrying at the sky and examined the action. His face was intense, grim.

A question popped to mind as Yocke watched Toad. Would the naval officer have used it? No, he had made the mistake of asking the wrong question once already today, and as he looked at Toad, he thought he knew the answer. Yocke was still feeling the aftereffects of the adrenaline. Somehow, for a reason he comcdn’t quite fathom, Toad seemed the proper person to tell. “I was pretty pumped up back there.”

“Uh-huh,” Tarkington muttered and glanced at the reporter, then resumed his scrutiny of the weapon.

Yocke couldn’t let it alone. “You know, you can watch a hundred movies and see the carnage every night in the hospital, but nothing prepares you for that feeling when the bullets are zinging by and you realize that every second could be your absolute last.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that, life for you might stop right here. Like it did for all those folks down there on those subway platforms.”

Toad finished his inspection of the rifle and held it, butt on his hip, pointed at the sky. He surveyed the knot of senior officers and the smooth-faced soldiers in battle dress and glanced up at the steel-gray sky. “I don’t know how much life insurance you got,” Toad said, “but if you’re going to trail along behind Jake Grafton, you’d better get some

re.” Without waiting for a reply Toad wandered off to d the soldier who had lent him the rifle.

Yocke watched him go.

The brass was still in conference. And here comes Samantha Strader, as I live and breathe. She marched over to the group and joined it. His reporter’s juices flowing, Jack Yocke managed to squeeze between the shoulders of two aides.

One of the men talking was not in uniform, although he had that look. Yocke whispered to the man beside him, who whispered back, “FBI. Guy named Hooper.”