“Down! Get DOWN!” I yelled in my command baritone when my logical brain came back online. “Hands in front of you! NOW!”
The big guy belly-flopped on the floor, his hands outstretched as ordered. From the descriptions we had, he had to be Caldwell and the other one Patterson.
Patterson shouted, “I’ve got him covered. You frisk him.”
“GET ON THE GROUND!” Carmen yelled in Patterson’s ear.
“He’s armed!” Patterson repeated. “I’ve got him.”
“Drop or I’ll shoot you,” Carmen said.
“We need them alive!” I said.
Patterson, just a silhouette with the light behind him, nodded at Carmen as if he were one of us.
A grenade rolled in the door and right to my foot. I swatted it back up the ramp with my rifle. Years in Little League finally paid off. The explosion was deafening. After a few seconds of stunned silence, the roof over the ramp collapsed on one side, leaving a triangular exit. While it narrowed the angle for them to shoot at us, it also meant a more dangerous departure.
“I know who he is,” Caldwell said, his eyes locked on Patterson. “Don’t shoot. I’ll tell you—”
Patterson fired three quick shots into the big man’s brain.
Carmen slammed her rifle’s stock into Patterson’s head. As he fell, I wrenched the pistol from his hand and tossed it aside. I held his wrist and slammed my boot into his shoulder. He howled.
“Stay down,” I said. For emphasis, I placed the muzzle of my rifle at his ear.
He stopped struggling.
Carmen waved her phone around the room for a few long seconds.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said. “Secure the area.”
“Evidence,” Carmen said, putting her phone away.
She tugged at the straps holding Ms. Sabel. In seconds, she had the top half freed but had to work harder on the legs. Ms. Sabel didn’t move. Carmen took the boss’s pulse, checked her eyes, and looked at me. “Barely conscious.”
My finger squeezed around the trigger as the rage in my head mounted.
I’d killed men for less, but never an immobilized prisoner.
Carmen said, “Don’t. She wouldn’t want that.”
Carmen was right. I put my boot to Patterson’s head and kicked his skull into the concrete. He exhaled like an unconscious man. I let go of his limp arm. I said, “One twitch and you’re a dead man.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t twitch.
A noise outside caught my ear. Running to the door, I saw a figure trying to squeeze into the triangular opening and fired a couple bursts up the ramp. He fled before I could get a bead on him. The ramp was a tactical death trap for both sides. Stalemate for now.
I slapped plasticuffs on Patterson, stepped to Carmen’s side, and looked at Ms. Sabel. Her right eye was black and swollen; her left cheek was scraped and bruised. Her eyes floated independently, one rolled back in her head, the other tried to focus.
“You motherf—” I turned to yell at Patterson but stopped, too angry to finish. I raised my rifle only to feel Carmen’s tug again. I cursed and kicked the man a second time, harder.
“Jacob!” Carmen said. “Cool down. Focus on getting out of here.”
“Yeah.” I got to work, bagging Patterson’s weapon and shoving it in my pack.
“Can you carry her?” Carmen asked.
Ms. Sabel stirred. Her eyes aligned, and she tried to sit up on her elbows. Carmen pressed her gently back down.
Ms. Sabel said, “Caldwell … I need to talk. Caldwell.”
I said, “He didn’t make it, Ms. Sabel.”
Carmen squatted next to Patterson and checked him out.
Ms. Sabel grabbed my arm and pulled herself up to a half-sitting position. “What … do you mean?”
I told her.
“No. No, he can’t do that. I need Caldwell.”
“I’m sorry.”
She sat up fast and nearly passed out. I grabbed her arm and steadied her as she swayed back and forth on the gurney’s edge.
“It’s not a concussion,” Carmen said about Ms. Sabel. “I think it’s a brain problem of some kind. Looks like the bastards waterboarded her. She needs rest, which she’s not going to get. I think the best thing we can do is take over her decision making, treat her like an eight-year-old.”
“Roger that.” I turned to Ms. Sabel. “Wait right there, and I’ll carry you.”
She stared blankly, sitting on the gurney’s edge, holding on with both hands.
Patterson was also sitting up, not as woozy as Ms. Sabel and coming around quicker, but still in obvious pain.
I yanked him to his feet. “Why’d you kill Caldwell?”
His eyes focused on me. “Who are you?”
“Agent Jacob Stearne, Sabel Security.”
He looked at his wrists. “He was going for his gun. Ankle holster.”
Carmen checked the corpse, found the gun, looked at me, and shrugged. She went through his pockets, pulled a couple items, stuffed them in her pack, and rose. “Let’s get out of here.”
I patted down Patterson and shoved him forward. “You’re Don Patterson, right?”
“I just saved your life.” He looked me up and down. “I’m trying to help you.”
“I never saw that guy so much as twitch, much less reach for a pistol.”
Carmen stepped between us, her weapon jammed in Patterson’s ribs. “I got this guy. You get Pia.”
Facing the gurney, I put my shoulder under Ms. Sabel’s arm and stood her up. She wobbled for a second, then slid a foot forward. She muttered something about walking on her own—always the proud athlete—then slipped and grabbed me. With one arm around her waist and my weapon cradled in the other, we started across the room. After a few steps, she let go of me and stood on her own.
Carmen looked up the ramp and ducked several incoming rounds. They’d gotten inside the opening. She jumped behind the door, stuck her weapon around the jamb, and fired a few shots blindly up the ramp. Tossing another grenade was out of the question. If the throw was short, it could roll back to us.
Carmen pressed her earbud. “Tania, Miguel, can you hear me? We need some help from outside. We’re pinned down.”
I looked around the room and traced the electrical conduit to where it disappeared behind a rack of shelves.
Tania’s voice came back, barely audible above what sounded like a chain gun. “We’re trapped in the CO’s quarters, next building over. Can you make it here?”
I threw the rack to the floor and found a large piece of plywood nailed to the concrete wall, the conduit going through it. I fired a bullet into it to check my theory. No ricochet. I fired more rounds into the corners of the wood, then kicked it in. A mechanical crawlspace. Flashing a light down it, I could see no end, but plenty of seeping water and mud.
The electricity had to come from somewhere, and my guess was the CO’s quarters.
We pushed Patterson in first, making him scoot forward on elbows and knees. Carmen followed with her rifle poking him in the ass. Ms. Sabel went next. I fired a few more rounds up the ramp and tossed a flashbang as far as I could.
I booby-trapped the space behind us with a remotely detonated explosive and clenched the trigger in my teeth. After inching through mud for five minutes, Patterson fell into a brick-lined basement. A generator hummed in one corner of the small space. With no grace at all, and covered in mud, the rest of us tumbled into the dim room. I blew the crawlspace mine and collapsed the tunnel at the bunker end.
The basement opened into a kitchen with a living room on one side and a hallway on the other. Tania and Miguel manned .50 cals barricaded with sandbags at opposite windows in the living room. Two dead Syrians lay in the middle of the room.
“Check the hallway,” Tania said. “We tossed a grenade, but might be some Hajjis still back there.”
Miguel brushed back attackers with a long burst and Tania added a shorter one of her own.
I gently guided Ms. Sabel to a recliner in what was left of the living room, then pushed Patterson against the wall in front of Miguel. “If he wiggles, shoot him.”
Miguel stuck his sidearm in the man’s mouth, keeping his other hand on the big gun. He turned back to the window and let off a burst.
Carmen and I checked the bedroom wing. We found one trembling guy cowering in the bathroom. Anyone who survived a firefight could feel his pain. I calmed him down a bit, disarmed him, and lashed him to the sink.
One door was still closed at the end of the hall. We blew it open with a breaching charge and found an officer knocked out by the flying door. No doubt about his rank: older, better-looking uniform, last room in the house, and the thickest door. A cache of new weapons lined the walls of his den. I gave the man a closer look—two stars and an eagle on his epaulet, the insignia of a Syrian colonel.
Carmen checked his vital signs while I took a look around.
Our fearless colonel had gathered a few essentials in a duffel bag on the bed: a couple power bars, a grooming kit, a phone, passport, and extra magazines of ammo. Ready to flee?
There was a bed, a bathroom, a wardrobe, and a laptop on the desk. On the laptop display was a map of the grounds with blinking lights. Several were moving. Several were not. They had ID beacons, same as ours, but a different frequency. I noted the positions and switched to the control panel. The username was Abdul Nakdali. He had encrypted e-mail, no internet connection, a military video conferencing tool, and little else. He was the administrator, so I changed his password and set the fingerprint reader to my index finger. I grabbed the laptop and three of the ten or so external hard drives lying next to it and stuffed them in my pack with his passport.
I grabbed a radio, set it to the only working channel, and shouted, “Fall back,” in Arabic. Probably wouldn’t work, but worth a shot.
“How’s he looking?” I asked Carmen.
“Minor head injury.” She bound him with plasticuffs. “He’ll be ready for questioning pretty soon.”
When we dragged him into the living room, Ms. Sabel rose slowly from the easy chair, looking like she’d seen a ghost. “Colonel Nakdali?”
I pulled his passport out of my pack and handed it to her—Abdul Nakdali.
Her eyes jumped back and forth from the passport to the man. Her brow wrinkled, and her head tilted sideways. “But they killed Nakdali…”
Bullets raked the front door. Miguel answered with a long burst.
I shouted over the noise. “Some officers use doubles.”
Dhanpal sent a text: Found pilots shot execution-style. Moved two Syrian prisoners. Have children safe. Water rising fast. Should we join you?
I responded: Negative. More hostiles than plan. Can you ride out storm?
Maybe, have 2-3 hours, but flooding – ???
We’ll join you.
A couple hours in a cave was better than waiting for the Syrians to mount a full-scale assault. I’d seen the dots on Nakdali’s laptop—we were outnumbered. There were four of us, and we were moving two prisoners and a foggy heiress. We scanned the windows for the best way out. None of us saw anything exciting.
Bullets were wearing down the thin sandbags, and the walls were beginning to look like Swiss cheese.
Over his shoulder, Miguel shouted, “They’re massing for an attack over here.”
I texted Tony: Need an exit.
He texted back: You’re surrounded.