Chapter Five

 

 

Washington Square, outside Berlin Hauptbahnhof’s main entrance

Berlin, Germany

June 16, 6:40 p.m.

 

The woman swung on her heels and reached deep inside the stroller. “Allahu akbar—”

Justin shot her in her right shoulder. He aimed high, intent on stopping the woman, but not killing her. There was no sliver of doubt in his mind about her goal, but she was more valuable to him alive, as a possible source of intelligence, rather than as a dead female terrorist.

His gunshot echoed around the square. The crowd scampered in all directions, with loud shouts, screams, and curses. People dropped their luggage, trampled and tripped on each other as they scrambled toward safety. Which at this point was as far away as possible from the crazy man who had discharged a weapon in public.

Justin stepped over the woman writhing on the ground and peeked inside the stroller’s baby compartment. As he had suspected, a bomb was nestled inside, wrapped in white and blue blankets. The bomb’s wires and the trigger—a cell phone—stared back at him. At the tap of a button, the bomb would detonate in a powerful explosion sufficient to kill everyone and destroy everything in the square.

The woman moaned, then screamed something in German. Justin wished he knew what she was saying. Sometimes people in desperate situations revealed intelligence without the thought of doing so even crossing their minds. Her eyes flogged him with an evil glare, then she turned her head to the left.

Justin looked around the square, trying to follow her eyes and identify what or who she was looking at. If the woman had accomplices, they might have noticed the turn of events and could switch to Plan B: a remote-control detonation of the explosives in the stroller. Perhaps the woman’s gaze would betray the location of the other terrorist cell members.

The chaos around him continued as people scuttled as far away as possible in all directions. Two blond men were running toward Justin; they were plainclothes BfV agents assigned to this operation. A police car siren blasted from around the corner and stopped near the main entrance. Two officers stepped out of the car, their weapons drawn and ready to fire. Another man and a woman, who were also BfV agents, were searching the eastern side of the square.

Then Justin’s eyes registered a lone man in a white windbreaker who was not running away like almost everyone else. He was furiously scrambling with a device in his hands, some kind of a cell phone, and lifting it high above his head. It looked like he was desperately trying to establish a connection. That’s the bastard who’s trying to blow up the charges.

Justin took another second to think, then put his plan into action. The man was about a hundred yards away and moving around, turning himself into a hard-to-hit target. Plus, Justin was not completely sure whether the man was a terrorist wannabe or a reporter wannabe, trying to record the incident with his cell phone’s camera.

So Justin did the next best thing in this situation.

He gave the stroller a strong shove.

It rolled away fast, its large wheels spinning on the gray tiles as it cut a straight path through the square. Then it hit a bump—an uneven tile maybe, a stone, or a small piece of debris—and it leaned to one side. Justin bit his lip, worried the stroller would tip over. It was not yet far enough from the glass-and-steel façade of the station. An explosion at this point would still cause numerous casualties.

The stroller’s wheel dropped back down and the stroller kept moving forward, albeit at a slower speed. Justin aimed his pistol at the man and shouted at him to get down. The man ignored Justin, repeating his frantic gestures.

Justin turned his attention toward the station’s façade. A large number of people were observing the events from behind the glass. He hollered at them to get back and away from the explosion’s range. As they did not pay attention right away, he pointed his pistol at them and brandished it.

That seemed to do the trick. A few people stepped away from the glass; others ran deep inside the train station. Justin threw another glance at the man in the white windbreaker. He was now standing still. His hand holding the device was pointed toward Justin, toward the station.

The stroller had stopped at about the halfway point to the square.

It’s still too close.

That was Justin’s thought as he dove to his right behind one of the square concrete barriers lining the street.

The explosion happened the second he hit the ground.

A piercing flash of blinding yellow, then a ball of fire erupted in the middle of the square. The expansion of gas from the explosion sent a shock wave at supersonic speed. A split second later, the blast wave washed over Justin, shattering most of the station’s glass façade behind him, as he would find out later. He kept his head and his body down, to protect himself from glass shards and fragments of debris that followed the blast wave and were raining down on him from all directions.

The air became heavy with smoke, and Justin detected the smell of burned plastic. He slowly lifted his head, just as a large panel of glass dropped to the ground behind him and broke into a thousand pieces. Smoke and dust billowed from the site of the explosion and were slowly filling up the sky.

Justin brushed glass fragments off his hair, neck, and shoulders. He glanced at the train station. Big gaps in the torn façade and a number of bodies strewn about on the ground. Most of them were still moving, albeit slowly and with difficulty.

As he got to his feet, his eyes fell on the blonde woman. The explosion had tossed her against one of the barriers. A pool of blood was forming around her scraped and twisted neck.

The man in the white windbreaker was nowhere in sight. Justin peered so hard that his eyes began to water, but the man had vanished without a trace. Justin cursed and ran toward the explosion site.

The detonation had dug out a shallow crater, about three feet deep and six feet wide. Chunks of tile, gravel, and other earth debris were spread around the area. A small, tattered part of the stroller’s blue cloth lay near the left edge of the crater. A section of the mangled metal body had been thrown about thirty feet away by the bomb’s powerful blast.

The screech of tires came from behind him, and Justin turned his head. A BMW with a dinged hood and a scratched passenger door came to an abrupt stop, then Will jumped out of the driver’s seat. “Justin, how are you, man?”

“All right, I think.” He shrugged, then winced as he felt a sharp stab in his back.

“What? You’re wounded. Your arms and face are covered in bruises.”

“Eh, that happened when I sought cover. But a piece of glass is still inside my shirt.”

He took off his polo shirt, turned it inside out, and gave it a strong shake. A few fragments crackled as they fell to the ground. Justin swept the front and the back of his bulletproof vest and removed a couple of small slivers embedded in it. He ran his left hand along his waist, checking for more fragments, but found none.

He said, “The hot ‘mom’ had an accomplice, a man in a short white coat and black pants, most likely jeans. Dark-toned skin, black shoulder-length and curled hair. I lost him right after the blast.” He placed his SIG pistol back in his waistband holster and put on his shirt.

“Where was he?” Will asked.

“Right there.” Justin pointed at the last place he had seen the man, across from the square.

They walked in that direction, taking in every detail of the surroundings. A number of white-and-yellow tour buses were parked to the left. Their windows had been burst apart by the detonation and people were stumbling out of the buses. A few were lying on the ground, undoubtedly hit by the high-velocity shrapnel or the blast pressure wave and blast wind. Justin wondered about their injuries, and his hand instinctively went over his chest and his abdomen. He felt fine and had only suffered small surface wounds.

A red city bus was stopped in the middle of the street further down to the right. It seemed the bus had suffered minor damage, and only three or four people were standing around it. The bus shelter straight ahead was empty. Justin scanned a series of cars and taxis parked to the right, but did not see the target.

“I’m checking this area,” he said to Will. “Radio for backup to start their search here and at the river.” Justin pointed across the street and toward the Gustav Heinemann pedestrian bridge over the Spree River that meandered through most of Berlin.

“You think he jumped in the water?”

“I would have.”

Will nodded and ran toward the BMW.

Justin pulled out his SIG pistol and marched with a quick pace toward the cars. The terrorist cell probably had a getaway vehicle, especially if one or two of the members were not a part of the suicide squad, as the early evidence seemed to indicate. He hoped the course of events would have disrupted their escape plans, and the detonation man was still within grasp. Perhaps he was separated from the other cowards, who had taken off in their car and had abandoned him.

Justin searched a couple of sedans, then moved to a taxi. No driver. Perhaps he had gone out for supper. But why leave his taxi behind? Is there a bomb in the car? He was tempted to break the glass and tear apart the seats, but he remembered the police had extremely well-trained bomb-sniffing dogs in their units. The canine friends would find out if there were other explosives planted in any of the taxis.

The next two cars were also empty. When he came to the taxi furthest away, he saw a man in his sixties cowering, hunkered down in the driver’s seat. Justin wondered why the cabbie had not just driven off, but then realized he was frozen with fear.

Justin knocked on the driver’s window with the muzzle of his pistol.

The cabbie returned a timid glance with his widened, terrified eyes, then mouthed something inaudible. A moment later, he spoke a little bit louder, rattling off something in German.

“Do you speak English?” Justin asked.

The cabbie nodded.

“Roll down the window. I’m with the police. I need to talk to you.”

The cabbie nodded again and reached slowly for the lever controlling the window glass. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” he shouted as soon as he had lowered the glass barely a crack.

“I’m not.” Justin lowered his pistol about an inch but still kept it aimed at the cabbie, in case his shock was just part of a ruse. “I’m looking for a man in a white jacket. Dark skin. Black hair. Seen him?”

The cabbie shook his head. “No, I have not seen him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Justin frowned. “You were here the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“What did you see?”

The cabbie thought about his reply for a moment. Justin saw the old man was filtering his thoughts and seemed to carefully select his words. A deep frown fell on his wrinkled face as he said in a somber tone, “I heard a gunshot, then I saw the explosion . . . the killing.” He paused for a moment, sighed, then added, “A real tragedy. I hope you . . . you catch the people who did this.”

His words felt genuine. Justin peered into the cabbie’s eyes and saw nothing else but fear and sadness. “Anything else you remember?”

The cabbie began to shake his head, but then stopped halfway with the realization of something coming to his mind. “I saw people running toward me, then they went that way.” He pointed to the right down Rahel-Hirsch-Straße, the stretch of the street in front of the train station. “Now I remember there was a man in a white jacket, a short, thin one.”

Justin nodded. “Yes. Which way did he go?”

“To the right. Then, I don’t know.”

As Justin pondered his next question, the familiar squeal of brakes came from behind him.

“Get in.” He heard Will’s voice before he even turned his head. “We’ve got eyes on our man. He was spotted a few blocks south, going down Straße des 17 Juni, I mean Street of 17 June, in a blue van.”

The information confirmed the cabbie’s story.

“Thanks,” Justin told him. “Be safe.”

The cabbie nodded and heaved a deep sigh of relief.

“Was he alone?” Justin asked Will as he buckled himself in the passenger seat.

“No. Two other men with him.” Will hit the gas and the BMW zoomed through Rahel-Hirsch-Straße.

“Any other team on his tail?”

“Falco and Carrie are the closest to the van. They should catch up to them at any moment.”

Justin frowned. His hand went to the rifle by his feet. He picked it up and cocked it. He hoped they would reach the van before Carrie and her team. Otherwise, the aftermath would not be pretty. Carrie was likely to go in with a heavy hand, and she rarely missed her shots. And he had more than one reason for wanting to get to at least one of the fugitives while they were still drawing breath.

“Faster, go faster,” he said as they came to a bridge.

Will gave him a slight frown, but did not reply. He stomped on the gas pedal. The BMW darted forward, its tires spinning on the asphalt. The jolt threw Justin against the seat.

“What’s the rush?” Will asked as he eased up for a moment on the gas.

They came to a turn, which the BMW took quite smoothly. Will avoided slamming into a convertible Mercedes-Benz parked illegally on the other side, and the BMW drifted perfectly around the shiny red roadster. He straightened the wheel and floored the gas again.

They were racing through the Spreebogenpark, a triangular park with wide, meticulously trimmed green lawns and lined with oak and beech trees. About a dozen or so people were staring at the smoke billowing in front of the train station across the river. When they had come for a picnic or a leisurely stroll in the park, the last thing on their minds was witnessing a bomb explosion.

“Justin, did you hear me? What’s the rush? Other teams are closer, and they’ll get to the van in no time.”

“I want to be there and catch the bastards with my own two hands.” Justin tried to make his answer sound as genuine as possible, his voice booming with true rage. “And I don’t want them dead. We can’t interrogate the dead.”

Will threw Justin a quick sideways glance, then returned his eyes to the road. He swerved around a slow Volkswagen van and another even slower Peugeot hatchback, and followed the curving street.

They came to a complex of sparkly glass-and-steel government and parliament buildings, with the German Chancellery to the right and the famous Reichstag a little further on and to the left. Will turned into a narrow street that cut through the northern part of Tiergarten, once a hunting ground and now the largest public park in the city.

Will glanced again at Justin, who wondered if Will was trying to spot any telltale signs on his face. Justin took a certain amount of pride in being able to conceal his emotions. Still, he looked up at the mirror on the sun visor and quickly checked his reflection. He was wearing his best poker face, or he so thought.

“We just passed the Brandenburg Gate. Where’s everybody?” The dashboard radio crackled with Carrie’s stern voice.

Justin thought he sensed a hint of impatience and an equal amount of irritation in her tone. He picked up the radio. “Hi, Carrie. We’re still on . . .” His voice trailed as he dropped his head and began to look for a sign indicating their location.

“Heinrich-von-Gagern Straße,” Will offered.

“Yes, we’re on Heinrich-von-Gagern. We’ll catch up to you. How far is it, Will?”

Will gestured at a pair of humongous open-top tour buses stopped at the intersection in front of the BMW. “Three minutes, maybe.”

“We’ll see you in one minute,” Justin said.

Will shook his head, stepped on the gas, and began to pass the tour buses. He crossed into the other lane and almost crashed into an oncoming Audi sedan. Will slammed his fist on the horn, then rolled down his window and shouted at the young man in the Audi’s driving seat, demanding he get the hell out of their way.

The young man hesitated for a moment too long, and Will edged forward, seemingly determined to plow through the young man and his small sedan. The young man’s jaw dropped in panic. He put his car in reverse, but was not able to drive back in a straight line, probably because of the shock. He went into the bicycle lane, then ramped the curb, and the back of the Audi hit a traffic sign.

Will turned the steering wheel and began to squeeze the BMW between the Audi and the tour bus, whose driver was also moving toward the side of the street. The BMW only just made it, and Justin’s side mirror scraped the side of the bus. But they were out of the traffic jam. Will hit the horn again and zipped through the intersection.

The street up ahead was empty but for a young woman riding a white bicycle. Will switched lanes and slowed just for a heartbeat as the BMW went by the woman. Then he slammed on the gas pedal. The BMW’s six-cylinder engine vroomed again, and they rocketed down the street.

As they came to the four-lane Street of 17 June, Will switched off the lights and the siren. He gave the horn a long blast—indicating his intention of cutting through the busy stream of traffic—and forced his way into a very tight space between a van and a hatchback in the nearest lane.

He clutched the steering wheel in a tight grasp. The BMW fishtailed, then smashed into the front bumper of the silver Fiat hatchback. The full-sized SUV sent the small Fiat off its course. The driver crashed into the back of a red Nissan on the cobblestone park lane, and both inflated airbags filled the Fiat’s small cabin.

Will’s face was burning with what Justin interpreted as pure rage and true passion. The adrenaline rush had kicked in. Will’s freckles had become more noticeable against his reddish face. His clamped jaws and focused eyes showed his concentration, while his knuckles had turned white as his hands gripped the steering wheel.

The fast-moving flow of vehicles lost its initial haste. He glanced at both sides, considering his next moves. The park lane was full of vehicles bumper to bumper. The small gaps in between were insufficient for the BMW to squeeze its way through without the risk of becoming stuck in the process. A little further, an entire section of the park lane was cordoned off by a series of red-and-yellow pylons. Heaps of gravel, stacks of cobblestones, and other construction material and debris were scattered around the area. A mid-sized compactor machine, a small dump truck, and other equipment and tools occupied a long stretch of that lane.

Will cursed and punched the horn in frustration. He flipped on the left turn signal, but the heavy truck coming up the lane did not slow down to let in their SUV. And neither did the box-shaped Volvo station wagon behind the truck. Will exploded in a long tirade in German which Justin thought sounded as nasty as in English.

“Can’t even turn the siren on,” Will said. “Don’t want to give away our approach.”

“Yes, we need to come up to them in silence.”

The chances of such a stealthy advance actually taking place were near zero, but going in with sirens blaring and lights flashing removed any likelihood of sneaking up on the fugitives. Justin nodded as he pondered the possibility of the terrorists blowing up any explosive charges in their car in the busy street, especially if they felt they were backed into a corner. After all, this was supposed to be a suicide bombing, although neither the blonde nor the man who remotely triggered the explosion at the square showed any overwhelming desire to become martyrs until the inescapable bitter end.

“I hope Falco and Carrie aren’t trapped like us,” Will said.

“Yeah, me too.”

He reached for the radio. “Carrie, Falco, where are you?”

“We’re coming up to the Victory Column roundabout. No sign of the blue van yet.” Carrie’s voice was calm and dry, like the air before a turbulent storm. But the lightning bolts were not too far away in the distance.

“We’re stuck back and crawling forward.” Justin sighed.

He peered at the distance at the slender 230-feet-high monument towering over Berlin, crowned with a golden statue of the goddess Victoria. The monument celebrated Prussia’s triumphs over Denmark, Austria, and France in their late-nineteenth-century wars and was a favorite tourist attraction. And that fact automatically put a bull’s-eye on it, ranking at the top of terrorists’ hit lists. Are they going to target the monument?

Carrie said, “The construction ends at some point and there are fewer parked cars on the side. That’s how we got ahead.”

“All right. We’ll do the same. When you see them, remember we need them alive.” He stressed the last word more than necessary, avoiding any possibility of Carrie misunderstanding him.

“If possible,” Carrie said. “They’re sworn terrorists on a mission to blow up innocent people.”

The reply Justin was afraid she was going to give him. But she was right. He wished he could call her and explain the need to catch the informant alive, but he could not word that message in such a way that Will would miss it. And McClain’s order stopped Justin from divulging that piece of intelligence. This was not going to be the first time for Justin to disobey a clear and direct order, but in these circumstances he had decided not to break his silence.

“Of course, Carrie. If possible, let’s take them alive. And as always, be safe.”

“Will do. And you be safe too.”

He sat upright in his seat to see further away. The traffic picked up speed, and slowly but steadily they covered the length of a city block. Justin rolled down his window and stuck his head out. The pylons came to an end about fifty yards away. The cobblestone lane was clear of any heavy machinery or construction materials.

“We’re almost there,” he said to Will. “A few more seconds.”

But the traffic came to a sudden standstill. Will cursed again and turned the steering wheel to the right. The left corner of the BMW’s front bumper cut into the tail end of a silver Porsche Boxster, but Will’s face remained unfazed. The Porsche’s driver—a man in a black business suit with a full head of silver hair—barged out of his banged-up beauty. But Will had already plowed through a couple of the pylons, flinging them like bowling pins over the windshield. The BMW was zipping through the shoulder lane, kicking up handfuls of gravel that sprayed the vehicles in the nearest lane like a furious hailstorm.

Will hit the brakes as they came to the end of the construction zone. He swerved around a metal pylon, then hit two plastic ones with the side of the SUV. He veered sharply to the right, where a seemingly large enough space had opened up between a black BMW sedan and a yellow Peugeot van.

The gap between the cars turned out to be insufficient. The BMW dinged the front of the van, tearing apart its bumper. Will stomped on the gas and the SUV jerked forward. He leaned hard on the steering wheel as the BMW bounced on the sidewalk, and avoided slamming against the nearest tree or the lamppost. He also missed two pedestrians and a man on a bicycle coming from the opposite direction in the lane reserved for non-motorized vehicles.

“That’s some excellent driving,” Justin said.

Will thanked him with a head nod.

He eased on the gas and tapped the horn, announcing his presence to oblivious pedestrians up ahead. They jumped to the sides and out of the BMW’s way.

Justin scanned the vehicles on the street, hunting for the van. Still nothing. A couple of tour buses were partly blocking his view, so he cocked his head and stretched his neck to see around the obstacle. The cars behind were sedans and trucks, but no van, blue or otherwise.

“There, look there,” Will shouted.

Justin returned his gaze to the front. Two men were running through the traffic stopped at the roundabout, in the direction of the Victory Column. They were carrying weapons in their hands. The first one looked Caucasian, with short brown hair. The other gunman had black hair and darker skin. Is one of them the informant?

A moment later, a blue van just blew through the red light, almost crashing into a red city bus coming from the other direction. The van cut through the lawn of the park surrounding the Victory Column and kept going toward its stairs. A crowd of people were enjoying the magnificent monument, innocent people who at any moment could become victims.

Or hostages.

Justin could not let that happen. “Faster, faster.”

The BMW barreled down the lane. Will kept his left-hand thumb on the blaring horn, which cleared their path. As they came to the roundabout, a flimsy auto rickshaw cut in front of them. Will hit the brakes and jerked the steering wheel. He missed the rickshaw—whose young bearded driver jumped out of the back—but the BMW came to a head-on collision with one of the black lampposts.

Justin was thrown against the dashboard. His head hit the windshield. He shrugged it off and looked at Will, whose hands were still grasping the steering wheel. “You’re okay, Will?”

He shifted the SUV into reverse gear. The engine whined and a cloud of white smoke puffed out of the hood. The BMW went nowhere.

“Yeah, I’m fine, but we’re stuck.”

“We’ll catch up to them on foot.”

“I’ll radio Carrie and the others.”

“Good.”

Justin grabbed his C8SFW assault rifle and pushed open the door. He bolted through the stalled traffic, zigzagging between the vehicles. Before he could cross the three lanes, one of the gunmen noticed him and turned his weapon toward Justin.

The barrage lifted sparks off the nearest Mercedes-Benz and burst open its side windows. Justin rolled on the asphalt, seeking cover behind the bullet-ridden sedan. He opened the front passenger door and called to the driver—a middle-aged woman—who was shaking in the driver’s seat. He told the woman to unbuckle her seatbelt. Her hands failed her, and she botched the first try. A bullet skipped over the car’s hood, and that provided sufficient motivation for the woman’s fingers to do their job. Justin reached for her and pulled her out as more bullets peppered the sedan.

A brief check told Justin the woman did not have any visible wounds but he still asked her, “You’re okay?”

She nodded, unable to form any words or sounds.

“Stay down.”

Other people had abandoned their vehicles and chaos was swallowing up the roundabout. The scream of slammed brakes was followed by the clamor of a metal-on-metal bang and shattered glass. Shouts and curses erupted from behind him as gunfire burst from up ahead.

Flat on his stomach, Justin crawled forward and covered the distance to the next vehicle, another Mercedes-Benz sedan. Two rounds spurted right over his head. Sharp glass fragments cascaded over his shoulders. The gunmen were following his moves.

He wanted to fire back, but it was too dangerous because of the crowds. His eyes went to a cement truck stopped in front of the sedan. Now that’s what I call good cover.

He reached the front of the sedan, then dashed toward the cement truck. Bullets struck the other side of the drum, but he was able to reach the cabin. He swung open the door and found no one inside. The driver had fled, but the keys were still in the ignition.

Justin climbed in and slid into the driver’s seat. A bullet hit the windshield. It bored a hole and formed a huge spiderweb crack. The round landed less than a foot away from his right shoulder.

He stepped on the gas and yanked the wheel. The beast huffed and groaned as it slowly turned toward a minuscule Smart car in the other lane. From Justin’s viewpoint, the car looked even smaller than it was in reality.

The barrage continued but bullets thumped against the thick metal skin of the cement truck’s drum. Justin’s foot was planted on the gas pedal. The truck’s hood smashed into the passenger door of the Smart car. Its driver had already left behind his ride. The truck tossed it aside with brute force, as if it were a plastic toy car.

Justin was now out of the roundabout. His eyes searched the circular lanes for the van. He found it as it swung around a couple of trees and benches and headed for the other side of the monument. It was going toward a tour bus that was surrounded by at least three dozen or so kindergarten-aged children.

He understood the terrorists’ diabolical last-ditch effort.

Justin’s right foot hit the gas pedal so hard he thought it went through the cabin’s floor. The cement truck growled like a predator preparing for his hunt, and rocketed through the sidewalk and the low hedge of shrubs lining the park. Then it cut through the green lawn, heading toward its blue prey.

He could not hear the bullets hammering the cement truck’s drum because of the engine’s roar, but he was sure the gunmen were doing everything within their power to stop him. Where are Carrie and the backup teams?

Justin steered the truck to the right, and avoided running over a couple of benches. He wanted nothing to slow him down even if it were for a matter of moments. Every second counted when faced with a potential car bombing.

He followed the van’s tracks dug into the lawns. As he came to a turn, his eyes caught one of the gunmen shouldering a weapon and pointing it at the monument. It was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Justin mumbled a brief prayer. It was all he could do at that moment.

The RPG projectile ripped a grayish streak through the clear blue fabric of the sky. A split second later, it slammed into the farthest column of the monument’s base. The explosion spurted a wide wave of shrapnel as dust began to cover that section of the park, concealing it from Justin’s eyes.

He turned his gaze to the gunman, who was readying his launcher for the second shot. A gust of wind had cleared the small mushroom cloud of smoke around him formed by the weapon’s cone-shaped breech. With his expert hands, he was screwing the rocket propellant cylinder into the warhead.

Justin looked around the park for Will, Carrie, or anyone from the other teams. Where is everybody?

His clasped his rifle with his right hand and rested it on the steering wheel. But the bumpy ride in the heavy truck over the uneven terrain rattled the rifle. The distance to the gunman and the high chance of casualties among people scampering behind him stopped him from pulling the trigger.

The gunman loaded the projectile into the RPG’s muzzle. He aimed again at the Victory Column and seemed to cock the weapon.

Justin winced.

Then he saw the head of the gunman explode in a pink mist.

His lifeless body fell to the ground, but he must have triggered the weapon with a last unconscious finger twitch. The warhead went off about a foot away from him. The explosion blew the gunman to pieces.

Justin looked for the shooter who had taken down the gunman. The fatal round had come from the south. Will’s direction.

As he came to another turn, the van came into Justin’s view. It was stopped right behind the tour bus. The crowd had disappeared, and Justin assumed all children and their chaperones were inside the bus.

That was exactly where the terrorists wanted them to be.

Justin turned the steering wheel and aimed straight for the van. There was no time for a more conventional dismantling of a potential bomb stuffed inside the van.

He felt his sweaty fingers slip from the plastic-coated steering wheel. Justin readjusted his grip and steadied his foot on the gas pedal. He blinked away drops of sweat from his eyes and focused his gaze up ahead, ignoring his heart pounding in his chest. He was about thirty yards away from the van and closing the distance with every passing second.

A young oak tree and a bench appeared in his path, but he did not make an effort to steer away. He did not even flinch as the cement truck plowed through, snapping the tree in half like a twig. The crash scattered a canopy of branches and leaves that blanketed his windshield view, then the truck bounced over the metal bench.

Justin shifted in his seat, and cocked his head, then flipped on the windshield wipers. They cleared some of the leaves, but they were useless against the large heavy branches. He peered through the dense cover and saw nothing else but the blue target.

He rammed the driver’s side of the van.

The brutal collision lifted the van off the ground, flipping it to the side. The impact hoisted the two front wheels of Justin’s truck up into the air. He was thrown against the back of his seat, and was glad he had secured his seatbelt.

He stomped his foot on the gas, and the truck obeyed his powerful thrust. It shoved the van away from the tour bus and into the empty lanes of the roundabout. The van rolled over again, then spun sideways for a 180-degree turn.

Justin realigned his course so that the cement truck’s hood was heaving the twisted van away from the park. He feared one of the terrorists would still try to blow up the explosive charges. The collision should have pulled apart the bomb components, but there was no way to be absolutely positive of that fact.

The truck kept going for another twenty feet. Justin aimed for the pathway leading into a new section of the Tiergarten park. He hoped there was no major picnic or a large gathering of people there. If the bomb was still active, an empty park was the best location for an explosion.

The van lost one of its doors and rolled another time as it came to the sidewalk. Justin eased up on the gas pedal and stepped on the brakes. Both the van and the truck entered the pathway. The park was empty.

Justin drove for another fifty feet or so, the brakes screeching as he came to a stop. He retrieved his rifle and jumped out of the truck. He threw a last glance at the scrunched ball of metal and plastic that used to be the van, then sprinted toward the Victory Column.

The tour bus had disappeared. He heaved a sigh of relief, but then wondered if the terrorists had climbed aboard and had taken the passengers as hostages.

His fears were relieved, but only for a moment. A man appeared from behind the gigantic base of the monument. He held a woman by a handful of hair with his left hand. His right hand pointed a small pistol at her temple.

Justin raised his rifle and dashed toward the gunman. “Let her go and you’ll live,” he shouted first in English, then in Arabic.

The gunman was taken aback by Justin’s words but kept pushing the woman in front of him. He slumped behind her, using her as cover, and jammed his pistol against her head. “No, you drop your weapon,” he shouted back in Arabic.

The woman shivered and stopped her sobbing. “Help me, help me,” she cried.

“Shut up, shut your mouth,” the gunman said.

Justin stepped into a standing firing position. He set his rifle’s rubber buttplate in his right shoulder pocket. The rifle’s sights were leveled to his eyes. His fingers rested on the trigger guard. “Your last chance or I’ll blow your brains out.”

He was bluffing, because the gunman was almost completely hidden behind the hostage. Justin did not have a clear shot. He held little hope that the gunman would surrender but the standoff was going to buy him time. A few precious seconds until Carrie or Will or another team member cornered the gunman from the other side.

“I will kill her, I will kill her,” the gunman said.

Justin closed his left eye and peered at the gunman through his rifle sights.

A single gunshot cracked through the park.

The gunman toppled forward over the woman’s shoulder. They both tumbled to the ground. She shrieked, kicked, and crawled away from him.

Justin fired a couple of rounds into the fallen gunman, hitting him in the head and in the chest. Lifting up his eyes, Justin scanned the area for the shooter who had saved the hostage. When he found what he was looking for, he flinched. He was staring into the eyes of the third terrorist. About twenty feet away, at the edge of the monument’s eight-step foundation, stood the man Justin was now convinced was the SIS informant.

The informant held an assault rifle in his hand, but he pointed it down and not at Justin. A gunfire burst flared up from the northern side of the park. Bullets bored holes into the monument’s base, splintering its square red marble slabs, inches away from the informant’s head.

Justin peered deep into the informant’s face, committing his sharply carved features to memory.

The man shook his head and pursed his lips. His mouth seemed to form the words, “I’m sorry.”

Justin lowered his gun and gave the informant an almost imperceptible head gesture toward the south. The only seemingly safe side. The only way to escape.

The informant nodded his understanding. He tossed his rifle to the side and broke into a dash, running for his life. He turned the corner, jumped down the stairs, and raced through the park and the roundabout. Within seconds, he had disappeared into the Tiergarten park.

Justin shook his head and let out a deep sigh. He turned around and pivoted on his heels, taking a sweeping view of the park. The shooting was over and there had been no bomb explosion. But the chaos around the park and square continued. And the aftermath of this operation had just begun.