Besieged

MAHEGAN STOOD AND FOUND THE CIRCUIT BREAKER INSIDE THE stairwell, then flipped the master switch off. He had noticed it on his way up the stairs and saw shutting down the lights as the quickest way to conceal their movements, if only for a few seconds.

“Either move now, or we’re all dead,” he said.

He stood at the door as the two women knocked their chairs back in surprise at his rapid movements. He heard the car doors slam and saw the men jogging through the front yard. Two broke off from the main group and headed toward the back. It was nighttime, and he was able only to see the faint movements of the men, first, because the dome light of their vehicle came on, and second, because the streetlight in the distance was casting a pale glow.

He wondered about Misha and whether Casey had found her.

De La Cruz grabbed his arm and said, “What’s going on?”

He tried to assess whether the worry in her tone was authentic. It was entirely possible that she had led these men here. But he had to assume that she had been unaware of his presence at the Constance household upon her arrival and that her only reason for being there was that the key to the code lay somewhere inside the basement servers.

“There’s a better place to go,” Layne said. She had grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter.

“Let’s get into the basement. Now,” he commanded.

He heard the footsteps on the front porch as the women passed him and began descending. He retrieved his Sig Sauer Tribal and knelt on the first step, keeping the basement door cracked. He had a perfect line of sight through the kitchen–dining area to the front door.

Wood splintered as they burst through the door. The noise was deafening, but he held his aim steady. The two men moved quickly into the house and then stopped, holding MP5s at eye level, scanning.

Mahegan double tapped the lead man twice in the chest and caught his wingman in the neck, with the second shot hitting his shoulder. The lead man was down but getting up, and Mahegan thought, Body armor. So he shot him in the head, as he was on one knee. Two nine-millimeter Parabellum hollow-point rounds fired at twenty feet would knock a man down even if body armor absorbed the force. The other man wasn’t moving, so Mahegan held his aim for a few seconds more, then shifted his focus to the other two men.

By now the back door to the house was opening, and he considered his options: kill those two or lock the kitchen door to the basement stairwell, grab the women, and get them to safety. First, he was still concerned about Misha and her whereabouts. He hadn’t had time to check his phone, and if it had vibrated, he hadn’t felt it. Second, he knew that whatever might be on those servers was important enough to protect. Last, he considered whether there were more Persians on the way and took a calculated risk that there were not. Starting with the thirty to forty men whom he had seen in the containers, he was confident that he had whittled that number by at least 20 percent, based on the tunnel fight, the chase in Carolina Beach, and now the battle at the Constance home.

The problem was that the sight line he had with the front door was a disadvantage in terms of the back door. He had no sight line except for a small crack in between the door and the jamb. The door separating the basement and the kitchen opened toward the back door, where the men had just breached the house. He could feel them moving silently through the family room toward him. A shadow slipped across the quarter-inch vertical crack between the door and the wall. They were close. He slid back against the wall of the stairwell, leaving the door slightly ajar.

He saw fingers curl around the door, envisioned a man’s arm, its length, the shoulder to which it was attached, and the body and head locations based upon that calculus. As the man began to move the door, he nosed his MP5 around the corner, which was when Mahegan fired two rounds through the door. It was a cheap pressed-paper door, which was no kind of door for securing living quarters from a basement. Mahegan had backed away from it, because it afforded no protection, only concealment.

The MP5 flipped end over end like a football during a kickoff and actually bounced against Mahegan’s leg. He fully expected the next and last shooter to begin spraying and praying into the stairwell, so he snagged the MP5 and leapt to the basement floor, turned the corner, and felt the turbulence as bullets whipped into the basement.

The man most likely knew he was a lone gunman now and had neighbors and cell phones to worry about, as well. As Mahegan was moving toward the basement exterior door, a hand grabbed his ankle.

A voice whispered something, which was drowned out by the fusillade.

He said nothing and hoped she would get the message that talking was not the best option at the moment. Bullets continued to rain down the funnel of the stairwell, ricocheting off the steps and the floor. He was hopeful that they would not need the computer equipment for anything else, as it was taking a beating.

He felt the hand around his ankle tighten, perhaps with fear, perhaps as a result of injury and pain. He was at a disadvantage being right-handed and using the left side of the stairwell for cover. Instead of being able to aim from a protected position, he would have to expose more of his body if he wanted to take a measured shot that would count. He had fired seven of his ten rounds, and even though he had the MP5 slung across his shoulder, he didn’t like firing a weapon he hadn’t previously shot. As it was, the Tribal felt light in his hand, its magazine nearly empty. The MP5 probably wasn’t in much better condition.

He heard the slightest ping, which would have been unrecognizable to 99 percent of the people in the world. It was a middle or high C pitch, but nothing musical would follow. It was the sound of the spoon releasing from the body of an M84 stun grenade. He had about three seconds to find cover for whoever had her hand wrapped around his ankle and for himself. He knelt and followed the hand, which was connected to a body beneath the stairwell. The gap was just large enough for him to fit into, because De La Cruz was slender. He smelled her perfume and heard the accented voice.

“I’ve been trying to get you under here,” she said.

He wedged his body up against hers and said in a hoarse whisper, “Close your eyes and cover your ears—”

He had put his pistol on the concrete by his chest and had fingers stuffed into both ears. The flashbang, or stun grenade, was famous for its ability to immobilize people for minutes. The grenade was designed to blind and deafen, creating a tactical gap for rapid entry by assault forces. Its steel body had holes cut into it to allow the sound and light from the explosives out while keeping the grenade from creating shrapnel. There was not much anyone could do but to protect against what it was designed to do, if you knew it was coming.

He felt the whump of the grenade course through his body, as if he was standing next to a building falling in on itself from demolition. The stairwell absorbed much of the concussive force, which was a shock wave that blew two of the wooden staircase treads upward. By closing his eyes, he prevented the flash of the grenade from blinding him. And he could handle the smell. The only question was, would the grenade create a fire? He had used the flashbang hundreds of times, and on rare occasions fires had started simply because of the proximity of the blast to something flammable, like a wooden staircase.

He didn’t smell a fire, and he didn’t hear anyone coming down the steps just yet. He opened his eyes and noticed that one of the treads was clean off the supporting risers. He could see and shoot through the gap.

He saw a flashlight arcing back and forth through the wafting smoke. De La Cruz was trying to struggle against him, but he forced his body into her, pushing her against the wall, trying to make her shut up.

He heard the first footfall, then the next. The flashlight was focused outward, looking for a shooter in the distance. The purr of the MP5 sang out, and he heard bullets raking the computer equipment and the far wall.

Two more steps and another burst of MP5 ammunition shattered the far window next to the door. He began to wonder where Layne Constance was. As if he had summoned her, she appeared at the bottom of the stairs, walking slowly, staring up at the man with the gun, whose feet were on the stairs just above his head. Layne’s face was ashen in the glow of the flashlight, like a horror mask. The MP5 or the stun grenade had wounded her. His guess was the random fire had found her.

“Please forgive me,” she whispered. “Beso. Beso de la muerte.”

Mahegan looked at her face, and she was not looking up at the shooter, but directly at him. Her face was eye level with Mahegan’s a short ten feet away. The shooter’s flashlight left her face and then focused on the open plank of the stairway.

She had just muttered the phrase “Kiss of death” in Spanish. For what was she seeking forgiveness? he wondered. Her unwitting divulging of information to Franco?

The wood was too thick to shoot through, but he placed the pistol against the step he thought the shooter was on and fired two rounds, saving his last bullet for a clear shot.

The shooter stumbled and leapt from the stair to the basement floor and landed atop the wounded Layne Constance. After rolling off of her, he spun to one knee, the other splayed out, as if he couldn’t lift it.

One of the rounds must have caught him in the leg, but he appeared to be a fighter, as his aim was directly at Mahegan’s face until Mahegan pushed off the wall and slid onto the concrete basement floor. When Mahegan stopped sliding, the shooter’s ability to track his MP5 to his large body mass was not as good as Mahegan’s ability to put the last bullet in the shooter’s head.

He fell forward onto Layne, who was lying on her back, as if waiting for the crime-scene chalk fairy to come and draw an outline. Mahegan wasn’t convinced she was dead, but she didn’t have much time if she was alive.

De La Cruz peeked her head out of the cubby beneath the stairwell that had been their saving grace.

“Let’s move now,” he said.

He flipped the Iranian terrorist off of Layne and found the pulse in her neck.

De La Cruz was moving toward the door when he said, “Not so fast.” He wanted to be the first one out the door. He had pocketed his empty Tribal but still had the MP5. Carrying Layne in his arms, he could see where she had been gut shot. A bullet could do too much damage down there, making it challenging to repair everything to stop the bleeding.

Stepping into the night air, he sucked in the fresh breeze, trying to get the cordite and smoke out of his lungs. Despite the fact that no fire had caught yet, the smoke had been significant. He backtracked the way Misha had led him in, through the Daniels’ backyard, and they came out onto the street precisely where Casey Livingstone was parked.

He saw Misha’s face pressed against the window and was glad to see that she was wearing her glasses. He reached forward and secured the strap to her sweatshirt. She recognized her mother in his arms, and she turned away as he approached.

Casey popped the rear door of her SUV and helped him slide Layne into the back.

“First-aid kit?” he asked.

“Here,” Casey said, handing him a small white box with a red cross on it. “It came with the vehicle. Probably not much you can use on her.”

“Drive to the hospital, please.”

“On it.”

De La Cruz got in the backseat with him. He leaned over the seat and began to work on Layne Constance as her daughter, Misha, sat in the front seat, staring straight out the window. Layne was shot in the side. Blood was slowly oozing from the wound. He applied pressure with a wadded-up bunch of gauze pads from the first-aid kit.

He heard Misha speak in the slightest whisper as she looked at the floorboard.

“Hope she’s dead.”