There was a knock at the door. Dale ran to it and looked through the peephole. The buzzing drone had moved off but the phone was still ringing. Whoever was knocking was keeping out of sight.
“Hotel security,” a male voice said on the other side of the door.
Dale ignored it and hurried back toward the bed. “Give me your bag,” he said. He spoke in Farsi to make sure Nadia Rahimi understood.
She gestured to a large roller bag sitting vertically near the minibar.
Dale hoisted it onto the king bed and threw it open. He turned it over and dumped out the contents. “Do you have a belt?” he asked, sifting through the bag. “Like a big strong one?”
“Yes, I suppose. It’s . . .” She pointed.
He found a wide leather belt, the type to be worn with jeans. He also found a long shawl and tossed it toward her. “Hang on to this. You may need it later.”
He found some athletic shoes and a pair of yoga pants. “And these.”
The knocking at the door continued.
Dale said, “Put the pants and the sneakers on. Right now. Keep the belt around your waist, a little loose but buckled. Okay?”
The knock intensified on the door. She gaped at him.
“Right fucking now! Do it.”
She disappeared into the bathroom and hurriedly changed while Dale started emptying the contents of his backpack.
When she was back, he said, “Your cosmetics, where are they? I don’t see them here.”
“I have a makeup bag in the bathroom that I . . .”
Dale dashed past her, found the case in the bathroom, and returned to dump it on the bed. He also had a Kleenex box, a wad of bath towels, and a roll of toilet paper. He threw all of it on the bed in a messy pile.
He turned to her and said, “Keep the curtains closed and stand over there, that side of the window against the wall. Do exactly as I tell you and we’ll live to tell about this. Question me or hesitate and we are both going to die today. Do I make myself clear?”
There was a loud slamming noise against the door.
Fuck.
It was a breach. Some kind of battering ram or sledgehammer trying to bust the hinges right off. Dale had never been on the inside of this before. He was used to being the one kicking in doors.
Hunched over the bed, he picked up Nadia’s can of hair spray. He applied it to wads of toilet paper and Kleenex. He poured a six-ounce bottle of nail polish remover across the paper. He picked the mess up and made a pile of it in front of the door, with the hair spray can standing in the center. The steady slamming thumps were still coming a few feet away. Dale guessed he had fifteen to thirty seconds before the attackers broke through.
He pulled the bathroom and closet doors, which, when opened together, covered the width of the room’s entryway, blocking it, isolating the small entry from the rest of the room. He took what was remaining of the nail polish remover and poured it in a circular pattern on the entry carpet near the door. The liquid shone in a small ring around the piled-up Kleenex.
He went to the other side of the two doors, the main part of the room. Before he pulled the two doors together again, he bundled up another wad of paper and lit it with the Zippo. He tossed the flaming paper on the pile. He pulled the doors together to wall off the entry. He pulled a zip tie from his backpack and used it to hold the doors together.
He took note of the room’s fire sprinkler system, wadding towels at the top of the two open doors to separate the entry from the rest of the room. There was no sprinkler on the entry side. Once he felt he had it about right, he shoved Nadia out of the way and muscled a desk sideways into the entry to backstop the two wedged doors.
A burning odor filled the room. He hit the room’s speakerphone button on the nightstand, got a dial tone and then the front desk.
“Yes, Mrs. Rahimi, how can I help you?” answered the receptionist, her English accent lilting pleasantly.
With smoke creeping into the room, Dale said slowly and deliberately, “I am from the Islamic State. I have a bomb and am going to blow up this hotel and everyone in it. You have five minutes to evacuate.”
He hung up and pulled a coil of black-and-yellow-striped climbing rope from his bag, along with a tangled set of metal hooks and carabiners.
The rising fumes from the chemical burn made Nadia cough. He ran a knot through a carabiner and looped it around the edge of the heavy bed frame, through Nadia’s belt, then his own. He spent ten seconds tying it all together, arranging the rope. He put his backpack around his back, tightened the straps, and turned toward the window, with Nadia close behind him. Back at the burning entryway, he could hear the doorjamb beginning to crack and splinter.
He spread the curtains. The drone wasn’t there now. He opened the sliding-glass doors and felt a rush of humid sea air.
There was a loud bang at the entryway. The can of aerosol hair spray had finally blown. Flames were leaping at the edges of his little barricade and black smoke was hovering near the ceiling, now pouring out of the open doors over his head. He heard the ringing bell of the fire alarm and the hiss of the sprinkler. His delaying tactic wouldn’t last long now.
He saw the two open doors that had formed his barricade break apart. Through the flames he caught a quick glance of a man’s head. One of the “Aussies” from the bar. His instinct had been right. The man was forced to turn away from the leaping flames.
Tethered to Nadia, Dale shoved her to the balcony, squashing her against the railing. He’d threaded the rope through his legs and across a few carabiners to form a crude Swiss seat. He’d bound her to him, wrapping her belt and torso. Wearing gloves, he pushed her hard into the railing.
“Climb over now!” he shouted, jostling her against the railing.
She screamed. He didn’t care. He grabbed her by the shirt and belt, violently hoisting her over the railing while she continued screaming. Her weight took him with her. They were in free fall for about ten feet before the king bed slid all the way to the edge of the room and arrested them with a jerk. Dale and the woman dangled thirty feet above the ground, looking up at the smoke coming out of the room somewhere above them.
Grunting, he used his legs to push against the white stucco of the building. He released more line, dropping them another five feet. Pushing out again, he swung onto another room’s balcony on the second floor. He was out of rope and they were still too high to sustain a fall to the pavement below.
Dangling like a marionette, he used his feet to maneuver, finally hooking a balcony railing with his ankle. Flexing his hamstrings, he pulled them closer to the building and pushed Nadia over the railing. He released his last few feet of line and they fell in a heap on the concrete balcony, gasping. He’d landed on top of her. She was crying, muttering something, her makeup a smeared mess. He undid her belt and pulled her to her feet.
“You’re okay,” he said, shaking her by the shoulders. “Just keep listening to me and we’re going to live through this.”
The glass door in front of them was locked. Dale pulled the Glock from his pants and took aim at the glass.
“Going to be loud,” he said.
He shattered the glass with five rounds in a circular pattern, followed by a poke from his elbow. Ducking to avoid the falling shards, he made it into the room. Nadia followed.
She was horrified but compliant. Whoever her husband was, he must have told her something about his business.
A steady stream of guests was flowing through the wide-open front doors. As they ran out, a fire-alarm bell clanged insistently, echoing off the tile floors. A few of the maroon-jacketed dark-skinned hotel staff were waving the guests on, hurrying them outside. A police van rolled up, lights blazing. Two heavily armed cops fought against the rush of people to enter the building.
Maria remained standing near the bar, watching them leave. Oleg’s voice crackled in her ear. “We’re through the door but the room’s on fire. He went out the window, but we couldn’t see much,” he said.
“Anything in the room worth getting?” she asked.
“I can’t tell. Fire’s keeping us out. We can’t get past the entryway.”
“Dmitry, what do you have?” she asked one of the other Spetz men. He was in the parking lot, set up in their white minivan, operating the drone.
“He must have come out on a rope. I lost him for a few seconds in the smoke, but the rope is still there. It stopped near the second floor.”
“Stay on it,” Maria said. “Oleg, get the team back to the lobby. He has to be coming out here with this swarm of people.”
Shortly after she spoke, one of the maroon-jacketed men came and grabbed her elbow, pulling her toward the exit. She jerked free and glared at him. He moved on to someone else.
Dale took a quick scan of the second-floor room they’d entered to see if there was anything he could use. An open suitcase on the bed. Male clothing. He went to the closet. There was a midlength raincoat.
“Here,” he said to Nadia, removing his backpack and holding it to her. “You put this on for now.”
She shouldered into the backpack, sobbing. He tightened down the straps. With the loss of the climbing rope, the pack was significantly lighter, less bulky. Dale unzipped it and removed his ball cap, which he then tightened over his head. He untied the long green shawl from Nadia’s waist, cut a hole through the center of it, and draped it over her, pushing her head through the hole. He arranged the shawl over the backpack, pushing against the fabric here and there, knotting the shawl at the back of the bag.
“I want you to walk behind me, hunched over, okay? Tie your scarf over your head like you would in Iran.”
She nodded and did as asked.
Dale put the blue nylon raincoat on. It was three sizes too large, which was fine with him. He tightened his ball cap again and glanced at himself in the mirror. Before leaving the room, he shoved his Glock into his waistband.
There was a steady stream of guests descending the stairs. Dale and Nadia joined in the swell, the hotel’s warning Klaxons and ringing bells echoing off the walls.
“Stay hunched,” Dale kept saying to Nadia as they moved down the steps. He stole a few quick glances at the nervous people shuffling around him.
When they were in the lobby, a cop was waving his arms, directing them toward the door. There were flashing lights outside. From beneath the brim of his hat, Dale’s eyes shifted around the lobby. All was movement toward the door, except for the cops. Then he saw a blond head. She was over by the bar, staring intently into the crush of people, the only civilian standing still.
Dale looked back at the floor and pulled Nadia close to him. “Hunch!” he said through clenched teeth, squeezing her arm. “Very important. Make yourself short.”
A few seconds later they were through the door, among a milling crowd in the parking lot. Dale kept her moving toward the west end of it, aiming for a gate on the far side that went to the boardwalk. Under the raincoat, the heat was insufferable.
He shuffled her through the maze of parked cars. He didn’t have too much farther to go before he made it to his little three-wheeler truck.
“Anything?” Maria said into her earpiece, her rising voice indicating a growing unease. “They haven’t come through the lobby. Dmitry, is there another exit?”
“Yes,” Dmitri, the drone operator, said. “I can see one in the back, the kitchen. But so far no sign of our target.”
“What can you see in the front?”
“It’s a huge crowd. Cops everywhere,” he said, watching the aerial view in his laptop screen. He was sitting in the front passenger seat of the white minivan they’d borrowed from the consulate. Via the laptop, he made small adjustments to the drone above him. “I parked it at a higher altitude so the cops wouldn’t notice. But they probably will soon.”
Oleg said, “We’re coming down the stairwell now. We’ll set up a cordon outside in the parking lot.”
The drone operator slunk down as two people approached his car. They were weaving through the other parked cars, apparently on their way to the back gate of the parking lot. After they’d moved on, he looked at them again. The Spetz operator noted the man’s ill-fitting raincoat in the oppressive heat. There was something wrong with the way the woman’s back was shaped. Together, they looked downright weird. He caught a glimpse of Dale’s face.
“Hang on,” Dmitry said over the net. “I think I may have him. Was he with someone?”
“Don’t know,” said Oleg.
“Well, he is now,” the drone operator said.
Meredith had commandeered one of the watch stations on the second floor at HQS. She and her team of two deputies had maintained a twelve-hour vigil, waiting to hear anything from John. She was on her fourth cup of coffee, feeling queasy, struggling to stay awake. She decided she’d better eat something. She cracked open the wrapped sandwich from the Agency cafeteria she’d been saving—room-temperature tuna. Gross but better than nothing.
Three televisions over her head were set to all-news cable channels, on mute. Scattered around the cold, windowless room were a handful of desks, phones, and laptops. She’d been there since four in the morning and it was now approaching seven. She knew John was supposed to meet Cerberus somewhere in Mumbai about now. But she’d heard nothing from him, as usual.
“That was Captain Collins from the Marine Air Wing on Bonhomme Richard,” said Rick Desmond from the desk on the far side of the room.
“And?”
“The Osprey they sent just refueled at the IAF base near Mumbai. The crew’s standing by.”
“Good,” Meredith said.
“The thing is . . . ,” Desmond added.
“Fuck,” she groaned, swallowing some of the tuna salad. “What now?”
“He says they’ll only hang out for another half hour or so. They’re concerned about crew rest. He said if it goes much longer, they’re shutting down and getting some rack time.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Your Captain Collins has no idea what we have in store for him.”
By that, she meant that she would rain holy administrative hell down on the poor USMC captain’s head from the DC halls of power.
She’d been busy greasing the wheels of this exfil and no lowly captain was about to get in her way. As promised, Dorsey had gotten the director to say something to the Secretaries of Defense and State for a little help, just in case she and her staff ran into issues. And of course, they’d run into issues. The American national security establishment was the world’s largest bureaucracy, dictated primarily by inertia, as all such bureaucracies are.
But Dorsey had delivered. Like magic, the Indians had agreed to let an American aircraft enter Indian airspace. Already in the Gulf of Oman, the Marines moved the Second Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) farther to the east.
Its flagship was the Bonhomme Richard, a small aircraft carrier designed for ground support with an air wing of helicopters and jump jets. When within range, Bonhomme had detached an MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft to an IAF base near Mumbai. The long-range vertical-takeoff and -landing bird had arrived within the last hour.
Desmond was about to respond to Meredith. He suddenly paused, distracted by the TV. He studied the other TV over Meredith’s head.
“Huh,” the thirty-year-old analyst said.
“What,” Meredith replied irritably.
“Look at this.” He pointed to the TVs.
Meredith backed from her desk to get a better view. She picked up the remote and turned up the volume on one of them. She was looking at a head-on view of the Hotel Taj Lands End in Mumbai. Smoke was pouring from a window on one side of the building. The chyron beneath the picture read, “Breaking: Terror Plot at Mumbai Hotel.” She listened to the anchor describing what they knew so far: a bomb threat from ISIS, a fire, an evacuation. All three TVs were going to the live feed.
John.
“Call that captain back,” she barked at Desmond. “Tell him to get that Osprey to the consulate. Now!”
“Do I follow?” asked Dmitry, sitting in the van. “They’re almost to the gate.”
“No,” Maria said quickly.
He could tell by her voice that she was already running toward him on her way out of the building.
She continued. “We need you focused on the drone. Follow them that way.” She ordered the team out to the van immediately. “We’re coming to you,” she said before signing off.
Dmitry maneuvered the drone to get a wider view of the walkway by the sea. There was a huge crowd there now: some who’d come to watch the calamity at the hotel, others part of the swarm of evacuees heading in the other direction. Amid the swirling pack, he had a hard time picking out his target. But then he saw them, steadily maneuvering through the crowd toward a small parked vehicle.
Moments later the Alpha team was at the side of the van, crawling in. Oleg maneuvered himself behind the wheel. Maria was right behind him.
“They just entered that vehicle,” he said, angling his laptop so they could see it.
“Where is this?” asked Maria. “Where physically?”
“Over there, through the gate. There’s a walkway and then that’s them.”
“Drive,” she said to Oleg.