SEVENTY-TWO
Haz Mirza entered the building on the western side, through the kitchen, following behind three of his men. He’d seen a fourth Quds operative, a man in his thirties named Jamshidi, catch a shotgun blast to the stomach, and he now lay dying in some manicured bushes near the wall of the mansion. He had heard a report over the radio that another of his cell had been killed in the entry hall while entering the main gallery where the art was on display, and a third had been wounded trying to go around the back to make certain the ambassador didn’t try to flee in this direction. This man was still in the fight, but immobile with a gunshot wound to his leg.
There was a lot of gunfire coming from the house now, but Mirza pushed forward behind his men. Tarik had told him the ambassador would be put in a locked room off his office, and this was up the stairs on this side of the home. He’d also given him a lot of detail about the safe room and the camera system attached to it.
Mirza and the trio with him were tasked with bypassing as much fighting on the ground level as they could so that they could quickly pin the ambassador.
They reached the stairs, allowing several civilians to pass after shining their weapon lights on them to be certain they were neither armed nor the one man they had come to find. But upon taking the staircase up, they found themselves under fire from the mezzanine. One of Mirza’s men went down, shot in the back by a man with a pistol, but the other two Quds gunmen eviscerated the American security man and sent him tumbling over the railing, down to the ground floor.
More unarmed civilians appeared at the top of the stairs, and they were cut down by Mirza himself and another Quds man before they realized they were unarmed. When they stopped moving, the Iranians still on their feet reloaded their magazines, while the wounded man covered the ground floor.
At the top of the stairs Mirza and the others encountered a pair of men leaning out of a room with rifles to their shoulders. The Americans fired high and Mirza and his teammate raked the doorway, hitting one man in the knee and the other in the stomach and pelvis.
Both men dropped down, still alive but heavily wounded, trying desperately to keep their guns up and get them back on target.
Mirza continued firing, dumping a magazine into one of the men before he finally stilled.
Court listened to all the shooting near Hanley in the west wing. “Matt? You okay?”
There was no reply.
“Matt? How copy me?”
Still nothing.
He turned to Zoya. “We have to advance into the gallery, take it to the west wing, and go up the stairs there. You good?”
She dropped the mag in her pistol, looked at it, and snapped it back into the grip. “For four rounds I’m good, then I guess I’ll just admire the artwork.”
“We’ll find you a weapon,” he said, and then, “On me.”
She put a hand on his right shoulder. Together they rose and began moving slowly up the dim and smoky hallway, their bodies close together.
Matt Hanley stood in silence, his hands raised alongside another seven men and women in cocktail attire. The two security men who had been in the room had both been killed at the doorway to the well-appointed office, but so far no one else had been harmed.
Hanley knew Sedgwick was behind the steel door inside the closet on his right, and he had two security men in there, as well. The ambo was safe, for now, but Hanley couldn’t say the same for himself and those with him.
Hanley was unarmed, and he wished he had his trusty old Colt 1911 with him right now.
But he did have one thing. He had communication with the three Poison Apple assets who were somewhere else in the building.
Gunfire continued downstairs, and in different parts of the second floor, as well. This remained a fluid scene, but the four terrorists who made it into the ambassador’s home office now had the door shut and blocked with a small but heavy wooden bookshelf, and they’d effectively cut off the ambassador from any hope of rescue.
At first two terrorists had entered the office; one he recognized as Mirza himself, and with him was an older man in black who appeared uninjured. Moments later, however, a man with an AK crawled into the room, a trail of blood behind him, and he rolled onto his side and pointed his gun back out onto the mezzanine he’d just left.
The ambulatory Iranian knelt down and patted the man on the shoulder to check on him, while Mirza held his gun on the group gathered here.
Within moments a fourth and then a fifth terrorist entered; it seemed clear to Hanley they’d all been ordered to come to this location, which meant Mirza had known the ambo would flee here to his panic room.
Hanley and all the others were searched for weapons and phones. No one had a gun, but all the phones were tossed into the corner. Still, Hanley’s tiny, skin-tone earpiece was in place in his left ear, so even though his phone was not on his person, he could hear the Poison Apple team as they moved around on the roof and downstairs, and he could communicate with them if he had to, simply by speaking.
Haz Mirza immediately stepped over to Ryan Sedgwick’s walnut desk and sat down behind it, and then he surprised Hanley by taking off his backpack and pulling out a laptop computer, as if he were at Starbucks doing his schoolwork, save for the polymer-and-metal Kalashnikov hanging on his chest.
He opened his computer and began typing, but soon he shouted in annoyance in Farsi to his men. Clearly he saw something on his laptop he didn’t like.
Quickly the DDO realized what had the terrorist so worked up. Hightower had shot down his reconnaissance drone, which had been giving Mirza the clearest picture of the situation outside.
The Iranian went to work on his laptop, no doubt tasking another craft of the swarm to be his main visual reference point.
On the roof Hightower had taken a grand total of one shot at a one-yard-square target in the dark hundreds of yards above his head, and he’d missed. He had no way to determine if his shot was high or low, left or right, and he recognized the folly of this task. He figured he shouldn’t do any more wild-ass-guess shooting up here unless he had to, because two dozen police cars were in view, approaching up Clayallee, and he didn’t want to get sprayed with lead by Berlin’s finest.
He did continue to scan the sky, and while doing this he saw one of the quadcopters leave its formation and descend straight down. It stopped over the park, roughly in the same spot as the drone he’d shot down, and now he realized he did have a chance to take down a second of what appeared to be about twenty of the unmanned aerial vehicles.
He lined up his shot as he’d done before, well aware that even though he was firing up, his round would still go somewhere if he missed, and he might end up shooting some poor hapless civilian in southern Berlin out on a Friday night.
But he put it out of his mind—Zack was a master at compartmentalizing his emotions—and he fired.
A second drone dropped to the ground in the park; this time its warhead detonated on impact.
He looked back up into the sky with his thermal optic. This wasn’t a sustainable fight, Zack knew this. Soon, whoever was controlling the swarm would grow annoyed at the dickhead sniper on the roof shooting down his craft, and he would rain high explosives on Zack’s position.
He had seen that the wounded spotter on the roof had been carrying a shotgun, and this gave Zack an idea. The weapon would be loaded with buckshot, and it would fire in an ever-widening pattern. If Zack had the shotgun handy, he might be able to take out more of the swarm if they came down within range.
He’d likely die in the process; he couldn’t get them all before they got him, but he told himself fighting off a robot attack would be one badass way to go.
He ran across the roof now, his body low. On the ground in the front lawn of the property he heard someone yell at him in German, but he ignored it, just as he ignored the smattering of gunfire that continued below his feet in the building. He snatched up the shotgun, saw that there were extra shells in a carrier on the wounded man’s chest, and ripped off the Velcro carrier and ran back to his attic sniper’s hide.
He’d just made it back to the window when the screaming of four tiny propellers grew in his ears, and he dove headfirst inside as a massive explosion peppered the flat roof right behind him with shrapnel.
Zack rolled into a ball for a moment, his ears ringing again, then pushed himself up to his knees and racked a shell into the shotgun’s breech.
“Fuck you!” he shouted, his eyes wild. Hightower was in a one-man battle to the death with the robots now, and it was as if he had lived his entire life for this moment.