SEVENTY-THREE
Court and Zoya passed several dead security officers before Zoya found a weapon that was both operable and powerful enough for her. She slid the sling of a Colt M4 with simple iron sights off the neck of a motionless Regional Security Office man lying facedown, then felt in his jacket for another magazine. This she stuck in her waistband next to her pistol, and she checked the rifle to make sure it was loaded and the safety was off.
They’d moved halfway through the long gallery; only emergency lighting high on the walls was still operational, so they cast long, incriminating shadows as they walked.
A group of people came out an open door on their right. Court trained his MP5 submachine gun on them but saw that they were State Department personnel. He motioned them forward, and they reluctantly moved out past the threshold.
Zoya whispered to them, “There are armed drones outside. You do not want to go out there and make yourself a target. Find a position and fortify it.”
The little group moved past the two operators, back up the hall, and Zoya had no idea if they would listen to her or not.
She and Court moved on towards the west wing, past paintings and bodies, past discarded food trays and champagne bottles, past an American flag that had fallen on its side. A dead woman, a security officer from DSS, lay on her back, her eyes open and vacant.
They made it nearly to the end of the gallery when another door opened, and they saw a pair of men in black reach out with their AKs. Both Court and Zoya dropped flat behind an antique chest of drawers along the wall, then popped back up together, aimed their weapons across the marble top, and opened fire.
The pair of Quds Force men had separated at the doorway; one went left and the other right, and Court shot the one on the left through the mouth with a 9-millimeter round that exited the back of his head. Blood splattered a large, nearly blank canvas on the wall behind him, and the man went down.
Zoya fired a pair of three-round bursts at her target, killing the man on the right, then dropped to one knee and spun around, checking her six.
Court kept his weapon trained on the doorway in front of them, but when no one else came out, he and Zoya began moving forward again.
Before they entered the door, they each went to a fallen Iranian and relieved him of his Kalashnikov. The AK was much more powerful than Court’s current weapon, so he slung his MP5 and fielded the dead terrorist’s rifle, and he drew another magazine from the man’s chest rig. Zoya put her M4 on her back and chose the other dead terrorist’s short-barreled automatic rifle as her primary weapon.
She was Russian, after all, and had infinitely more experience with Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK platform than she did with Eugene Stoner’s American-made AR platform.
She then looked up at the blood-splattered painting over the dead man’s crumpled body.
Zoya whispered, “And, just like that, it’s a Jackson Pollock exhibit.”
Court had no idea what she was talking about, but he didn’t ask. They moved through the doorway, weapons high, heading for the western staircase.
Mirza had spent the past minute on his computer, and he seemed frustrated by what was going on there. Hanley had heard another booming gunshot above him, and shortly after that he’d heard a loud explosion. He wondered if that meant Romantic had dropped another drone and, perhaps, Mirza had sent a drone after Zack.
Romantic wasn’t transmitting at the moment, but Hanley knew he probably had a lot to deal with at present.
While the man at the desk kept his focus on his computer, one of the other Quds men pushed past Hanley and opened the closet door, his weapon in front of him. He found a steel door inside, and the latch was locked. They’d already searched the bathroom, as well.
After another explosion on the roof, Mirza shouted loudly, pumping his fists in the air. Hanley hadn’t heard Hightower transmit over the commo net in over a minute, and he wondered if that meant Mirza had killed him with a drone.
Outside the sound of sirens grew and grew, but the DDO knew, as long as Mirza had a UAV swarm to call on, no one was going to make it inside this property.
It was down to whatever assets were already in the building, Hanley told himself, and then he reminded himself that he was an asset, too.
Zack tasted blood in his mouth, felt it running down his ringing right ear, and he looked down at his arm. A roofing nail had cut him from the wrist to the elbow and he bled all over his torn white dress shirt.
He pushed the wood and the roofing shingles off him and sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes.
Whoever was commanding the drones had just slammed his position with what seemed to have been some sort of a shaped charge that penetrated the attic, ripping a baseball-sized hole in the roof before detonating inside. Zack had moved to the opposite end of the room, anticipating a strike after his last quadcopter shootdown, but even though he was twenty yards from where the warhead detonated, he was amazed he’d not been even more badly injured in the blast.
Even so, he doubted he could survive another hit like that.
As soon as enough of the smoke cleared for him to see, he rubbed more debris from his eyes, ignored his bloody arm, then went back to his sniper rifle near the window and removed the thermal scope from the rail at the top. This he quickly mounted to the Remington 870 shotgun he’d taken from the dead spotter. It wouldn’t be perfectly sighted, but at least he could see the quadcopters in the sky and fire at them if they came within range.
There was nothing sure about a shotgun, however. Nine .33 caliber pellets of steel would fly from it and spread apart, and he couldn’t put any one projectile on a spot like he could with a sniper rifle.
Still, the spray pattern would increase his chances for hits, especially if the weapons he was targeting were moving.
He shouldered the shotgun, peered through the sight, and pointed the weapon out over the park, hoping to spy another recon drone. Zack didn’t know a ton about unmanned vehicles, but he did know they would all have cameras, so the operator could, if he wanted, just fly one of the ships down from where they hovered at three hundred meters or so and slam it right onto Zack’s position. Clearly Mirza or one of his people had just tried that twice, and the only reason they hadn’t tried it a third time—they still had fifteen or more drones in the sky—was that they probably thought Zack had been killed with the last warhead.
Zack had a slight advantage due to this, but he knew it wouldn’t last. As soon as he started knocking the little machines from the sky again, the operator on the other end of this fight would know where to send his explosives.
An SUV displaying the decal of the Berlin polizei raced with its lights out over the grassy park. Zack saw another just behind it, and he worried they would be too good a target for the UAVs to pass up.
He brought the thermal to his eye, scanned back and forth, and then he saw it. A pinprick of light—the reflection of the still-burning truck fire on Finkenstrasse against the ball-shaped camera on the bottom of a quadcopter. It was racing down, at speed, like a falling star. One hundred fifty meters away from his position, Zack knew he had less than a half second to stop it before it impacted with one of the vehicles.
He fired, pumped the shotgun to chamber another shell, and fired again.
The quadcopter detonated fifty feet over the SUVs, sending fire and debris down on them, but not destroying them or killing the occupants. They rolled closer to the ambassador’s residence.
“It’s on now, motherfucker!” Zack shouted, and he scanned the sky again.
Soon he saw another device lowering, as if homing in on a target. It wasn’t moving as fast, and Zack didn’t take the time to see what it was aiming to destroy, but at a range of eighty yards he fired three more shells, and this airship, too, detonated harmlessly in the sky.
Zack knew he had to move, so he jumped to his feet, ran across the attic to the other side again, and dove into the corner.
He’d shot down four drones, and his enemy had expended three more trying to kill him. He couldn’t play this game all night but, he told himself, he wanted to take out at least one more quadcopter before yet another was spent taking him out.
Matt Hanley knew how to read people, and it was clear to him that Haz Mirza was out of his mind with both stress and fury at the moment. It was Hightower, Hanley knew; he was still up on the roof somewhere, blasting hovering machines out of the sky.
Mirza looked up from his computer for the first time in minutes, then stood and stepped away from it, walking over to his cohorts. There were four other men dressed in black and carrying Kalashnikovs now, and the injured man who had crawled in earlier lay still in the middle of the room. Hanley was pretty sure the man had bled out from his wounds, and his teammates obviously were, too, because they had disarmed him and left him there unattended.
Mirza spoke with his men for a moment more, then made a call on his radio that received no response.
Hanley put it together. These five shitheads were all that was left of the group, and as long as Mirza was not at his computer, the drones would leave Zack alone. Even if they were autonomous, they would be programmed to attack concentrations of individuals or moving vehicles; they wouldn’t be set to detonate over a single man.
The leader of the Berlin cell turned away from his men, then headed towards the group of men and women standing against the wall near the closed closet door behind which the panic room was hidden.
His English was fair. “Ambassador Sedgwick is in his secure room, right there in the closet. He is a coward. While he watches you in safety, he leaves you to your fates.”
Mirza turned around dramatically and pointed his weapon high in the corner of the home office. Hanley couldn’t see a camera there, but the young Iranian seemed sure that there was one. He addressed a spot on the wall. “Mr. Ambassador, if you do not come out of that room, I will kill every last hostage.”
Matt Hanley knew he had to buy time. He stepped forward, and an AK barrel was jammed into his chest by one of the Quds fighters. Undeterred, he said, “Please, listen to me. I can help you.”
“How?” Mirza asked. He wasn’t even looking his way; instead he was checking his laptop.
“I am more valuable than the ambassador. Take me with you. I am all you need to achieve your objectives tonight.”
Mirza looked at the big American in the dark gray suit, then looked at his men and laughed, more relaxed than when he was focused on his drones. “You think you know my objectives?”
“I do.”
“And how is this so?”
Hanley answered flatly, “Because I am the deputy director for operations for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Mirza’s eyes widened in astonishment, and the other hostages let out a collective gasp.
“Liar,” Mirza said.
“It’s really not something I’d make up at a time like this.”
The Iranian commander spoke to one of his men in Farsi. The man took out a phone and began typing in it.
It took Hanley a second to realize it, but soon he put together that the terrorists were Googling him.
Jesus Christ, he thought.
Mirza looked over the other Iranian’s shoulder, then at the big man standing against the wall in front of the group. “What is your name?”
“Matt Hanley.”
The cell leader cocked his head. “Matt? It is like Matthew?”
“That’s right. Matthew Patrick Hanley.”
The man holding the phone used a finger to scroll on his screen, and then Mirza looked up at the American. “That is the name. But there is no picture of you.”
Hanley sniffed. “It’s the CIA, kid. We don’t do a lot of photo shoots.”
“How do I know you are not lying?”
Hanley said, “Take me someplace private to talk, and I’ll tell you everything I know about you, Mirza.”
The Iranian sniffed. “You know my name. So does every television station in the world. Proves nothing.”
“Yeah, but not every TV station knows the identity of the real mastermind of what is happening tonight.”
Mirza’s eyes narrowed in both confusion and anger, but Hanley said, “I’m the one guy here who knows that you, Haz . . . you are just the fucking errand boy.”
Now the Iranian lunged towards Hanley and smashed the buttstock of his rifle into the man’s ribs. Then, when the American was doubled over in pain, Mirza grabbed him by the collar and pulled him into the bathroom, shouting to his men in Farsi. While three of the four guarded the closed and barricaded doors, the other kept his weapon trained on the other hostages.
Hanley saw nothing else before Haz Mirza closed the door, then turned around, keeping the AK low in front of him, his finger hovering over the trigger. He faced Hanley. “You are not leaving here with your life.”
“Neither are you, sport. But, in your case, I guess death in battle is more of a feature than a glitch, isn’t that right?”