knowingly at Freeman. “In the Middle East, girls can marry at twelve. I know about women. There’s Paradise here if you’re alive. Hamas is nuts. If I went with you, General, they’d chase me down,
The boy’s unemotional, businesslike tone was alarming, chilling. The child had a cold, calculating heart beyond his years, the inheritance of the terrorist heartlessness.
“Is he armed?” Freeman asked, ready to bring up his AK-47 from its casual barrel-down position by his right side.
“A pistol in his waistband,” the boy told him. “He’s left-handed.”
El-Hage was still standing by the truck, as if frozen in time. Wait a minute, thought Freeman, slowing. What if the kid was lying — a sucker ploy to get him away from the sniper, Thomas, her shooter’s eye resting in the scope’s reticule. A no-miss shot, with El-Hage in her scope.
El-Hage suddenly ran to the other side of the truck and snatched up an AK-47. Freeman immediately dropped to the ground, firing as he did so underneath the Jinlin. He heard a cry of pain, the Arab’s legs out from under him, and the man fell, his AK-47 clattering on the Jinlin-flattened reeds. The general unleashed another long burst, and the Hamas leader was grossly spastic in his death throes. He tried to say something to the boy, but only bright arterial blood issued from his mouth, and he was dead.
Freeman heard the rifle’s crack, and wheeled. Thomas, still too weak to shout loudly, had fired a warning shot into the air from her sniper rifle, and was now pointing at the T-90 a half a mile away in the minefield, its gun lowering to slightly below the azimuth, which meant it was about to engage a short-range target. “Run!” Freeman told the boy, who needed no encouragement, having sized up the situation as quickly as the general. They heard the boom of the 125 mm cannon and felt a great rush of air.
“Down!” Freeman yelled as the Jinlin somersaulted ten feet into the air and became a ball of tangled metal and flame crashing to the ground.
Melissa now had the scope on Abramov, his head and that of the other two crewmen by the cupola in her crosshairs. The tank was coming straight for her. Below the Russians were winks of orange light, the T-90’s machine guns sweeping the rain-drenched reeds that Freeman and the boy were racing for.
So enraged was Abramov, kneeling on the tank with one hand on the cupola, that, despite the T-90’s superb suspension, his head kept bobbing around in Melissa’s IR scope. The furious terrorist’s instructions to his driver didn’t allow for any zigzag pattern during the T-90’s charge. He wanted to run Freeman down.
Melissa lowered the M40A1 for a seventy-yard chest shot, and fired. Abramov flew off the tank into its wake, the impact of Thomas’s sniper round against Abramov’s Kevlar vest such that while it didn’t penetrate all the way through, it knocked him ass-over-tit,
Though badly wounded and bleeding, Abramov rose in feral rage, screaming at the now-stopped tank, from which Nureyev, his driver, and two other terrorists escaped, risking all to get his money for themselves. The general was waving his 9 mm Makarov menacingly at them as Freeman, emerging from the reeds, fired a long burst. Abramov’s body was sent reeling back, his face a bloody pulp.
The four terrorists, would-be millionaires, held up their hands. One, with a green signal flag, frantically called, “Don’t shoot. No shooting!”
“You’ll take the money and leave?” shouted Freeman, his AK-74 aimed at the four Russians.
“Sure,” said one of them. “No problem.”
Without taking his eyes off the four Russian terrorists, Freeman told the boy to climb quickly up on the T-90 and drop his jacket in, the Russians mesmerized by the brightly colored Euros and thousand-dollar U.S. bills still falling out of Abramov’s torn knapsack and being sucked away by the faint but frigid breeze.
“We get the money now?” asked the man who had been waving the maneuver flag.
“Sure,” said Freeman. “It’s yours.”
The boy had taken off his jacket and, without a glance at Freeman, tore the collar label, dropped the jacket into the hole with his right hand, and slammed the cupola lid down with his left.
There was a noticeably soft “whoomp” in the tank as the boy jumped off, slipped on the wet reeds, and banged his head hard against the tank’s track. The Russian terrorists turned as one, and Freeman cut them down with one long burst, his AK-74’s barrel steaming in the cold. “Grab that backpack,” he told the boy, pointing to Abramov. The boy obeyed quickly, picking up the belt of gold bullion as well. “Here,” said Freeman, stuffing the backpack and gold into a plastic garbage bag he’d taken from his DARPA “goodies” waist pouch. “We’ve got to get a move on. Got a plane to catch.” They were running toward the X. “You okay, son?” Freeman saw fresh blood in the boy’s hair.
The boy didn’t answer, but kept running with Freeman and never looked back at the burning tank and river of spilled fuel that by now was incinerating the dead radio operator who’d remained inside. “Boy” seemed to Freeman a misnomer for someone so mature. But then Hamas had had him. They were a tough outfit, and Douglas Freeman knew it would take some deprogramming at home, a place which at the moment Freeman knew in his gut they had only a fifty-fifty chance of reaching, to straighten the kid out.
The STAR, or Surface-to-Air Recovery technique, was known throughout Special Forces and Special Ops command as a last resort. Indeed, it was the riskiest extraction method ever devised by man.
“You afraid of heights?” Freeman asked the boy as they sprinted to where Marine Thomas, now barely visible in the dusk, had begun preparations as per the instructions in the container as the Herk and its two Joint Strike Fighters loitered overhead.
“Fill it!” Freeman shouted at her. “Time to go. Give the valve its head.”
What a moment before had been the size of a giant jellyfish now quickly expanded into a car-sized and then a small but definite Goodyear blimp-shaped dirigible as the helium silently inflated it, and it rose high into the icy air, unraveling the first one hundred feet of the five-hundred-foot-long specially treated nylon rope that lay coiled at Freeman’s and Melissa Thomas’s feet as they hurriedly donned the multilayered thermal boilersuits complete with hoods, skydiver helmets, and rescue harnesses for each of them.
“You’re going to have to hold on to me tightly, son,” said Freeman. “What’s your name, Blue Eyes?”
“Jamal.”
“All right, Jamal, now the big Hercules — that plane up there — is going to come down pretty low to get us three out of here. First we’ll go up like a—”
“Ever been on a swing, Jamal?” Freeman shouted against the roar of the Herk as he and Melissa Thomas strapped their harnesses together.
“Yes, I’ve been on lots of swings.”
Freeman took the boy in a bear hug. “Not like this one, kid. You hang on to me no matter what, okay?”
“O—” And they were off, the plane’s V-shaped proboscis having snagged the line, whisking them straight up for 120 feet before the big pendulum swing began, their initial acceleration from the sitting position to more than a hundred feet surprisingly smooth, if very fast, like being whipped up through the air at the end of a five-hundred- foot-long elastic band. The sensation of speed was so frightening and exhilarating that Freeman felt it in his loins as the three of them, in an experience for which not even Top Gun graduates volunteered, went hurtling through frigid air, the lake already far below and behind them, a silver sheen in the moonlight slipping away westward, the black Herk entering cloud. The easy part was over.
Above the Herk, now traveling at 144 miles per hour, the dirigible’s breakaway cords snapped from the sheer stress of the air buffeting its huge volume. Inside the plane, at the Herk’s rear ramp door, one of two volunteer crewmen set about lowering a hook line to catch the lift line, which now arced back from the nose of the Herk, now traveling at 136 miles per hour. Meantime, a second volunteer crewman began working the telescopic arm which would, it was hoped, reach out and grab the lift line so it could be brought closer to the underside of the plane, and
