MacDonald tried to bring his M-16 up in time, but the. 44 round caught him high in the chest and slammed him backward into one of the steel pillars just as the second. 44 slug mushroomed into Mike Takahara's solar plexus and sent the shocked technical agent stumbling backward through the broken glass wall and atop the sprawled body of Lisa Abercombie.
Then, humming contentedly to himself, Paul Saltmann checked his watch, glanced at the flashing red numerals on the control board that had changed from forty-five to thirty-six, and walked through the destruction he'd caused toward the lower-level conference room and stairwell.
As he did so, Saltmann was unaware that wheelchair- bound Roy Parker, blocked from escape by the six- inch- thick emergency doors, was rapidly working himself toward the command-and-control center from the opposite direction.
It was Lightstone who picked up on the pattern first, noting that as the returning ICER members worked their way back into the first of the Hogan's Alleys, designed to look like two floors and the open plaza of an indoor shopping center, Carine Mueller had started to conserve her energy by waiting for the explosion of the flash grenade and then running immediately to the position vacated by Gunter Aben, invariably using the cover of her previous position to protect herself from the raid team's directed gunfire.
'Hey, Brickard, Paxton,' Lightstone hissed as he holstered his pistol, pulled one of the flash grenades off his belt, and then signaled with his hands what he intended to do.
They waited until Gunter Aben suddenly rolled away to a new position under the covering fire of Carine Mueller's H amp;K submachine gun.
Then, after Paxton heaved one of the canister grenades at Mueller's position, and Brickard and the remaining three Louisiana wildlife officers opened fire on both positions, Lightstone took three lunging steps forward, pulled the pin and flung the grenade toward the barricade position that Gunter Aben had just vacated.
At that point, Henry Lightstone had less than a second to roll forward and cover his ears as the detonation of the first grenade sent shock waves through every inch of his exposed body.
Dazed by the concussive force of the blast, Lightstone was still reaching for his shoulder-holstered 10mm semiautomatic when Carine Mueller broke from cover, lunged toward her new position, and then saw Lightstone out in the open.
Hesitating in mid-stride, the beautiful young counter- terrorist started to come around with her finger tightening on the trigger of her H amp;K when her eyes caught the motion of the rolling canister out in front of her. Reacting instinctively, she turned away just as the grenade exploded and sent her tumbling to the floor, the H amp;K clattering away in the red-tinged semidarkness.
Nearly unconscious and bleeding from the mouth, ears, and nose, Carine Mueller's right hand fumbled for her belt-holstered Model Sixty-six. 357. Henry Lightstone centered the sights of the 10mm automatic on the young German woman's hand, because they had all agreed that they wanted to take someone out of here alive.
But then the words of A1 Grynard flashed through his mind: Whoever killed Scoby used a couple of Model Sixty-sixes.
Without thinking about it further, Henry Lightstone shifted the sights of the heavy automatic, sent five 10mm hollow-point rounds into Mueller's upper chest, throat, and head, then rolled away from the stream of 9mm slugs that tore the wooden floor into splinters right where he had been lying… and Gunter Aben screamed out his rage in his native German tongue.
Continuing to twist away from the furious 9mm assault, Lightstone fired one round at the German's exposed head, missed, felt the jarring clack as the receiver jammed open on an empty magazine, and was reaching for one of the loaded magazines on his belt when Gunter Aben came back around the corner fast, the H amp;K leveled, a sneering smile on his face.
The impact of the first. 44 bullet nearly severed Gunter Aben's arm as it ripped through bone and tissue, punched through the gap where his thick Kevlar vest didn't quite overlap, splintered a rib, and then buried itself in the counterterrorist's heart.
The second bullet that slammed his back into the wall was unnecessary. The ICER team member, who could never quite control his temper when he tried to outwit Clarence MacDonald's simulators, was dead before his knees hit the floor.
When Dwight Stoner hobbled into the lower-level conference room, he saw Mike Takahara trying to push himself up on his hands and knees, coughing out blood in the process. As he moved to the doorway of the command-and- control center, Stoner saw the sprawled bodies of Clarence MacDonald, who was starting to moan and move around a little, and Morito Asai, who wasn't doing either, and a man in a wheelchair working frantically at the keyboard of the control console.
Roy Parker didn't see or hear Dwight Stoner coming until the agent's huge body suddenly filled the doorway and blocked out the incoming light from the adjoining conference room. Parker turned to look and then drew back in shock as he saw the huge form pointing the barrel of the 12-gauge pump shotgun directly at his head.
'Move away from that desk,' Stoner ordered in a cold, deep, and unfeeling voice.
'It wasn't me, buddy. I didn't shoot any of them,' Parker said carefully, trying to keep his voice steady as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the red numerals on the control board change from thirty-three to thirty-two.
'Shut up and keep your hands in the air,' Stoner ordered.
'I'm carrying a Beretta nine-millimeter in a shoulder holster, right-hand draw, under my jacket,' Parker said quietly as Stoner moved slowly around to his back. 'It's clean. It hasn't been fired.' Then Parker took a deep breath as he felt the shotgun barrel against the base of his skull.
'Look at the blood splatters on that wall,' Parker continued in a voice as steady as he could manage. 'No nine-mil in the world could do that. That's Saltmann. He carries a forty-four mag with hot loads. Like a fucking freight train when they hit.'
The barrel of the shotgun dug deeper into Parker's neck, and he immediately realized that he had said the wrong thing.
'Hey, no, wait a minute!' Parker whispered frantically. 'You gotta listen. They wired this place to blow, and it's-'
'It's okay, man. He's not the shooter,' Mike Takahara gasped in a pain-filled voice, holding his right arm tight against his severely broken rib cage as he slowly reached into Roy Parker's jacket with his left hand and pulled out the loaded and locked 9mm pistol. 'Big curly-haired bastard wearing an FBI raid jacket.'
'That's Saltmann,' Parker nodded, nervously aware that the barrel of the shotgun was still pressed tight against his neck. 'He's the cutter on this deal. He's supposed to shut the whole operation down and blow the place if something goes wrong.'
'Keep talking,' Mike Takahara directed in a painful whisper. He stuck the 9mm Beretta in the back of his belt, brought Parker's hands down, one at a time, and handcuffed them through the left wheel of the wheelchair. Then he wiped the blood from his mouth and tried not to cough or breathe any more than he had to as he placed his shaky left hand on the console for support. He tried to blink his eyes clear enough to see how the control board had been designed.
'The guys on top wanted to make sure they didn't end up with another Watergate or an Iran-Contra deal blowing up in their face,' Parker went on carefully, sensing that the two agents were beyond the point of caring about rules and regulations. 'So they put Saltmann, Arty, Corrie, and me in as a safety valve. Something goes wrong, we're supposed to make the whole thing go away.'
In the background, Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald clutched both forearms to his chest in the area where the hot-loaded. 44 Magnum expanding round had mushroomed against his Kevlar vest, breaking several of his ribs and causing massive bruising all the way to the pericardial covering of his heart. He tried to bring himself up to a sitting position.
'That what happened to the little guy in the doorway, and to the broad out there on the floor?' Stoner growled.
'Yeah. We're supposed to take everybody out so they don't get any ideas about talking,' Parker nodded. 'Only, Arty and Corrie are dead, and I'm pretty much out of it, so Saltmann's on his own.'
'So who takes you guys out?' Mike Takahara asked in almost a whisper as he motioned for Stoner to drag the wheelchair out of the way. Then he sat down gratefully in the console chair and used his left hand to call up the menu on the screen.
'Yeah, we talked about that,' Parker said nervously as he felt the shotgun barrel dig into the back of his neck
