his head as if he could clear away this craziness.
“You two speak English?” the dark-skinned woman asked.
“
“Good. I want both of you to remain very quiet. Keep your hands up in the air where I can see them. Good. Now, move toward the hatch.”
The two officers did as they were told.
“Now, open the hatch.”
“Open it?”
“You heard what I said. Open it!”
The captain made for the hatch, but the first officer had other ideas. He turned, screamed something in Russian at the captain, and lunged for Fancha with both hands outstretched, going for the gun.
There was no time to hesitate. She fired one round, caught him in the knee, and he buckled to the floor, writhing in pain.
The Russian captain, very shaken now, cranked the big stainless-steel wheel around a few times. There was a pop, a hiss of air, and then the hatch cover was shoved upward violently by someone below. The steel edge of the round door caught the captain under the chin, and he, too, went sprawling, bleeding from a deep gash.
Fancha looked down and saw Stokely’s smiling face beaming up at her.
“Hey,” he said. “Look who’s here.”
“Oh, baby, oh, baby, oh, baby,” she said, reaching down to touch his face.
“Honey, you got to get out of the way. I got about thirty pumped-up killer angels climbing up my tail crazy to come aboard as quickly as possible.”
Fancha moved to the rear of the control-room pod and watched an endless stream of heavily armed men in black, who had climbed hand over hand up the steel cable, now come pouring up through the hatch. Stoke had the captain and the first officer off to the side, grilling them aggressively at the point of a gun about the current whereabouts of all of the terrorists, especially the ones who were not to be found in the ballroom.
She saw Alex Hawke poke his handsome head through the hatch and smile at her.
She’d never seen a man look so happy in her life.
“Fancha,” he said, grinning at her. “You did it.”
61
SEALs don’t train with regulation human-silhouette targets. They use small three-by-five index cards taped strategically over the silhouette. To qualify, you had to be able to hit the card with a double tap, two shots in rapid succession, whether you were popping up from below the water or bursting into a hijacked airliner packed with terrified passengers. SEAL instructors don’t care how you shoot, one-handed, two-handed, right- or left-handed, doesn’t matter, as long as you hit tight, man-killing groups every single time.
The heavy loads the two SEAL platoons were using tonight would knock the terrorists aboard the airship down no matter where they hit them. Head, chest, arm, leg, didn’t matter. The terrorists who had hijacked this airship didn’t know it yet, but their life expectancies had just dropped to zero.
The assault-and-hostage-rescue group quickly divided itself into two platoons, one on either side of the pod’s ladder up to A Deck. Stoke and Harry Brock would take the Alpha Platoon, Stoke commanding. They would search the ship from stem to stern. They’d be looking for any tangos currently off duty, sleeping, or simply hiding and capture or eliminate them. Basically, a door-to-door sweep of the entire airship.
Meanwhile, Hawke and the fourteen men of Bravo Platoon would go directly to the ballroom, take out the Russian tangos guarding the hostages, and secure any other hostages in sickbay or otherwise not found with the main group.
“Listen up,” Hawke said, addressing the whole squad. “This, as you gentlemen all damn well know, is a game for thinkers, not shooters. That’s always been true, but it is especially true tonight. When we go in with our flashbangs and smoke grenades, we’re going to enter a room full of screaming, shell-shocked hostages, many of them elderly and infirm, and perhaps a dozen highly trained Russian terrorists. As you know from the briefing, these guys are very bad news, formerly the death-squad commandos in Chechnya.”
“OMON, skipper?”
“Exactly. So, the trick will be
“Thanks for the heads-up, skipper,” one of the younger SEALs said, laughing.
“Little humor,” Hawke smiled.
It was easy as hell to get too tight at the run-up, too tightly wound, and that was the last thing he wanted his squad to be feeling at the moment.
There were a more few chuckles, and Stoke said, “This is serious shit, guys. Any monkey can shoot people. You men know better than anyone what counts right now is the split second when you know to back the hell off. Okay? Listen to the man!”
Hawke, all trace of humor gone, said, “Once the spoon pops on the first smoke and flashbang grenades, you have two-point-seven seconds before the blast. Fingers off the triggers until you aim to kill. Look all the way into the danger zones before turning into the room. When you get inside, key your focus on weapons, not movement. Maintain fields of fire, and for God’s sake, don’t fuck this up. All right? Everybody ready? You all know where to go, so go, dammit, go!”
He and Stoke stood back and let the teams race up the ladder to reform in the lounge area at the top.
Stoke had made sure a crewman from the sub would fast-rope up the cable with a bosun’s chair and help Fancha back down to the sub, get her to sickbay if necessary. The captain and the first officer were likewise to be removed from the pod and hauled down to the sub for intense interrogation.
At the top of the grand staircase, the hostage-rescue team split into two parties. Stoke took Alpha left down the ship’s central corridor, where they would begin a room-by-room search of the entire vessel, every deck, every nook, every cranny.
Hawke and Bravo went right.
Every member of the team had memorized the ship’s layout. They knew every crack, turn, and stair, including the ballroom’s location and layout on the diagrams. Just two minutes later, Hawke and his assault team were silently checking weapons and gear one last time outside the ballroom’s main entrance, just beyond the line of sight of anyone inside.
Hawke looked at the digital timer ticking down on his watch and stepped forward, stopping just short of the door. He had affixed a noise suppressor to his M8 and now held it at eye level, the selector set for a three-round burst. Should an unfriendly step outside the room now, he was dead. He reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a flashbang. He slowed his breathing. Adrenaline was coursing through his system, just enough to maintain the right edge. In his earpiece, he could hear Stoke breathing.
“Bravo,” Hawke said into his tiny lip mike.
“Copy, Bravo,” Stoke replied. “Alpha is at yellow. Request compromise authority and permission to move to green.” Yellow meant Stoke’s squad was at its last position of cover and concealment. That no-man’s-land between safe and totally rat-fucked. His team had orders not to engage any enemy until Hawke’s primary force had initiated its assault on the ballroom.
“Bravo at green,” Hawke told Stoke, cupping a grenade loosely in his left hand. “Stand by, Alpha…ten seconds…”
He looked at his team, making final eye contact with as many of them as he could. “Remember,” he told them one last time, “key on weapons, shoot surgically, think four steps ahead.”
The team nodded. Hawke saw they were ready. It was finally time for everybody to get real busy, hop and pop.
