and for a second this puzzled Moore. He walked a few more steps, then froze and whirled toward the room.
The explosion tore through the hallway, heaving up a chute of flames and a mountain of rubble that cut off Moore from the elevator and knocked him flat onto his rump. Next came the smoke pouring out of the room and billowing in thick clouds down the hall. Moore rolled onto his hands and knees, gasping curses as his eyes burned and the air grew thick with the stench of the bomb. His thoughts raced, taking him back to every reservation the colonel had mentioned, as though all of those doubts had manifested themselves in the explosion. Moore imagined Khodai and his colleagues being ripped apart, and that image drove him onto his feet and toward the now-empty stairwell—
After the bastard who’d run off.
The chase left no time to feel guilty, and for that Moore was thankful. If he paused, even for a second, to reflect on the fact that he’d convinced Khodai to “do the right thing,” only to get the man killed because of his team’s lapse in security, he might break down. And that was, perhaps, Moore’s greatest weakness. He’d once been described in an After-Action Report as “an immensely passionate man who cared deeply for his colleagues,” which of course explained why a particular face from his Navy SEAL past never stopped haunting him, and Khodai’s sudden loss only reminded him of that night.
Moore burst into the stairwell and spotted the man charging downward. Gritting his teeth, Moore raced after him, using the railing to take three and four stairs at a time and swearing over the fact that his pistol was still down in the car. They’d been permitted to use the hotel as a meeting place, but both hotel security and the local police had been adamant about their weapons: None would be allowed inside the building. There’d been no room for negotiation on this point, and while Moore and his colleagues had access to a number of weapons that could bypass security, they’d opted to honor the request, lest they risk an already tenuous relationship. Moore had to assume that if the man had made it past the ISI security checkpoint, then he wasn’t armed. But Moore had also assumed that their hotel room was a safe meeting place. They’d chosen one of the four vacant rooms on the fifth floor that faced the street so they could observe comings and goings of guests and traffic patterns. Any abrupt changes were early clues that something was about to happen, and they liked to call that an early-warning system for the astute. While they hadn’t had access to a bomb-sniffing dog, they had scanned the room for electronic devices and had been using it for a few weeks without incident. That these thugs had managed to get explosives inside was infuriating and heartbreaking. Khodai had passed through screening with no problems, thus Moore had to assume the man had not been wired …unless of course the security checkpoint itself was a fake, the man there working for the Taliban …
The little guy kept a blistering pace, hit the first floor, and burst out of the stairwell door, with Moore about six seconds behind him.
A couple of breaths later and Moore was out the door, swinging his head left toward the main lobby, then right toward a long hall leading off to the spa, gym, and rear parking lot nestled at the corner of a large wooded area.
Meanwhile, the rest of the hotel was gripped in chaos, with alarms sounding, security personnel screaming, and hotel staff dashing everywhere as the smoke from the explosion began filtering into the air system with the pungent scent of explosives.
Stealing another look over his shoulder, the man sprinted for the door as Moore whirled and bounded after him, drawing the attention of two housekeepers, who were pointing at them and screaming for security.
Moore closed the gap as the guy raised both hands and slammed into the rear door, swinging it open before he vanished outside. And three, two, one, Moore hit the door with a gasp, the cooler night enveloping him as he caught sight of the man sprinting toward the same parking lot where Moore had left his car. This was the best exit for him, with the woods beyond, but it would also take them past Moore’s car — and his pistol stowed inside.
Moore’s anger finally found his muscles. This guy would not get away. This was no longer a decision or even a goal but a cold, hard fact. Moore already envisioned his capture; it was simply time to make it so. As expected, his prey did not have the physical endurance that he did, and the man began to slow as he hit his lactate threshold, but Moore had a long way to go before he reached his …and so he darted up behind the man like a wolf and launched himself into a low kick to the guy’s left leg that sent him screaming and crashing onto the grass, just before both of them reached the asphalt.
There was an old and very well-known saying about Muay Thai fighting techniques: “Kick loses to punch, punch loses to knee, knee loses to elbow, elbow loses to kick.”
Well, this asshat had just lost it all to Moore’s kick, and now Moore seized the man’s wrists and maneuvered himself on top to straddle and pin him.
“Don’t move. You’re done!” Moore said in Urdu, the language most frequently used in the city.
The man lifted his head, struggling against Moore’s grip, but then his eyes narrowed and his mouth opened in — what? Horror? Shock?
Thunder boomed somewhere behind them. Familiar thunder. Terribly familiar …
At nearly the same time the man’s head exploded, showering Moore in blood and causing him to react on instinct, all muscle memory, no forethought, just self-preservation driving him away from the man and rolling onto his side.
He gasped, kept rolling, still in full control of his body, the evolutions of SEAL training never forgotten, the body remembering, responding, reacting.
The gun boomed two more times, the rounds burrowing into the dirt not six inches from Moore’s torso as he came onto his hands and knees and bolted off toward his car, right there, just ten meters away. That gun was a Russian-made Dragunov sniper’s rifle. Moore was certain of that. He’d fired them, watched them be fired, and been shot at by men using them. The weapon had a range of eight hundred meters, and up to thirteen hundred if the shooter was skilled and exploiting his scope. The ten-round detachable box magazine could keep this guy in business for a while.
Another shot punched a hole in the driver’s-side door as Moore reached into his pocket, hit his key fob, and the car chirped. He shifted around the vehicle, out of the sniper’s line of fire, and opened the passenger’s-side door.
The windshield shattered as another round punched through. Out of the glove box came Moore’s Glock 30, the word AUSTRIA embossed on the.45-caliber pistol’s side. He came around the door, scanned the tree line and hotel beyond, and there he was, leaning forward on the roof of the two-story tech center next door.
The sniper wore a black woolen cap, but his face was clearly visible. Dark beard. Wide eyes. Broad nose. And Moore nodded inwardly over the Dragunov sniper’s rifle with the attached scope and big magazine that the sniper lifted higher, balancing it with one elbow propped on the ledge.
Even as Moore spotted him, the sniper saw Moore and fired three shots in rapid succession that hammered the door as Moore rushed back around the car, toward the driver’s side.
But then, just as the third shot echoed off, Moore bolted up and, cupping his gun hand in his left palm, returned fire, his rounds drilling into the concrete within inches of where the sniper had been perched, about forty meters away. That was beyond his pistol’s accurate range, but Moore figured the sniper wasn’t doing any ballistics homework at the moment, only ducking from wild bullets.
Four hotel security guards were already rushing into the parking lot area, and Moore pointed and shouted to them, “He’s up there! Get down!”
One guy rushed at Moore while the others darted behind several other parked cars.
“Don’t move!” the guard ordered — and then the sniper took off his head.
Another guard began barking into his radio.
When Moore returned his gaze to the building, he spotted the sniper on the far east side using a maintenance ladder to descend to the lot below, gliding swiftly, like an arachnid leaving its nest.
Moore sprinted away and the path grew uneven, the grass turning to gravel and then back to pavement. A narrow alley between the tech center and a row of small one-story offices behind it led northwest toward Aga Khan Road, the main thoroughfare in front of the hotel. The scent of sweet pork had filled the alley, as the hotel’s kitchen exhaust fans filtered in that direction, and Moore’s stomach growled even though a meal was hardly on his mind.
Without slowing, he turned left, his Glock leading the way, and there, not twenty meters ahead, sat an idling
