'Franklin, Price, move in to the west. I repeat, move in from the west.'
'Franklin is moving in to the west,' the rifleman replied. 'Moving in now.'
'His pitchin' career's over,' Nance said, loading the body into the Night Hawk.
'Sure as hell, if he's a lefty. Back to the hospital, I guess,' Malloy strapped into the chopper and took the controls. Inside a minute, they were airborne and heading east for the hospital. In the back, Nance strapped their prisoner down tight.
It was a hell of a mess. The driver was dead, Chavez saw. crushed between the large wheel and the back of his seat from when the truck had slammed into the guardrail, his eyes and mouth open, blood coming out the latter. The body tossed out of the back was dead as well, with two bullet holes in the face. That left a guy with two broken legs,and horrible scrapes on his face, whose pain was masked by his unconsciousness.
'Bear, this is Six,' Clark said.
'Bear copies.'
'Can you pick us up? We have an injured subject here, and I want to get back and see what the hell's going on.'
'Wait one and I'll be there. Be advised we have a wounded subject aboard, too.'
'Roger that, Bear.' Clark looked west. The Night Hawk was in plain view, and he saw it alter course and come straight for his position.
Chavez and Mole pulled the body onto the roadway. It seemed horrible that his legs were at such obviously wrong angles, but he was a terrorist, and got little in the way of solicitude.
'Back into the hospital?' one of the men asked O'Neil.
'But then we're trapped!' Sam Barry objected.
'We're bloody trapped here!' Jimmy Carr pointed out. 'We need to move. Now!'
O'Neil thought that made sense. 'Okay, okay. I'll pull the door, and you lads runback to the entrance. Ready?' They nodded, cradling their weapons. 'Now!' he rasped, pulling the sliding door open.
'Shit!' Price observed from a football field away. 'Subjects running back into the hospital. I counted five.'
'Confirm five of them,' another voice agreed on the radio circuit.
Vega and Tomlinson were most of the way to the emergency room now, close enough to see the people there but not the double glass doors that led outside. They heard more screams. Vega took off his Kevlar helmet and peeked around the corner. Oh, shit, he thought, seeing one guy with an AKMS. That one was looking around inside the building-and behind him was half the body of someone looking outward. Oso nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand came down on his shoulder. He turned. It was Franklin, without his monster rifle, holding only his Beretta pistol.
'I just heard. five bad guys there?'
'That's what the man said,' Vega confirmed. He waved Sergeant Tomlinson to the other side of the corridor. 'You stick with me, Fred.'
'Roge-o, Oso. Wish you had your M-60 now?'
'Fuckin' A, man.' As good as the German MP-10 was, it felt like a toy in his hands.
Vega took another look. There was Ding's wife, standing now, looking over to where the bad guys were, pregnant as hell in her white coat. He and Chavez went back nearly ten years. He couldn't let anything happen to her. He backed off the corner and tried waving his arm at her.
Patsy Clark Chavez, M.D., saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a soldier dressed all in black. He was waving to her, and when she turned the waves beckoned her to him, which struck her as a good idea. Slowly, she started moving to her right.
'You, stop!' Jimmy Carr called angrily. Then he started moving toward her. Unseen to his left, Sergeant George Tonlinson edged his face and gun muzzle around the corner. Vega's waves merely grew more frantic, and Patsy kept moving his way. Carr stepped toward her, bringing his rifle up-as soon as he came into view, Tomlinson took aim, and seeing the weapon aimed at Ding's wife, he depressed the trigger gently, loosing a three-round burst.
The silence of it was somehow worse than the loudest noise. Patsy turned to look at the guy with the gun when his head exploded-but there was no noise other than the brushlike sound of a properly suppressed weapon, and the wet-mess noise of his destroyed cranium. The body-the face was sprayed away, and the back of his head erupted in a cloud of red-then it just fell straight down, and the loudest sound was the clatter of the rifle hitting the floor, loosed from the dead hands.
'Come here!' Vega shouted, and she did what she was told, ducking and running toward him.
Oso grabbed her arm and swung her around like a doll, knocking her off her feet and sending her sliding across the tile floor. Sergeant Franklin scooped her up and ran down the corridor, carrying her like a toy. In the main lobby he found the hospital security guard, and left her with him, then ran back.
'Franklin to Command. Dr. Chavez is safe. We got her to the main lobby. Get some people there, will ya? Let's get these fucking civilians evacuated fast, okay?'
'Price to Team. Where is everyone? Where are the subjects?'
'Price, this is Vega, we are down to four subjects. George just dropped one. They are in the emergency room. Mrs. Clark is probably still there. We hear noises, there are civilians in there. We have their escape route closed. I have Tomlinson and Franklin here. Fred's only got a pistol. Unknown number of hostages, but as far as 1 can tell we're down to four bad guys, over.'
'I've got to get down there,' Dr. Bellow said. He was badly shaken. People had been shot within a few feet of him. Alistair Stanley was down with a chest wound, and at least one other Rainbow trooper was dead, along with three additional wounded, one of those serious-looking.
'That way.' Price pointed to the front of the hospital. A Team1 member appeared, and headed that way as well. It was Geoff Bates, one of Covington's shooters from the SAS, fully armed, though he hadn't taken so much as a single shot yet today. He and Bellow moved quickly. Somehow Carr had died without notice. O'Neil turned and saw him there, his body like the stem for a huge red flower of blood on the dingy tile floor. It was only getting worse. He had four armed men, but he couldn't see around the corner twenty feet away, and surely there were armed SAS soldiers there, and he had no escape. He had eight other people nearby, and these he could use as hostages, perhaps, but the danger of that game was dramatically obvious. No escape, his mind told him, but his emotions said something else. He had weapons, and his enemies were nearby, and he was supposed to kill them, and if he had to die, he'd damned well die for The Cause, the idea to which he'd dedicated his life, the idea for which he'd told himself a thousand times he was willing to die. Well, here he was now, and death was close, not something to be considered in his bed, waiting for sleep to come, or drinking beer in a pub, discussing the loss of some dedicated comrades, the brave talk they all spoke when bravery wasn't needed. It all came down to this. Now danger was here, and it was time to see if his bravery was a thing of words or a thing of the belly, and his emotions wanted to show the whole bloody world that he was a man of his word and his beliefs… but part of him wanted to escape back to Ireland, and not die this day in an English hospital.
Sandy Clark watched him from fifteen feet away. He was a handsome man, and probably a brave one-for a criminal, her mind added. She remembered John telling her more than once that bravery was a far more common thing than cowardice, and that the reason for it was shame. People went into danger not alone, but with their friends, and you didn't want to appear weak in front of them, and so from the fear of cowardice came the most insane of acts, the successful ones later celebrated as great heroism. It had struck her as the worst sort of cynicism on John's part… and yet her husband was not a cynical man. Could it therefore be the truth?
In this case, it was a man in his early thirties, holding a weapon in his hands and looking as though he didn't have a friend in the world
–but the mother in her told Sandy that her daughter was probably safe now, along with her grandchild. The dead one had called after her, but now he was messily dead on the hospital floor, and so Patsy had probably gotten away. That was the best information of the day, and she closed her eyes to whisper a prayer of thanks.
'Hey, Doc,' Vega said in greeting.
'Where are they?'
Vega pointed. 'Around this corner. Four of them, we think. George dropped one for the count.'
'Talk to them yet?'
Oso shook his head. 'No.'
'Okay.' Bellow took a deep breath. 'This is Paul,' he called loudly. 'Is Timothy there?'
