snatched up the detonator and turned the key…
'Everybody get down!' the shirtless man screamed, and then a burst of AK-47 fire tore through his body, knocking him over the back of a theater seat. As he fell, Dean had a clear shot at the shooter and took it, firing three rounds into the gunman in rapid succession as Walters opened fire as well. The gunman collapsed, and Dean swung, aiming his weapon across the crowd. It was still possible that there were other terrorists here on the main floor, sheltering among the hostages.
And there he was, bolting for the door at the top of the aisle, one remaining gunman.
Screaming people continued to clog the aisle, blocking Dean's shot, and the man was underneath the back balcony now, out of the sight of Brisard and the others. The terrorist knocked several people over; a young woman panicked and ran, and the gunman spun, raising his AK. An older man leaped and knocked the woman flat but was hit himself by a burst of full-auto fire as the gunman emptied his AK into the shrieking mob. Then he spun and vanished out the door just as Walters fired twice, the bullets slamming into the closing door behind the fleeing hijacker, spraying splinters.
David Yancey heard the yammer of an AK. Bullets screamed off the refrigerator, and he felt a hammer's blow against his right side, slamming him to the left. Boone opened up with his AA-12, the first rounds going high. Staggering with the slam to his side, Yancey kept tracking the figure by the truck, loosing a three-round burst from his H&K, then another, then a third.
The gunman with an AK off to the right was continuing to fire and Yancey was hit again, but the man by the trucks collapsed as Yancey and Boone both kept firing.
Yancey dropped to his knees; he wasn't in pain, exactly, but he was having trouble breathing. Boone shifted his aim and brought down the other gunman as Coulter and the others climbing up onto the crates reached an overlook and joined in as well. Caught by 12-gauge shotgun blasts, 9mm, and 5.56 rounds from several directions, the gunman crumpled in a heap on the deck.
'We've got one runner,' Dean called as the fleeing gunman banged out the theater door just ahead of Walters' shots. 'First Deck, heading aft!'
'Let him go,' Rubens said.
'Clear here!' Brisard called from the balcony. His men were checking the bodies, making sure the three tangos up there all were dead.
'And clear here!' Walters called. He'd moved over to the left side of the theater and was checking the body of the man who'd fallen.
'Five tangos down, theater,' Dean added. 'We have at least two civilian casualties. No… make that three… correction… four.' Several people had been hit by the indiscriminate spray of AK fire from the top of the aisle.
'One of you stay with the civilians,' Rubens said. 'Help the wounded and keep the rest quiet. The rest need to head for the bridge.'
Dean moved up the aisle to the wounded man, easing him down off the seats and onto his back on the floor. He was wearing swim trunks. He had a savage gunshot wound in his stomach, hidden by fast-welling blood, and a second wound higher up, in the right side of his chest, bubbling as he tried to breathe. Dean, the ex-Marine, had seen enough combat wounds in the field to recognize a sucking chest wound.
'I've got him,' an older man said, kneeling at Dean's side. 'I'm the ship's doctor.' The man had his shirt off and was pressing it against the bloody abdominal wound. 'Cigarettes!' he yelled. 'Anyone here have cellophane cigarette wrappers?'
Several men and women offered the wrappers from their cigarettes. The doctor accepted two and slapped them over the bubbling holes, entry wound and exit wound, in the man's chest and back.
'Listen…,' the wounded man said. His voice was weak, and it sounded like he was gargling. 'Those two women… He took them… '
'We saw,' Dean told him. 'We'll get them!'
'Sharon Reilly. Janet Carroll. Please, please… help them… '
'We'll do our best.'
Coulter jumped down off the wall of boxes and jogged toward the truck. The terrorist with the firing switch lay in a fetal curl in a spreading pool of blood; emotionlessly Coulter put another 9mm slug into the man's skull, just to make sure. 'This one's dead!'
'Four tangos down!' Boone called. 'Team member down!'
'I'm okay,' David Yancey said, rising unsteadily. He reached up under his harness, probing the heavy weave of his Kevlar combat vest, then pulled a slightly flattened 7.62 slug from the weave. 'Gonna have a bruise or two, though'
'Stay put. We'll check the trucks.'
He lurched to his feet, still clutching his side. 'Fuck that. I'm with you.'
Daniels was scrambling down off the crates. He was waving a handheld Geiger qounter in front of him. 'It's hot!'
'We're copying the radiation readings here,' Rubens' voice said. 'Our advisor with the AEC says one man at a time, no more than fifteen minutes' total exposure for any of you. Understand?'
'Roger that,' Yancey said. 'Coulter! Get away from there! All of you guys, clear out. Set up a defensive position on the other side of the galley door.'
Unsteadily he approached the trucks, looking for signs that the explosives were booby-trapped.
While the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Iraq had acquired a reputation as bad boys with improvised explosive devices — IEDs — their best was rarely very sophisticated. They were proficient at planting mines that could be set off remotely, from a distance, or with trip wires, and they'd been known to pull cute tricks like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and leaving it beneath a dead or injured man, the firing lever compressed and held in place by the weight of the body Elaborate booby traps involving choices between multiple colored wires and which order to cut them in were generally the provenance of Hollywood… and usually bad Hollywood at that.
Yancey had gone through quite a bit of training with the SEALs, in both the creation and the disarming of improvised explosives. He'd also trained for a time with the Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal people, the EOD. He approached the trucks carefully, tracing the electrical wiring by eye. There was the battery, beneath the table, a pair of wires leading up and into the back of the truck. Yanking those wires ought to be all that was needed to safe the bomb.
Ought to be. You didn't make it in the SEALs or the EOD without acquiring a bit of paranoia. He knew radiation was burning him — he couldn't feel it, but it was burning him nonetheless. Every instinct he possessed told him to yank those battery cables and get the hell out of there.
But he followed the two battery wires up onto the back of the nearest truck. The flatbed was piled high with nondescript cardboard boxes, each one holding block upon block upon plastic-wrapped block of C-4 explosives. One of the battery leads was connected to a larger cable, and that ran back through loop after loop to the firing box in the dead tango's hand. A second lead emerged from the firing-box cable and was connected to a solid-pack electrical detonator embedded in a block of C-4. Another wire connected the battery directly with the detonator. So far, so good. Arm the firing box by turning a key, press the red button, the circuit completed, the blasting cap went off, and with it went several tons of plastic explosives.
But a part of the wire directly connecting the battery with the blasting cap was hidden under a large box of C-4. He was reaching for the wire to pull it out when he stopped. In this line of work, paranoia was good.
Shaking his head, he backed off. Returning to the battery on the deck outside, he unscrewed the caps and removed the wires. The blasting cap ought to be harmless, now, its connection to the battery gone.
But he still didn't trust it.
He switched on his radio. 'Art Room! This is Cougar Six!'
'Go ahead, David,' Rubens' voice replied. 'What've you got?'
