by Rick Acker
“Hold on!” shouted Sergei as he threw the car into gear and slammed the accelerator to the floor. Shouts of surprise and alarm filled the car as its tires spun in the loose gravel on the side of the road.
The RPG shot toward them in a burst of fire and white smoke. It missed the back of the Mustang by two feet and exploded in the field on the other side of the road. The concussion shattered the right rear window on Sergei’s car and blew it onto two wheels for an instant.
Sergei kept his foot down and accelerated toward the cluster of buildings ahead. For a split second he considered making a U-turn, but he glanced back and saw that the man already had another RPG ready to launch. If there was a way out, it lay past the hornet’s nest in front of them. Also, the Chechens almost certainly would not expect him to drive toward their base.
The buildings were only silent silhouettes in the sunset, but Sergei had no doubt that at least one of them was a hive of activity as the Chechens scrambled to deal with the speeding Mustang. He hoped no one else had an armed grenade launcher handy. “Everybody get down,” he said. “They’ll start shooting any second.”
Everyone except Sergei ducked below window level. He crouched over the wheel to present the smallest possible target. For several seconds, nothing happened. The buildings loomed larger, and Sergei spotted a narrow lane between the warehouse and an electronics factory—a perfect shooting gallery if the Chechens could get men to it in time. If they couldn’t, it would be an excellent sheltered escape route.
The shooting started when they were about a hundred yards away. The windshield shattered, showering them all with glass. Howling ninety-mile-an-hour wind and the high-pitched buzz of flying bullets filled the car. Sergei ducked even lower, his eyes just above the dashboard. Automatic rifle fire dug a row of divots out of the road just in front of the car and a long crease appeared in the hood. Ben’s headrest exploded in a burst of leather scraps and chunks of foam rubber.
Bangs and pings from under the hood told Sergei that bullets were finding their way through the grille. One hit the radiator, sending a blast of hot steam over the front of the car and into Sergei’s face. He choked and squinted as he struggled to keep control of the car.
Fifteen yards from the buildings, the front right tire blew out. The wheel jerked in Sergei’s hands as the Mustang sheered suddenly to the right, taking them straight toward the brick facade of the warehouse. Sergei yanked the wheel hard to the left, but the car careened off the corner of the warehouse and smashed into the front offices of the factory. It hurtled through the glass-and-steel exterior and the plant manager’s office before finally coming to rest between two rows of cubicles. A corner of the roof collapsed behind them with a crash, blowing a cloud of plaster dust and ceiling-tile particles over the wrecked sports car. The engine died and all was suddenly silent.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ENDGAME
“Excellent work! You have gained glory for yourselves and Allah,” Elbek said to the cluster of men hastily positioned outside the brewery entrance. They had shown good discipline and initiative, grabbing their weapons and racing out the door to join their commander as soon as Ibrahim’s ambush failed and the Russian unexpectedly charged them. Elbek was a good shot, but his pistol alone might not have been enough to stop the speeding car. “Go make sure they’re dead and see what you can learn.” He turned to the most senior of the men. “Movsar, you’re in command.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied. The group jogged toward the electronics factory as Elbek went back into the brewery.
“Yunus!” he called.
His aide quickly appeared from the back, where he had been supervising the loading of the vans and SUVs. “Yes, General?”
“We need to move faster. Much faster. The Americans will be here any moment, and we need to be ready for them. The squads must all be gone, and the building must be ready. I will take over loading and dispatching the squads. I need you to make the final preparations here.” Elbek paused and looked his longtime assistant in the eyes. “There is a very good chance that the enemy will arrive before we can leave.”
“Yes, General.” Yunus betrayed no emotion as he left to arm the explosives that would obliterate the building and all trace of their operation, adding crucial hours, maybe days, to the time it would take the Americans and their allies to discover what was happening. Of course, the building had to be destroyed before the enemy could seize it—no matter who was left inside.
Ben looked around. The chalky dust and pale-gray light of the dying day gave everyone in the car a corpse-like appearance. A trickle of blood, black in the dim light, ran down the side of Sergei’s face as he lay slumped over the steering wheel. For an instant, Ben feared that he was the only one left alive. “Is everyone okay?” he asked, his voice loud in the silence.
Sergei groaned and sat up. “I’ll live. How are you guys in back?”
“My legs are stuck,” said Will in a strained voice. Ben looked over his seat and saw that it had been jammed back almost into Will’s lap, trapping his legs.
Noelle was sitting next to Will. She bent over to get a better look at the problem. “It looks like . . .” Her voice trailed off and she sat back, looking sick. “There’s bone sticking out, and there’s a lot of blood.”
Elena leaned over Noelle and examined Will’s badly broken legs. “He has to get to a hospital. Will, how do you feel?”
“It hurts pretty bad,” he said, his face slick with sweat. “I can take it, but I . . . I’m having trouble focusing. Probably blood loss ’n’ shock.”
Elena turned to Sergei. “There’s no way an ambulance can get in here, and he won’t last long without help.”
“And none of us will last long if the Chechens show up in force,” Sergei replied. He pulled a towel from under his seat and tore it into several long strips. “Here, use this for a tourniquet, and get him as flat as possible,” he said as he handed the pieces back to her. “I’m going to go see what they’re up to.”
The driver’s door was completely smashed in, so Sergei climbed out through the smashed driver’s-side window. He winced as his burns bumped against the doorframe, reminding him that he still wasn’t fully recovered from his last visit with the Chechens.
He walked down the row of cubicles in a half crouch, keeping his head below the level of the partitions. When he reached the end, he took a deep breath and peered around the corner.
A group of five armed men stood looking in through a window, apparently trying to make out the crash scene in the gloom.
Sergei slipped into a cubicle and crouched motionless, listening. After thirty seconds, he heard careful footsteps coming through the hole the car had torn in the exterior wall. He waited ten more seconds and then slipped back out into the walkway between the cubicle rows. The men had their backs to him as they approached the wreck, weapons ready. Sergei wiped his sweaty palms and took out his Beretta.
Just like at the Academy, he told himself.
Bracing himself for the recoil, he squeezed off three shots in rapid succession.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The first two bullets hit their targets squarely between the shoulder blades, dropping them immediately. By the time Sergei fired the third shot, the men were turning toward him and the third bullet hit one of them in the left shoulder. Sergei dove back behind the cubicles as the remaining Chechens opened fire. He stumbled and fell as bullets tore through the partitions where he would have been had he kept his feet. He heard the familiar sound of a Glock .40 caliber firing from the direction of the car, followed by confused shouting and running. He smiled. When the Chechens turned to chase him, Elena must have opened up on them with her FBI standard-issue firearm. No wonder they had run.
Sergei carefully poked his head over the top of the cubicles. Three Chechens lay dead; the rest had vanished. One man’s eyes were still open, staring at Sergei. He walked quickly past the dead men and
back to the car. “Is everyone okay?”
“We’re fine,” answered Ben, a slight adrenaline quiver in his voice. “Do you think they’ll be back?”
Sergei nodded. “And next time we won’t take them by surprise.” He walked back to the bodies and picked up their weapons. “Here,” he said as he handed them to Ben and Noelle, “you’ll need these.”
He looked over at Will Conklin. The FBI agent was breathing unevenly and his face was pale and strained.
Elena followed his gaze. “I tried to call the police to ask if there was some way they could move faster, but my phone won’t work in here.”
Sergei tried his phone, which also didn’t work. He glanced through a window in the wall that separated the front office from the production lines. Much of the machinery had been left on, and displays and sensors glowed in the darkness. Maybe all that equipment was interfering with the phone signals, or possibly the place was shielded against cell-phone transmissions and other stuff that would interfere with the equipment. “I’ll go outside and try.”
“While you’re at it, see if you can figure out what’s going on next door,” Elena said. “I’m sure the Chechens have been busy.”
Sergei nodded. “I’m sure they have.” The Vainakh Guard would no doubt be watching the front of the building, so Sergei headed for the back to look for a door or window. The machines on the factory floor generated just enough little pools of colored light to prevent Sergei’s eyes from adjusting to the dark, but not enough to see by. Small hums and whirs masked his steps—and the steps of anyone else who might be there.
If one of them is in here with night-vision gear, I’m dead.
He saw the dim outline of a window ahead, a rectangle of slightly less dark space hanging in the blackness. He walked over to it as quickly as he could, hands in front of him like a child playing blindman’s buff. A file cabinet stood under the window. Sergei climbed clumsily onto it, making far too much noise for his comfort. He unlocked the window and slipped through, dropping the few feet to the ground.
Evening was rapidly fading into a moonless and cold night. Sergei found himself beside a long, bare wall of pale limestone, exposed to a sharp wind and—more importantly—sharp eyes that might be able to pick out his silhouette against the light stone.
He spotted a clump of fir bushes at the end of the wall and ran toward it. Gunfire sounded in the distance as he ran—pops like firecrackers interspersed with the unmistakable rattle of full-auto bursts. It was too far away and in the wrong direction to be a renewed attack on Elena and the rest. The Elmhurst police must have arrived and set up checkpoints or roadblocks on the exits from the industrial park. Good.
Frost rimed the short needles, which jabbed through Sergei’s slacks as he wedged himself between the bushes and the building. As soon as he was settled, he dug his cell phone out of his pocket and turned it on, making sure to hide the display light. To his great relief, it showed a strong signal. The sharp scent of bruised pine needles surrounded him as he dialed, causing him to think incongruously of Christmas.
“Elmhurst Police Department,” said a woman’s voice.
“This is Sergei Spassky. I’m at the Western Industrial Plaza, and I need to talk to the officer in charge out here. I’m working with Elena Kamenev of the FBI. She spoke to your department earlier about putting together a raid out here.”
Thirty seconds later, a man’s voice came on the line. “This is Captain Thompson.”
“Captain, we have a badly injured agent in here. When will your men be ready to make their assault?”
“It could be a while. Our first priority is to reestablish our cordon. We’ve been intercepting vehicles full of armed suspects coming out along the rear access road, and they’ve been fighting us. The last one rammed through our roadblock and took out a lot of my men. We stopped them, but there are a lot of officers down and the roadblock is effectively gone. It won’t be back up until—”
“—I can get some more men over there, and I had to send the men I had for the raid. So the raid is on hold until we get more reinforcements,” the police captain’s tinny, fuzzy voice said from the speaker. Even Elbek, whose English was very good, had difficulty understanding it.
A burst of static drowned out the Russian detective’s response. “Sorry sir,” said the Vainakh Guard’s electronics officer over his shoulder. He hurriedly adjusted the knobs on the scanning equipment.
“I need to hear this, soldier!” snapped Elbek. He had found out about the roadblocks ten minutes ago, when Squad One had radioed back a terse message before suddenly going silent. That was a nasty shock, but Elbek had grown used to those during his military career.
He kept sending vehicles out anyway, in the hope that at least one of them would break through. It was a desperate strategy, but he had no choice. The only other options were to wait for the final assault or try to escape on foot across empty fields where infrared cameras would have no trouble spotting them.
“Yes, sir,” said the electronics man.
A few seconds later, the signal came back. The police captain was speaking again.
“. . . five minutes, maybe ten. It’ll take a few minutes to reposition our men, and they’ll have to wait for the ambulances to finish. The first priority is to get the injured men stabilized and out of there.”
“The first priority has to be to stop any vehicles from getting through,” insisted the detective. “They’re probably loaded with highly lethal bioweapons. If one of them escapes . . .”
Elbek had heard enough. He ran back to the loading dock where an efficient team was packing the last two minivans. “Get the weapons in those vans and get them out of here now!”
Ben looked down the barrel of the AK-47 in his hands and into the darkness beyond. According to Elena, it was the easiest gun in the world to use. Just point and shoot.
Keep the barrel low; it’s going to buck upward when you fire, he reminded himself as he braced against the smashed-in car door for the recoil and silently prayed that he would have no occasion to test Elena’s advice.
The gloom deepened by the minute as the last vestiges of twilight faded outside. As night fell around them, the likelihood of a renewed attack increased—as did their opponents’ advantage. The growing darkness hid their enemies—but not them. The Chechens knew exactly where they were.
Ben sniffed, and a new fear formed in his mind. “Do you smell gasoline?” he asked in a low, hurried whisper.
“Yes,” replied Elena.
“Me too,” said Noelle. “I just noticed it.”
Something moved outside the building windows, a barely perceptible shadow against the lightless sky. “Sergei?” Ben called.
No answer.
He saw another movement and fired, shattering the windows. A sharp breeze blew in, carrying a strong smell of gas.
They’re going to burn us out! Ben realized. Before he could say anything, a wall of flame roared up. Fed by the breeze, tongues of fire licked in through the broken windows, igniting curtains, splintered furniture, and piles of paper.
Elbek and Yunus climbed into the front seat of the lead van. Yunus drove and Elbek sat beside him. Four more men rode with them—two crouching by the open side doors with AK-47s and RPG launchers, and two other heavily armed gunmen in the back, guarding against any attack from the rear. A plain cardboard box sat on the floor in the middle of the van, carefully packed to prevent it from sliding or tipping. The second van was similarly equipped and manned.
They turned onto the access road, and Elbek got his first clear view of the remnant of the police roadblock. It lay a quarter of a mile ahead, where the street ended in a T-intersection with a four-lane road. A burning police cruiser lay on its roof on the shoulder, and two more had been rammed into a deep ditch on the far side of the intersection. A white Dodge Caravan and two white Ford Expeditions were in a parking lot on the far side of the
four-lane road, surrounded by a half dozen police. Two ambulances had pulled up to the south of the intersection, and paramedics were carefully removing dead and wounded officers from the wreckage.
Shattered glass and bits of plastic sparkled on the asphalt in the glare of the emergency lights, but the intersection was clear. Ten minutes ago, Elbek had feared that they would all die in a heroic last stand in the brewery, but now he had hope—no, more than hope: a realistic belief—that they would complete their mission.
Once they were past the roadblock, it would be a small matter to abandon the vans, board buses or trains, and vanish. They would need to redivide the Variant D dispensers and revise their target list, but that would not be difficult. It also probably would not matter, because a virulent plague in even one city would likely spread throughout the nation in a matter of weeks as people fled from the disease by car or plane, unwittingly taking the terror with them.
But there still remained the task of getting past the roadblock—which should be simple, but could not be taken for granted. “Yunus, watch the road when you make the turn,” said Elbek. “We cannot afford a flat tire.” He turned to the men by the doors. “Put two RPGs in the parking lot, then follow with gunfire. We want them to be dead or distracted when we drive past.”
“He’ll probably die if we try to move him!” Elena shouted over the blaring fire alarm.
The flames raced up the wall and flowed in broad sheets across the ceiling, blackening and consuming the sound-absorbing tiles. The alarms had gone off almost the instant the fire started, but no water came from the sprinkler heads that dotted the ceiling. The collapse of the roof when the Mustang crashed in must have cut off the water supply.
The flickering flames gave an artificial glow of health to Will’s unconscious face, but his slack features and increasingly uneven breathing showed that he was failing rapidly. Despite Noelle’s and Elena’s best efforts with the tourniquets, a steady flow of blood oozed from his legs.
