by Larry Bond
“Jesus Christ!” Helen snarled. A booby trap. Those bastards inside had rigged their front door with a booby trap as a precaution against unwelcome nighttime visitors. Part of her mind was silently screaming in shock and in time with Jackson. Another part, colder and more analytical, realized that knocking down the door had triggered the explosive—probably a sheet charge mounted in the side jamb. Simple. Classic. And totally unexpected.
She tore her eyes away from the boiling cloud of smoke and still-falling debris at the front door. Ricks and Jackson were out of action, but she had other forces in motion. She keyed her mike. “Three, are you in yet?”
Frazer answered immediately. “Negative! Negative! They’ve reinforced the back door! It’s backed by steel!”
“Can you rig a breaching charge?” Helen demanded. The tactical situation was going from bad to worse at a rapid, breathtaking pace.
It got worse.
Gunfire crackled suddenly from somewhere in the back of the house.
“Shit! Shit!” Frazer shouted over the radio. “We’re taking fire! Christ!” The noise doubled in volume as he and Brett started shooting back. “We’re pinned down, One! Can’t go forward! Sure as hell can’t go back!”
Helen gritted her teeth. She called the leader of the sniper team posted to cover the rear of the house. “Byrne! Take that bastard out!”
“Trying, Sierra One,” the sniper replied calmly. She heard him pause and caught the muffled crack of his high-powered Remington rifle. “Gonna be tough. Hostile has a flash-suppressed weapon. I’m having a hard time drawing a bead on him.”
Lying beside her in the hedge, DeGarza suddenly stiffened. “I’ve got movement in the right front window, boss.”
“Great.” Helen peered through her goggles, zeroing in on the window he had indicated. Was that a curtain stirring?
More gunfire erupted—this time from the front of the house. The Ford Taurus parked on the street rocked crazily back and forth, hammered by the stream of rounds that tore through its doors and shattered every window. Sparks flew off metal in wild, corkscrewing patterns. Whoever was inside the house was making sure there were no attackers hiding behind the vehicle.
Helen saw brick dust and splintered wood puff up around the house’s front windows as her snipers opened up in an attempt to silence the still-unseen gunman. The curtains jerked wildly—shredded by each bullet—but the hostile fire continued without pause. She shook her head decisively. This was too slow. “Emery!” she ordered. “Smoke ’em out!”
In response, a grenade launcher thumped once from behind her, hurling a tear-gas grenade toward one of the house’s windows. But instead of sailing on through into the rooms beyond, the grenade bounced back outside onto the lawn and lay hissing, spewing its gray cloud of tear gas harmlessly into the open air.
Helen swore sharply to herself. The defenders must have strung netting behind the curtains. She grimaced. Booby traps, reinforced steel doors, and now grenade netting. She and her section were attacking a fortress.
Alerted by the attempted grenade attack, the gunman inside shifted his fire away from the mangled Taurus to the homes across the street.
Helen and DeGarza burrowed deeper into the hedge as rounds whipcracked past their heads. The chattering roar of automatic-weapons fire rose higher. Someone else inside the house had opened up, systematically shooting into every piece of cover that could shelter an attacker.
“Jesus,” the stocky HRT trooper whispered into her ear. “Who are these guys?”
She shook her head impatiently. Their enemies were damned good. That was all that was important now.
Her gaze darted across the flame-lit, bullet-torn landscape in front of her as she evaluated and then rejected courses of action in the blink of an eye. That bomb-blasted front door gaped open invitingly, but getting to it would be impossible. There was too much cleared ground to cover. Anyone trying to cross that street would be gunned down before they took three strides.
The back door was out too. Frazer and Brett were still pinned down there, unable to get close enough to slap the necessary breaching charge in place. What did that leave?
Helen’s eyes narrowed as she made her decision. It was time to gamble. They were running out of time and options. Every passing minute gave the terrorists inside more time to destroy the information they needed or to prepare for a mass suicide.
She tapped DeGarza’s helmet to get his attention and wriggled back out of the hedge. The other agent followed her. Crouching low to avoid the bullets still flying past overhead, she made another radio call to the sniper team covering the front. “Horowitz! Keep shooting! Keep these bastards busy! Emery! Fall back and meet us at the school!”
FBI command van
With half its interior taken up by the radio and other equipment needed to manage a surveillance operation or raid, the five men inside the back of the command van were crowded together almost cheek-to-jowl. They were parked out of sight, two streets away from the pitched battle now raging around the terrorist safe house.
“Damn it!” Peter Thorn slammed his fist into his thigh in frustration as he listened to the rising crescendo of gunfire outside and the desperate radioed reports from the stunned HRT assault force. He couldn’t just sit here idle while Helen and her section were cut to ribbons. He yanked off the headphones he was wearing and whirled around to face Flynn. “Your people need help now! Give me a weapon and three men and I’ll lay down a base of fire on that frigging house long enough for them to break inside!”
For an instant, the older FBI man seemed tempted. Then he shook his head. “Not possible, Pete! You don’t have any jurisdiction here.”
“Screw the fucking jurisdiction!” Thorn snarled angrily. He started to stand without really being sure of where he planned on going or what he planned on doing.
“Sit down!” Flynn barked. His voice softened. “Look, Pete, think it through. Things are already bad out there. You really think throwing in another set of strangers with guns—in the dark—is gonna make them better?”
Thorn shook his head numbly, unwillingly admitting to himself that the other man was right. His instincts urged him into action. His brain told him an unplanned, unrequested intervention now could be disastrous. Plenty of soldiers and police officers were killed by friendly fire in the dark or in the swirling confusion of battle.
“Let Helen do her job,” Flynn said quietly. “She’s in command. If she wants help, she’ll ask for it.”
Arlington
Lugging her submachine gun and a pack carrying extra gear, Helen Gray dashed across the playground toward the waiting Blackhawk helicopter. DeGarza and Emery, similarly burdened, ran right at her heels. They ducked low under the helo’s turning rotors and scrambled up into the troop compartment.
“We’re in! Take us up!” Helen shouted to the pilot over her command circuit.
“Roger.”
Turbines howling, the Blackhawk climbed skyward, already spinning left to head toward the battle. It leveled off just fifty feet above the ground.
Helen crouched in the helicopter’s open doorway, staring down as they slid low over the street. Orange flames and black, oily smoke billowed out of the burning Ford Taurus. She could see Jackson’s body sprawled on the front lawn. They were over the roof of the house in seconds.
The Blackhawk pilot’s voice crackled through her helmet headset. “You ready?”
Helen craned her head to check with her teammates. They both nodded and gave her a thumbs-up signal. She whipped back around and confirmed that for the pilot. “We’re ready. Let’s do it!”
Rotors whipping through the rising smoke, the Blackhawk went into hover only a few feet above the roof.
Without pausing, Helen dropped out through the helo’s open side door. Robbed of her natural grace by her weapons and extra equipment, she landed awkwardly on the sloping asphalt shingles. She teetered there for a second, fighting briefly for her balance. Breathing hard, she regained it and knelt down—al
ready tearing open the equipment pack she’d been carrying. DeGarza and Emery made the same leap and moved to her side.
Helped by DeGarza, she extracted the thin, rolled-up sheet of explosives she’d been digging for, unrolled it, and started tamping the charge into place on the roof. Emery crouched nearby, aiming his M16 downward.
Helen finished securing her end of the breaching charge and carefully attached the detonator. They were almost set. She looked across at DeGarza …
And rolled away from a hail of splinters as bullets blasted through the roof directly in front of her, fired upward from inside the house. She felt a sharp, stinging pain in one cheek and wiped away a smear of bright red blood with one gloved hand. Some of the splinters must have caught her in the face. “Jesus!”
Emery fired back, using three-round bursts to punch new holes in the roof. Suddenly, the FBI sniper jerked upright, caught by a bullet under the chin. The top of his head blew off, and he toppled backward, sliding rapidly out of sight.
Hell. Helen blinked away tears and felt the welcome inrush of a cold, focused, killing rage. At least three of her men were down—dead or dying. She intended to make the bastards inside this house pay for that.
Her fingers raced through the last adjustments, setting the detonator for a five-second delay. “Done!”
Four. Three. She and DeGarza scrambled up the sloping roof and over the peak. Then they threw themselves flat, hugging the shingles. Two. One.
The house rocked under them. Flame spurted skyward, but most of the blast was directed downward—through the roof.
With her ears still ringing from the enormous explosion so close by, Helen pulled herself back upright and peered at their handiwork. The breaching charge had torn a jagged, five-foot-wide hole in the roof. Smoke and dust boiled upward through the new opening.
She clapped DeGarza on the shoulder and shouted, “Come on!”
Then she unslung her MP5, skidded down the roof, and dropped straight through the ragged opening. Speed was life. They had to strike before the stunned terrorists inside the house recovered.
Helen landed heavily on a tangled heap of debris—torn shingles, pieces of charred support beams, and the mangled corpse of a man. One of the terrorists had been right below the charge when it went off. Good, she thought coldly. One less to kill.
Ignoring the sharp, stabbing pains shooting through her legs and rib cage, she rolled off the still-smoking pile of wreckage and came up into a crouch with her submachine gun ready to fire. DeGarza followed immediately after her and came up facing in the other direction. He swung around after making sure they were alone in the room.
Helen summoned up memories of the blueprints she’d studied. They were inside what had been a living room before the HRT’s bullets and their breaching charge ripped it apart. She rose and moved toward a hallway that ran the width of the house. A hand signal sent DeGarza right—toward the two bedrooms and bathrooms on the ground floor. She turned left—toward the dining room, kitchen, back door, and the stairs leading down into the basement.
Gliding quietly across the dining room’s scarred hardwood floor, she skirted past a dinner table and chairs and drew closer to the open arch connecting to the kitchen. Every sense, every perception, she possessed was at its highest possible pitch.
“One, this is Two. All clear.” DeGarza’s hoarse whisper rang loudly through her earphones. “Coming back your way.”
Helen froze. She could see part of the kitchen now. Not much of it really, just the glint of a glass-fronted microwave on one of the tiled counters. Was there something reflected in that dark glass? An arm? Perhaps a weapon?
Conviction crystallized without conscious thought. She shifted her aim and fired a burst through the edge of the doorway, tearing away chunks of wood and plaster. Before the stuttering echoes faded she was moving again, charging sideways to bring more of the kitchen into her line of sight.
There! She spotted a moving shape near the opening.
Helen squeezed the trigger again, holding her submachine gun tight on target as it spat out another three rounds.
The terrorist, already hit at least once, jerked again convulsively and fell back against a refrigerator, sliding slowly to the floor. His eyes were already open and fixed before his arms and legs stopped twitching. Helen’s eyes took in the dead man’s dark hair and light skin before moving on to inspect the rest of the room. It was empty.
“Two, this is One. Kitchen is clear. Come ahead,” she breathed into her mike.
DeGarza followed her in, his weapon still sweeping through controlled arcs as he checked potential hiding places.
Helen stopped facing a door left ajar. It led down into the basement. Her gaze fell on a dark smear on the door handle. Blood. Another of the terrorists must have been wounded in the earlier exchange of fire with Frazer and Brett.
She moved closer to get a better look at the staircase and frowned. It turned sharply at a right angle halfway down. This was going to be a bitch. And there wasn’t time to summon reinforcements.
She signaled DeGarza into position on one side of the half-open door and crouched on the other. Then she tugged a flash/bang grenade out of her leg pouch and looked across at the stocky agent. He nodded.
Counting silently to herself, Helen tugged on the grenade’s pull ring, slammed the door open, and lobbed the cylinder down the stairs, trying to bounce it around the bend. DeGarza followed the grenade down, taking the stairs two at a time. She hurtled after him.
They rounded the corner at high speed and took the last few steps into a long, low-ceilinged room lit only by the blinding strobes thrown by the exploding grenade. Helen sensed rather than saw motion in the far corner and yelled a warning. “Down!”
She and DeGarza dropped prone just as a third terrorist reared up from behind a sofa and fired a long, tearing burst from an assault rifle. He missed. They shot back from the carpet. Shredded by multiple hits, the man collapsed across the sofa, bleeding into the ripped stuffing and exposed steel springs.
Helen breathed out. These bastards were good—good enough to shake off the effects of a stun grenade and fight back. Well, she thought wearily, maybe this one had been the last.
More gunfire rang out suddenly inside the basement, muffled only slightly by distance and closed doors. Crap.
Helen surged to her feet and sped down a hallway that led to the last two bedrooms and bath. DeGarza dogged her heels.
Without pausing, she kicked open the door to one room and rolled back away as the other HRT agent dove inside. She risked a glance and got a hasty impression of a small, starkly furnished room containing nothing but an unmade bed and a few closed suitcases. A bullet-riddled portable computer lay in pieces near the bed. That explained the gunfire they’d heard.
Damn it! They’d needed the information that shattered machine had once contained.
She swore again in sudden realization. If the man who’d destroyed that computer wasn’t in there, then …
Helen whirled as the door to the bedroom behind her flew open. A fourth terrorist, this one a fair-haired man with pale blue eyes, stepped out into the hallway, already raising an AKM assault rifle in her direction. He was too close, and there wasn’t any cover she could reach in time.
The world around her slowed to a crawl. In the long, seemingly endless blink of an eye, she recognized the face she had stared at for so many weeks. The face captured in black and white by a Metro security camera. The cruel, arrogant face of the man who had planted the National Press Club bomb.
Reacting instinctively, Helen threw herself forward and slammed her submachine gun down across the AKM’s longer barrel, pushing it toward the floor. Her finger tightened on the MP5’s trigger.
Both weapons fired at the same time.
Helen felt something punch across her thigh and ignored it at first. Then she was falling backward as her leg buckled. She felt a second impact, as another steel-jacketed round ricocheted off the concrete floor and slammed into her lower
back below her body armor.
She tumbled to the floor still clutching her submachine gun. Clenching her teeth, she raised her head high enough to see the terrorist she’d shot. He lay propped up against the doorjamb. Her bullets had torn his chest open.
The fair-headed man stared back at her, breathing in shallow, gasping pants as the blood pumped out of his wounds. “A woman,” he whispered in amazement. One corner of his mouth twisted upward in a terrible smile and then froze. He was dead.
Helen shivered, suddenly horribly, terribly cold—colder than she had ever been in her life. She could sense something wet spreading across her back, but she couldn’t feel anything below her stomach.
“Oh, my God.” DeGarza dropped to his knees beside her and smacked his hands over her thigh, desperately trying to hold back the blood spouting out of her severed femoral artery. “Hotel One, this is Sierra Two! I need a medic! Sierra One is down and hit bad!”
Helen slid slowly into an icy, black void.
HRT medevac flight
With an ashen Mike Flynn at his side, Peter Thorn pushed through the crowd of grim-faced policemen and FBI agents surrounding the Blackhawk. Medical teams were busy loading stretchers into the helicopter as it spooled up for an emergency hop to the trauma unit at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Blankets covered most of the faces. All four terrorists caught inside the shattered safe house were dead. Two members of the HRT assault force, Ricks and Emery, were also dead. Helen and Frank Jackson were still alive—but only barely.
Thorn saw Helen lying motionless on one of the stretchers already aboard and stopped, rooted in place by his own despair. Paramedics surrounded the stretcher, working feverishly to stabilize her condition long enough to get her into surgery. One had his hands clamped around her thigh, holding the artery closed, while another slid a blood pressure cuff as high up as he could over the wound and started pumping it up, using the device as an improvised tourniquet.
