by Tom Clancy
“Busy fucker, isn’t he?” Ryan said as he hustled back in to watch on the monitor.
Rehan had taken off the suit coat he was wearing, and now he was clad in a simple white shirt and black suit pants. He and the man who was beginning to look like his second-in-command were standing back in the hall with a group of about eight men, most of the guard force that had come with them fromÀnin Pakistan, as well as a couple of faces Ryan recognized as being regulars at the house.
The audio was good, Dominic and Ryan could hear every word, but neither man spoke Urdu, so they would have to wait for the translator in West Odenton, Maryland, to translate the conversation in order to put some context to the scene.
Seconds later, Rehan and an entourage left through the front door.
“Show’s over for now, I guess,” said Dom. “I’m going to make a sandwich.”
Twenty minutes after Domingo Chavez left Embling and al Darkur’s flat, there was a knock at the door. The Pakistani major was on the phone with his staff in Peshawar, so Embling went to answer it. He knew there was security in the building that would not allow anyone off on this floor of private residences who did not have permission from one of the occupants, so he was not concerned about his security. As he looked through the peephole he saw a waiter in a white tuxedo jacket holding a wine bucket full of ice and a bottle of Champagne.
“May I help you?” he asked through the door. Then he mumbled to himself, “By taking that lovely bottle of Dom Pérignon off your hands?”
“Compliments of property management, sir. Welcome to Dubai.”
Embling smiled, opened the door, and then he saw the other men rushing up the hallway. He made to slam the door shut, but the waiter had flung his wine bucket aside, drawn a Steyr automatic pistol, and leveled it at Nigel Embling’s forehead.
Embling did not move.
From around the side of the doorway, hidden from sight from the peephole, General Riaz Rehan of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous appeared. He carried a small automatic pistol himself.
“Indeed, Englishman,” he said. “Welcome to Dubai.”
Nine other men burst into the apartment, past Nigel, with handguns held high.
56
Caruso had finished his sandwich, and he and Ryan were in the process of powering down the bug-bot surveillance devices in order to save battery power. They would wait until evening to fire them up again, hoping that Rehan would be back by then.
The sat phone on the table rang, and Caruso answered it.
“Yeah?”
“Dom? It’s Bell.”
“What’s up, Rick?”
“We’ve got a problem. When we got into the office, we started at the beginning of your transmission of the audio, so we’ve been about fifteen minutes behind on the translations.”
“Not a problem. Rehan took off a little while ago so we are powering down the—”
“There is a problem. We just translated what he said before he walked out the door.”
Domingo Chavez was stuck in traffic just a quarter-mile from the exit to the airport. On his way back from picking up his sniper rifle and ammo from the Hendley Associates Gulfstream, he got caught behind a bad traffic accident on the Business Bay Bridge, and now he sat in the BMW, very glad at the moment that the air conditioner was saving him from the brutal heat, because it looked like he’d be going nowhere soon.
In front of him, some three miles away, he could see the Burj Khalifa reach up into the sky. On the other side of that, all the way over at the coast, was Palm Jumeirah, his destination.
Just then his mobile rang. “Go for Ding,” he said.
It was Ryan, his voice rushed and intense. “Rehan knows Embling and al Darkur are at Burj Khalifa! He’s headed there now with a crew of goons.”
“Shit! Call Nigel.”
“I did. No answer. Tried the landline to his place, too. Nobody picked up.”
“Son of a bitch!” Chavez said. “Get over there as fast as possible. I’m stuck in gridlock.”
“We’re moving, but it will be twenty minutes, at least.”
“Just haul ass, kid! They are our only link to Sam! We can’t lose them!”
“I know!”
In the BMW just west of Business Bay Bridge, Domingo Chavez slammed his hands into the steering wheel in frustration. “Dammit!”
Both Mohammed al Darkur and Nigel Embling had been secured with plastic restraints, their hands behind their backs, their ankles zip-tied together. Rehan had ordered his men to stand the men up against the floor-to-ceiling windows in the sunken living room with their backs against the glass. General Rehan sat in front of them on the long couch, his legs crossed and his arms back over the cushions. He was a man in his element, comfortable here with prisoners at his mercy.
Rehan’s men — Colonel Khan and an eight-strong security force — stood around the room. Another sentry remained outside in the hallway. They each carried a pistol of their own choosing — Steyrs and SIGs and CZs were represented in the force, and Rehan and Khan both carried Berettas in shoulder holsters.
If Nigel Embling still harbored any faint shred of doubt as to the trustworthiness of ISI Major Mohammed al Darkur, that doubt was dispelled. Rehan’s men bashed al Darkur’s face into the glass window multiple times, and the thirty-five-year-old Pakistani shrieked curses at his elder countryman.
Nigel did not need forty years of in-country experience in Pakistan to recognize that these two Pakistanis did not care for each other.
Al Darkur shouted at Rehan. He spoke in English. “What did you do with the American in Miran Shah?”
The calm general smiled and answered in English. “I met with the man personally. He did not have much to say. I ordered him tortured for information about your plans. I suppose your future plans are not as important to me now as they were when I gave that order, seeing how you now have no future.”
Al Darkur kept his chin high. “Others are on to you. We know you are working with the coup organizers, we know you have trained a foreign force at the Haqqani camp near Miran Shah. Others will come behind me and they will stop you, inshallah!”
“Ha,” Rehan laughed. “Inshallah? If Allah wills it? Let’s see if Allah wills you to succeed, or if he wills me to succeed.” Rehan looked to his two guards standing near the prisoners by the window. “It is stuffy in this pretentious apartment. Open a window.”
The two guards drew their pistols, turned as one, and fired over and over into a ten-by-ten-foot pane of the thick floor-to-ceiling window glass against whˀ>Thich the two prisoners stood. It did not shatter immediately, but as the number of holes increased in the pane, from five to ten to twenty, white fissures spread between the bullet holes. The men reloaded their handguns while the cracking and popping of the glass continued, growing in volume until the massive glass square shattered outward, sending razor-sharp shards falling 108 stories down.
Warm wind blew into the luxury apartment, some pebble-sized flecks of glass with it, and Rehan and his men had to shield their eyes while the dust settled. The whine of the airflow up the side of the building rushing into the open panel in the window forced Rehan to stand up from the couch and come nearer to his prisoners to be heard.
He looked at Major al Darkur for a moment before turning to Nigel Embling, propped against the window glass, hands and legs bound, next to the huge opening to the bright sky. “I’ve looked into your background. You are from another century, Embling. The expatriate spy of a colonial power that has somehow missed the message that it no longer has any colonies. You are a pathetic man. You and the other infidels of the West have so long raped the children of Allah that you can no longer understand that your time has passed. But now, old fool, now the caliphate has returned! Can you not see it, Embling? Can you not see how the destruction of British colonialism has so perfectly set the stage for my ascendance to power?”
Embling shouted at the big Pakistani standing just feet from his face, and spittle flew from his mouth. “Your ascendance
to power? Your lot are the ones destroying Pakistan! It is good men like the major here who will lead your country back from the abyss, not monsters like you!”
Riaz Rehan just waved a hand in the air. “Fly home, Englishman.” And with that he gave a curt nod to two ISI security men standing near Nigel Embling. They stepped forward, yanked the big man off balance by his shoulders, and pulled him backward toward the open window.
He screamed in horror as they pushed him over the edge, then let him go, and he fell backward, away from the building, tumbling out, head over feet through the hot desert wind, dropping 108 floors toward concrete and steel below.
Major Mohammed al Darkur screamed at Rehan. “Kut-tay ka bacha!” Son of a dog! Though bound hand and foot, he pushed forward off the glass, tried to lunge at the big general. Two security men grabbed him before he fell forward into the apartment, and they wrestled with him, finally pulling him backward toward the ten-by-ten-foot hole in the floor-to-ceiling glass.
Rehan’s men looked up to their general for guidance.
General Rehan just nodded with a slight smile. “Send him to join his English friend.”
Al Darkur cursed and shouted and tried to kick. He shook one of his arms away from the man dragging him to the edge, but another gunman holstered his weapon and rushed forward. Together three men now fought the major on the ground in the flecks and chips of broken window glass.
It took a moment, but they gained control of al Darkur. The others in the room stood around laughing as the ISI officer fought with only the movements of his torso.
Al Darkur screamed at Rehan. “Mather chot!” Motherfucker!
The three guards dragged Major al Darkur across the floor, pulled him closer to the edge. Mohammed stopped his fight now. The wind racing from the desert floor, up 108 stories of hot glass and metal, blew the cinnamon-skinned Pakistani’s black hair into his eyeˀhiss, and he shut them, squinted tight, and began to pray.
The three gunmen took him under his shoulders, lifted him up, and grabbed him by his belt as well. As one they heaved his body back, ready to launch him forward toward the sun.
But they did not move forward as one. The security officer holding al Darkur’s left shoulder lurched away from the window and spun around; he dropped the major and, in so doing, caused the other two to lose their grip.
Before anyone in the room could react, a second man at the window’s ledge moved away from the bound major. This man fell backward into the apartment, rocked back on his heels, and tumbled down into the sunken seating area by the sofa.
Rehan turned to look at the man, to see what the hell he was doing, but instead his eyes looked past his guard and toward the cream-colored leather sofa that was now covered in a crimson splatter of blood.
Rehan looked back out the window. In the distance he saw a black speck in the sky a few hundred feet over the Burj Al Arab hotel in the distance. A helicopter? One second later, just as the last man holding al Darkur let go of the major and grabbed his bloody leg while falling to the floor, General Riaz Rehan shouted to the room.
“Sniper!”
Colonel Khan leapt over the sofa and tackled Rehan to the tile just as a hot rifle round raced past the general’s forehead.
57
Get me closer, Hicks!” Domingo Chavez shouted into the boom mike of the headset as he slammed a second five-round magazine into the magazine well of his HK PSG-1 sniper rifle. He’d missed with his last two shots, he was certain, and only by getting closer could he nail Rehan and his men, as they were now running and crawling and scrambling for cover.
“Roger that,” Hicks said in a calm Kentucky drawl, and the Bell JetRanger raced nearer to the massive spire-like structure.
Even with the broken windowpane in al Darkur and Embling’s place, Chavez would never have been able to identify the location of their apartment had he not also been able to catch a glimpse through his twelve-power scope of something tumbling out of the side of the building, spiraling down toward the ground.
It was a man, Ding knew this instinctively, though he could not take the time to try to identify who was plunging before him to their death. Instead Chavez had to range his weapon for five hundred meters and do his best to line a target up in his mil-dot crosshairs.
Even though Chavez had not spent much range time working on sniper craft in the past year, he still felt comfortable making a five-hundred-meter shot under the right conditions. But the helicopter’s vibrations, the downwash of the rotors, the upward movements of the air currents along the skyscraper, all had to be solved for in order to make a precision hit.
So Chavez did not go for precision. He did his best to calculate everything he could to the best of his ability, and then he lined up for a gut shot. Center mass on his targets. A man’s stomach was not the perfect location for a sniper shot. No, perfect would have been the brainpan. But targeting the upper stomach gave him the greatest margin of error, and he knew there would be some errors in his targeting, considering everything he had to deal with.
He fired from the backseat of the chopper, propping his weapon in the open win evdow. This would absolutely destroy the carefully tuned barrel harmonics of his rifle, but again, getting closer would fix everything.
“Closer, brother!”
“You worry about your gadget. Let me worry about mine,” replied Hicks.
To say the call from Chavez to the aircraft twenty minutes earlier had come as a surprise to Chester Hicks was putting it mildly. He had been going through some paperwork with Adara Sherman when his mobile rang.
“Hello?”
“Country, I’m on my way back! I need you to scare me up a helicopter in ten minutes! Can you do that?”
“You bet. There is a charter service right here at the FBO. Where should I tell them you are heading?”
“I need you to fly it, and we will likely be heading into combat.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“This is life-and-death shit, ’mano.”
A quick pause. “Then get your ass back here. I’ll grab us an aircraft.”
Hicks had been all action after that. He and Adara Sherman jogged across the tarmac to a dormant JetRanger that belonged to a resort hotel twenty miles up the coast. There were many newer and fancier helos on the tarmac, but Hicks had flown the JetRanger, he’d trained on Bell helos, and Hicks figured the most important factor on this hasty mission ahead of him would be the skill of the pilot, and not the most advanced technology. After looking the craft over for just a few seconds, he sent Sherman to the FBO to collect the keys by any means necessary. He removed the tie-downs and checked the fuel and the oil while she was gone, and even before he sat behind the cyclic, Sherman was back, tossing him the keys.
“Do I want to know what you did?”
“Nobody home. I probably could have snagged some sheik’s Boeing wide-body if I wanted it.”
Chavez arrived five minutes later, and they were in the air as soon as he strapped in.
While Chavez loaded his sniper rifle, Hicks asked over the intercom, “Where are we going?”
“The tallest building in the world, doubt you could miss it.”
“Roger that.” He turned the nose of the JetRanger toward the Burj Khalifa and increased his rate of climb and his ground speed.
Rehan and Khan crawled across the tile floor of the apartment toward the door to the hallway. The colonel kept his body positioned between the shooter in the helicopter and his general as they scrambled, until another protection officer slid over next to them both and then covered General Rehan.
Just as Rehan entered the hallway and rolled out of the line of fire from the helicopter outside, one of his security men grabbed him by the collar and pushed him forward to the elevator. This guard was nearly as big as Rehan himself, a hulking six-foot-three-inch-tall bruiser in a black suit and carrying a big HK pistol. He banged on the down button with his fist, turned to make sure Rehan and Khan were still with him, and then turned back as the doors sl
id open.
Ryan and Caruso were surprised by the size of the armed Pakistani who appeared right in front of them in the hallway, but they were ready for trouble. Both men heӀnd ld their pistols high. They dropped to their knees as one as the ISI security man’s eyes widened. The Pakistani lifted his own gun up into action, but both Campus operators fired into the broad chest of their target at no more than six feet.
The guard did not fall away from them, instead he lunged forward, into the elevator car. Both men fired a second and then a third time, stitching 9-millimeter rounds across his upper torso, but the ISI officer crashed into Jack Junior, pinned him in the corner, and head-butted the American with all the strength remaining in his body. He fired his HK pistol, but his arm had drooped low and the round went through Ryan’s pants, just above the knee, somehow missing his leg.
More ISI men in the hallway fired into the elevator now. Ryan was pinned by the dead man, but Caruso had dropped low to the floor and was engaging targets. He caught a half glimpse of General Rehan running away, up the hall in the opposite direction of Embling’s apartment, but he had to focus on the men shooting at him and Jack. He shot another of the general’s security detail, hitting the man in the lower abdomen, and with another three-round volley he chased the remaining men out of his line of fire, sending them up the hallway, where they disappeared into the stairwell near Embling’s flat.
Rehan had already headed into the stairwell, presumably to another floor to take an elevator down.
“Get this big motherfucker off me!” Ryan shouted.
Dom helped roll the dead man over, and immediately he saw blood on Jack’s face. “Are you hit?”
Jack ignored the crack he had taken to his right eye and instead reached down to his leg. He’d felt a round brush him there as it passed a fraction of an inch from his knee. He found the hole in his pants, reached inside it, and felt around for blood. When his fingers came back clean he said, “I’m good. Let’s go!” And they took off toward Embling’s apartment, afraid of what they might find.
