Tsar

by Ted Bell

  That was the theory come up with by the genius brigade in the wardroom, anyway. The two ensigns had their doubts, but it wasn’t their job to offer suggestions. It was their job to hook up to the airship and start winching this big four-hundred-foot-long mother right down to the sub.

  The terrorists were threatening to throw live hostages out the door if anyone messed with them. Mansfield’s mission was to get the airship down to sea level fast enough to take that option off the table.

  “Okay,” Mansfield said, peering through the scope crosshairs at his target. “Fire!”

  Blair yanked the lanyard that fired the harpoon. There was a whoosh of expelled gas, and the grapnel hook shot upward toward the underside of the zeppelin, a trail of steel cable beneath. Mansfield kept his right eye glued to the scope.

  “Oh, baby,” he said, raising his head and smiling at Blair.

  “Frozen rope?”

  “Fuckin’ A, podnuh. Nailed it. Hooked the damn cross beam a foot from the hatch.”

  Blair pushed the red lever that operated the big winch inside the base of the harpoon. The cable snapped taut as the slack disappeared in a heartbeat, and slowly but surely, the winch began to reel the massive airship down toward the sub’s conning tower.

  “Outta the way!” one of the first SEALs to emerge through the hatch yelled. The big black guy, a veteran named Stokely Jones who’d come aboard at Bermuda, was on that steel cable and climbing hand over hand up toward the ship faster than either Blair or Mansfield had ever seen a human being move before. Especially one his size and carrying forty pounds of weapons, equipment, and ammunition on his back.

  “SOMETHING’S VERY WRONG here,” Pushkin’s first officer said to his captain, Dimitri Boroskov. He was staring in disbelief at the instruments arrayed on the ship’s master control panel.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re losing altitude, sir.”

  “Don’t be absurd. That’s impossible,” the captain said, his eyes rapidly scanning the console, looking primarily at the internal gas-pressure gauges. The Vortex I had been designed with twin hulls. An outer hull of thin, rip-stop material and a rigid inner hull of microthin titanium, this lightweight metal hull strong enough to survive all but the most catastrophic disasters. Sandwiched between the two hulls was ninety million cubic feet of helium.

  The only things that could possibly cause a loss of altitude would be wind shear from a thunderhead or a loss of gas from inside the outer hull. There was no storm activity within fifty miles. And every one of his gauges showed no signs of leakage. The exterior hull pressure readings in all compartments were pegged safely inside the normal range, just where they were supposed to be. No leaks. No wind. It made no sense at all.

  “All pressure readings normal,” Boroskov said. “Slight wind out of the northeast, two knots gusting to five.”

  “That may well be, Captain. But look at the altimeter, will you? And the variometer. We are definitely descending.”

  “I don’t believe it. Must be something wrong with the altimeter gauge. It’s giving a false reading.”

  The captain leaned forward and stared out at the black sky and the few stars scattered near the horizon. “We certainly appear to be stationary, at any rate.”

  “Only because the descent rate is minimal, sir. Look! Four hundred ninety feet above sea level and dropping. We’ve lost ten feet according to the altimeter! And the rate seems to be increasing!”

  “Impossible.”

  “Should I notify Commander Yurin? He demands to be kept abreast of anything unusual, sir.”

  “Not yet. We don’t want to look foolish, and there might still be a simple explanation. Call engineering first. There must be a leak somewhere. Perhaps the computer systems monitoring the internal pressure gauges are malfunctioning. This could be the problem. Still, we take no chances. Get engineering teams to go over every square inch of this ship’s interior. Find that leak, if it exists, and fix it!”

  “Aye-aye, sir!” the first officer said, and ran for the ladder, while the captain nervously eyed the outward-looking radar, looking for any enemy incursion into their no-fly zone.

  “Sir?” his first officer said a moment later, pausing at the bottom of the ladder and looking up toward the open hatchway.

  “What is it now?” said the captain, frantically scanning the altimeter, elevator position indicator, and inclinometer. At eye level was his variometer, which he used to measure the ship’s rate of rise or fall. With his left hand, he spun the elevator wheel, trying to detect and correct changes in trim. He was intent on moving the airship forward now, attempting to gain altitude, but he couldn’t seem to do either.

  He had the oddest sensation of his entire career.

  He felt that his ship was stuck in midair.

  “I believe there is now another problem, Captain,” he heard his first officer say behind him. Boroskov looked quickly over his shoulder. What he saw, at first glance, did not appear to be a problem.

  He saw a beautiful pair of legs descending the ladder, shapely calves, knees, thighs. At first, he thought the woman might be naked, and then he saw the short black satin skirt, the apron. Finally, the beautiful woman with the dark red hair stepped down from the bottom rung. She was wearing the uniform of the housekeeping staff, but she was not anyone he recognized. She had a gun in her hand. Things were getting so strange. The captain shook his head as if he could clear away this craziness.

  “You two speak English?” the dark-skinned woman asked.

  “Da, da, da,” the captain replied. “Yes, yes, yes, of course.”

  “Good. I want both of you to remain very quiet. Keep your hands up in the air where I can see them. Good. Now, move toward the hatch.”

  The two officers did as they were told.

  “Now, open the hatch.”

  “Open it?”

  “You heard what I said. Open it!”

  The captain made for the hatch, but the first officer had other ideas. He turned, screamed something in Russian at the captain, and lunged for Fancha with both hands outstretched, going for the gun.

  There was no time to hesitate. She fired one round, caught him in the knee, and he buckled to the floor, writhing in pain.

  The Russian captain, very shaken now, cranked the big stainless-steel wheel around a few times. There was a pop, a hiss of air, and then the hatch cover was shoved upward violently by someone below. The steel edge of the round door caught the captain under the chin, and he, too, went sprawling, bleeding from a deep gash.

  Fancha looked down and saw Stokely’s smiling face beaming up at her.

  “Hey,” he said. “Look who’s here.”

  “Oh, baby, oh, baby, oh, baby,” she said, reaching down to touch his face.

  “Honey, you got to get out of the way. I got about thirty pumped-up killer angels climbing up my tail crazy to come aboard as quickly as possible.”

  Fancha moved to the rear of the control-room pod and watched an endless stream of heavily armed men in black, who had climbed hand over hand up the steel cable, now come pouring up through the hatch. Stoke had the captain and the first officer off to the side, grilling them aggressively at the point of a gun about the current whereabouts of all of the terrorists, especially the ones who were not to be found in the ballroom.

  She saw Alex Hawke poke his handsome head through the hatch and smile at her.

  She’d never seen a man look so happy in her life.

  “Fancha,” he said, grinning at her. “You did it.”

  61

  SEALs don’t train with regulation human-silhouette targets. They use small three-by-five index cards taped strategically over the silhouette. To qualify, you had to be able to hit the card with a double tap, two shots in rapid succession, whether you were popping up from below the water or bursting into a hijacked airliner packed with terrified passengers. SEAL instructors don’t care how you shoot, one-handed, two-handed, right- or left-handed, doesn’t matter, as long as you hit tight, man-
killing groups every single time.

  The heavy loads the two SEAL platoons were using tonight would knock the terrorists aboard the airship down no matter where they hit them. Head, chest, arm, leg, didn’t matter. The terrorists who had hijacked this airship didn’t know it yet, but their life expectancies had just dropped to zero.

  The assault-and-hostage-rescue group quickly divided itself into two platoons, one on either side of the pod’s ladder up to A Deck. Stoke and Harry Brock would take the Alpha Platoon, Stoke commanding. They would search the ship from stem to stern. They’d be looking for any tangos currently off duty, sleeping, or simply hiding and capture or eliminate them. Basically, a door-to-door sweep of the entire airship.

  Meanwhile, Hawke and the fourteen men of Bravo Platoon would go directly to the ballroom, take out the Russian tangos guarding the hostages, and secure any other hostages in sickbay or otherwise not found with the main group.

  “Listen up,” Hawke said, addressing the whole squad. “This, as you gentlemen all damn well know, is a game for thinkers, not shooters. That’s always been true, but it is especially true tonight. When we go in with our flashbangs and smoke grenades, we’re going to enter a room full of screaming, shell-shocked hostages, many of them elderly and infirm, and perhaps a dozen highly trained Russian terrorists. As you know from the briefing, these guys are very bad news, formerly the death-squad commandos in Chechnya.”

  “OMON, skipper?”

  “Exactly. So, the trick will be not shooting. Every round we fire in there will be accounted for. I don’t need to tell you we probably have the American vice president’s wife in there on the floor. Also her White House security detail. When bullets fly and the fit hits the shan, as it surely will do, these U.S. Secret Service men will immediately cover her body with their own. These men are not, I repeat, not attacking the vice president’s wife.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, skipper,” one of the younger SEALs said, laughing.

  “Little humor,” Hawke smiled.

  It was easy as hell to get too tight at the run-up, too tightly wound, and that was the last thing he wanted his squad to be feeling at the moment.

  There were a more few chuckles, and Stoke said, “This is serious shit, guys. Any monkey can shoot people. You men know better than anyone what counts right now is the split second when you know to back the hell off. Okay? Listen to the man!”

  Hawke, all trace of humor gone, said, “Once the spoon pops on the first smoke and flashbang grenades, you have two-point-seven seconds before the blast. Fingers off the triggers until you aim to kill. Look all the way into the danger zones before turning into the room. When you get inside, key your focus on weapons, not movement. Maintain fields of fire, and for God’s sake, don’t fuck this up. All right? Everybody ready? You all know where to go, so go, dammit, go!”

  He and Stoke stood back and let the teams race up the ladder to reform in the lounge area at the top.

  Stoke had made sure a crewman from the sub would fast-rope up the cable with a bosun’s chair and help Fancha back down to the sub, get her to sickbay if necessary. The captain and the first officer were likewise to be removed from the pod and hauled down to the sub for intense interrogation.

  At the top of the grand staircase, the hostage-rescue team split into two parties. Stoke took Alpha left down the ship’s central corridor, where they would begin a room-by-room search of the entire vessel, every deck, every nook, every cranny.

  Hawke and Bravo went right.

  Every member of the team had memorized the ship’s layout. They knew every crack, turn, and stair, including the ballroom’s location and layout on the diagrams. Just two minutes later, Hawke and his assault team were silently checking weapons and gear one last time outside the ballroom’s main entrance, just beyond the line of sight of anyone inside.

  Hawke looked at the digital timer ticking down on his watch and stepped forward, stopping just short of the door. He had affixed a noise suppressor to his M8 and now held it at eye level, the selector set for a three-round burst. Should an unfriendly step outside the room now, he was dead. He reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a flashbang. He slowed his breathing. Adrenaline was coursing through his system, just enough to maintain the right edge. In his earpiece, he could hear Stoke breathing.

  “Bravo,” Hawke said into his tiny lip mike.

  “Copy, Bravo,” Stoke replied. “Alpha is at yellow. Request compromise authority and permission to move to green.” Yellow meant Stoke’s squad was at its last position of cover and concealment. That no-man’s-land between safe and totally rat-fucked. His team had orders not to engage any enemy until Hawke’s primary force had initiated its assault on the ballroom.

  “Bravo at green,” Hawke told Stoke, cupping a grenade loosely in his left hand. “Stand by, Alpha…ten seconds…”

  He looked at his team, making final eye contact with as many of them as he could. “Remember,” he told them one last time, “key on weapons, shoot surgically, think four steps ahead.”

  The team nodded. Hawke saw they were ready. It was finally time for everybody to get real busy, hop and pop.

  “Alpha, you now have compromise authority to move to green…”

  He paused a beat. He knew Stoke was moving.

  “Five,” Hawke said to his team, “four…three…two…one…”

  Hawke heaved the first of many stun grenades through the ballroom door. Next, the smoke grenades were tossed inside.

  Craaack!

  A hundred and eighty decibels of distraction preceded Hawke, who leaned into the smoke and noise and violence as his team stormed into the ballroom behind him.

  Bullets from the OMON troops ringing the room full of hostages instantly zipped over their heads with loud, supersonic retorts. Huge sonic explosions rocked the ballroom as the team charged through the hot zone. They were sidestepping wailing hostages as they lobbed more flashbangs and smokes ahead of them and expertly executing terrorists as they encountered them, head shots, torsos, whatever shots they could take. Surgical, like the man said.

  The return enemy fire was wild and sporadic as panic and confusion spread. But not all of it. The Russian OMON forces had clearly been training for an attempted hostage rescue, just as Yurin had told Stokely under duress.

  Hawke had seen two or three of his guys go down, wounded or dead. A lot of lead was still flying. He was shocked to see a few hostages struggling to their feet, two old men reaching down to help their wives get off the floor. They all held hands and, stumbling blindly through the smoke, tried to make their way toward a door with a lighted exit sign.

  They hadn’t gone six feet when all four of them were brutally executed by two OMON guys guarding the exit door. Hawke saw the wanton murder, dropped to a knee, sighted his M8, and unloaded on one of the two Russians, rounds to his head that would sever the connection between brain and spinal cord. He looked for the other one, but he’d disappeared into the smoke toward the stage.

  Hawke decided to follow. Murder got you the death penalty in this room. But suddenly, he was taking fire from above. Where? He whirled around. There were two tiny window openings in the wall above the stage, and he saw the glint of a muzzle protruding from one of them. It looked like a projection booth. Fire from above was lethal. He grabbed a stun grenade from his bag and pitched it through the second window. The resulting explosion of sound and the smoke pouring out had neutralized the shooter, at least temporarily.

  62

  “Locked door, skipper,” Harry Brock said to Stoke. Harry put his ear to the door. “Noise inside. Sounds like TV.”

  Alpha Platoon had already cleared one entire deck, killing two tango sentries and three more sleeping inside some kind of dorm room. They had just mounted the stairs to the promenade deck. Pricey real estate from the looks of it. Suites and shit like that. Lots of gold fixtures and silk-covered sofas out in the hallway.

  “Blow it, Harry,” Stoke said.

  “Breacher up!” Brock said, an
d a lanky young Iowan named Harry Beecher stepped past them to the door. Beecher the Breacher, he was called. He was carrying a sawed-off, pistol-gripped 12-gauge Remington shotgun loaded with two specially designed Hatton rounds. He also had a.45 in a cross-draw holster strapped across his chest and a bagful of flashbangs.

  Stoke signaled for the rest of the squad to proceed ahead, clear the rest of the corridor. He calculated the three of them had enough firepower for this one room. The rest of his team moved on, clearing room after room, as sporadic automatic-weapons fire echoed all through the corridor.

  Stoke called it, and Beecher put the gun to the lock.

  Boom-boom!

  Beecher had chipped out the dead bolt, and Stoke kicked the door open, went in low, half a step, and turned to his left.

  “Hostage left!” he yelled as Beecher and Brock moved inside.

  He instantly recognized Vice President Tom McCloskey’s wife from her pictures in the papers and on TV. Bonnie McCloskey sat in a chair, her hands cuffed in her lap as two wild-eyed OMON bully boys on either side held guns to her head. She looked exhausted and beat to hell, but she smiled angelically at Stoke, sweetly, as if he’d just dropped in for tea. For a terrified hostage, few sights are more welcome than a beautiful Old Glory patch on somebody’s shoulder, coming through the door.

  To the right, two more Russkie tangos were just coming up off the couch where they’d been watching Black Sunday on a plasma. Harry Brock, still moving forward at a crouch, dropped the one on the right with a three-round burst to the chest. Beecher had pulled his pistol and took out the guy on the left with one round to the forehead, a big.45mm ouchie that would never ever get all better.

  “Drop your guns!” Stoke shouted at the two men still holding guns to the vice president’s wife’s head. Catching his mistake, he screamed it again in phonetic Russian, swinging the barrel of his M8 rapidly back and forth from one bad guy to the other as he moved forward, just aching to pull the trigger.