He quickly keyed his chin mic and asked, “Ace, Ghost. Sit Rep?”
“We put two down. The others are in a nervous clump near the helicopter.”
“And the girls?”
“They’re fine, but Benson and Van Gries are using them as shields.”
“Everyone’s outside now?”
“As far as I can tell, but I don’t see Ernie or Jimmy.”
“10-4.”
Bob pointed his Beretta at the magnetic lock. “Heads up,” he warned The Batman as he turned his face away and fired three quick shots into the center of the lock mechanism. That was where he knew its circuitry was located. Magnetic locks were wonderful inventions, he mused. They could hold back a charging rhino, but the same 9-millimeter bullet that could put the big animal down could also render the lock useless if properly aimed.
He turned the doorknob, pulled it open, peered around the doorframe into the elevator lobby, and looked into the penthouse beyond. From the way Ace described the action on the roof, it was unlikely that anyone out there had heard him, but it paid to be careful. The penthouse’s ornate floor-to-ceiling lobby doors hung askew, with bits and pieces of broken hardware were strewn about the entryway floor. Obviously, someone had been in a hurry to get inside. The foyer was empty, so he and The Batman stepped inside the great room and saw the bodies of two of Theo’s men on the floor. Glancing into the master bedroom to his right, he saw the body of a boy lying in the doorway and three more bodies on the floor at the foot and sides of the bed. From their gaudy jewelry and poor taste in clothing, Bob knew it had to be three of the bozos whom Carbonari’s bosses had sent down from New York City.
“Someone’s been cleaning house up here,” The Batman said.
“A falling out of thieves,” Bob answered. But why, he wondered.
They split up and worked their way along the two sidewalls, staying low behind the chairs and couches as they headed for the rear doors to the deck. As he got within three feet of the hall closet, he heard whispered arguing going on inside. He immediately recognized one of the voices as that of Ernie Travers. The CPD captain was attempting to whisper, but that wasn’t working too well. It sounded as if he was arguing, teeth clenched, and he wasn’t too happy with whoever locked in there with him. The other voice was louder and whinier, and Bob immediately knew it had to be Jimmy Barker. Someone had wedged a stout dining room chair under the doorknob. Given what looked like a solid core door, a thick chair, and premium door hinges, Bob doubted that even Ernie could force it open from the inside.
He knocked on the door and asked, “If I let you two out, will you stop arguing? Or should I just leave you in there for a while longer?”
That shut them up. “Is that you, Bob?” he heard Travers ask.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said as he put his foot against the chair, shoved it aside, and turned the doorknob, opening the door far enough to look inside. From their embarrassed faces, he knew he had his answer.
“It wasn’t me. He…” Jimmy complained as he stepped out into the room. Bob quickly grabbed him by the seat of his pants and dumped him behind the couch. “Stay down and shut up. There are five or six guys out there with guns. If they end up running back in here, they’d love nothing better than to shoot you full of holes. You got that?”
“But they’ve got Patsy!” Jimmy argued.
“And they’ve got Linda,” Bob replied. “So do what I told you.”
The body of one of Theo’s men was lying a few feet away from the young Geek. He had been shot twice in the chest and was very much dead. Underneath him, Bob saw a Heckler and Koch P1 9-millimeter automatic. That was the standard German Army sidearm these days, so the body had to be Klaus Reimer, the Bundeswehr veteran.
“Who shot him?” Bob asked Ernie.
“Theo Van Gries. Dorothy broke Reimer’s wrist and dislocated his shoulder before she got shot back on the boat. Apparently, Theo Van Gries doesn’t have much use for liabilities or for Germans. He is one stone-cold killer.”
“Yeah, that’s what happens to you when you spend too much time in the desert fighting people who are even worse than you are,” Bob told him. “Ever use one of these?” he asked the Chicago cop as he tossed him the P1.
“I’ll figure it out,” Ernie answered as he quickly dropped the magazine out of the receiver, checked the load, and jacked a new round into the receiver. “After twenty years working the streets of Chicago, there isn’t much I haven’t shot or had shot at me.”
“Well, if you don’t like that one, there’s something else lying over there.” Bob pointed to the second body. “And I think I saw a selection of revolvers in the bedroom.”
“Can I have one?” Jimmy asked.
“No!” Bob and Ernie answered in unison.
“Stay behind the couch or get back in the closet,” Ernie told him. “The last thing we want is you behind us with a loaded gun.” Then he then turned to Bob and added, “Just so you know, I intend to empty this thing into the first one of those bastards that shows himself, so don’t get in my way.”
Theo Van Gries found himself in the center of the mounting chaos on the pool deck. Normally, he thrived in the quick-pulse, high-octane moments of a fast-moving firefight, when life itself was sliding down the edge of a razor blade. It made him feel alive, and he had come to love it and even crave it. In his career in the Royal Dutch Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had been under fire almost as often as Bob Burke had and was every bit as much of a skilled, professional soldier. Combat! There was nothing like the sound of gunfire first thing in the morning. It was better than that first coffee to focus the mind and get the heart pumping.
As the seconds slowly ticked away, Theo's brain began to function like a ballistic computer. Triangulating the bodies of Lucas Bakker and Joost DeVries at the moment the bullets struck them, he saw how their bodies moved. He saw the directions of the blood splatters and heard the trailing, deep-throated Blam! Blam! of the gunshots as they rolled across the roof. Snipers! There were two of them using long rifles, located to his left. From the distinctive sound, he knew it had to be .50-caliber Barretts, the favorite of the Americans, and the bullets had arrived with deadly accuracy.
Two of his three remaining men, Lucas Bakker and Joost DeVries, were down. That only left his top NCO, Eric Smit, who was now lying on the deck behind one of the pump housings a few feet away; the unarmed turncoat American, Benson, who was hiding behind the girl; and Donatello Carbonari, whimpering and cowering behind his briefcase, to take on an unknown number of Deltas. They were out there in the dark waiting for clear shots to kill the rest of them.
Theo still had his arm around Linda Burke’s neck. He knew she and the girl were the only two things keeping him alive. Instinctively, he pulled her closer and turned her in the direction of the shooters, moving back and forth and up and down every few seconds to throw off their aim. Still, all he could see out there was the dark night, the colorful lights of the city below, and the equally tall rooftops of Tuscany Towers and Siesta Cove beyond. That was it, he suddenly realized. The shooters were on the roof of Tuscany Towers! He could only curse his own stupidity. Burke was one clever, patient bastard. He must have placed two long rifles on the other hotel roof earlier in the evening, and they had ample time to measure, triangulate, and zero in on every square inch of the Bimini Bay’s penthouse roof at their leisure. They had been lying there in the dark, waiting for him and his men to stop arguing and come strolling out toward the helicopter without a care in the world. Then they took their shots.
From the amazing accuracy, he knew it might be Burke, or perhaps Randall out there, not that it mattered. The rest of Burke’s men came with excellent reputations as well, and men like that rarely missed. Like lambs to the slaughter, Theo had led his men right into their crosshairs. What a colossal blunder, he cursed himself.
“It’s Burke!” Benson turned and told Van Gries as the two men huddled behind the women. “He must’ve put two shooters on the oth
er hotel roof.”
“Don’t you think I know that, you idiot!”
Smarting from Theo's rebuke, Benson looked around and saw they were standing in the center of the roof and would already be dead without the women to hide behind. Before the first shot, he already had his arm around her waist and was holding her close. That may have caused them to look elsewhere for their first targets. When Bakker and DeVries went down, he immediately grabbed a handful of Patsy’s hair and stood her up in front of him. She would keep him safe for the moment, but that was about all. Theo had taken his Beretta away, but Benson was not completely unarmed. He slipped his hand into his rear pocket and pulled out the six-inch stiletto knife he always kept hidden there. He opened the blade, pressed it against Patsy’s throat and whispered to her, “Don’t move a muscle. Do you hear me?”
To his left, he saw Carbonari hiding behind his briefcase. “Donatello,” Benson shouted at him. “The helicopter. Get in and get it started. We’ve got to get out of here!”
The big Don looked over and stared back at him with vacant eyes. Benson couldn’t tell if Carbonari understood anything he was saying, but he tried again. “The helicopter, start the helicopter!” Benson screamed at him again, but the man just sat there wide-eyed and unmoving. He appeared to be in shock, not that it mattered any longer.
Burke had been two steps ahead of them all night; and as if to prove the point, Benson heard three more carefully measured .50-caliber rounds. He ducked again, but it wasn’t necessary. The bullets weren’t aimed at him, they struck the helicopter’s engine and turned it into so much scrap metal. As oil and hydraulic fluid poured out on the helipad, it was clear that Carbonari’s big toy wasn’t going anywhere now. That must have gotten the Don’s attention too. Instead of inching toward the cockpit, he suddenly turned and scrambled away on his hands and knees, dragging his briefcase behind him, until he got behind the big bamboo-sided Tiki bar near the pool.
Like Theo Van Gries, Benson remained where he was, hiding behind the girl. “We can’t stay here,” he called to the Dutchman. “They’re going to pick us off one by one.”
“Have you reached any other brilliant tactical conclusions?” Theo called back.
“The penthouse — we’ve got to get back inside, it’s our only chance,” Benson answered as he tightened his grip on Patsy’s hair. “Back up, one step at a time,” he ordered as he began pulling her toward the penthouse doors, exposing as little of himself as possible.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Dutch Marine sergeant Eric Smit lay curled up in the deep shadow behind the pool pump. With a half-dozen bright floodlights on the penthouse and around the pool, the rooftop was like a shooting gallery, while their enemy remained in the dark waiting patiently for their next shot. “A hell of a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, eh, Luitnant?” he called out to Theo Van Gries.
“Agreed, Sergeant. Who forgot to turn off the lights?”
Who indeed, Smit wondered. He was the senior sergeant, a tactical expert in his own right, and was supposed to think of things like that. In the end, he had failed. Well, he thought, this was probably as good a day to die as any other. As the sound of gunfire and oil and hydraulic fluid dripping beneath the helicopter faded away, the rooftop grew deathly quiet again. Smit turned his head and looked back longingly through the penthouse doors to the elevator lobby beyond. He knew that was their only way out now, until he saw that bastard Burke and another man advancing slowly across the great room floor toward him, blocking their way.
Smit swung his Glock 17 around and was about to fire at Burke when he heard an ominous sound in the dark sky above him and paused. It was a helicopter, circling above the big hotel like a vulture. From his years in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was familiar with dozens of makes and models from as many countries, but the rhythmic “Thump, Thump, Thump” of this one was different. The sound was in the lower registers, the beat of the rotar blades slower, and very quiet. While he had never seen one, he knew the Americans were developing stealth helicopters down at Fort Bragg for commando missions. That meant Burke had help, big help, and it offended Smit’s sense of fairness. War was supposed to be between men, but what chance did they now stand?
He raised his pistol and tried to focus again on Burke when the black helicopter suddenly swooped down out of nowhere and roared across the roof, only a few feet above him, pounding the Sergeant with its down draft and deafening noise. He pulled the trigger but he knew he had been distracted and the helicopter had spoiled his shot. He looked up and cursed the phantom machine as he swung the Glock away from Burke and began firing at the black monster, over and over again, until his magazine clicked empty.
As Bob advanced slowly through the penthouse toward the doors to the outside deck, he never saw Eric Smit curled up in the shadows directly in front of him. With the bright lights all around, the small shadow behind the pump housing was like a black hole, rendering the Dutchman almost invisible until he raised his arm. Burke knew Smit had him cold. His Glock 17 was pointed straight at him and the Dutchman couldn’t miss at this distance, until the black helicopter roared across the roof and threw off Smit’s aim. Instinctively, Burke dived behind the couch. Had Smit remained focused, Burke knew, he would be dead. He looked back up and saw the Dutchman standing, aiming at the helicopter and firing round after round at it as it disappeared into the darkness. With no further thought, Bob pointed his Beretta at him, pulled the trigger, and put the Dutch sergeant down.
Twenty feet away from Smit, Donatello Carbonari was also hiding in the shadows, but he was behind the Tiki pool bar. With his options running out, he drew his legs underneath him as if he were in the starting blocks of the 100-yard dash, trying to summon sufficient courage to bolt across the open deck to the safety of the penthouse.
“Ready… set…” He rocked back and forward, filling his lungs with a last, desperate, deep breath of air. He was only a split second away from a sprinter’s start when the helicopter flew directly overhead and sucked the last ounce of courage out of him. Broken, he slumped even further back into the shadows. Unfortunately, Donatello found no sanctuary back there, either. The man with the rifle knew exactly where he and all the others were. As he cowered even further back, the bastard fired another round, this time into the bar itself. The large slug barely slowed as it smashed through the decorative bamboo facing. It narrowly missed Carbonari, but smashed into the ample supply of liquor and wine he kept on the inside shelves, shattering a half-dozen bottles and giving him a quick shower of whiskey, bamboo splinters, wine, and broken glass. With his face stinging from the whiskey and a dozen small cuts, Carbonari screamed and turned away, whimpering, not knowing whether to throw up, stand up and run, or collapse on the deck, emotionally exhausted.
“Martijn!” he screamed in desperation. “You bastard, you got me into this. You got me into this.” If that damned Dutchman hadn’t tried to squeeze every last dime out of that American Army Sergeant Pastorini, Carbonari would never be in this mess to begin with. That vengeful bastard Burke would never have come here, Martijn would never have called his brother, and the Don of Atlantic City would still be sitting atop his little world, enjoying the most delicious food, the most delicious wine, and the most delicious young men. He looked down at himself, covered with one of his best vintages and his own blood, remembering that one of his favorite young men was lying dead on his bedroom floor at that very moment, and went into a rage.
“Martijn, I’m going to kill you!” he screamed again as he felt himself sliding down the slippery slope into the flames of his own private hell.
“Ace, Ghost. What can you see? You got a shot?
“Negatory, Ghost. Too risky. I can get the crosshairs on bits and pieces of Van Gries and Benson, but that’s about all. Koz, you got a shot?”
“Same-o, same-o here. Too risky, but don’t worry. He ain’t going nowhere.”
“Koz, Ghost. You want to explain that to Linda?”
“Point taken.”
“Gho
st, Ace. If it was your head he was holding the gun against, I’d take the shot, but we like her better. Let’s face it, it’s a standoff. He can’t move and we can’t shoot.”
Theo Van Gries continued shifting slightly to his left and to his right behind the woman so the riflemen had no clear shot at him. In the past three minutes, his little adventure here in New Jersey had quickly gone from bad to worse. Joost DeVries, Lucas Bakker, and now Eric Smit, his three best men, were all down, not to mention the two he had dropped inside. He was now alone, and it was time to withdraw on whatever terms he could negotiate from a far superior enemy.
Theo was a realist, and he knew he had been badly outplayed by a master. In the process, he committed the two most unforgivable cardinal sins an infantryman could commit. First, he allowed his own ego to seriously underestimate his enemy. And secondly, he painted himself into a corner up here on the roof. They were in an exposed position, six stories up, alone, and with an unseen and highly skilled enemy in front of him and behind him with superior weapons. His only allies now were a traitor, a coward, and his own wits. Marvelous!
As he thought about it, he could only laugh at himself. If there was a better definition of a hopeless military position, he couldn’t think of one. His instructors at the Royal Dutch Naval Academy in Den Helder would cut off his buttons and break his sword over their knees if they could see him now. He couldn’t run and he couldn’t fight, so he was down to his last card: the one he was holding in his left hand. He tightened his grip around Linda Burke’s throat and waited for Burke to come to him, as he knew he must.
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