The walls ran away from him at angles, with the other end of the welcome area larger than the width of the entrance where they now stood. The front of the lobby was a wall of glass—like everything else up here—and beyond were the darkened shapes of additional buildings, which he knew had once contained restaurants, a spa, and even a ballroom. Shadows cloaked everything in varying shades of gray and black. An ambush in every dark corner. Wonderful.
Two dark shapes appeared from a doorway at the far end. Logan couldn’t discern anything about the two new targets, which didn’t matter in the great scheme of things, as subdued flashes and bangs of suppressed weapons moved across the lobby.
“Two targets, twelve o’clock,” Logan said and dove to the right, eager to be out of the line of fire. “Stay on the stairs until I tell you. I’ve got this,” he ordered the rest of his team, who crouched down in defilade on the stairs in relative safety.
Okay, assholes, this is getting tiresome. Logan scampered across the floor, halting behind a large couch in the middle of the lobby. The incoming fire ceased. He moved to the far right end of the sofa and peeked around the corner, confident that the two shooters didn’t have a bead on him. Unless they have night vision, in which case your next thought will be nothing.
No shots came, as Logan squinted into the darkness, eager for a glimpse of shifting shadows. He thought he heard movement, the shuffling of feet, but the acoustics were deceptive. Need a diversion to pinpoint their locations.
He quickly glanced around his immediate surroundings and stopped on the long table between the couch and four leather high-back chairs in front of him. You’ve got to be kidding me.
On top of the table was an object immediately recognizable to most of the Western world. Like a relic of the seventies, a wooden bowl containing plastic fruit sat on the table. The presence of the bowl sent goose bumps dancing across the back of his neck as he realized how truly abandoned the hotel was, lost in a bygone era, cursed to stand above the city as a beacon from another time. Logan West didn’t believe in ghosts, but if there were ever a place that might actually be haunted, he believed it could be this one.
Logan shuffled around the couch, grabbed the entire bowl, and like an amateur shot-putter, hurled the bowl and its contents to his left. As the assorted fruit salad sailed through the darkened lobby, Logan raised the MP5, transitioned into a kneeling position, and waited.
The pieces of fruit and the wooden bowl clattered loudly to the floor, disrupting the eerie quiet of the lobby.
More suppressed flashes and bangs appeared at the far end of the lobby, but the two shooters had separated, creating a space of at least forty feet between them. Smart bastards, Logan thought, as he took aim at the shape on the left and fired several times.
The only feedback he received that he’d struck his target was the sudden silence as the shooter stopped firing, the sound of a weapon falling to the tiled floor, and what he thought might be a grunt of pain.
Logan moved the scope to the right, but the second shooter had also ceased firing. He looked away from the scope and spotted the dark outline of a figure running toward a set of glass doors at the front entrance. The shooter opened fire, but not at Logan; instead, he fired several rounds that shattered the glass doors.
Logan fired hastily, but the figure dashed through the ruined doors, even as glass crumpled around him.
Logan turned around and screamed toward the stairs. “All clear! One escaped through the front entrance. I’m going after him: no one gets away. Santiago, on my six. Cole, you and Hector get to the penthouse and see if there’s anything left to salvage. Rally back here, if we can. Go!”
He didn’t wait for a response and started for the door, confident that Santiago would soon be behind him. Within seconds, he stepped outside and into the pale moonlight, the wind and clouds whipping around the mountain’s ridgeline.
The fleeing figure was gone—fucker’s fast—but another building stood across the courtyard, and a door stood open, swinging slowly. Bingo.
Glass crunched under his boots as he pursued his prey. Like I said, no one gets away.
* * *
Cole and Hector ran through the lobby, the knowledge that evidence was burning several stories above them spurring them forward. As they reached the far side, there was a low moan from the downed shooter lying on his side.
Before Cole could react, Hector stopped, raised his suppressed weapon, and fired a single shot into the man’s head. The groan stopped.
Hector looked at Cole through the gloom. “No second chances for these men. If he somehow survived and ambushed us on the way out, your friends would never forgive me.”
Cole briefly contemplated the response. As someone who had executed a traitor under the cover of darkness on the back of a boat less than three weeks earlier and then dumped the body into the crab-infested depths of the Chesapeake Bay—albeit at the direct orders of the president—he understood the logic of the split-second judgment Hector had made. It was always the same—them or us. “Fair enough. We’re on the right side of this war,” Cole said, and breached the darkness beyond.
He paused, pushed a button, and the SureFire LED flashlight mounted under the barrel illuminated the space. The two men found themselves inside a small foyer. A small hallway lay in front of them, but to their immediate left stood another entrance.
Cole lit up the space. Thank God. Stairs ascended away from the doorway. “Hope your cardio is good, Hector. We’ve got fourteen floors to conquer as quickly as possible. Don’t be offended if I run ahead. Time isn’t our friend right now. See you up there,” Cole said, and sprinted up the steps two at a time.
* * *
Logan found himself in another building with a concave ceiling and another wall of partitioned glass on one side of the space. Well, I found the restaurant, he thought wryly. Tables and chairs were arranged neatly, as if patiently waiting for patrons that would never arrive.
He moved quickly through the space, even as he heard Santiago outside trying to catch up with him. Sorry, friend. Need to catch this rabbit. Another connecting walkway exited the restaurant in the far wall, and Logan ran into it, reckless in his determination to catch his quarry.
Five long strides later, he found himself in another building—this place is a rattrap—but before he could assess his surroundings, a mechanical whirring roared to life and reverberated throughout the area. Of all the things they could’ve updated, they had to do the cable car first. Awesome.
Built into the enormous far-side, two-story wall was a gigantic opening that led directly outside. Mountain air rushed into the arrival and departure area, cooling the sweat that had beaded on the back of his neck. One long cable ran in the left side of the mouth of the space, connected to an enormous concrete pillar with a rotary top, around which the metal cable wrapped before exiting through the right half of the opening.
A white, modern cable car moved around the pillar toward the opening, black gears on top of the pillar turning counterclockwise, propelling the car toward the dark night beyond the ledge of the wall.
Logan West, aggressive to the point of reckless abandon, launched into a sprint, only one thought in his mind—stop the shooter from fleeing.
The MP5 dangled across his chest as he accelerated, smacking his black Kevlar vest with each stride. He breathed hard as he closed in on the cable car, which had nearly escaped into the open air, lifting up to begin its voyage to the main station at the other end of the park.
This is not smart, Logan. But he didn’t care. The purposefulness and determination that separated him from all others was in control of his actions. He locked on to his target and ran harder.
The cable car lifted out of the station, escaping its grasp, as Logan West reached the edge of the platform. Please, God. Don’t let me be short, he thought as he leapt into the cold unknown.
For the briefest of moments, he thought he’d misjudged, and he wondered how far he would fall, either to the ground or to his dea
th off the side of the mountain. But then his hands slammed onto the metal safety bar near the bottom of the white car. As he closed his fingers around the metal, he was yanked upward, feet dangling over the darkened walkway fifty feet below.
Great. Now what, genius? As he pondered his next move, a structure loomed in the distance, growing closer with each passing second as the cable car approached. The support tower was old, with a crossbeam at the top where the cable passed through and then another crossbeam farther below, creating a space through which the cable car could pass.
You’ve got to be kidding me, he thought, as real concern washed over him in the face of his new dilemma—find a way inside the cable car or be knocked off as it traversed the support tower. This just gets better and better.
CHAPTER 15
Cole and Hector reached the top of the stairwell after what felt like an endless climb but in reality only lasted a little more than a minute. They found themselves on a landing on the outer wall of the hotel, where a hallway to their left led toward the center of the circular floor.
Cole forcibly slowed his breathing, preparing for what came next. Based on what he’d seen, the layout reminded him of a big donut, with the doors to the suites on the inner ring. In the short hallway, a glow danced across the walls from a source unseen. Tendrils of dark smoke wafted toward them. Great. It’s my own personal towering inferno.
“Let’s go, and let’s hope we don’t burn to death,” Cole said. “Believe me, there are much better ways to go.” Cole Matthews had seen enough videos of hostages being tortured and burned alive for one lifetime. It wasn’t like the movies, where a person caught fire, fell over, and died. In reality, it was a slow, excruciating, and suffocating death that lasted minutes, not seconds.
The two men started down the hallway, MP5s raised and bobbing slightly, ready to engage. The sound of fluttering flames reached their ears, growing in intensity and reminding Cole of the conflagration that had violently erupted inside Task Force Ares headquarters in Quantico less than three weeks ago. This place is a lost cause. It just might go up in flames.
They were pushing farther down the hallway when Cole heard a noise from his left and felt the rush of cold night air swirling around him. He turned his head and saw a small closet with a ladder in the middle that led upward.
Cole raised his hand in a fist, the universal hand signal—at least for those with training or military service or anyone who had seen a military movie from the eighties—to stop. He stepped into the room and looked up. Several thumps and a loud metallic clanging resounded through the access hatch in the ceiling. He turned back to Hector, and in a low voice he was certain no one other than the two of them could hear, said, “I’m going up. Someone’s up there. You see if you can save anything from the fire. If you can put it out, great. If not, come back and get me, and we’ll get the hell out of this death trap.”
“Understood,” Hector said, and exited the closet without another word.
Cole slung his MP5 across his back, pulled the suppressed Glock 17 from his web belt, and began to climb.
He reached the access panel, prayed there was no one waiting on the other side with a gun pointed at his head, and climbed through to the roof of the Humboldt Hotel.
No shots came his way as he assessed his surroundings. He was on the main level of the roof, but in front of him, two more levels like an oddly shaped wedding cake rose into the darkness. The outline of a large radio wave tower several decades old hung over him, creating a slight but growing sensation of vertigo, as if the tower might fall on him if he kept looking.
More noise came from above, and he crossed the outer ring of the roof, reached another ladder built into the side of the base layer of the roof structure, and ascended. As his head crested above the next surface, he saw the source of the commotion.
Directly in front of him, less than fifteen feet away, a figure stood over several pieces of communications equipment. The man swung away purposefully with an axe. Take him quietly and disarm him.
Cole Matthews, the former head of the CIA’s Special Activities Division and onetime member of the elite Unit that resided on secured grounds at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, stalked quietly toward the man.
It wasn’t anything Cole did wrong. It was just luck, bad luck in his case.
When he was within two strides of the axe-wielding man, the shadow stood up and turned. The man’s eyes widened in surprise, and he reacted, forcing Cole to launch a full-fledged assault.
As Cole closed the final few feet between them, the axe arced up and toward him, reached its apogee, and came plummeting back down. He quickly sidestepped the attack, and the axe clanged loudly off the hard surface of the roof. Cole was suddenly reminded of the fight he’d had in Sudan where he’d faced off against two homicidal prisoners with a bat and machete in an Everlast boxing ring in a black-site prison in what had definitely not been a sanctioned bout. This should be easier and with less buckets of bloodshed.
Still holding the suppressed Glock, Cole stepped toward the man and struck him in the temple with the butt of the weapon. The blow sent the man stumbling backward, even as he regained control of the axe. Cole moved forward and grasped the axe with his left hand and yanked with all his strength.
Unfortunately, his opponent executed the one countermove Cole hadn’t anticipated: he let go of the axe and shot both hands up to the Glock, which Cole had pulled back to use to strike him again.
With no counterweight to anchor him, his own strength pulled him off balance, and Cole fell to the left, the axe in his left hand. The worst part was that as he fell, he lost his grip on the Glock, which remained with his attacker.
Smart motherfucker, Cole thought. In one flawlessly executed expert move, his opponent had managed to disarm him and switch weapons.
Cole landed on his hands and knees and sprawled forward, acutely aware that he likely had less than two seconds before the shooter properly gripped the pistol, aimed, and fired. Think fast or die.
And then the rumbling began, and the Humboldt Hotel, a decaying symbol of decadence whose mere existence taunted the oppressed and impoverished citizens of Caracas below with its watchful gaze, began to shake.
* * *
Logan’s mind raced as he searched through a catalog of options. Break the glass. Climb in. Get shot. No good. Hang on the underside of the car like Indiana Jones and hope for the best. No way.
The clouds raced by overhead and taunted him with weightless speed. You stay here, you’re definitely dead. He looked down past his dangling feet and wondered if there was someplace soft he could drop that wouldn’t instantly kill him. He didn’t see anything below him in the darkness that might break his fall, only his neck or back. He lifted his right leg and propped the heel of his foot on the far end of the safety bar, his left leg still dangling below him, hoping that when the impact came, he might only lose a leg, not his life. This was a bad decision, Logan, and Sarah is truly going to be pissed if you die on this mountain.
But then the mountain began to tremble. Logan recognized the familiar sound, although he was too disoriented to locate the source. He turned his head toward the city, as the cable car swayed on its journey.
A black shape suddenly rose up one hundred yards away, blotting out part of his view, and Logan West, hanging precariously from the cable car, one slip from death, smiled in the darkness.
* * *
Grigori’s only thought was escape. Once Oleg had been shot in the lobby, his options had dwindled to two—stand and fight or escape to warn the general that they’d been compromised. While his Spetsnaz honor demanded that he stay, he knew that the larger mission was more important, and that required that he survive. So he did the only thing he could do—he ran, praying to the gods of war for his escape, thankful that his team had installed inside the cable car a remote control for the computer system that connected Ávila Station to the hotel. The Venezuelan government had ensured that the system was operational less than two weeks ago, a
nd the remote was a simple system that transmitted operational commands to both ends.
When the cable car had left the hotel’s station, Grigori had felt the car rock when his pursuer had leapt onto the safety bar. He wasn’t sure if the man was still under the carriage, but his MP7A1 was trained on the rear of the car after he’d moved to the opposite row of red plastic seats, swathed in darkness. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the tower, and waited. Whoever he is, he won’t be there much longer, Grigori thought. Once he’s off, get to Ávila Station, hop on the ATV, and head into the city under cover of darkness.
He’d been through much worse than this, even if the men he commanded were now all dead or dying. I’ll make it. I always do, he thought, remembering the lessons from Chechnya. But then the interior of the cable car was suddenly awash in a bright, garish light, and his thought process changed dramatically.
* * *
As Cole dove to the side, he fully expected to receive several rounds in the back from his own weapon. He was pleasantly surprised when he reached cover behind a large HVAC exhaust vent unscathed and still alive.
The rumbling intensified, and Cole glanced around the corner of the vent. The man was no longer there, but instead was running toward another ladder that ascended to the highest level of the rooftop, never turning around once to see if Cole was pursuing.
Where the hell is he going? Cole realized it didn’t matter. All that did was that he pursued him until he either caught him or died trying. Just another fun-filled day on Task Force Ares, he thought, and galloped across the rooftop with the axe held in front of him.
Rules of War Page 9
