Before he could comply, the man who’d been threatening her life moments ago wet himself.
“It’s a little tougher facing armed men in combat than blowing up innocents, eh?” Juan mocked. When the gag came off, he asked the Secretary, “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I think so. Who are you?”
“Let’s just say I’m the spirit of Lieutenant Henry Lafayette and leave it at that.” Juan pulled the hand radio from his pant pocket. “Max, do you copy?”
“About damned time you called in,” Max said so gruffly that Cabrillo knew he was beside himself with concern.
“I’ve got her and we’re on our way out.”
“Make it quick. The Sidra’s accelerating, and we’ve only got about two minutes for your extraction plan to work.”
Fiona got to her feet, massaging her wrists where the cuffs had dug into her skin. She kept a wary distance from the swordsman but did the most astonishing thing Juan could imagine. She said, “I forgive you, and someday I pray you will come to see me not as your enemy but as your friend.” She turned to Juan. “Do not kill this man.”
Cabrillo was incredulous. “With all due respect, are you nuts?”
Without a backward glance, she strode from the room. Juan made to follow, turned back on the swordsman, and fired a single shot. He grabbed the script from the deck where it had fallen and noted the frequency the television camera was going to broadcast on, the final piece of his plan. When he caught up to her, he said, “I couldn’t have him follow us, so I put one through his knee.”
He took her hand, and together they raced for the main deck. The smoke, he noticed, was much thinner. A pair of sailors was on the top landing of the stairs. They didn’t react until they recognized the Japanese-American Secretary of State. As if choreographed, they jumped at her simultaneously. Juan shot one as he flew, and the bullet’s impact was enough to alter his trajectory. The second slammed into Juan’s chest with enough force to blow the air from his lungs. Choking to refill them, Juan was defenseless for several moments, an opening the sailor took to throw a quick series of punches.
Fiona tried to wrestle him off her rescuer, and had she not been through the ordeal of the past few days she would have succeeded, but she was exhausted beyond her body’s limit. The sailor shoved her aside contemptuously and threw a kick that caught Cabrillo on the chin.
From outside the confines of the ship came a roar that rattled the stairwell.
A missile had streaked off a hidden launch tube buried on the Oregon’s deck. It lifted into the growing darkness on a fiery column that seemed to split the sky. The explosive-tipped rocket began to topple almost immediately on its short projected flight.
The sound galvanized the Chairman, and he found a berserker’s fury. The kick had rattled his brain, so he fought on instinct alone. He ducked as the next blow came at him and smashed his elbow down on the sailor’s exposed shin with enough force to snap the bone.
The man screamed when he put weight on it and the shattered ends grated against one another. Juan gained his feet, rammed a knee into the sailor’s groin, and pushed him down the rest of the steps. He grabbed Fiona’s hand, and they rushed for the exit.
The hatch he had used to gain entry into the Sidra’s superstructure was closed, and when he opened it, expecting to see the Oregonhard against the frigate’s side, he saw instead that his ship was a good thirty feet away. In her wake, the rocket’s contrail hung in the air, a twisting snake that corkscrewed into the night.
From the far side of the frigate came an explosion much more powerful than anything felt since the battle had begun. The ship-to-shore rocket had impacted on the inside of the main sluice gates for the Zonzur Bay Tidal Power Station.
EIGHT ASSAULT RIFFLES POURED their deadly fire into the mouth of the side cave. Stone chips and ricochets filled the air like a swarm of angry hornets. All four Americans were bleeding from multiple hits, though no one had as serious an injury as Eric Stone’s shoulder.
There was so much coming in at them that there was no way they could return fire, so they hunkered near the entrance as the terrorists advanced behind a wall of lead.
One gunman suddenly burst into the cave, shouting wildly. He fired from the hip, raking the walls, tearing apart the bed, and blowing books off the shelves. Linda hit him with a three-round burst to the chest before he could aim at any of them, blowing his body back out into the main cavern.
It had been dumb luck that she had killed him before he got any of them, and she knew that wouldn’t happen again. Next time, the entire team would rush them, and it would be over.
Linda checked her ammo. She had no spare magazines in her harness, and the clip jammed into her rifle’s receiver was only half full. Eric was out of rounds and held his weapon like a club, ready to defend himself hand to hand. Mark Murphy couldn’t have very many bullets left either, she knew.
A lifetime of defending her country had come down to this last stand in a dark cave far from home, fighting a bunch of fanatics who wanted nothing more than the right to keep on killing.
The firing outside the cave slackened slightly. They were preparing for the final push.
A grenade flew out of the smoke-filled passage and landed in the alcove loaded with chests. The wood absorbed half of the blast, belching splinters and glittering gold coins while the spray of shrapnel peppered the cave walls. Again, no one had been hit, but the concussion left them reeling. Bits of burning wood had landed on the beds and caught the linens on fire. In seconds, the air was choked with smoke.
Eric screamed something to Linda, but she couldn’t hear him with her ringing ears. They would come now, she was certain. In the wake of the grenade’s detonation, the terrorists had to know they had them. Filthy, aching, emotionally raw, she tightened her finger around the REC7’s trigger.
But nothing happened for long seconds. Of the seven surviving terrorists, only one or two were firing into the cave now. They were waiting us out, Linda thought, knowing the smoke will force us to them, or hoping we die in the fire.
Lying prone to get out of the worst of it, Linda took tiny sips of the fouled air, but each breath seared her lungs. Assad’s men were going to get their wish, she thought grimly. They couldn’t stay here much longer. She looked over at Eric and Mark, her eyes questioning. They seemed to read her mind and both nodded their assent. Linda scrambled to her knees and launched herself onto her feet, her shipmates at her side.
“Let’s go, Sundance,” Mark shouted as they charged into the mouths of the waiting guns.
They sprinted past the burning drapery over the cave’s entrance and made a good five feet and still hadn’t drawn fire. Linda searched for a target in the wavering light of the ship burning in the distance but spotted no one standing to face them. There was a terrorist sprawled on the ground a few paces from her, a neatly drilled hole between his shoulder blades. Then she saw others they had somehow managed to hit. The cavern floor was littered with them. Her headlong rush slackened until she stood stock-still with a total of eight bodies at her feet.
She felt a superstitious tingle run the length of her spine.
One of the men moved weakly, clawing at the sand and gasping for air. Like the first, he’d been hit in the back. Mark kicked the AK out of the man’s reach and rolled him over. Frothy blood from his ruptured lung bubbled from his lips. Linda had never seen Tariq Assad, so she didn’t recognize his distinctive unibrow.
“How?” he gasped.
“Your guess is as good as ours, pal,” Mark told him.
And then over the crackling of the burning Saqrand through the ringing in their ears came a rich melodious baritone singing, “From the hall of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli, / We will fight our country’s battles / In the air, on land and sea.”