The boy was zipping up his jacket as Freeman continued. “There’ll be two body harnesses. Put one on.”
“Should I start filling the balloon?”
“Just enough to get it off the ground,” said Freeman. “No more till I get back. Fully inflated, the dirigible’s like a house-sized Goodyear blimp.” He smiled. “But no gondola.” He turned to the boy. “Okay, Let’s go help your father.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry about making you cold,” Freeman apologized. “You understand? Sometimes bad people use children. Do you understand me?”
“Oh yes,” said the blue-eyed boy. “That’s why I want to tell you that this man we’re walking toward is the regional Hamas leader Wadi El-Hage and they told me all this bullshit about how Americans were evil and sent me to school over there to learn English.” He paused. “And where I found that American kids were great.”
Freeman was stunned by the boy’s mature self-confidence and sudden switch from the halting vocabulary one would expect of a peasant to the kind of A-plus high school student he himself had been. The general almost stopped walking, he was so surprised, but the boy continued walking and talking. “But these Hamas assholes have kept me like a prisoner and told me that if I ever left them, they’d hunt me down and kill me, no matter where I went. My pants and jacket are padded with explosive — with what Hamas call spun Semtex. You know what that is?”
“Semtex, yes, but not spun.”
“The detonator is a fine wire and a tiny watch battery in the jacket in a seam tucked into the collar label. The theory is that I tear it and you and I go to Paradise. I don’t believe any of it.” The boy paused now and looked knowingly at Freeman. “In the Middle East, girls can marry at twelve. I know about women. There’s Paradise here if you’re alive. Hamas is nuts. If I went with you, General, they’d chase me down, but if you take El-Hage and me prisoner, people’ll think we’re both locked up. You can take me back to America where I’ll be safe. I’m young, and you have the world’s best plastic surgeons in your witness protection programs.”
The boy’s unemotional, businesslike tone was alarming, chilling. The child had a cold, calculating heart beyond his years, the inheritance of the terrorist heartlessness.
“Is he armed?” Freeman asked, ready to bring up his AK-47 from its casual barrel-down position by his right side.
“A pistol in his waistband,” the boy told him. “He’s left-handed.”
El-Hage was still standing by the truck, as if frozen in time. Wait a minute, thought Freeman, slowing. What if the kid was lying — a sucker ploy to get him away from the sniper, Thomas, her shooter’s eye resting in the scope’s reticule. A no-miss shot, with El-Hage in her scope.
El-Hage suddenly ran to the other side of the truck and snatched up an AK-47. Freeman immediately dropped to the ground, firing as he did so underneath the Jinlin. He heard a cry of pain, the Arab’s legs out from under him, and the man fell, his AK-47 clattering on the Jinlin-flattened reeds. The general unleashed another long burst, and the Hamas leader was grossly spastic in his death throes. He tried to say something to the boy, but only bright arterial blood issued from his mouth, and he was dead.
Freeman heard the rifle’s crack, and wheeled. Thomas, still too weak to shout loudly, had fired a warning shot into the air from her sniper rifle, and was now pointing at the T-90 a half a mile away in the minefield, its gun lowering to slightly below the azimuth, which meant it was about to engage a short-range target. “Run!” Freeman told the boy, who needed no encouragement, having sized up the situation as quickly as the general. They heard the boom of the 125 mm cannon and felt a great rush of air.
“Down!” Freeman yelled as the Jinlin somersaulted ten feet into the air and became a ball of tangled metal and flame crashing to the ground.
Melissa now had the scope on Abramov, his head and that of the other two crewmen by the cupola in her crosshairs. The tank was coming straight for her. Below the Russians were winks of orange light, the T-90’s machine guns sweeping the rain-drenched reeds that Freeman and the boy were racing for.
So enraged was Abramov, kneeling on the tank with one hand on the cupola, that, despite the T-90’s superb suspension, his head kept bobbing around in Melissa’s IR scope. The furious terrorist’s instructions to his driver didn’t allow for any zigzag pattern during the T-90’s charge. He wanted to run Freeman down.
Melissa lowered the M40A1 for a seventy-yard chest shot, and fired. Abramov flew off the tank into its wake, the impact of Thomas’s sniper round against Abramov’s Kevlar vest such that while it didn’t penetrate all the way through, it knocked him ass-over-tit, verkh dnom, as the Russians say, his money-filled backpack leaking a trail of assorted currencies as his body, wrapped in gold, rolled in the tank’s wake.
Though badly wounded and bleeding, Abramov rose in feral rage, screaming at the now-stopped tank, from which Nureyev, his driver, and two other terrorists escaped, risking all to get his money for themselves. The general was waving his 9 mm Makarov menacingly at them as Freeman, emerging from the reeds, fired a long burst. Abramov’s body was sent reeling back, his face a bloody pulp.
The four terrorists, would-be millionaires, held up their hands. One, with a green signal flag, frantically called, “Don’t shoot. No shooting!”
“You’ll take the money and leave?” shouted Freeman, his AK-74 aimed at the four Russians.
“Sure,” said one of them. “No problem.”
Without taking his eyes off the four Russian terrorists, Freeman told the boy to climb quickly up on the T-90 and drop his jacket in, the Russians mesmerized by the brightly colored Euros and thousand-dollar U.S. bills still falling out of Abramov’s torn knapsack and being sucked away by the faint but frigid breeze.
“We get the money now?” asked the man who had been waving the maneuver flag.
“Sure,” said Freeman. “It’s yours.”
The boy had taken off his jacket and, without a glance at Freeman, tore the collar label, dropped the jacket into the hole with his right hand, and slammed the cupola lid down with his left.
There was a noticeably soft “whoomp” in the tank as the boy jumped off, slipped on the wet reeds, and banged his head hard against the tank’s track. The Russian terrorists turned as one, and Freeman cut them down with one long burst, his AK-74’s barrel steaming in the cold. “Grab that backpack,” he told the boy, pointing to Abramov. The boy obeyed quickly, picking up the belt of gold bullion as well. “Here,” said Freeman, stuffing the backpack and gold into a plastic garbage bag he’d taken from his DARPA “goodies” waist pouch. “We’ve got to get a move on. Got a plane to catch.” They were running toward the X. “You okay, son?” Freeman saw fresh blood in the boy’s hair.
The boy didn’t answer, but kept running with Freeman and never looked back at the burning tank and river of spilled fuel that by now was incinerating the dead radio operator who’d remained inside. “Boy” seemed to Freeman a misnomer for someone so mature. But then Hamas had had him. They were a tough outfit, and Douglas Freeman knew it would take some deprogramming at home, a place which at the moment Freeman knew in his gut they had only a fifty-fifty chance of reaching, to straighten the kid out.
The STAR, or Surface-to-Air Recovery technique, was known throughout Special Forces and Special Ops command as a last resort. Indeed, it was the riskiest extraction method ever devised by man.
“You afraid of heights?” Freeman asked the boy as they sprinted to where Marine Thomas, now barely visible in the dusk, had begun preparations as per the instructions in the container as the Herk and its two Joint Strike Fighters loitered overhead.