Shawn stood and squared off at the man. “My dad would never—”
“Shut your piehole, kid,” the man said. “If your daddy ain’t gone over the wall, then he’s got his ass shot off. We’re stuck with nothin’ to protect us but the hot tamale with a shotgun. End of stor—”
Camille flew at the man like a woman on fire, spitting and clawing at his face. The otherworldly wail of a woman who’d lost her child made the hair on Garcia’s neck stand up.
The idiot backpedaled, barking at Camille to leave him alone, and doubled his fist to hit her. Before he could swing, Mr. Larue smacked him in the side of the head with a piece of broken concrete, knocking him to his knees.
“I’m scared,” Larue said, straightening his pirate hat, “but not scared enough to listen to that.”
Camille stood over the man, one bare leg cocked back as if ready to fly at him again. Her dark hair was mussed, her chest heaving. The right strap of her swimsuit hung off a shoulder. Ronnie didn’t know if she’d ever seen such a burning intensity from another human being.
Blue Jays looked up at Ronnie with squinting eyes, mouth opening and closing — teetering on the verge of a scream. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his head in front of his ear. “You… you’re supposed to be some kind of law?” His voice rose in tremulous anger and indignation until it became a ragged scream. “What are you gonna do about this? Huh? Are you just gonna stand there and—”
Ronnie answered his question with a quick thump to the face with the butt of her shotgun, knocking him out cold. “Hot tamale, eh?” Ronnie said, fire flashing in the depths of her eyes. “No, postalita, I am not going to stand around and let you give us all away.” She gave Larue a wink in the darkness. “A necessary evil. He was making far too much noise.”
“I hate to say it,” Larue said, eyeing Ronnie and keeping his voice to a judicious whisper. “But it is true that your friends aren’t back yet. It’s been over a half an hour. We may need to try another option.”
Ronnie took a deep breath. Maybe the man was right. Jericho and Jacques had been gone too long.
The scrape of a boot on gravel outside the ship caused Ronnie to wheel back to the porthole. She held up her left hand to silence everyone in the crowded ship, and pointed the shotgun out the porthole, toward a man wearing a park uniform approaching from the shadows.
Fadila Baghdadi watched as a flower of orange flame erupted like cannon fire from the side of the wooden ship. A hundred feet away in the trees, she clutched her pistol and watched as Abu Nasser pitched forward into the darkness, cut down by the sudden blast. She’d witnessed many deaths that night, and expected to witness many more. Her own death was inevitable, part of the plan — but she still found it painful to see her friends die.
This was not part of the plan at all. Abu Nasser was not supposed to go yet. They would all go together when the cameras arrived and police stormed the park in a final, glorious battle. But somehow, someone inside the ship had gotten their hands on a gun.
Fadila kept to the shadows, working her way toward the dark hulk of the pirate ship, stopping alongside a wooden shack that smelled of sweets, less than twenty yards away. There were definitely people inside, several of them from the sounds of murmuring — hiding there, waiting to cut down her friends as they walked past. The thought of it set a hot ball of rage alight in her belly.
She wondered if the people inside the ship were the ones responsible for the incessant music that had cut off their communications and rendered the radios useless. Hers was off, but she abandoned it on the sidewalk anyway, realizing it would give her away.
Lifting the black polo, she shoved the pistol down the waistband of her khaki shorts in front of her hip bone. She took a deep breath to steel her resolve, then pulled a green egg-shaped object from her front pocket and held it in her open palm, staring at the oblong outline of a RGD-5 hand grenade. There were only two. Tariq had one and she had the other. They’d planned to use them together, taking many infidels with them at the time of their own deaths. Not as powerful as the American grenades, the Russian weapon was far cheaper, and much easier to obtain. It would most certainly kill anyone hiding in the stupid ship.
She stuffed the grenade back in her shorts, leaving it high in her pocket so she could reach it easily. The fuse would burn for less than four seconds, so Fadila knew she would die as well — but that was of no consequence.
She mussed her hair to look as if she was also being hunted, then affected the terrified expression she’d seen on the faces of the people she’d killed that night. Americans were quick to trust a woman in jeopardy. Whoever was in the ship, police or otherwise, would believe her long enough to give her the opportunity to kill them all.
Chapter 15
Quinn gave the base of the AK-47’s magazine an upward smack with the flat of his hand, and then racked the bolt and pulled the trigger. Years of training had embedded the tap, rack, bang drill in his brain for a failure-to-fire malfunction—
Tap, rack… but no bang. Quinn chided himself for not checking the chamber when he’d picked up the weapon, realizing Saqr must have run it dry.
Abu Kaliq turned out to be much more athletic than the others in his group and jumped sideways at the first sight of Quinn, as if to try and dodge his fire. The jihadi smiled when the gun malfunctioned, and then dove for his own rifle that leaned against the wall. Quinn threw the useless AK like a spear, crashing in behind it with the point of his shoulder.
Quinn felt the other man’s rib cage bend inward as they came together. It would have been a devastating blow, but the knife wound in Quinn’s thigh throbbed as if it had been stuffed with hot coals and robbed him of a considerable amount of power as he sprang forward. Still, it knocked the wind out of Kaliq long enough for Quinn to get him rolled back on his heels — for the moment.
Quinn saw the black plastic box that had to be the cell phone jammer and tried to work his way to it, but Kaliq circled, putting himself in front of the device. Tariq was nowhere to be seen, but Quinn didn’t have time to worry about anyone who wasn’t trying to kill him right then and there.
Battle, especially in close quarters, was frenetic and unpredictable — but for a victory, it had to be fought with an end goal in mind. Inflicting pain might slow down the opponent or redirect his energy, creating a different avenue for attack. But pain didn’t stop a determined fighter. In the end, blood or oxygen to the brain had to be interrupted, from a correctly applied choke, a bullet, a blade — or the sudden fatal meeting with the concrete after a fall from twenty-one stories.
Quinn pressed forward, shoving Kaliq backward toward the rail, driven by momentum and rage. But the young jihadi had other plans, and stepped off-line to slow Quinn’s attack. At the same time, he reached over Quinn’s shoulder to yank the T-shirt up his back toward his neck, gripping all the gathered fabric from neck to hem in a stout fist. Crossing his forearms, Kaliq snaked in to grab a second handful of shirt and collar on the other side of Quinn’s neck — and then squeezed.
His turn to push, the heavier man drove Quinn backward as he pulled his forearms together, bashing Quinn into the clear Plexiglas tube that covered Dead Drop’s entry. The flimsy tube was meant for safety, not security, and it separated from the wall under the force of Quinn’s body. Tipping sideways like a tree, it rolled across the concrete to expose the trapdoor.
The collar of Quinn’s own shirt pressed against the arteries at the side of his neck, cutting off the blood to his brain. With only seconds until he passed out, Quinn shot his left arm between Kaliq’s elbows, putting the flat of his own hand to the side of his head, wedging open the jihadi’s grip with his arm and shoulder — a simple but effective choke escape called “answering the phone.”