He practiced the pivot twice, then decided to go for it. He settled himself with a deep breath. The first shot was taken with care, but the second one was all muscle memory and hope.
When the second bullet was away, he dove again for the ground. It took a few seconds for them to react, but when they did, it was just like the previous fusillade, their bullets tearing up the forest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The carnage at the base of the barracks stairway was unlike anything Len had ever seen. There had to be seven or eight men dead, twice that many wounded, some of them seriously.
Gregory met him in the hallway, on this side of the carnage. His hands and his shirt and the front of his pants were slick and shiny with blood. Dazed and frightened men gathered behind him, all of them armed with rifles and most of them still in underwear from having been rousted from bed.
“Are you hurt?” Len asked.
“No,” he replied. “But so many are. What is happening?”
“We are under attack,” Len explained. “But it is not for the weapons. It is for—”
He saw the shutter flash of light first, followed an instant later by the pulse of air pressure that fractured the stone walls and floor and knocked him to his knees. The sound of the explosion registered more as a vacuum of silence than noise as the pressure wave — alternately reduced and magnified by outside and inside corners — hammered his eardrums.
In that instant, he knew that they’d lost everything. Anyone who was standing in the hallway outside the chapel was dead. That meant Dmitri. Whoever had been standing inside the chapel had been reduced to vapor.
Nothing would be left of the Movement after tonight. There’d be no humiliation of America, no return to Soviet principles based upon his heroic deeds. The hopes and plans of two decades had been destroyed in ten minutes. All that was left for Len was vengeance.
That alone was something to live for.
The terrible irony — so clear to him now — was that the weapons had never been the focus of the invaders. He didn’t know how he was so certain but he knew without doubt that the explosion was merely a diversion to allow the invaders to liberate the prisoners in cell block six, the ones who never should have been brought here in the first place.
The Americans had discovered the whereabouts of the Mishins, and they had mobilized their Navy SEAL teams or their Delta Force. This was an unconscionable violation of his agreement with the White House, yet he’d understood, as he could never make Dmitri understand, that there were some lines in life that should never be crossed.
He could not let the Americans escape the island alive. To stop them, though, he needed to move quickly to stem the panic that the explosion had solidified among his troops.
“Listen to me!” he shouted in Russian. “Stop shouting! Get ahold of yourselves!”
Others in the crowd took up the request for him, and soon silence washed over the men like a wave.
“Our mission is in crisis,” Len said. “We have been crippled by American soldiers who want to humiliate us. We must stop them. If this must be our final battle, let us make it a costly one for the invaders. If we must die, let us die for the dream that is so much larger than any one of us.”
He watched the faces of the men as they processed his words. These men were not weaklings — far from it — but many of them paled at their impending mortality. For a moment, Len feared that he would lose them entirely. Had it not been for the smallest man in the crowd, that might have happened.
Geoffrey stepped forward. At five-five, maybe one hundred twenty pounds, Geoffrey looked more like a boy than a man, but had always held sway over the others. “Let’s go,” he said. His AK looked comically large in his hands, but he handled the weapon as if it weighed nothing. “We’re all with you.”
Somehow, that sealed it. As Len led the procession down the Area Four corridor, he counted at least fifteen people behind him. Whatever the final number was, he hoped he wasn’t hopelessly outnumbered.
Joey screamed. That’s the only way to describe the terrible sound that launched from his throat and his gut. A brilliant white light came first, followed just an instant later by a sharp explosion that seemed to make the stones move — to make the whole building move. And the sound continued to rumble on and on. He’d never heard anything so loud, and his scream escaped before he could stifle it.
Now that it had started, he didn’t know if he could stop it. It was as if his fear had sharp claws and was trying to tear itself out of his body. He felt his dad reach for him, but Joey wanted none of that. He didn’t need any more I’ll make it betters or I won’t let them hurt yous. People were shooting and blowing things up, and there was nothing Dad or anybody but God almighty could do to stop it. Most terrifying of all, God had seemed to be really distracted these past couple of days.
They were going to die here. And Joey would never even know why.
The initial flash turned the night to day. David’s eyes happened to be focused at exactly the right point in space to see one of his hunters as clearly as if it were stop-action photography. The image persisted on his retinas long enough for him to shoot at the lingering outline, but the sound of his shot was completely lost in the roar of the explosion. The fact that he’d been expecting the explosion didn’t take anything away from the gut fear that it invoked.
The enormous boom seemed to split the world, as if it sucked all the air out of the atmosphere, and then reinjected with the gain turned up full. The noise hit with a physical force, like a hammer blow to his chest that knocked him off balance.
The hunters first jumped, then scattered in the seconds that followed. In the space of a blink, they seemed to realize together that the explosion was a distant event, separate and apart from their confrontation with the single person who was tearing them up with gunfire. In the confusion, and blessed with the infusion of new light, David took a bead on one of the attackers — there were still three of them, so clearly one of his bullets had missed — and squeezed off a shot. He watched the target’s head erupt in mist.
Down to two. And they were truly, deeply pissed. They opened fire again, spraying wildly, apparently still with no strong notion of where he was.
Using the noise of the gunfire as cover, David lurched out of his hiding place and dropped to one knee. He chose one of the remaining silhouettes and fired eight or nine bullets in that direction. Someone yelled out in pain, and then someone unleashed what had to be a full magazine of ammunition in his direction. These shots landed much nearer than any of the others. The surviving guy was beginning to adapt.
Now it was down to one on one.
“Holy shit,” Jonathan said. “How much C4 did you use?” They’d just been knocked to the floor by the force of the pressure wave.
“Told you there was a lot of shit in there,” Big Guy said with a grin. “I think we might have forced them back a few notches in their terrorist dreams.”
“Are you okay, Yelena?”
She nodded. Her eyes seemed bigger than her face.
“Yeah, I’m good, too, Boss,” Boxers said.
Jonathan stayed focused on the First Lady. “Ma’am, things are going to move quickly now. You’ve got to keep up.”
He didn’t wait for a response. With his rifle at his shoulder, Jonathan led the team to the end of the hallway, where he encountered a locked heavy wooden door, the hinges for which were on his side. Letting his MP7 fall against its sling, he raised the Mossberg from under his armpit and racked a round into the chamber. “Going hot,” he said. “Yelena, look away.” In her haste to jump onto the boat, she hadn’t donned eye protection.