“Fire in the hole,” Big Guy said, and he touched the lighter to the fuse. “Now, let’s get the hell—”
The boy’s scream for help echoed through the prison.
Jonathan and Boxers pivoted in unison, weapons up, and headed for the door.
Nicholas had never seen anyone move as fast as his mother did after Josef screamed. She lowered her head and charged Alexei like a bull, driving both the man and the boy into the stone wall. They hit hard, and in the impact, Alexei lost his grip on Joey, who fell to the floor and scrambled out of the way to join his father.
It was hard to see the details in the dim light, but Yelena seemed to be in a rage that was beyond anger. After the initial impact, she drove her forehead into the bridge of Alexei’s nose. His knees sagged and he dropped his knife. As he slid to the floor, Yelena gripped his hair or maybe his ears and drove the back of his head over and over again into the stone. The vibrations of the impact reverberated through the floor.
She was going to kill him. And Nicholas was fine with that.
With his NVGs down and in place, Jonathan slid the turn into the cell with his weapon up and ready to shoot. It took a few seconds to process what he saw. PCs One and Two were together on the floor near the door, while Yelena struggled with a man in the far corner. Her rifle lay on the floor five feet away as she smashed the guy’s head repeatedly against the wall. Even if Jonathan had had a shot, there’d be no need to take it.
“Yelena!” he yelled. “Stop!”
She was beyond listening to instruction. She’d entered the realm of murderous frenzy.
“Hey!” He yelled it louder this time, but she still didn’t respond. Jonathan crossed the cell in three long strides, and pulled her away from the unconscious man by the collar of her vest.
Yelena whirled on him, spun up to do battle with whomever she saw. She threw a punch, but he blocked it and grabbed her shoulders. “Stop,” he said. “He’s out cold. No need to kill him.”
“Bullshit! He tried to kill me. To kill us.”
Jonathan glanced over to Nicholas and the blood he saw on the floor near him, and put that picture together with the knife that lay on the floor. Well, shit. At least they were still alive.
Big Guy was already stepping over everybody, with a zip tie in his hands for the guy Yelena had been beating up on.
“We’ll take him with us,” Jonathan said. “We’ll squeeze him for intel, and then Wolverine can do with him whatever she wants. For now, plug your ears and—”
The explosion was epic.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Becky was horrified. She was looking right at the prison compound when a chunk of the building erupted in a blast of flame and flying debris.
“Holy shit!” David yelled over the intercom. “Did you see that?”
“Looks like the boys just cut themselves an exit door,” Striker said. As he spoke, the nose of the helicopter dipped, and the engine noise crescendoed. “Yee-hah.”
He said that last part—“Yee-hah”—in a normal conversational tone, and if she read his body language correctly, he was laughing. Laughing! What was wrong with these people? They pretended that this was somehow fun. It was a sickness. People were dying, and they were laughing about it.
The helicopter dropped quickly, like a roller coaster. As they closed to within a hundred feet of the hole in the stone, and then fifty and then ten feet, Becky saw the details of the wound that had been avulsed from the building. At first, the view was dominated by smoke. Or maybe it was dust. An opaque cloud that rendered details undetectable. As it cleared, she saw that the entire wall was gone, and that the roof had collapsed on an angle.
Tink. Tink-tink.
“We can’t stay here,” Striker said over the intercom. “Rooster, take that bag of rope on the floor there and get out on the roof and help them out.”
“What?” David looked terrified. “You mean outside?”
“Yep. And quickly. Before we get shot down.”
Tink-tink.
“Now! Chickadee and I are going to fly cover for you.”
David looked to Becky for advice. “No,” she said. “It’s crazy.”
He nodded. Then he unclasped his harness, grabbed the bag, and jumped.
The instant David cleared the skid, Striker poured on the power and tore away from the building. “We can’t just leave them!” Becky yelled.
“We’re not leaving anybody. Now do me a favor and shoot back.”
She looked out the door at the ground. It was chaos, a mass of people running and shooting. “I don’t know who to shoot at,” she said.
“It’s easy,” Striker said. “If they’re on the ground and they’re not next to a cop car, shoot them.”
The blast launched the cell door across the hall with such force that the heavy wooden door was reduced to shards and splinters.
“Listen up,” Jonathan said. “This is the last step in the mission. If we screw it up, we’re dead.” He paused for a beat to make sure they were all listening. “Follow me, do precisely what you’re told, and we’ll have you out of here in the next couple of minutes. Give me a thumbs-up if you understand that.”
It was important that hostages were actually dialed into what was going on, and there was no better way than to elicit an affirmative action like a thumbs-up. He got three of them. Perfect.
“Big Guy, leave the rucks,” Jonathan instructed as he shrugged out of his own. There was nothing in them that couldn’t be replaced, and perhaps more important, there was nothing in there that would trace back to them. “How many claymores did you set?”
Boxers held up two fingers.
With Jonathan’s two, that made four, and he’d definitely heard four explosions, so they were good to go. If that were not the case, since the next people to pass in front of the motion triggers would likely be good guys, he’d have had to manually trigger them before they left.
Without waiting for instruction, Boxers lifted Nicholas into a one-shoulder fireman’s carry on one side, and held Josef’s hand with his other as he led the way to the ruined cell. Yelena followed, leaving Jonathan to carry the still-unconscious Alexei.
Shattered stone and wood littered the corridor, making footing treacherous. It didn’t help having to negotiate the route with an unconscious man on your back. Lingering smoke and dust stung his eyes.
Jonathan turned the corner into the blasted cell and saw that the explosion had done its job and then some. The wall was gone, but so was half the floor, creating a chasm that dropped to the level below. The roof had partially collapsed as well, creating a cantilevered section of timber that tilted into the cell and presented a kind of ramp that started six feet off the floor and sloped at a steep angle to the roof. Beyond that, they had a clear view of the night sky, marred as it was by flames and roiling smoke.
He laid Alexei onto the floor.
“Now what do we do?” Yelena asked.
Outside, the shooting continued. Rounds weren’t impacting close to him or his team, so Jonathan ignored them.
“We’ve got to get up there,” Jonathan said.
“On the roof?”
“Then Striker will bring the chopper around and we’ll climb aboard.”
Yelena looked at the distance to the edge of the cantilevered ramp, then shook her head. “I can’t reach that.”
“That’s where having Big Guy along becomes a big advant—”
Movement on the roof caught Jonathan’s attention. It was a face, and Jonathan reacted instantly, pushing Yelena away and stepping in front of her as he shouldered his MP7.
“Jesus, no!” the face yelled. “It’s me. David. Christ, don’t shoot.”