“How the hell did you get on the roof?” Jonathan yelled in anger. David would never know how close he came to having his head blown off.
“Striker dropped me off. I’ve got rope.” He displayed a hundred-fifty-foot drop bag of climbing rope.
“There’s a tail of rope sticking out of the end of that bag,” Jonathan said. “See it?”
David looked, then nodded. “Got it.”
“Okay, hang onto that tail and drop the bag down here.”
David dropped the bag, and a length of rope unspooled as it crashed to the shattered wooden floor.
“If I remember my sat photo right,” Jonathan said, “there’s a chimney coming through the roof about a hundred feet behind you.”
David craned his neck and then nodded. “Yes.”
“Take the end of that rope — take as much rope as you need — and tie it around the chimney. Then come back and tell me you’ve done that.”
“I don’t know knots.”
“I don’t care. I give not a shit. Any knot will do.”
David disappeared from view, and the rope continued to unspool. If it came to the point where the end of the rope emerged from the bag, Jonathan would grab it and pull. Otherwise, they only needed enough to climb ten feet.
He figured it couldn’t take more than a few minutes.
Becky didn’t realize that Striker was intentionally trying to draw gunfire away from the roof of the prison until five or six bullets pierced the floor of the helicopter within eighteen inches of her foot.
“You need to shoot back,” Striker told her through the intercom. “Otherwise, we’re just a target in a shooting gallery. Make ’em pay for that shit.”
Becky pointed her rifle out the door and pulled the trigger, launching a string of bullets that may or may not have hit anything. Striker said to shoot, and so she shot. That didn’t mean that she had to intentionally kill. Those people down there were every bit as frightened as she was. From their perspective, they were defending themselves from an attack. And from their perspective, she was the attacker.
Who was she to pass judgment on their lives from three hundred feet above their heads?
Her magazine went dry and she dropped it out, replacing it just as she’d been taught. This one, too, would be sprayed into the night. She couldn’t imagine living with the knowledge that she’d taken another person’s life. Think of the children they’d never have. Of the grandchild—
A bullet passed within an inch of her head, shattering the earphone on her left side. It was a bone-jarring noise, loud enough that it might have deafened her. And as luck would have it, she’d seen the muzzle flash of the gun that had sent it her way.
Using all the lessons she’d been taught from Big Guy, she settled her sights on the spot where that shot had come from, and she emptied a thirty-round magazine into that space.
The monster of a man — they called him Big Guy — lifted Joey under the arms and put him onto the slanting bit of roof that he said led to safety. “Just go to the top,” the man said, “then lie flat against the roof until someone tells you that it’s safe to move.”
Big Guy said that as if it were easy as pie. In reality, there was nothing to hang on to. Big Guy lifted him onto this sagging slab of roof, but after that, it was all about not losing your grip as you did a lizard crawl up to the point where the roof flattened out.
Joey forced himself not to think about the cold or about the noise or about the fires that burned all around him. He forced himself not to think about the stink of what he knew had to be dead bodies.
The men who came to save him had apparently killed a lot of people to deliver him from danger. He decided not to think about that, either, but to concentrate on the fact that he was this close to being out of this terrible place.
He belly-crawled up the incline of the collapsed roof until it flattened out. When he got to that point, a guy he hadn’t seen before put a hand on his shoulder.
“Hi,” the guy said. “I’m David. You’re almost home.”
Within a few seconds, Josef’s grandmother was next to him on the roof. She reached out with both arms to embrace him in a hug. “Josef,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. We’ll be safe in a few minutes.”
God, I hope that’s true, Joey thought. Because for right now, everything pretty much sucked.
“You’re next,” Jonathan said to Boxers.
The next step was an engineering challenge. Even though Boxers could easily carry Nicholas on his back to make the climb, there was no guarantee that Nicholas would have the strength to hang on. And the penalty for losing his grip was death.
“You make your way to the top,” Jonathan said, “and I’ll tie the PC into a rescue knot. Once you’re in position, haul him up and send the rope back down for our Russian friend. I’ll bring up the rear.”
Big Guy didn’t respond, but rather eased Nicholas onto the floor and started to climb toward the roof. From a distant part in his brain, Jonathan wondered if the cantilevered roof flap had the strength to hold Boxers, but he realized it didn’t matter. They’d all know at the same time in just a minute or so.
He stooped to go eye to eye with Nicholas. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m hurt,” Nicholas said. “Badly. I think he might have gotten a kidney.”
Jonathan gathered the rope. “Don’t worry too much,” he said. “You’ve got two. That’s a hundred percent overkill.” He’d meant it as a joke, but Nicholas was either not in the mood, or in too much pain. Maybe just plain scared.
The rescue knot is a complex bit of ropesmanship, starting with a bowline on a bite for the legs, and then evolving into an elaborate knot around the chest. It took time, and that was the one commodity of which they were quickly running out. He aborted fancy in favor of simple.
“Listen up, Nicholas,” Jonathan said. “I’m going to slip a rope over your head and under your arms, and then Big Guy is going to lift you to the roof. Do you have the strength to keep your arms crossed under the knot so you don’t slip out?”
“Sounds like I don’t have a choice.”
“Oh, you have a choice,” Jonathan said with a smile. “But the alternatives all suck.” It was nowhere near as secure as the correct knot, but sometimes you just had to take chances. Jonathan tied a simple slipknot into the end of the rope and he slipped it into place around Nicholas’s body. A glance toward the roof delivered a thumbs-up from Boxers, and it was time to go. Within seconds, Nicholas was airborne, his feet dangling as he was hoisted up.
Thirty seconds later, Boxers said, “Heads up,” and the looped end of the rope landed back on the ground next to Jonathan.
Alexei was awake by now, but he wasn’t yet dialed back into reality. His eyes were unfocused, and blood poured at a pretty good clip over his face from a wound somewhere under his hair.
Jonathan slipped the loop over Alexei’s head and shoulders, and then tugged it all the way to the man’s waist to accommodate the hands that were tied behind his back. That done, he cinched the knot, and exchanged another thumbs-up with Big Guy, and watched as Alexei levitated away.
In his ear, he heard Boxer’s voice say, “Striker, Big Guy. We’re ready for dust-off whenever you are.”
And now it was Jonathan’s turn. He didn’t trust his ability to execute the kind of pull-up that would be necessary to follow the path of the others with all his gear in place, so he opted to scale the broken stair-stepped bricks of the broken outer wall. Never a fan of heights, he stayed focused on the view above, and avoided looking at the spot down below where he’d leave a grease spot if he fell.
While he was poised there on the ledge between success and death, his spine launched a chill as he saw the chopper turn on its nose and head back into the maelstrom to do its job. Helicopter pilots continued to be the great unsung heroes of nearly every Special Forces op that Jonathan had ever been on. They rarely took the shot at the HVT — high-value target — and they rarely put their hands on a PC, but without them, thousands of brave operators would have died.