"Team-1 is ready."
"Rifle Two-One is ready and on target," Johnston said. "Rifle Two-Two is ready, but no target at this time," Weber told Clark.
"Three, this is One," the scanner crackled in the command room.
"Yes, One," the man atop the castle replied.
"Anything happening?"
"No, One, the police are staying where they are. And the helicopter is flying around somewhere, but not doing anything."
"The bus should be here in fifteen minutes. Stay alert."
"I will," Three promised.
"Okay," Noonan said. "That's a time-stamp. Mr. One calls Mr. Three about every fifteen minutes. Never more than eighteen, never less than twelve. So-"
"Yeah." Clark nodded. "Move it up?"
"Why not," Stanley said.
"Rainbow, this is Six. Move in and execute. Say again, EXECUTE NOW!"
Aboard the Night Hawk, Sergeant Nance moved left and right, sliding the side doors open. He gave a thumbs up to the shooters that they returned, each man hooking up his zip-line rope to Drings on their belts. All of them turned inward, getting up on the balls of their feet so that their backsides were now dangling outside the helicopter.
"Sergeant Nance, I will flash you when we're in place."
"Roger, sir," the crew chief replied, crouching in the now empty middle of the passenger area, his arms reaching to the men on both sides.
"Andre, go down and look at the courtyard," Rene ordered. His man moved at once, holding his Uzi in both hands.
"Somebody just left the room," Noonan said.
"Rainbow, this is Six, one subject has left the command center."
Eight, Chavez thought. Eight subjects to take down. The other two would go to the long-riflemen.
The last two hundred meters were the hard ones, Malloy thought. His hands tingled on the cyclic control stick, and as many times as he'd done this, this one was not a rehearsal. Okay… He dropped his nose, heading toward the castle, and without the anticollision lights, the aircraft would only be a shadow, slightly darker than the night better yet, the four-bladed rotor made a sound that was nondirectional. Someone could hear it, but locating the source was difficult, and he needed that to last only a few more seconds.
"Rifle Two-One, stand by."
"Rifle Two-One is on target, Six," Johnston reported. His breathing regularized, and his elbows moved slightly, so that only bone, not muscle, was in contact with the mat under him. The mere passage of blood through his arteries could throw his aim off. His crosshairs were locked just forward of the sentry's ear. "On target," he repeated.
"Fire," the earpiece told him.
Say good night, Gracie, a small voice in his mind whispered. His finger pushed back gently on the set trigger, which snapped cleanly, and a gout of white flame exploded from the muzzle of the rifle. The flash obscured the sight picture for a brief moment, then cleared in time for him to seethe bullet impact. There was a slight puff of graylooking vapor from the far side of the head, and the body dropped straight down like a puppet with cut strings. No one inside would hear the shot, not through thick windows and stone walls from over three hundred meters away.
"Rifle Two-One. Target is down. Target is down. Center head," Johnston reported.
"That's a kill," Lieutenant Harrison breathed over the intercom. From the helicopter's perspective, the destruction of the sentry's head looked quite spectacular. It was the first death he'd ever seen, and it struck him as something in a movie, not something real. The target hadn't been a living being to him, and now it would never be.
"Yep," Malloy agreed, easing back on the cyclic. "Sergeant Nonce-now!"
In the back, Nonce pushed outward. The helicopter was still slowing, nose up now, as Malloy performed the rocking-chair maneuver to perfection.
Chavez pushed off with his feet, and went down the zipline. It took less than two seconds of not-quite free-fall before he applied tension to the line to slow his descent, and his black, rubber-soled boots came down lightly on the flat roof. He immediately loosed his rope, and turned to watch his people do the same. Eddie Price ran over to the sentry's body, kicked the head over with his boot, and turned, making a thumbs-up for his boss.
"Six, this is Team-2 Lead. On the roof. The sentry is dead," he said into his microphone. "Proceeding now." With that Chavez turned to his people, waving his arms to the roof's periphery. The Night Hawk was gone into the darkness, having hardly appeared to have stopped at all.
The castle roof was surrounded by the battlements associated with such places, vertical rectangles of stone behind which archers could shelter while loosing their arrows at attackers. Each man had one such shelter assigned, and they counted them off with their fingers, so that every man went to the right one. For this night, the men looped their rappelling ropes around them, then stepped into the gaps. When all of them were set up, they held up their hands. Chavez did the same, then dropped his as he kicked off the roof and slid down the rope to a point a meter to the right of a window, using his feet to stand off the wall. Paddy Connolly came down on the other side, reached to apply his Primacord around the edges, and inserted a radio-detonator on one edge. Then Paddy moved to his left, swinging on the rope as though it were a jungle vine to do the same to one other. Other team members took flashbang grenades and held them in their hands.
"Two-Lead to Six-lights!"
In the command center, the engineer again isolated the power to the castle and shut it off.
Outside the windows, Team-2 saw the windows go dark, and then a second or two later the wall-mounted emergency lights came on, just like miniature auto headlights, not enough to light the room up properly. The TV monitors they were watching went dark as well.
"Merde, " Rene said, sitting and reaching for a phone. If they wanted to play more games, then he could-he thought he saw some movement outside the window and looked more closely
"Team-2, this is lead. Five seconds… five… four… three-" At "three," the men holding the flash-bangs pulled the pins and set them right next to the windows, then turned aside. "-… two… one… fire!"
Sergeant Connolly pressed his button, and two windows were sundered from the wall by explosives. A fraction of a second later, three more windows were blown in by a wall of noise and blazing light. They flew across the room in a shower of glass and lead fragments, missing the children in the corner by three meters.
Next to Chavez, Sergeant Major Price tossed in another flashbang, which exploded the moment it touched the floor. Then Chavez pushed outward from the wall, swinging into the room through the window, his MP-10 up and in both hands. He hit the floor badly, falling backward, unable to control his balance, then felt Price's feet land on his left arm. Chavez rolled and jolted to his feet, then moved to the kids. They were screaming with alarm, covering their faces and ears from the abuse of the flashbangs. But he couldn't worry about them just yet.
Price landed better, moved right as well, but turned to scan the room. There. It was a bearded one, holding an Uzi. Price extended his MP-10 to the limit of the sling and fired a three-round burst right into his face from three meters away. The force of the bullet impacts belied the suppressed noise of the shots.
Oso Vega had kicked his window loose on leg-power alone, and landed right on top of a subject, rather to the surprise of both, but Vega was ready for surprises, and the terrorist was not. Oso's left hand slammed out, seemingly of its own accord, and hit him in the face with enough force to split it open into a bloody mess that a burst of three 10-mm rounds only made worse.
Rene was sitting at his desk, the phone in his hand, and his pistol on the tabletop before him. He was reaching for it when Pierce fired into the side of his head from six feet away.