“How would that work to our goals?” The Engineer said dismissively.
“We only kill one!”
The hideout was an abandoned tire factory that had been one of the possible targets on Brooke’s quick list. From a safe distance, she used extreme-powered binoculars and spotted a lookout on the eastern end of the roof. She estimated the shot at about six hundred yards. “Get your sharpshooter team up here on the double,” she ordered the Swiss SWAT commander.
“As soon as the lookout is neutralized we go right through the front gate. On the way we’ll use the radar imagery scope and locate the outlines.” She took out of her breast pocket a copy of the picture from Juth’s desk. Even though every cop on the case had a copy and memorized the faces and body types, she held it up, tapping it, “Remember we got two hostages, an adult female and a little girl.” Three more SWAT members appeared. “You three, you are responsible for any opposition on the first floor. We are weapons-free, but somewhere in there is a person who can be a high-valued intelligence target. He is known as The Engineer or Architect, or it could be two targets. We’d like them alive if possible, but take no chances. Everybody gets to go home tonight, right?”
The eight SWAT guys and the commander answered verbally in unison, “Right!”
Thirty seconds later, the Swiss kill team was on the roof of a nearby building and drawing a bead on the lookout at the factory. A few seconds later, as Brooke was closing the door on the SWAT van that would ram the front gate, her radio crackled, “Target acquired.”
“Take ’em out,” she said into the radio mic, then turned to the driver, “Gun it.”
Through the scope of the GM6 sniper rifle, the police sharpshooter could see the lookout scanning the terrain. He saw the man stop his right-to-left panning of the area that lay before him and swing his glass back to the sniper’s own position, where he surely thought he saw a glint. If he did, it was the last thing he saw, as the 50-caliber slug punched a hole in his forehead and blew the back of his skull halfway across the rooftop.
As soon as the spotter radioed, “Confirm one kill,” the van smashed through the rickety cyclone fence and darted to the entrance of the factory.
Brooke jumped out of the vehicle before it came to a full stop, shouting, “Go, go, go, go!”
In the hallway of the dilapidated factory one of The Engineer’s goons saw the van lurch. He ran to the front door and trained his weapon on the first person exiting the truck.
He squeezed the trigger, but was spun around as his shoulder exploded from another .50 caliber sniper round that made him grunt.
Upon hearing the grunt, Brooke raised her silenced Glock Model 17 and fired. The goon hit the floor dead. She was in full run and jumped over his body as she hit the lobby. She glanced at her phone, which was getting the video signal from the radar scanner, which finds warm bodies through concrete walls. It showed five targets on the second floor, then two in the corner of a room on the other side of the second floor. But what caught her eye was the outline of a lone figure headed toward the two distant outlines nestled in the corner of the distant room. The stillness of the other figures told her that the presence of her team was not yet known to the remainder of bad guys in the building.
At the Large Hadron Collider, Bill had taken up a position fifty feet from Juth in a room that was just off his area. The big clock on the wall read 2:57:08 p.m. He hoped Brooke was seconds away from rescuing the reason Raffey was following their unthinkable orders. That was the pivot point the whole operation rested on; namely Bill’s assessment that Juth was not the mastermind of the plan and was being pressured. Just in case, a Swiss army commando was seated next to Bill. If Brooke was unsuccessful, or Juth proved to be the real threat, hell bent on blowing up the LHC, the military man’s orders were to put a bullet into Juth’s prodigious brain. Bill was okay with this back-up plan because, in the end, he felt the universe was protected whichever way this turned out.
Brooke found the main staircase and was joined by the first floor team, who now headed up to the second floor and to the cluster of bad guys. Brooke headed toward the two figures in the far off room. She was convinced they were the hostages and, with the clock ticking, the figure heading toward them was their executioner. She took the stairs two at a time and before going through the door waved on a SWAT guy with a fiber optic camera. He bent the flexible lens around the corner and saw that the way was clear. She pointed to the five-man kill team and directed them to the room down the hall, and she ran off in the other direction with one cop in tow.
The main body of the SWAT team reached the room, which held the five figures. A flash bang would have been the recommended way of storming the room, thus temporarily blinding and deafening the men inside, however, with the hostages’ whereabouts not confirmed, the noise could signal their hasty execution. So they hit the room in force and acquired targets, shooting to kill those with weapons and to wound those who were unarmed. As they had practiced for hundreds of hours, they swept in, two right, two left and one center, each responsible for his own field of fire. Their instincts took over from there; two men in the room with weapons in their hands were immediate kills, one from team right and one from team left. The center SWAT man shot the legs out from under one of two older men and placed the muzzle of his gun on the temple of the other, who was scrambling across the table to get a pistol. The man saw the logic in freezing and retracting his hand. Given the muzzle suppressors of their guns, the sound didn’t go much farther than the immediate hallway around the room, and since no bad guy got a shot off, their presence was still a secret.
The center man suddenly realized something. “Confirm, I count four targets?”
“Confirm four,” came the response that caused him to say, “Shit, one got away!”
Three from the team immediately hurried to get the one who was now running toward the other end of the building.
Checking her phone quickly, Brooke saw her own outline and that of the figure just ahead, but there was no one in the corridor in front of her. She immediately reckoned there was a parallel hallway. Then her phone lost its signal in the steel of factory structure. She was flying blind now, but knew she had just seconds to save the mother and child.
As she reached a crossing corridor, she cautiously approached the corner. The SWAT guy looked with the fiber optic gooseneck lens and gave her the clear sign. She ran as lightly as she could in order to not give her position away. She knew the figure headed toward her might not have passed this corridor yet, and at any second she could stumble across the person, so she had her weapon up and was ready to kill anything coming at her. First she peeked around the corner in the direction someone would come from. It was clear; a quick turn of the head allowed her to catch a glimpse of a woman entering the room at the end of the hall.
Brooke padded quickly to the end of the hall and flattened up against the door jamb. She pivoted in and saw a woman standing five feet from Leena and her daughter. Then the woman’s cell phone’s bright video light went on and Brooke could see the image of the two hostages cowering in the screen.
The woman spoke, “You want to play games?” She cocked the gun and pointed it at Leena. Brooke raised her weapon and squeezed the trigger, but at that instant her body was racked to one side by a concussion in her left shoulder bade. The impact made Brooke stumble as she fired and missed the center mass of the woman, instead hitting her in the arm. She then heard two shots behind her.
The trooper down the hall reacted immediately when a man unexpectedly came out of the stairwell door right next to the room at the end of the hall. The man got off the shot that hit Brooke in the back of her vest, but before he could fire again, the SWAT man double-tapped the intruder in the head and he was down.