‘Hannah, stand down!’ Vaughn yelled.
Hannah reached the jeep and circled around it even as the door to the storage lot opened and a man rushed out screaming, an assault rifle in his grasp. Hannah saw the barrel come up but she continued walking and fired from almost point — blank range.
The shot hit the gunman in the shoulder and he spun aside and slammed into the wall of the building, then whirled and aimed again. Hannah pulled her trigger and the pistol clicked as she realized that she had emptied the magazine.
The gunman aimed his rifle at her, and an ear — shattering gunshot thundered in her ears as her world spun wildly and she collapsed onto the hot asphalt.
‘Shots fired at District Storage, Bethesda!’
The call came across as Ethan saw the lot and the low rows of storage buildings ahead and he almost screamed at the driver.
‘Go, now! All units, go!’
The vehicles screeched into the parking lot, the police driver aiming straight for lot number 4. Ethan could already see bodies strewn across the asphalt and a man crouched over one of them with his pistol in one hand and a cell phone in the other.
Ethan leaped out of the SUV even before it had stopped moving and dashed toward the crouching man. Already he could see that the body lying before him was a woman, her long auburn hair snaking across the ground. Special Agent Vaughn looked up at Ethan as he sprinted toward them and pointed frantically.
‘Four men, running out back!’ he yelled. ‘Go!’
Ethan dashed past the black jeep, Vaughn and Hannah Ford as he saw the bodies of three foreign looking, armed men lying in pools of blood around the entrance to the storage building.
He kept moving, sprinting hard and pumping his arms to keep his chest open and air flooding into his lungs as he built up speed and rounded the far corner of the storage buildings.
He immediately saw three men clambering up and over the fences toward a small copse of trees that led into the parking lot of what looked like a nearby shopping mall. One of them was already over the fence, something on his back in a rucksack, and for a brief moment the man looked up and saw Ethan running toward him. Dark eyes, a broad jaw thickly forested with black growth, closely cropped hair and the glitter of radicalism flaring like a distant supernova in his gaze.
Abrahem Nassir.
Ethan ran harder but the two men on the fence jumped back down and pulled weapons from their jackets. Ethan changed direction for the parked vehicles to his right and threw himself down into cover as a hail of gunfire showered the cars. Ricochets zipped up over his head and pinged off hot bodywork as he rolled out of sight and pulled his pistol out.
The two men were twenty yards away and at that range they could hardly hope to hit Ethan, the bodywork of the vehicles strong enough to slow and catch the rounds being fired before they got to him.
Moments later a thunderous broadside of assault rifle fire erupted from Ethan’s left as his support team rushed to his aid. Ethan broke cover, coming up over the hood of one of the parked vehicles and aiming at the two men in time to see them cut down by the savage gunfire.
‘Hold your fire!’ he yelled.
The rifles fell silent as Ethan saw Abrahem Nassir and an older man hurry out of sight across the mall’s parking lot and vanish into the crowds. Ethan spoke quickly into his microphone as he emerged from behind the vehicles, the DIA team advancing on the fallen gunmen.
‘Suspects on foot, headed north through the mall lot, Abrahem Nassir and Tariq Adel confirmed. All available units pursue immediately.’
Ethan cursed as he heard sirens wailing across the city and jogged back toward where Vaughn was still crouched over Hannah.
‘What the hell was that?!’ he demanded.
Vaughn stood up, his hands open toward Ethan. ‘I don’t know. She just went for it, almost got herself killed and now she’s out cold. She wasn’t even shooting straight, just aiming at anything that moved, and then she kind of woke up and just stood there as someone was aiming a rifle at her. I barely got the last guy before he took her down. She wanted to arrest Abrahem Nassir before you guys got here.’
Ethan looked down at Hannah for a moment and saw blood trickling from her nose.
The sound of an engine starting caught his attention, and he turned to see a white van pull away from the sidewalk nearby and begin accelerating down the street.
Ethan broke into a run without conscious thought as he sprinted out of the lot exit and onto the street.
XXXIX
Ethan ran hard as the white van accelerated away, turning in the middle of the street as it sought to escape back toward the south and the district. Ethan heard the squeal of its tires on the asphalt as it spun round and saw the face of the driver as he hauled on the wheel.
Oriental, maybe thirty years of age.
The van’s rear quarter presented itself to Ethan as he ran, and he stretched out and jumped up onto the rear step as the vehicle rushed away from the storage buildings. His hands slipped on the surface of the van and Ethan’s heart missed a beat as he flailed and thought that he was going to slip and fall. He let his gun fall from his grasp as he reached out and his fingers gripped the edges of the closed door, barely hanging on as the van lurched from left to right in an effort to shake him off.
The rear door of the van burst open alongside Ethan and a Chinese man poked his head out, a pistol in his grip as he turned and looked at Ethan in surprise.
Ethan grabbed the man’s collar and hauled himself up again as the gunman grabbed the door rail in terror and he tried to stop himself from being pulled out of the vehicle. Ethan pulled hard on him as though to throw him out onto the asphalt racing past inches beneath them, and then purposefully shoved him back into the vehicle.
The unexpected change of motion caught the gunman off guard and he tumbled back into the van as Ethan grabbed the open door and launched himself inside. The gunman crashed onto his back in a tangle of limbs alongside two men sitting at computer consoles who were staring in wide eyed terror as Ethan flew past them and crashed down on top of the gunman.
Ethan’s left hand clamped around the gunman’s wrist and smashed it down against the metal floor of the van as he let his right knee plough deep into the gunman’s plexus. The Chinese man’s eyes bulged and he folded up at the waist as his head raised toward Ethan in sympathy with the blow, and Ethan ducked his head down and thrust it forward in time to smack into the man’s nose with a sickening crunch.
The gunman’s eyes rolled up into their sockets and he slumped back again, the back of his head hitting the floor of the van with a resounding thump as Ethan grasped for the pistol.
‘Don’t move!’
Ethan froze, one hand on the weapon as he swiveled his gaze to his right and saw both of the computer technicians standing, reared up against their consoles as the open door of the van swung against its hinges. One of them was holding a pistol close to Ethan’s head, the man’s aim trembling as he spoke in heavily accented English.
‘Hands behind your head!’
Ethan hesitated, then glanced at the cab where the driver and another passenger were looking over their shoulders and waiting to see what would happen. Ethan looked back to where the technician was aiming the pistol, barely inches from Ethan’s temple. Too close, within easy reach.
Ethan nodded slowly, released the gun he was pinning to the floor of the vehicle and began slowly to raise his hands, his right hand only inches from his assailant’s pistol. As he did so, the gunman took an instinctive step back to give himself space, lifting one foot off the floor of the van to do so.