“Man, I could get used to this,” Max said as a woman in a bikini passed close enough for him to smell the coconut in her tanning lotion.
“You ogle any harder, your eyes are going to pop out.”
Juan led them away from the elevator and took up a position so they could see it on the off chance that the two secret policemen had followed them up. He was pretty sure they wouldn’t, but he hadn’t stayed alive in such a dangerous profession for so long by not being cautious.
A moment later the elevator doors parted again. Cabrillo tensed, his hand in his pocket, his finger resting along the trigger guard. He knew he wouldn’t shoot it out with these guys—Singapore had the death penalty—but, if need be, he could toss the pistol into a bush to his right and avoid a major weapons violation. Provided they didn’t find the second, one-shot gun embedded in his artificial leg.
A family dressed for a little time under the sun emerged, the father holding the hand of a little pigtailed girl. An older boy immediately rushed to look over the railing at the miniature cityscape so far below.
The doors started to close. Juan blew out his breath and was about to make a snarky comment to Max when a hand appeared between the gleaming elevator doors and stopped them from closing entirely.
Cabrillo cursed. It was them. They looked out of place with their long dark coats and their darting eyes. He backed a little deeper into the trees. They would have to sneak along the back side of the restaurant to get to the elevator housing for the third tower. To do that they would need to scale a concrete retaining wall and that might attract the attention of one of the servers or pool attendants. It couldn’t be helped.
He put his foot on the first tier of the wall and was about to boost himself up when an eagle-eyed lifeguard a dozen yards away shouted for him to stop. He must have been watching them the whole time and suspected they were up to something.
The two agents immediately were on guard and started moving toward them, even though Juan and Max were still out of their direct line of vision.
The time for subtlety was over. Juan heaved himself up onto the wall, climbing the three tiers with the agility of a monkey. When he reached the top, he lowered a hand to help Max. The lifeguard began climbing off his little mahogany tower and blowing his whistle to attract additional security. He either hadn’t noticed or had dismissed the two men in trench coats.
The agents burst into view. One threw open his coat and brought up a vicious-looking machine pistol. Max was halfway up the wall, as exposed as a bug on an entomologist’s lab table. Juan had a split second to make a decision, and he did so without hesitation.
He dropped Max.
Just as the agent pulled the trigger. Cement dust and chips exploded off the wall where Max had been dangling. People started screaming and stampeding away from the chain saw-like whine of the machine pistol as the entire thirty-round clip was emptied against the concrete wall inches above Max’s prone form.
Not knowing what was going on but acting on instinct and adrenaline, Cabrillo drew the Kel-Tec and returned fire. His first rounds were snap shots, just trying to break the gunman’s fixation on perforating Max. The gunman jerked slightly as a more carefully aimed yet still a little wild bullet struck the crown of his head.
The second agent started opening his coat, where he doubtlessly had his own weapon. Juan shifted his sights and, to his horror, saw that the “agent” was wearing a heavy suicide vest. He could see the packs of explosives and other bags that would contain metal scrap for shrapnel.
“Allahu Akbar,” the man shrieked.
Juan put a bullet down his open throat, and the man fell back like a marionette with its strings cut.
The first gunman had blood sheeting down his face and was staggering backward, dazed by the .380 caliber bullet that had gauged a trench through the top of his skull. He’d dropped his machine pistol down onto its sling and was fumbling in his coat pocket.
Juan couldn’t get a clear shot at him as people continued to streak past, not realizing they were blundering into the middle of the gunfight. He knew this first guy was probably also packing a vest and made the decision that hitting one of the civilians with a stray bullet was preferable to dozens of them getting mowed down in an explosion.
A hotel guard finally arrived. He’d been on the far side of the platform and hadn’t seen a thing. He noticed the one man down on the ground in a pool of his own blood, paid no attention to the guy with blood on his face, and instead trained his attention on Cabrillo, an obviously armed target.
He started to raise his pistol and nearly had it centered on Cabrillo when Max threw himself across the intervening ten yards and hit him like a linebacker. They crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs, bowling over another man in the process.
Juan took a chance and fired again. He hit the bomber in the chest, but the man merely staggered back from the impact. The bullet had hit one of the bags of nails, which stopped it like body armor. The Kel-Tec’s slide was locked back over an empty chamber.
Cabrillo flipped himself around so that his foot was pointing toward the gunman. The barrel of the .44 caliber pistol hidden inside his prosthetic leg made up its central support strut to give it as much length, and thus accuracy, as possible. There was only one round, so essentially the weapon was just a tube with a dual-trigger firing mechanism that ensured it couldn’t accidentally discharge.
When he hit the second trigger, it felt like someone had slammed the bottom of his stump with a sledgehammer. The round punched through the sole of his shoe, and the recoil almost knocked him off his perch. The heavy 300-grain bullet entered the bomber’s body in the abdomen, its kinetic energy lifting him off his feet like he’d been jerked from behind.
He hit the pool, his body parting the water, and sank from sight when the vest detonated. Water geysered in a solid white column that rose forty feet over the deck before crashing back like a torrential rain. The blast had been big enough and close enough to blow out part of the pool’s steel side. Water gushed through the opening, dancing and twisting as it fell over the side of the building on its long journey to the ground. The once-bucolic swimming pool had become one of the tallest waterfalls in the world.
There was nothing left of the bomber, and with the pool absorbing so much of the explosive force and the shrapnel, it didn’t appear that anyone had been injured, at least seriously.
Cabrillo’s hearing was just returning after the sonic assault of the blast. More people were screaming now, running, panicked and unsure of where to go or what to do. Over all this, he detected a high-keening wail, a sound of true mortal danger that cut above the fearful bleating of hotel guests.
There was a little boy still in the pool, his arms supported by plastic water wings. He’d been in the shallow end, playing by himself, when all the adults had scrambled from the water at the opening salvos of the attacks, and apparently his parents hadn’t had the time to rescue him.
As the water drained through the twisted opening, sucked through it like it was a high-speed pump, the floating child was being drawn inexorably toward the shattered metal.
Juan leapt off the eight-foot retaining wall and sprinted across the deck. He threw himself into a perfect dive that would have gotten applause from Olympic judges and struck out for the boy. He could feel the current pulling on his body. It was like trying to fight a riptide. He had been a strong swimmer his entire life and had been able to stroke his way out of some pretty dangerous situations, but nothing had prepared him for the raw power of the pool draining through its blown-out side. The hole was at least four feet in diameter.