“ Jebem ti mater! ” the gunman husked through his mask. “ Vi ete ga gledati umreti.”
Kealey regarded him without expression. Still on his knees, he simultaneously hefted the dead man to his right and swung his own firearm around. He felt as if he’d been kicked through a dark, spiraling time warp. His lack of visible emotion gave no hint of his surprise and puzzlement. It had been over a decade since he’d heard Serbian spoken by a native, but he’d recognized it now, remembered the dialect from down in southern Kosovo, and understood the coarse profanity followed by an invitation to watch Colin die. No doubt the man hadn’t expected Kealey to understand. It was just one of those spit-in-your-eye gestures so common to Eastern European insurgents. What was stranger, though, was that in the corridor minutes ago, when the other hostage takers had been shouting excitedly to one another, they had been speaking some other language entirely.
A moment passed. Another. Kealey stood there, pulling the long-unused vocabulary from his memory, giving its particular syntax a moment to click into place.
“Steta ga i… da e… biti ubi Jeni,” he said at last. He was warning the man that he would also wind up dead if he tried anything. “Ja u te ubiti… sebe.” Kealey was promising that he would make sure of it, would kill the man himself.
The man snorted. “Yawa zhaba heskla bus nada!”
Kealey didn’t respond. That had not been Serbian. It was the same language he’d heard from the others out in the corridor. Pashto, he thought.
What the hell is this? A convention of anti-American terrorists? Someone at Immigration and Naturalization was going to have a lot of explaining to do when, dead or alive, the gunmen were all ID’d.
Kealey kept staring into the room. Behind the gunman, the window shimmered a little as the lights of a hovering helicopter bounced off its tinted laminated glass, coming in almost horizontally over the church across the street. For a moment, the hostage taker and Colin were in stark silhouette. The helicopter was far enough away, at least a half mile, so that the sound did not intrude. Their gun-muffled hearing also worked to conceal its presence.
Shifting his gaze to Colin, Kealey was able to hear his rasping intakes of air. He looked at the weapon under Colin’s chin, at the hand in the fingerless shooter’s glove clenched around its stippled grip.
“I didn’t come to play games,” Kealey said at last. “What do you want with these people?”
The gunman laughed, shifting to English. “They say the more languages one speaks, the better one can know other men.”
Kealey looked at him. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Who are you?” the man asked. “You do not seem FBI.”
“I’m the janitor,” Kealey said flatly.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” the man snapped. Without warning, he tightened his choke hold around Colin’s neck, pushing his head up higher with the assault rifle. Colin gagged audibly, a sound like water draining through a clogged pipe.
“Who is out there? How many of you?” the man demanded.
“What’s it matter?” Kealey asked. “You’ve lost.”
“I have won!” he roared. “I enter your house to kill as many as I can, to send your people to the grave one after another.”
There were muffled sobs from different places around the room.
“Even if it means joining them?” Kealey asked.
“If I accomplish my goal, yes.”
Kealey felt his stomach wring tight with anger, but he just kept staring at him, his face a shield of calm. He needed to stall. Help was coming, but he had to make sure it came soon enough to save Colin.
“I remember Cuska after the massacre,” Kealey said. “I saw what the Sakali did to the villagers. Do you know what I said to one of the killers?”
The man did not respond. Obviously, Kealey was not FBI. The references had caught him off guard.
“I told him that he would die in torment if he harmed anyone else.” Kealey’s voice dropped as he said, “I told him, ‘ Al sizvul.’ ” He had chosen his words carefully, using the idiomatic Serbian phrase for “blood oath.” “I say that now to you,” Kealey went on, “and to whoever is working with you, and to whoever you leave behind. I will find them and make it my business to kill them. Or we can stop this now.”
“You think I fear you?” the gunman yelled.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kealey said. “It’s over.”
They looked at each other, Colin between them. Kealey kept his eyes steady, appearing to stare at the man while again letting his gaze travel past him to the window. Outside, the spotlight from the helicopter seemed to coat the church towers with molten gold as it washed over their high, curved roofs before splashing brightly up against the smooth glass wall of the convention center. But it was no longer shining on the window behind the gunman. And there was a good reason for that.
Recon was over.
Suddenly, the gunman’s patience appeared to run out. The man jerked the arm he’d clamped around Colin’s neck up with a sudden violent motion that audibly stopped his breath. The hostage taker began moving forward with the young man, who was gagging as he tried to walk on his toes.
Kealey felt his stomach constrict. He wished to hell he knew what was going on outside this room. Because the only option he seemed to have left was to take a shot at the man, drawing his fire and hoping he could kill the son of a bitch before he himself went down.
Chandra knelt on the wooden boards of the bell platform, the barrel of a Heckler amp; Koch PSG-1 sniper rifle cradled in his left hand, his right wrapped lightly around its grip, his elbows carefully balanced on the sill beneath the tower’s window arch. Inhaling, exhaling, getting into the right breathing tempo, he peered through the weapon’s powerful 6x42 telescopic sight, studying his target through the third-floor window of the convention center across the street.
There were good shooters, and there were snipers. There were methods and formations that could make ordinary shooters better-by making a “figure eight” rotation with the barrel and firing at the peak of the second circle, or by firing in between breaths, but not actually holding your breath-but just how fast and how accurate a shooter was at making the calls and the shots, estimating a long-range target’s distance, adjusting for conditions, stalking the prey to the point of invisibility, learning to live with discomfort in even the most serene terrains, and disguising himself to adapt to the most hell-sucking surroundings, anywhere and nowhere, and all while never existing in the enemy’s eye, that was what demarcated a sniper. A sniper was as stealthy as his rifle was deadly.
Chandra was a city boy, recognized by his comrades more for his precision than his trail-hunting abilities; country boys were better known for tracking. But in either battlefield setting, it was imperative that scopes and muzzles remained invisible. If they couldn’t see you, they couldn’t hit you. Luckily for Chandra, urban environments were filled with glinting metal structures and flickering lights and windows. Perfect cover for a sniper rifle.
Beside him, in a nearly identical firing position, Alterman held a rifle of the same make and model, which gave them almost thirty thousand dollars’ worth of precision ordnance to match the twenty years of training and experience between them here in the church tower. Both agents, in addition, wore tactical vests and black unis with the circular black and silver patch of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team sewn onto their shoulders, though only Alterman, the pair’s senior member, had on amber shooter’s glasses.
In his flippant moments-and this was anything but one-the Indonesian-born Darma Chandra joked that the glasses were a sign of the other man’s advancing decrepitude, Alterman being forty-three years old in comparison to his thirty. But Chandra knew his partner was the most capable and seasoned marksman in the unit, having been certified at the U.S. Marines Corps’ 4th MEB antiterrorism school at Camp Lejeune, having done advanced recon in northern Afghanistan, then having been selected for diplomatic and embassy security in Kabul back in the days when Taliban assassins were a common roadside presence in and around the city.