It was of no solace to him at all that the rifle-wielding maniac ahead was in violation of this law by shouldering a Kalashnikov in the middle of town. He doubted the attacker was troubled that in addition to the attempted murder of the one hundred or so people in the garden café in front of him he’d probably also be cited by the police for unlawful possession of a firearm.
Boom!
Only when the first shot missed and exploded into a decorative masonry fountain just four feet to his left did Scott Hagen snap out of it. He knew his family was right behind him, and this knowledge somehow overpowered his ability to duck. He stayed big and broad, using his body to cover for those behind, but he did not stand still.
He had no choice. He ran toward the gunfire.
The shooter snapped off three rounds in quick succession, but the chaos of the moment caused several diners to knock over tables and umbrellas, to get in his way, even to bump up against him as they tried to flee the café. Hagen lost sight of the man when a red umbrella tipped between the two of them, and this only spurred him on faster, thinking the attacker’s obstructed view could give Hagen a chance to tackle the man before getting shot.
And he almost made it.
The attacker kicked the umbrella out of the way, saw his intended victim charging up an open lane in the center of the chaos, and fired the AK. Hagen felt a round slam into his left forearm — it nearly spun him and he stumbled with the alteration to his momentum, but he continued plowing through the tables.
Hagen was no expert in small-arms combat — he was a sailor and not a soldier — but still he could tell this man was no well-trained fighter. The kid could operate his AK, but he was mad-eyed, rushed, frantic about it all.
Whatever this was all about, it was deeply personal to him.
And it was personal to Hagen now. He had no idea if anyone in his family had been hurt, all he knew was this man had to be stopped.
A waiter lunged at the shooter from the right, getting ahold of the man’s shoulder and shaking him, willing the weapon to drop free, but the gunman spun and slammed his finger back against the trigger over and over, hitting the brave young man in the abdomen at a distance of two feet.
The waiter was dead before he hit the ground.
And the shooter turned his weapon back toward the charging Hagen.
The second bullet to strike the commander was worse than the first — it tore through the meat above his right hip and jolted him back — but he kept going and the shot after that went high. The man was having trouble controlling the recoil of the gun. Every second and third shot of each string was high as the muzzle rose.
A round raced by Hagen’s face as he went airborne, dove headlong into the man, slamming him backward over a metal table.
Hagen went over with him, and both men rolled legs over head and crashed to the hard pavers of the outdoor café. Hagen wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the barrel of the Kalashnikov to keep it pointed away, and the hot metal singed his hand, but he did not dare let go.
He was right-handed, but with his left he pounded his fist over and over into the young man’s face. He felt the sweat that stuck there, soaking the man’s hair and cheeks, and then he felt the blood as the attacker’s nose broke and a gush of red sprayed across his face.
The man’s hold on the rifle weakened, Hagen ripped it away, rolled off the man, heaved himself up to his knees, and pointed it at him.
“Davai!” The young man shouted. It was Hagen’s first indication this shooter was a foreigner.
The attacker rolled up to his knees now, and while Hagen shouted for him to stay where he was, to stop moving, to put his hands up, the man reached into the front pocket of his trench coat.
“I’ll fuckin’ shoot you!” Hagen screamed.
An unsheathed knife with a six-inch blade appeared from the attacker’s coat, and he charged with it, a crazed look on his blood-covered face.
The kid was just five feet away when Hagen shot him twice in the chest. The knife fell free, Hagen stepped out of the way, and the young man windmilled forward into the ground, knocking chairs out of the way and face-planting into food spilled off a table.
The attack was over. Hagen could hear moans behind him, screams from the street, the sound of sirens and car alarms and crying children.
He pulled the magazine out of the rifle and dropped it, cycled the bolt to empty the chamber, and threw the weapon onto the ground. He rolled the wounded man on his back, knelt over him.
The man’s eyes were open — he was conscious and aware, but clearly dying, as compliant now as a rag doll.
Hagen got right in his face, adrenaline in control of his actions now. “Who are you? Why? Why did you do this?”
“For my brother,” the blood-covered man said. Hagen could hear his lungs filling with blood.
“Who the hell is your—”
“You killed him. You murdered him!”
The accent was Russian, and Hagen understood. His ship had helped sink two submarines in the Baltic conflict. He said, “He was a sailor?”
The young man’s voice grew weaker by the second. “He died… a hero of… the Russian… Federation.”
Something else occurred to Hagen now. “How did you find me?”
The young man’s eyes went glassy.
“How did you know I was here with my family?” Hagen slapped him hard across the face. A customer in the restaurant, a man in his thirties with a smear of blood across his dress shirt, tried to pull Hagen off the dying man. Hagen pushed him away.
“How, you son of a bitch?”
The young Russian’s eyes rolled back slowly. Hagen balled his fist and raised it high. “Answer me!”
A booming voice erupted from near the hostess stand at the sidewalk. “Freeze! Don’t move!” The naval officer looked up and saw a New Jersey state trooper with his arms extended, pointing a pistol at Hagen’s head. This guy didn’t know what the hell was going on, only that, in a mass of dead and wounded lying around the nearly destroyed restaurant, some asshole was beating the shit out of one of the injured.
Hagen raised his hands, and in doing so, he felt the wounds in his side and arm.
His brain went fuzzy, and he rolled onto his back. Stared up at the night.
Behind him now, over the shouts and screams of shock and terror, he was certain he could hear his sister crying loudly. He could not understand this, because he thought he’d given his family the time they needed to run.
2
Unlike his famous father, Jack Ryan, Jr., did not have any fear of flying. In fact, he rather trusted airplanes — certainly he trusted them much more than he trusted his own ability to fly through the air without one.
His relative comfort with aviation was at the forefront of his mind now, chiefly because in mere moments he planned on throwing himself out the side door of a perfectly functioning aircraft, into the open blue sky, 1,200 feet above the Chesapeake Bay.
Jack had packed his own parachute, following the instructions and oversight of Domingo Chavez, the senior operative in his clandestine unit, and he felt certain he’d packed it exactly right. But his mind wasn’t working in his best interests now. While he needed his brain to reinforce his certainty that everything would go off without a hitch, he couldn’t get out of his head the fact that on his last trip out of town, he’d forgotten to throw his favorite pair of running socks into his carry-on.
He thought he’d done a fine job packing that day, too.
Not the same thing, Jack. Packing a carry-on has no relationship to packing a damn parachute.
His imagination seemed intent on giving him an ulcer this morning.