She took him by the arm and started leading him toward the large opening to the King Street Metro, one story below the tracks above.
“John will call when he can, but there are three men trailing you right now. Not with us. He wants you inside the station.”
Laird seemed surprised but not panicked. “Okay. Do these knuckleheads look like they mean business?”
“My colleague is behind them and in my ear. Midas?”
Midas replied, “They slowed when you made contact with Laird. They’re trying to figure out who you are and what you are doing. Still, they are squaring off for an altercation. Keep moving into the station.”
Adara just picked up the pace with her arm around the older man’s waist now. “This could get ugly,” she said.
“You armed?” he asked.
At the entrance to the station they moved through a thick crowd of tourists, just down the escalator from the tracks above the station concourse. “No,” she replied. “We can’t carry legally in D.C., and we didn’t know if you’d head into the District. You?”
Laird lifted the front of his shirt and Adara could see the butt of a small revolver.
“You’re my kind of guy, Mr. Laird.”
He said, “Never even drew my piece in Kabul. Would be ironic to get my ass in a shoot-out right here.”
33
Midas was at a full run now, heading toward the single man on the right side of the parking lot. At fifty feet away he pulled out his karambit knife and held it down by his side.
Just then the man’s backpack dropped to the ground, and a black Uzi sub gun remained in his hand. As soon as Midas saw the weapon appear, he whispered urgently, “Guns are out, Adara. Get to cover.”
Chakir never got a shot off. He stopped in the parking lot in front of a parked Metro bus, leveled his weapon toward the white-haired man just entering the station, and he felt a presence on top of him. A hooked knife blade appeared in front of his face, then it was dragged back, plunging into his throat.
At the same time a large man crushed him in a tight grasp from behind, then pushed him down to his knees. Blood shot onto the hot sidewalk in front of him and screams of shock and panic erupted in all directions.
Chakir fell face-first in a splashing pool of his own blood as the big man behind him let go.
Through her earpiece Adara heard Midas grunt with effort as he took out one gunman in the parking lot behind her on her right. She and Eddie broke into a full sprint when the screams erupted in the relative quiet of the morning. Eddie reached under his shirt while he ran, but just as they neared a large support column in the rear of the cavernous station hall, fully automatic gunfire exploded directly behind them. Adara grabbed Eddie by the shirt and tried to pull him around to cover, but lost her grip when the seventy-year-old spun and dropped to one knee, raising his pistol toward the threats.
Two submachine guns tore into the tile flooring in front of Eddie and Adara, and Adara whirled her body behind the heavy column. Still, she reached out for Laird, trying to take hold of her principal to yank him out of the line of fire.
But she couldn’t reach Eddie, and as he returned fire on the two men at the entrance to the station, he winced in pain and doubled forward, dropping his pistol and crumpling down beside it.
In the parking lot Midas yanked the Uzi away from the man with the spurting carotid artery, who lay facedown, and tried to spin to engage the other shooters, fifty yards away and just inside the wide entrance to the dark lower level of the station. But dozens of screaming and fleeing civilians blocked his path, and before he could level the weapon, out of the corner of his left eye he saw a huge black form barreling down on him.
Midas tried to leap forward, but he took a glancing blow from the left front quarter-panel of the speeding Nissan Pathfinder and it spun him through the air. He landed hard on the hot pavement, knocking the Uzi out of his hands and the earpiece from his ear.
If the driver slammed on his brakes then and there he could have shot Midas dead before he recovered from the impact, but the Pathfinder sped on across the parking lot, bouncing over a grassy median and into the bus lane, then back up on the sidewalk, racing toward the entrance to the Metro station.
Adara dove out into the line of fire, lifted Eddie’s revolver with one hand while she grabbed him by the wrist with the other hand, trying to heave him to cover behind the column near the southwest corner of the big open hall.
As she pulled on the wounded man she aimed in the direction of the gunfire and instantly saw that one of the men was down on his back, writhing in obvious agony. She assumed Laird had hit him, and adjusted her aim to the second shooter. He was firing a pistol blind into the station, missing her by ten yards but sending nine-millimeter rounds just over the heads of terrified Metro passengers lying flat on the floor.
Adara watched while the second attacker’s hand reached out and pulled the Uzi away from the wounded man. She tucked tighter behind the column as fully automatic fire rang out again and more dust and debris flew around her on all sides.
Saleh dumped the full magazine of Mehdi’s Uzi, then pulled it back around his column, crouched down, and leaned his back against the hard cover. The Language School operatives had been taught to tape magazines together, side by side, separating them by small pieces of wood so they would seat easily in the magazine well of the weapons. By this method they didn’t have to fish around in their pockets for a second magazine, and they could carry sixty-one nine-millimeter rounds on their fully loaded weapons, instead of just thirty-one.
While Saleh snapped the second magazine into position he looked next to him and saw Mehdi rolling around in pain, blood smearing on his clothes and the tile floor.
Saleh now looked to where Chakir had been positioned, wondering why he wasn’t hearing any gunfire from over there, but instead he saw Badr racing the Pathfinder across the wide pedestrian zone right toward Saleh and Mehdi’s position. Good. Saleh had no idea where Chakir had gone, but he was reasonably certain he’d shot Edward Laird, and now all he had to do was get the hell out of here in one piece.
Adara did not have a decent shot at the gunman still in the fight inside the station, especially not while multitasking trying to yank a man to safety, because the gunman was crouched behind a column just inside the wide entrance. But to buy herself some time, she fired at the column, breaking off chunks of concrete and letting the would-be assassin know she was armed and in the fight. The revolver held only five rounds, however, so she clicked on an empty chamber after two shots.
Damn it, she thought. She’d just emptied her only real weapon.
Adara saw the Pathfinder just as she pulled Laird farther behind her column. It screeched to a stop inside the station, and a pair of transit police came running down the escalator, some forty or fifty yards off Adara’s left shoulder, and immediately fired at the vehicle. The driver dumped a burst from his full-auto Uzi at Adara’s position behind her column, and all she could do was throw herself over the form of Eddie Laird and wait out the fusillade.
She looked over the older man and saw that he’d been shot in the chest, and again in the stomach. She tried to render first aid, but he pushed her hand back, then reached down into his pocket, pulled something out, and folded it into her right hand.
She didn’t know what he was trying to give her at first, but when she looked at it, she saw it was a speed loader, a cylindrical disk-shaped device with five .357 Magnum shells in it, used to load a revolver more quickly than one could by using loose bullets. It was covered with Eddie’s blood, but she didn’t bother wiping it off. As the gunfire on the far side of the column continued, she ejected the spent brass from the stubby Smith & Wesson and slid in the five fresh rounds.