Assassin

Chapter Fifty-Three

The Emirate

IT WAS CRAMPED UP FRONT. THE TERRIFIED KID RASHID driving, Hawke in the middle, Patterson on the door. Both men were wearing Type 3 Kevlar body armor, but Alex was strongly considering removing his because of the painful injuries to his ribs. The entire team wore the same armor, plus white balaclavas to protect their heads. Hawke had the muzzle of his USP .45 pistol wedged between two of the driver’s ribs. They’d gotten the Hagglund ATV turned around and were retracing its fresh tracks in the snow along the shoulder of a ridge, assuming they would lead them back to the mountain fortress built into the south side of the lower peak.

The .50-cal mounted above him on the roof started chattering before Hawke could see what Quick was shooting at. They came over a rise and he saw the target just below. A tracked Soviet Spetsnaz-style BTR-60 armored personnel carrier and twenty mountain troops all clad in white. The armored vehicle had just finished clanking across a small arched steel bridge which spanned a crevasse maybe sixty feet across. Beyond the bridge, their destination. A whirling red light marked the opening of a tunnel leading inside the mountain. Somebody inside that mountain had heard the shooting and sent this second war party out to see what was going on.

Quick’s .50 rattled again, expended brass cartridge cases pinging off the roof. Now this mountain division knew they had unwelcome guests.

“Don’t stop!” Hawke yelled at Rashid. “No matter what! Do, and you’re dead.”

Quick’s fire was rapid and lethal. The troops, or what was left of them, had been caught completely unaware. They scattered, diving behind snow banks or the rocks on either side of the steel bridge. The return fire was sporadic and for the most part inaccurate, but a few rounds were surely sizzling around Quick, who was exposed up on the roof. And it was only a matter of seconds before that armored carrier opened up on them. Luckily, Patterson had fitted the .40mm grenade launcher to the muzzle of his HK machine gun. The rooftop .50 was useless against the heavily clad Russian-made vehicle.

Without saying a word, Tex opened his door, swung it outward, and climbed out onto the step-up bar mounted beneath the doorsill. He hung on to the windscreen with one hand and tried to get a bead on the carrier through the open window.

“You got this bastard?” Hawke yelled at him. The troop carrier was getting dangerously close.

“Yeah, Pards, I got this sumbitch!”

Tex fired. There was a whoosh and a white vapor trail and suddenly the carrier’s ugly snout exploded and was engulfed in flames. It veered left and stopped, clearing the way to the snow-covered bridge. Then the carrier’s gas tank went up with a roar, putting a fiery end to everybody inside. There wasn’t much time for a victory celebration.

The Hagglund’s windscreen suddenly exploded into a thousand pieces. They were taking heavy fire from the left.

“Go! Go!” Hawke screamed at Rashid. He was leaning across the boy, firing his .45 pistol out the driver’s window. He saw two drop and kept firing. Maybe not hitting many hostiles, but keeping up appearances. Unlike their dead comrades on the ground behind him, Hawke thought, these troops meant business. The palace guards, no doubt. Fiercely loyal, fight-to-the-death types. The only way to do this was just blow right by any resistance and get inside that tunnel. Thank God he had Quick on the rooftop fifty and Tex riding shotgun.

Seconds before they reached the bridge, Rashid screamed something in Arabic and yanked the wheel hard right, locking it. Hawke thought he’d taken a bullet but, no, the kid was just trying to kill them all. The ATV veered sharply right of the bridge and plowed through a snowbank, accelerating toward the yawning black emptiness of the bottomless crevasse. They were going over an edge where the black ice of the mountain plateau disappeared into nothingness.

“Jump! Now!” Hawke screamed at Patterson, who was still hanging out the open door. “You, too, Tommy!” It was their only chance. He himself was locked in a desperate struggle with the boy for control of the wheel. He smashed his pistol against Rashid’s hand on the wheel, but the kid would not let go. Hawke was desperately stabbing at the brake pedal with his left foot. The Hagglund fishtailed, slowing, for he’d finally found the brakes, but it was still headed, skidding wildly now, out of control, straight for the precipice. The vehicle’s tracks finally stopped, but not the forward momentum.

It was too late.

The bottom fell out of Alex’s stomach as the cab lurched over the edge and dropped into space. Hawke and the boy were thrown forward against the empty windscreen frame. The crazily spinning view below was sickening. A ten-thousand foot drop into nowhere. There was a screeching metal sound and the cab bounced against the face of the crevasse and jerked to a stop, suspended in nothingness. Hawke remained completely still, his heart pounding, and did nothing for a second, willing himself not to breathe or move a muscle.

He felt the vehicle’s weight shift. Tom Quick was somehow still on the roof, most likely clinging to the base of the .50-caliber machine gun though he couldn’t see him. Where the hell was Patterson? Had he jumped in time? The door was still attached, at least the small part of it he could see, but it was hanging down at a weird angle.

He knew instinctively what had happened. They were hanging by a thread. The cab itself had gone over the edge but not the troop carrier they were towing. The brakes had slowed them just enough to prevent the entire rig from going over the side. Only the weight of the carrier up on the ledge, and the men inside it, stood between him and the abyss. Without even breathing, he craned his head around and looked up through the cab’s rear window. The carrier was up there, all right, tracks perched out over the lip of icy rock. He could hear no automatic fire. It was dead still except for the wind whistling through the cab.

That’s when he saw Patterson’s bloody hand appear. He hadn’t jumped, he was still clinging to the dangling doorframe. Somehow, Tex had reached up and grabbed a visible section of the door. The fingers were clawing at the metal, the joints showing white with strain.

“Hey, Pards,” he heard the cracked voice below say, “Gimme a hand, here, willya?”

“Hold on!” Hawke shouted. Hawke knew he had only one chance and he had to take it now. He hooked his left foot up under the dashboard and dove for the hand. The cab lurched sickeningly over to the right with his weight shift, the metal door Tex hung from banging against the rock face. Christ. He had one shot here. Hawke shot his right arm out and lunged for Texas Patterson’s hand. A fraction of a second more and he might have grabbed it. He watched in horror as five bloody fingers peeled away from the frame one at a time and disappeared before he could reach them.

Tex didn’t scream going down.

“Jesus Christ,” Hawke whispered, his breath ragged. He used his foot to haul himself back to the center of the seat and the cab swung back, grinding against the ice. Hawke slowly craned his head around and stared at the ashen-faced Rashid. “You bloody bastard,” he said to the kid. “Goddamn you to hell for what you did.”

Rashid had lost it. He was wide-eyed, staring down through the windscreen at the bottomless gorge below, taking rapid, shallow breaths. Watching Tex plunge ten thousand feet had taken a good deal of the religious fervor out of the holy warrior. Hawke briefly considered two options and opted for his second idea.

“Get out,” he said.

The kid stared at him, his eyes unseeing, too scared to understand what Hawke had said, perhaps. Vocal chords paralyzed with fear.

Hawke, barely keeping his emotions under control now, spoke.

“You wanted to go to Paradise? You’re looking at it.”

“Please—”

“Now! Get the hell out.”

Without waiting for a reply, Hawke reached gingerly across Rashid’s chest and unlatched the driver’s door. The cab had ended up tilted just enough to the driver’s side that gravity did the job for him. Rashid screamed and reached out for something, anything to hold on to, but all he got was a fistful of air. He slid straight out and down into oblivion. He fell so far, Hawke lost sight of him. He took a deep breath, said a silent farewell prayer for Tex, and weighed his options.

He noticed the cab had shifted slightly back toward an even keel with the sudden loss of weight on the driver’s side. Good. But now he could see one of Quick’s bloody boots dangling below the windscreen. Bad.

“Tommy?” Hawke said into his mike, praying they could still communicate.

“Jesus Christ,” Quick said, his voice quaking.

“Yeah. I know. Just hold on.”

“Oh, God, Skipper. I—I think my hand is broke. I’m having a hard time holding—”

“Just don’t move, Tommy. You just hang on, I’m going to get us out of this. Widowmaker? FlyBaby? Copy?”

“Copy,” was the terse, one-word reply from one of his guys still inside the troop carrier precariously balanced up on the ledge.

“Everybody all right up there?” Hawke asked.

“We’re all afraid to move, sir,” Gidwitz said. “Weight shift.”

“Yeah. Probably wise. This situation is a bit iffy. Can you see anything up there?”

“We’ve got the rear doors cracked. Tangos are approaching. Cautious, but here they come.”

“Listen carefully,” Hawke said. “You’ve got mountaineering equipment in that thing, I saw it. Nylon lines, grapnels, carabineers. Secure one end of a line somewhere solid inside. Anything seriously bolted down. Do it now. Then, two guys go out the door, one high, one low. Start shooting as you go out. No full auto. Three-round bursts and make them count, save your mags. Everybody still in the truck covers the third guy who goes out two seconds later with the bitter end of the line, heads straight for the steel bridge and takes two wraps around the rail. Got that?”

Hawke heard a sharp grinding, screeching sound above him. The cab dropped, a stomach-turning foot or so, maybe more, and jerked to a stop. A hard rain of rock and ice from above clattered on the body of the cab. Then it stopped. Nobody said anything.

“Uh, roger that last, Skipper,” Gidwitz said, finally breaking the tense silence. “Line is already secure here inside the carrier. Ring bolt in the floor. Taking it out myself. What about the loss of ballast weight when we bolt out of—”

“I can’t blame you if I’m dead, now, can I? It’s all we’ve got, Ronnie. Ready?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Gidwitz said.

“Go.”

It was probably not much longer than two minutes, but in the swaying frozen cab it felt more like two hours before the distinctive tune of automatic-weapons fire ceased and he heard Gidwitz’s voice through his headphones again. “Double lines rigged to the bridge here, Skipper. Solid. We got six tangos down, nobody else moving up here. We’ve secured the area.”

“Good. Get a slip-harness down here to Sergeant Quick. Now. He’s still out on the roof, holding on to the .50 with a broken hand. So make it extremely quick.”

“We’re on it. Rigging a second one for you, Skipper. Uh, and Chief Patterson’s status? We heard—”

“Yeah. You heard. Two rigs will do it. He, uh—”

“For God and country, sir,” Gidwitz said, his voice choked with emotion.