Commander-in-Chief

74

Ding Chavez had used the cover of the dust and smoke cloud to enter the suite. He rushed left, all the way to the bathroom, where the older man with the wound to his shoulder had entered a minute earlier.

When he entered the bathroom he found the man lying by the toilet. A detonator lay on the marble floor next to him, and blood smears were all over the toilet, the white marble floor, and the wall. He’d been in the process of tying off his injury with a towel when Chavez surprised him.

The man reached for the blood-covered handgun next to him.

Ding shouted, “No!”

But the man lifted it anyway, and Ding shot him in the face.

Outside in the suite, two gunmen with AKs crouched low over the lower edge of the hole in the wall. They held their weapons over the side and fired in at the doorway where Dom and Jack were. Ding saw what they were doing, realized they hadn’t seen him enter, so he moved out of the bathroom and made his way to the back wall.

He stood here for a moment, out of sight of the men firing through the jagged cinder-block hole from the Congress Center side. They were twenty feet away, but before he got any closer to engage them, he wanted to make sure his two teammates knew what he was doing.

Ding wasn’t about to rush the hole in the wall and attack the men there as long as there was a chance Caruso or Jack Junior was going to stick a compact pistol around the corner and open fire.

Just then Jack leaned out through the doorway to take aim at the threats. He looked up to see Ding in the far left corner of the room. Jack nodded to him, then raised his pistol at the hole just as both gunmen stood up with their AKs at the ready.

Jack fired three rounds, hitting one of the men in the hand, then ducked away as the other returned fire.

This was Chavez’s opportunity. He holstered his pistol, went low against the wall, and crawled on his hands and knees across the floor. Just under the hole in the wall he rolled onto his back, drew his pistol again, and waited.

In seconds he saw the barrel of an AK jut through the big hole, just three feet from his face.

He pulled his watch cap off his head, used it as an oven mitt on his left hand, then reached up and yanked the hot barrel of the gun forward, pulling the user off balance. He sat up as he controlled the weapon, used his right hand to aim his little pistol at point-blank range under the chin of the astonished man.

Ding blew the top of the terrorist’s head off with a single hollow-point round.

He ripped the gun away.

Back at the door to the hall, Dom yelled, “You’re clear!”

All three Americans began rushing toward the hole in the wall. Dom and Jack vaulted the cinder blocks, and here Jack saw the man he’d injured in the hand as he sat cross-legged, trying in vain to switch his slung rifle to his off hand.

Jack shot him twice more with his pistol, emptying his magazine with the final shot.

Dom raced by next to him. “Take his AK, but give me your spare mags.”

Jack scooped up the Kalashnikov and ran alongside his cousin. He had only one spare to his pistol remaining, but he pulled it out from under his shirt and tossed it to Dom as he ran through the big conference hall, heading toward the sounds of gunfire just beyond the exit to the atrium. Dom reloaded and ran along, leaving Chavez behind.

Twenty-five-year-old Spaniard Nuria Méndez was the leader of the Earth Movement. Today’s attack was to be the culmination of her life’s work against the oil and gas industry, larger than the attack in Lithuania just two and a half weeks earlier.

As in Lithuania, her heart pounded with pride, so honored was she to be taking part in this event, even though this was not her plan. As in Klaipėda, her Russian benefactor had arranged everything down to the last detail; he’d even found other members to join her. Some of the men in this group — actually all of them, she realized — were not environmentalists at all. They were just some sort of gunmen from somewhere in Eastern Europe, taking orders from the Russians.

Nuria didn’t care in the least, she was happy to have them. The end result would mean those who controlled European oil pipelines that were destroying the earth’s natural habitat would suffer and die today, and she would make deals with the devil for this opportunity.

She ran along the atrium and shot at a man as he ran up a hallway, missing just over his head. She was no seasoned terrorist herself, but she was smart enough to know the promises the Russian benefactor had made to her about today had been lies. There were not three hundred men and women sitting “like sheep for the slaughter.” Instead she now ran down an escalator, far beyond the nearly empty conference room where all the killing was to take place, doing her best to control the recoil of the big and unfamiliar weapon. At most she’d actually hit only four people — a far cry from the shooting gallery she’d been promised.

She hoped the men from Eastern Europe were somewhere else in this big complex exacting a huge toll on the evil men and women all around.

Just then she looked to her left and saw the glass doors leading to the courtyard. Out there, from what she could see from the escalator to the first floor, were dozens and dozens of men and women trapped in a small area.

She turned and ran back up the escalator, hoping to fire down on them all.

Jack Ryan, Jr., ran down a hallway on the third floor of the conference center, waving along the men and women who came rushing toward him, their eyes wide with shock. Jack carried the same weapon as all the terrorists killing people here in the building, but he wasn’t wearing a mask, so few seemed to notice the rifle in his hands.

He was halfway up the hall when a door to the side opened and a portly man with silver hair and a gray suit rushed out and then lurched forward, slamming face-first into the wall opposite the door. The booming gunfire told Jack the man had just been dropped with an AK.

He knelt down, aimed at the doorway, and watched a masked woman in a red skirt and white blouse step out, turn the other way, and then take aim on a middle-aged woman who had peeked out the door of an administrative office. Jack shot the female terrorist in the left side of her rib cage before she could fire; she pitched to the side and fell to the ground, her weapon cartwheeling away from her.

Jack stood back up and raced on, pushing through more civilians, some wailing, some screaming, and many near catatonic as they moved through the hallway.

Dom Caruso scored himself an AK after he shot a masked man in the back of the head, stepping out of a coffee shop. When Dom scooped up the weapon next to the body, he looked into the little shop and realized he’d been too late. There were five people inside, and they all appeared to be dead.

Suddenly he heard more gunfire right outside the shop, and he looked out. A female terrorist toppled to the ground, and in seconds she was passed over by Belgian police, who raced through the first floor now with guns high.

Dom put his AK back where he found it, uninterested in getting shot by the good guys today.

Domingo Chavez made it down to the ground floor faster than his two teammates had, by chasing a terrorist into a stairwell off the atrium. As soon as he entered he heard gunfire, so he took cover for a moment, but when he started down again he saw a man and a woman, both wounded in the arms and legs. He passed them with a promise to send help, then descended another floor after hearing another shot. Here Ding saw a dead man lying on the stairs; next to him was the terrorist’s Kalashnikov. Chavez picked it up, expecting to find it empty, but the magazine was half full.

He was confused for a moment, but then he realized the dead man lying next to the gun wasn’t wearing his neck badge.

Instantly, Chavez understood. The terrorists were dumping their guns and their masks, then taking ID badges to melt into the crowd of escaping conference-goers.

Chavez dropped the rifle back on the stairwell and holstered his pistol, then ran down the stairs as fast as he could.

Chavez stood at the bottom of the escalator a minute later, looking up at dozens of men and women rushing down. Gunfire continued upstairs. His eyes settled on a woman in a blue blazer and a blue skirt as she descended with the others, packed tightly in the middle of the conference attendees making their escape past the now huge police response.

Ding could see the neck tag around her neck, but it was facing in, not out.

She reached the bottom of the escalator and started toward the exit.

Ding began to follow her out onto the street. Something about her demeanor got his attention; she was just a little too casual compared with the others around her. He couldn’t say he remembered her outfit from the hotel room at the Sofitel, but he also could not rule it out.

As he walked he noticed the woman continued past where many of the conference-goers were milling around. She took the sidewalk all the way past the entrance to the Sofitel and onto the Place Jourdan, then she turned and looked back.

Ding stared right at her, just seventy-five feet away.

She turned away quickly, and he knew she recognized him.

She was one of the terrorists, he had no doubt.

He closed on her as she reached the end of the square and made a left turn.

Once she left his sight, Ding began to run toward the corner, afraid she would climb into a vehicle and make her escape. As he came around the corner, however, she was standing right there, a short knife in her hand. She swung it up as Ding passed, slashing at his throat, but he caught her little wrist easily, wrenched her hand behind her back, and yanked up. She let go of the weapon before he dislocated her shoulder, but when she cried out, screaming in French for someone to help her, Ding threw a shoulder into her back and knocked her, forehead-first, into the brick wall of a bistro.

She dropped to the sidewalk, dazed, and he scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder.