End Game

CHAPTER 2

Oxford Circus.

It was one of the busiest stations on the London Underground, vying with both Waterloo and King’s Cross in a back-and-forth annual battle for the statistical title. It was in an upscale part of London with pricey and fashionable shops and buildings resting above it. The Underground carried nearly a billion and a half passengers per year and nearly a hundred million of them came through the Oxford Circus station annually.

The Underground had suffered a terrorist attack on July 7, 2005, when terrorists had blown themselves up on three separate train cars. A fourth device had been detonated on a London bus. In all, fifty-two victims were killed.

The explosive devices used that infamous day were powerful, but not nearly so powerful as what was currently being planned.

A cobalt bomb was at the center of this. One had never been detonated before. Also known as a salted bomb, it was a thermonuclear device designed to maximize the radiation fallout, leaving a large area contaminated for a hundred or more years.

Fortunately, it was a very difficult thing to accomplish.

Unfortunately, it was not impossible.

Even more unfortunately, one was now in London.

The speaker in Robie’s helmet relayed information to him as he walked along.

His final destination was just up ahead.

As he walked along he spun a suppressor onto the barrel of the UMP, then did the same for the twin M11s.

Stealth was called for tonight.

Until it wasn’t.

He reholstered the military-grade pistols and touched his chest. What was underneath there might end up saving his life tonight. He had the same protection on both thighs. Right below these shields were his femoral arteries, twin pipelines of massive blood flow. If those got pierced, he was a dead man. The bleed-out from a punctured femoral was almost never survivable.

Four people had given their lives in order for the intel leading up to the mission tonight to make its way to the Americans. The intelligence agencies had then shared it with the British, who remained one of the United States’ closest allies, regardless of who was in charge of the government at any given time. That had been the case ever since the English redcoats had burned down the American White House, which showed that strong friendship could indeed bloom from previously infertile ground. According to the information, the planned London op was merely a dress rehearsal for what would come later, in the United States.

Just like a manufacturer did in trying to commercialize a new product, terrorists needed to work the kinks out, too.

The kink was why Robie was now ascending a hundred feet to the surface.

His final destination was not another alley. It was a basement.

Of the four people to die in this operation so far, the third person had sacrificed her life to maneuver the target to stay in this building. Situated on the outskirts of London on a lonely street of a few modest residences, the structure had been used during World War II as a safe house and an operations center for senior government personnel. An escape tunnel and a bomb shelter had been paramount, and so they had been added. Over the last seven decades a floor had been put over the basement concrete and the trapdoor covered.

And forgotten.

It was no longer covered. And it was no longer forgotten.

London was an ancient city, and no one truly knew or understood all the passages and tunnels and labyrinths that lay underneath it, or how they all connected. A series of tunnels beneath that basement eventually intersected with a concrete pipeline that, with some minimal wall piercing, would allow one eventually to reach an equipment storage room under Oxford Circus Station. In that room the cobalt bomb was to be planted and detonated at the busiest hour of the day for the tube stop, when over a hundred thousand passengers would be in the station, with at least another hundred thousand pedestrians and vehicles immediately above. In all, over two million persons would be affected by the detonation as well as over a thousand buildings.

The place would be uninhabitable, for a century or two, at least.

Some dress rehearsal, thought Robie.

He didn’t want to see a far larger encore on American soil.

The terror cell he was targeting tonight planned to use the tunnel to their advantage.

Robie planned to use it to their supreme disadvantage.

The reasons that an army of police and special forces was not descending on this terrorist plot instead of one man were complicated but, distilled to bare essentials, easily understood.

Panic.

When an army moved, it could not be kept a secret.

But when one man moved, a secret could be maintained.

And to avoid revealing what had been planned to the world and causing just such a panic that the terrorists no doubt would have rejoiced over, they had sent Robie in to have a shot at taking the terrorists down. Alone.

The Brits had special-ops people who could have performed this mission. But the higher-ups had concluded that if things went sideways, having a non-Brit involved gave the home team the best grounds for plausible deniability.

However, nothing was being left to chance. There was a hidden army surrounding the home. If Robie failed, the army wouldn’t, panic be damned.

There were two homes on either side of the target. The residents in them had been prevented from returning home that night, so Robie had a bit of a buffer in which to operate and try to keep the mission out of the morning news broadcasts.

Hence the trio of suppressors on his gun barrels.

He finished climbing the rungs to the trapdoor. Though the people inside had no idea their mission had been compromised, they had taken standard protection procedures. The trapdoor was securely locked and also alarmed. But using three different tools provided to him, Robie ensured that it no longer was locked or alarmed.

He received one more communication in his headset.

“Vee-one.”

It was the same call-out used by the aviation industry. Vee-one meant the aircraft had reached sufficient takeoff speed and there was no going back.

Robie acknowledged that command and turned his comm pack off. From now until either he or his opponents were dead, there would be nothing more said.

His helmet was fitted with a wireless camera so that his handlers could see everything that he could. They would either watch Robie win, or else see the bullets coming that would kill him.

An M11 in his right hand, he opened the trapdoor and looked around.

Nothing.

He climbed up and quietly set the trapdoor back into place. The basement was what one would expect in an old, crappy house in a tattered neighborhood — it was dirty and smelled of mold.

But there was one element of interest. In a far corner was a metal box about six feet in length. He slipped over to it, squatted down, pulled an instrument from his belt, and ran it over the box. He looked at the readout meter.

Cobalt bomb confirmed. It wasn’t armed yet. They wouldn’t do so until they moved it to Oxford Circus.

And Robie also knew that he would keep himself between them and the bomb at all times.

He holstered his M11 and readied his UMP.

He rose and moved to the wooden stairs. From his intelligence briefing on the house he knew that the fourth riser up squeaked, so he went from the third to the fifth.

In addition to him, there were currently seventeen people inside this place.

Robie’s goal was to kill sixteen of them.

The fire selector on his UMP was set to two shots. One shot was enough to kill any man if placed properly, but Robie had left no room for chance.

The basement door was partially open.

He peered through it into the kitchen.

Two men sat at a table drinking what looked to be cups of coffee. They apparently needed a stimulant at this late hour.

He looked at his watch through his panoramic goggles.

The second hand was just sweeping to twelve.

Four… three… two…

On cue, the lights in the house went out as the power was cut.

Through his helmet Robie saw the two men clear as day jerk forward and then stand.

Then he watched them fall from suppressed UMP bursts delivered to their chests.

Two down, fourteen to go.

Robie was through the kitchen in three seconds and then hit the hallway.

His finger nudged the shot selector to full auto.

He did so because darkness tended to make people congregate closer.

Sure enough, coming down the narrow hall were three men, all with guns.

They opened fire. With pistols.

Robie pulled the UMP’s trigger, and two seconds and twenty-six rounds of concentrated fire later there were three more dead men on the floor of this humble abode. The UMP’s ejector sent the spent casings tumbling to the floor, where they sounded like metal pearls cascading from a broken necklace.

Five down, eleven to go.

He ejected the mag, slapped in a fresh one, and turned and rolled to his right as more gunfire came at him.

He counted two heads through his goggles.

He emptied half his UMP mag at them.

Seven down, nine to go.

Two more men appeared at the head of the stairs and fired down at Robie.

He could see that they had on NVGs as well, so his tactical advantage had lessened.

He pulled a stun grenade, released the pin, and threw it up the stairs at the same time he looked away.

The stunning flash of light did not blind him, nor did the concussive sound paralyze him, since his helmet cushioned him from this effect.

The two men at the top of the stairs could not claim the same.

One tumbled down and landed at the bottom of the stairs.

One slash across the neck from the KM2000 severed two critical arteries, and Robie added another to his tally.

He reholstered the bloody blade.

Eight down, an equal number to go.

The other man slowly rose at the top of the stairs, but was obviously concussed. He then fell back down and lay unconscious. That was the only thing that saved his life.

That and two men attacking Robie from his right and left flanks.

The M11s came out, one in each hand. Robie aimed an M11 in each direction simultaneously and then trigger-pulled ten shots from each gun, sweeping up and down from chest to thigh, the arc of fire evenly spaced over a ten-foot radius. A kill zone field of fire delivered with max efficiency.

Jacketed rounds tore through flesh. These sounds were followed by two thumps, as corpses hit carpet.

Ten down, six to go.

Since the cat was definitely out of the bag, he sprayed the stairwell using the rest of his second mag on the UMP. He then raced up the steps, after reloading his M11s.

A bullet, fired from above, struck him in the abdomen.

The liquid armor vest he had on hardened within a millisecond, catching the round and wringing out virtually all of its kinetic energy by forcing it to be displaced along the breadth of the vest.

The armor then lost its rigidity and became flexible once more.

Robie had no idea who had invented this stuff, but if he survived tonight, he would buy the person a drink.

His second stun grenade flushed out the shooter. Robie shot him once in the knee with an M11 to incapacitate, then performed the kill shot to the head on the upper stairwell.

Eleven down, five to go.

He reached the upper hall, reholstered the M11, and reloaded the UMP with his final mag just as someone blindsided him. They tumbled back down the stairs. His attacker had a gutting knife and he managed to strike Robie in the thigh. His liquid armor once more seized up, and the knife didn’t even penetrate to the skin.

Robie’s right hand clamped down on the wrist with the knife. He torqued himself around so that he was on top when they slammed into the floor at the bottom of the stairs. The man beneath him was stunned by the impact but for only a second.

That was still a moment too long for survival.

Robie had used the man’s own knife to slit his throat. Arterial spray danced across his visor.

He hoped the handlers back in their safe space were enjoying the show.

It wasn’t nearly as much fun on his end.

Twelve down, four to go.

He rose, turned, and rolled out of the way as a volley of machine-gun fire blew down the stairs, ripping off part of the handrail, shredding the wall, and exploding a slew of the risers.

With his night vision, Robie could see where it was coming from.

Instead of trying to attack back up the stairs, he moved to his left, where the upper part of the stairway was partially covered by the wall rising from the lower floor.

He pointed the UMP at a forty-five-degree angle up and five clicks to the left. He pressed the trigger and fired half his mag. The ACP rounds blasted through the cheap drywall. Robie counted to three and watched as the shooter’s body rolled down the stairs and landed at the bottom and on top of the gent who’d had his throat slit by Robie.

Robie made sure the shooter was dead with an M11 round dotting the man’s forehead.

Thirteen down, three to go.

And those three were upstairs.

Now it became purely a tactical game. A chess match played with guns and battlefield strategy instead of molded pieces on a square board.

The enemy had the high ground and Robie the low. For him to attack, he would have to move through a funnel where they could concentrate their fire, and he couldn’t count on the liquid armor to see him through.

What Robie wanted was the high ground, and as he looked to his left, he saw a way to take it.

He popped open the window, climbed out, and found handholds in the uneven brick surface. On past missions he’d scaled what appeared to be sheer rock walls, so this was not a stretch for him.

The window was just above. The floor plan of the house told him exactly where this opening would take him. He spent three seconds calculating, which was his allotted time to think at any interval during a mission such as this.

Holding on to the windowsill with one hand, he jimmied the window with his knife. He did a controlled tumble through the opening and rolled up to a defensive position.

Having seized the tactical advantage, Robie charged into the upstairs hall and saw one man peering cautiously down the stairs, unaware that his rear flank was fully exposed.

His life ended with a pair of M11 rounds in his back.

Fourteen down, two to go.

The next man came out of another bedroom holding the exact same type of weapon that Robie held.

It was UMP versus UMP.

But not really. It wasn’t just about the hardware. A gun was a gun. The same models worked pretty much the same.

What really mattered was the software.

And the shooter was always the software.

Robie threw himself through a doorway as the muzzle of the opposing UMP took aim at him.

He transferred his UMP fully to his right hand, making sure by touch that his selector was still on full auto. The only part of him exposed was his gun and his hand. He used the lower part of the doorjamb as his fulcrum because the recoil kick on an UMP was not always kind if the collapsible stock was not firmly against one’s shoulder. That might foul the shot and Robie didn’t have the time for that.

The UMPs fired at the same time.

The man’s UMP managed to take a chunk of polymer off Robie’s weapon.

Robie’s UMP managed to blow the head off the man.

Robie dropped the UMP, his ammo exhausted.

Fifteen down, one to go.

But what a one it would turn out to be.

The young woman stepped out of a room and into the upstairs hall.

In her hand was not a weapon, at least not a conventional one.

Clenched in her fingers was a dead man’s — or in this case a dead woman’s—trigger wired to the vest around her torso. Strapped there were six packs of connected Semtex. More than enough to collapse the house and kill her and Robie, and maybe crack the belly of the cobalt bomb in the basement and radiate the neighborhood until the twenty-second century.

He understood at once. She was the designated fail-safe.

She smiled at him.

He didn’t return it.

The bloodstained KM2000 flashed through the air.

It severed the wire from the trigger to the suicide vest before lodging in the wall.

The woman looked down at the useless trigger, then back up at Robie. She screamed at him even as her hand went to the vest.

Robie did not wait for her to blow them up another way.

He shot her in the head and she fell to the floor wrapped in her unexploded bombs.

Sixteen down.

None to go.

Time clock punched.

Sunrise coming.

Ninety-nine percent was apparently good enough.