Locked On

57

Get me closer, Hicks!” Domingo Chavez shouted into the boom mike of the headset as he slammed a second five-round magazine into the magazine well of his HK PSG-1 sniper rifle. He’d missed with his last two shots, he was certain, and only by getting closer could he nail Rehan and his men, as they were now running and crawling and scrambling for cover.

“Roger that,” Hicks said in a calm Kentucky drawl, and the Bell JetRanger raced nearer to the massive spire-like structure.

Even with the broken windowpane in al Darkur and Embling’s place, Chavez would never have been able to identify the location of their apartment had he not also been able to catch a glimpse through his twelve-power scope of something tumbling out of the side of the building, spiraling down toward the ground.

It was a man, Ding knew this instinctively, though he could not take the time to try to identify who was plunging before him to their death. Instead Chavez had to range his weapon for five hundred meters and do his best to line a target up in his mil-dot crosshairs.

Even though Chavez had not spent much range time working on sniper craft in the past year, he still felt comfortable making a five-hundred-meter shot under the right conditions. But the helicopter’s vibrations, the downwash of the rotors, the upward movements of the air currents along the skyscraper, all had to be solved for in order to make a precision hit.

So Chavez did not go for precision. He did his best to calculate everything he could to the best of his ability, and then he lined up for a gut shot. Center mass on his targets. A man’s stomach was not the perfect location for a sniper shot. No, perfect would have been the brainpan. But targeting the upper stomach gave him the greatest margin of error, and he knew there would be some errors in his targeting, considering everything he had to deal with.

He fired from the backseat of the chopper, propping his weapon in the open window. This would absolutely destroy the carefully tuned barrel harmonics of his rifle, but again, getting closer would fix everything.

“Closer, brother!”

“You worry about your gadget. Let me worry about mine,” replied Hicks.

To say the call from Chavez to the aircraft twenty minutes earlier had come as a surprise to Chester Hicks was putting it mildly. He had been going through some paperwork with Adara Sherman when his mobile rang.

“Hello?”

“Country, I’m on my way back! I need you to scare me up a helicopter in ten minutes! Can you do that?”

“You bet. There is a charter service right here at the FBO. Where should I tell them you are heading?”

“I need you to fly it, and we will likely be heading into combat.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“This is life-and-death shit, ’mano.”

A quick pause. “Then get your ass back here. I’ll grab us an aircraft.”

Hicks had been all action after that. He and Adara Sherman jogged across the tarmac to a dormant JetRanger that belonged to a resort hotel twenty miles up the coast. There were many newer and fancier helos on the tarmac, but Hicks had flown the JetRanger, he’d trained on Bell helos, and Hicks figured the most important factor on this hasty mission ahead of him would be the skill of the pilot, and not the most advanced technology. After looking the craft over for just a few seconds, he sent Sherman to the FBO to collect the keys by any means necessary. He removed the tie-downs and checked the fuel and the oil while she was gone, and even before he sat behind the cyclic, Sherman was back, tossing him the keys.

“Do I want to know what you did?”

“Nobody home. I probably could have snagged some sheik’s Boeing wide-body if I wanted it.”

Chavez arrived five minutes later, and they were in the air as soon as he strapped in.

While Chavez loaded his sniper rifle, Hicks asked over the intercom, “Where are we going?”

“The tallest building in the world, doubt you could miss it.”

“Roger that.” He turned the nose of the JetRanger toward the Burj Khalifa and increased his rate of climb and his ground speed.

Rehan and Khan crawled across the tile floor of the apartment toward the door to the hallway. The colonel kept his body positioned between the shooter in the helicopter and his general as they scrambled, until another protection officer slid over next to them both and then covered General Rehan.

Just as Rehan entered the hallway and rolled out of the line of fire from the helicopter outside, one of his security men grabbed him by the collar and pushed him forward to the elevator. This guard was nearly as big as Rehan himself, a hulking six-foot-three-inch-tall bruiser in a black suit and carrying a big HK pistol. He banged on the down button with his fist, turned to make sure Rehan and Khan were still with him, and then turned back as the doors slid open.

Ryan and Caruso were surprised by the size of the armed Pakistani who appeared right in front of them in the hallway, but they were ready for trouble. Both men held their pistols high. They dropped to their knees as one as the ISI security man’s eyes widened. The Pakistani lifted his own gun up into action, but both Campus operators fired into the broad chest of their target at no more than six feet.

The guard did not fall away from them, instead he lunged forward, into the elevator car. Both men fired a second and then a third time, stitching 9-millimeter rounds across his upper torso, but the ISI officer crashed into Jack Junior, pinned him in the corner, and head-butted the American with all the strength remaining in his body. He fired his HK pistol, but his arm had drooped low and the round went through Ryan’s pants, just above the knee, somehow missing his leg.

More ISI men in the hallway fired into the elevator now. Ryan was pinned by the dead man, but Caruso had dropped low to the floor and was engaging targets. He caught a half glimpse of General Rehan running away, up the hall in the opposite direction of Embling’s apartment, but he had to focus on the men shooting at him and Jack. He shot another of the general’s security detail, hitting the man in the lower abdomen, and with another three-round volley he chased the remaining men out of his line of fire, sending them up the hallway, where they disappeared into the stairwell near Embling’s flat.

Rehan had already headed into the stairwell, presumably to another floor to take an elevator down.

“Get this big motherfucker off me!” Ryan shouted.

Dom helped roll the dead man over, and immediately he saw blood on Jack’s face. “Are you hit?”

Jack ignored the crack he had taken to his right eye and instead reached down to his leg. He’d felt a round brush him there as it passed a fraction of an inch from his knee. He found the hole in his pants, reached inside it, and felt around for blood. When his fingers came back clean he said, “I’m good. Let’s go!” And they took off toward Embling’s apartment, afraid of what they might find.

Inside, Dominic and Jack ran to al Darkur. The Pakistani major was having no luck trying to cut his cuffs off with a small piece of glass. Caruso pulled out a folding knife and made short work of the plastic restraints, and he and Ryan helped Mohammed up to his feet.

“Where is Embling?” Ryan had to shout it over the ringing in his ears after the gunfire in the hallway.

Al Darkur shook his head. “Rehan killed him.”

That sank in for just a moment before Caruso grabbed al Darkur by the arm and said, “You are coming with us.”

“Of course.”

Dom waved to the chopper, and Hicks peeled his borrowed helo away, heading off with Chavez in the backseat.

Alarms sounded in the hallway here on the 108th floor, but the elevators were still in service. Mohammed, Jack, and Dom had no doubt there would be police in the elevators by now, but no one could have ascended more than a couple dozen floors of stairs since the shooting started, so all three ran to the stairwell and began heading down. They descended eighteen flights in three minutes of frantic running and leaping. Once down to the ninetieth floor they boarded an elevator with a few Middle Eastern businessmen who were slow to evacuate, complaining they had not smelled smoke and doubted there was any real fire. But al Darkur’s bruised face, Ryan’s bloody eye and nose, and the sopping sweat on the faces of all three of the men shocked the Middle Easterners.

When one of the men lifted his camera phoneӀon to take a photo of al Darkur, Dom Caruso snatched the device from the man’s hand. Another made to shove Dom back, but Ryan drew his pistol and waved the men back against the wall.

As the elevator dropped at forty-five miles an hour, the Pakistani major and the two American operatives pulled the phones from all three men, stomped them with their heels, and then stopped the carriage on the tenth floor. Here they ordered the men off, and then hit the button for the lower of two basement parking garages.

Fifteen minutes later, they walked out of the parking exit and into the sunlight. There the three men melted in with the crowd; they passed police and firefighters and other first responders rushing into the building, and headed out into the hot afternoon streets to find a taxi.

While Jack, Dom, and al Darkur raced to the airport, Chavez had Hicks drop him off in a parking lot near the beach. Hicks returned alone to the airport, and Ding took a taxi back to the Kempinski to break down all the surveillance equipment in the bungalow.

Their operation against Rehan here in Dubai was compromised, and that was putting it mildly. There would be no way the three men could go back to the bungalow and wait for Rehan to return; the heat would be turned up too high after the massive shootout. There would be bodies on the evening news in a city that did not have much in the way of crime, and the comings and goings of all foreigners would face tighter scrutiny. Ding had instructed Hicks to call Captain Reid and have the Gulfstream ready to go asap, but Chavez wouldn’t be on it himself. He’d need a few hours to clean up all traces of their activities at the Kempinski, and he’d just have to find another way out of the country after that.

Hicks landed the chopper right where he’d picked it up, then met Sherman at the bottom of the stairs to the Gulfstream. She’d given the man working the desk at the FBO ten thousand euros when he’d come looking for the missing helicopter, and she felt reasonably certain he’d keep his mouth shut until they were wheels-up.

Once Jack, Dom, and Mohammed arrived in their taxi, they boarded the plane, and Helen Reid called the tower to let them know they were ready to execute their flight plan.

Their customs departure had been taken care of by Ms. Sherman, with the help of another ten thousand euros.

They flew Mohammed al Darkur to Istanbul. He would make his own way back to Peshawar. They all agreed it would be dangerous for him to return to his home country. If Rehan was willing to take a step as big as his Dubai attack, there was no question he would work to have al Darkur killed as soon as the major returned. But Mohammed assured the Americans he knew a place where he could lie low, away from the elements of the ISI that were plotting against the civilian leadership. He also promised them he would find where Sam Driscoll was being kept and report back as soon as possible.