Phantom

Fifty-one

Red Team stormed through the steel gate first, the SEALs charging close behind, hard on their heels, each man leaping in turn over the three corpses. Every single combatant had his Mark 16 combat assault rifle on full auto, blasting away in short bursts at targets Hawke couldn’t even see. He could hear the distinctive return fire of AK-47s from the sharpshooters on the wall above him. He was elated when his last man made it inside the tunnel alive.

Hawke was studying his aerial map of the citadel, calculating the shortest route through the narrow streets and alleys, the maze of shanties and ancient villages inside the wall. He wasn’t too worried about street fighting. He was concerned about getting across the huge white marble piazza that housed the residential palace. He and his men would be totally exposed but he had no choice.

Stony Stollenwork, the Blue Team leader, said to Hawke, “Commander, we are go on your command.”

“Aye. Red goes left to the residence, Blue goes right into the main village. By the looks of it, there are civilians. Keep a weather eye out for snipers, Stony. Assume they have night-vision capability just like we do. The guards I’ve seen, however, do not. Good hunting, guys. On my signal.”

Hawke motioned for them to follow and headed for the mouth of the tunnel where he paused.

He turned and faced his group of determined men, the best trained men in the world, and bristling with the best equipment money could buy. He studied their faces for a moment and saw what he was searching for. They all had it, down to the last man. They all had the “look.”

“Red left, Blue right, go, go, go!” Hawke said. He took the point and sprinted across the broad white marble piazza toward the residence. He could hear Stoke and his men right behind him. He was about two hundred yards from the covered entrance when he heard Stoke cry aloud in his earpiece, “Shit!”

“Talk to me, Stokely,” Hawke barked into his radio.

“Snipers with noise suppressors. Second floor on our left, bossman. One of the bastards stung me.”

“You okay?”

“Hell, yeah, I’m okay. It was only a bullet, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t like it, man,” Hawke heard Brock say.

“Like what?”

“Taking fire from high ground. Sucks, big time. Anybody besides me a graduate of the War College?”

“Take them out then, Harry, that’s your job description,” Stoke said.

“Aw, shit, man,” Brock said. “These assholes are killing us down here. I got a guy spilling his guts out on my spit-shined boots.”

“Don’t say fuck, Harry,” Stoke said, firing as fast as he could. “Boss don’t like it. Told you that in Afghanistan.”

“Yeah? Fuck him. Somebody up there just blew half my fucking ear off.”

“So? Shut up and shoot back, man, God and country.”

“I don’t need no Negro inspirational messages right now, awright? Especially from you.”

“Yeah? I don’t need no closet homos afraid of a few little bullets, awright?”

“You know what you can do? You can go-”

“Don’t say that F-word again, Harry. Boss kick your skinny white ass.”

The sudden thump-thump of Harry’s heavy machine gun rent the air. Huge chunks of cement, calved off, raining down on the marble. Harry was finally cooperating in earnest.

Red Team was now spitting lead, and the air suddenly filled with tracer rounds as their fire chewed up the walls and obliterated the windows above. Hawke spotted guards emerging from the domed entrance, scattering, but running straight toward them. He wanted a gunfight and it looked like he was going to get one. He saw at least two of his men drop, obviously mortally wounded. Others were getting clipped, but kept on fighting, spraying fire at the dispersing enemy fighters.

Hawke dropped to one knee, put his eye to his scope, and started carefully picking off the enemy one at a time, their running figures bright red in his lens. Bullets whistled overhead, adding to his excitement quota. Times like this he always remembered Churchill’s immortal quote, “Nothing in life is quite so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

Stokely blew by him, a huge presence, firing on the run, shouting something unprintable. He was followed by Brock, whose sole redeeming feature was that he was an indestructible killing machine.

Brock had been designated the squad’s heavy machine gunner. He was laden down with the big M-60 machine gun and was laying down a base of fire of 7.62 rounds. It was devastatingly effective and instantly gave Red Team an increasing advantage over the enemy.

Hawke continued to score hits, all the while calmly talking business with Stony Stollenwork.

“Navy Blue, this is Big Red One. We’re taking heavy fire outside the residence. I’ve got casualties. At least two KIAs and some wounded. Over.”

“You need backup?”

“Negative. We can handle it. Any luck over there?”

“Affirmative. Big time. We found the lab, checked it out. Huge. Langley’s geeks were right. Looks like bioengineering, all right. A fucking bug factory. I’ve got one team setting charges right now. You hear any large explosions, it’s courtesy of the U.S. Navy. That bio-terror lab will be smoking debris in less than two minutes.”

“Good work, Stony. And your location?”

“Still looking for the machine. Doing a house-to-house in the main village, taking sporadic sniper fire from warehouse windows. Of course, we may have seen the goddamn machine and not recognized it. This is messed up, Commander. It could look like a goddamn stuffed polar bear for all we know. Over.”

“Stony, it won’t be furry. It will be metallic.”

“Yeah, yeah-detonating now-keep your head down, Big Red. Navy Blue, over.”

A massive explosion rocked the citadel and instantly Hawke saw a plume of fire, debris, and black smoke climbing into the night sky. The bug factory, at least, was history.

O nce the last man was past him, Hawke got to his feet and followed, providing his team with covering fire from their rear. Night vision helped a lot. Some dark figure would suddenly step out of a doorway and aim in his direction. Guy was dead before he finished pulling the trigger. Hawke kept expecting them to confront him using a woman as a human shield and wondering what he’d do. Hell, he knew exactly what he would do. These people used pregnant mothers wearing bomb vests to climb on buses loaded with schoolchildren.

The snipers had been nullified and the number of enemy combatants on the piazza was dwindling rapidly. These were obviously combat-hardened soldiers, unlike the three stooges at the gate. This, he knew, would be Darius Saffari’s Imperial Guard, men with orders to fight until the last man.

It was now up to Hawke to make sure they followed those orders to the letter.

He saw that Stokely and Brock had made it to the great archway that marked the palace entrance. He saw Stoke shoot the flat of his hand into the air and bring the squad to a halt outside. A moment later Hawke arrived at his friend’s side.

“Good work,” Hawke said, glancing at Brock. “Stoke, you and I go inside first for a quick recon. Harry, if you hear us taking fire, don’t hesitate to come to our aid, okay? Otherwise, wait for my signal.”

“Yes, sir.”

The two men ducked inside, weapons at the ready. They found themselves in a massive circular room with a domed ceiling that appeared to be made of gold. Some kind of reception area, Hawke guessed. Across the room was another arched doorway that seemed to open onto a long passageway, brightly illuminated. He flipped his NVGs up onto his helmet.

Waiting at the end of this corridor, Hawke hoped, was the man he’d come halfway around the world to kill.

F ifteen minutes earlier, Darius Saffari had been seated next to his huge canopied bed where his beloved Aphrodite lay. She was naked, the black silken sheets covering very little of her extraordinary body. Her golden hair fanned across the pillows, she was speaking provocatively to him and cupping one of her breasts in her hand, proffering it to his lips.

“This one is for you, master. Only for you. If you tire of it, I have another in reserve. See? Right here.”

Now she was cupping both breasts in her hands, kneading them while looking up at him from beneath long black lashes.

“No woman on earth has the right to be as beautiful as you are, my love.”

“Yours for the taking.”

“Roll over onto your stomach. I want to-”

Gunfire.

What?

How could it be? There’d been no alarm sirens wailing, no call from the radar station saying aircraft had penetrated the perimeter. Ever since the death of Osama bin Laden, Darius had been terrified of the throbbing beat of approaching helicopters bearing U.S. Navy SEALs. He’d installed more antiaircraft emplacements around the perimeter and doubled the guards. And now there was someone inside his compound shooting?

It wasn’t possible.

Yet the sound of automatic fire seemed to be getting rapidly closer to his residence.

“Darling! Quick! You must hide!” Aphrodite said.

“Hide? Where? They’ve come to kill me. They won’t leave until they’ve found me.”

“But what will you do?”

“The danger of cornering a rat, darling, is that he must bite you to get out. A long time ago I began preparations for this inevitable moment. There is a chance I won’t see another sunrise. I may escape. But if I’m to go out, at least I shall go out in a blinding blaze of glory.”

The long corridor was brightly lit with recessed LEDs, and utterly empty. As they made their way forward, Hawke noticed empty niches on each side of the passage, fairly deep and approximately man-sized. There was one about every ten feet or so, about twenty-five on each side. This is where the guards he had just encountered stood watch over Darius, most probably twenty-four hours a day. A man could sleep quite peacefully with that kind of protection.

Alas, Darius had no protection now.

Hawke could now see two massive bronze doors, closed tight, at the end. They were carved with scenes from Persia’s past glory. There could only be one man behind them.

“Brock, load a grenade round. We’re going to blow those doors,” Hawke said.

“Aye-aye, sir,” Stoke said. His M-16 was equipped to accept 40mm RPG rounds. Grenade loaded, he brought his weapon up to firing position and Suddenly, the lights went out.

Before anyone could even light up their powerful weapon-mounted SureFire lights, they could hear the great doors open with a whoosh and a deafening rattle of. 50-caliber machine-gun fire. And the object that came flying at them from the darkness behind those doors was nothing but a nightmare of death and destruction for anything in its path. The great doors slammed shut behind it.

As he dove for cover, Hawke thought it was some kind of whirling dervish, speeding toward them, spitting fire and lead in all directions by spinning rapidly, flying about two feet above the floor. No one could survive this thing, whatever the hell it was.

Hawke screamed into his battle radio, “Take cover! Get inside those niches and get down! Heads on the floor. Don’t move an inch until I give the all-clear!”

Hawke, his cheek on the cold marble, eyed the damnable thing as it flew by, the fusillade of automatic fire showering him with chunks of stone as countless rounds chopped up the marble above and behind him. Once it was past, he quick-peeked out of his niche and watched it fly down the long corridor, and, unimpeded by armed resistance, sail through the entrance and out into the night. He waited a few long minutes until he was satisfied the thing was not returning.

“All clear,” he said. “Medical corpsman, attend to any wounded and get them back to the ship safely. The rest, rendezvous on me.”

Stoke was the first to get to his feet and reach Hawke. Hawke was gratified to see the majority of his men on their feet and moving toward him, their SureFire lights wavering in the darkness.

“What the hell, boss?”

“Unmanned aerial vehicle. Never seen anything like it.”

“A flying Gatling gun, spinning like a top.”

“Yeah. Let’s blow those big doors, Stoke, and pray there aren’t any more of those bloody things behind them.”

Red Team proceeded down the rock-strewn passageway until they reached the bronze doors. Stokely Jones stepped forward and aimed his weapon, waiting for Hawke’s signal.

“We go in low, half left, half right. Jones, Brock, and I will cover the center. Based on what just happened, be prepared for anything. On my count, three… two… one… fire!”

A beat, and then, “Go! Go! Go!”

They blasted through the door, prepared, like the commander had said, for anything.

What they were not prepared for was a naked woman, sprawled across a vast bed, her thighs spread open to them, a very seductive smile on her face. He’d never seen such a sublime specimen of womanhood in his life. Her eyes were an ethereal blue that defied description. Hawke forced himself to look away. It appeared there was no one else to be found in the cavernous bedchamber, but his men were searching every closet, every nook and cranny.

“All clear,” he heard Stoke say.

“Good. Post a guard outside the door.”

Hawke leveled his weapon on her and advanced to the edge of the rumpled bed strewn with silk and satin pillows.

“Who the hell might you be?” he said, unable to keep his eyes from straying.

“Me? I’m the goddess Aphrodite,” she replied in a crisp, upper-class British accent.

“My God, you’re English.”

“No, actually, I’m not. I’m simply mimicking you.”

She smiled at all the young men surrounding her, staring at her, slack jawed, their eyes feasting hungrily upon her. She suddenly pulled a black silk duvet up under her chin, covering her torso, her breasts.

“What are you doing here?” Hawke said.

“Well, until you and your boys so rudely interrupted, I was making love.”

“Making love with whom?”

“A brilliant chap named Darius Saffari. He may have passed you in the hall.”