Prey

Chapter Forty-Five

Sunday September 26th

Lisa Abercombie was furious.

"They can't do that!" she screamed into the phone.

"My dear, they not only can do it, they will do it if you don't find Chareaux and this Agent Lightstone immediately," Albert Bloom warned.

"But-"

"Lisa, listen to me. The FBI is beginning to probe into areas that we do not want examined. And if they ever manage to discover what you and Wolfe have done, there will be nothing we can do to protect you. Nothing."

The words "you and Wolfe" jarred at Lisa Abercombie's soul, but she forced herself to ignore their lethal implications.

"Albert, that's not fair," she protested in a raspy voice, finding it difficult to believe that she was actually using those words. "You provided the Chareaux brothers with the best legal team in D.C."

"Yes, but they had absolutely no connection to any of us," Bloom reminded. "You do, and we cannot allow it to go beyond you. Not something this big. You, of all people, should understand that."

"Albert, you have to tell them-" Abercombie started in, but her mentor and lover would have none of it.

"Lisa, listen to me," Bloom said in a calm, cold voice. "I can't tell them anything right now. They are telling me."

"But-"

"Find Lightstone and Chareaux, and dispose of them immediately," Bloom repeated. "It's the only thing you can do."

The phone disconnected with a loud click.

"Goddamn you, Albert, you spineless bastard!" Abercombie screamed, her face ashen with fury as she slammed the phone down on her desk and stormed out into the hallway.

"Where's Maas?" she yelled at the first person she saw. She followed the aide's stammered directions until she burst into the central conference room on the lower level to find Maas, Gunter Aben, Carine Mueller, and Kimiko Osan standing around the sprawled, dirty, and blood-splattered body of Alex Chareaux.

He was lying facedown on the floor, his wrists hooked together with nylon ties behind his back. Around his neck, a long chain was fastened, the end of which was held by Carine Mueller. Abercombie could see that Chareaux's eyes were blackened and swollen and that blood was dripping from his mouth, nose, and ears.

As she came forward, Abercombie also noted that Gunter Aben had what appeared to be a recently bandaged cut on his left forearm, and that Kimiko Osan had a similar wound across her left cheek. Of the four, only Gerd Maas seemed to be amused by the situation.

"Thank God you found him," Lisa Abercombie said fervently as she stepped into the loose circle formed by the four ICER team members, and then leaped backward in shock as Alex Chareaux suddenly brought his knees up to his chest, rolled, came up fast, growled in the depths of his throat, and lunged at her with his teeth bared like a wild beast… only to be hammered back to the floor with the butt of the shotgun in Gunter Aben's gloved hands.

"For God's sake, what did you bring him here for?" Abercombie demanded, shaken by the insane fury that she had seen in the Cajun poacher's reddened eyes. "Kill him right now, and then go out there and find Lightstone."

"Not yet," Gerd Maas said coldly. "It is better to use him."

"What do you mean, use him?" Abercombie's dark eyes widened in disbelief. "The Committee is getting ready to shut us down, right now, if we don't find this Lightstone bastard."

"There is no need to go after Lightstone," Maas smiled, his pale eyes gleaming with amusement. "He will come to us."

"Maas, listen to me-" Lisa Abercombie started to plead, and then the excited voice of Dr. Morito Asai caught everyone's attention.

"We have a problem!" he yelled from the doorway leading to the conference room.

"What is it?" Abercombie yelled back.

"Park service people. They say they have an emergency situation. They must land. Injured people."

"For God's sake, no! Tell them they can't land here!"

"I will try, but-"

"Jesus Christ!" Abercombie cursed as she looked around wildly and saw Gerd Maas-with a wide grin on his face now-step forward and pull Alex Chareaux to his feet.

"Hey, where are you going with him?" Abercombie demanded, but Maas ignored her as he and the remains of his ICER assault group started walking toward the connecting hallway to the main training areas, dragging Alex Chareaux along as they went.

Still cursing and mumbling to herself, Abercombie ran to the command-and-control room and grabbed the microphone out of the hands of the radio-room technician.

"What's their call sign?" she demanded.

"Uh, Two-Five-Poppa-Sierra," the technician stammered.

"Two-Five-Poppa-Sierra, this is Whitehorse Cabin," Abercombie spoke into the microphone. "Do you read me?"

"Two-Five-Poppa-Sierra, that's a roger," the static-filled voice acknowledged.

"Two-Five-Poppa-Sierra, Whitehorse Cabin is a restricted area. You cannot land here."

"Uh, roger that," the pilot responded. "Be advised we have an emergency situation. The Park Service is fighting a brush fire in the southeast sector. I'm transporting three badly injured smoke jumpers to Gardiner, and I'm losing oil pressure. I have to put down, and these guys are in bad shape. We need help from your medical staff."

Abercombie looked up at the helicopter camera monitor that showed a white helicopter with a red cross on the side setting down onto the helipad in a swirl of dirt and leaves. Dark smoke was coming out of one of the engine exhausts. The side door slid open, and men in fire-fighting uniforms jumped out onto the asphalt pad, crouching down to avoid the swirling blades as they pulled the first stretcher out.

Abercombie turned to the technician. "Close and lock the emergency doors," she ordered.

"But they-" the technician started to protest, only to wither under Lisa Abercombie's rage as she screamed, "Do what I tell you, and do it now!"

The technician reached for the five levers that controlled the two upper-level and three lower-level emergency exit doors to the underground facility.

"What's the matter with you? Hurry up and close those doors!" Lisa Abercombie yelled when nothing happened. The technician began to tug frantically on the individual levers.

"I can't! They're stuck. Somebody must have locked them open!"

"What?" Abercombie screamed as she watched the second and third stretcher being unloaded.

"Call MacDonald," Asai advised. "He will know what to do."

"Sergeant MacDonald, call the command-and-control room immediately," the technician spoke hurriedly into the intercom mike. "Repeat. Sergeant Clarence MacDonald. Call the command-and-control room immediately."

Abercombie and the technician waited expectantly, but there was no answer.

"For Christ's sake, I'm going to the training area to get Maas," Lisa Abercombie snarled, and then started for the door when the first shots rang out in the underground training facility.

The first stretcher team was waved through by Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald and Master Gunnery Sergeant Gary Brickard, both dressed in full combat gear and armed with M-16 assault rifles.

As soon as they were inside, Paxton rolled off the stretcher. The carriers, both officers of the Louisiana Department of Fish and Game, let the stretcher drop. All three men, armed with shoulder-holstered pistols and wearing Kevlar vests under their fire-fighting jackets, took up defensive positions. Gunter Aben took one look and cut loose with a stream of 9mm submachine gun bullets that caught one of the Louisiana officers across the chest and throat. Aben immediately twisted away then and disappeared as a burst of 5.56mm ball ammo from MacDonald's M-16 and three evenly spaced hollow-point rounds from Paxton's SIG-Sauer shredded wood and plasterboard around his head.

The second stretcher team, consisting of Lightstone and Takahara as the bearers of a stretcher loaded with assault rifles, shotguns, stun grenades, ammo pouches, and first-aid gear, hit the floor to avoid the first flurry of gunshots. They disappeared then down the sloping helipad access tunnel, followed by MacDonald and Brickard and the Louisiana sergeant as the third stretcher team-consisting of the four remaining Louisiana officers and Stoner-moved into defensive positions and immediately went to the aid of the injured officer.

By the time they got to the end of the tunnel and were positioned to cover the swinging access doors to the conference room and the stairwell, MacDonald was already forming a plan.

As Brickard, Lightstone, Takahara, the Louisiana sergeant, and three of his officers crouched against the angled walls, their weapons out and ready, watching for the first sign of movement at either of the doors, MacDonald nodded at Lightstone.

"I'm Clarence MacDonald," the veteran combat soldier said, and then motioned with his head. "The gunny over there is Gary Brickard. You Lightstone?"

"Yeah," Lightstone nodded as he continued to scan the opposite corridor.

"Anybody else on the way?"

"Eventually there'll probably be a couple hundred FBI agents surrounding the park," Lightstone replied, "but right now, we're it. How many of them are there?"

"Seven," MacDonald said, "and they're all damn good."

"Which one's the white-haired asshole with the rhino-skin boots?" Lightstone asked.

"That's Maas," Brickard said. "He's the one you really gotta watch out for," the gunny sergeant advised. "Man's got reflexes like a cat. You see him, you better put him down fast."

"What about Chareaux?" the Louisiana sergeant asked quickly.

"They brought him in about a half hour ago on the end of a chain," MacDonald said, "beat to shit, and now they're hauling him around like a goddamn dog."

"We want him alive," the Louisiana sergeant said.

"Fine with me," MacDonald shrugged. "Okay, here's what we'll-"

At that moment, a pair of crashing gunshots rang out, followed by the sound of a loud, pulsing alarm that echoed through the huge underground facility.

The volley of gunfire in the distant corridor sent Lisa Abercombie running back into the command-and-control room, where she found Dr. Morito Asai trying to follow the movements of the invading law-enforcement officers on a bank of monitors as he spoke into his headset microphone. The communications technician had long since disappeared.

"Who are they?" Abercombie demanded as she closed and locked the glass-paneled door behind her.

"I don't know yet." Asai shook his head as he continued to adjust one of the security cameras.

"Look, there!" he said, pointing to the main screen.

"Who… wait a minute!" Lisa Abercombie's eyes bulged. "That's Paxton! He's supposed to be dead!"

"And Agent Stoner, too," Asai said as he switched over to the outside helipad camera. He focused on the huge agent who was guarding the entry into the facility.

"And Takahara, and… oh, my God, Lightner, he's here!" Lisa Abercombie whispered as Asai focused security camera number twelve on his easily recognizable face.

"Yes, definitely him," Asai smiled as he hit a button with his foot and spoke into his headset microphone.

"Maas, I can see eight intruders outside the lower-level stairwell. One of them is Lightner."

"Ah, gut!" The German assault-group leader's voice echoed over the speakers.

Then Asai and Abercombie whirled around with a start, Asai going for his shoulder-holstered semiautomatic pistol pistol, as Paul Saltmann entered the control room with a Smith amp; Wesson. 44 Magnum revolver in his muscular hand.

"Christ! You scared the shit out of me," Lisa Abercombie gasped as she glared at her intelligence specialist. "What the hell is going on out there?"

"Looks to me like MacDonald and Brickard changed sides," Saltmann said as he glanced over at one of the monitors and saw the two combat-uniformed soldiers. "How many of them are there?"

"Not so many," Asai shrugged as he took his hand away from the grip of the small automatic. "Maybe ten at the most."

Saltmann smiled and shook his curly head sadly. "Those poor bastards. Maas can handle that many by him-Oh, shit!" The intelligence specialist blinked, his eyes widening in surprise as he stared at one of the far monitors.

"What's the matter?" Abercombie demanded, and then stared in horror at the row of camera monitors that showed the expanse of land surrounding the facility. Each of the six small screens showed at least two assault-type helicopters landing and unloading armed combatants.

Saltmann shook his head and turned to Asai. "Can you tell who they are?"

Dr. Morito Asai made several rapid adjustments to the control panel. The camera lenses zoomed in until all three of them could easily read the lettering on the raid jackets and the sides of the helicopters.

"FBI and U.S. Army," Lisa Abercombie whispered. "My God, what are we going to do?"

Dr. Morito Asai turned to look at Abercombie, and she realized that he was waiting for her to make a decision.

It occurred to her then that she might have a chance, after all, if she could tell her story to the right people… to someone who would appreciate the significance of what they had tried to do and the magnitude of the risks that were necessarily involved.

Someone who would understand.

"Tell Maas that we must surrender immediately. There are too many of them for us to fight," she said to the Japanese team leader, who nodded solemnly and turned back to his control board.

Paul Saltmann raised the. 44 Magnum and triggered off a high-velocity round that blew Dr. Morito Asai out of the console chair like a rag doll. The concussion sent Lisa Abercombie staggering back against the glass wall in shock, her hands clenched tightly over her ears.

"Why did you do that?" she shrieked, deafened by the explosive force of the contained gunshot, unable to hear the words even as she screamed them.

"Sorry, folks, but we are not going to surrender," Saltmann said evenly. He shifted the aim point of the powerful handgun in his two-handed grip and fired a second expanding. 44 bullet. The creator of ICER, hit square in the chest, was flung backward through the shattering glass wall.

Paul Saltmann checked to make sure that no one else was around, moved up to the control board and called up the menu on the computer screen. He selected "Security," typed in his password, and selected "Destruction," typed in a second password, checked his watch, typed in the numerals 45, selected "Activate," and then "Confirm."

Then, after working through a similar set of commands to cancel all other passwords out of the system, Paul Saltmann ran out into the tunnel corridor leading to the ICER team's quarters while red warning lights began to blink overhead and a blaring alarm began to pulse and echo through the building.

No one had bothered to tell Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald that the engineers who created the Whitehorse Cabin training facility had incorporated an interesting twist into the design of the lower-level command-and-control center: namely, the destruct sequence overrode the manual settings and automatically closed the five exterior emergency doors that provided access to the secured facility.

Dwight Stoner discovered this when a heavy concrete door suddenly started to roll across the twelve-foot opening. The crippled agent took one last look at the rapidly approaching helicopters, shrugged, and barely managed to jump inside the access tunnel before the leading edge of the six-inch-thick panel slammed into the locking mechanism on the opposite side, effectively sealing off the facility from outsiders.

Shaking his head and mumbling to himself, Dwight Stoner grabbed his crutch in one hand, a twelve-gauge shotgun in the other, and began hobbling down the sloping corridor toward the sound of distant gunfire, barely audible over the pulsing alarm.

The stairwell leading to the upper level of the training facility had become a free-fire battle zone.

As the agents, state wildlife officers, and military instructors moved up the stairs to the upper level behind the concussive blasts of flash grenades and directed gunfire, and the ICER counterterrorists continued to retreat, both sides shot out lights to conceal their position and their intended movements. As a result, most of the available light in the smoke-filled stairwell and upper-level hallways came from red emergency lights pulsing in a synchronous rhythm with the echoing alarm.

And thanks to the frenzied antics of Gunter Aben and Carine Mueller, who delayed the raid team's advance with bursts of 9mm submachine gun fire, the bullet-pocked stairs and hallways were now slippery with blood and expended brass casings.

Of the ten men who had begun the raid from the deceptive landing of the white-painted helicopter, two Louisiana officers were dead and four others-Brickard, Lightstone, Paxton, and the Louisiana sergeant-had been wounded.

On the ICER team side, Carine Mueller was now bleeding from the nose-the result of being too close to the stairwell door when a flash grenade went off-and limping from a ricocheting chunk of buckshot in her upper thigh. Gunter Aben had sustained at least four or five minor wounds, which hadn't slowed him down at all. He continued to dive and twist and roll from one barricade to another, sending three- and four-round bursts of 9mm ball ammo at anything that moved in the reddish-streaked darkness.

Farther back in the forestlike Hogan's Alley, Gerd Maas worked with cool, calm, and deliberate movements to set the stage for his latest, and possibly his most exhilarating, brush with death. He ignored the curses and screams of Alex Chareaux as Kimiko Osan guarded her assault group leader's back with careful sweeps of her laser-aimed Colt Commando submachine gun.

When Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald and Special Agent Mike Takahara burst into the lower-level command-and-control room, they first spotted the bloody, lifeless body of Dr. Morito Asai, then looked out through the broken glass and discovered Lisa Abercombie, equally dead.

Both men looked up when the curly-haired man in the distinctive blue FBI raid jacket stepped into the room. MacDonald tried to bring his M-16 up in time, but the. 44 round caught him high in the chest and slammed him backward into one of the steel pillars just as the second. 44 slug mushroomed into Mike Takahara's solar plexus and sent the shocked technical agent stumbling backward through the broken glass wall and atop the sprawled body of Lisa Abercombie.

Then, humming contentedly to himself, Paul Saltmann checked his watch, glanced at the flashing red numerals on the control board that had changed from forty-five to thirty-six, and walked through the destruction he'd caused toward the lower-level conference room and stairwell.

As he did so, Saltmann was unaware that wheelchair- bound Roy Parker, blocked from escape by the six-inch- thick emergency doors, was rapidly working himself toward the command-and-control center from the opposite direction.

It was Lightstone who picked up on the pattern first, noting that as the returning ICER members worked their way back into the first of the Hogan's Alleys, designed to look like two floors and the open plaza of an indoor shopping center, Carine Mueller had started to conserve her energy by waiting for the explosion of the flash grenade and then running immediately to the position vacated by Gunter Aben, invariably using the cover of her previous position to protect herself from the raid team's directed gunfire.

"Hey, Brickard, Paxton," Lightstone hissed as he holstered his pistol, pulled one of the flash grenades off his belt, and then signaled with his hands what he intended to do.

They waited until Gunter Aben suddenly rolled away to a new position under the covering fire of Carine Mueller's H amp;K submachine gun.

Then, after Paxton heaved one of the canister grenades at Mueller's position, and Brickard and the remaining three Louisiana wildlife officers opened fire on both positions, Lightstone took three lunging steps forward, pulled the pin and flung the grenade toward the barricade position that Gunter Aben had just vacated.

At that point, Henry Lightstone had less than a second to roll forward and cover his ears as the detonation of the first grenade sent shock waves through every inch of his exposed body.

Dazed by the concussive force of the blast, Lightstone was still reaching for his shoulder-holstered 10mm semiautomatic when Carine Mueller broke from cover, lunged toward her new position, and then saw Lightstone out in the open.

Hesitating in mid-stride, the beautiful young counter- terrorist started to come around with her finger tightening on the trigger of her H amp;K when her eyes caught the motion of the rolling canister out in front of her. Reacting instinctively, she turned away just as the grenade exploded and sent her tumbling to the floor, the H amp;K clattering away in the red-tinged semidarkness.

Nearly unconscious and bleeding from the mouth, ears, and nose, Carine Mueller's right hand fumbled for her belt-holstered Model Sixty-six. 357. Henry Lightstone centered the sights of the 10mm automatic on the young German woman's hand, because they had all agreed that they wanted to take someone out of here alive.

But then the words of A1 Grynard flashed through his mind: Whoever killed Scoby used a couple of Model Sixty-sixes.

Without thinking about it further, Henry Lightstone shifted the sights of the heavy automatic, sent five 10mm hollow-point rounds into Mueller's upper chest, throat, and head, then rolled away from the stream of 9mm slugs that tore the wooden floor into splinters right where he had been lying… and Gunter Aben screamed out his rage in his native German tongue.

Continuing to twist away from the furious 9mm assault, Lightstone fired one round at the German's exposed head, missed, felt the jarring clack as the receiver jammed open on an empty magazine, and was reaching for one of the loaded magazines on his belt when Gunter Aben came back around the corner fast, the H amp;K leveled, a sneering smile on his face.

The impact of the first. 44 bullet nearly severed Gunter Aben's arm as it ripped through bone and tissue, punched through the gap where his thick Kevlar vest didn't quite overlap, splintered a rib, and then buried itself in the counterterrorist's heart.

The second bullet that slammed his back into the wall was unnecessary. The ICER team member, who could never quite control his temper when he tried to outwit Clarence MacDonald's simulators, was dead before his knees hit the floor.

When Dwight Stoner hobbled into the lower-level conference room, he saw Mike Takahara trying to push himself up on his hands and knees, coughing out blood in the process. As he moved to the doorway of the command-and- control center, Stoner saw the sprawled bodies of Clarence MacDonald, who was starting to moan and move around a little, and Morito Asai, who wasn't doing either, and a man in a wheelchair working frantically at the keyboard of the control console.

Roy Parker didn't see or hear Dwight Stoner coming until the agent's huge body suddenly filled the doorway and blocked out the incoming light from the adjoining conference room. Parker turned to look and then drew back in shock as he saw the huge form pointing the barrel of the 12-gauge pump shotgun directly at his head.

"Move away from that desk," Stoner ordered in a cold, deep, and unfeeling voice.

"It wasn't me, buddy. I didn't shoot any of them," Parker said carefully, trying to keep his voice steady as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the red numerals on the control board change from thirty-three to thirty-two.

"Shut up and keep your hands in the air," Stoner ordered.

"I'm carrying a Beretta nine-millimeter in a shoulder holster, right-hand draw, under my jacket," Parker said quietly as Stoner moved slowly around to his back. "It's clean. It hasn't been fired." Then Parker took a deep breath as he felt the shotgun barrel against the base of his skull.

"Look at the blood splatters on that wall," Parker continued in a voice as steady as he could manage. "No nine-mil in the world could do that. That's Saltmann. He carries a forty-four mag with hot loads. Like a fucking freight train when they hit."

The barrel of the shotgun dug deeper into Parker's neck, and he immediately realized that he had said the wrong thing.

"Hey, no, wait a minute!" Parker whispered frantically. "You gotta listen. They wired this place to blow, and it's-"

"It's okay, man. He's not the shooter," Mike Takahara gasped in a pain-filled voice, holding his right arm tight against his severely broken rib cage as he slowly reached into Roy Parker's jacket with his left hand and pulled out the loaded and locked 9mm pistol. "Big curly-haired bastard wearing an FBI raid jacket."

"That's Saltmann," Parker nodded, nervously aware that the barrel of the shotgun was still pressed tight against his neck. "He's the cutter on this deal. He's supposed to shut the whole operation down and blow the place if something goes wrong."

"Keep talking," Mike Takahara directed in a painful whisper. He stuck the 9mm Beretta in the back of his belt, brought Parker's hands down, one at a time, and handcuffed them through the left wheel of the wheelchair. Then he wiped the blood from his mouth and tried not to cough or breathe any more than he had to as he placed his shaky left hand on the console for support. He tried to blink his eyes clear enough to see how the control board had been designed.

"The guys on top wanted to make sure they didn't end up with another Watergate or an Iran-Contra deal blowing up in their face," Parker went on carefully, sensing that the two agents were beyond the point of caring about rules and regulations. "So they put Saltmann, Arty, Corrie, and me in as a safety valve. Something goes wrong, we're supposed to make the whole thing go away."

In the background, Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald clutched both forearms to his chest in the area where the hot-loaded. 44 Magnum expanding round had mushroomed against his Kevlar vest, breaking several of his ribs and causing massive bruising all the way to the pericardial covering of his heart. He tried to bring himself up to a sitting position.

"That what happened to the little guy in the doorway, and to the broad out there on the floor?" Stoner growled.

"Yeah. We're supposed to take everybody out so they don't get any ideas about talking," Parker nodded. "Only, Arty and Corrie are dead, and I'm pretty much out of it, so Saltmann's on his own."

"So who takes you guys out?" Mike Takahara asked in almost a whisper as he motioned for Stoner to drag the wheelchair out of the way. Then he sat down gratefully in the console chair and used his left hand to call up the menu on the screen.

"Yeah, we talked about that," Parker said nervously as he felt the shotgun barrel dig into the back of his neck again. "We've got FBI and DEA credentials that're supposed to look good enough to let us talk our way out, but we figured-"

Then the red numerals on the console board changed from a thirty-two to a thirty-one, and Parker started to panic.

"For Christ's sake, man," he pleaded, "we've gotta shut this damn thing down. It's gonna blow in thirty-one minutes, and I can't do a goddamn thing to stop it."

Mike Takahara had already discovered that "Security/ Destruction" was locked out of the menu. He tried to go in through the operating system and found himself blocked there also.

"What's your access code?" Takahara whispered.

"'Sunshine,' but it won't do you any good," Parker said. "I already tried. It doesn't work."

Mike Takahara tried a series of machine language instructions that should have given him access to the back door of the processing chip, but they didn't.

The red numerals changed from thirty-one to twenty-nine.

"How's it wired?" Mike Takahara finally asked.

"It's a dual system," Parker said. "First series of explosions takes out the internal cross-support walls, and probably kills everybody inside. The second series goes off fifteen seconds later and basically blows the two main side walls into each other like a couple of fucking bricks."

Dwight Stoner muttered something under his breath, but Takahara ignored it.

"What's the explosive?" he asked.

"They said C-Four, but I don't know," Parker said. "They never showed any of it to me."

"Come on, Snoopy, how long's it gonna take you to break into this thing?" Dwight Stoner demanded uneasily as he listened to the sound of automatic gunfire in the distance.

"The long, safe way, probably a couple of hours," Takahara whispered, wincing as he readjusted himself in the chair.

"For Christ's sake, we haven't got a couple of hours!" Roy Parker exploded, and then froze as the shotgun barrel pushed harder against his neck. "Come on, man," he pleaded quietly. "We can't get out of here, because the goddamned doors are blocked off. Do it the fucking short way."

"Right," Mike Takahara nodded, groaning in pain as he reached around behind his back and drew out Parker's 9mm Beretta. Then, before Dwight Stoner could say or do anything to stop him, the technical agent fired five 9mm pistol rounds pointblank into the main processing unit of the command-and-control computer.

The handcuffed counterterrorist looked on in horror as every light on the command-and-control console seemed to increase in intensity and the red numeral display went haywire. Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, the console board went dead, the red numerals blinked out, the pulsating alarm was suddenly silent, and the red warning lights stopped flashing.

As Roy Parker and Dwight Stoner turned to stare at Mike Takahara with expressions that ranged from absolute horror to stunned disbelief, the technical agent looked up at the two men and said with the smallest shrug possible, "I cheat."

Shaking his head and muttering another heartfelt curse, Stoner hobbled over to where Sergeant Clarence MacDonald had managed to pull himself up into a sitting position. Judging from the stunned expression on the combat instructor's face, Stoner figured that MacDonald was alert enough to realize what Mike Takahara had done.

"Here," he said as he set the 12-gauge shotgun in MacDonald's lap. "Far as I'm concerned, you can shoot both of them any time you want."

Then, drawing the. 45 SIG-Sauer from his shoulder holster, Dwight Stoner started hobbling on his single crutch toward the distant stairwell.