Target America

36

The CIA plant/concierge was of Arabic descent. He’d been working at the Luxor for the past eighteen months, spying on Arabic gamblers, and though he had gotten to know Faisal pretty well during that time, he had never once suspected the man might be funding terrorists. He stopped the elevator on the nineteenth floor. “I sure hope you guys are right about this.”

“Makes two of us,” Gil replied, wrapping a green and black shemagh around his head. The other three operators were Alpha, Trigg, and Speed. Once all their faces were concealed behind shemaghs, making them look like Shiite raiders, they unzipped the valises they had brought along and armed themselves with suppressed AK-47 rifles.

“You’re sure there’s no guard outside the room?” Gil asked.

“If there is,” said the concierge, “he’ll be the first one I’ve seen.”

“Okay,” Gil said to the others. “Remember, only gutter Arabic.” This was a shorthand form of communication they had developed during their time in the Middle East that they could use in the dark without immediately giving themselves away as Americans. It was barely rudimentary Arabic, but to the untrained American ear, they would sound enough like Arabs to convince any witnesses they were terrorists. “And try like hell not to hit the women.”

He checked his watch. “Okay,” he said to the concierge. “Ninety seconds. Let’s go.”

The concierge turned the key, and the inclinator rose to the twentieth floor. The doors opened with fifty seconds to go, revealing an Arabic security man sitting on a chair against the wall. He looked up just in time to catch a 7.62 mm round right between the eyes. His head snapped back as blood, brain, and bone spattered the wall, and he fell out of the chair. The bullet had continued on through the wall, but didn’t seem to have alerted anyone.

No one said a word to the CIA man about getting it wrong as they dismounted the inclinator and attached the breaching charges to the door; combat was an ever-evolving set of circumstances, where nothing ever remained the same.

With ten seconds left on the clock, Tuckerman sat forward on the love seat to line himself up with his target. The door imploded with a bang, and he launched himself at Faisal, delivering a flying elbow to the bridge of his nose and taking the couch over backward, dumping both Faisal and the girl onto the carpet.

The girls screamed, and Faisal’s security men struggled to gain their feet even as they were being shot down with perfectly placed bursts of heavy-caliber fire. Blood flew as the men went down without ever managing to draw their weapons. Only Ma’mun succeeded in drawing a pistol before he took a three-round burst to the face, exploding his head. His pistol went off as he flew back against the bar and crashed to the floor.

With all secondary targets down, Gil ran forward and pulled Tuckerman off of Faisal, making sure they were both still alive, and quickly secured Faisal’s hands with flex cuffs. The women were sobbing and lying on the floor covering their heads, two of them wounded by flying door fragments. Only Faisal’s blonde was silent. Speed and Trigg began dragging the others one by one into a bedroom, shouting violently at them in gutter Arabic, to keep up the charade.

Tuckerman got to his knees beside the blonde and saw the bullet hole just above her left eye. He grabbed her up into his arms, realizing that Ma’mun had inadvertently shot her as a result of a motor reflex spasm in his arm.

Gil kicked the dead girl out of Tuckerman’s arms and hauled him to his feet, shoving a silenced USP .45 into his hands and growling at him to get moving. Speed slammed the door to the bedroom where the other five girls were now flex-cuffed on the bed, all of them still sobbing loud enough to be heard through the door.

Tuckerman moved to cover the hall where the CIA man was pulling the laundry cart from the elevator. Alpha gave Faisal a shot of sodium pentothal to knock him out, and Trigg tossed him over his shoulder, carrying him into the hall and dumping him into the cart. They covered him with bed linens and began wheeling him down the hall toward the service elevator, with the CIA man leading the way.

Missy was still standing in the stairwell debating whether to leave her roommate behind when she’d heard the explosion that took out the door to Faisal’s suite. She grabbed the door handle and opened it a crack, just in time to see what looked to her like an Arab terrorist charging into the room with a machine gun. She was still peering through the crack in terror when the Arabs came back out of the room pushing the laundry cart in front of them, an Arabic concierge leading the way.

The door to the nineteenth floor burst open one flight down, and six men with pistols in their hands poured into the stairwell. One of them wore a white T-shirt with LAPD — Los Angeles Police Department — on the front. They were in town for their shift sergeant’s bachelor party in the room directly beneath Faisal’s suite. They’d heard the blast and were on their way up to check it out.

“What the hell’s going on up there?” the sergeant demanded. He was the one in the T-shirt, a barrel-chested fellow with a thick mustache, and, being in his midthirties, the oldest. The others looked like they were probably in their mid- to early twenties, rookies mostly.

“Terrorists!” Missy blurted, jumping back from the door.

The sergeant mounted the stairs with the rookies right on his tail. They stopped at the door to the twentieth, and Sergeant Mustache opened it a crack to see men in Arab headgear shoving a laundry cart down the far hall.

“Fucking towel-heads with machine guns!” he said in a harsh whisper. “Definitely tangos! We’ll hit ’em hard and fast!”

Tuckerman was looking back over his shoulder toward Faisal’s suite when the door to the stairwell opened and the cops poured into the hallway. Shots rang out, and he was knocked off his feet. He opened fire with the .45 at the bodies coming toward him, downing a big man with a mustache wearing an LAPD T-shirt.

The rookies panicked and began pouring fire down the hall.

The SEALs whipped around with their AK-47s and shot down the remaining five out-of-town cops without having time to think about what they were doing. The CIA man was dead with a bullet through his head and throat, and Tuckerman was bleeding out fast through a hole in his gut.

“It’s the abdominal aorta,” Trigg muttered in a low voice, grabbing a hotel towel from the laundry cart and jamming it against Tuckerman’s belly. “He’s gonna bleed out.”

A guest dared to poke his head from his room. Gil whipped around with his AK-47, and the guest ducked back inside, slamming the door.

“We need a fuckin’ AAT!” Trigg hissed, referring to an abdominal aortic tourniquet, a pneumatic Velcro tourniquet that wrapped around a wounded soldier’s abdomen, functioning a lot like a pneumatic pressure cuff used for taking blood pressure.

“Put ’im in the goddamn laundry cart!” Gil ordered.

“He’ll fucking bleed out!” Trigg grabbed a sheet from the cart and started to wrap it around Tuckerman’s body. The towel was already completely soaked with blood. “We can twist this tight over the towel. Call for an ambulance!”

“Get him on the elevator!” Gil took his iPhone from his harness and turned it on. He did not notice that Marie had left him a voice mail and would not have paid it any attention if he had. They got Tuckerman onto the service elevator, and Speed ran back for the laundry cart containing the unconscious Muhammad Faisal. The dead CIA man was left behind in the hall.

Gil had seen enough men die in combat to know that Tuckerman would be dead before they made it to the ground floor, but he got Crosswhite on the phone and made sure the paramedics would be ready to meet them at the service entrance below.

“Who were those fuckin’ assholes?” Speed asked ripping the shemagh from his head.

“Beats the fuck outta me.” Gil knelt down beside Tuckerman, putting his hand beneath his head. “How ya doin’, partner? You gonna hang on for us?”

Tuckerman reached for Gil’s free hand. “Thanks for not letting me rot in prison,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I disappointed you.” He glanced at Trigg. “You can let go, dude. The pressure’s killin’ me.”

Trigg’s face contorted with emotion, and he released his grip on the twisted sheet tourniquet.

Gil squeezed his hand, feeling the dying man’s grip fading fast. “Anybody you want me to talk to when this is over? Anybody you want me to go see?”

Tuckerman shook his head, his face pallid. “I’m good to go, Chief. You guys are my family.”

Gil bent down to kiss his forehead. “You rest easy, brother. We’ll catch up to you on the other side. You wait for us there! Hear me?”

Tuckerman winked. “You know I do…” A few moments later he was gone, leaving behind only the faintest of smiles.