True Faith and Allegiance

33

Midas was at a full run now, heading toward the single man on the right side of the parking lot. At fifty feet away he pulled out his karambit knife and held it down by his side.

Just then the man’s backpack dropped to the ground, and a black Uzi sub gun remained in his hand. As soon as Midas saw the weapon appear, he whispered urgently, “Guns are out, Adara. Get to cover.”

Chakir never got a shot off. He stopped in the parking lot in front of a parked Metro bus, leveled his weapon toward the white-haired man just entering the station, and he felt a presence on top of him. A hooked knife blade appeared in front of his face, then it was dragged back, plunging into his throat.

At the same time a large man crushed him in a tight grasp from behind, then pushed him down to his knees. Blood shot onto the hot sidewalk in front of him and screams of shock and panic erupted in all directions.

Chakir fell face-first in a splashing pool of his own blood as the big man behind him let go.

Through her earpiece Adara heard Midas grunt with effort as he took out one gunman in the parking lot behind her on her right. She and Eddie broke into a full sprint when the screams erupted in the relative quiet of the morning. Eddie reached under his shirt while he ran, but just as they neared a large support column in the rear of the cavernous station hall, fully automatic gunfire exploded directly behind them. Adara grabbed Eddie by the shirt and tried to pull him around to cover, but lost her grip when the seventy-year-old spun and dropped to one knee, raising his pistol toward the threats.

Two submachine guns tore into the tile flooring in front of Eddie and Adara, and Adara whirled her body behind the heavy column. Still, she reached out for Laird, trying to take hold of her principal to yank him out of the line of fire.

But she couldn’t reach Eddie, and as he returned fire on the two men at the entrance to the station, he winced in pain and doubled forward, dropping his pistol and crumpling down beside it.

In the parking lot Midas yanked the Uzi away from the man with the spurting carotid artery, who lay facedown, and tried to spin to engage the other shooters, fifty yards away and just inside the wide entrance to the dark lower level of the station. But dozens of screaming and fleeing civilians blocked his path, and before he could level the weapon, out of the corner of his left eye he saw a huge black form barreling down on him.

Midas tried to leap forward, but he took a glancing blow from the left front quarter-panel of the speeding Nissan Pathfinder and it spun him through the air. He landed hard on the hot pavement, knocking the Uzi out of his hands and the earpiece from his ear.

If the driver slammed on his brakes then and there he could have shot Midas dead before he recovered from the impact, but the Pathfinder sped on across the parking lot, bouncing over a grassy median and into the bus lane, then back up on the sidewalk, racing toward the entrance to the Metro station.

Adara dove out into the line of fire, lifted Eddie’s revolver with one hand while she grabbed him by the wrist with the other hand, trying to heave him to cover behind the column near the southwest corner of the big open hall.

As she pulled on the wounded man she aimed in the direction of the gunfire and instantly saw that one of the men was down on his back, writhing in obvious agony. She assumed Laird had hit him, and adjusted her aim to the second shooter. He was firing a pistol blind into the station, missing her by ten yards but sending nine-millimeter rounds just over the heads of terrified Metro passengers lying flat on the floor.

Adara watched while the second attacker’s hand reached out and pulled the Uzi away from the wounded man. She tucked tighter behind the column as fully automatic fire rang out again and more dust and debris flew around her on all sides.

Saleh dumped the full magazine of Mehdi’s Uzi, then pulled it back around his column, crouched down, and leaned his back against the hard cover. The Language School operatives had been taught to tape magazines together, side by side, separating them by small pieces of wood so they would seat easily in the magazine well of the weapons. By this method they didn’t have to fish around in their pockets for a second magazine, and they could carry sixty-one nine-millimeter rounds on their fully loaded weapons, instead of just thirty-one.

While Saleh snapped the second magazine into position he looked next to him and saw Mehdi rolling around in pain, blood smearing on his clothes and the tile floor.

Saleh now looked to where Chakir had been positioned, wondering why he wasn’t hearing any gunfire from over there, but instead he saw Badr racing the Pathfinder across the wide pedestrian zone right toward Saleh and Mehdi’s position. Good. Saleh had no idea where Chakir had gone, but he was reasonably certain he’d shot Edward Laird, and now all he had to do was get the hell out of here in one piece.

Adara did not have a decent shot at the gunman still in the fight inside the station, especially not while multitasking trying to yank a man to safety, because the gunman was crouched behind a column just inside the wide entrance. But to buy herself some time, she fired at the column, breaking off chunks of concrete and letting the would-be assassin know she was armed and in the fight. The revolver held only five rounds, however, so she clicked on an empty chamber after two shots.

Damn it, she thought. She’d just emptied her only real weapon.

Adara saw the Pathfinder just as she pulled Laird farther behind her column. It screeched to a stop inside the station, and a pair of transit police came running down the escalator, some forty or fifty yards off Adara’s left shoulder, and immediately fired at the vehicle. The driver dumped a burst from his full-auto Uzi at Adara’s position behind her column, and all she could do was throw herself over the form of Eddie Laird and wait out the fusillade.

She looked over the older man and saw that he’d been shot in the chest, and again in the stomach. She tried to render first aid, but he pushed her hand back, then reached down into his pocket, pulled something out, and folded it into her right hand.

She didn’t know what he was trying to give her at first, but when she looked at it, she saw it was a speed loader, a cylindrical disk-shaped device with five .357 Magnum shells in it, used to load a revolver more quickly than one could by using loose bullets. It was covered with Eddie’s blood, but she didn’t bother wiping it off. As the gunfire on the far side of the column continued, she ejected the spent brass from the stubby Smith & Wesson and slid in the five fresh rounds.

Now she returned her attention to Laird, but she could see from his open, vacant eyes that he was dead.

“Shit!” she screamed. “Principal’s down! Midas? Where are you?”

When Badr slammed on his brakes inside the station hall, the Pathfinder skidded to a stop right at the edge of the column Saleh was using for cover. He then lifted his Uzi and, blasting through the closed passenger window by one-handing his Uzi across the front seat, engaged the woman and Laird, who were tucked behind the column closer to the back wall. While he did this Saleh stood up behind the column and focused his fire on the several transit police on the other side of the turnstiles near the escalators. He poured round after round at the cluster of four or five men and women, hoping to get them to go for cover so he could dive into the Nissan and make his escape.

He had no idea if young Mehdi was alive or not, because he could not see over the hood of the Pathfinder to where he’d last seen the eighteen-year-old rolling in pain, but Mehdi would have to save himself. Saleh wasn’t going to vault the hood and scoop the kid up, exposing himself to gunfire from two directions. No, Saleh fired the last round of the Uzi and raced past the driver’s-side door, then opened the door to the backseat. Just as he tucked his head in, however, glass all around him shattered, and he took a blast from a D.C. transit officer’s SIG Sauer P226, right in the neck.

He fell onto his back on the far side of the Nissan from the cops, and dropped his empty submachine gun, while he held pressure on his bloody wound.

He sat back up, looked up at Badr behind the wheel of the Pathfinder, while Badr looked down at him.

But only for a second. Then Badr put his SUV in reverse.

“Istanna!” Saleh yelled — Wait! — then he reached for his Glock tucked in his pants.

Midas knew he had to be careful rushing up into the gunfight, because from the sound of it, there were several unknown shooters, probably cops, banging it out with the two terrorists inside the station and the guy behind the wheel of the Nissan, who’d just driven right up to the scene. But Midas was back on his feet, with the Uzi from the dead man in his hands, and he knew both Adara and Laird were somewhere inside.

He’d lost his earpiece when he’d been hit by the car, and he wondered how badly he’d been hurt, but his arms and legs were moving for now, and right now was all that mattered.

He ran as fast as he could past the row of newspaper stands, dodged some more civilians trying to escape the raging battle around them, and then, when the group in front of him scattered out of the way, he saw an injured man sitting on the ground outside the Nissan, holding a neck wound with his left hand and pulling a Glock out from under his shirt with his right.

At the same time this happened, the Nissan launched backward on screaming and smoking tires, right toward Midas.

Oh, God, not again.

Midas was one hundred feet behind the vehicle, and the Nissan would run him down in less than four seconds. He remained calm, leveled the Uzi, lined the bladed front sight up on the back of the head of the driver of the black SUV, and fired a single nine-millimeter bullet from the ten-inch barrel.

The driver’s head lolled forward, and instantly the rear of the vehicle swerved to Midas’s right. It crashed into iron gates at the edge of the station entrance at speed, so hard and fast it spun 180 degrees, and then began rolling forward again across the pedestrian zone, with a dead man slumped behind the wheel.

But Midas wasn’t looking anymore, because he knew he had to stop the man sitting on the ground before he opened up with the Glock.

He swiveled his sights back to the wounded terrorist just in time to see the man’s gun arm extended toward him with the barrel pointing his way.

A shot rang out, then a second, a third, and a fourth.

The terrorist jolted forward as if shot in the back, and Adara Sherman appeared behind him. She came running around the column ten feet away from where the terrorist had been sitting, and Midas saw she had a small revolver extended in her hand, pointed at the now prostrate man with the Glock lying next to him.

The other terrorist was lying facedown in a pool of blood just feet away.

A black Range Rover screeched to a halt in the bus lane, just to Midas’s left. Adara ran past Midas and climbed into the backseat of Clark’s vehicle, and Midas himself jumped in the front passenger seat.

As soon as they climbed inside, the Nissan Pathfinder, now seventy or eighty yards behind them, rolling at idle in the bus lane, exploded with an incredible boom. As all three in the Range Rover ducked, bits of debris struck the vehicle and burning shrapnel crashed down all around.

Adara looked back and realized that the only thing that saved them from taking more of the massive detonation was that the Nissan had been behind a parked Metro bus when it blew up.

Clark did not race away instantly. He could see blood running down Midas’s forearm, streaks of blood on his T-shirt, and Adara had blood all over her white summer blouse.

“Where’s Eddie?” Clark asked.

“Sorry, John,” Adara said. “He’s gone. I tried to save him, but there was nothing I could do.”

Only now did Clark step on the gas. He drove quickly, but in a manner that wouldn’t give passersby who didn’t know better a hint anyone inside the black Range Rover had been involved in the gun battle at the station.

“How badly are you two injured?”

Midas asked, “Adara?”

“I’m unhurt. Midas is wounded. Covered in blood. We need to get him to a hospital.”

“Negative,” Midas said. “Just took a bump from that Pathfinder. Most of this blood is from one of the Crows.”

“One of the what?” Adara asked.

“Crows. The bad guys.” It was Delta Force talk, and Adara hadn’t heard it before.

Clark made a right onto Prince Street, but he knew he’d need to make fifty turns in the next ten minutes to have any prayer of clearing this scene and being certain they weren’t being followed. Plus, they’d have to switch vehicles and, more than anything, avoid returning to the office for the rest of the day, if not the week. He listened to the heavy breathing of the two trainees, then asked, “Who the hell did this?”

Midas said, “Four unsubs. I only got a good look at the one I stuck. He was twentyish, small, olive, dark hair, but lighter skin. Could have been Turkish or something. Hard to say.”

Adara added, “The guy who Laird shot… when I ran by him I got a good look. I’d be surprised if he was seventeen years old.”

“Middle Eastern descent?”

“Or North African. Yeah,” she said, distractedly. And then, “I’m so sorry, John. I tried to get Laird behind some cover, but he pulled his weapon and engaged.”

“What weapons did you see on the hostiles?” Clark asked, desperately looking for any indicator about the identity of the attackers.

Midas said, “Full-auto Uzis, and I saw a Glock.”

Adara nodded in the backseat. “I saw the same. Handguns and sub guns. Mr. Laird killed one of the men.”

Clark just nodded. “Good for Eddie.” Then he slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “Who the hell was after him?”

No one responded, because no one had a clue.