True Faith and Allegiance

59

As the van raced through the park toward the gunfight, Midas opened the door on the left side of the minivan, just behind Felix. He stood on the floorboard and leaned out, holding on to the back of the driver’s seat to steady himself with his left hand.

In the front passenger seat Chavez held his gun out the window, and he leaned out behind it to get his eyes on the weapon’s sights. Within a half-second of each other, he and Midas both opened fire. Chavez shot at the figure who had just killed the two cops, now kneeling beside a tree at the edge of the woods. Midas, on the opposite side of the minivan, engaged the men left standing on the far side of the parked police cruiser.

Chavez struck his target, but another figure revealed himself deeper in the trees with a muzzle flash and the sound of a bullet striking the grille of the minivan. Chavez assumed both these men had climbed out of the van back where Jack had said Dalca had jumped the fence to get into the park.

Another round struck Chavez’s vehicle, this time in the windshield. Felix shouted out with pain, and instantly the minivan began to veer sharply to the left.

Chavez kept firing at the second figure, even though he was certain the vehicle he was riding in was seconds from either rear-ending the police car or crashing into the trees.

Jack could see no more targets from his position, so he reloaded quickly and looked around toward the second police car on the scene. To his shock the officer near him lay crumpled on his back in the street, his weapon several feet away. When Jack couldn’t see the cop on the far side of the vehicle, he worried that the driver of the van might have shot them both. Jack had been so occupied firing at the two men at the back of the van, and trying to get an angle on the men a few dozen yards down the wood line to the west, he’d not engaged the driver, leaving him for the cops to deal with.

He saw no one behind the wheel of the van now, which meant the driver was dead or had debussed during the fight. That he could see no bullet strikes on the windshield worried him the latter was the case.

Just then he saw the lights of his team’s vehicle veer off to the left, and he heard the sound of cracking tree branches and breaking glass on the far side of the van.

Jack ran up onto the road and toward the police car nearest him, his weapon sweeping for targets. He dropped to his knees by the driver’s-side door to look through the vehicle, hoping to see the cop on the other side. He halfway worried the officer would shoot at him if he saw him, but he was more worried the man was already dead.

He saw no one, so he stayed in a low crouch and began to move around the back of the police car, his pistol still up in front of him.

As he swung around the back, he was surprised to see a man doing the same thing from the far side. Jack realized this man was not in a police uniform, and the man was swinging his gun up to fire. Jack and the dark figure both fired their pistols at the same time from point-blank range.

The men were almost touching, but their extended gun arms were both off target, so they fired by each other. Jack threw his right elbow up into the man’s face, but the instant he struck, the man swept back with his pistol and knocked Jack’s gun from his hand.

Both handguns clanked along the darkened park road.

Jack could see his opponent was Asian with a larger-than-average frame, and Jack’s elbow had not knocked the man down, so he instinctively tried to tackle the man and put him on his back. But as he threw himself into the figure at the back of the squad car, the man stepped to the side, sending Jack slamming hard against the trunk. The impact hurt, but Jack anticipated a blow from behind, so he spun around with his arm up to parry an attack. A left punch was on the way; Jack took it in the upper arm, then threw his own left jab that struck the man square in the jaw.

This snapped the man’s head back, and he reeled on his heels, but still he did not drop.

Jack feinted another attempt to tackle, and the Asian man went for it, spinning to his left. Jack went to where he thought the Asian man’s movement would take him, and he lowered his right shoulder and put his entire body behind it, slamming hard into the man’s chest.

Both Jack and his opponent landed in the middle of Aleea Michael Jackson, fists and knees and elbows thrashing in both directions. Behind the ground fight, the sound of snapping gunfire erupted again.

Jack felt the Asian man trying to reach for something at his waist, so Jack pinned his arms as best he could, and head-butted him mercilessly twice, then three times, before the man dropped back dazed.

Quickly Jack felt around the man’s body and found a stiletto clipped into his front right pants pocket.

Jack pulled it away, yanking it from its sheath in the process, and then he rolled off the man and began crawling for his pistol. He got to it just as the man behind him reached down to his ankle and pulled a tiny silver backup gun, so Jack opened fire at close range, stitching him from his pelvis to his face with bullet holes, and ending the fight.

Midas shot the third shooter behind the van, and Chavez pumped four rounds into the last man in the trees, sending him crawling off on his hands and knees, presumably to die, because he’d left his pistol where it fell. Chavez told Midas to look after Felix, and then he climbed out of the minivan and began moving forward carefully but quickly.

He’d called Jack several times over the net but had not received any response. He hated to expose his location, but he also didn’t want to walk in front of Jack’s gun. “Ding is comin’ to you!” he shouted, then passed the white van on his left.

“It’s clear!” came a response from farther back, relieving Chavez instantly. “All hostiles down!”

Chavez found Jack with a flashlight in his mouth, training it on a wounded Romanian police officer, a young man who couldn’t have been older than twenty-three. Jack had found him lying in the grass next to his vehicle. He’d been shot through the forearm and the shoulder, but he would survive.

All in all there were five dead hostiles, and one more who Ding was certain he’d shot multiple times in the torso and was probably bleeding out in the woods. There were also three dead cops. Felix had been grazed in the forehead and had some deep cuts on his cheek from broken windshield glass striking him at high speed, but he was still awake and aware, and apologizing for wrecking the minivan.

Sirens were closing in from both sides of the park by the time everyone started back to the minivan, but Chavez realized there was no way to get the vehicle back up on the road from where it had crashed. They made the decision to pile into the white Renault, although there were several bullet holes in the windows and doors. Chavez climbed behind the wheel, and the other two Campus men helped Felix inside.

As Chavez raced out of the engagement zone with his headlights extinguished, he found a narrow unpaved lane through the trees to avoid the oncoming police vehicles.

It was silent in the vehicle until they got out of the park, turned on the headlights, and began driving normally, despite the holes in the sides.

Chavez said, “That was nuts, but the only thing I know for sure is that Dalca is gone.”

Jack said, “We can go north and look for him. He still might be on foot.”

Chavez said, “Negative. We have to pick up Gavin and get out of Dalca’s neighborhood. This whole part of the city is going to be crawling with cops in no time.”

As he drove he called Clark. It was afternoon on the East Coast, and the director of operations of The Campus answered immediately. Chavez spent five minutes filling him in on every detail, and Clark said he’d try to get Mary Pat on the phone and reach out to the Romanian intelligence services. They had a great relationship with the Ryan administration, and although Mary Pat would have some difficulty explaining the fact that several undeclared agents of her government had been at the center of a running gun battle in Bucharest, she also had some cards in her favor for the conversation to come. A Romanian ex-con had been at the center of the ISIS attacks in America, under the nose of the Romanian government, and the Romanian government would have every reason on earth to help America and to keep this out of the news.

While Chavez was still on the phone with Clark, the minivan picked up Gavin and all the team’s gear in an alley two blocks from their safe house. The heavyset IT director had lugged everything down five flights of stairs and over a hundred yards, making two trips to do so, and they found him sitting on stacked Pelican cases and North Face backpacks, a sheen of sweat on his face and his chest heaving more than that of any of the three men who’d just fought off a half-dozen armed hostiles and escaped from local police ten minutes earlier.

Gavin loaded gear through the open lift-back, and then recoiled in shock as he realized the big form in the very rear of the minivan was not a duffel bag but, instead, a dead body. He didn’t know why the team was hauling a corpse, but he was too winded to say anything at the time.

He just shut the back and climbed into the side door.

They took off again, and by the time Chavez finished his conversation with Clark and was driving farther south, Gavin finally caught his breath.

He said, “I got a good look at the shooters. Did you see them?”

Chavez said, “My guess was Chinese.”

Gavin said, “Yeah. Looked like it to me. I got fair pictures of a couple of faces. We can run them against known Chinese intelligence officers to see if anything turns up.”

Jack said, “Considering their track record with cyberintel breaches… a fair assumption.”

Midas said, “Why are they after Dalca if they’re working together?”

Jack said, “One of the theories Gavin and I had was that this was some sort of inside job at the cyberfraud company, and one person, Dalca, stole the data from whatever state actor had commissioned the breach. If that’s the case — Dalca’s the thief, and China’s the state actor — then it follows that Dalca would not be thrilled about serious-looking Chinese gents knocking at his door.”

Gavin asked, “Are we going to the airport?”

Chavez shook his head. “We don’t have Dalca, so we’re not going anywhere. We need to find a place to hole up while we figure out our next move.”

Felix spoke from behind a faceful of gauze handed to him by Midas. “I know a place. My nephew is in the Army, deployed with NATO. He has a little farm in Sinteşti, just fifteen minutes out of the city. It’s not much. He’s a bachelor and never home, but it’s quiet.”

Chavez said, “Lead the way, Felix. We’ll get you patched up when we get there.”

Finally Gavin asked, “Who is the dead guy in the back?”

The other men in the vehicle all turned to look his way.

“What dead guy?” Jack asked.

“See for yourself.”

Jack crawled over some of the luggage and used a penlight to look over the body. The man was clearly dead, with a bullet wound in his forehead. Digging through his pockets, Jack pulled the man’s ID and shined a light on it. “Dragomir Vasilescu.”

Gavin said instantly, “He’s the director of ARTD. Why’d you guys shoot him?”

“We didn’t. He came with the car. Either the Chinese executed him, or else he got hit in the crossfire of the gunfight. With a hole right between his eyes, my guess is it was the former.”

Chavez said, “We don’t know if he was working for Dalca or not, and we don’t know for sure those were Chinese. Either way, whoever was after Dalca decided to hold Vasilescu responsible.”

“Yeah,” Midas said, “those guys weren’t playing around back there.”

Chavez looked at him in the low light of the van. “Clark said you told him you were looking to make a difference. Does this qualify?”

“We didn’t get Dalca, but if we just kept the guy with all the secret intel against our military and spooks from getting picked up by the Chinese, then I guess that is better than nothing.”

“Damn right,” Chavez said. “Now let’s finish the job.”