Warlord

SIXTY-FOUR

THE GOOD NEWS, STOKE THOUGHT, WAS they'd gotten very lucky with the weather: a storm had rolled in. Heavy fog with intermittent rain. That meant it would be a lot harder for any enemy shooters on the ground to hit them once they'd deployed their chutes. There was also a lot of booming thunder around them that would mask the thwump-thwump of the rotor blades when they descended from their current altitude.

The bad news, Stoke realized, was with the heavy ground fog at night, it might be a hell of a lot harder to spot the LZ, or, if you missed the landing zone, find another good spot to land on the rooftops of Balmoral Castle without breaking your damn leg or worse. Stoke had never seen so many damn chimneys on one house in his whole damn life.

"How are you feeling, big man?" Hawke, who was seated next to him, asked, just loud enough to be heard over the noise of the twin rotors.

"My pucker factor is rising a little."

"Really? Why?"

"What you said to me back there in the hangar at Stornoway."

"Which part, Stoke?"

"The part where you said, and I quote, 'This is the big one, Stoke, the counterterrorist Lifetime Achievement Award, so get ready. It won't look good on either of our resumes if we come back from this mission with a dead Queen.'"

"Oh, right. I did say that, didn't I? Well, it's true, isn't it?"

"Damn straight it's true. That's why my pucker factor is so elevated."

Hawke said, "And another thing, Stokely. Don't shoot my best friend Ambrose Congreve if you can possibly avoid it, all right?"

"I thought I was your best friend."

"You are."

"How's that work again?"

"It's a tie, all right? A dead heat."

"Don't say dead anything, okay?"

"Look. We can do this, Stoke. These SAS Special Projects troops are the best-trained counterterrorist outfit in the world. You've never worked with anybody remotely as good as these guys at this kind of thing. Seriously, Stoke. They wrote the book."

"Hell I haven't. I'm telling you, man, the U.S. Navy SEALs are as good as anybody in the whole damn world. Maybe these guys wrote the book, but the SEALs? They made the movie and the movie is better."

"You're right. It's a tie, okay?"

"Yeah. I guess."

At the stroke of midnight, Hawke's chosen mode of transportation, a matte-black Royal Air Force Chinook HC2 helicopter with no RAF insignia, had arrived on station at its insertion point, five thousand feet directly above Balmoral Castle. The tandem-rotor Chinook carries up to fifty-five troops and, because this might be a casualty evacuation, twenty-four stretchers. There were two RAF medical officers aboard, too, with full trauma emergency capabilities.

Early on in the planning at RAF Stornoway, Hawke had decided this had to be a nighttime operation. The Chinook's cockpit had full nighttime capability when operated with night-vision goggles. The helo was armed, too, with two M134 six-barreled miniguns, one in each front side window, and an M60D heavy machine gun on the ramp. It was the perfect aircraft to conduct a low-level night operation in a hostile environment.

At this moment, the Chinook, flying IFR, on instruments, with no visible lights, was hovering, an invisible black-bellied monster hiding in the soup.

In the belly of the beast, in addition to the mission commander, Alex Hawke, and his colleague, Stokely Jones, there were two fourteen-man squads of SAS counterterrorist commandos known as SP teams. They specialized in assault and hostage rescue missions. They were all checking and rechecking their gear and weapons, sitting directly across from each other on the canvas cargo sling seats that ran up and down the interior fuselage of the Chinook.

All were wearing one-piece assault suits made of flame-retardant Nomex 3, bulletproof armored waistcoats, ceramic armor plates covering the front, back, and groin, and an armored helmet capable of stopping a 9mm round at close range.

The weapons they carried included the HK MP5 submachine gun, the SIG Sauer P226 pistol, and Remington shotguns loaded with "hattan" rounds designed to shoot off door hinges without putting hostages at risk. From their utility belts hung stun grenades, flash-bang grenades, and smokers.

The SAS had two ways of going into a hostage situation: quiet or noisy. Hawke had insisted they go in quiet; thus, their weapons were all carrying noise suppressors. And he'd added two of the SAS's very best snipers to the team.

One lucky troop would jump with a very cumbersome "Harvey Wallbanger" in his arms. This wall-breaching device fired a water-filled plastic projectile at high velocity, causing a breach. The projectile immediately lost all kinetic energy once the breach was made. Much safer, and quieter, than explosives.

In addition, each troop carried a postcard-sized blueprint of the enemy-occupied stronghold to be assaulted, plasti-cuffs, and glow sticks filled with chemicals that glow when the sticks were snapped. These would be used to mark an area as "cleared."

Numerous SAS sniper teams were already in place on the ground. They were arrayed around the Balmoral estate's perimeter. And they were more than ready to take out any "X-rays," as terrorists were called, once an assault was launched to rescue the "Yankees," which is what the SAS called all hostages, including, for the very first time, the entire Royal Family of England. A little irony there, Hawke thought, Royal Yankees.

A blowup of a recent aerial photograph of the castle from directly above was taped to the bulkhead of the cargo hold where the troops were waiting for the jump order. A red circle marked an area of the roof large enough for the big Chinook to set down. This was also the designated LZ, a one-hundred-square-yard landing zone, for the paratroopers. The waiting troops had been studying the aerial photo carefully, looking for a good bail-out spot if for some reason they missed the LZ entirely.

DIRECTLY BENEATH THE CHOPPER and Balmoral Castle, three stories underground, Ambrose Congreve was spoon-feeding his friend Sir David Trulove hot cream of tomato soup. This, courtesy of Higgins up in the kitchen. C, the crusty old gent, having taken two bullets at extremely close range, was very lucky to be alive. The credit went to one of his fellow hostages, Lady Beale, who happened to be a volunteer nurse at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. The two slugs had narrowly missed his heart en route to passing through his body. Lady Beale had torn her purple silk skirt into strips to use as temporary bandages for the director of MI6.

It had been an extremely long and difficult day.

The killing of Colonel Zazi had had a predictable result on the mood down in the cellar. The terrorists, having seen their heroic leader shot dead, had become much harsher in their treatment of the prisoners. Prior to Zazi's death, the young killers had pretty much ignored their aristocratic captives. Now that he was dead, they went out of their way to shout at, kick, and insult them at every opportunity.

As if that were not enough, there was the infamous "Mr. Smith."

Ambrose could scarcely imagine how Prince Charles must be feeling. Shattered, to say the very least. To learn, to discover, that one of one's closest friends, trusted beyond measure, beyond any faint shadow of doubt for decades, a very senior member of the nation's key intelligence service, had in fact murdered the Prince of Wales's beloved godfather, Lord Mountbatten. And, in a stunning revelation, to learn he'd killed the mother of his children, Diana, as well. It simply had to be beyond devastating for him and the boys.

The monster, this Mr. Smith now unmasked as the MI6 heir apparent, Montague Thorne, had even laughed while describing to the Queen in great detail how he had masterminded the horrific fire at Windsor Castle. And then, gloating, told Prince Charles and his two sons just how close he'd come to assassinating Prince Harry in Afghanistan only one month earlier!

Harry, enraged upon hearing this, jumped to his feet and spat out, "But we almost assassinated you, didn't we, Thorne, you filthy bastard! How's your idiot sniper doing? Is he feeling better?" This earned him a vicious backhand blow to the side of his head. For a moment, everyone in the cellar held their breath, looking at the madman Thorne, knowing they all were teetering on the thin edge of chaos and mass murder. But Monty had only laughed and walked away.

Ambrose reached into the pocket of his dinner jacket and felt the comforting presence of Sir David's knife, still crusty with blood. He'd managed to secret it away before his jailers were any the wiser. Now, if he could only find the chance to use it…