Rehan’s men looked up to their general for guidance.
General Rehan just nodded with a slight smile. “Send him to join his English friend.”
Al Darkur cursed and shouted and tried to kick. He shook one of his arms away from the man dragging him to the edge, but another gunman holstered his weapon and rushed forward. Together three men now fought the major on the ground in the flecks and chips of broken window glass.
It took a moment, but they gained control of al Darkur. The others in the room stood around laughing as the ISI officer fought with only the movements of his torso.
Al Darkur screamed at Rehan. “Mather chot!” Motherfucker!
The three guards dragged Major al Darkur across the floor, pulled him closer to the edge. Mohammed stopped his fight now. The wind racing from the desert floor, up 108 stories of hot glass and metal, blew the cinnamon-skinned Pakistani’s black hair into his eyeˀhiss, and he shut them, squinted tight, and began to pray.
The three gunmen took him under his shoulders, lifted him up, and grabbed him by his belt as well. As one they heaved his body back, ready to launch him forward toward the sun.
But they did not move forward as one. The security officer holding al Darkur’s left shoulder lurched away from the window and spun around; he dropped the major and, in so doing, caused the other two to lose their grip.
Before anyone in the room could react, a second man at the window’s ledge moved away from the bound major. This man fell backward into the apartment, rocked back on his heels, and tumbled down into the sunken seating area by the sofa.
Rehan turned to look at the man, to see what the hell he was doing, but instead his eyes looked past his guard and toward the cream-colored leather sofa that was now covered in a crimson splatter of blood.
Rehan looked back out the window. In the distance he saw a black speck in the sky a few hundred feet over the Burj Al Arab hotel in the distance. A helicopter? One second later, just as the last man holding al Darkur let go of the major and grabbed his bloody leg while falling to the floor, General Riaz Rehan shouted to the room.
“Sniper!”
Colonel Khan leapt over the sofa and tackled Rehan to the tile just as a hot rifle round raced past the general’s forehead.
57
Get me closer, Hicks!” Domingo Chavez shouted into the boom mike of the headset as he slammed a second five-round magazine into the magazine well of his HK PSG-1 sniper rifle. He’d missed with his last two shots, he was certain, and only by getting closer could he nail Rehan and his men, as they were now running and crawling and scrambling for cover.
“Roger that,” Hicks said in a calm Kentucky drawl, and the Bell JetRanger raced nearer to the massive spire-like structure.
Even with the broken windowpane in al Darkur and Embling’s place, Chavez would never have been able to identify the location of their apartment had he not also been able to catch a glimpse through his twelve-power scope of something tumbling out of the side of the building, spiraling down toward the ground.
It was a man, Ding knew this instinctively, though he could not take the time to try to identify who was plunging before him to their death. Instead Chavez had to range his weapon for five hundred meters and do his best to line a target up in his mil-dot crosshairs.
Even though Chavez had not spent much range time working on sniper craft in the past year, he still felt comfortable making a five-hundred-meter shot under the right conditions. But the helicopter’s vibrations, the downwash of the rotors, the upward movements of the air currents along the skyscraper, all had to be solved for in order to make a precision hit.
So Chavez did not go for precision. He did his best to calculate everything he could to the best of his ability, and then he lined up for a gut shot. Center mass on his targets. A man’s stomach was not the perfect location for a sniper shot. No, perfect would have been the brainpan. But targeting the upper stomach gave him the greatest margin of error, and he knew there would be some errors in his targeting, considering everything he had to deal with.
He fired from the backseat of the chopper, propping his weapon in the open window. This would absolutely destroy the carefully tuned barrel harmonics of his rifle, but again, getting closer would fix everything.
“Closer, brother!”
“You worry about your gadget. Let me worry about mine,” replied Hicks.
To say the call from Chavez to the aircraft twenty minutes earlier had come as a surprise to Chester Hicks was putting it mildly. He had been going through some paperwork with Adara Sherman when his mobile rang.
“Hello?”
“Country, I’m on my way back! I need you to scare me up a helicopter in ten minutes! Can you do that?”
“You bet. There is a charter service right here at the FBO. Where should I tell them you are heading?”
“I need you to fly it, and we will likely be heading into combat.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“This is life-and-death shit, ’mano.”
A quick pause. “Then get your ass back here. I’ll grab us an aircraft.”
Hicks had been all action after that. He and Adara Sherman jogged across the tarmac to a dormant JetRanger that belonged to a resort hotel twenty miles up the coast. There were many newer and fancier helos on the tarmac, but Hicks had flown the JetRanger, he’d trained on Bell helos, and Hicks figured the most important factor on this hasty mission ahead of him would be the skill of the pilot, and not the most advanced technology. After looking the craft over for just a few seconds, he sent Sherman to the FBO to collect the keys by any means necessary. He removed the tie-downs and checked the fuel and the oil while she was gone, and even before he sat behind the cyclic, Sherman was back, tossing him the keys.
“Do I want to know what you did?”
“Nobody home. I probably could have snagged some sheik’s Boeing wide-body if I wanted it.”
Chavez arrived five minutes later, and they were in the air as soon as he strapped in.
While Chavez loaded his sniper rifle, Hicks asked over the intercom, “Where are we going?”
“The tallest building in the world, doubt you could miss it.”
“Roger that.” He turned the nose of the JetRanger toward the Burj Khalifa and increased his rate of climb and his ground speed.
Rehan and Khan crawled across the tile floor of the apartment toward the door to the hallway. The colonel kept his body positioned between the shooter in the helicopter and his general as they scrambled, until another protection officer slid over next to them both and then covered General Rehan.
Just as Rehan entered the hallway and rolled out of the line of fire from the helicopter outside, one of his security men grabbed him by the collar and pushed him forward to the elevator. This guard was nearly as big as Rehan himself, a hulking six-foot-three-inch-tall bruiser in a black suit and carrying a big HK pistol. He banged on the down button with his fist, turned to make sure Rehan and Khan were still with him, and then turned back as the doors slid open.
Ryan and Caruso were surprised by the size of the armed Pakistani who appeared right in front of them in the hallway, but they were ready for trouble. Both men held their pistols high. They dropped to their knees as one as the ISI security man’s eyes widened. The Pakistani lifted his own gun up into action, but both Campus operators fired into the broad chest of their target at no more than six feet.
The guard did not fall away from them, instead he lunged forward, into the elevator car. Both men fired a second and then a third time, stitching 9-millimeter rounds across his upper torso, but the ISI officer crashed into Jack Junior, pinned him in the corner, and head-butted the American with all the strength remaining in his body. He fired his HK pistol, but his arm had drooped low and the round went through Ryan’s pants, just above the knee, somehow missing his leg.