Roselli leaned back as the lead SAS breaker aimed his shotgun against the front door’s upper hinges and squeezed the trigger. The gun went off with a hollow boom… a boom repeated an instant later as he slammed a second one-ounce slug into the door’s second hinge. The door breaker rolled back out of the way, chambering another round into his pump-action Mossburg, as the three SAS troopers waiting to either side plunged ahead, the first man up smashing the door aside and tossing in a stun grenade. Even outside on the street, the chain-reaction explosion was deafening; before the final echo had faded, the first man in the stick had lunged into the door, cutting loose with a burst of full-auto fire from his H&K subgun but never pausing for an instant as he cleared the opening, closely followed by his mates in a meticulously choreographed pas de trois that gave all three men clear fields of fire in mutually supported directions.
“Go!” Roselli snapped, and Higgins, unrecognizable in his hooded combat dress, mask, and goggles, swung his sledgehammer in a wide sweep that shattered one of the street-level windows. Sterling tossed a cardboard-bodied flashbang through the opening, and the three men pressed back against the bricks of the apartment as the explosions thundered inside.
Then Roselli was through the window, blinking into the smoky near-darkness of a small parlor just off the apartment’s entrance hallway. His mask was hot and close and narrowed his field of view almost as sharply as night vision gear would have, and he wished he could pull it off; but he concentrated on sweeping every corner of the room. Enough light spilled in through the windows at his back for him to see, but he pulled a flashlight off his vest and held it ready, just in case.
There was one man already in the room, a scruffy-looking tango in jeans and combat vest, writhing about on the floor next to the door leading to the hallway, hands pressed to his ears and blood streaming from his nose. Roselli took three quick steps across the parlor floor, keeping the man beneath the muzzle of his H&K as he kicked the FN FAL assault rifle lying next to the man across the room. He kept the man covered as Sterling slipped in close, knelt by the tango, and frisked him for weapons. Normally, in a quick-moving assault, Roselli would have shot the man dead and moved on, but this operation wasn’t hampered by the need to protect hostages… and the intelligence provided by live prisoners would be as useful as any documents they could hope to find.
“He’s clean,” Sterling said, reaching into a vest side pocket and extracting a clear plastic tie with one hand, as he used the other to grab the tango’s right wrist and slam it into the small of his back.
“Eagle Four-one,” Roselli said into his lip mike as Sterling efficiently cuffed the stunned terrorist. “South parlor on the ground floor secure. One prisoner.”
Over his radio, he heard a second report close on the heels of his. “Eagle Two-two. Entrance achieved, second-floor bedroom. One terr dead, one prisoner.”
“Eagle Three-one,” Sergeant Major Dunn’s voice added. “Entry at the front door. Front passage secure. Two down here.”
“Two-two, Three-one,” Roselli warned. “Coming in from the parlor.”
“Come ahead.”
Roselli moved through the parlor door and into the front hallway. The SAS men were already inside, deploying in different directions, each with a flashlight held next to his weapon, the beams probing through the haze and semidarkness. One terrorist lay sprawled head-down on his back halfway up the stairs, while another was draped over the banister on the landing above. Both had been shot through the head. The entry teams, armed with submachine guns, weren’t packing the explosive 7.62mm bullets used by the snipers’ PM rifles to defeat the terrorists’ body armor.
Burst-fire head shots at close range guaranteed an instant kill.
Gunfire sounded upstairs, harsh, sharp, and insistent. Seconds later, a tango in black jeans and a bulky sweater appeared running along the landing, running blindly, looking back over his shoulder, an M-16 in his hands as he fled some unseen threat at his back. Roselli brought his H&K up to his shoulder and triggered a three-round burst in the same instant that Dunn and another SAS man did the same; the terrorist was caught in a three-way crossfire of bullets that twisted him around, sending him slamming hard against the landing’s banister. Wood splintered and the man catapulted into empty air in a shower of fragments, crashing heavily on the polished wood floor beside the stairway.
Two more SAS men, ominous in solid black, anonymous in their goggles and gas masks, appeared at the top of the landing. “Second floor, clear,” said a voice over Roselli’s headset. “Another down.”
“Back of the flat,” Dunn ordered, gesturing. “Down the passage. Watch for ambush.”
Roselli moved deeper into the flat.
“I’m going downstairs,” Chun said, shouting to make herself heard above the clatter of the helicopters hovering low above the building’s roof. She hefted her weapon, an Uzi. From the cacophony of explosions and muffled bursts of gunfire, mingled with the shouts and screams of the defenders, it sounded as though the attackers were storming up from the ground floor. She started toward the door.
Katarina Holst screamed a warning, and Chun whirled, seeking a target. Black shapes, like immense spiders, had slid down next to the exterior of each window. Karl Steiner raised his assault rifle, and gunfire stabbed in the dim light of the room, thunderously full-auto, as he wildly sprayed the windows in a shower of splintering wood and flying chips of plaster, but then return fire was slashing in through all four windows, pinning Steiner in a twisting, writhing dance before he pitched backward, finger still clenched on the trigger as his weapon chewed a ragged line of holes across the ceiling.
Something like a cardboard tube flew through an open window, bounced once on the floor…
By reflexes honed through long training, Chun squeezed her eyes shut, threw up her arms, and dropped to the floor. The explosion of the flashbang was like nothing she’d ever experienced before in her life, a chain of ear-shattering concussions accompanied by a pulsing, strobing flash so bright it burned bright red through her tightly closed eyelids. After the first cracking explosion, she wasn’t even certain that she was hearing anything anymore, but she could feel the continuing detonations hammering at her body, slapping and clawing at her clothing like a high-pressure blast from a fire hose.
When the concussions ceased, she opened her eyes. Dimly, through a smoky red haze, she could see tall and bulky men swinging through the windows, landing on the floor, unfastening their rappelling ropes from the harnesses they wore over their torsos. The ice-cold sweep of those emotionless goggles was like the gaze of some huge and alien insect. The H&K MP5s strapped to their bodies swept the room, seeking targets, seeking prey. One of the commandos began unfolding a large, heavy blanket as soon as he was free of his line. With practiced speed, he advanced on the drum of burning records and threw the blanket over the top, smothering the flames. In seconds, the smoke in the room grew thicker, harsh white and choking, spilling from beneath the blanket.
Chin stirred, battling the paralysis that seemed to be pressing her down into the floor. They were trying to save the records still burning in the fifty-five-gallon drum! Someone was groaning on the floor close by, and Chun thought it must be Steiner.
She fumbled for her Uzi. Damn… where was it? She couldn’t find it, she’d dropped it, and the men in black were bearing down on her like nightmares made flesh and blood. There was a short, harsh, three-round burst of gunfire into one of her compatriots — she couldn’t tell who. Another burst… and Steiner’s groans were silenced. Katarina Holst struggled to rise, an H&K in one hand, and one of the invaders triggered a burst that tore into her throat and face like a scythe. Without a word or even a sound, the German woman sagged back against a plaster wall stained by her blood, her subgun slipping from limp fingers.