No… no! It wasn’t goddamned fair! She wasn’t supposed to be shot by the guys on her own side!…
Men were running toward her… terrorists. She tried to rise, but her left arm refused to support her. They were firing, though whether at her or the helicopter behind her she couldn’t tell. She did know they would be on her in seconds…
Then fire stabbed again from the helicopter’s open side door, cutting into the running PRR terrorists and scattering them like tenpins.
And then the big SEAL from Texas, Blake’s friend MacKenzie, was there, sliding to a halt next to her, helping her up. “No!” she shouted above the helicopter’s thunder. “In the crane! In the crane!”
In a heartbeat, she’d pushed free of MacKenzie and raised her pistol again, one-handed, aiming once more at Pak, who was illuminated now by the light inside the crane’s control cabin, struggling with one of the levers.
Gasping against the crushing paralysis that was clamping down on the entire left side of her chest, Inge squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in her hand and she kept firing, slamming round after round into the cab. Damn! She couldn’t hold the target! Miss! Another miss!
She kept firing…
Bullets slammed into the cab, smashing the windshield, pocking the metal roof. Turning in his seat, Pak saw the woman sprawled awkwardly on the deck outside, firing round after round directly at him. One of the SEALs was there too, aiming his H&K.
One bullet slammed into Pak’s side, nearly knocking him out of the seat, but the woman was too late, the SEAL and the noisily hovering helicopter were too late, they were all too late… Laughing, the sound a bit hysterical even to his own ears, Pak grasped the release knob and pulled, just as a string of rounds struck him in the side, higher up, just beneath his left arm.
There was an agonizing delay… and then the atomic bomb suspended at the end of the cable dropped away; the cable leaped into the air, dancing at the release of so much weight. The bomb plummeted through darkness toward the surface of the water fifty feet below.
Pak didn’t hear the splash when it hit two seconds later.
26
Murdock had seen the bomb’s release as he raced across the rooftop toward the crane, seen it drop from the hoist and arrow fifty feet straight down, vanishing into the gray water with a splash. He reached the railing above Alpha’s southwest corner and stood there looking over the edge, hands gripping the railing so tightly his knuckles ached, holding his breath, waiting for that searing, final instant that could come any second now.
No one knew how the thing might be armed and triggered. The assumption all along had been either a remote-control device of some sort that would detonate the thing at the press of a button, or a timer, set either manually or through a remote control. The former was a nightmare possibility; the latter was deemed more likely. The PRR terrorists who set the thing would almost certainly allow some leeway for their own escape. There were terrorists who seemed suicide-minded enough to go to certain death, but that didn’t fit the usual profile of terrorist shooters drawn from the old RAF or the Provos. Politically motivated, they seemed to go for the main chance, seeking to create havoc but rarely allowing themselves to get drawn into suicide situations. They shot it out to the last bullet only when there was no other way out.
If these terrorists had been members of the Japanese Red Army now, it would have been a lot more worrisome from the start. Some of those guys deliberately sought martyrdom, like the Hezbollah crazies who’d driven an explosives-laden truck into an American compound in Lebanon.
As the minutes passed and there was no blinding flash, Murdock started to relax. Maybe the bomb hadn’t been armed after all. Perhaps it had dropped by accident.
Or… Pak was supposed to have a remote control of some sort. Turning from the rail, Murdock raced back toward the crane… then came to a dead stop. Mac was there… and, oh, God, no…
“Inge! ”
Mac was there, cradling Inge’s head. There was a lot of blood on her blouse, and some on her face as well, next to her mouth. SAS and GSG9 commandos had circled off the area, creating a perimeter around the crane. A young officer looked up as Murdock approached.
“I’m sorry, Yank,” he said. “We thought—”
“Inge!” She was unconscious. He looked up at Mac. “How is she?”
“Don’t know, L-T. She took a fifty through her back.”
He probed her shoulder, front and back. Entrance and exit wound were clean and no wider than his gloved finger, punching through her left shoulder blade from behind and emerging beneath her collarbone; a fifty-caliber round was so powerful it must have punched clear through her and scarcely slowed. Still, there was a hell of a lot of blood. Mac or someone had plugged the wound with a cloth that was already sodden through with blood.
“We’ve got a medic coming down now,” the SAS officer said.
“Where’s Pak?” Murdock demanded.
MacKenzie nodded toward the crane. “Up there. She got him, L-T. You would’ve been proud. But he pulled the damned lever anyway.”
“We’re still here,” he said. “Take care of her.”
“Right, L-T.”
He left them and started up the ladder to the crane cab.
Crackling radio calls over Murdock’s earphone followed the progress of the assault inside the quarters.
“Charlie-five, Charlie-three. I’m on Level One, Corridor Two. Two prisoners here. Moving!”
“Delta-one, this is seven. We are in the rec hall. Repeat, in the rec hall. Two terrs down. The hostages are okay. ”
“Seven, one. Keep ’em there. Medics and handlers are on the way. ”
“Echo two, Echo one. Watch yourselves. We’re coming down Corridor Seven. ”
“Roger that. ”
Elsewhere, the battle was rapidly dying out. British helicopters remained hovering off each corner of Alpha, as dozens of SAS and GSG9 troops scoured the roof, penetrated the doors, filtered down into the depths of the labyrinthine installation. Occasional scattered bursts of gunfire sounded from below, but by and large, all resistance had ceased. Several tangos had been rounded up by SAS troopers and were lying flat on the deck, hands in the smalls of their backs, as commandos cuffed and searched them.
Pak was crumpled in the corner of the cab, bleeding from a dozen wounds but still alive. Murdock thought the man was unconscious, but as he started searching him, as he found and retrieved the remote-control unit in an inside jacket pocket, the North Korean’s eyes opened.
“Too… late.”
“What do you mean, ‘too late’? What’d you do?”
Pak started coughing, vomiting blood. “Too late,” he managed to say again as his eyes drifted shut. He was dying.
Murdock glanced down at the twisted, broken leg. His hand snapped down, slamming against the broken ends. “Wake up, you bastard! What did you do?”
Pak’s eyes opened again. The pain seemed to brace him, to give him strength. “Pressure switch,” he said. “I set it for eighty… for eighty… ”