“Pawn, on my signal move in fast.” He knew that Asya’s glasses showed her the same image. “I’ll go left, you go right.”
“Ready.”
“Go on three… One… two… three.” He slipped around the corner, leading with the Uzi.
He shot the first target before anyone in the room was aware of the intrusion. He swung the gun toward the next closest target. The crosshairs moved with him, and when they settled on the head of another soldier, his finger tightened on trigger. The gun coughed and bucked slightly in his two-handed grip. The man fell dead, but King had already moved on.
Asya eliminated her designated targets with equal efficiency. Two were down, the third, who had been facing away when the attack had begun, was just starting to turn when a bullet caught him in the throat. He dropped, a torrent of blood pouring from his mouth, as he fought to get his rifle up.
King killed the last target and swung his Uzi around to engage any survivors. Asya had already lined up a second shot on the wounded soldier and finished the job her first bullet had started… but not before the soldier got his finger into the trigger guard of his Kalashnikov. As he slumped forward, the weapon discharged.
It was just a single shot, and the bullet embedded itself harmlessly in a wall, injuring no one, but it was enough. A gun had been fired inside the palace.
There was a possibility that the report would raise no alarm. Accidental discharges happened in even the most disciplined armies — and the Congolese military certainly was not that — but King resisted the seductive desire to hope for the best.
Asya muttered a curse under her breath, but King silenced her self-recriminations. “It’s done. The first rule of war is that no plan survives contact. Shit happens. Stay alert and keep moving.”
He quickly turned down the wick of the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, and then he called the rest of the team forward. The guardsmen might have benefited from the light in the short term, but their eyes were already adjusted to the dark. Exposure to even a dim light source would have left them night blind.
He continued through the room, steeling himself for the likelihood that the next encounter would not be so one-sided.
The bobbing yellow glow of a flashlight heralded the approach of a squad of soldiers running to investigate the shooting. Although they no longer had the element of surprise in their favor, King and Asya still had technology on their side. The soldiers went down in a hail of whisper quiet 9 mm, but they didn’t go quietly. As their comrades dropped, the soldiers began firing blindly into the darkness where King and Asya were concealed. None of King’s team were hit, but it was now almost a certainty that their enemies would be ready for them.
The assembly room, where he hoped to find the hostages, lay just ahead, but to get there, they would have to cross a wide atrium — an area where the enemy forces would almost certainly be waiting.
King consulted the map, looking for a better answer.
He found it.
He called the senior guardsman forward and quickly outlined his strategy. The man nodded enthusiastically, eager for a chance to do more than just trail along in King’s shadow, and then he urged his men forward. King took Asya back the other way.
Moving quickly, unencumbered by the guardsmen, they found a stairwell and ascended. They hadn’t visited the second floor, so the virtual map was mostly blank, but the landing opened into a hallway that ran in the same direction as the corridor they had just scouted on the first floor. The atrium lay ahead to their left. As King and Asya moved at a jog, the noise of gunfire filled the air. The guardsmen had, right on schedule, engaged the enemy forces assembled on the ground floor of the open hall.
Light spilled through the open passage leading to the balcony, which overlooked the atrium, where the battle was now raging. The army troops had set up mobile generator-powered lights in the big hall. King could see a dozen soldiers on the balcony, firing down at the guardsmen, oblivious to the threat approaching from their flank. He and Asya picked them off from the shelter of the entryway, and with the way clear, they raced out onto the balcony.
None of the soldiers on the lower floor took note of what was happening above, but seizing the high vantage point was not King’s ultimate goal. Instead, he moved to the far side of the atrium and plunged into the dark passage opposite the one from which they had emerged. Further down the hall, he found a matching stairwell. The map showed an entrance to the assembly hall just ten yards from the first floor landing.
The stairwell muted the sound of the gun battle, but when they reached the ground floor, King and Asya found themselves in the thick of the fight. The guardsmen, clustered at the eastern entrance to the atrium were firing at a group of soldiers who had taken up a position in the western entrance, a stone’s throw from the stairwell. The soldiers, focused on the threat in front of them, paid no heed to the stealthy pair at their rear, but stray rounds were sizzling past them and into the corridor.
“Stay low,” King whispered, and then ducked out into the corridor, his sister right behind him.
King felt a rising anxiety as he reached for the door handle. Everything had been leading up to this moment. He didn’t know what he would find on the other side of that barrier, but their survival and indeed the success of their entire mission in Africa, hinged on what would happen in the next few seconds.
He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
Electric lanterns illuminated the assembly room, and revealed more than two dozen figures huddled in the far corner of the room, doing their best to avoid being hit by bullets penetrating the wall that abutted the atrium. Several heads turned in their direction and the facial recognition software went completely nuts. Red, yellow and green icons started popping up as the computer instantaneously began separating friend, foe and unknown. There were, unfortunately, plenty of the latter two categories, and many of them were clustered tightly in the midst of the captive dignitaries.
A soldier, marked with a yellow dot, started to bring his rifle around. Asya dropped him with a precise headshot. King however, sprinted forward, desperate to reach his primary objective in the center of the group. He didn’t need the red dot to find her. Monique Favreau’s white face stood out clearly.
She was looking right at him with an eager, hungry expression.
Another Caucasian man — presumably one of her mercenaries — got his machine pistol up and fired in King’s direction. King somersaulted forward and the burst hit the wall behind him, each overpressure round blasting a cantaloupe-sized hole in the wood paneling.
King came out of his roll in a crouch just three yards from where Favreau and the mercenary stood. He fired point-blank without bothering to check the virtual crosshairs and drilled the man between the eyes. In the same fluid motion, he stood up and thrust the Uzi in Favreau’s direction. The smoking suppressor floated a hand’s breadth from her face.
But he didn’t fire.
As satisfying as killing Favreau would have been, his goal from the start had been to take her alive and use her as a human shield, so he could move the hostages to the river shore, where a gunboat would get them clear of the fighting. He did not doubt for a moment that she was the puppet-master pulling the strings of the revolution. The only troubling question was whether the rebellious army forces would lay down their arms to save her life.
Time to find out.
“Drop your weapons,” he shouted in clear French, “or she dies.”
The noise of the battle in the atrium continued, but there was total silence in the assembly hall.
Favreau just stared at King like a hyena savoring a carcass. Her smile never wavered, but after a few seconds, she spoke in an equally forceful tone. “Do as he says.”