"Two more down!" Yancey called, stepping across one of the bodies. Ahead he could now see the inside of the main outer doors to the cargo hold. Fifty feet to the right of those were three trucks, with enclosed cargo decks and open tailgates.
But he couldn't see the other two tangos.
A door opened on the second-level balcony in the back of the theater. There were two tangos back there, one to the left, one to the right, and they both turned at the sound.
Dean lifted his SIG Sauer, dropping into a kneeling crouch and bracing the weapon in a two-handed stance, aiming at the gunman on the right-side balcony forward. The man had also heard the door and was turning to face it, raising his AK.
The range was a good fifty feet from the front-row seats to the front balcony one level up, a long shot for a pistol. Long hours on the practice range, however, had let Dean qualify as an expert, both with his beloved accurized M1911A1 and with the SIG Sauer P226. Releasing his pent-up breath halfway, he squeezed with his whole hand.
The shot came as a surprise, as it should in careful marksmanship. The terrorist lurched to one side, twisting, as the AK in his hands went off, the muzzle flash long and stuttering in the theater's dim light.
People in the theater screamed, some bolting in panic, others trying to duck down among the rows of seats. Dean reacquired and fired again, and the terrorist dropped out of sight behind the balcony railing.
At Dean's back, Walters fired again and again as his target jackknifed over the railing, then dropped twenty feet to the deck. Brisard and his people were moving down the balcony aisles at the same moment, firing at the two terrorist gunmen there. Dean pivoted, ready to add his fire to theirs, but both tangos were already dropping.
The back doors to Deck One swung open, however, and two more terrorists rushed in — the guards who'd been standing outside, obviously brought in by the burst of AK fire. Dean dropped his aim and fired twice at one, then pivoted to aim at the other… but held his fire. Panicking civilians were everywhere, scattering as one of the newly arrived terrorists opened fire with his AK.
"Get down! Everybody down!" Dean yelled.
One young man stood up, shirtless, waving his arms.
Omar Mohammed Ra'd heard the echoing thud-thud-thud-thud of a heavy weapon close by and leaped toward the trucks.
Aram and Fahaj had left moments before to investigate the opening of the door to the galley. No one was supposed to come through that door unless word came from the Amir himself that it was okay. In retrospect, it might have been better for the men guarding the trucks in the hold to have stayed in place, concealed and ready to open fire on any intruders… but the four of them had not been chosen for their combat experience or their tactical expertise.
Ra'd was the oldest of them, and he was just nineteen. He was Egyptian, the son of a poverty-crippled family in a suburb of Cairo. He'd joined the revived Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a militant Egyptian group that had united with al-Qaeda in 2006. From a training camp in Egypt he'd been sent to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, where he'd first met Amir Rahid Sayed as-Saadi and transferred to the Islamic Jihad International Brigade.
Ra'd and the three with him had been chosen, as-Saadi told them, because of their faith.
And Ra'd was dedicated to the way of submission, to Allah and Islam and the word of the Prophet. Ra'd had welcomed the opportunity offered by the Amir to guard the trucks and their tons of high explosives and to detonate those explosives if at any time the enemies of Islam tried to take them. The four of them had been warned not to wander too close to the trucks, that there was a deadly poison inside the trucks on top of the explosives, but if enemy forces tried to break into the ship's hold, they were to detonate the explosives immediately.
The detonator lay on a small folding table set up next to one of the trucks, at the end of a long, black coil of rubber-sheathed cable. A car battery rested in the deck beneath, connected with a tangle of electrical cables leading into each vehicle. All he needed to do was turn the arming key on the detonator and press the red button.
Behind him, Said Shalabi snatched up his rifle. "Go, Omar! Go, and I will cover you!" To his left, Aram and Fajah tumbled across the deck in an explosion of wet scarlet, as two ominous figures in black rounded a line of refrigerators holding foodstuffs for the galley.
One of the figures shouted something… but Ra'd spoke no language but Arabic — specifically the Egyptian dialect. He'd had trouble understanding his brothers from Syria and Morocco.
The thunder sounded again, and something shrieked off the bulkhead behind him. Heart pounding, he snatched up the detonator and turned the key…
"Everybody get down!" the shirtless man screamed, and then a burst of AK-47 fire tore through his body, knocking him over the back of a theater seat. As he fell, Dean had a clear shot at the shooter and took it, firing three rounds into the gunman in rapid succession as Walters opened fire as well. The gunman collapsed, and Dean swung, aiming his weapon across the crowd. It was still possible that there were other terrorists here on the main floor, sheltering among the hostages.
And there he was, bolting for the door at the top of the aisle, one remaining gunman.
Screaming people continued to clog the aisle, blocking Dean's shot, and the man was underneath the back balcony now, out of the sight of Brisard and the others. The terrorist knocked several people over; a young woman panicked and ran, and the gunman spun, raising his AK. An older man leaped and knocked the woman flat but was hit himself by a burst of full-auto fire as the gunman emptied his AK into the shrieking mob. Then he spun and vanished out the door just as Walters fired twice, the bullets slamming into the closing door behind the fleeing hijacker, spraying splinters.
David Yancey heard the yammer of an AK. Bullets screamed off the refrigerator, and he felt a hammer's blow against his right side, slamming him to the left. Boone opened up with his AA-12, the first rounds going high. Staggering with the slam to his side, Yancey kept tracking the figure by the truck, loosing a three-round burst from his H&K, then another, then a third.
The gunman with an AK off to the right was continuing to fire and Yancey was hit again, but the man by the trucks collapsed as Yancey and Boone both kept firing.
Yancey dropped to his knees; he wasn't in pain, exactly, but he was having trouble breathing. Boone shifted his aim and brought down the other gunman as Coulter and the others climbing up onto the crates reached an overlook and joined in as well. Caught by 12-gauge shotgun blasts, 9mm, and 5.56 rounds from several directions, the gunman crumpled in a heap on the deck.
"We've got one runner," Dean called as the fleeing gunman banged out the theater door just ahead of Walters' shots. "First Deck, heading aft!"
"Let him go," Rubens said.
"Clear here!" Brisard called from the balcony. His men were checking the bodies, making sure the three tangos up there all were dead.
"And clear here!" Walters called. He'd moved over to the left side of the theater and was checking the body of the man who'd fallen.
"Five tangos down, theater," Dean added. "We have at least two civilian casualties. No… make that three… correction… four." Several people had been hit by the indiscriminate spray of AK fire from the top of the aisle.