Jack moved quickly into the room, swung his weapon to cover the blind spots, and was immediately passed by Chavez and Caruso, both of whom began rushing for the ladder that led down to the lower deck.
Jack caught up to the others. They all hurried now, because while Jack’s weapon was suppressed, it still made significant noise, and there was a hostage on board this yacht who would be imperiled by the sounds of the thumping full-auto fire.
They cleared staterooms quickly and efficiently; all three men worked together for each room instead of splitting up. Then, at the third of the four rooms, Dom pushed down the latch silently and shoved open the door. Inside, Adara Sherman sat on a bed with a mug of coffee in her hand and a magazine in her lap.
She didn’t even look up from her magazine. “Yay, I’m saved.” The comment was said with playful sarcasm.
Adara was the transportation manager for The Campus, among other duties, but today Dom knew that she was here to play the role of the hostage. Still, no one knew if she’d been booby-trapped or armed with a pistol and ordered to fire on her rescuers in a mock Stockholm-syndrome scenario, so Dom approached her with his weapon shouldered and pointed at her chest. He did this with an apologetic look on his face, and it took him out of his game for a moment, just long enough to miss clearing the head off to Adara’s right.
His mistake came to him suddenly, but just as it did he heard his cousin’s voice from behind, back in the passageway. “Contact!”
The door to the remaining stateroom flew open, and John Clark stood there with an MP5 submachine gun at his shoulder and goggles over his eyes. He opened fire, but managed to squeeze off only a single round before Domingo Chavez shot him with a three-round burst to the chest. Ding knew his rounds would strike in the thick old canvas coat Clark wore over his three layers of thermal henleys, minimizing the pain from the impact of the Simunitions.
Clark had been shot by Sims many times before, and Chavez knew he was no fan.
In the stateroom with the hostage, Dom heard Chavez call out that he’d ended the threat in the passageway, and he lowered his weapon a little, feeling certain he and his team had eliminated all the shooters in the opposition force. Then he turned back to Adara to search her, just as he would any recovered hostage.
While he did this, Jack covered him from the doorway between the stateroom and the passageway, but Jack didn’t know the tiny head with the toilet, sink, and shower on the left had not yet been cleared by his cousin.
With his back to the head, Caruso did not see the pistol that emerged from behind the shower curtain there, and the shower was just out of Jack’s sightline, so he couldn’t see the threat.
Only when the crack of a pistol filled the room did both Dom and Jack know they’d screwed up. Dom took the shot straight between the shoulder blades, pitched forward onto Adara, and then caught a second round before he could raise his hands, signifying he was down.
Jack Ryan, Jr., burst into the little stateroom, dove past Dom and Adara on the bed, and fired a long, fully automatic burst into the head, desperate to end the threat before the hostage was also hit.
His rounds slammed into the shower curtain, shredding it just like they were real metal-jacketed bullets.
“Owww! Okay! Ya got me!” The voice had a distinctive Kentucky drawl, and instantly Jack’s blood went cold.
Gerry Hendley, former senator Gerry Hendley, director of The Campus Gerry Hendley, stepped out of the shower now, covered in red splotches and rubbing a vicious purple welt growing by the second on the side of his neck. “Holy hell, Clark was right. Those little bastards hurt!”
“Gerry?” Jack croaked. Hendley was in his late sixties, and other than maybe some quail hunting, he was not a shooter. He’d never even been present for any of the Campus training exercises, much less taken part in one.
Jack could not fathom why the hell he was here. “I am so sorry! I didn’t know—”
John Clark called out from the passageway, “Cease fire! Exercise complete! Make your weapons safe!”
Jack thumbed the fire selector switch down to safe, and let his weapon hang free on his chest.
Adara launched from the bed now, ripped off her safety glasses, and rushed over to Gerry. “Mr. Hendley, let me get you topside to my med kit. I’ll get the worst of those cleaned and bandaged.”
Jack tried to apologize again. “I’m sorry, Gerry. If I had any idea you were—”
Hendley was in obvious pain, but he waved the comment away. “If you had any idea I was in the OPFOR, this wouldn’t have been good training for you, would it? You were supposed to shoot me.”
“Uh… Yes, sir.”
Gerry added, “Of course I would have appreciated a little better marksmanship. I wore a padded vest because John assured me I’d catch a round or two right in the chest, and that would be that.”
Jack had tagged Gerry in both arms, his neck, chest, stomach, and right hand. The hand and the neck bled openly, and Gerry’s shirt was torn at the arm.
As Adara led him out of the stateroom and back to the ladder up to the main deck, Gerry Hendley looked at Clark in the small passageway. He said, “You certainly made your point in one hell of a dramatic fashion, John.”
Jack looked up at Clark now and saw the always unflappable sixty-seven-year-old looking utterly embarrassed.
“Sorry, Gerry. It shouldn’t have gone down like that, no matter what the circumstances.”
Jack sat next to Dom on the bed. Both young men looked like students in the principal’s office just after getting caught skipping class.
Chavez leaned against the wall in the stateroom. “Damn, Jack. You just sprayed your employer at close range with a dozen rounds of Sims traveling five hundred feet per second. He’s going to feel like he tripped into a hornets’ nest for the next week.”
“What the hell was he doing here in the first place?” Dom asked.
John Clark entered the master stateroom and stood by the door. “Gerry was here because I wanted him to see for himself. The Campus cannot operate safely in the field with only three men. We’ve been lucky lately, and that luck is not going to last. Either we get some new blood in the operational ranks to help us out or we severely curtail the types of missions we take on.”
Chavez nodded. “I’d say we illustrated the point. Dom’s dead, two in the back. You didn’t clear the head?”
Dom said, “I came into this expecting five bad guys. When the fifth went down, I dropped my guard.”
“Which means?” Chavez asked.
Dom looked at him. He didn’t try to excuse his error at all. “Which means I fucked up.”
Clark wasn’t happy about how things went today, and he didn’t hide his feelings. “That started well enough. Jack’s jump was good, I watched it with my binos. You all three hit the boat with authority, got down to the hostage quickly, and used your speed, surprise, and violence of action to take down five opposition. But the only thing that matters in combat is how you finish, and you lost one-third of your number in that drill. That’s a fail in anybody’s book.”
No one replied to this.
Clark added, “Clean all your gear, return it to the lockers at The Campus, then all three of you have the weekend off. But you have homework. I want to bring two new members into The Campus’s operational staff, and it’s your job to each come up with one candidate. Monday morning we’ll meet and discuss. I’ll vet the prospects, talk to Gerry, and make my recommendations.”
Caruso said, “One of the security staff might work.”