Prey (54 page)

"Hey, Brickard, Paxton," Lightstone hissed as he holstered his pistol, pulled one of the flash grenades off his belt, and then signaled with his hands what he intended to do.

They waited until Günter Aben suddenly rolled away to a new position under the covering fire of Carine Mueller's H&K submachine gun.

Then, after Paxton heaved one of the canister grenades at Mueller's position, and Brickard and the remaining three Louisiana wildlife officers opened fire on both positions, Lightstone took three lunging steps forward, pulled the pin and flung the grenade toward the barricade position that Günter Aben had just vacated.

At that point, Henry Lightstone had less than a second to roll forward and cover his ears as the detonation of the first grenade sent shock waves through every inch of his exposed body.

Dazed by the concussive force of the blast, Lightstone was still reaching for his shoulder-holstered 10mm semiautomatic when Carine Mueller broke from cover, lunged toward her new position, and then saw Lightstone out in the open.

Hesitating in mid-stride, the beautiful young counter- terrorist started to come around with her finger tightening on the trigger of her H&K when her eyes caught the motion of the rolling canister out in front of her. Reacting instinctively, she turned away just as the grenade exploded and sent her tumbling to the floor, the H&K clattering away in the red-tinged semidarkness.

Nearly unconscious and bleeding from the mouth, ears, and nose, Carine Mueller's right hand fumbled for her belt-holstered Model Sixty-six .357. Henry Lightstone centered the sights of the 10mm automatic on the young German woman's hand, because they had all agreed that they wanted to take
someone
out of here alive.

But then the words of A1 Grynard flashed through his mind:
Whoever killed Scoby used a couple of Model Sixty-sixes.

Without thinking about it further, Henry Lightstone shifted the sights of the heavy automatic, sent five 10mm hollow-point rounds into Mueller's upper chest, throat, and head, then rolled away from the stream of 9mm slugs that tore the wooden floor into splinters right where he had been lying . . . and Günter Aben screamed out his rage in his native German tongue.

Continuing to twist away from the furious 9mm assault, Lightstone fired one round at the German's exposed head, missed, felt the jarring
clack
as the receiver jammed open on an empty magazine, and was reaching for one of the loaded magazines on his belt when Günter Aben came back around the corner fast, the H&K leveled, a sneering smile on his face.

The impact of the first .44 bullet nearly severed Günter Aben's arm as it ripped through bone and tissue, punched through the gap where his thick Kevlar vest didn't quite overlap, splintered a rib, and then buried itself in the counterterrorist's heart.

The second bullet that slammed his back into the wall was unnecessary. The ICER team member, who could never quite control his temper when he tried to outwit Clarence MacDonald's simulators, was dead before his knees hit the floor.

When Dwight Stoner hobbled into the lower-level conference room, he saw Mike Takahara trying to push himself up on his hands and knees, coughing out blood in the process. As he moved to the doorway of the command-and- control center, Stoner saw the sprawled bodies of Clarence MacDonald, who was starting to moan and move around a little, and Morito Asai, who wasn't doing either, and a man in a wheelchair working frantically at the keyboard of the control console.

Roy Parker didn't see or hear Dwight Stoner coming until the agent's huge body suddenly filled the doorway and blocked out the incoming light from the adjoining conference room. Parker turned to look and then drew back in shock as he saw the huge form pointing the barrel of the 12-gauge pump shotgun directly at his head.

"Move away from that desk," Stoner ordered in a cold, deep, and unfeeling voice.

"It wasn't me, buddy. I didn't shoot any of them," Parker said carefully, trying to keep his voice steady as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the red numerals on the control board change from thirty-three to thirty-two.

"Shut up and keep your hands in the air," Stoner ordered.

"I'm carrying a Beretta nine-millimeter in a shoulder holster, right-hand draw, under my jacket," Parker said quietly as Stoner moved slowly around to his back. "It's clean. It hasn't been fired." Then Parker took a deep breath as he felt the shotgun barrel against the base of his skull.

"Look at the blood splatters on that wall," Parker continued in a voice as steady as he could manage. "No nine-mil in the world could do that. That's Saltmann. He carries a forty-four mag with hot loads. Like a fucking freight train when they hit."

The barrel of the shotgun dug deeper into Parker's neck, and he immediately realized that he had said the wrong thing.

"Hey, no, wait a minute!" Parker whispered frantically. "You gotta listen. They wired this place to blow, and it's—"

"It's okay, man. He's not the shooter," Mike Takahara gasped in a pain-filled voice, holding his right arm tight against his severely broken rib cage as he slowly reached into Roy Parker's jacket with his left hand and pulled out the loaded and locked 9mm pistol. "Big curly-haired bastard wearing an FBI raid jacket."

"That's Saltmann," Parker nodded, nervously aware that the barrel of the shotgun was still pressed tight against his neck. "He's the cutter on this deal. He's supposed to shut the whole operation down and blow the place if something goes wrong."

"Keep talking," Mike Takahara directed in a painful whisper. He stuck the 9mm Beretta in the back of his belt, brought Parker's hands down, one at a time, and handcuffed them through the left wheel of the wheelchair. Then he wiped the blood from his mouth and tried not to cough or breathe any more than he had to as he placed his shaky left hand on the console for support. He tried to blink his eyes clear enough to see how the control board had been designed.

"The guys on top wanted to make sure they didn't end up with another Watergate or an Iran-Contra deal blowing up in their face," Parker went on carefully, sensing that the two agents were beyond the point of caring about rules and regulations. "So they put Saltmann, Arty, Corrie, and me in as a safety valve. Something goes wrong, we're supposed to make the whole thing go away."

In the background, Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald clutched both forearms to his chest in the area where the hot-loaded .44 Magnum expanding round had mushroomed against his Kevlar vest, breaking several of his ribs and causing massive bruising all the way to the pericardial covering of his heart. He tried to bring himself up to a sitting position.

"That what happened to the little guy in the doorway, and to the broad out there on the floor?" Stoner growled.

"Yeah. We're supposed to take everybody out so they don't get any ideas about talking," Parker nodded. "Only, Arty and Corrie are dead, and I'm pretty much out of it, so Saltmann's on his own."

"So who takes you guys out?" Mike Takahara asked in almost a whisper as he motioned for Stoner to drag the wheelchair out of the way. Then he sat down gratefully in the console chair and used his left hand to call up the menu on the screen.

"Yeah, we talked about that," Parker said nervously as he felt the shotgun barrel dig into the back of his neck again. "We've got FBI and DEA credentials that're supposed to look good enough to let us talk our way out, but we figured—"

Then the red numerals on the console board changed from a thirty-two to a thirty-one, and Parker started to panic.

"For Christ's sake, man," he pleaded, "we've
gotta
shut this damn thing down. It's gonna blow in thirty-one minutes, and I can't do a goddamn thing to stop it."

Mike Takahara had already discovered that "Security/ Destruction" was locked out of the menu. He tried to go in through the operating system and found himself blocked there also.

"What's your access code?" Takahara whispered.

"'Sunshine,' but it won't do you any good," Parker said. "I already tried. It doesn't work."

Mike Takahara tried a series of machine language instructions that should have given him access to the back door of the processing chip, but they didn't.

The red numerals changed from thirty-one to twenty-nine.

"How's it wired?" Mike Takahara finally asked.

"It's a dual system," Parker said. "First series of explosions takes out the internal cross-support walls, and probably kills everybody inside. The second series goes off fifteen seconds later and basically blows the two main side walls into each other like a couple of fucking bricks."

Dwight Stoner muttered something under his breath, but Takahara ignored it.

"What's the explosive?" he asked.

"They said C-Four, but I don't know," Parker said. "They never showed any of it to me."

"Come on, Snoopy, how long's it gonna take you to break into this thing?" Dwight Stoner demanded uneasily as he listened to the sound of automatic gunfire in the distance.

"The long, safe way, probably a couple of hours," Takahara whispered, wincing as he readjusted himself in the chair.

"For Christ's sake, we haven't
got
a couple of hours!" Roy Parker exploded, and then froze as the shotgun barrel pushed harder against his neck. "Come on, man," he pleaded quietly. "We can't get out of here, because the goddamned doors are blocked off. Do it the fucking short way."

"Right," Mike Takahara nodded, groaning in pain as he reached around behind his back and drew out Parker's 9mm Beretta. Then, before Dwight Stoner could say or do anything to stop him, the technical agent fired five 9mm pistol rounds pointblank into the main processing unit of the command-and-control computer.

The handcuffed counterterrorist looked on in horror as every light on the command-and-control console seemed to increase in intensity and the red numeral display went haywire. Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, the console board went dead, the red numerals blinked out, the pulsating alarm was suddenly silent, and the red warning lights stopped flashing.

As Roy Parker and Dwight Stoner turned to stare at Mike Takahara with expressions that ranged from absolute horror to stunned disbelief, the technical agent looked up at the two men and said with the smallest shrug possible, "I cheat."

Shaking his head and muttering another heartfelt curse, Stoner hobbled over to where Sergeant Clarence MacDonald had managed to pull himself up into a sitting position. Judging from the stunned expression on the combat instructor's face, Stoner figured that MacDonald was alert enough to realize what Mike Takahara had done.

"Here," he said as he set the 12-gauge shotgun in MacDonald's lap. "Far as I'm concerned, you can shoot both of them any time you want."

Then, drawing the .45 SIG-Sauer from his shoulder holster, Dwight Stoner started hobbling on his single crutch toward the distant stairwell.

Chapter Forty-Six

"All right!"

"Yes, sir. Way to go, FBI!"

The sight of the man in the FBI raid jacket taking out Günter Aben in two quick shots brought a rousing cheer from Larry Paxton and the Louisiana wildlife sergeant, the only two, apparently, with enough breath or energy to yell.

After verifying that Carine Mueller and Günter Aben were dead and that no more ICER counterterrorists were in the immediate area, the raid team pulled together into a defensive position and began to treat their wounded.

As they did so, the pulsing alarm and the flashing-red warning lights suddenly went out, leaving the area illuminated only by the pale yellow glow of the battery- powered emergency lights.

"What the hell's going on now?" Larry Paxton demanded, but Henry Lightstone and the others just shrugged, intent only upon finding Alex Chareaux, the infamous Gerd Maas, and whoever else remained of his counterterrorist team.

Then, as the seemingly impatient blue-jacketed figure followed them from the catwalk above, Henry Lightstone, Larry Paxton, Gary Brickard, and the Louisiana sergeant slowly and cautiously moved forward into the mock forest of the mountain cabin simulation area.

They left behind the remaining Louisiana officer—who had caught a 9mm round in the knee from Günter Aben's last flurry—to stay with his far more severely wounded buddy and to provide rear-guard support.

Spreading out and moving as carefully and quietly as they could through the amazingly lifelike concrete and plastic trees, brush and rock, the four men never saw Kimiko Osan pop out of the concealed trapdoor, and were aware of her presence only when she opened up on Brickard and the Louisiana sergeant with a burst of 5.56mm rounds from her laser-sighted Colt Commando submachine gun.

Both men went down, and Kimiko Osan was running for her next position when a concussive
ka-boom!
echoed throughout the cavernous simulation area. The impact of the .44 round sent the small, young, and incredibly fast counterterrorist tumbling to the floor as her laser-sighted weapon clattered away in the semidarkness.

"Nice shot, buddy," Gary Brickard, the veteran gunny sergeant muttered, grateful for the overhead cover as he quickly set his M-16 aside and knelt down beside the groaning Louisiana sergeant—vaguely aware of the pain in his lower hip from the one 9mm round that he
hadn't
absorbed with his vest—and began to apply a field dressing to the wildlife officer's shattered upper thigh.