The Fallen: A Derek Stillwater Thriller (18 page)

Lieutenant Sam O’Shay, U.S. Army’s 1
^st
Special Forces Operational Detachment, Delta, checked his gear— the High Altitude Precision Parachute System (HAPPS)— for the tenth time, studied his altimeter, then double-checked his watch. He and his five-man insertion team were roaring at 20,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains toward the Cheyenne Resort. Operation Tagger had been put together just about as fast as any op could be put together.

“Okay, gentlemen,” he said into his radio, the roar of the CASA C-212 Aviocar aircraft drowning out any other communication. “Operation Tagger. There are three, I repeat, three Secret Service snipers on the roofs of each building. We will be landing on the Cheyenne Center itself. The snipers have been made aware of this operation.”

“Gee, you take all the fun out of it,” said Santiago, smirking.

O’Shay knew Santiago made jokes to overcome his fear. He continued. “There are approximately six hundred hostages being held, at last count, by ten— I repeat, ten!— armed terrorists. The building has been wired with C4 or Semtex and the detonators are controlled via a PDA held by the terrorist leader. He doesn’t have to turn them all on or off, he can control each individually. Also, the leaders of the world— including the president of the United States— are wired with C4 or Semtex and can presumably be detonated by hand. The Puzzle Palace is going to scramble the satellite signals and jam any radio signals starting in five minutes. Gentlemen, they will not be able to set off or turn off those explosives from this time forward. They will not be able to communicate with each other. But we will not be able to communicate with each other, either. Stay in visual communication and be careful. Let’s hunt some bad guys.” He looked at his watch then checked in with the pilot.

“T-minus four minutes, Lieutenant. Proceed with predrop.”

They were going to perform HALO drops, or High Altitude Low Opening. They didn’t know who The Fallen Angels had outside the facility watching. They didn’t know what the communications were like. The NSA would be jamming all communications, but they didn’t know if these guys had some sort of visual communication or not.

Lieutenant O’Shay thought their intel sucked, and had spoken freely to General Puskorius on that issue. The general had ordered him to proceed, which was the job of Delta Force, after all. To do the impossible. Antiterrorism, hostage rescue.

In O’Shay’s ears the pilot said, “T-minus two minutes. We have a westerly wind at ten knots on the deck.”

O’Shay studied a PDA attached to his wrist, part of his complicated drop-and-insert gear. He punched a key and brought up aerial photographs of the Cheyenne Center. To his team he said, “Note the layout of the buildings. Do NOT miss the Cheyenne Center. Do NOT confuse them.”

Santiago said, “Looks to me like there’s a Starbucks down the road. Maybe I’ll drop in there for a Frappuccino.”

“Santiago, we pull off Tagger and I’ll buy the beer for the next month.”

“Promises, promises.”

“T-minus one minute.”

“We’re up,” O’Shay said.

His team trotted toward the back of the C-212. With a punch of a switch, the rear hatch opened. Wind roared into and out of the plane.

“Let’s go!” O’Shay rushed forward and threw himself out of the hatch, spread eagle. Even through his flight suit he could feel the bite of the cold at 20,000 feet. The oxygen through his mask tasted metallic and flat.

Down they plunged, gravity grabbing the team and dragging them toward earth at ever-increasing speeds.

O’Shay, into his radio, counted off his altimeter. “20,000. 18,000. 16,000—”

Faster and faster. Finally, visual. He spotted the Cheyenne Resort just outside the suburban sprawl of Colorado Springs. The green open spaces of the golf course, the blue of the lake, the outline of the numerous buildings and parking lots.

They were right on target. He checked the GPS on his left wrist, noted the pilot had been accurate in their launch time. If they didn’t encounter wind sheer on the ground, they shouldn’t have a problem hitting their targets.

His team screamed downward at 260 feet per second.

4,000.

3,000.

2,000.

At 1,000 feet, his chute opened automatically with a ripping, popping sound. His entire body jerked at the deceleration, a snap to every bone and muscle in his body that he would feel for days afterward. His hands by his sides, he yoked the controls until he had the rectangular shape of the Cheyenne Center in his line of vision.

I hope to hell the snipers have been informed.

Around him he saw the rest of his team, parachutes open, flying toward their target.

800 feet.

700.

They were low enough they could now see details of the building. Black-topped roof. Red brick walls. The snipers weren’t visible against it from this height. He noted the Mobile Control Unit. He noted the National Guard rolling down the roads, setting up perimeters— tanks and armored personnel carriers and Humvees.

400 feet.

Something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. A splash of scarlet where there shouldn’t be one.

Twisting around, he saw Santiago’s jumpsuit covered with red. Santiago slumped unnaturally in his harness.

Another.

He swiveled his head. Franklin. A mist of red swirling into the up-draft, a fog of blood escaping from a helmet that was barely there.

O’Shay went cold. There were snipers out there, taking out his team as they parachuted in.

Into his microphone: “Snipers. Take evasive action! I repeat, take—”

But the National Security Agency was jamming all radio and satellite communications in the area. They couldn’t hear him. No one could.

O’Shay spun his chute in an erratic fashion, jinking, swerving, trying to avoid being an easy target. Another of his team went down, slumped in his harness, blood soaking his flight suit.

Where the hell were the snipers? Not the bureau snipers on the building. In the hills surrounding the resort?

“Goddammit, we didn’t have enough—”

But Lieutenant O’Shay didn’t have even enough time to finish his thought as a high velocity sniper round struck him in the chest as he crossed into the three hundred-feet range.

Derek found the elevator structure to be relatively intact. The wall that had separated the hallway from the elevator was gone. Huge chunks of concrete and steel were piled six and seven feet high, some of them from the elevator infrastructure, most from the floor, wall, doors, and ceiling.

The catwalk was a twisted, unstable wreck. As they inched along, the catwalk wobbled and vibrated with every move they made. Finally, drenched in sweat, vision doubling, pain flashing through his head and leg, he made it to the wall. Instead of a steel hatchway crisscrossed with wires and Semtex, Derek found a ragged hole in the structure.

Derek hauled himself through and sprawled atop the elevator car. Maria slipped in beside him.

Gulping air, he studied their situation. They could drop into the elevator through the roof hatch, pry open the doors, and possibly make their way into the lobby, though he had suspicions that there was as much debris blocking that way as was blocking the route they had come.

In addition, it was almost certain that two of Coffee’s Fallen Angels were patrolling the lobby, armed and in better shape than he and Maria.

He took the flashlight out and beamed it upward. His heart sank.

Some elevator companies placed steel rungs into the elevator shaft so maintenance workers could climb up and down the shaft as necessary. Most did not. Derek knew that most elevator workers just rode the elevator on the roof— elevator surfing— until they got to the motor and gears built into the rooftop elevator controls. That was apparently the situation here. There was no ladder or steps or steel rungs. What he saw were blank concrete walls and steel cables that ran upward past the limits of his flashlight beam.

Derek was intimately familiar with the Cheyenne Center. The elevator
was built to ferry people from the basement to the first floor. It also had a secondary function: to move maintenance people to the ballroom attic or to the roof. The attic was actually another crawl space, about five feet tall, filled with a mass of electrical wiring and heating and cooling ducts for the main structure. If the crawl space between the first floor and superstructure was a complicated, tight mess of infrastructure materials, it was nothing compared to the one above the ballroom.

They could go down, he supposed. Access to the basement would give them hallways to move through, in and around the structure, possibly even out of the Cheyenne Center. That might be desirable. It was time to get Maria to safety.

It was just that he wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to accomplish that. You couldn’t slip beneath an elevator from inside the elevator. If he activated the elevator— there were override controls on the roof of the elevator— the two Angels in the lobby would be alerted to their presence.

“This is fun,” said Maria. “But where to now?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Well, don’t hurt yourself—”

Derek held up his hand, suddenly tense. Maria started to protest, but he slapped his hand over her mouth. He thought he heard a noise.

He waited, ears tuned to every sound, no matter how small. He thought initially it must be the movements of the two Angels in the lobby. But what he heard was a slow, delicate, regular rhythm from below them, from where they had just come. The catwalk.

Slowly leaning toward the hole in the wall, he rested his hand on the remnants of the catwalk.

He could feel the tension in the wrecked metal. And the vibration. Tiny, regular, as if it were supporting somebody’s weight.

A moment later, the metal vibrated harder as whoever was on the structure moved forward.

Derek jerked back inside and studied the elevator shaft. He put his lips to Maria’s ear. “Can you climb ropes?”

“I don’t know.”

He studied the elevator cables. There were six thick metal cables, at least an inch in diameter, maybe even thicker. They were greasy, which
was going to be a problem. He grabbed hold, testing them. The metal cables would rip their hands to shreds. There was no way they could climb these things.

He reached down and flipped open the hatch to the elevator. He pointed down. Maria clambered down. Derek followed.

With a shrug, Derek tapped the button for the basement. With a grinding sound, the elevator dropped downward.

With a clunk it stopped and the doors opened. Derek stood ready, the MP-5 aimed into the basement elevator lobby. No one. Good.

Taking Maria’s hand, he rushed out of the elevator.

Irina Khournikova followed Agent Swenson out of the Mobile Command Unit. The U.S. National Security Agency was jamming all phone, radio, and satellite transmissions in the area just as Operation Tagger began. The only way they would have to communicate with anybody for the next fifteen minutes was via landlines and e-mail, although Swenson had seemed unsure as to whether or not those would be available.

Irina didn’t like the unknown quantities. She recognized an operation put together too quickly without enough intel, and she knew from personal experience how these ops tended to end— tragically. She kept her opinion to herself. She thought Swenson had too many balls in the air as it was.

Outside, they kept an eye on the sky. Irina said, “What of the Security Center?”

“No word.”

“I’ll go check.”

Swenson reached over and snagged her arm. “I want you with me.”

“Right where you can keep an eye on me.”

“That’s right. Ah, here they come.”

She looked skyward. At first she saw nothing but birds. Then they grew larger and she realized the birds were human beings in free fall, growing larger and larger.

Then the blue parachutes blossomed above them, the canopies almost invisible against the Colorado sky.

“Your, how do you call it, Delta Force? The best of the best of the best?”

“Roughly equivalent to your Spetsnaz.”

Irina nodded, hoping this worked. She counted five parachutes. She
could only see them because she had known where to look. Something caught her attention.

“What was that?” she asked.

Swenson scowled. He had heard it, too. The sound of a gunshot from somewhere in the hills. “Dammit! What—”

He sprinted into the MCU and returned a moment later with a pair of binoculars. His posture as taut as a bowstring, he focused the binoculars on the incoming paratroopers. “Holy fuck!”

“What is it?” she asked.

He handed her the glasses and she located one of the plummeting soldiers. He was slumped in his parachute harness, blood streaming from his head, which appeared to be blown to pieces. “Sniper,” she said. “In the surrounding hillside?”

Swenson raced back into the MCU, growling commands. “Get me General Cole on a land line NOW! Inform Puskorius that snipers are taking out the Delta team! Do it! Do it!” He spun around then rushed out of the MCU toward an FBI agent armed with an assault rifle and screamed, “There are hostile snipers in the hills. I want teams scouring for them right now! Right now! Get on it!”

The agent ran off. Swenson spun again, an expression of near panic on his grizzly face. He stared at Khournikova. “Are you armed?”

“No.”

“Follow me.” He raced back into the MCU. She followed him. He yanked open a locker door. It was filled with rifles and handguns. He gestured. “Arm yourself. Khournikova, pick a team of my people and go open up that motherfucking security center. Do it now!”

“Yes, sir,” she said, reaching in and pulling out an MP-5 assault rifle and a Sig Sauer P229 handgun, grabbing magazines to go with them. “Communications?”

He tossed her a handset. “It’s useless right now, but communications will be back up ASAP, fourteen minutes at the latest. I sent three people over there and haven’t heard from them. Something’s going on. Clean it up.”

He took a breathless gulp of air and snarled, “You understand what I mean here, Khournikova?”

She nodded. She understood perfectly. She hesitated, then pointed
to another locker. He followed her gaze. This locker held hand grenades, flash grenades, and other high-level ordinance. “That might be helpful.”