Crusader One (Tier One Thrillers Book 3) Page 11

  When they reached the level-three landing, Dempsey took a knee by the door. Baldwin must have still been having problems getting imaging from the drone because normally they’d be getting a warm-body report before entering the hall. Dempsey had become spoiled enough running ops with Ember’s superior tech that now he felt entitled to the information before turning every corner. He glanced at Jarvis and Munn, saw they were set, and grabbed the lever. He raised three fingers: Three . . . two . . .

  The lights went on.

  Blinded, Dempsey released the door lever, knocked his NVGs up, and squeezed his eyes shut. “What the fuck is going on, Zero?”

  “The standby generator just came on,” Baldwin replied. “It failed to start immediately after the outage and just came on now.”

  “Turn it off!”

  “Working on it, John . . . patience.”

  He had a tactical decision to make: light-adjust his eyes, or hope Baldwin worked quickly and try to keep his night vision. He listened for the sound of boots converging in the stairwell from below or the hallway outside the door . . . Nothing at the moment, but that could change. There was no way he was going to lead the team into the hallway with lights bright, but they couldn’t remain in the fire-escape stairwell indefinitely, either.

  “Baldwin, get that fucking genny shut down, ASAP,” Jarvis commanded over the comms channel.

  After a beat, the lights in the emergency stairwell flickered twice and then went dark.

  “Don’t let that happen again, Zero,” Jarvis said.

  “No guarantees, Three,” came Baldwin’s reply. “But we’re primed and ready for the next restart.”

  Dempsey dropped his NVGs back down into place and assessed the quality of his vision. Just a few more seconds. “Two, Three—ready to go?”

  “Check.”

  “Check.”

  Dempsey reached for the door lever, and this time the lights did not go on when he opened it. Munn and Jarvis slipped past him into the hallway, the doc clearing left and Skipper clearing right.

  “Clear,” both operators said in unison.

  With the immediate vicinity clear, Dempsey chopped his hand south and took point. They moved like ghosts, three seasoned SEALs in perfect combat crouches sighting over their weapons.

  “Zero, report,” Dempsey said, hoping for something, anything, useful from their eyes in the sky.

  Baldwin’s voice chimed over the comms channel, “One, Zero, now that you’re out of the stairwell, I have you on intermittent thermal. With the jammers powered down, drone performance is much better, but even with XIR, the system is still having trouble with structural interference.”

  “Need data, Zero, not exposition,” Dempsey growled.

  “Your hallway is clear ahead and behind. I have three bodies in a room fifteen meters down the hall on your left. Must be living quarters, because I hold a man, a woman, and what can only be a child.”

  Dempsey kept advancing and soon made out a dim light dancing along a doorsill.

  That’s a flashlight . . . Stay in your room, people. Please stay in your room, he chanted silently to himself, his finger on the trigger guard as he glided past the occupied space.

  “Right turn at the next intersection, then forty feet, and then a left turn onto the hallway leading to the Iranian mission,” Baldwin said. “Be advised, you have one body, definitely male, moving away from you toward the mission.”

  Could it be Rostami?

  There was no way Baldwin could possibly know the man’s identity from an XIR signature, but Dempsey couldn’t help but hope this was it. At the corner, Dempsey glanced back over his shoulder and saw Jarvis clearing their six.

  “Lost thermal,” Baldwin said. “We’ve only got good coverage in a fifty-five-degree sector. Bringing the drone back around.”

  Dempsey’s mental operational alarm clock was beeping at him. This was taking too damn long, and they needed to pick up the pace. Rostami would have evacuation and contingency plans in place. The man was an experienced VEVAK operator and terrorist—the instant the embassy went dark, he would have taken action to protect or exfiltrate himself. Dempsey took the corner, cleared left while Munn cleared right. The hallway ahead was clear; the figure that Baldwin had seen moments ago had either already rounded the corner or disappeared into a room. Dempsey’s heart rate picked up. He put the odds of a Rostami ambush at fifty-fifty.

  Fuck it . . . Dempsey lengthened his stride, pushing forward. May the operator with the best reflexes win.

  “Multiple bodies on the first floor, generally moving southwest toward the admin building,” Baldwin reported. “I have two bodies below you heading north, possibly toward the fire-escape stairwell you used. Be alert on EXFIL.”

  With the power out all over Cleveland Park, the resident staff would not have reason to be suspicious, but the duration of the blackout was now stretching long enough to induce anxiety and even panic for those without flashlights. Realistically, a chance encounter with a panicked civilian was their greatest counterdetection threat, but as Jarvis had warned, they had no choice but to treat every encounter inside the Iranian mission as potentially hostile.

  Dempsey paused at the corner and waited for Munn and Jarvis to get set.

  “Zero, report contacts,” he whispered.

  “No coverage at your six,” Baldwin said, his voice apologetic. “I don’t know where the male contact went.”

  Scowling, Dempsey raised three fingers and counted them down: Three, two, one . . . He rounded the corner, every nerve in his body primed and ready for bullets to come flying at him, but the hallway was empty. At the end of the hall sat an abandoned security desk with a sign: “Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” On the right and left sides of the hall were two doorways. Dempsey chopped a hand at each, Munn taking the right side and Jarvis taking the left as Dempsey slowed his advance and kept his holographic sight fixed on the wooden door behind the desk.

  “Clear” and “Clear” came the nearly simultaneous reports from Munn and Jarvis clearing their respective doorways. Together, they advanced until Dempsey reached the heavy door behind the security desk. He placed a gloved hand on the large brass knob and slowly checked it. To his surprise, the knob turned easily.

  This was it. Finally.

  He reminded himself that it was imperative to take Rostami alive. Not shooting this terrorist motherfucker in the face would take all the self-control he’d developed as a Navy SEAL over the past two decades. With a final, definitive exhale, he pushed the door open and moved left. He quickly cleared the left corner then swiveled right to scan the small foyer. With Munn and Jarvis in matching tactical crouches beside him, they crossed the marble tile floor in perfect synchronicity toward a cased opening on the facing wall. Dempsey held up a closed fist, and in unison the team halted. His weapon trained on the archway, he listened. The room was silent except for the sound of his own breath and that of his teammates—no fleeing footfalls, no rustling of clothing, no weapons clatter. He chopped a hand forward and they moved swiftly to the archway. At the threshold, they paused again, and Dempsey tapped out a three-count cadence by nodding his head. They rounded the corner and stepped into a sitting room that was outfitted with old-school decor, complete with leather club chairs flanking a fireplace nestled between bookshelves. Dempsey’s blood pressure ticked up a couple of notches in aggravation, but he checked the emotion so as not to lose his tactical edge. They cleared the empty room and advanced on the set of double doors on the wall opposite the fireplace. Dempsey took up a position next to the left door, while Jarvis took a crouched position on the right. In his peripheral vision, he saw Munn check their six then take a tactical knee and sight on the middle of the double doors. Another three count and Dempsey pushed the door in, but it stopped abruptly on contact halfway through the swing arc. Heart pounding, he swept around the door and into the room, scanning left then forward. He instantly registered the two motionless bodies on the floor, but he focused his active attent
ion on sweeping the office for upright threats.

  “Clear,” he whispered.

  “Clear,” echoed Jarvis as he advanced on another door on the right wall. Munn fell in beside Jarvis, and they cleared the next room while Dempsey trained his rifle on the closer of the two bodies, the one behind the door he’d hit on the in-swing.

  Jarvis was back a beat later. “Kitchenette,” he reported. “Clear.”

  “Looks like a security guard here,” Dempsey said, poking the dead body with the muzzle of his rifle.

  Munn drifted over and took a knee beside the fallen guard, downed with what appeared to be a single round to the forehead. “Dead.”

  “So’s the other guy,” said Jarvis, who had moved to a position behind the room’s massive executive desk. “No need to check this one for a pulse.”

  Dempsey walked over to where Jarvis was standing and was greeted by the stuff of nightmares—a headless corpse sprawled in a lake of blood. He couldn’t tell if the body lay prone or supine because the hands had been expertly amputated at the wrists. Twin ovals of blood, black in his NVGs, stained the Persian carpet at the ends of the outstretched arms.

  “Zero, One—where’s the warm body we were trailing?”

  “After I lost him, I never regained contact on level three,” Baldwin answered. “It’s very possible he took the south stairwell down to the ground floor and out with the others.”

  “Shit,” Dempsey growled and checked his watch. Seven minutes had elapsed. He looked at Jarvis. “We need to go, Skipper.”

  Jarvis was scanning the headless corpse with a light he had clicked on from the Picatinny rails of his rifle. Dempsey could see now that the corpse was lying facedown.

  “Zero, Three—we have a body we will be taking with us,” Jarvis said over the radio.

  Dempsey flipped up his NVGs and scanned the body with his own light. “It’s him—it’s Rostami,” he said, both rage and joy competing for dominance of his emotions.

  “Maybe,” Jarvis said. “Or maybe it’s the lead bomber from the DNI attack.”

  Dempsey took in the size, the shape, the curve of the spine below the ragged stump of bleeding neck. He thought back to the figure moving through the tunnels beneath the UN a year ago. “It’s him,” he said again. “I’m positive.”

  Munn had taken up a position by the office door, still scanning over his rifle. “I guess fingerprints and dental records are out of the question,” he said.

  Jarvis turned back to Munn. “Dan, you are on corpse detail. You’ll carry the body and stay between us on the EXFIL.”

  “Fuuuck,” Munn grumbled while double-timing it over to Jarvis. “Gonna leave one helluva trail behind me with all the blood leaking out of that sack o’ meat.”

  “We’ll be long gone by the time they put it together,” Jarvis said. “Now let’s get ’em up.”

  Munn grunted as he heaved the headless corpse up and into a fireman’s carry across his broad, powerful shoulders.

  “Zero, status report on external security?”

  “Security is actively sweeping the embassy grounds now,” Baldwin said. “Three guards, but they’ve been staying together in a bunch.”

  “Where are they now?” Dempsey asked.

  “Walking the front perimeter between the gate and the admin building.”

  “Shit,” Dempsey huffed. “We gonna need a distraction if we want to retrace our INFIL route.”

  “Or we could go over the east fence behind the building,” Munn suggested. “It’s a pretty big drop, but doable.”

  “What about the north side?” Jarvis said. “Is there an emergency exit from the north stairwell at level one?”

  “I remember seeing a door,” Dempsey said.

  “Perfect,” Jarvis said, looking at Dempsey, his SAD Chief. “You good with a north side level-one exit, John?”

  “Yeah,” Dempsey said. “Zero, guide us out of here.”

  “Drone is in position. I have good eyes everywhere except inside the north stairwell, just too much steel and concrete even for augmented thermals,” Baldwin said.

  Dempsey nodded to his teammates and lowered his NVGs. Settling into a tactical crouch, he led them out of the Iranian mission and back into the hallways of the Pakistani embassy’s third floor.

  “Ah jeez. What a mess,” Munn grumbled as they retraced their steps toward the north stairwell. Dempsey knew exactly what Munn was complaining about; he’d seen the bloody neck and wrist stumps start leaking blood all over Munn the instant he’d picked up the corpse.

  “That family still holed up in their room?” Dempsey asked as they approached the final turn.

  “Hold,” Baldwin said.

  They all took a knee, Munn grunting under the deadweight and Jarvis and Dempsey taking up security postures, scanning the hall behind and ahead.

  “The family is still in the room, but we have another problem . . . Two tangos just entered the north stairwell on level one . . . Hold in place . . .”

  Dempsey gritted his teeth, feeling the crushing weight of time running out. Baldwin had said they’d get ten minutes of night, plus or minus two. They’d been here nine fucking minutes already.

  “Zero, status?” Dempsey whispered but just got static from Baldwin.

  Finally, after an eternity, Baldwin said, “Okay, they’re on the second floor now, moving south . . . You’re clear.”

  Dempsey nodded and he and Jarvis cleared the corner. They rushed past the occupied room to the stairwell. At the stairwell door, Dempsey paused again for a three count: Three . . . two . . . one . . .

  He pushed the door open and advanced into the stairwell with Jarvis right behind him. The stairwell was dark, even for NVGs, but he trusted his ears and waved Munn in. As Jarvis eased the door shut behind them, Baldwin’s voice crackled over the radio.

  “One, Zero, you need to move. The two tangos are coming back. I repeat, two tangos heading toward the stairwell on level two.”

  Dempsey didn’t bother responding, just double-timed it down the stairs—trying to be as quiet as possible but erring on the side of speed. The metal staircase began to thrum and vibrate as their combined weight and cadence seemed to set the entire structure into some sort of harmonic resonance.

  “Ten seconds,” Baldwin reported. “Hurry!”

  Dempsey glanced at the level-two door as he passed, looking for some way to jam the handle, but saw nothing expedient and just kept moving. His mind automatically began a silent count from Baldwin’s last report: Eight . . . seven . . .

  Ten more steps.

  Six . . . five . . .

  His boots hit the level-one landing, but Munn was still half a flight behind, doing a damn fine job considering the weight of the corpse on his back, but lagging nonetheless.

  Four . . . three . . .

  Dempsey pressed the push bar on the emergency exit door and opened it. A blast of wind buffeted his cheeks and howled through the gap in the door. Jarvis ducked outside and Munn followed right behind him.

  Two . . .

  Fighting the wind, Dempsey eased the door shut silently into its frame.

  One.

  “Holy hell that was close, John,” said Baldwin’s voice on the wireless, with what was probably the most emotion he’d ever heard from the Professor.

  “We’re not out of the woods yet,” Dempsey said and chopped a hand toward the fence along the north perimeter. The three former SEALs moved swiftly toward the six-foot-tall fence that ran along the top of a stone retaining wall that sloped from west to east. Dempsey peered down through the bars. From their location, it was approximately a seven-foot-drop from the top of the wall to the ground.

  “What you want me to do with him?” Munn said.

  “Chuck him,” Dempsey said.

  “You fucking serious?”

  “Yeah, dude, we gotta motor.”

  Dempsey took a step in to help, but to his astonishment, Munn military-pressed the headless corpse into the air and lobbed it over the fence. The body tum
bled about its axis as it fell and hit the ground on the other side of the wall with a resounding thud.

  “You’re a beast, you know that?” Dempsey said with a crooked grin as he hoisted himself up and over the fence.

  “Zero, Three,” Jarvis called in while sighting west along the side of the embassy toward the gate. “Report threats.”

  “You’re clear—wait, one of the roving guards at the gate just turned your direction.”

  Dempsey dropped from the stone wall and hit the dirt beside the body. He looked up and saw Munn going over the fence, with Jarvis following a beat later. Dempsey sighted up the sloping grounds between the Pakistani and Nigerian embassies.

  Munn dropped next, stumbling on the steeply sloping ground, but quickly regained his footing. A flashlight beam arced overhead as Jarvis dropped next. Munn wasted no time slinging his rifle and hoisting the bloody corpse back up onto his shoulders.

  “Did he see you?” Dempsey asked Jarvis.

  “Don’t know, but let’s move,” the Ember Director said, turning east toward International Drive.

  “One, Zero—hold,” said Baldwin’s voice in his ear. “You’ve got a southbound vehicle on International Court.”

  To the west behind them, somewhere above the retaining wall but out of view, Dempsey heard shouting. “I think the guard saw you. Sounds like he’s calling for reinforcements.”

  “That’s correct. I see two more guards closing on your position,” Baldwin confirmed.

  “We move to the bottom corner of the retaining wall,” Dempsey said. “I’ll watch our six; you guys load the body.”

  He got simultaneous nods from Munn and Jarvis.