Tower of Terror (13 page)

Working slowly because of their improvised tools, Charlie Green and two of his office staff, Jill and Diane, carefully removed the screws fastening the window's molding to the steel window frame. In the outer office and corridor, Sandy and Mrs. Forde stood guard. The Federal Agents in the building opposite the Tower had code-signaled Green and his staff to dismantle this particular window and remove the plate glass. The agents had emphasized in repeated Morse that the lives of everyone in the building depended on the window not falling to the sidewalk. If it did, the terrorists would be alerted.

"Done up here," Green told the others. He dropped the last screw, left the molding in place, let his arms fall to his side. Standing on a desk, he'd had his arms above his head for thirty minutes. His arms ached.

"I'm going as fast as I can," Diane told him.

"Me, too," Jill added.

"How many more?" Green asked. He saw blood dripping from Diane's hands. "Take a break, Diane."

"Damn it, my blister's popped."

"Go check on Mrs. Forde and Sandy, tell them we're almost ready to take out this window."

"Done down here," Jill told him. "Look! They're flashing the code again."

Across the street, the agents signaled again. Green interpreted the blinking light. "They want us to hurry."

"Are you going to answer them?"

"I'm going to pull out this window is what I'm going to do." Green dropped the last screw from the side molding, jammed the screwdriver between the aluminum molding and the steel frame, and levered carefully. Gooey plastic caulking stretched. Green got his fingers around the molding and pulled with all his strength. The molding slowly tore away from the plastic. He threw down that strip, went to the others. Finally, he ripped away the last molding strip. Only plastic caulking held the eight-by-six-foot sheet of plate glass in the frame. Green tried to lever out the plate glass with a screwdriver. The glass chipped. He tried to pull it out with his fingertips. Blood ran from his shaved fingers.

"What's wrong, Mr. Green?" Jill asked.

"The window's glued in there with plastic!" Across the gulf between the two buildings, Green saw the federal agents' code-light blinking incessantly.

Five minutes, the code repeated. Five minutes. Five minutes.

He scraped the plastic away from the glass, cleared a foot of plastic in thirty seconds.
One foot in thirty seconds
, he thought. He looked at the sheet of glass.
And I've got twenty-eight feet of window edge to do
.

Then he looked through the edge of the glass. Plastic caulking cemented the other side, too! Even if he scraped away all the interior plastic, the exterior caulking would still hold the window in place.

"Find a cigarette lighter, matches!" he shouted to Jill. "Right now! Hurry!"

They tore through the drawers of the office. Whoever used this particular office wasn't a smoker. They went into another office, finally found a book of matches.

When they returned to the window, the light across the street flashed four. Four.

Green put a flame to the plastic. It softened, then burned. A line of flame ran up the window's edge. He soon had all the caulking in flames. The plate glass made cracking sounds as the burning plastic heated it. He saw burning plastic flow down the outside of the window.

Jamming his screwdriver into the frame again, Green levered. Flames burned his hands. But the glass moved.

In the corridor, pistol shots!

Black-suited for battle, Lyons paced the office. He checked the straps of his nylon harness for the tenth time. The steel mountaineering hook clanged against the silenced CAR-16 slung over his shoulder. He smoothed the Velcro flaps of the pockets holding the spare magazine for the CAR. He touched the pouches of concussion grenades.

At the office window, Blancanales waited with a high-powered compound bow. He had an arrow ready in place. A fishing reel attached to the bow held three hundred feet of monofilament. At his side was a coil of nylon rope. One end of the rope was already knotted around a steel beam above the office's acoustic-tile ceiling.

Federal agents clustered near the window. One held a flashlight with a long tube extension pointed at the window across the street. He urgently repeated the Morse code message. Another agent watched the window through binoculars.

"What goes on with those people?" Lyons shouted.

The agent with the binoculars turned to him. "They've got some kind of problem with the window."

"Look!" Blancanales pointed. It was then that they saw the window framed in flame.

Taximan, still wearing his cab-driver's uniform, arrived in the crowded office. "The helicopters are circling at two miles out, waiting for your signal."

Then Gadgets came through the door. He pushed past Taximan. Like Lyons and Blancanales, he wore battle-black and had a silenced CAR-16 slung over his shoulder. In each hand he carried several small electronic devices. "Last-minute trick. Here, radio in the front pocket, here's the earphone."

"More walkie-talkies?" Lyons asked. "I've got two already."

"These pick up their frequency. See the knob?" Gadgets explained as he slipped the small radio into Lyons' pocket. "We can monitor them. But when things get moving, twist the knob. It'll jam their walkie-talkies."

"Any chance they'll be monitoring us?"

"I don't think so. The truck out in New Jersey had all their serious electronics in it." Gadgets looked over at the flaming window. "What's going on over there?" They saw the plate-glass window drop back into the office. A young woman waved her arms. Blancanales raised the bow, drew back, but didn't let the arrow fly.

"Go!" Lyons told him. "Make your shot!"

"Signal for her to get out of the way," Blancanales told the agent with the flashlight.

"
We got three minutes! Make your shot
!"

The arrow arced through the night, monofilament singing from the reel.

Shivering in the chill wind, Mrs. Forde explained what had happened. "Diane came out of the office and told me we were almost ready for the officers to come in. Sandy wasn't paying attention to the elevators, she wanted to hear what we were saying... Then the two creeps with guns came out of the elevator. She didn't see them until I shot at them. I think I hit one. But they grabbed Sandy, took her with them." She was almost hysterical.

"Did you watch what floor they went to?" Green asked her.

"The third floor. They went straight down to the third floor."

"Okay, calm down. Get out of the wind. The shakes will go away, don't worry." Green pried the pistol out of Mrs. Forde's hands, checked the cylinder. He pulled out two brass casings. "Reload your pistol. They could come back."

Jill was standing in broken plate glass, hauling in monofilament, hand over hand. In seconds, they had a heavy nylon rope in their hands. Green stood on the desk, ripped a hole in the false ceiling, looped the rope over a steel beam. He pulled the rope taut, knotted it. Then he hung by his hands from the rope to test the knot. The nylon was as tight as an iron rod.

The nylon line angled up to the building across the street, three floors higher. Green waved his arms. He saw the signal flash in response.

A shadow stepped from the far window, and started to hurtle towards Green. He stared for an instant at the man in black sliding through space. Then he remembered his own training and experience, years before. He quickly checked the office for obstacles. The desk!

Green shoved the desk aside, kicked away a chair. The blond, wide-shouldered man in a commando's black jumpsuit flew through the window, jerked to a halt, dropped to the floor in a crouch.

"Officer!" Green called out. "They know we're here. The terrorists..."

The man in black glanced at Green with cold blue eyes, stepped past him, flashed a light to the opposite building. In twenty-five seconds, two more men in black were in the small office. Then the blue-eyed commando turned again to Green.

"They may know you're here," he told Green, "but they're too busy to come back. Take your people to another floor now. Hide. It'll all be over in ten minutes. Whatever you do, don't go down to the ground floor. Understand?"

"They took one of my staff with them!"

But the three men in black were already gone. Green ran after them. He saw the elevator doors slide shut. The indicator light went to the ninety-seventh floor, and stopped. Then it continued to the hundredth floor.

"I thought they were going to rescue us!" Jill cried.

"What now?" Mrs. Forde asked.

"You and the other two take the stairs down to the next floor," Green told her. "Lock yourselves in an office and wait. They said it will be over in a few minutes. It looks like there's going to be shooting. Don't leave the office once you're in there."

"What about you?" asked Diane.

"They took Sandy, and she's my responsibility." Green strode to the elevator and punched the down button.

As he dropped to the fifth floor, he took the .45 pistol from his coveralls pocket and slipped the safety.

From the ninety-seventh floor, the Able Team took the stairs. Lyons went first. He moved as fast as he dared through the stairwell's half-darkness, peering around corners, waving his flashlight across the landings to check for booby traps. His caution cost precious seconds.

He whispered into his radio's mike. "Team moving to Position Two, over."

In his right ear, he heard the response from the command center: "Check, over." In his left ear, through the radio monitoring the terrorists' frequency, he heard only an occasional word or phrase in Spanish, too colloquial and quick for him to understand. He pulled the earphone out of his ear and tucked it into his pocket.

The concrete shaft of the stairwell echoed with sounds from far below them. There was a voice, a clank of metal on metal. Lyons glanced back to Blancanales and Gadgets. They moved quickly, silently, as if they were shadows without flesh. The distant sounds continued.

At the landing of the hundredth floor, one flight of stairs short of the stairwell housing that opened to the roof, Lyons unscrewed the 40-watt light bulb. He called Blancanales forward. They talked in the dark, their CAR-16's aimed at the roof door.

"What are you hearing on the monitor?" Lyons asked. "I can't make out the Spanish."

"They're behind us. The shooting on the fifty-third floor slowed them down. We got an extra two minutes. What about the door? Any way we can check it?"

"I'll chance it. Alcantara said the plan was for the lower floors only to be wired. So back off, I'm going up. And kill that light down there; someone could be waiting for me when I go out that door."

Blancanales touched Lyons' shoulder. "
Adios
."

Lyons laughed. "Don't get sentimental." When Blancanales blacked out the landing and had taken cover, Lyons crept to the roof door. He ran his hand along the steel door frame, felt nothing. Then he flattened himself against the wall, and started to ease the door open.

The cool evening wind touched his face. He heard the distant throbbing of the helicopters. Lyons didn't continue through the door. It made no sense to him that the door wasn't booby-trapped. Unless this was the way the crazies intended to take to the helipad.

Even if that's true, he thought, they should have it set so we can't follow them.

He couldn't risk a flashlight. Instead, he took a slip of paper from his pocket, a diagram of the WorldFiCor rooftop area, and tore off a strip. Using it like a feeler, he ran it along the doorframe.

Just above ankle height, the paper caught on something. Lyons touched it again, then laid himself down on the landing and looked closely.

There, finer than a hair, glinting with starlight, a transparent strand of filament extended from one side of the doorway to the other. Lyons checked for other trigger-strands. Then he spoke into the radio-mike.

"We got one here. One line of filament, ankle high. I'm going on."

Carefully he stepped over it. He found the charge: it was a kilo of C-4. Then he continued, scanning the rooftop and helipad for terrorists. He lifted his feet high as he walked. He couldn't search the entire roof for booby traps, but he would have to do all he could to avoid the trip-lines.

Making it to the elevator's motor housing opposite the helipad, he felt carefully again for trip-lines or pressure triggers, then went up the ladder. On top, he spoke into his mike.

"Hardman One in position. Next, please. And good luck."

Blancanales came out, took his position in the air-conditioning stacks across the helipad from Lyons. Finally, Gadgets took a position on top of the stairwell housing. Regardless of how the terrorists came out — elevator or stairs — the Able Team had them in triangular ambush.

"Hey," whispered Gadgets suddenly. "They're on their way! Oh, good God! Politician, did I hear that Spanish right? Tell me I didn't."

"You did," Blancanales answered, his voice infinitely weary and sad. "All right, that's it. Let's do the best we can to save the hostages that the psychos bring up here. Zuniga has just poured gasoline on the ones he left downstairs. There's nothing we can do for them now."

It was happening in the auditorium on the mezzanine floor.

"You filthy Yankee scum!" Zuniga ranted from the auditorium's stage. "I will cleanse the earth of you. I will give you a few minutes of hell before Satan takes your souls for his inferno!"

Behind their packing-tape gags, the prisoners' faces contorted in silent screams, their eyes wide.

"You will die in flames for the sins of your Empire! There! Look there!" Zuniga pointed to the projection port at the back of the auditorium. On his cue, Ana smashed out the glass. She placed a box at the edge of the port. "You die when that bomb explodes! May your souls burn forever!"

Zuniga laughed. As he left the stage, he glanced at some prisoners who did not seem to be in a panic. Three of the young executives — two men and a woman — had already freed their hands and feet. They didn't scream or struggle. They waited for their chance to escape. They would be the leading players in Zuniga's comedy.

In the corridor, the members of his squad shoved and kicked several hostages into groups of two, then knotted nylon line around the prisoners' throats. Each squad member had two hostages who would serve as human shields when they stepped out onto the Tower's roof. The squad would take some into the helicopter, leave the others to die when the Tower exploded. The hostages in the helicopter would live only a few minutes more.

Zuniga blocked the auditorium doors and set the charges. The prisoners inside would break down the doors quickly, detonating the charges, which in turn would detonate the ton of C-4 and incendiaries.

"Fernando!" Zuniga called out.

"Yes, commander!"

"You remain here. Scream at them. Rave. When the helicopter is ready, I will signal. Then you come up to the roof. Understand?"

"I will come when you signal."

Each with a pair of hostages, the squad waited. Rico had the young blonde woman they had captured only minutes before on the fifty-third floor. He twisted the rope savagely around her throat. He kicked her into the elevator, and jerked her to her feet when she fell.

"Careful,
compadre
," Zuniga warned. He glanced at his watch. "She must live another two minutes."

Zuniga pressed the elevator button marked RH for roof/helipad.

Lyons felt the cables and motors start to vibrate in the elevator's housing beneath him. He spoke into his throat-mike: "Here they come. Helicopter, come on down. Any problems with our guest star?"

"He is one very frightened man."

"They just came out the door! Over." Turning up the volume on Alcantara's body-mikes, Lyons heard the man's petulant voice complaining over the noise of the rotors. "... the vileness of your threats... I thought this was a civilized country... I don't believe you'd dare..." Lyons flicked off the safety on his CAR-16.

Have no doubts, Mr. Alcantara
, Lyons said to himself.
We have the nerve, all right
.

Clutching a hostage against him and holding his M-16 at ready, Zuniga left the elevator, stepped over the filament and into the rotor storm. He scanned the rooftop for ambushers, saw no one. He motioned for his squad to follow, cautioning each one about the booby trap, then shoved his first hostage ahead and dragged the second behind him. She staggered, fell, choked as Zuniga pulled her to her feet by the rope around her neck.

He heard the second helicopter and looked up. He warily approached the helicopter on the pad. He pointed his automatic rifle through the side-door.

"Is this a trap,
federates
! If it is, you all die!"

Alcantara, his leader through all the months of planning and preparation — who had given Zuniga's pointless life meaning, who had brought his lifetime of hatred to flower — stepped from the helicopter. The landing lights made his coward's face seem like a mask of blood.

"Zuniga! My compatriot! Yes, they planned a trap for you! But I learned of it and changed the plans.

The helicopter will take us all to freedom!
Victory is ours
!"

Too surprised to speak, Zuniga said nothing. His leader, who had always been so proud and aloof, aristocratic, strangely blond, threw his arms around Zuniga, embraced him.

"Where is the detonator, my friend?" Alcantara asked him, his voice almost begging. "May I have the honor of pushing the button?"

Lifting the walkie-talkie to his lips, Zuniga called down to Fernando. "We are ready, come now.
Viva Puerto Rico Libre!'

Zuniga turned to his leader, studied his face. Alcantara's smile quivered, became a grimace of fear. Now Zuniga knew.

"How could you have learned what the
federates
intended?" And he raised his M-16 to Alcantara's throat. The burst ripped away his leader's head.

From the third-floor stairwell, Charlie Green heard the psycho screaming curses in Spanish. He inched the door open, saw a young Puerto Rican in a moving company's overalls pacing the corridor, turning every few seconds to laugh or shout at the closed doors of the company auditorium. The doors' handles were lashed together.

Across the corridor, near the elevators, Green saw stacked army-drab crates.

Through the inch-wide space, Green watched, waiting for his chance. He held the .45 pistol pointed straight up, the hammer at full cock, safety off. His sweat made the grip clammy. Sweat trickled down his arm. If the terrorist had put Sandy in the auditorium, he'd free her and any other people the terrorists might have taken prisoner. He would tell them about the commando team upstairs. If Sandy wasn't there, he'd take the psycho's M-16 and go find her. He liked Sandy. She had introduced her husband to him at a company party: they were a beautiful young couple with a two-year-old child. It was Green who had called her to work that morning. She was his responsibility. Period.

The psycho's walkie-talkie buzzed. A few words blared from the speaker, then he slung his rifle over his shoulder, went to the elevator, pushed the "up" button. Green knew it would take the terrorist two seconds to unsling his rifle, chamber a round and fire.

Sprinting, his running shoes silent on the corridor carpeting, Green crossed the twenty yards separating them before the young man could jerk the rifle from his shoulder. The .45 was less than a foot from the terrorist's face when Green fired. The slug entered the psycho's gaping mouth, tore his head from his lower jaw, spraying brains and blood and bone over the immaculate chrome of the elevator doors.

Pulling the rifle from the twitching corpse, Green chambered a round, flipped the lever to full auto, and watched the elevator doors. The car came, the doors sliding open to reveal the empty interior.

He turned to the auditorium. Someone on the other side pushed against the doors. Green heard a voice inside: "Is he still there?"

"No," Green answered. "He's dead."

"Who's that?" The voice called through the doors.

"Charlie Green, Eastern European Accounts. Is Sandy Robinson in there?"

"Get us out of here!" voices screamed. "There's a bomb in here!"

Green tore at the ropes binding the door handles.

When they saw the muzzle-flash of the terrorist's M-16 on the helipad below them, the federal agents circling in the second helicopter hit the switch powering the Xenon searchlight. Ten thousand watts of white light created a disorienting noon on the rooftop.

An agent in the helicopter recorded the slaughter on high-resolution video tape for later analysis. It only lasted seconds.

But for Lyons and his partners Blancanales and Schwarz, the few seconds were hours.

From their positions around the helipad, they looked into the confused group of terrorists and hostages, crowded shoulder to shoulder, their heads only inches apart.

Lyons had anticipated this. Before entering the Tower, he had requested, and received, specially loaded 5.56mm cartridges for their CAR-16's. The standard 50-grain military and the 55-grain hollow-point hunting slugs used with the 5.56mm cartridge had a maximum kill range of four hundred yards. At close range, regardless of the slug used, the 2700-feet-per-second muzzle velocity of the CAR'S would create through-and-through wounds, the slug continuing through the body of the target to perhaps kill or maim someone beyond. Knowing that the combat would be at close range, with the terrorists shielding themselves behind hostages, Lyons had Able Team's weapons loaded with specially cast hollow-point slugs.

The 40-grain bullets were actually lead cups, their interior voids packed with common lubricating wax to give the slug additional weight. These slugs, though unstable and inaccurate at distances exceeding one hundred feet, had the advantage of dissipating the bullet's striking energy of 1200 foot/pounds within inches of the point of penetration.

Impact opened the cup from its diameter of 5.56mm to a disc of approximately 25mm, resulting in the instantaneous dissipation of the striking energy and the conversion of the lubricating wax filler into expanding gas.

At the sound of Zuniga's auto-burst, Lyons and Blancanales and Gadgets became mechanical marksmen. To them their work appeared in slow motion.

The first radical hollow-point from Lyons' CAR-16 struck Zuniga just above his right ear. His head ceased to exist, only the blood-spurting stump of his neck and a few ragged strips of jaw and scalp remaining. The impact threw the corpse and the two hostages to the helipad asphalt.

Simultaneously, slugs from Blancanales' and Gadgets' rifles killed Rico and Julio. Staring up at the second helicopter, Rico had turned to ask instructions of his squad leader, his jaw moving to form the first word of the question. Blancanales' slug hit him at the base of his skull. The jaw and brains and pink fragments of skull struck Ana in the face and chest.

Julio had been startled by the sound of Zuniga's burst, was straightening suddenly. Gadgets' bullet hit him just above the collar-bone, slamming his head back as his throat and spine exploded. His head flopped forward, attached to his torso by only a few ligaments and strips of skin, as his corpse fell.

Brains and blood on her face, Ana's eyes went wide at the sight of a jaw falling onto her chest, the teeth brilliantly white in the Xenon light. A scream rising in her throat was never heard, the breath from her contracting lungs hissing through the gore and torn tissue of a throat without a head, spraying blood-mist into the Xenon glare. Lyons' second target fell, the rope binding her hostages falling from her spasming hands.

Lyons sighted on Luisa, touched the trigger as Blancanales' second shot snapped her head forward. Lyons' bullet entered the woman's exploding skull, destroyed her again.

But Carlos ducked, pulled his shields — a man and a woman — backwards as he scrambled for safety. One-handed, he jerked his rifle up. The female hostage courageously, instinctively blocked the rifle with her elbow, pushing the barrel down. The magazine emptied into the asphalt.

Three slugs caught Carlos simultaneously. Each member of Able Team sighted on whatever part of the terrorist's body was visible from his particular angle. Lyons' shot snapped his spine, dumped the terrorist's guts from his body. Blancanales' shot tore away the terrorist's entire face. Gadgets annihilated his left leg.

"
Ceasefire
!" Lyons shouted.

Bodies covered the helipad. Some moved, some twitched with the impulses of dying nerves. Able Team scanned the carnage for anyone with a rifle still alive. Hostages twisted away from the corpses. Men and women sobbed. Someone laughed.

The man whom Carlos had held as a shield struggled to his feet and looked down at the disintegrated terrorist in horror. "There's one more downstairs!" he managed. "One of them's still down below!"

Lyons leaped from his position. He saw Blancanales climbing down from the air-conditioning stacks, and ran to him.

"Why did Zuniga kill Alcantara?"

"Alcantara said he learned of a trap," said Blancanales, "that he'd changed the plans. Zuniga asked him how he could have known of a trap, and pulled the trigger on him. But I think it was the way Alcantara was acting — Zuniga saw something was wrong."

"What did he say about the detonator?"

"Nothing. He called down to someone else, said they were ready now. And said '
Viva Puerto Rico Libre
.' Then he shot Alcantara."

"A suicide man? To trigger the bomb?"

Blancanales changed magazines on his CAR-16. "Let's go find out."

Gadgets ran from the stairwell housing. "I've killed this booby trap," he said, "at least across the stairhead."

"Okay. Now watch the elevator after we go down," commanded Lyons. "The last guy could slip past us somehow."

A tall, middle-aged woman in a blood-splashed pants suit called out to them. "They're all in the auditorium, second floor. There's still time to save them."

Lyons and Blancanales ran to the elevator.

Tearing away the first loop of nylon cord holding the auditorium doors closed, Green shouted to the hysterical employees inside.

"Back off! Just a second! I can't untie the ropes with you pushing."

"Cut them! Please, get us out of here!"

"I don't have a knife. I can't go looking — just a second!"

He glanced around the corridor. He saw the stacked boxes, a few discarded lengths of nylon rope, a woman's shoe, a black nylon bag. But no knives, no bottles to break, nothing. He started over to the dead terrorist lying near the elevator doors.

Green stopped. For the first time in the sixty seconds since he'd killed Fernando, he stood still. He read the wording on the crates stacked against the elevator column.

"United States Army" had been marked over with stenciled letters. He didn't immediately recognize the stenciled letters. The lettering and words were Vietnamese!

On the end of one crate, he saw the letter and number: C-4.

A twisted plastic rope ran from the boxes. Green was standing on the rope. He looked down at his feet, then to the rope behind him. It extended from the U.S. Army packing crates to the discarded nylon bag. The bag had been thrown into the corner near the auditorium doors.