Tsar (51 page)

Once, then twice.

She collapsed back onto the bed and pulled out the sat phone. Thank God for speed dial. Her hand was shaking so badly she couldn’t have punched more than one button.

“Stoke?”

“Fancha, you okay?”

“Baby, I just killed three people. They were going to…rape me, and I just—”

“Aw, honey, I’m so—”

“No, no. Shh. I’m okay. Happy is dead. I shot him. Those gas canisters I told you about are here in his room. I think they’re just small enough to go out through the portholes if I can get them open.”

“Do it now, okay? I would love to know there is no gas in play when we come aboard.”

“Hold on.”

She was back on the line a minute later. “Canisters just went overboard,” she said. “Gas is gone.”

“Great. Now, hostages? Still in one place?”

“Yeah. All in the ballroom, most of them trying to sleep on the floor. Some huddled around the tables. Ten armed guys standing around the perimeter.”

“So, ten standing watch over the hostages, ten off duty, maybe sleeping. That’s a big help.”

“Thanks.”

“How long till you get down to the bridge, baby?”

“Ten minutes, if I’m lucky.”

“Don’t be lucky, be careful. I love you. See you soon.”

T
he submarine lay at a depth of 600 feet below the surface, maintaining neutral buoyancy.

In the middle of her control room were two periscopes on a raised platform. One of the periscopes had a surface video camera that sent pictures to monitors throughout the control room and to the captain’s quarters. Each monitor now displayed an image of the giant zeppelin hovering five hundred feet above the ocean’s surface. Except for the flashing red running lights along her hull and a few lit windows along the center of the fuselage, she was mostly dark, darker even than the black sky behind her.

Directly in front of the two periscopes was the duty station—or the “con”—which is the watch station of the officer of the deck. Tonight, Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Robins had the con. To his right was the fire-control station. Forward, the three bucket seats of the control station, now manned by two enlisted men who operated the diving planes and the rudder, the planesman and the helmsman. In the middle sat the diving officer. To the left of the planesman was the ballast-control panel with two emergency blow handles.

Robins looked aft at the assault party waiting impatiently at the base of the conning tower. He caught the eye of Commander Hawke, who nodded his head once and gave Robins a thumbs-up. The SEAL teams were more than ready. It was go time.

“Blow emergency main ballast tanks,” Robins said quietly.

The diving officer reached over and pushed in the two valves simultaneously, then pulled up, triggering the sub’s emergency surfacing maneuver. The two valves sent high-pressure air from the air banks flooding into the EMBT, the emergency main ballast tank.

The submarine instantly rocketed straight to the surface like a 6,000-ton torpedo.

Her bow came out, flew out of the water, almost vertically, the hull rising at an impossible angle, before falling back into the dark sea and settling directly beneath the hovering airship.

Two enlisted men, Ensigns Blair and Mansfield, raced up the ladder first. It was their job to open the main hatch in the sub’s “sail” or conning tower. As the SEALs crowded forward to begin their rapid ascent up the ladder, the two crewmen up top now mounted a compressed CO
₂
gas-powered harpoon gun atop a swivel base. The base contained an enormously powerful high-speed electric winch. The harpoon gun, used normally in emergency rescue operations, was capable of firing a rubber-coated grapnel hook trailing a thousand feet of steel mesh cable with astounding accuracy.

“Only get one shot at this,” Blair said to Mansfield.

“Yeah, I know. I need a frozen rope.”

That’s what you needed when a foundering vessel was sinking fast in twenty-foot seas, a frozen rope. You needed to put one right on the money, hook a steel bulkhead or something solid, before she slipped under the icy waves with all hands.

Mansfield put his eye to the high-powered scope and looked up the barrel of the harpoon gun. He got the center of the pod’s superstructure in his crosshairs. Twin steel beams ran fore and aft on either side of an emergency hatch in the belly of the pod. These perforated steel brackets secured the bridge pod to the fuselage above. He’d be firing directly at the one nearer the hatch. If they were lucky, the thick rubber coating on the grapnel hook would be sufficiently noise-deadening so as not to alert anyone inside the pod.

That was the theory come up with by the genius brigade in the wardroom, anyway. The two ensigns had their doubts, but it wasn’t their job to offer suggestions. It was their job to hook up to the airship and start winching this big four-hundred-foot-long mother right down to the sub.

The terrorists were threatening to throw live hostages out the door if anyone messed with them. Mansfield’s mission was to get the airship down to sea level fast enough to take that option off the table.

“Okay,” Mansfield said, peering through the scope crosshairs at his target. “Fire!”

Blair yanked the lanyard that fired the harpoon. There was a
whoosh
of expelled gas, and the grapnel hook shot upward toward the underside of the zeppelin, a trail of steel cable beneath. Mansfield kept his right eye glued to the scope.

“Oh, baby,” he said, raising his head and smiling at Blair.

“Frozen rope?”

“Fuckin’ A, podnuh. Nailed it. Hooked the damn cross beam a foot from the hatch.”

Blair pushed the red lever that operated the big winch inside the base of the harpoon. The cable snapped taut as the slack disappeared in a heartbeat, and slowly but surely, the winch began to reel the massive airship down toward the sub’s conning tower.

“Outta the way!” one of the first SEALs to emerge through the hatch yelled. The big black guy, a veteran named Stokely Jones who’d come aboard at Bermuda, was on that steel cable and climbing hand over hand up toward the ship faster than either Blair or Mansfield had ever seen a human being move before. Especially one his size and carrying forty pounds of weapons, equipment, and ammunition on his back.

“S
OMETHING’S VERY WRONG
here,”
Pushkin’s
first officer said to his captain, Dimitri Boroskov. He was staring in disbelief at the instruments arrayed on the ship’s master control panel.

“What is it?”

“We’re losing altitude, sir.”

“Don’t be absurd. That’s impossible,” the captain said, his eyes rapidly scanning the console, looking primarily at the internal gas-pressure gauges. The Vortex I had been designed with twin hulls. An outer hull of thin, rip-stop material and a rigid inner hull of microthin titanium, this lightweight metal hull strong enough to survive all but the most catastrophic disasters. Sandwiched between the two hulls was ninety million cubic feet of helium.

The only things that could possibly cause a loss of altitude would be wind shear from a thunderhead or a loss of gas from inside the outer hull. There was no storm activity within fifty miles. And every one of his gauges showed no signs of leakage. The exterior hull pressure readings in all compartments were pegged safely inside the normal range, just where they were supposed to be. No leaks. No wind. It made no sense at all.

“All pressure readings normal,” Boroskov said. “Slight wind out of the northeast, two knots gusting to five.”

“That may well be, Captain. But look at the altimeter, will you? And the variometer. We are definitely descending.”

“I don’t believe it. Must be something wrong with the altimeter gauge. It’s giving a false reading.”

The captain leaned forward and stared out at the black sky and the few stars scattered near the horizon. “We certainly appear to be stationary, at any rate.”

“Only because the descent rate is minimal, sir. Look! Four hundred ninety feet above sea level and dropping. We’ve lost ten feet according to the altimeter! And the rate seems to be increasing!”

“Impossible.”

“Should I notify Commander Yurin? He demands to be kept abreast of anything unusual, sir.”

“Not yet. We don’t want to look foolish, and there might still be a simple explanation. Call engineering first. There must be a leak somewhere. Perhaps the computer systems monitoring the internal pressure gauges are malfunctioning. This could be the problem. Still, we take no chances. Get engineering teams to go over every square inch of this ship’s interior. Find that leak, if it exists, and fix it!”

“Aye-aye, sir!” the first officer said, and ran for the ladder, while the captain nervously eyed the outward-looking radar, looking for any enemy incursion into their no-fly zone.

“Sir?” his first officer said a moment later, pausing at the bottom of the ladder and looking up toward the open hatchway.

“What is it now?” said the captain, frantically scanning the altimeter, elevator position indicator, and inclinometer. At eye level was his variometer, which he used to measure the ship’s rate of rise or fall. With his left hand, he spun the elevator wheel, trying to detect and correct changes in trim. He was intent on moving the airship forward now, attempting to gain altitude, but he couldn’t seem to do either.

He had the oddest sensation of his entire career.

He felt that his ship was
stuck
in midair.

“I believe there is now another problem, Captain,” he heard his first officer say behind him. Boroskov looked quickly over his shoulder. What he saw, at first glance, did not appear to be a problem.

He saw a beautiful pair of legs descending the ladder, shapely calves, knees, thighs. At first, he thought the woman might be naked, and then he saw the short black satin skirt, the apron. Finally, the beautiful woman with the dark red hair stepped down from the bottom rung. She was wearing the uniform of the housekeeping staff, but she was not anyone he recognized. She had a gun in her hand. Things were getting so strange. The captain shook his head as if he could clear away this craziness.

“You two speak English?” the dark-skinned woman asked.

“
Da, da, da,
” the captain replied. “Yes, yes, yes, of course.”

“Good. I want both of you to remain very quiet. Keep your hands up in the air where I can see them. Good. Now, move toward the hatch.”

The two officers did as they were told.

“Now, open the hatch.”

“Open it?”

“You heard what I said. Open it!”

The captain made for the hatch, but the first officer had other ideas. He turned, screamed something in Russian at the captain, and lunged for Fancha with both hands outstretched, going for the gun.

There was no time to hesitate. She fired one round, caught him in the knee, and he buckled to the floor, writhing in pain.

The Russian captain, very shaken now, cranked the big stainless-steel wheel around a few times. There was a pop, a hiss of air, and then the hatch cover was shoved upward violently by someone below. The steel edge of the round door caught the captain under the chin, and he, too, went sprawling, bleeding from a deep gash.

Fancha looked down and saw Stokely’s smiling face beaming up at her.

“Hey,” he said. “Look who’s here.”

“Oh, baby, oh, baby, oh, baby,” she said, reaching down to touch his face.

“Honey, you got to get out of the way. I got about thirty pumped-up killer angels climbing up my tail crazy to come aboard as quickly as possible.”

Fancha moved to the rear of the control-room pod and watched an endless stream of heavily armed men in black, who had climbed hand over hand up the steel cable, now come pouring up through the hatch. Stoke had the captain and the first officer off to the side, grilling them aggressively at the point of a gun about the current whereabouts of all of the terrorists, especially the ones who were not to be found in the ballroom.

She saw Alex Hawke poke his handsome head through the hatch and smile at her.

She’d never seen a man look so happy in her life.

“Fancha,” he said, grinning at her. “You did it.”

S
EALs don’t train with regulation human-silhouette targets. They use small three-by-five index cards taped strategically over the silhouette. To qualify, you had to be able to hit the card with a double tap, two shots in rapid succession, whether you were popping up from below the water or bursting into a hijacked airliner packed with terrified passengers. SEAL instructors don’t care how you shoot, one-handed, two-handed, right- or left-handed, doesn’t matter, as long as you hit tight, man-killing groups every single time.

The heavy loads the two SEAL platoons were using tonight would knock the terrorists aboard the airship down no matter where they hit them. Head, chest, arm, leg, didn’t matter. The terrorists who had hijacked this airship didn’t know it yet, but their life expectancies had just dropped to zero.

The assault-and-hostage-rescue group quickly divided itself into two platoons, one on either side of the pod’s ladder up to A Deck. Stoke and Harry Brock would take the Alpha Platoon, Stoke commanding. They would search the ship from stem to stern. They’d be looking for any tangos currently off duty, sleeping, or simply hiding and capture or eliminate them. Basically, a door-to-door sweep of the entire airship.

Meanwhile, Hawke and the fourteen men of Bravo Platoon would go directly to the ballroom, take out the Russian tangos guarding the hostages, and secure any other hostages in sickbay or otherwise not found with the main group.

“Listen up,” Hawke said, addressing the whole squad. “This, as you gentlemen all damn well know, is a game for thinkers, not shooters. That’s always been true, but it is especially true tonight. When we go in with our flashbangs and smoke grenades, we’re going to enter a room full of screaming, shell-shocked hostages, many of them elderly and infirm, and perhaps a dozen highly trained Russian terrorists. As you know from the briefing, these guys are very bad news, formerly the death-squad commandos in Chechnya.”

“OMON, skipper?”

“Exactly. So, the trick will be
not
shooting. Every round we fire in there will be accounted for. I don’t need to tell you we probably have the American vice president’s wife in there on the floor. Also her White House security detail. When bullets fly and the fit hits the shan, as it surely will do, these U.S. Secret Service men will immediately cover her body with their own. These men are not, I repeat,
not
attacking the vice president’s wife.”

“Thanks for the heads-up, skipper,” one of the younger SEALs said, laughing.

“Little humor,” Hawke smiled.

It was easy as hell to get too tight at the run-up, too tightly wound, and that was the last thing he wanted his squad to be feeling at the moment.

There were a more few chuckles, and Stoke said, “This is serious shit, guys. Any monkey can shoot people. You men know better than anyone what counts right now is the split second when you know to back the hell off. Okay? Listen to the man!”

Hawke, all trace of humor gone, said, “Once the spoon pops on the first smoke and flashbang grenades, you have two-point-seven seconds before the blast. Fingers off the triggers until you aim to kill. Look all the way into the danger zones before turning into the room. When you get inside, key your focus on weapons, not movement. Maintain fields of fire, and for God’s sake, don’t fuck this up. All right? Everybody ready? You all know where to go, so go, dammit, go!”

He and Stoke stood back and let the teams race up the ladder to reform in the lounge area at the top.

Stoke had made sure a crewman from the sub would fast-rope up the cable with a bosun’s chair and help Fancha back down to the sub, get her to sickbay if necessary. The captain and the first officer were likewise to be removed from the pod and hauled down to the sub for intense interrogation.

At the top of the grand staircase, the hostage-rescue team split into two parties. Stoke took Alpha left down the ship’s central corridor, where they would begin a room-by-room search of the entire vessel, every deck, every nook, every cranny.

Hawke and Bravo went right.

Every member of the team had memorized the ship’s layout. They knew every crack, turn, and stair, including the ballroom’s location and layout on the diagrams. Just two minutes later, Hawke and his assault team were silently checking weapons and gear one last time outside the ballroom’s main entrance, just beyond the line of sight of anyone inside.

Hawke looked at the digital timer ticking down on his watch and stepped forward, stopping just short of the door. He had affixed a noise suppressor to his M8 and now held it at eye level, the selector set for a three-round burst. Should an unfriendly step outside the room now, he was dead. He reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a flashbang. He slowed his breathing. Adrenaline was coursing through his system, just enough to maintain the right edge. In his earpiece, he could hear Stoke breathing.

“Bravo,” Hawke said into his tiny lip mike.

“Copy, Bravo,” Stoke replied. “Alpha is at yellow. Request compromise authority and permission to move to green.” Yellow meant Stoke’s squad was at its last position of cover and concealment. That no-man’s-land between safe and totally rat-fucked. His team had orders not to engage any enemy until Hawke’s primary force had initiated its assault on the ballroom.

“Bravo at green,” Hawke told Stoke, cupping a grenade loosely in his left hand. “Stand by, Alpha…ten seconds…”

He looked at his team, making final eye contact with as many of them as he could. “Remember,” he told them one last time, “key on weapons, shoot surgically, think four steps ahead.”

The team nodded. Hawke saw they were ready. It was finally time for everybody to get real busy, hop and pop.

“Alpha, you now have compromise authority to move to green…”

He paused a beat. He knew Stoke was moving.

“Five,” Hawke said to his team, “four…three…two…one…”

Hawke heaved the first of many stun grenades through the ballroom door. Next, the smoke grenades were tossed inside.

Craaack!

A hundred and eighty decibels of distraction preceded Hawke, who leaned into the smoke and noise and violence as his team stormed into the ballroom behind him.

Bullets from the OMON troops ringing the room full of hostages instantly zipped over their heads with loud, supersonic retorts. Huge sonic explosions rocked the ballroom as the team charged through the hot zone. They were sidestepping wailing hostages as they lobbed more flashbangs and smokes ahead of them and expertly executing terrorists as they encountered them, head shots, torsos, whatever shots they could take. Surgical, like the man said.

The return enemy fire was wild and sporadic as panic and confusion spread. But not all of it. The Russian OMON forces had clearly been training for an attempted hostage rescue, just as Yurin had told Stokely under duress.

Hawke had seen two or three of his guys go down, wounded or dead. A lot of lead was still flying. He was shocked to see a few hostages struggling to their feet, two old men reaching down to help their wives get off the floor. They all held hands and, stumbling blindly through the smoke, tried to make their way toward a door with a lighted exit sign.

They hadn’t gone six feet when all four of them were brutally executed by two OMON guys guarding the exit door. Hawke saw the wanton murder, dropped to a knee, sighted his M8, and unloaded on one of the two Russians, rounds to his head that would sever the connection between brain and spinal cord. He looked for the other one, but he’d disappeared into the smoke toward the stage.

Hawke decided to follow. Murder got you the death penalty in this room. But suddenly, he was taking fire from above. Where? He whirled around. There were two tiny window openings in the wall above the stage, and he saw the glint of a muzzle protruding from one of them. It looked like a projection booth. Fire from above was lethal. He grabbed a stun grenade from his bag and pitched it through the second window. The resulting explosion of sound and the smoke pouring out had neutralized the shooter, at least temporarily.