Hostage (39 page)

‘One minute out,’ the pilot
called through their earpieces.

Lieutenant Webber, ‘point man’
for the operation, clicked off the safety on his assault rifle. Like the other soldiers
in his unit, he knew what was at stake and had trained all his life for just such a
mission.

In the green glow of his night-vision
goggles, the shadowy outline of the compound came into view. He spotted the ghostly face
of a sentry peering into the night, hunting for the source of the thudding blades. As
they made their final approach, Webber targeted his laser gunsight on the man’s
head and squeezed the trigger. A split second later the man dropped lifeless to the
ground.

Another sentry appeared and fired his AK47
blindly in their direction. A crack-shot from the other Black Hawk took the man out. The
two remaining sentries fled their
posts and sprinted for the main
building. Webber brought them both down a few metres from the doorway. But he had no
doubt the alarm had already been raised. His squad now had little more than a minute to
locate and extract the hostages – any longer and it would be too late.

As soon as they’d cleared the compound
wall, the SEALs fast-roped from the hovering helicopters to the ground below. Touching
down on the hard-packed earth, amid swirls of dust, they unclipped themselves and dashed
to the central building. A set of metal double doors served as the entrance, but
they’d been locked from the inside.

Kneeling by the doorway, Webber waited a few
precious seconds while one of his team, a large man from the Bronx nicknamed Sparky,
attached an explosive charge.

‘Clear!’ barked the soldier,
retreating a step and shielding his face.

The device detonated, flinging the metal
doors back on their hinges. They banged like temple gongs, the blast echoing around the
dusty compound. Inside, the building was cloaked in darkness, but the soldiers’
night-vision gear revealed a long empty corridor with doors opening off on either
side.

As point man, Webber took the lead.

Suddenly there was an eruption of gunfire.
Bullets whizzed past, narrowly missing Webber as he dived into the shelter of a doorway.
He and his men returned fire.

‘Stairwell!’ shouted one of the
SEALs.

Webber had line of sight and sprayed the
landing with 7.62 calibre rounds. A robed man tumbled down the
staircase and landed in a bloody heap on the corridor floor.

A turbaned head then peered out from a room
on the far right and immediately disappeared back inside as a hail of bullets raked the
corridor wall. Ceasing fire, Sparky hurled a ‘flashbang’ through the open
doorway. The stun grenade went off, blinding light and a concussive blast incapacitating
the occupant within. Aware they might need the man alive, one of the SEALs cuffed him
while the rest of the unit swept the other rooms.

The ground floor was clear; no sign of the
hostages.

But under the staircase they found an iron
gateway and a set of steps leading downwards. Dividing into two teams, one SEAL unit
headed for the upper floor to subdue any remaining hostiles, while Sparky blew the lock
on the gate.

Webber descended the narrow stairwell. It
was pitch-black and even his night-vision goggles struggled to pick up anything. As he
approached basement level, his ears strained for the sound of footsteps or the telltale
clink
of a round being chambered. He was on the last step when he heard the
scrape of a sandal and caught the faintest glint of a blade to his right.

Webber dropped and rolled, squeezing off
several rounds at the same time. A man screamed in the darkness. More shots rang out,
deafening within the confined quarters of the basement. Sparky and the other SEAL
discharged their weapons into the room, neutralizing a second assailant toting an
AK47.

Scrambling to his feet, Webber took no more
chances. He tossed flashbangs into the two final chambers. The
basement blazed lightning white and the air shuddered with the thunderclap of
detonating stun grenades. But the SEALs encountered no more hostiles.

Webber noticed a door at the far end of the
corridor. He directed Sparky to attach a small charge to the lock. As it exploded, he
kicked the door wide open.

‘Alicia? Connor?’ he called.

Storming in, finger primed on his trigger,
Webber was greeted by an empty cell.

The door to Alicia and Connor’s cell
crashed open. The black-robed giant, his face still no more than a pair of raging eyes
through the slit of his headscarf, barged in and seized them both by the scruff of their
necks.

‘
TAHARAK!
’ he snarled,
dragging them through the door.

Connor and Alicia had no choice but to obey
as they were shoved along the corridor at gunpoint. Once again they found themselves in
the makeshift video room. Two masked terrorists flanked the black flag while the leader
stood waiting before the camera, his jewelled dagger in hand.

Connor’s heart froze at the sight of
the gruesome knife.
The deadline must have passed. The terrorists’ demands not
met.
He couldn’t believe that President Mendez had failed to negotiate
at least
a delay
. His throat went dry with panic and he began to hyperventilate. Despite
his training, nothing could prepare him for his own execution.

Alicia took his hand, clasping it tight.
Connor met her terrified gaze, her eyes brimming with tears at the prospect
of losing him forever. Connor then felt a strange calm wash over him.
Despite the fear for his own life, a cool logic reasoned that if he was sacrificed
she
could be saved. The US Government would be forced to submit to the
terrorists’ demands, in some form or other, and Alicia would be freed. His death
wouldn’t be in vain. He’d have protected Alicia with his life, just as
he’d promised to.

A ghost of a smile even passed across his
lips as he realized he’d be following in his father’s footsteps … right to
the very end.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he
told her as he was pushed towards his fate.

‘No, just the girl,’ ordered the
leader. ‘It’ll have more impact.’

Connor was stunned by his unexpected
reprieve. But his fears quickly turned to Alicia as
she
was forced to kneel
before the camera, her back to the foreboding flag. Without thinking of the
consequences, Connor flung himself at the leader to grab the dagger. But, before
he’d even gone two steps, the giant hammered a fist into his right kidney. Connor
buckled to the floor, wheezing from the blow, pain flaring bright within him.

‘Let’s send the Americans a
message they
can’t
ignore,’ declared the leader, paying no
attention to Connor’s suffering and gesturing to the man behind the camera.

As the terrorist pressed Record, the leader
stood over Alicia with his knife. Alicia became stock-still, her eyes fixated on the
gleaming steel blade.

‘President Mendez,’ spat the
leader to the camera,
making no effort to hide his contempt. ‘We
gave you the opportunity to do the honourable thing. To bow to our demands with your
head still held high. But you’ve broken the terms of our deal by attempting – and
failing
– to rescue your daughter. Worse still, you murdered our innocent
countrymen in the process. Now we, the Brotherhood of the Rising Crescent, will
broadcast our message to the world – and you will listen and
obey
.’

Sheathing his knife, he pulled a gun from
his belt and planted the muzzle against Alicia’s temple.

Alicia whimpered softly, shying away from
the cold hard barrel that promised her death. Yet somehow she managed to overcome her
terror and glare up at her captor. ‘My father will
never
give in to
you.’

The leader ignored her. ‘President
Mendez, we’re men of our word – but it is
you
who have forced our
hand.’

He pulled the trigger.

‘NO!’ shouted Connor, reaching
out desperately to Alicia as she screamed.

But the gun clicked empty.

The leader stared hard into the camera
lens.

‘Next time, there
will
be a
bullet,’ he warned. ‘You’ve less than two hours to meet our demands.
Do NOT try our patience again!’

Charley, Amir, Ling and Marc huddled round
the monitor in the operations room, sickened and speechless at the terrorists’
ruthless mock execution of Alicia.

‘So that’s the situation with
less than two hours to go,’ said Colonel Black gravely over the conference video.
‘This crisis has gone public, the rescue attempt has failed, and the President is
out of options.’

‘But where’s Connor?’
asked Ling. ‘He wasn’t in the video.’

Colonel Black’s expression darkened.
‘That I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps he’s escaped,’
Amir suggested, his expression hopeful.

‘But we’re taught never to leave
our Principal,’ reminded Ling.

‘He could be dead,’ said Marc
flatly.

‘NO,’ said Charley, denying even
the possibility. ‘We don’t know anything, so cannot presume
anything.’

‘Then why isn’t he
in
the video?’ asked Marc.

‘The terrorists are possibly holding
him back for the
deadline,’ replied Colonel Black grimly.
‘I’ll contact you if there are any updates.’

As the colonel ended his transmission, Alpha
team exchanged uneasy looks with one another, each aware what Colonel Black meant by
‘deadline’.

From the corner of the room came a shout.
Leaning back in his chair, Bugsy slapped his forehead with the flat of his hand.
‘So that’s what they’ve done!’ he exclaimed, shaking his head in
frustrated disbelief.

‘What?’ asked Amir.

Bugsy beckoned them over to his workstation.
‘These terrorists are using a number of crafty technical tricks to mislead us.
I’ve just digitally compared their two videos and both have a distinctive call to
prayer sounding in the background. I extracted them both from the audio. Look at the two
wave patterns. They’re an exact match!’

On the monitor two graphic sine waves
appeared. Using his mouse, Bugsy dragged and dropped one on top of the other. The two
patterns were identical.

‘So what does that mean?’ asked
Ling.

‘The “call to prayer” has
been added in post-production,
after
the recording had been made,’
explained Bugsy. ‘Whoever their techie is, he’s good. He anticipated that
we’d search for a location clue in the first video and planted it on purpose for
us to discover, making us think they were somewhere else. But he’s used the same
trick twice.’

Bugsy now pulled up a stream of code on his
computer workstation.

‘Next, I analysed the two emails the
President received.
As we already know, the terrorists misdirected us
over the origin of the email, using fake IP addresses and server relays. I thought my
beta program had cracked the source. But see this code here.’ He pointed to a
bewildering collection of numbers and commands. ‘This indicates the terrorist
programmer set up the equivalent of an “infinity loop” between
servers.’

‘What’s an infinity loop?’
asked Marc.

‘Like two mirrors opposite one
another, this piece of code creates a duplicated signal that bounces between two servers
continuously. To my program, this appeared to be a dead end, the “origin” of
the email. Whereas in fact it was a “doorway” that only opens on
command.’

‘So, can you now trace the
source?’ asked Charley.

Bugsy grimaced and shook his head.
‘We’d have to access the mirrored servers at the exact moment the terrorists
send another email. The chances of doing that are next to zero. I’m afraid
there’s no more I can do. Wherever he is, Connor’s on his own.’