Specter (33 page)

“One-One,” Murdock called into his lip mike. “We're in the front door.”

“You're clear outside,” Higgins said. “And Two-Eyes is on the third floor.”

“Roger that. Keep an eye out for unfriendly neighbors. The commo shack was occupied in here.”

“Ay-firmative.”

The soft stutter of suppressed fire clattered at Murdock's back. Turning, he saw Nicholson and Sterling in the middle of the rotunda, firing full auto at a trio of half-glimpsed shapes moving on the second-floor balcony at the top of the stairs. One shape slumped over the banister, then dropped to the stone floor below; another spilled onto the stairs, thumping loudly as it rolled halfway down. The third slipped through a door to the left, vanishing.

The lights came on.

“Hello,” Jaybird said, reaching up to adjust his night goggles. “Somebody's home!”

“Jaybird! Red!” Murdock snapped. “You've got the basement! Nick, you're with me.”

“Right, Skipper.”

Together, Murdock and Papagos stormed up the stairs.

“What's
happening
? What's
happening
?”

“Easy, Celia,” Kingston said quietly. “Worst thing we can do now is panic.”

“That's right, Celie,” Bunny added. “The Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand.”

Another explosion sounded, much closer this time, and Kingston was certain she could hear someone screaming in pain. She wondered if the lights would stay on this time.

The women were all in the same room, lying flat on the floor behind the bed with their arms over one another, listening to the approaching thunder. Never in her life had Ellen Kingston felt so utterly and completely helpless. There were six of them, Kingston, the four of her staffers who were women, and one female sergeant who was on Colonel Winters's staff. So far they'd held up remarkably well, Kingston thought, all except Celia, who'd been on the verge of hysterics the whole time and who was certain that they were all going to be raped.

Celia, unfortunately, was the Army sergeant. In Congress, Kingston had delivered speeches several times in favor of bills that would allow women to serve in combat. After observing Celia these past few days, she was beginning to question her stand.

So far, and despite Celia's shrill fears, none of them had been mistreated in any way. . . none of the women, anyway. She'd not seen any of the male hostages since they'd arrived here—wherever “here” was—and she didn't know where they'd been taken. The soldiers watching them had been stiffly formal and correct, even courteous with an Old World formality; the women had been fed, and several times a day a uniformed woman had escorted them one at a time to the toilet.

But no one had so much as questioned the women or come to tell them why they were being held or what demands were being made for their release. Hour after hour was an agony of not knowing, of wondering what each new sounding of footsteps in the corridor heralded.

Footsteps sounded outside the door, and the rattle of the lock as someone turned the knob. Kingston, braced for the worst, prayed that it would be Americans who opened it....

Celia began to scream.

The door banged open, and Kingston's prayers dissolved in sick horror. The man was in uniform, but not of any U.S. military service. There was a lot of gold braid on the unbuttoned jacket, and he held a vicious-looking little pistol with a curved magazine in front of the trigger. Two more soldiers crowded in behind him, brandishing assault weapons.

“Up ladies,” the man said, his accent thick and Slavic-sounding. “Everybody up!”

“What do you want with us?” Beth Leary cried from behind the bed.

“He's going to rape us!” Celia screamed.

“I will kill you if you don't do precisely what I tell you!” the man snapped. He added something in a rasping, Slavic tongue, and the two men with him came in and shut the door, taking up positions on either side of it.

The officer shoved his way through the women until he was face to face with Kingston. “You,” he said, “will come with me.” Moving around behind her, he reached around her with his left arm, not circling her throat as she'd thought he was going to do, but slipping it under her left arm and across her breasts. She caught the sharp tang of his cologne mingled with his sweat. He jerked back suddenly, lifting her off her feet, swinging her about to hold her between his body and the door, backing farther away from the door until his back was up against the wall. Bunny screamed.

“Shut up!” the officer shouted. Still holding Kingston inches above the floor with one arm, he reached out with the deadly-looking little gun, until the muzzle was only a couple of inches from Bunny's right eye. “Shut up, bitch, or you die this instant!”

The woman fell quiet. “That is better,” the man said, but he did not relax at all. “Now, we wait.”

Stepano had point going up the stairs; Kosciuszko was at his back, moving up the steps backward with his M-16 trained up the stairwell, insurance against someone pulling a hop-and-pop surprise from further up the steps. Frazier followed, then Holt, packing his big M-60 like a child's toy. DeWitt and Fernandez brought up the rear.

“Looks clear,” Stepano was saying as he went, a kind of mantra, a chant. “Looks clear ... looks clear . . .”

It was one of those tightly wound spiral stairs, all of stone, winding up the middle of the castle keep. If there was a good place for an ambush ...

Movement ... a face, a weapon at the landing just above. Stepano fired instinctively, the silenced weapon thuttering briefly as he sent a burst snapping into the target. Stepano took the next few steps three at a time, bounding onto the landing, stepping across the body. The man was still alive, his eyes starting from his head, his hands scrabbling weakly at his chest and shoulder, which were already slick with blood.

He was wearing an officer's uniform ... a captain in the JNA.

Stepano grabbed the man's collar beneath his chin. “
Kade
e Gospogya
Kingston?”
he demanded. “Where is Ms. Kingston?” Then he repeated it in Serbian, the words almost identical.
“Gde ye Gospogya Kingston?”

“Top floor,” the wounded man answered, speaking Serbian. He seemed anxious to talk, and Stepano wondered whether that was because he thought he was dying, or because he was terrified of the black-clad apparition looming over him. “Room twelve.”

“Are the hostages all together? Or did you spread them out?”

“Women . . . in room twelve. Men are ... are room three. Please. I didn't—” And then he was dead.

“Room twelve and three,” Stepano told DeWitt.

“Room twelve and room three, people,” DeWitt echoed. “Let's go!”

“You wanna split up and take 'em down together?” Holt asked.

“Sounds good,” DeWitt said. “Three and three. Kos, you take Bearcat and Scotty. Steponit and Rattler, you two with me. Watch out for a trap.”

Stepano didn't think the dying man had lied, but it was certainly a possibility. At the top of the stairs the SEAL squad turned right and pounded down a corridor. Room eight ... room ten ... there! Room twelve.

Silently, DeWitt deployed his men, Stepano to the left of the door, himself to the right, both crouched below the level of the doorknob in case the opposition tried firing through the door. Rattler took up a crouched position slightly on the right of the door, his shotgun switched to single-shot.

DeWitt held up three fingers ... two ... one . . .

Blam! Blam!
And the door splintered inward, flying off shattered hinges. Kingston screamed; she couldn't help herself ... and then her ears rang with a deafening quickfire chain of explosions and a blinding light like a news reporter's camera strobe set off inches from her face.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, seeing that blinding light even through her closed eyelids, feeling something like a hot blast of air slap her face and clothing and set her skin tingling. When she opened her tear-streaming eyes again, she had a glimpse—just a glimpse—of monsters crashing through the shattered door. They were dressed head to foot in black, with vests heavily laden with arcane and technical-looking gadgets, with visored helmets and with the visible parts of their faces thickly smeared with green and black paint. Their weapons were submachine guns of some kind, but with muzzles as long and as thick as her forearm.

The first man through rolled to the right, so low he might have been sitting down, his weapon held high and stiff-armed; he nearly collided with the soldier crouched in the corner, who had fallen to the floor and had his hand over his eyes. The submachine gun spoke—a fluttering whisper—and the stunned soldier's face came apart.

A second black-clad figure had rolled through the door to the left close behind the first. The other Serb soldier had had his head turned away from that dazzling light and was still on his feet. As the black apparitions burst into the room, he tried to raise his assault rifle, but before he could fire he was slammed back against the wall by the attacker's shot and the gun went clattering into the floor.

“Stop!” the officer holding Kingston screamed, his mouth an inch from her right ear, the muzzle of his machine pistol pressed against her head. She knew he was shouting, could feel his chest moving and feel the breath on her face, but her ears were still ringing from the explosions and his voice seemed very far away. “Stop now or I kill them!”

“American Special Forces,” one of the men shouted back. “Hurt her and you're dead, y'hear me? You can't get out of here. Best thing for you to do is drop your gun and give it up!”

Everything seemed suspended in time and space. Both invaders had their weapons turned now, aimed—she was certain—directly at her, and there was a third invader still in the hallway, covering them all with something that didn't even look wholly like a gun. Kingston found herself looking straight down the black openings at the fronts of those heavy barrels. The women were flat on their faces or on their hands and knees, knocked down by the explosions; only Ellen Kingston was still upright, and that was only because her captor was still holding her up off the floor. She swung her legs, kicking at him, but he only tightened his grip painfully across her chest.

“No! You will drop weapons!” her captor shouted. “Now! Then back out of the way!”

It happened so fast she could scarcely tell what had happened. The black figure on the right took two steps further to the right, the muzzle of his gun still aiming at a point directly behind Kingston's head. He said something ... and it wasn't English. What was he saying? The words were liquid and Slavic-sounding, spilling out so quickly she felt completely bewildered. She'd assumed her rescuers would be Americans, not . . . God, was that
Russian
he was speaking?

Her captor stiffened; the muzzle of his gun left her head, sweeping across an arc to aim at the Russian-sounding man. Her captor screamed something. . . .

The other invader's strange weapon spoke twice, a sound like the double slam of a door. At almost the same instant, her captor's gun fired, and the rattling crack it made was far louder in that narrow hotel room than the gunfire from the other weapon.

And the Russian-sounding man was already lunging toward her; she saw the bullets striking his vest, opening holes in the nylon fabric, and the little gun was still firing, the muzzle flash dragging up across the black-clad body. . . .

And then she was on the ground, and her captor was limp beneath her and her deliverer was a dead weight lying on top of her and Celia was screaming and screaming and Ellen thought if this went on much longer she would surely shoot Celia herself.

The weight was lifted off her and she sat up, gasping for breath. Bunny knelt beside her, holding her upright, helping her over to the bed.

“It's okay!” the man was saying, shouting to be heard above Celia. “Everybody stay down! I'm Lieutenant j.g. DeWitt, and we're here to get you out. Stay calm, stay quiet, and stay on the floor. Okay?”

“You're . . . American?” Monica Patterson asked.

“They're American!” Celia cried.

... and then the women were leaping to their feet, screaming now for sheer, adrenaline-shaking joy.

“Stay down!” DeWitt bellowed, and the screaming stopped as though cut short by the throwing of a switch. As the women parted before him, he moved across the room to kneel above the body of the man who'd somehow called her captor's shots to himself. The man in the hallway with the strange gun came in and checked each of the uniformed soldiers briefly, then knelt beside the other two. The women watched quietly, sensing the life-and-death drama, afraid to speak, afraid almost to breathe.

“This one's still alive,” the man with the strange gun told DeWitt.

“I don't give a fuck about him. Tie him and then mount guard at the door.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

DeWitt kept working with the wounded man, pulling a first-aid kit from one of his pouches, opening the man's vest. There was a lot of blood. “Aw, shit, Steponit! Shit! Talk to me!
Shit!
”

“He gonna make it, sir?”

“Watch that door!”

“Yessir.”

“Shit, Steponit. What the fuck did you tell the bastard to piss him off so bad?”