Extreme Measures

Even before the confrontation with Zachariah, Farid could see Karim was begi

Farid sensed there was a deeper purpose to the move, but he hadn’t been a hundred percent sure until just today. After all the men had their vests on, Karim pulled him aside and handed him a master detonator. Each vest had a digital timer that was to be started when they rolled through the gate. Those timers could be shut off or restarted, should they need more time to get to their target. They had five minutes to kill as many people as possible; moving through the room laying down a 360-degree cone of fire. Thirty seconds before detonation, the men were to spread out so as to maximize the blasts that would hopefully tear the roof off the building, kill any remaining survivors, and render the entire space useless. If any of the men had second thoughts about completing their mission, or they were somehow met with stronger force than they had anticipated, Farid was to hit the master detonator.

As he lay on his back trying to piece together what had just happened, this thought was floating on the periphery of his mind. He did not understand what had gone wrong. The SWAT uniforms had worked perfectly. Every security guard and agent they had encountered froze. Just as Karim had said they would. Everyone except this man standing above him. Farid remembered the bolt on his rifle locking in the back position. His thumb hit the magazine release, expelling the empty box, while he reached for a fresh one. It occurred to him that the rifle fire had suddenly gone silent. He sensed movement behind him, and then there was the stabbing hot pain in his back. He had dropped his rifle and fallen to his left, hitting the ground and then rolling onto his back.

Now lying there, Farid realized he couldn’t feel his legs. He tried to move them, but it was as if some great unseen weight had smothered them. Farid raised his head and looked at his lower body. Everything appeared to be fine. He tried desperately to move his legs again and then the harsh reality struck him that he was paralyzed. That hot pain that he had felt earlier was no doubt bullets slicing through his spinal column. Low enough, however that his arms still worked. Farid imagined himself in a wheelchair for a second, and then realized it was an extremely foolish thought. They were all wearing their vests.

Farid turned his head to the right to see what had happened to the others. All he saw was a jumble of black boots, vests, gloves, and helmets. They were all dead. The man standing above him started yelling at others, and that was when Farid remembered Karim’s order. He had told him if it appeared that they would be overwhelmed, he should not take any chances. He should hit the master switch and blow all the vests. He wondered how much time had passed since they’d come through the gate. Farid tried to remember where he had placed the detonator. Everything else had been rehearsed, but this had been a last-minute addition to the plan. He reached for his vest and then realized he’d put it in the cargo pocket on his left thigh. His hand began groping for the device, when there was a loud noise and a flash followed by searing hot pain in his elbow.

CHAPTER 74

RAPP stood over the last man and surveyed the damage, his weapon trained on the blown-out main door, fearing that more men would come through at any moment. Moans and cries of pain were coming from every direction. To his right, Art Harris emerged from his office with a bloodstained shirt. He was stepping unsteadily over broken glass, but otherwise appeared fine. Rapp had one round in the breach and eight more in the grip. He popped out the half spent magazine, put it in his pocket, and grabbed a full one.

More people were up and moving now. Rapp could see a few of them had guns in their hands. “Art!” Rapp screamed. “Get some people over on that door and secure it!”

Harris started yelling orders to his fellow agents.

Rapp caught some movement beneath him. He looked down and saw the man on the floor reaching for something in his pocket. The image of a grenade popped into Rapp’s mind. His 9mm swung down and he sent a round into the man’s elbow socket. The arm jumped a few inches in the air and then lay flat at a slightly odd angle. The fingers twitched as the man strained to make his hand respond.

After stepping on his other arm, Rapp bent down and patted the pocket that the man had been reaching for. There was something square inside. Rapp reached in the pocket and pulled out an electronic detonator roughly the size of a pack of cards. He studied the device for a second and then looked down at the man. “Too bad you’re not going to be able to use this.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the man said in near perfect English. With a smile he added, “It would have only sped up the inevitable.”

Rapp moved his gun to the man’s face and tore off his goggles. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I am not afraid to die. I have already martyred myself. I have killed many Americans today. Allah will be very pleased with me.”

Rapp hated that word – martyr. He’d learned long ago that guys who liked to throw it around had a particularly crazy religious bent. The fact that this guy had just had his spinal column blown out and his left elbow shattered, and was looking up at him as if he was experiencing some kind of religious nirvana, was extremely unsettling. Rapp began looking him over from head to toe. His tactical vest was packed with extra magazines for his rifle, but not much else. At the neckline, though, he saw the seam of what appeared to be a second vest under the first. Rapp stuffed the detonator in his shirt pocket and yanked at the Velcro and zipper on the man’s tactical vest. The vest fell open to reveal a sight that caused Rapp’s entire body to tense for a second. There was a second vest under the first, and the pockets that were designed to hold ammunition were instead filled with blocks of pasty gray C-4 plastic explosives. Like the bombs that had been set off earlier in the day, these too had ball bearings pressed into the C-4.

In the pocket just above the man’s heart, near the neck of the vest, he found the detonator. Rapp carefully slid it out and looked down at the small digital readout as it ticked from forty-three to forty-two seconds. He resisted the urge to pull the wires from the device, knowing that it could very well trigger the explosion. Rapp looked around the room that was now swimming with the walking wounded and people crying for help. There was no way in hell he could get all of these people out of here in just over half a minute. His eyes fell on the windows that looked to the northeast. At the base of it, six floors down, was the ramp that went down into the underground parking garage.

Rapp couldn’t be certain that the glass was blastproof, but it was a pretty good possibility. Then again, blastproof glass was designed to keep the blast wave of an explosion out. It wasn’t designed to keep things in. Rapp quickly looked over the other five bodies. He had to assume they were all wearing vests.

Just as Nash came up, Rapp swung his pistol around, aimed it at the window, and squeezed off four quick rounds that punctured and spidered the glass but did not shatter it. Rapp started shooting again, the rounds popping off in rapid succession. In less than four seconds he emptied the rest of the seventeen-round magazine into a two-by-two-foot section of the window that was starting to give way.