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Chapter 33
The hallway was quickly filling with more smoke and more screaming people as Harvath swung the red dot of his pistol’s laser sight into every room looking for DeWolfe. Aside from the fact that the rooms seemed to have unusually low ceilings, there was nothing else very remarkable about them.
As he passed the panicked throngs, he instructed them in his best German possible to stay low to the floor and make their way to the bedroom he had just come from at the right front of the building. With each face he looked into, the realization began to grow in him that any one of them could be the killer who had started the fire, and he would never know it. He had to find DeWolfe.
Harvath fought his way up one of the public stairwells and found that the third floor was laid out much the same as the second. He checked each room, but there was still no sign of DeWolfe.
Back on the stairs, he could hear people below him, but the terrified tide making their way down from above had stopped. Hopefully, they had all gotten the message and had headed for the second floor.
After climbing two more flights of stairs, Harvath carefully pulled open the door and crept into what he expected to be another long hallway similar to those he had searched on the previous two floors. Instead, he found himself in a large chamber with rough sawn hardwood floors. Harvath quickly swept the filtered red beam of his flashlight around the room and realized he was in a mockup of some sort of Medieval dungeon. Chains hung from the ceiling and there were assorted torture devices scattered around the room.
As Harvath made his way to the lone door on the far side of the chamber, he heard a sudden noise off to his right. Dropping to one knee, he spun and pointed his pistol in the direction from which the sound had come. Raising his flashlight and depressing the thumb switch, Harvath illuminated a long leather couch and, as he tilted it upwards, he found the helpless form of DeWolfe, gagged and shackled against the wall but still struggling against his restraints. The man’s eyes appeared to be bulging out of their sockets and Harvath had no idea if it was from abject fear or fury.
Whoever had hung DeWolfe up like a trophy probably wasn’t too far away. He pulled the suppressor from his pocket and screwed it onto the threaded barrel of his H amp;K. Taking careful aim, he put two quick rounds into the hinges of the metal restraints that were pi
Without even thinking about it, Harvath released the thumb switch of his flashlight, plunging the room back into darkness and began rolling along the floor in the direction he had come. As he did, he could hear the pop of dry wood as a course of bullets from a silenced weapon tracked his progress, tearing up a straight line across the floorboards right at him.
Without the beam from his flashlight Harvath was completely blind, and he rolled hard into something big and sturdy, smacking his head against what he assumed was some sort of table leg. He scrambled to get out of his attacker’s line of fire and knew that the only way the person could be following his movements was with night vision goggles. It made perfect sense. Cut the power and blind your opponent. Bait the trap properly and when he comes to you, killing him will be easier than tipping over drunk Frenchmen at a Beaujolais festival. That plan, though, had one major problem. Scot Harvath was not that easy to kill.
Reaching out to find one of the legs for orientation, Harvath quickly pulled himself beneath the table. Taking a deep breath, he lunged upwards in a squat thrust maneuver flipping the table over and affording himself at least the appearance of better cover. Though his attacker was using a silenced weapon, the wordsilenced did not mean completely devoid of sound and Harvath had developed at least a vague idea of where he was.
He could see only one means of escape. After flipping up the hinged red filter cap from his flashlight, he reached around to the small of his back and pulled the painfully oversized PDA from his jeans. He felt along its smooth surface for the place where the device had deflected the shot and saved his spinal cord from being severed and said a quick word of thanks, then sent the device arcing in the direction of his attacker. When he heard it smash against the far wall, he jumped from behind the table and aimed the 225-lumen power of his SureFire flashlight in the same direction in order to blind his attacker. The white-hot beam sliced through the blackness of the chamber, lighting up the entire far side of the room, but the shooter wasn’t there.The son of a bitch had moved.
Harvath ducked back down behind the table just as one of the uppermost legs splintered into hundreds of ungainly toothpicks. The shot had come from over his right shoulder. The shooter was right behind him! Harvath turned and opened fire as he raced to get out of the open and find a new place to hide, but where the hell could he go? Without turning his flashlight on, he couldn’t see a thing. He needed to formulate another plan, and fast.
Harvath rolled along the ground back over to where he had first seen DeWolfe.There had to be a way out of this. When he found him, DeWolfe was lying on his back trying to catch his breath.
“Are you okay?” whispered Harvath.
DeWolfe nodded his head, slowly.
“Can you sit up on your own?” continued Scot as he disco
“Yeah.”
“All right. I’m going to give you my laser sight so you can draw this guy’s fire. Do you think you’re up to that?”
DeWolfe held out his hand for the device.
Harvath smiled. “Good. I figure he’s at about our two o’clock, so when I say ‘go’ I want you to raise that thing above the couch and start shining it over there like we’re to trying to pick him off, okay?”
“What are you going to?”
“I’m going to pick him off, what else? Ready?”
DeWolfe nodded his head.
“Go!” said Harvath as he rolled across the floor.
DeWolfe sat up and started pointing the laser sight as if he were aiming a gun of his own. The shooter went for the bait and immediately fired several rounds into the couch DeWolfe was using for cover.
The muffled spits were enough to give Harvath a lock on the shooter’s location. Harvath depressed the thumb switch of his SureFire and lit the guy up like an inmate going over the wall at San Quentin.
Just as Harvath suspected, his assailant was wearing night vision goggles, but what he hadn’t expected were the man’s superb instincts. Instead of being startled and turning into the beam from Harvath’s flashlight, the man shed his goggles, dropped to the ground and began firing.
Harvath had to roll hard and quick to get out of the line of fire. As he rolled, he got off a series of shots, one of which he was positive had made contact when he heard his opponent groan in pain.
“Gotcha,” coughed Harvath, as he found shelter behind a long bench covered with short metal spikes, the uses for which he couldn’t even begin to fathom.
Smoke was filling the room and it was becoming more difficult to breathe.The fire was getting closer. Harvath worried that if he and DeWolfe didn’t get back down to the second floor soon, they were going to have to find another way out. And with very little clue as to the layout of the building, Scot wasn’t exactly crazy about their chances.He had to do something, but what?
Suddenly, there was what sounded like large pieces of furniture being hurriedly dragged across the floor.Was the shooter creating more cover for himself? Was it some sort of ruse? Harvath didn’t know what to think. The one thing he did know was that his opponent could smell the smoke just as well as he could and was just as aware of how close the fire was getting. At that same moment, something else struck Harvath. If this man had started the fire, he wouldn’t have brought DeWolfe all the way up to the fourth floor without some plan for his own escape.But where would he go? Something Nixie had said about the King George was suddenly echoing in his mind, ‘The entire building is riddled with secret doors and passageways to help certain people sneak in and out during the Cold War.’