Sam nodded. Lopez and Muldoon were watching, too. “So you want the welcome to the team handshake or the welcome to the team kiss? I figure since I’ve never really had the opportunity to give the welcome kiss before I should take advantage of—”
“I’ll take the handshake,” she said. Her face was straight, but she was fighting a smile. He saw it lurking at the edges of her mouth.
He took her hand and shook it. He wanted to hold on to it inappropriately long, to kiss her palm or even suck one of her fingers into his mouth, but he didn’t because the team was watching.
There was a time when he would have done it because the team was watching.
And she knew it.
“I won’t let you down, sir,” she said.
“I know.” He nodded at her. Turned away.
“Sam.”
He turned back, surprised she’d used his name.
“Stay safe. Take head shots.”
He smiled, touched that she cared. “I will.”
She stepped closer. Lowered her voice. But it still wasn’t low enough to keep Jenk and Cosmo from overhearing if they really wanted to. “After we’re done here . . . Well, I was thinking, um, that, well, that you’re someone I’d really like to get to know better. And I was wondering if maybe you’d like to have dinner with me.”
Sam glanced at Jenk, who was pointedly not looking at him. He looked back at Alyssa, into the warm swirl of hope in her eyes, and he was afraid to open his mouth because he didn’t think he could form any coherent words. He was afraid that a mindless howl of joy would escape, embarrassing her to death.
“In a restaurant,” she added, as if he wasn’t already aware that she’d fucking invited him to dinner in public.
So he just breathed for several long moments and nodded his head, hoping that she could see the party going on inside of him by looking into his eyes. And when he finally could speak, he uttered the understatement of the fucking millennium. “I’d like that.”
“Good.” She smiled and headed for the roof.
He did his best to walk away, too, without doing a dance.
And then he stopped dancing, even in his mind, because his radio squawked. It was Lieutenant Paoletti.
“We’re done waiting,” L.T. said. “There’ve been more shots fired on the plane. It’s time to go in.”
Des was more than half expecting Helga to be surprised to see him. But she opened the door quickly at his knock and let him in without a murmur of protest.
He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The place was covered with sticky notes. Reminders, comments, lists of names.
“Man,” he said.
She nodded. “It’s a mess.”
He pulled her close for a hug. “How bad is it? Do you remember talking to me on the phone?”
“Of course.”
“Really?”
She pulled away from him, showed him the page of her notepad.
“Des is coming here. You told him you’re losing your marbles. He has something important to tell you,” was written on it.
“I figure since I wrote this, I must’ve spoken to you on the phone,” she said. “How else would I have told you?”
“What year is it?” he asked.
She pulled a note from the headboard of her bed. “It’s 2001. Most of the answers are here. Of course, if I spend all my time reading them, over and over, I manage never to leave this room.”
“I bet it’ll be better at home,” he said.
Helga nodded. “It makes sense that it would be.”
“We’ll go to the doctor,” Des said past the lump in his throat. “Maybe there’s some new medicine.”
She nodded. “That’s not what you came here to discuss.”
“No.” He sat down on her bed, rubbed his forehead. God, where to start. “Do you know who I work for?”
There was a gleam in her eye. “You mean, besides me? You’re with intelligence, no?”
“Not exactly. I’m part of an organization even more covert than Mossad or . . . But that’s not important. What’s important is that my immediate superior is a man with political aspirations that have seriously clouded his judgment. And no, I’m not going to tell you his name.”
She sat there, watching him, and he had to wonder how much of this she was going to remember. Maybe it didn’t matter if he used his superior’s name. “Over the past few days, I’ve discovered some information about our hijackers that raises the stakes.” He took her notepad and a pen from the bedside table. “I’m going to write some of this down for you, because I need you to remember. How many hijackers are on that 747?”
Helga looked at her Post-it notes. “Five.”
“No,” Des said. “There are six. In addition to the five men that we all know about, there’s also a woman. She’s rigged with explosives under her coat—a suicide bomb.”
“Oh, my God,” Helga breathed.
The approach to the plane went down exactly as they’d rehearsed.
The SEALs moved in from the rear, from the aircraft’s blind spot.
Stan was with Muldoon, leading the way—a relatively easy task despite the fact that it was broad daylight. He knew exactly where the blind spot was, where the tangos could and could not see them. There was no need even to crawl—extra Marines had been brought in during the past twelve hours, and they were guarding the perimeter of the airport, making certain that no one unauthorized could see the movement on the runway.
Yeah, the last thing they needed was the hijackers getting a warning signal via mirrors from someone watching from the brush, tipping them off to the fact there were SEALs crawling around on the outside of the aircraft.
Big Mac and his two-man team were already out there under the plane, having taken advantage of the freedom of movement allowed by those extra Marine guards. They were attempting to get audio and video back up and running.
Once under the aircraft, the take-down team would begin the far more dangerous and painstaking task of gaining access to the front and rear emergency doors.
From here on in, they’d communicate via hand signals only.
Stan looked at Lieutenant Starrett and nodded.
Starrett nodded back, a glitter in his eye, clearly as glad as Stan was finally to be doing instead of waiting.
“They’re all members of an extremist group,” Des told Helga. “Their goal is simple—to die. They don’t expect Osman Razeen or anyone to be freed by hijacking this plane. They only want to bring as much attention to their cause as they can. And the best way they know to do that is to take as many American lives with them as possible.
“I’ve found out that their plan is to wait until the rescue team is on the plane, and then blow it and everyone on board to hell,” Des told her grimly. “Apparently the bomb has a fail-safe in the event that the woman wearing it is killed in the takedown. There’s a sensor that reads the woman’s pulse. If it doesn’t pick up that pulse after thirty seconds, it goes into a three-minute countdown. Which isn’t even close to the amount of time we’d need to evacuate all those people from that plane. They don’t just want this thing to blow up—they want us to know it’s going to blow and be unable to stop it.”
“How did you find out this kind of detail?”
“I had a little conversation with the designer of the bomb.”
“Do . . .” Helga took her notepad back from him and flipped through the pages. “Do Max Bhagat and Tom Paoletti know about this?”
“No.”
It was blazing hot on the roof of Terminal A.
A fly buzzed around Alyssa’s face, but she ignored it. She watched her target through her scope and breathed, listening to Max Bhagat’s voice through her radio headset, hearing what her target could hear in the cockpit of that 747.
Persuasive and smooth, like an FM radio announcer, Bhagat was keeping both her and fellow sniper Wayne Jefferson’s targets up by that radio.
Bhagat was talking to them as if they were friends. Fellow caring human beings.
Alyssa wouldn’t have been able to do that. Not knowing they were murderers. Rapists.
She’d heard a rumor that Sam had been in the negotiators’room when the girl, Gina, had been attacked. Rumor had it that he’d thrown up. Tossed his cookies right in the wastepaper basket.
Alyssa believed the rumor.
Poor Sam. He pretended to be so tough, but she’d seen him get sick like that before.
She tried to imagine what it must’ve been like to be Sam and have to stand there and listen to that girl getting beaten. Raped.
And then she thought long and hard about what it must’ve been like to be the girl.
She kept her crosshairs aimed in the middle of her target’s forehead, waiting for the clicks over her headset that signaled the SEALs were in place, waiting for the word from Tom Paoletti: Go.
“No one knows but me and now you.” Des rubbed his face. “I’ve been ordered to sit on this information. My superior believes that the destruction of the plane and the death of so many Americans—including a team of Navy SEALs—will make the U.S. and Israel even more strongly united against terrorism. If I come forward with this, my career is over.”
“But by leaking the information to me . . .” she said, still a very smart woman despite the disease that was ravaging her brain. “My career has already come to an end.” She looked at him. “Order me not to tell.”
“I order you not to tell.”
“Phooey to you. I’m not going to let those people die.” She picked up the phone. “Who do I call with this?”
“Yeah,” Des said. “That’s where we’ve got a little problem. Landlines are down and my cell phone’s been dead since last night. Short of hitching a ride to the airport and flagging down Max—”
“What are we waiting for?” No-nonsense to the bitter end, Helga grabbed her purse and her notepad and headed for the door.
Sam Starrett clicked once into his headset microphone as he gave the hand signal—ready.
The SEALs on surveillance would be watching him and they’d report to Lieutenant Paoletti in the negotiators’room that Starrett and Karmody were in place and ready to go.
He thought about Alyssa up on the roof, lying there in the hot sun.
He thought about Alyssa in his bed.
In his life.
WildCard was looking at him oddly and Sam realized he was grinning like a stupid-ass fool.
Wouldn’t that be just his luck? To be too distracted to do his job, and get his ass killed.
God, don’t take me now, he prayed. Don’t pull some ironic shit here and have me die today.
And then he helped God out a little by refreshing his grip on his weapon and focusing on the job ahead, waiting for the other members of his team to signal that they were ready, too.
“We need to get to the airport immediately.”
Teri turned to see Helga Shuler and her assistant hurrying toward her.
“Can you take us?” Mrs. Shuler asked.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “Not without proper authorization. I’d need to receive orders to—”
“Do you have a radio?” Mrs. Shuler asked. “Can you get in touch with either . . .” She looked down at a pad of paper she was carrying.
“Lieutenant Paoletti or Max Bhagat,” her assistant supplied the names.
“Is there a problem?” Teri asked. “Is this some kind of an emergency?”
“There’s a bomb on the hijacked plane,” Mrs. Shuler said with a grim certainty. “There’s a sixth terrorist on board—a woman. Once the SEALs take the plane, she’s going to set the thing to blow. Everyone on board will die.”
Teri stared for two or three seconds. Then she leapt for the radio.
Her vision was blurred.
Both of her eyes were swollen, one of them nearly all the way shut.
Her lip was split, her entire mouth cut and bleeding from her own teeth.
Her wrist was broken and each breath she took—both in and out—made her sides burn with pain.
She was bleeding. Her head, her nose, between her legs.
She lay there, beaten and naked from the waist down, her shirt torn, her shorts gone. Her uninjured hand covered what little she could manage to cover, and her knees were pressed tightly together—as if that would keep the next one from pushing her legs apart and pushing himself inside of her.
She’d known what was coming when Bob told Al to hurt her. She’d expected it, braced herself for it. Planned to endure it.
As long as she could keep breathing, as long as she was still alive, she was winning.
And finally it was over. Al had spit in her face and climbed off of her and she knew that she’d won.
Except she hadn’t.
Because Bob had dropped his pants. And it wasn’t over. And it was worse, far worse because he’d made her believe that he was her friend.
There was blood on the walls. Sprayed in a pattern. Someone—the pilot, she thought—had tried to stop them from hurting her and had died for his efforts. They’d shot him—the pilot—and he’d lain there beside her, half of his head blown away, for countless long minutes until they’d dragged him away.