Andrew Britton - The Operative

“ Who? ” repeated the masked man. Gripping the phone hard, waving it in the air, shaking it furiously in the air. “ Tell me! ”

If anyone had a suspicion, they were too afraid to voice it. Or maybe it was courage, a last act of defiance. Colin didn’t know.

Jesus, he thought. You’re writing tweets in your head.

With a gruff oath, the other guard said something to the man with the phone. It was in a language Colin did not understand. He didn’t have to. He knew what they were doing. The men were to his right. Colin rolled his head slowly in that direction.

They were pressing buttons on the phone. The men might not be able to read the tweets or figure out real names from Twitter accounts, but there was one language he knew they would understand.

They were going through his photos. Colin estimated there were two dozen pictures of him stored in the album, shots in which he was posing with a smile, which might as well be a giant bull’s-eye.

More seconds were passing. Each one was a small triumph for Colin, but he knew they were running out. He pulled in a breath, hoping it would settle him, but he was beyond any semblance of calm. His legs were shaking, barely able to support him. He shifted to his knees. The men were so intent on the phone, they didn’t notice. He looked at the door, wondered what his chances were of getting there, over and around his fellow hostages, before the guards could fire. The likelihood was probably real small, but he knew he did not want to die here, doing nothing except perspiring into his Nikes.

He was wondering how much longer he could hold himself together when he heard the commotion, a sudden uproar in the corridor. The noise was like fresh air blowing into the room. He heard a radio crackle on one of the men, heard the masked men move, saw them step on hands and bags on their way to the door, bringing their guns around with them.

It was only as the shooting started that he realized he still hadn’t exhaled.

Kealey saw the stairs leading to the third floor as they emerged from the walkway. They were straight ahead. He ran with his shoulders rolled forward, his chin tucked into his chest, and his legs working like pistons, the way he’d once run through simulated cross fire on the training courses at Fort Bragg; the way he’d run through the war-blasted streets of Kosovo, loaded down with weapons and 150 pounds of combat gear, dodging sniper rounds from windows, rooftops, and doorways as he moved from one position to another; the way he’d run to avoid getting cut to ribbons or blown out of existence in burning deserts, steamy jungles, and urban hellholes around the bloody, violent world.

His hand still clutching Allison’s forearm, she kept her head low alongside him, a quick study, and it was a good thing, too. This was a natural kill zone, open, without concealment, but he’d had no time to spell out the risks, nor seen any upside to it. It was in or out, and she would not want to leave without trying to help her nephew.

Anyway, what would he have told her? Just keep moving so you weren’t a large, exposed target-survival could be that basic in a fight no matter how alert you were, how effective your weapons, how thorough your training.

Incredibly, most of the interior systems seemed to be on in this section of the building, the air-conditioning cycling to make it breathable in here, the large metal halides overhead merging with the brightness from whatever late-day sunlight was still pouring through the glass walls and ceiling. That made sense: whatever backup electrical system the facility had, this would be an area from whence the most people were leaving or, in an emergency, where the most would naturally congregate.

Glancing neither left nor right, his eyes on the stairway a few yards in front of him, Kealey still managed to scan both sides of the mezzanine with his peripheral vision and caught glimpses of the horrible scene down in the exhibition hall: fallen debris, blasted plywood booths, toppled signs, broken glass, bodies everywhere. Those still alive and able to move appeared to have been herded toward separate ends of the hall; Kealey supposed their captors’ next step would be to gather them into conference rooms with the other hostages or massacre them right there on the spot, an undeniable possibility.

It won’t come to that, Kealey thought. He wouldn’t let it.

They dashed across the last few feet to the stairs. Kealey figured they would need less than thirty seconds to make their way through the open mezzanine, and hoped the gunmen downstairs would be too preoccupied with the prisoner roundup and Colin’s cell phone to spot them immediately.

Reaching the stairs, they bounded up them, taking them as quickly as possible. They had gotten to within four steps of the mid-floor landing when Allison produced a kind of clipped, horrified gasp. They both snatched hold of the handrail as their feet nearly slipped on the blood. Slick and dark, it was everywhere, reflecting the overhead lights and streaming down the risers to puddle on the flat marble treads.

She could not help but stare up at the body, even as Kealey pulled her around it. Riddled with bullets, one leg dangling loosely over the edge of the landing, it belonged to a young man about Colin’s age. Kealey had noticed the momentary dread that passed over Allison’s face before she focused on the bloodied clothes plastering him. They weren’t Colin’s. There would have been no way to tell his identity from his features; the shots that had torn into his skull had left the victim badly disfigured.

Kealey squeezed her hand as they hurried up the remaining stairs to the third-floor hallway.

On the wall to Kealey’s right were signs for the conference rooms, and past them the large glass door to the corridor. He raised his weapon slightly as they drew closer, and that was when he saw the masked man in the slight recess leading toward the door, guarding it there on the mezzanine. The man saw them, too, and his submachine gun came up quickly.

Kealey caught him with a 3-round burst at close to point-blank range, then instantly triggered a second burst. The man dropped without firing a single round, blood erupting from his chest, hitting the floor with a soft smack as his weapon went twirling from his grasp like a flung baton.

“Come on,” Kealey grunted, leaping over the man’s body and pushing through the door into the corridor. He immediately saw four black-clad men outside a room up ahead to the left, maybe 20 feet up the corridor. They had started turning toward him, toward the sound of the gunfire. Kealey cut them down as he simultaneously pulled Allison directly behind him. It was an easy strike; the masked men were all in a row, one behind the other, all but the first man blocked from firing at him by the man in front of him. And that first man never got a chance to do anything but die.

The fact that the men were clustered around the door, not fully turned toward the corridor, showed that his plan had worked. They had been facing the room, waiting to see who had managed to get a cell phone inside. That had bought him the seconds he needed to cross the walkway after shooting the guard.

As soon as the four men went down, Kealey stiff-armed Allison across the chest, pushing her back toward the wall and following her up against it. He waited. He did not think that whoever was inside the room would strafe the corridor without first making sure the four guards were down.

A masked forehead poked out, one eye looking down the corridor. The side of the man’s face evaporated in blood. The head dropped.

“ Down! ” Kealey hissed to Allison, simultaneously pulling her and dropping. He held his firearm in front of him, arms extended, hands cradling the weapon. He might have only a second to fire.