Jack Coughlin - Running the Maze

He recognized the area and led the other two men directly to the outer door of the airlock that shielded the sterile clinic. “Come,” he said. “We can all go through it at the same time.” The three stepped inside, the door shut tightly behind them, the rubber seals locked into place, and the automatic fans blasted them for ten seconds. Al-Masri closed his eyes against the force of the wind and remained immobile until the fans cut off and the automatic inner portal opened with a hiss to admit them into the infirmary.

The startled inspector came to a halt. The cloth screen at the far end had been pushed aside, and the bed behind it, where the chief engineer had been subdued, was empty. The restraints hung down to the floor like sleeping snakes. There was movement at the far doorway, through which a figure dressed in black and carrying a weapon was disappearing. Al-Masri shouted an order to stop, fumbled out his own pistol, and snapped off two shots. The bullets flew wide and chipped the wall.

The unknown figure immediately spun back and answered with a hard rip of automatic rifle fire, a raking stream of bullets that crashed through the room left to right and hip high. The three New Muslim Order men went sprawling on the floor, hugging the cool tiles as a hail of glass and wood and plaster chips splattered into a rising cloud of debris and dust, while ricochets sang wherever the slugs hit metal. When the firing stopped, al-Masri looked up again, pointing his weapon over a flipped table, but no one was there. The door was closed, and the empty room smelled of burned gunpowder.

He eased his weapon down, and they all got to their feet, shaking off the surprise assault. There had been no forewarning of any danger. Both of the others had their own weapons out, too late to join the fight. “Who was it?” the bigger one asked.

Al-Masri surveyed the wreckage, taking quite a bit of time to process his thoughts before speaking. He knew what he had seen clearly before the shots were fired: the diminutive size, the white feminine face, and the short blond hair were unmistakable. A woman had made him cower like a whipped dog. Impossible. It could only be a little Satan from the Zionists, who were the only people that used women to actually fight their battles for them. He would never speak of it, at least until after he killed her; slowly. “It is a Jew special operations team,” he concluded, walking to the bed where the technician had been strapped. “The Zionists have stolen the chief engineer. They must not leave this bridge alive.”

Where was Sergeant Hafiz?

“DAMMIT, COASTIE! DON’T DO that.” Swanson barked at Beth, who was changing magazines. She had emptied a full clip into the room when the man fired at them and had seen three of them dive to the floor as she hammered away with long bursts.

“They were shooting at us,” she explained, a calm, empty voice. She had not given the possibility that she had killed anyone a second thought. Worrying about that sort of thing was part of another life, a distant memory of an lowa farm girl who no longer existed.

“We have limited ammunition, so stop hosing down things like this is some action movie,” Kyle said. “Be selective. Short, targeted bursts.”

“Huh,” she said, turning away, angry. She had just saved their asses and all he could do was bitch, although she knew he was right. There had never been a shortage of ammo in her HITRON helicopter, but they were using NATO 5.56 mm rounds today and had only had what they carried. She would not make the same mistake again. Beth made a mental note to pick up the next AK-47 she saw and a bunch of magazines. There was certainly no shortage of AK bullets in this place.

Swanson found himself in a large, well-appointed suite that would have fit in well at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston: walls of finished wood, well-made furniture, and an open balcony that extended outside. “Will the satellite phone work out there?” he asked their new guide.

Mohammad al-Attas shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps. No guarantee. May I make an alternate suggestion?”

“Sure.” Kyle was ready to try anything. The mission had been blown, and the bad guys knew they exactly where they were. It was time to call the birds and get out.

The engineer moved to a small desk on one side of the room and pulled open the center drawer to reveal a computer keyboard, then unfolded a seventeen-inch flat-screen monitor. “This has a separate hard drive but is wired into the main computer system to get a clear wireless link. Can you send an e-mail, or do a Skype face-to-face video connection?”

For a moment Kyle considered Commander Kahn of the New Muslim Order sitting before this keyboard, playing chess by himself, adding new friends on his Facebook page, updating his MySpace profile, checking out porn sites or launching an attack on the United States. The beauty and the bedevilment of social media was its anonymity, and it was so simple that a caveman could do it.

Swanson grunted assent. The control room of Task Force Trident was manned 24/7 when an operation was in progress, and Commander Benton Freedman would be plugged in, constantly trawling his electronic universe. Kyle shifted his gear so he could sit at the desk, pulled the keyboard close, and sent a quick note to lizard@lizard.com. “Liz?” He signed it “Bounty Hunter.”

There was a brief pause; then a pop-up window appeared in one corner of the screen to show the Lizard had created a point-to-point connection. “Yo,” came the response.

Kyle typed, “Launch extract.”

“Confirming extract, Bounty Hunter. Cords?”

Swanson referred to his map and typed two groups of numbers, and the Lizard confirmed.

“When?”

The engineer had been watching over Kyle’s shoulder, impressed by the knowledge being demonstrated at the other end of the conversation. Whoever it was had cracked his security wall with ease and put up a private window that no one else could control. For the first time, he entertained a doubt about the security of the entire project. There were other smart people in the world.

“How long will it take for us to get from where we are right now up to the top of the bridge?” Kyle asked the engineer.

“Maybe ten minutes,” al-Attas replied. “If we are not slowed down too much by fighting.”

Kyle knew that was unlikely. The battle had already begun and would only get worse. “T-minus-twenty,” he wrote. “Start time now. Hot LZ.”

“On the way. Lizard out.” The image of a green gecko scurried up the screen, ate the window and the words in it, then crawled off the screen, leaving it blank.

Swanson ripped out the hard drive and checked his weapon. Another problem solved. A pair of Boeing V-22 tilt-rotor Ospreys had been orbiting safely out of harm’s way and beyond radar range since Kyle and Beth had parachuted into the night. With in-flight refueling and relief crews aboard, the high-speed, long-range birds could remain on station almost indefinitely and were perfect as an exfiltration vehicle. They could take off and land like helicopters, and the large turbofan engines on each wing could rotate to provide conventional flight, which made them much faster than a chopper. The Lizard was even now alerting them to break out of orbit and head in. One would supply covering fire while the other did the pickup.

A new checklist was forming as he surveyed the room one last time. “What are the exits here? Just the two doors and the ledge? Is there an emergency way out?”

“Of course.” Al-Attas remembered the original instructions he had been given to design the living facility so that the resident would never be trapped, no matter what. “The easiest way is a long rope that can be snapped to that big ring secured into the rocks out on the balcony.”