Tom Clancy: Locked On

The suppressed gunfire, while certainly not silent, would not be heard over the sound of the Mi-8’s rotors.

Ding had already shifted focus to the right. As his eyes spun, he caught a distant unfocused image of a sentry on the northwest corner as his weapon rose, and then the left side of the sentry’s head exploded and the man dropped where he stood.

Chavez focused, though, on the man at the eastern portion of the roof now, just twenty-five feet or so from where the American knelt. The terrorist did not have a weapon up, though he was looking right into Ding’s eyes. As the Dagestani struggled to bring his sights to this new target who had just dropped out of the night sky, he shouted in fear.

Domingo Chavez, Romeo Two, double-tapped the man with two.45-caliber rounds to the forehead. The man backpedaled a few steps as he fell.

Ding stood, relaxed just slightly now that the last threat had been dealt with, and he reached for a fresh magazine for his UMP. While doing so he watched the stumbling sentry, waiting for him to fall onto the cold concrete roof.

But the dead man’s body had other plans. His rearward momentum continued to carry him back, and Chavez recognized in an instant of horror that the body would fall off the roof. He would land in a heap right in front of the door below, right in the lights illuminating the man walking from the chopper.

“Shit!” Chavez sprinted across the roof, desperate to catch the sentry before he tumbled off and gave away the entire operation right at its most vulnerable point.

Ding let go of his HK, launched off the ground, and in the air he reached at full extension for the dead man’s uniform.

The Jamaat Shariat gunman fell backward over the edge of the roof.

Israpil Nabiyev climbed out of the helicopter and stepped into the light. Before him the huge building sat in the snow. The thirty-two-year-old Jamaat Shariat leader squinted and took a step on the hard snow, then another, each step bringing him closer to the freedom that he had sought for these many long months he’d been held prisoner.

The butt of a rifle struck Nabiyev in the back of the head, sending him tumbling onto the snow. The blow dazed him, but he climbed back up to his knees, tried to get up and walk again, but two of the guards from the helicopter grabbed him from behind and secured his wrists with metal cuffs. They turned him around and pushed him back onto the chopper.

“Not today, Nabiyev,” one of the men said over the whine of the helicopter engines. “The LCC for the Rokot system looks a lot like the LCC for the Dnepr system, doesn’t it?”

Israpil Nabiyev did not understand what was happening. He did not know that he was fifteen miles west of the Dnepr facility, and had been duped into thinking he was being handed over to Safronov and Jamaat Shariat. The helicopter lifted off again, it turned around at a hover, and then it flew off, away from the bright lights.

Georgi Safronov holstered his Makarov and motioned for the prisoners to be sent out to the waiting Russian Air Force helicopter. The American, British, and Japanese men and women, all bundled in heavy coats, filed past him and out into the light. In front of them, the bearded man came closer; he was just thirty meters away now. Georgi could make out a smile on the man’s face, and this made Georgi himself smile.

The prisoners moved faster than Nabiyev, Safronov noticed, and he motioned for his countryman to pick up his pace. Georgi wanted to shout to him but the chopper engine was too loud, even here.

He waved his hand forward one more time, but Nabiyev did not comply. He did not look injured — Georgi could not understand what was wrong.

Suddenly the man stopped in the parking lot. He just stood there, facing the building.

In a heartbeat Safronov went from elation to suspicion. He sensed danger. His eyes scanned the lot, the helicopter behind, the prisoners rushing to it.

He saw nothing, but he did not know what danger lurked in the dark out past the lights. He took a step back deeper into the hallway, tucking himself behind the door.

He looked to Nabiyev, noticed the man had begun to move forward again. Safronov was still suspicious. He squinted into the light, stared at the man’s face for a long moment.

No.

This was not Israpil Nabiyev.

Georgi Safronov screamed in rage as he unholstered his Makarov and held it low behind his back.

Chavez’s gloved left hand grasped the iron post holding the spotlight. The fingers ached and burned, because Ding’s body hung off the building, and his right hand held the pants of a dead terrorist just above the ankle. One hundred forty pounds of dead weight wrenched Ding’s shoulder nearly out of its socket.

He knew he could not pull himself back up onto the roof and continue his mission without tossing the body, and he could not toss the body without exposing the mission.

He could not imagine his situation getting much worse, but when he saw that the Russian FSB operator disguised as Nabiyev had stopped dead in his tracks to stare at the spectacle twenty feet above Safronov and his gunmen at the front door, Chavez just shook his head over and over, hoping to get the man moving again. The man did move again, fortunately, so Ding went back to concentrating on not dropping the body or losing his own grip.

Just then, above him in the snowy sky, he saw the movement of several shapes.

Rainbow operators under their chutes.

And below him, twenty feet from the tips of his swinging boots, he heard gunfire.

Safronov ordered one of his men to go out to Nabiyev and check him for explosives. The Dagestani gunman complied without question; he ran out into the lights and the snowfall with his rifle in his hand.

He made it ten feet before he spun on the soles of his boots and fell dead to the pavement. Georgi had seen the flash of a sniper’s shot in the darkness on the far side of the helicopter.

“It’s a trap!” Georgi shouted as he raised his Makarov and fired it at the imposter standing alone in the center of the parking lot. Safronov emptied the gun of its seven rounds in under two seconds.

The bearded man in the snow himself pulled a gun, but he was hit over and over in the chest and stomach and legs by the.380 rounds from the Makarov, and he staggered and fell.

Georgi turned away from the door. He began running toward the LCC, his pistol still in his hand.

Two gunmen Safronov left at the doorway raised their AKs to finish the writhing man off, but just as they readied to fire, a body fell across their line of sight. It was one of their comrades from the roof. He slammed into the steps in front of the door, right in front of them, and it took their eyes out of the sights of their rifles at a critical moment. Both men looked at the body quickly, then resighted their weapons on the injured imposter twenty-five yards away.

A sniper’s round took the gunman on the right in the upper chest, knocking him back into the entry hall of the LCC. A quarter-second later another bullet fired from a second sniper took the other man in the neck, spinning him on top of his comrade.

Chavez pulled himself back onto the flat roof and rolled up onto his kneepads. He did not have time to assess himself for injuries, he only had time to heft his weapon and run toward the stairwell. His original plan, devised by him and Clark, was to breach the LCC’s bunkerlike ventilation shaft. It was nearly forty inches wide and accessible here on the roof. From here he could descend directly to a vent over the LCC, climb out in the auxiliary generator room, shut down the backup power generator to the entire building, stopping the launch cold.