Tom Clancy - Locked On

Khan turned to Rehan. “Get in the helicopter. I will get rid of them.”

The trucks stopped just twenty-five yards shy of the chopper and fifty yards from the front loading dock of the warehouse. They parked next to a pair of full coal carrier cars left parked on a spur of track at the edge of the access road, and several men climbed out of the trucks. Khan could not see how many, since their bright lights were in his eyes. He just waved to the men, motioned for them to turn around and go away, and he pulled his ISI credentials out and held them up to the light.

A man stepped in front of the beams and walked closer. Khan squinted, tried to make him out. He gave up, just reached out his hand with his ISI credentials, and told the man to turn around and forget what he saw here.

He never did see the man’s face, and he never did recognize Mohammed al Darkur, and he never did see the pistol in the major’s hand.

He saw a flash, he felt the ripping in his chest, and he knew he’d been shot. He fell backward, and as he fell, al Darkur’s second shot caught him under the chin and blew out his brains from below.

As soon as al Darkur killed Colonel Khan, Caruso and Ryan, both having just climbed onto the coal carrier next to the trucks, opened fire on the windscreen of the helicopter with their booming G3 rifles.

While they fired at the helo, Mohammed’s two officers flanked to the right. They ran to the corner of a small switching station on the edge of the tracks. Here they opened fire on the men in the windows of the warehouse.

The LeT gunman quickly had al Darkur’s men sighted, and one of the two officers was killed with an AK blast across his legs and pelvis. But the second officer took out the sentries, and when al Darkur made it over to his position and picked up his fallen comrade’s G3, they suppressed the men firing at the loading door to the warehouse.

Ryan and Caruso’s heavy gunfire killed the pilot and copilot of the Mi-8 almost immediately. Their bullets — each man fired a full thirty-round magazine through the aircraft — also tore through the cabin, killing and injuring several of the ISI guards who had already boarded. Rehan himself was at the chopper’s door, and the gunfire, just barely heard above the sounds of the Mi-8’s engine and rotors, made him dive to the parking lot, and then roll away from the helo. His men returned fire on the gunmen on the coal carrier, five ISI men against two attackers, but the ISI men were armed with only pistols, and Jack and Dom picked them off one at a time.

Rehan climbed to his feet, ran behind the helicopter, and raced down an alleyway to the west of the warehouse. A surviving member of his protection detail ran behind him.

Caruso and Ryan dropped from the coal container. Jack said, “You and the others go for the warehouse. I’m going after Rehan!” The two Americans ran off in separate directions.

Jack turned down three darkened alleyways before he caught sight of the fleeing general and his bodyguard. Rehan was in good condition, as evidenced by the way he ran, and the way he knocked others to the ground as he did so. Sporadic groups of civilians, laden with family possessions, rushed through all parts of the railway station, looking for conveyance out of the embattled city. Rehan and his younger goon pushed past them or barreled over them.

Jack dumped the big cumbersome rifle in favor of the Beretta pistol, and he sprinted with it, alternately finding and then losing and then finding Rehan in a warren of outbuildings and warehouses and disconnected rail cars across the tracks from the busy train station.

Jack turned back to the west; other than the light of a sliver of moon it was completely dark here, and he jogged between two sets of parked and dormant passenger trains. He’d made it no more than fifty feet between the trains when he sensed movement ahead. In the dark a lone man leaned out from between two cars.

Jack knew what was coming; he dove headfirst to the ground and rolled on his shoulder just as the crack of a pistol shot filled the air. Ryan continued his roll, came out of it on his knees, and he returned fire twice. He heard a grunt and a thud, and the darkened figure fell to the ground.

Jack shot the still man a third time before moving forward, warily, to check the body.

Only when he got close enough to roll the man over on his back was he able to tell that this was the bodyguard and not General Rehan.

“Shit,” Jack said. And then he ran on.

Ryan saw Rehan in the distance a moment later, then he lost him again as a long passenger train lumbered past, but when it continued on he saw the big general moving one hundred yards on, toward the crowded train station.

Jack stopped, raised the Beretta, and aimed it at the distant figure in the dark.

With his finger on the trigger, he stopped. A hundred-yard shot for a pistol was optimistic, especially now that Jack was breathing heavy from the run. And a miss could send a round right into a building chock-full of hundreds of civilians.

Ryan lowered the handgun and sprinted on as trains approached in both directions.

Dominic Caruso and the surviving ISI captain kicked in a boarded window on the south side of the warehouse. The boards crashed onto the floor, and immediately the two men dove out of the way of gunfire. The captain reached around with his rifle and fired several semiauto shots inside the building, but Dom gave up on this entry point and ran around the warehouse, finding a disused side door. He shouldered in the door, it broke at the hinges, and he fell to a dusty floor.

Immediately heavy gunfire from the center of the warehouse erupted, and sparks and dust kicked up all around Dom. He leapt to his feet and scrambled back out of the doorway, but not before a bullet fragment from a ricochet off the wall tore through his right butt cheek.

He stumbled to the concrete outside, grabbing onto his burning wound. “Motherfucker!”

He stood again slowly, and then looked around for some other way to get into this building.

Mohammed al Darkur grabbed a Kalashnikov dropped by a dead LeT militant near the front door to the warehouse. With it he fired a full magazine at a cluster of men crouched behind a large crane and a large wooden container near the center of the room. Several of his rounds tore into the box; splinters flew in all directions.

Al Darkur spun the dead man over and took a rifle magazine out of his pocket and reloaded, then leaned around and started firing more selectively. He thought it possible the box contained the nuclear device, and he did not feel great about shooting the contraption with an assault rifle.

He’d killed two of the Lashkar terrorists, but he saw at least three more close to the box. They returned fire on Mohammed’s position, but only sporadically because they were also taking fire from two other directions.

The major worried that they were all in for a protracted gunfight. He had no idea how much time he had until the bomb went off, but he figured that if he was going to be crouched here much longer he, and much of Lahore city, was going to be incinerated.

General Riaz Rehan climbed onto the first occupied platform of the Lahore Central Railway Station that he reached after his long run. Crowds of passengers were boarding an express train to Multan in the south of Pakistan. The general pulled his ISI credentials and pushed his way into the masses; as he gasped for breath, he shouted that he was on official business and everyone needed to get out of his way.

He knew he had only twenty minutes to get out of town and clear of the blast. He needed to be on this train when it moved, and when it moved, he needed to make sure the conductor kept the train going through Lahore without stopping at any other stations.