Ted Bell - Tsar

“Aye-aye, sir!” the first officer said, and ran for the ladder, while the captain nervously eyed the outward-looking radar, looking for any enemy incursion into their no-fly zone.

“Sir?” his first officer said a moment later, pausing at the bottom of the ladder and looking up toward the open hatchway.

“What is it now?” said the captain, frantically scanning the altimeter, elevator position indicator, and inclinometer. At eye level was his variometer, which he used to measure the ship’s rate of rise or fall. With his left hand, he spun the elevator wheel, trying to detect and correct changes in trim. He was intent on moving the airship forward now, attempting to gain altitude, but he couldn’t seem to do either.

He had the oddest sensation of his entire career.

He felt that his ship was stuck in midair.

“I believe there is now another problem, Captain,” he heard his first officer say behind him. Boroskov looked quickly over his shoulder. What he saw, at first glance, did not appear to be a problem.

He saw a beautiful pair of legs descending the ladder, shapely calves, knees, thighs. At first, he thought the woman might be naked, and then he saw the short black satin skirt, the apron. Finally, the beautiful woman with the dark red hair stepped down from the bottom rung. She was wearing the uniform of the housekeeping staff, but she was not anyone he recognized. She had a gun in her hand. Things were getting so strange. The captain shook his head as if he could clear away this craziness.

“You two speak English?” the dark-skinned woman asked.

“ Da, da, da, ” the captain replied. “Yes, yes, yes, of course.”

“Good. I want both of you to remain very quiet. Keep your hands up in the air where I can see them. Good. Now, move toward the hatch.”

The two officers did as they were told.

“Now, open the hatch.”

“Open it?”

“You heard what I said. Open it!”

The captain made for the hatch, but the first officer had other ideas. He turned, screamed something in Russian at the captain, and lunged for Fancha with both hands outstretched, going for the gun.

There was no time to hesitate. She fired one round, caught him in the knee, and he buckled to the floor, writhing in pain.

The Russian captain, very shaken now, cranked the big stainless-steel wheel around a few times. There was a pop, a hiss of air, and then the hatch cover was shoved upward violently by someone below. The steel edge of the round door caught the captain under the chin, and he, too, went sprawling, bleeding from a deep gash.

Fancha looked down and saw Stokely’s smiling face beaming up at her.

“Hey,” he said. “Look who’s here.”

“Oh, baby, oh, baby, oh, baby,” she said, reaching down to touch his face.

“Honey, you got to get out of the way. I got about thirty pumped-up killer angels climbing up my tail crazy to come aboard as quickly as possible.”

Fancha moved to the rear of the control-room pod and watched an endless stream of heavily armed men in black, who had climbed hand over hand up the steel cable, now come pouring up through the hatch. Stoke had the captain and the first officer off to the side, grilling them aggressively at the point of a gun about the current whereabouts of all of the terrorists, especially the ones who were not to be found in the ballroom.

She saw Alex Hawke poke his handsome head through the hatch and smile at her.

She’d never seen a man look so happy in her life.

“Fancha,” he said, grinning at her. “You did it.”

SEALs don’t train with regulation human-silhouette targets. They use small three-by-five index cards taped strategically over the silhouette. To qualify, you had to be able to hit the card with a double tap, two shots in rapid succession, whether you were popping up from below the water or bursting into a hijacked airliner packed with terrified passengers. SEAL instructors don’t care how you shoot, one-handed, two-handed, right- or left-handed, doesn’t matter, as long as you hit tight, man-killing groups every single time.

The heavy loads the two SEAL platoons were using tonight would knock the terrorists aboard the airship down no matter where they hit them. Head, chest, arm, leg, didn’t matter. The terrorists who had hijacked this airship didn’t know it yet, but their life expectancies had just dropped to zero.

The assault-and-hostage-rescue group quickly divided itself into two platoons, one on either side of the pod’s ladder up to A Deck. Stoke and Harry Brock would take the Alpha Platoon, Stoke commanding. They would search the ship from stem to stern. They’d be looking for any tangos currently off duty, sleeping, or simply hiding and capture or eliminate them. Basically, a door-to-door sweep of the entire airship.

Meanwhile, Hawke and the fourteen men of Bravo Platoon would go directly to the ballroom, take out the Russian tangos guarding the hostages, and secure any other hostages in sickbay or otherwise not found with the main group.

“Listen up,” Hawke said, addressing the whole squad. “This, as you gentlemen all damn well know, is a game for thinkers, not shooters. That’s always been true, but it is especially true tonight. When we go in with our flashbangs and smoke grenades, we’re going to enter a room full of screaming, shell-shocked hostages, many of them elderly and infirm, and perhaps a dozen highly trained Russian terrorists. As you know from the briefing, these guys are very bad news, formerly the death-squad commandos in Chechnya.”

“OMON, skipper?”

“Exactly. So, the trick will be not shooting. Every round we fire in there will be accounted for. I don’t need to tell you we probably have the American vice president’s wife in there on the floor. Also her White House security detail. When bullets fly and the fit hits the shan, as it surely will do, these U.S. Secret Service men will immediately cover her body with their own. These men are not, I repeat, not attacking the vice president’s wife.”

“Thanks for the heads-up, skipper,” one of the younger SEALs said, laughing.

“Little humor,” Hawke smiled.

It was easy as hell to get too tight at the run-up, too tightly wound, and that was the last thing he wanted his squad to be feeling at the moment.

There were a more few chuckles, and Stoke said, “This is serious shit, guys. Any monkey can shoot people. You men know better than anyone what counts right now is the split second when you know to back the hell off. Okay? Listen to the man!”

Hawke, all trace of humor gone, said, “Once the spoon pops on the first smoke and flashbang grenades, you have two-point-seven seconds before the blast. Fingers off the triggers until you aim to kill. Look all the way into the danger zones before turning into the room. When you get inside, key your focus on weapons, not movement. Maintain fields of fire, and for God’s sake, don’t fuck this up. All right? Everybody ready? You all know where to go, so go, dammit, go!”

He and Stoke stood back and let the teams race up the ladder to reform in the lounge area at the top.

Stoke had made sure a crewman from the sub would fast-rope up the cable with a bosun’s chair and help Fancha back down to the sub, get her to sickbay if necessary. The captain and the first officer were likewise to be removed from the pod and hauled down to the sub for intense interrogation.

At the top of the grand staircase, the hostage-rescue team split into two parties. Stoke took Alpha left down the ship’s central corridor, where they would begin a room-by-room search of the entire vessel, every deck, every nook, every cranny.

Hawke and Bravo went right.