Ted Bell - Tsar

Every member of the team had memorized the ship’s layout. They knew every crack, turn, and stair, including the ballroom’s location and layout on the diagrams. Just two minutes later, Hawke and his assault team were silently checking weapons and gear one last time outside the ballroom’s main entrance, just beyond the line of sight of anyone inside.

Hawke looked at the digital timer ticking down on his watch and stepped forward, stopping just short of the door. He had affixed a noise suppressor to his M8 and now held it at eye level, the selector set for a three-round burst. Should an unfriendly step outside the room now, he was dead. He reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a flashbang. He slowed his breathing. Adrenaline was coursing through his system, just enough to maintain the right edge. In his earpiece, he could hear Stoke breathing.

“Bravo,” Hawke said into his tiny lip mike.

“Copy, Bravo,” Stoke replied. “Alpha is at yellow. Request compromise authority and permission to move to green.” Yellow meant Stoke’s squad was at its last position of cover and concealment. That no-man’s-land between safe and totally rat-fucked. His team had orders not to engage any enemy until Hawke’s primary force had initiated its assault on the ballroom.

“Bravo at green,” Hawke told Stoke, cupping a grenade loosely in his left hand. “Stand by, Alpha…ten seconds…”

He looked at his team, making final eye contact with as many of them as he could. “Remember,” he told them one last time, “key on weapons, shoot surgically, think four steps ahead.”

The team nodded. Hawke saw they were ready. It was finally time for everybody to get real busy, hop and pop.

“Alpha, you now have compromise authority to move to green…”

He paused a beat. He knew Stoke was moving.

“Five,” Hawke said to his team, “four…three…two…one…”

Hawke heaved the first of many stun grenades through the ballroom door. Next, the smoke grenades were tossed inside.

Craaack!

A hundred and eighty decibels of distraction preceded Hawke, who leaned into the smoke and noise and violence as his team stormed into the ballroom behind him.

Bullets from the OMON troops ringing the room full of hostages instantly zipped over their heads with loud, supersonic retorts. Huge sonic explosions rocked the ballroom as the team charged through the hot zone. They were sidestepping wailing hostages as they lobbed more flashbangs and smokes ahead of them and expertly executing terrorists as they encountered them, head shots, torsos, whatever shots they could take. Surgical, like the man said.

The return enemy fire was wild and sporadic as panic and confusion spread. But not all of it. The Russian OMON forces had clearly been training for an attempted hostage rescue, just as Yurin had told Stokely under duress.

Hawke had seen two or three of his guys go down, wounded or dead. A lot of lead was still flying. He was shocked to see a few hostages struggling to their feet, two old men reaching down to help their wives get off the floor. They all held hands and, stumbling blindly through the smoke, tried to make their way toward a door with a lighted exit sign.

They hadn’t gone six feet when all four of them were brutally executed by two OMON guys guarding the exit door. Hawke saw the wanton murder, dropped to a knee, sighted his M8, and unloaded on one of the two Russians, rounds to his head that would sever the connection between brain and spinal cord. He looked for the other one, but he’d disappeared into the smoke toward the stage.

Hawke decided to follow. Murder got you the death penalty in this room. But suddenly, he was taking fire from above. Where? He whirled around. There were two tiny window openings in the wall above the stage, and he saw the glint of a muzzle protruding from one of them. It looked like a projection booth. Fire from above was lethal. He grabbed a stun grenade from his bag and pitched it through the second window. The resulting explosion of sound and the smoke pouring out had neutralized the shooter, at least temporarily.

“Locked door, skipper,” Harry Brock said to Stoke. Harry put his ear to the door. “Noise inside. Sounds like TV.”

Alpha Platoon had already cleared one entire deck, killing two tango sentries and three more sleeping inside some kind of dorm room. They had just mounted the stairs to the promenade deck. Pricey real estate from the looks of it. Suites and shit like that. Lots of gold fixtures and silk-covered sofas out in the hallway.

“Blow it, Harry,” Stoke said.

“Breacher up!” Brock said, and a lanky young Iowan named Harry Beecher stepped past them to the door. Beecher the Breacher, he was called. He was carrying a sawed-off, pistol-gripped 12-gauge Remington shotgun loaded with two specially designed Hatton rounds. He also had a.45 in a cross-draw holster strapped across his chest and a bagful of flashbangs.

Stoke signaled for the rest of the squad to proceed ahead, clear the rest of the corridor. He calculated the three of them had enough firepower for this one room. The rest of his team moved on, clearing room after room, as sporadic automatic-weapons fire echoed all through the corridor.

Stoke called it, and Beecher put the gun to the lock.

Boom-boom!

Beecher had chipped out the dead bolt, and Stoke kicked the door open, went in low, half a step, and turned to his left.

“Hostage left!” he yelled as Beecher and Brock moved inside.

He instantly recognized Vice President Tom McCloskey’s wife from her pictures in the papers and on TV. Bonnie McCloskey sat in a chair, her hands cuffed in her lap as two wild-eyed OMON bully boys on either side held guns to her head. She looked exhausted and beat to hell, but she smiled angelically at Stoke, sweetly, as if he’d just dropped in for tea. For a terrified hostage, few sights are more welcome than a beautiful Old Glory patch on somebody’s shoulder, coming through the door.

To the right, two more Russkie tangos were just coming up off the couch where they’d been watching Black Sunday on a plasma. Harry Brock, still moving forward at a crouch, dropped the one on the right with a three-round burst to the chest. Beecher had pulled his pistol and took out the guy on the left with one round to the forehead, a big.45mm ouchie that would never ever get all better.

“Drop your guns!” Stoke shouted at the two men still holding guns to the vice president’s wife’s head. Catching his mistake, he screamed it again in phonetic Russian, swinging the barrel of his M8 rapidly back and forth from one bad guy to the other as he moved forward, just aching to pull the trigger.

“Get the fuck down!” he yelled, advancing with his M8 at head level. “Get the fuck away from that hostage! Now! ”

Brock was now edging his way along the wall behind the bound hostage and her two captors. The Russians were wide-eyed with indecision and fear, knowing that if they shot their captive, they were dead men standing, also knowing that if they turned their guns on the huge black man…Stoke’s concentration was so intense at that moment that he could actually see their fingers squeezing the triggers as Brock stepped silently forward and shot each man from one foot behind, two split-second double taps that literally took the tops of their heads off.

Stoke launched himself forward, grabbed the hostage under the arms, and got her out of that room in a hurry. Nobody needed to see and smell the kind of carnage that filled that room any longer than they had to. He carried her straight across the hall to an open room they’d previously cleared, sat her gently down on the bed, and quickly sliced the plastic cuffs off with his knife.