Ted Bell - Tsar

“You okay? You need a doctor? We got a medical corpsman with us.”

She looked at him blankly, her eyes welling with tears.

He turned and shouted toward the open door, “Harry! Get the corpsman up here, pronto! ”

“Happening as we speak, boss!” Brock said, sticking his smiling face inside the door.

“No, no, wait,” the shaken woman said. “I’m all right. Get your corpsman to help those poor people in the ballroom. Some of them are terribly ill and afraid. Especially the elderly. Please, don’t waste any more time on me. I’m fine. Perhaps some water, and if I might just lie down for a moment?”

“Here’s water,” Brock said, tossing a bottle to Stoke. “I’ll dispatch the corpsman to the ballroom right away.”

Harry bolted.

“Ma’am, let me help you with that pillow. That man’s name is Harry Brock, Mrs. McCloskey. He’s a CIA field agent. He’s going to see that you get home to Washington safe and sound. There’s a Navy plane waiting at Bermuda. I’ll have you there in less than an hour.”

“So, it’s-over?”

“Yes, ma’am, it’s just about over.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking up at Stoke, and then the big tears started rolling, and she collapsed against the pillow. “Thank you so very much.”

“You’re most welcome,” Stoke said, not letting go of her hand.

“Those poor people down there. All that shooting. Can you possibly save them?”

“We are certainly trying, ma’am. We’ve got the best hostage-rescue team on the planet down there right now. I think it’s going to be all right.”

HAWKE, EYES BURNING red from flashbang smoke, barely saw the lone tango trying to escape the carnage. It was another muscle-bound brute with close-cropped blond hair, using the smoke screen to try to slip through the curtains at the back of the stage. Hawke caught a bit of profile as the guy disappeared and recognized him instantly. It was the barbarian who’d gunned down the four elderly hostages in cold blood, the very same bastard he’d lost in the smoke a while earlier.

Yeah, this had to be the guy from Miami, all right, the one Stoke had told him all about. An OMON officer named Yurin who’d specialized in killing small children in Chechnya after the carpet-bombing of the Chechen capital at Grozny. In wardroom briefing, Stoke had referred to him as the baby killer. This was Yurin’s operation, Hawke knew, and if you kill the head, you kill the snake. He wiped his stinging eyes, moving rapidly through the smoke toward the stage.

Hawke mounted the stage and pushed through the heavy velvet curtains. It was pitch-black backstage, but he heard gunfire above and saw flashes of light beneath a door at the top of a metal stairway. It had to be the projection booth. Most, if not all, of the Russian operators had been taken out by Bravo by now. But the effect of Yurin’s fire on the dance floor below would be murderous: firing into the panic, killing indiscriminately, the elderly people filled with hope now, running madly for the exits, only to be cruelly cut down as they tried to escape.

Hawke mounted the steps three at a time.

The door was slightly ajar, and he kicked it open with his boot. He tried to bring himself to shoot the bastard in the back but just couldn’t do it.

“Hey, baby killer!” Hawke shouted, his M8 trained on the Russian’s broad back as the OMON commander slammed a fresh mag into his subgun and squeezed the trigger, the explosive chatter deafening in the tiny room.

“What did you say?” the guy said, rapidly pulling away from the little window and bringing his gun around to bear on Hawke.

“I said baby killer. That’s you, right?” Hawke’s finger was already applying pressure to the M8’s trigger when the Russian looked up into his stone-cold eyes.

“Hawke?”

“That’s me,” Alex said, and cut him to ribbons with a sustained burst from his very lethal weapon.

“Sit down, Tom,” the president told his vice president. The poor man was a walking train wreck, pale and trembling, two days’ worth of stubble on his haggard face. He’d been pacing the hallway outside the White House Situation Room for hours, chain-smoking Marlboros and drinking countless pots of coffee. The McCloskey children were upstairs in the Residence, waiting for any word on their mother’s fate, trying to console their father whenever he came upstairs to console them.

“Damn it, we should have heard something by now,” McCloskey said from the doorway. The big man crossed the room and took his customary seat at the table beside President McAtee. Looking forlornly at the large digital clock on the opposite wall, he added, “The assault commenced nearly an hour ago. It’s a blimp, for God’s sake. How long can that take?”

He pushed a soggy box of half-eaten pizza away from him, knocking over a water glass.

The president reached over and squeezed his forearm in what was a likely futile effort to reassure his friend.

“Tom, we’ve got the toughest, most professional team in the world on that airship right now. If anyone can save Bonnie and all those poor people, it’s Alex Hawke and the Navy’s Team Six boys. You know that as well as I do, Tom.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry, Mr. President. It’s just-”

“Totally understandable is what it is,” the president said, rubbing his own fatigue-reddened eyes and nodding at the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Moore. “Charlie, please continue. NATO troop redeployment in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltics. Where are we on that?”

It was well after midnight, Washington time, an hour later in Bermuda. The wan and drawn faces of the men and women in the room bore mute witness to the unbearable stress the entire White House staff was under. It had been a hellish week.

The boyishly handsome FBI director, Mike Reiter, in particular, looked like unadulterated hell. He looked like a man who was about to give the president of the United States some really, really bad news. And in fact, that was precisely why he was there.

Now, less than a week before Christmas, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had assumed a bunker mentality. This despite the cheery tree just put up in the Blue Room, the red, green, and gold Christmas decorations throughout the residence, and the huge lighted tree standing on the fresh blanket of snow covering the South Lawn.

There was little cause for cheer this Christmas. A megalomaniacal ruler had seized power in Russia and was threatening world war. A Russian death squad was holding four hundred terrified and exhausted hostages at gunpoint on an airship over the North Atlantic, including, just to spice things up, the lovely wife of his own vice president. Merry bleeping Christmas, Jack McAtee thought, scribbling the three words on his pad and drawing some scraggly holly leaves around them as General Moore wound up his report on NATO redeployment. Moore turned, looked solemnly at Reiter, and spoke to the president.

“Mr. President, Director Reiter is here to give you a report on what the FBI has learned during its ongoing investigation into the recent bombing at Salina. Mike?”

Reiter got to his feet.

“Mr. President, I’m afraid what we’ve learned at Salina indicates that we confront a threat that is far more serious, far worse than anything we could have ever imagined. The potential exists for a catastrophe of enormous, worldwide magnitude here. I’ve got a few slides here on PowerPoint, and I’d like to use them to demonstrate what we’re-”

“Mr. President?” a naval orderly said, striding rapidly into the room. “Sorry to interrupt, sir. Urgent call for you coming in from Moscow.”

“Korsakov.” The president scowled, picking up the phone directly in front of him. “Wonder what the crazy bastard is up to now.”