Chapter Thirteen

Wilmington, Delaware

Saturday, August 28, 9:09 A.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 98 hours, 51 minutes

It was a routine pickup, a classic no-shots-fired thing where the afteraction report would be short and boring. Only it wasn’t.

First Sgt. Bradley Sims—Top to everyone who knew him, and second in command of Joe Ledger’s Echo Team—was on point at the door knock. Like his two fellow agents he was dressed in a nondescript navy blue government-issue suit, white shirt, and red tie. Flag pin on his lapel, a wire, and sunglasses. The motel hallway was badly lighted, so he removed his shades and dropped them into his coat pocket. He might have been NSA, FBI, or an agent of any of the DOJ’s domestic law enforcement agencies, maybe a middle-grade agent in charge of a low-risk field mission. He dressed for the part. He had FBI credentials in his pocket, though he’d never so much as set foot in Quantico. He also had badges for the ATF and DEA in the car.

The Department of Military Sciences did not operate under the umbrella of the Department of Justice, nor did it fall into the growing network of agencies under the Homeland charter. The DMS was a solo act, answerable to the President of the United States. They didn’t have their own badges. They weren’t cops. The credentials Top Sims carried, however, were completely authentic.

He knocked on the door. “FBI!” he announced in the leather-throated roar of a lifelong sergeant. “Please open the door.”

Out of habit he stepped to one side so that the reinforced frame rather than the door was between him and whoever might be inside. Cops did that; so did soldiers. Top had been a soldier since he enlisted on his eighteenth birthday, and that was twenty-two years ago and change.

Both of the agents flanking him were bigger and younger than Top. They looked like a pair of giants. To his left was Big Bob Faraday, a former ATF field man who stood six-five and had massive biceps that strained the fabric of the off-the-rack blazer. To Top’s right was Bunny—born with the unfortunate name of Harvey Rabbit—who had joined the DMS after eight years as a sergeant in Force Recon. Bunny was two inches taller than Faraday and though he was also heavily muscled, his build was more appropriate to volleyball, which until recently he’d played at the Pan American Games level. His service in Iraq had kept him out of the Olympics, but he didn’t hold a grudge.

There was no answer at the door.

“Maybe he ain’t home,” suggested Bunny.

“It’s Saturday morning,” said Big Bob. “Guy’s got no job, no friends. He’s here or he’s at Starbucks.”

“Maybe I’ll just knock louder,” said Top.

He did. No answer.

“Let’s kick it,” Top decided.

“I got it,” said Big Bob, moving past Top to front the door. Big Bob had thighs like bridge supports and could bury the whole rack on the Nautilus leg press. Twice now he’d kicked doors completely off their hinges. He wanted a hat trick.

Top shrugged and stepped aside. “Entertain yourself.”

Top and Bunny drew their weapons and quietly racked the slides. The man they were there to arrest, Burt Gilpin, was a middle-aged computer geek who had figured a way to hack into the mainframes of several major universities that were involved in medical, viral, and genetic research. He’d constructed elaborate Web sites with phantom pages and rerouted e-mail drops so he could advertise the stolen data and accept bids from interested parties. Gilpin knew his computers and he understood security, but MindReader was designed to spot certain kinds of patterns related to key topics. Genetics and virology were major red flags and it zeroed him in a nanosecond, and Church had taken a personal interest because the method Gilpin used to hack the systems bore some similarities to MindReader. Nobody else was supposed to have that technology, and Church wanted to have a long talk with Gilpin.

Top drew the pickup detail and tagged the first two members of Echo Team to report that morning to go with him. Gilpin had no police record apart from parking tickets; he had never served in the military, never belonged to a gun club or registered a firearm, and didn’t even go to a gym. Sending Top, Bunny, and Big Bob was overkill, but it was also an excuse to get out of the shop for the day.

“Kick it,” said Top.

Big Bob raised his leg and cocked his foot, but just as he was about to kick, Bunny saw a shadow move past the peephole on the motel door.

“Wait!” he started to say, and then the door seemed to explode as heavy-caliber bullets ripped through wood and plaster and slammed into Big Bob Faraday.

The big man screamed as two bullets tore into his leg; one smashed his shin and the other struck the underside of his kneecap and then ripped a tunnel through the meat of his thigh, tearing muscle and tendon and missing his femoral artery by three one-hundredths of an inch. Three additional rounds struck him high in the abdomen. The Kevlar vest is designed to flatten bullets and stop them from penetrating the body. The foot-pounds of impact still hits like a hammer, but the wearer can live with broken ribs.

Kevlar is not designed to stop steel-core Teflon-coated rounds. Street thugs and gangbangers call them cop killers for a reason.

The bullets chopped through Big Bob Faraday like he’d been bare chested. The combined impact slammed him backward with such force that he hit the door of the motel room opposite and tore it out of the frame so that he fell halfway into the room.

All of this happened in a second.

In the next second Top and Bunny threw themselves down and out of the line of fire as bullets continued to rip the doorjamb apart. Hundreds of rounds tore chunks of cement and pieces of lath out of the walls and filled the air above them with a hurricane of jagged splinters. They both knew, even as they were diving for cover, that Big Bob was down. Down and maybe dead.

Top flattened on the floor and reached his arm out to point his gun into the room. He opened fire, knowing he had little chance of hitting anything, but return fire can disrupt an attack and he needed to buy time.

A voice yelled, “Perekroi dver!” And though Top didn’t understand the words, he could recognize the language. Russian. It made no sense.

He unloaded his full magazine and there was a sudden shrill scream from inside. He’d gotten a lucky hit.

“Bozhe moi!”

Top saw that Bunny had squirmed around and was ready to imitate his blind shooting trick. Their eyes met and Bunny mouthed the word Russians? Top nodded and there was no more to be said. His receiver locked back, and as he withdrew his hand Bunny reached around the shattered jamb, his hand angled up, and began firing. The return fire was fierce and when Top whipped his hand back his skin was a cactus plant of tiny splinters that covered him from knuckles to wrist.

As Top dropped his mag and slapped in another, Bunny cut a lightning-fast quick-look through an apple-sized hole in the wall. He immediately moved away from the spot as bullets reamed the hole. The afterimage of what he’d seen was burned into his brain. He hand-signaled to Top. Four men in a firing line. One injured. What Bunny couldn’t convey was that a fifth man was duct-taped naked to a chair, his limbs streaked with blood. Gilpin.

Top signaled to Bunny to go high and left while he went low and right. He finger-counted down from three and then they spun into different quadrants of the ruined doorway and opened fire. Neither hit anything with his first shot, and they hadn’t expected to; the first round was fired to cover them as they came into position and to give them a fragment of a second to locate their targets. Four men in a small room. Very little in the way of cover. They both saw what they needed. Their next shots punched into the four Russians, hitting legs and groins and torsos and heads, the bullet impacts dancing them backward so that they looked like a film of people walking played in reverse. The heavy automatic weapons of the Russians filled the air with bullets, but Bunny’s and Top’s bullets spoiled all aim and accuracy. It was a perfect counterattack and it turned the apartment into a shooting gallery.

The slide locked back on Bunny’s gun and Top spaced out his last two shots to give Bunny some cover and time to reload. Then Top dropped his mag and slapped in his last one.

But it wasn’t necessary. The gunfire from inside had died.

Bunny and Top got to their feet and spun around the smoking edges of the shattered wall and entered the room hard and fast, guns up and out. Nothing moved except the pall of smoke eddying around them like a graveyard mist.

Bunny kicked open the bathroom door. “Clear!”

“Clear!” Top yelled as he checked all points of the small main room. He kicked the weapons away from the slack and bloody hands of the Russians. “Secure this and call it in,” he ordered as he pivoted and ran back out into the hallway to check on Big Bob.

Bunny called a man-down report to the DMS command center, who in turn notified local police and EMTs. He checked Gilpin, but the little computer hacker was as dead as the Russians, his body covered with the marks of savage torture, his throat cut.

“Damn,” Bunny said, and then joined Top in the hall.

Top had used a switchblade to cut away Faraday’s jacket shirt and the straps of his Kevlar vest. Bunny tore the shirt into pieces and they used it to pack the three entry wounds in Big Bob’s chest and the three much larger exit wounds in his back. Top used Faraday’s tie as a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding in his ruined leg.

Big Bob was unconscious, his eyes half-closed and his lips beginning to go pale with the massive blood loss and the onset of shock. Both agents peeled off their own jackets and used them as a makeshift blanket. In the distance they could already hear the wail of sirens.

“Christ, this is bad,” Bunny said as he cradled Big Bob’s head in his lap.

Top was a lifelong expert in karate and knew a great deal about anatomy. He studied the placement of the wounds and shook his head. “I think the rounds clipped his liver and one kidney. There must be lung damage, but it’s not sucking.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s not good. Lung could be filled with blood already.”

The sirens were louder now, outside. He heard people yelling and then the pounding of feet as EMTs and uniformed cops ran down the hall toward them. The EMTs pushed past them and began their own wound care, but they listened to Top’s professional assessments.

“We’ll take over from here, sir,” they said, and the agents backed off.

The cops circled them and Bunny flashed his credentials. Somebody at the DMS must have made the right call, because the police deferred to them, even to the point of staying outside the crime scene. The DMS operator had assured Top that Jerry Spencer, the head of the DMS’s high-tech forensics division, would be on the next thing smoking.

Top stood in the doorway and looked at the carnage.

“This don’t make sense,” Bunny said, looking over Top’s shoulder. “I mean, am I crazy or were these clowns speaking Russian?”

“Sounded like it to me. Or close enough.”

“Russian Mafia?” Bunny ventured.

“Shit if I know, Farmboy. But these guys were pros of some kind. Ex-police or ex-Russian military. They knew how to ambush a door knock.”

On the floor by the overturned table was a device that looked like a PDA. Someone, presumably one of the Russians, had attached it to Gilpin’s hard drive with narrow cables.

“Looks like they were downloading his shit,” said Bunny. He nudged the device. The PDA and the hard drive had been smashed to junk by gunfire.

“No way to know if they were downloading the data to take it or forwarding it on. Maybe they tortured him to get his passwords.”

“All this for a computer hacker?”

“I think we just stepped in somebody else’s shit.”

Bunny grunted. “It’s our shit now. Big Bob makes it or not, I’m going to want a piece of somebody’s ass for this. Whoever ordered this.”

“Hooah,” murmured Top. “The captain’s going to take this amiss.”

“We’d better call him.”

“He’s at the cemetery this morning.”

“He’ll want to know about this,” Bunny said, but before he could punch in a number Top’s phone rang.

Top looked at the code. “Uh-oh,” he said. “It’s the big man.” He flipped open his phone. “Sir.”

Mr. Church said, “Operations just informed me that there’s been an incident, that one of ours is down. Give me a sit rep.”

Top told him everything. “EMTs don’t like what they’re seeing. Big Bob’s in the ambulance now. We were just about to call Captain Ledger.”

“Scratch that, First Sergeant. We have a more pressing problem.”

“Sir?”

Church told him about the NSA. “It’s possible you men are off their radar because you’ve been operating with Bureau credentials, but now that this has happened the bloodhounds will be running.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“As soon as Captain Ledger surfaces we’ll find you some air transport and the three of you will head west. We’ve lost track of the Denver team and that incident may be separate from this—and it may be a lot more important,” Church said. “I want you two to vanish. Get off the radar and stay off until you make contact with Major Courtland, Captain Ledger, or myself. Don’t get taken. You may use any methods short of lethal force.” He read off a string of possible locations and made Top read them back. “Go to each one in order. Wait ten minutes. If Captain Ledger does not come, proceed to the next one until you rendezvous. He’ll have further instructions.”

“Yes, sir.” Top paused. “But what about Big Bob? We were going to go to the hospital once Jerry Spencer gets here.”

“Agent Spencer will neither need nor want your help, First Sergeant; and as for Sergeant Faraday . . . he’ll be protected. I have some friends in Wilmington who will watchdog him. I want you and Sergeant Rabbit to get mobile and get gone most riki-tik.”

He hung up.

Bunny, who had leaned close to eavesdrop, stepped back and looked at Top. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“I don’t know, Farmboy, but the man said to get our asses into the wind, so let’s boogie.”

Bunny lingered for one moment longer, first looking at the bodies sprawled in the motel room and then turning to gaze at the smears of blood where Big Bob had gone down.

“Son of a bitch must pay,” Bunny said.

Top nodded. “Hooah.”

Then they were gone.