The King of Plagues jl-3 Read online

  My sunglasses had a mike pickup built into the frame. I whispered, “Go.”

  Instantly the rest of Echo Team hit the house. Big Bob Faraday, a former ATF field man who was built like Schwarzenegger’s big brother, kicked the back door completely off its hinges. Top Sims, my second in command, swarmed past him with Joey Goldschein at his heels. Joey was our newest member, a good kid, six months back from Afghanistan. They bellowed at the top of their lungs as they moved through the empty kitchen and into a side hall.

  “Federal agents! Lay down your weapons!”

  The adjoining dining room was filled with men, most of them crowded around a big oak dining table that was covered with bricks of C4 and all the wiring needed to blow the whole house into the next dimension.

  You’d think that people would be disinclined to initiate a firefight when there’s forty pounds of high explosives lying right there on the table. You’d be wrong. Lot of crazy people out there.

  Suddenly it was the O.K. Corral.

  Out front, the man arguing with Khalid turned sharply at the noise from inside the house. He never saw Khalid pull open his loose Orioles shirt and pull his piece. Maybe the man heard the shot that killed him, but I doubt it.

  Khalid and I both had the whole team yelling in our ears about explosives and armed resistance. Deep Throat’s intel had been solid.

  Khalid and I opened fire together, hammering the front windows and the doorway. The men were so tightly clustered that there was no way for us to miss.

  Then the dead were falling and the others were backpedaling into the house. We jumped up onto the porch and I covered Khalid while he reloaded. Then I had to duck behind the brick wall between window and door as a hail of heavy-caliber bullets ripped through the frame. There were screams and blaring horns from the street behind us, and I knew that backup teams were closing on the house. The Hamas team was in a box that we were nailing shut. It was up to them whether the box was a container or a coffin.

  Khalid and I both yelled in Palestinian Arabic for them to lay down their arms. The only answer was a renewed barrage of automatic gunfire.

  “Flash out!” I barked into my mike, and then pulled a flash bang out from under my shirt and lobbed it through the doorway. Khalid and I covered our ears and squeezed our eyes shut. The blast was huge.

  “Go! Go!” I snapped, and Khalid spun out of his protective crouch and rushed inside. I was right behind him. He fanned left; I took the right. There were five hostiles in the living room, but all of them were down, rolling around on the floor, screaming but unable to hear their own voices. Flash bangs blow out the eardrums and temporarily blind the unwary. We kicked weapons out of their hands and kept moving. The firefight in the dining room was still hot and heavy. I saw Top Sims in a shooter’s squat behind a breakfront that bullets had reduced to little more than splinters and shattered crockery. Big Bob and Joey were firing from the hallway entrance.

  I tapped Khalid and he nodded and took up a shooting position from the living room doorway while I peeled off and headed for the stairs. From the sound of it there was a second firefight up there. The team’s other big man, Bunny—a moose of a kid from Orange County—had been on-point for the second-floor entry, and he had former MP DeeDee Whitman on his wing.

  “Green Giant, this is Cowboy. On the stairs and coming up,” I barked into the mike.

  “Join the party, Cowboy.” Bunny’s voice sounded relaxed.

  Then DeeDee added, “Stay away from the windows. Chatterbox is enjoying himself.”

  “Copy that, Scream Queen.”

  Chatterbox was our last team member. His real name was John Smith, and the DMS had headhunted him away from LAPD SWAT. He was one of those silent, introspective types who looked like a beatnik poet from the Village but who was the hammer of God with a sniper rifle.

  I tapped the command channel and keyed over to Smith’s frequency.

  “Chatterbox, this is Cowboy. I’m on the second floor. No window shots until I give you the word.”

  “‘K,’” he said.

  I peered around the wall at the top of the stairs and looked right into the eyes of a dead man. He was sprawled on the floor with a black bullet hole above his left eyebrow and a look of profound surprise stamped onto his face. The whole back of his head had been blown out. John Smith at work. I’ve seen a lot of great shooters in the military and on the cops, and I’ve met a few whose accuracy bordered on the supernatural. But John Smith was a Jedi. He was spooky good. If you’re unlucky enough to step into his crosshairs, then you’d better be right with Jesus.

  I leaned farther out into the hall and saw that most of the second floor was an open-plan studio. There were two more men slumped like rag dolls. Automatic weapons lay near each one. Three other men knelt beside the windows, weapons in hand. They were probably too smart and too scared to try to return fire after three of their brothers had taken head shots. It was a tough nut to crack, because a sniper is the most feared man in any battle scenario.

  The second most feared is the guy who sneaks up behind you.

  I ducked back onto the stairs and whispered into the mike. “Cowboy to Chatterbox. I’m moving into the field of fire. No shots until I give the word or fifteen seconds is up. Copy?”

  “‘K,’” he said again. Guy never shuts up.

  I took my Beretta in a two-handed grip and then I was up and moving, rounding the corner, entering the open room, running fast as I cleared the corners with a flick and then fanned the barrel back to the shooters, taking the one farthest from me first with two in the head and shifting to the next gun without a pause. The other two shooters started to turn, but I shot the middle guy twice through the side of the head and the impact sent him crashing through the broken window.

  The third guy was almost in kicking range and he was moving at lightning speed, swinging his AK-47 up, turning toward me, finger already inside the trigger guard. If he’d had a handgun instead of a long gun he might have beat me to the shot, but I put the first one in the center of his chest, then raised the gun fourteen inches and put the second one through his forehead. Double tap. All six shots fired in less than three seconds and my head ringing with thunder.

  Then John Smith’s voice was yelling in my ear, “On your six! On your six!”

  I ducked and spun to one side as a hail of bullets burned through where I’d been standing. Four shooters were crowding into the doorway and I had no idea where the hell they’d come from. The first two banged into each other trying to get through the doorway, and I was already coming up out of my jump and roll. I killed them both with five shots between them. I moved like a son of a bitch, rushing in but to one side, firing one-handed as I tore a fresh magazine out of my pocket. The bodies in the doorway fell face forward just as my slide locked back. The third shooter kicked his way into the room, starting to turn as he cleared the doorway and the bodies.

  Shit. No time to swap out the mags, so I dropped my Beretta and drew the Rapid Response Folding knife from its sheath clipped inside my jeans pocket. The RRF has a wicked little 3.375-inch blade that locks into place with a snap of the wrist. What it lacks in weight it makes up for in speed, because at only four ounces it moved as fast as my hand. No drag at all.

  I bashed the rifle aside with my left and whipped him across the throat with a very tight semi-circular slash. Blood exploded outward in a hydrostatic jet. I faded left and took a hard leap past his shoulder, and drove the point of the knife into the face of the fourth shooter. The blade caught him beside the nose and I punched it all the way through. He screamed and his finger clutched around the trigger, sending half a magazine into the legs of the guy whose throat I’d cut. I gave the knife a quarter turn and yanked it out, then plunged it back into his throat.

  He collapsed over the tangled legs of his comrade.

  I tore the knife free and wiped it clean on a dead man’s sleeve, then retrieved my Beretta and swapped out the mags.

  My heart was hammering in my chest and I could
smell my own sweat mixed with the copper stink of blood. There hadn’t been time to be scared before now, but it was catching up to me like a son of a bitch.

  I tapped the commlink. “Chatterbox, Green Giant—center room clear. All hostiles down. Repeat: All hostiles are—”

  “Get out!”

  It broke into the team channel. Top’s voice. Screaming.

  “Hostile with a vest! Hostile with a vest! Out–out–out!”

  A vest.

  Jesus Christ.

  We all knew about those vests. Anyone who had been in Iraq or Afghanistan knows about suicide bombers who follow the compulsion to strap on forty pounds of high explosives and turn the day into red nightmare.

  Suddenly we were all yelling and running. I ran for the window and went out like I was Superman. Maybe a drop of fifteen feet to the street. There was a huge black noise behind me, and just as I cleared the window I felt myself lifted as if wishing I could fly was making it so.

  As if.

  The force of the blast threw me out over the street. I pinwheeled my arms, and my legs mimicked running as I flew. There were cherry trees along the curb. In one of the weird moments of clarity that happen in the middle of a crisis, I knew that the leaves and branches were going to break my fall, but I wasn’t going to like it one bit. Behind me the fireball burned the air and ignited the leaves and sucked all the air out of my lungs. Then the tree curled its branches into a fist and knocked me out of all sense and understanding.

  I WOKE UP in an ambulance. Top and Khalid were with me, both of them covered with soot and bloodstained field dressings. Top told me the news.

  One of the hostiles had come up out of the cellar wearing a vest packed with bars of Semtex. Everyone on Echo Team had taken cuts and burns except John Smith.

  I started to say that we’d gotten off lucky, but something in Top’s face stopped me.

  “What—?” I asked.

  “Joey,” he said. “He pushed Khalid out the door, but he caught his foot on a throw rug and went down. He got up, but he was one step too late.”

  Joey Goldschein had been the only one of my team left inside when everything went to hell. He was six months back from his second tour in Afghanistan. He deserved a longer life.

  That was our first encounter with the Seven Kings.

  AFTER THAT, DEEP Throat came to Church with dribs and drabs of intel. My part in the Seven Kings affair slowly evaporated as I became involved in several unrelated cases. Other DMS teams worked on it, and it’s both sad and frightening to say that there are always multiple threats chewing at the fabric of our society. Vultures and predators, sharks and parasites, bent on destroying us in order to satisfy their own political agendas. I don’t say that they do this to satisfy their religious agendas, because I’m either idealistic enough or cynical enough to believe that religion is deliberately misused as a label for greedy sons of bitches whose real objective is wealth and power. Sure, the freedom fighter in the trenches may think that God wants him to strap C4 to his chest and walk into a post office, but until the so-called religious leaders do that themselves I think it’s a scam. And they’re scamming their own loyal followers as much as they’re scamming the rest of the world. I think this was true during the Crusades and it’s true now in the Middle East. I seldom trust the guys at the top.

  The real bitch was that despite having clashed with groups supported by the Seven Kings, we didn’t have a frigging clue as to who or what the Kings were. It was like fighting an invisible empire … and yes, I know that sounds like an old movie serial. But there it is.

  Chapter Six

  The Royal London Hospital

  Whitechapel, London

  December 17, 10:52 A.M. GMT

  Church said, “The Kings have been busy during your ‘vacation.’���

  “Deep Throat been calling his BFF again?”

  “I see isolation and contemplation haven’t matured you. Pity,” Church said. “We’ve had five additional tips. Three out of five of the tips resulted in action taken. We recovered prisoners in several of the raids, but none of them were above street level. They knew the name Seven Kings but nothing else of substance.”

  “Did Deep Throat warn you about today?”

  “Not specifically. He said, ‘Watch out; the next one will be epic.’ However, if this is a Seven Kings attack, it would be their first hit on foreign soil.”

  “That we know of.”

  “Yes.”

  “You any closer to finding out who Deep Throat is?”

  “No. But I have some friends in the industry working on this.”

  The blaze looked even hotter than before. The crowds surrounding the Hospital had to number in the thousands.

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is a terrorist hit,” I said.

  “Even if no one comes forward to take credit for this, we’re likely to see a rise in hate crimes.”

  I agreed. After 9/11 there was an insane wave of violent hatred toward Muslims even though we were not—and never had been—at war with Islam. Echoes of the Japanese internment camps. Xenophobia is one of humankind’s most embarrassing traits.

  I said, “Destroying a medical complex of this size had to have taken enormous and very detailed planning. Can’t have been a matter of someone walking in the front door with a C4 vest or a car bomb in the parking garage. This place is massive and it all went up at once. Someone put some real thought into this and—”

  Church interrupted me. “How are you doing?”

  Church is borderline heartless, so the fact that he was asking made me stop and do a quick self-check. I realized that I was speaking way too loud and way too fast. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and in doing so I could feel how much of it was stale air that had been turning to poison in my chest.

  “I’m good,” I said more slowly.

  He didn’t comment. He wouldn’t.

  “Dr. Sanchez will be on the first thing smoking.”

  “I don’t need a shrink,” I began irritably, but he cut me off.

  “I’m not sending him to hold your hand, Captain. Dr. Sanchez has a great deal of experience with post-traumatic stress, and much of that can be ameliorated if dealt with from the jump.”

  That was true enough. Rudy was an old friend and he was my own post-trauma shrink before he became my best friend. Since we both signed onto the DMS he’d been the voice of reason and everyone’s shortest pathway to a perspective check. Even, I suspected, for Church himself, though Rudy refused to discuss it.

  Church said, “You’ll liaise with Barrier and offer them any support you can. Barrier knows that anything they tell you will be processed through MindReader, and they’re comfortable with that. They don’t have anything as sophisticated, so we may get some hits before they do.”

  Barrier was the global model for effective covert counterterrorist rapid-response groups, and it actually predated the DMS by several years. Church had tried to get the DMS in place first, but when Congress wouldn’t green-light the money he served as a consultant to the U.K. to build Barrier. When that organization proved itself to be an invaluable tool against the rising tide of advanced bioweapon threats, the Americans finally got a clue and Church built the DMS. The Barrier agents I’d met were every bit as good as our guys, most of them having been handpicked from the most elite SAS teams.

  However, hearing the name Barrier inevitably conjured the image of Grace Courtland.

  Damn.

  Maj. Grace Courtland had been Church’s second in command at the Warehouse, the DMS field office in Baltimore. She was a career military officer and the first woman to join the SAS as an active operative, and the permanent liaison between Barrier and the DMS. She was tough, smart, and beautiful, and she was my direct superior in the chain of command. At the end of August, against all common fucking sense, we fell in love. That was wrong in a whole lot of ways. Rudy tried to warn me, but I brushed him off and told him to mind his own business. And yes, I know that as he
was the DMS shrink this was his business, but when was the last time someone falling in love listened to good advice?

  Grace and I knew that a love relationship, no matter how discreet, made us fly too close to the flame. As agents of the Department of Military Sciences we tackled the deadliest threats imaginable, so personal entanglements could only end in trouble. In our case, it ended in disaster. We faced off against a threat so huge that books will be written about it. At the end of it, the good guys won and I lost. I lost Grace. She died saving us all, and I think I died, too. Part of me, anyway.

  Since then I’ve knocked aimlessly around Europe with my dog, Ghost, a specially trained DMS K9. We got into a couple of scrapes together while doing some unofficial stuff for friends of Mr. Church. I hadn’t actually quit the DMS, but I didn’t want to return to the Baltimore Field Office. Grace would not be there. The place would be full of echoes, of shadows and memories. Of ghosts.

  Originally, I had come to Europe on a hunting trip. The bastard who shot Grace escaped the bloody resolution of that case. He escaped and went into the wind. As a going-away present, Mr. Church left me a folder full of leads, travel documents, and money, and, without ever saying so, his blessing.

  Ghost and I went hunting, and after many weeks we ran our prey to ground. There’s an unmarked grave on one of the Faroe Islands off the coast of Denmark. I pissed on it after I hand-shoveled the dirt and rocks over what was left of the body.

  It didn’t bring Grace back, but I believed that somewhere—maybe in Valhalla—her warrior’s soul approved.

  Ah … Grace.

  Damn it.

  Church apparently got tired of the silence on my end of the phone and plowed ahead. “Your current credentials will get you into the investigation. I advised the President and Prime Minister about your participation. And … I’ll likely be on the same flight as Dr. Sanchez. Do you want me to bring Jerry Spencer as well?”