Like her and Irina and Kaitlyn, she thought. But the bastard wouldn't find them defenseless.
She motioned to her companions for them to stay where they were, then leveled the machine pistol and stepped around the corner in time to see a stocky, gray-haired man in slacks and a lightweight jacket reaching the bottom of a ladder formed by iron rungs cemented into the wall.
Jamie frowned. From this angle, he didn't
look
like the other terrorists she had seen. For one thing, he was a lot older. But maybe he was the mastermind of the whole attack. Until she knew for sure, she couldn't afford to take a chance.
As quiet as a cat, she stepped up behind him and pressed the Steyr's muzzle to the back of his neck. At this range, if she pulled the trigger the stream of bullets would saw his head right off his shoulders.
“Don't move,” she said.
The man obeyed the order, she had to give him credit for that. He stood absolutely motionless with his hands still on one of the ladder rungs.
Then he said, “Lady, you don't sound like a terrorist, gun or no gun.”
Jamie's breath hissed between her teeth in surprise as she heard the American tones in the man's voice. She said, “You'reâ”
“Hoping that we're on the same side,” the man broke in. “My name's Jake Connelly. I used to be a cop, and right now I'm trying to find a good place to fight back against the men who have taken over this mall.”
For a second, relief flooded through Jamie. The emotion was so strong she wanted to lower the gun and cry. That would have been too stereotypically feminine a thing to do, though, so she kept the Steyr level as she moved back a step and said, “Turn around, Mr. Connelly. Carefully. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Like I told you, ma'am, I used to be a cop. I know the drill.”
He turned, and again Jamie fought the urge to break down as her tension eased even more at the sight of his broad, friendly, bulldog-like face.
He was observant, too, because he said, “Ex-military?”
“Captain. Air Force. Three tours in Afghanistan.”
Jake's face creased in a grin as he said, “Then I was right. We're on the same side.” He glanced past her and added, “Who's this?”
Jamie looked over her shoulder and saw that Irina and Kaitlyn had come around the corner, unable to resist the temptation to find out what was going on. Irina held the Steyr Jamie had given her a short time earlier.
“Friends of mine,” Jamie said. “I'm Jamie Vasquez. This is Irina Dubrovna and Kaitlyn Hamilton.”
“Ladies,” Jake said as he nodded to them. “All of you look like you have a fight in mind.”
“That's right. We're on our way to the sporting goods store, since that's where we'll find the most guns and ammo.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me.” Jake sketched a salute. “I'm at your command, Captain Vasquez. We'd better get moving, though. I don't know how much time we have left.”
“How much time before what?”
Jake pointed up with a thumb and said, “Before a bunch of Special Forces guys drop down on the roof and all hell breaks loose in here.”
Chapter 34
T
here was too much to keep up with, Habib thought. Too many things to remember. He summoned Mujidan Bashir and told his second-in-command to check on the situation at the sporting goods store.
“I don't have to go check,” Bashir said. “I just talked to one of the men down there. The Americans who took refuge there are still trapped inside.”
“We haven't gotten them out yet?” Habib didn't try to keep the irritation out of his voice as he asked the question.
“No, but you said we should just keep them penned up and deal with them later.”
“I know what I said,” Habib snapped. “But such defiance of Allah's will cannot go unpunished.”
Bashir shrugged and said, “It won't. There can't be more than a few dozen of them in there. Once we're finished with the others, we can all attack the store and finish them off.”
What Bashir said made sense, but Habib wasn't going to tell him that. Instead he said, “I'll think about it. But I don't like the idea of them sitting in there thinking that they can get away with what they're doing.”
“No one gets away,” Bashir said. “Destiny catches up with everyone.”
Habib couldn't argue with that, either.
* * *
Calvin used the back of his hand to wipe sweat off his forehead. A few feet away, Pete McCracken said, “Hot in here . . . ain't it . . . kid?”
“The AC must've gotten knocked out in that explosion,” Calvin said.
“The AC . . . wasn't on. It's . . . late November.”
“Yeah, but the weather's been warm.”
“Not . . . that warm . . . You're sweatin' . . . because of all the people . . . crammed in here. And because . . . you're scared.”
Calvin turned his head to frown at the old man in the wheelchair.
“You're not even supposed to be up here in this part of the store. Where's Father Steve?”
“Probably back there . . . prayin'. I can . . . get around without him . . . you know.”
Pete moved the knob on the wheelchair's arm with his clawlike left hand, making the chair swing back and forth slightly as its motor hummed.
“Well, you need to go back where you'll be safe if those terrorists attack again.”
“Is anybody . . . in here . . . really safe?”
Calvin couldn't answer that question, or rather, he didn't
want
to answer it, he thought. That would have meant admitting that they were just holding off the inevitable. Sooner or later the terrorists would storm the store, he thought, and he knew how that pitched battle would end.
Already, the defenders had fought off half a dozen attacks. Three men had been killed so far. Their bodies had been carried into the back room, and others had replaced them. Those deaths had caused spirits to run low. People were beginning to sense that the end was looming.
The gunfire, the deaths, the sheer desperation had all combined to make Calvin feel numb. He could still force his brain to think, but everything else inside him had gone dead. Things weren't supposed to be this way, but they were and there was nothing he could do about it except to keep fighting.
He wondered how Tobey, Mr. Lockhart, and the others were doing. Calvin wished he had gone with them, rather than having Tobey pick him to be in charge of the store's defense. He would have rather been on the move, even if it was more dangerous.
He heard a quick patter of footsteps behind him as he knelt at the counter. Turning his head, he saw a girl about his age with brown hair approaching. She was standing up too straight, so Calvin motioned for her to get down. With a nervous look, she dropped to hands and knees and crawled toward him.
“You're the guy who's in charge up here, right?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess.” Calvin thought her name was Jennie, but he wasn't sure about that.
“The priest sent me to get you. He says somebody's trying to get in at the back of the store, through that door where my brother and those other men left.”
Calvin's heart thumped hard in his chest. The door into the service corridors opened into the store if you had a key for it, but anybody could open it from the other side. The doors were designed that way, he supposed, so that mall maintenance workers couldn't get trapped in there.
At Tobey's suggestion before he departed on his commando mission, the store's defenders had barricaded that door with a couple of file cabinets. When Tobey and the others returned, they were supposed to knock on the door in a prearranged signal so they could be let back in.
“It must be Tobey and your brother and the others,” Calvin told the girl.
She shook her head and said, “They didn't give any signal. They just tried to push the door open.”
Calvin closed his eyes for a second as despair went through him. His emotions weren't as numb as he had believed them to be. The terrorists must have found those narrow passages and were trying to launch a sneak attack.
He motioned one of the other defenders over and told the man, “Keep an eye out front. I've got to go in the back.”
“Trouble?” the man asked.
“I don't know yet,” Calvin said, but in truth, he did. There was nothing but trouble in the American Way Mall today.
Staying low, he and Jennie made it to the back room. The people who were hiding here had withdrawn to the other side of the room and were staring fearfully at the blockaded door. Most of them were armed, but the people who were more experienced with guns were all up front.
Still, how experienced did you have to be to point a weapon at a doorway and pull the trigger, Calvin asked himself. He pointed to half a dozen of the men and crooked his free hand at them, indicating that they should join him. They came over, albeit a bit reluctantly, and Calvin told them in a whisper, “A couple of you get ready to shove those file cabinets out of the way. The rest of you have your guns ready and start shooting if I give the order.”
The possibility that whoever was on the other side of the door was friendly still existed. Calvin wasn't going to take any chances, though. Whoever they were, they'd have to identify themselves in a hurry to keep from getting shot.
The men positioned themselves beside the filing cabinets. Calvin and the others lifted their guns. Calvin nodded, and the men shoved the cabinets aside, causing a scraping sound as they moved on the floor. The door swung open abruptly, and the first thing Calvin saw was the barrel of a machine pistol.
His nerves snapped, and he yelled, “Fire!”
* * *
Jake caught just a glimpse of the men standing on the other side of the door pointing guns in the direction of him and the three women. Irina had been confident that the back room of the sporting goods store was on the other side of that door, but when they had tried to open it, they had encountered resistance, as if something was blocking it.
None of them had wanted to call out, for fear that the terrorists were lurking right on the other side. Then they'd heard whatever was blocking the door being moved, and Jamie had snapped, “Get behind me,” as she stepped forward with the Steyr in both hands and used her foot to push open the door.
That was when Jake spotted the armed men, and he reacted instinctively, grabbing Jamie's collar and pulling her back and to the side while he lunged forward.
Somebody yelled, “Fire!” and guns roared, deafening in the close confines.
What felt like a giant fist smacked into Jake's upper left arm, spun him halfway around, and caused him to lose his balance as his legs tangled with Jamie's. They both fell, but that was good because they toppled out of the doorway and therefore out of the line of fire. As Jake landed, he saw Irina and Kaitlyn flinching away from the lead storm.
Jake's arm hurt like blazes where he'd been hit, but he didn't think the wound was serious. At least he hoped not. The barrage of bullets stopped abruptly. He thought it did, anyway. His ears were ringing so bad it was hard to tell for sure.
“Hold your fire,” a young voice ordered, sounding like it came from far, far away. “You terrorists, come out with your hands up!”
“Terrorists!” Kaitlyn repeated angrily. “
You're
the terrorists!”
“Wait, wait.” That was the young man again. “You're Americans?”
Jamie pushed herself up on an elbow and barked in her command voice, “Everybody stand down! That's an order!” She looked over at Jake. “How badly are you hit, Mr. Connelly?”
“Just grazed, I think,” he said. “Still hurts like the devil, though.”
Jamie stood up, and as the right leg of her jeans hiked slightly, Jake saw the steel shaft of a prosthesis going down into the foot-shaped block of plastic inside her shoe. He hadn't realized until just now that at least part of her right leg was gone. He had noticed that she had a slight limp but hadn't attributed it to such a severe injury.
She didn't let it slow her down much, that was for sure.
A young black man in a security guard's uniform appeared in the opening, holding a gun. He stared at Jake and the three females and said, “Oh, my God. We almost killed you.”
“You came too close for comfort, kid,” Jake said. “Somebody give me a hand here.”
Within moments, Jake was on his feet again and they were all inside the store's back room. Jake looked around, saw the frightened people gathered there, and realized that others had had the same idea of forting up in here where guns and ammo were available.
Briskly taking charge, Jamie said, “Mr. Connelly, you find a place to sit down. There's bound to be a first aid kit somewhere around here. We need to clean and bandage that wound.”
A woman who wore the uniform of the store's sales staff volunteered, “I'll get the kit. I know where it is.”
With that in hand, Jamie asked, “Who's in charge here?”
“I guess I am,” the young security guard said. “My name's Calvin Marshall.”
“I'm Captain Vasquez.” She nodded toward Jake. “This is Detective Connelly.”
Calvin swallowed and said, “Yes, ma'am. I think that makes
you
in charge now. Both of you. You sure as heck outrank me.”
“Tell me what's been going on here,” Jamie said.
Calvin summarized the past couple of hours, a time filled with so much violence and death that his voice sounded haunted by it. Jake noticed that Kaitlyn appeared to sympathize with him. He knew the girl had lost her mother, back in the opening moments of the terrorist attack, and that loss probably hadn't completely sunk in on her yet. Her moral fiber was strong enough, though, that she could feel for Calvin.
While that was going on, the woman who had gone to fetch the first aid kit returned with it in hand. She seemed to have had a little training in that area. Jake took off his jacket, and she cut away his shirt to reveal that the slug had plowed a bloody furrow across the outer part of his upper left arm. It was a painful wound, but it wouldn't incapacitate him.
A young, blond priest stepped forward to help as the woman cleaned the wound on Jake's arm and then wrapped a strip of gauze around it and bound it tightly in place.
“You should be able to use your arm some,” she told him, “but it's going to hurt.”
“Let it hurt,” he said. “Right now that doesn't matter a whole lot, does it? I really appreciate your help.” Jake nodded to the priest. “Thanks to you, too, Father.”
“I wish I could do more,” he said. “I'm Father Steve, by the way.”
“Glad to meet you.”
“Are you a Catholic?” Father Steve asked. “I mean, with a good Irish name like Connelly . . .”
Jake chuckled and said, “Sorry, Father. Methodist as far back in the family as I can remember.”
“Well, that's all right, too.”
Jamie and Calvin came over to join them. Jamie said, “Calvin's been telling me that some of the men who made it safely into the store have gone back out through those passages we were using.”
“To try to escape?” Jake asked.
“To kill as many of the terrorists as they can,” Jamie replied with a shake of her head.
Jake frowned and asked, “How many left here?”
“Seven men,” Jamie said.
“Against a hundred heavily armed terrorists?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” Calvin said, “but I wouldn't count them out.”