Zero 22, p.20
Zero 22, page 20
part #8 of Danny Black Series
They moved at a jog, heading down the corridor back towards the stairwell. Where the corridor turned a corner, he stopped again and listened. The ringing in his ears had subsided and he could discern no other sound. He turned. The way ahead was deserted. Two bedroom doors were ajar, one on either side. At the end of the corridor, twenty-five metres distant, was the door leading to the stairwell. The trio advanced again, still jogging, Danny’s weapon still raised. He stopped before they reached the first open bedroom door.
Checked for threats.
Clear.
They advanced to the second open door.
Checked for threats.
The sandy-haired Russian man with the polo neck and leather jacket never stood a chance. Danny recognised him immediately as the Russian stood there in the bedroom doorway, his weapon ready. He held it like a pro: like Danny, two handed. A Russian PL-15 pistol, suppressed. But unlike Danny, this guy, whoever he was, hadn’t spent untold hours in the Killing House at Hereford, testing his reflexes against targets that appeared suddenly and from nowhere, until it became second nature to drill bullets into them with perfect accuracy. Danny didn’t hesitate. It only took one round and it slammed straight into the man’s forehead before he could discharge a bullet of his own. He fell heavily to the ground, his forehead a mess of entry wound. Danny maintained his firing position, hyper aware of the possibility of another threat from inside the room. But there was silence. ‘Take his weapon,’ Danny said.
There was jostling in his peripheral vision. Bethany got there first. The sandy-haired guy was slumped over his gun. She rolled him on to his back with her right foot, bent over and unwound his dead fingers from the pistol. Danny maintained the firing position while she did this. ‘I’m a goddamn five-star general,’ O’Brien said, his voice testy. ‘What are you doing giving her a weapon ahead of me?’
Danny didn’t bother to answer. He turned back towards the door at the end of the corridor and continued to advance. The General was right behind him. Bethany was behind the General, regularly looking back to check for threats from behind.
They reached the door. Opened it to access the stairwell. Danny could hear people now on the lower floors. They moved down the stairs, Danny covering the space in front of and below them, Bethany above and behind. The sound of voices grew louder as they descended. Danny knew that as soon as any hotel guests saw him, they’d be thrown into panic, but he wasn’t about to lower his weapon. Not with the possibility of Wagner Group operatives round every corner.
They descended from the third floor to the ground floor before they saw anyone. A group of hotel guests in traditional Arabic dress were congregating around the elevator doors at the bottom of the stairs. Five men, three women. It was one of the women who noticed them first, she screamed and grabbed one of the men and suddenly there was a panicked hubbub and Bethany was shouting at them to get on the ground. Danny blocked that activity from his senses. He knew the people at the lift were not an immediate, active threat.
The immediate, active threat was straight ahead of him.
The Russian guy with the Tom Selleck moustache was approaching from the entrance to the bar. Distance: ten metres. Unlike the sandy-haired guy, he had no visible weapon, though he may have had a concealed carry. Danny had a decision and not much time to make it. Should he fire? The retort of the weapon would be audible across the ground floor of the hotel. It would potentially alert any further Wagner Group operatives to a firefight, not to mention the American soldiers in the building. Quieter to put him down manually. But slower.
Decision made. He upped his pace and bore down on the target. Within two paces he could see that his guy was reaching for a weapon. His right hand plunged beneath his jacket, feeling for whatever was concealed there. But Danny knew it would take him a minimum of two seconds to aim and fire. By that time, it would be too late. He braced himself as he ran towards the target and made contact just as the body of his firearm peeped out from under his jacket. There was a brutal thump as he collided with the Russian. As their bodies impacted, Danny wrapped his left arm around the man’s neck. He squeezed hard and jerked his forearm upwards and back. There was a stressed clicking sound as his neck broke. His body went limp and Danny eased him to the ground. The woman by the lift screamed again. Like the others she was now face down on the ground, but the noise she was making was a problem. Bethany was standing over her, weapon engaged. She gave Danny a ‘shall I?’ look and for a moment Danny considered it. Her weapon was suppressed, and the woman could be silenced without immediate consequences. But he shook his head. The Wagner Group was one thing. Innocent hotel guests? That was another. Not to mention that the more bodies they left behind them, the tougher it would be for them to get the hell out of Amman. ‘Move!’ he barked at Bethany and the General. ‘Now!’
They didn’t have time to take even a single step. Three figures emerged from the bar area. Camouflage gear. Weapons. American soldiers. They took one look at Danny, Bethany, their firearms and the prone Russian, and they reached for their guns.
Two things happened. Danny and Bethany got there first, raising their weapons before the soldiers were able to engage, and held them at gunpoint. And the General roared a command: ‘Hold your fire! That’s an order!’
The soldiers hesitated, giving each other sidelong glances. They clearly weren’t sure if the order was intended for them or for Danny and Bethany. One guy in particular, with a pockmarked face and a monobrow, looked especially twitchy. Danny kept his focus on him as the General strode up to the men. ‘They’re with me,’ the General said. ‘You need to get us out of the hotel immediately. You have my authorisation to engage anybody you see with a weapon. Go.’
Fair play to the soldiers: they didn’t fuck around. They immediately surrounded the General and started hustling him into the bar area. Danny and Bethany were not their concern and they paid them no attention. They followed behind. Danny kept his weapon engaged, scanning the bar as they moved swiftly through it. Guests were returning now that the fire alarm was silenced. Mostly they were talking animatedly to each other. When they saw the armed soldiers hurrying the General across the room, and Danny and Bethany following with their weapons in plain view, they tugged at each other’s arms and pointed. Awareness quickly spread. A path cleared as other guests hurried away from the armed personnel. Danny distantly heard the woman by the lift screaming again, but he zoned it out and concentrated on the people around him. He was searching for threats, suspicious activity, sudden movements, anything that triggered his finely tuned sense of hostile action.
So far, nothing. Maybe sandy-hair and Tom Selleck were the only Wagner Group operatives on site.
They burst into the main foyer where the exhibition boards were still erected. It was much busier than before. Guests were pouring in from the outside. American soldiers, the guys tasked to guard the entrance, were freaking out, shouting orders and trying to herd people into groups so they could be searched. Hotel staff were patiently trying to encourage people back to their rooms now the fire alarm had stopped. Incongruously, the cocktail piano music had started up again. The General’s guys yelled at everyone in their path to make way. The piano player stopped playing. Receptionists retreated from their desks. Somewhere there was the sound of a baby wailing. The other soldiers, when they saw the General surrounded by three of his guys being manoeuvred towards the exit, started shouting at the other guests to get out of their way. Danny moved and scanned, moved and scanned. He had noticed something. An anomaly. His instinct was telling him something wasn’t right, but his brain hadn’t caught up yet.
Then he saw it. Twenty metres away, at his eleven o’clock, standing by a marble statuette on a burnished wooden plinth, was a man. White skin, deep-set features, greasy slicked-back dark hair, stubble. Russian? Possibly. Ordinarily Danny wouldn’t have looked twice at him. But now he did, because unlike almost everybody else in this large, chaotic reception area, he looked entirely calm. And that made him stand out. He wasn’t looking at the General, or his guys, or at Danny and Bethany with their handguns. He was looking across at the main entrance, where another man – blonde hair in a severe parting, shirt and tie but no jacket – was standing equally calmly.
Danny knew a set-up when he saw one. They were waiting for the General to get close to them so they could make a hit. He sprinted and put himself in front of the General’s guys. One of them shouted at him to move, but he stood firm and pointed over to his three o’clock where, at the far side of the reception, there was a green emergency exit sign. ‘That way,’ he said.
The General’s guys looked like they were going to argue, but O’Brien cut them short. ‘Do what he says,’ he instructed.
The soldiers probably didn’t like the order, but they carried it out. They immediately altered their trajectory and headed towards the second exit. Danny watched the reaction of the two guys he’d clocked. They didn’t look so relaxed all of a sudden. The blonde guy with the tie caught Danny’s gaze. Something passed between them. The dead-eyed look of two pros acknowledging each other, respecting each other and warning each other. Danny knew he’d just looked at the face of his enemy. He lost sight of him as a crowd of hotel guests obscured his line of sight. He cut his gaze away and, still scanning the room for anomalies and threats, followed the General and his guys to the side exit. Here there were members of the hotel staff: a bell boy, two waiters, a female member of housekeeping. They receded as the General’s guys kept yelling at them to move. Two American soldiers in camo were guarding the exit. One look at the situation and they opened the doors, letting in the night air. The General, his three guys, Danny and Bethany burst out of the hotel and into the street. The hot, humid night air hit Danny, a furnace wave after the air-conditioned atmosphere of the hotel. He quickly took in his surroundings. A busy urban street. Solid traffic. Fumes. A blur of light from cafes on the opposite side. People passing along the pavement, unaware of what was going on in the hotel. As soon as they saw the American soldiers, however, they kept their distance or crossed the road.
Danny turned to the General. ‘You need to come with us. We’ll extract you. Leave your men here.’
‘They’re good guys,’ the General said.
‘That’s why we need them here.’ He turned to the soldiers. ‘Twenty seconds time, two men are going to walk through that door. Blonde guy with a tie, dark-haired guy with stubble. They’ll probably be Russian and they want to nail the General. They most likely have accomplices. Don’t let them get anywhere near us.’
The soldiers looked uncertain. ‘Do as he says,’ the General told them again. He nodded at Danny.
Danny, Bethany and the General moved away from the hotel’s side entrance and crossed the road. Night had fallen. Car headlamps glowed in the dark. Cars honked angrily when the trio cut in front of them. Danny knew that the sound of the car horns would highlight their position, but it couldn’t be helped. If anybody were to fire on them from the hotel exit, the vehicles would act to some extent as a ballistic shield. Plus, they would slow the shooters down.
They reached the opposite side of the road. There were cafes here spilling out on to the pavement. Late-night fruit stalls. A guy selling dates. A few shops boarded up with metal grates. Two Jordanian men, seeing the handguns in Danny and Bethany’s fists, shouted out in alarm and fled. Their reaction caused a stir among the other pedestrians, then a panic. Danny blocked it out. He needed to focus on getting the General to their vehicle. The crossroads was a hundred metres up ahead. When they reached it, they needed to turn left to get on to the road where their vehicle was parked. Total distance to the car: about eight hundred metres. He directed Bethany towards the crossroads. As they moved, he looked back across the road at the hotel.
So he saw it all happen.
The two men Danny had clocked in the reception area had emerged from the hotel exit on to the street. The General’s three guys had surrounded them, displaying the body language of a hard arrest: weapons raised, standing round the targets in a close semicircle. There was no sign of the other two soldiers inside the hotel who had opened the door for them. The targets had their hands up. They showed no sign of alarm. Their body language was relaxed. The blonde-haired guy was almost smiling as he looked beyond his closest soldier. Danny followed his line of sight and saw two Western men weaving their way across the road towards the hotel, casually dressed in jeans and T-shirts. One of them was much taller and broader than the other. He had a black, buzz-cut mohawk – it looked particularly odd against the civvies – and pronounced scarring on his scalp. His nose looked like it had been recently broken. Pedestrians moved out of his way as he walked.
SAS scum. I killed two of your comrades with my hands. You will be an easy third.
‘Turgenev,’ Danny whispered. He felt a twinge in his shoulder.
He stopped. Calculated the distances. He was forty metres from the hotel exit. Much too far for an accurate handgun shot. Turgenev and his mate were fifteen metres from the soldiers. Too close for Danny to get to them before it happened. The street was noisy with traffic sounds. The soldiers wouldn’t hear him if he shouted.
There was nothing he could do. He found himself momentarily frozen as he watched.
The three American soldiers had their backs to Turgenev and his accomplice. It meant that two of them never knew what happened. Turgenev and his companion only revealed their handguns when they were a metre away from the Americans. They raised them so each was pointing at the back of a soldier’s head. They fired in unison.
Danny didn’t hear the sound of the suppressed weapons above the noise of the street, but he saw the guys go down. They slumped mundanely to the pavement. The remaining soldier started to turn. Did he know what had happened? It hardly mattered. Turgenev nailed him in less than a second.
‘Motherfuckers!’ the General shouted. Danny saw that he and Bethany had stopped and seen the shooting too. He sensed that the General wanted to join the fray. That made two of them. The urge to sprint back across the road to the hotel and deal with the man responsible for so many Regiment deaths was almost overpowering. But he mastered it. He grabbed the General’s arm and held him back. The shooting had taken place in full view of pedestrians. They scattered, creating several metres of open ground in the vicinity of the gunmen. The two Russian guys from the hotel pointed across the road directly at Danny and the others. Turgenev turned. He saw Danny immediately and he grinned. Again, Danny fought the urge to return. He saw Turgenev’s mate put one sleeve to his mouth. He was obviously speaking on a covert radio. And that meant only one thing: he was communicating with other hostiles.
‘There’s more of them,’ Danny said. ‘We need to get to the car now.’ Eight hundred metres. They should be able to get there within five minutes.
They ran in the direction of the crossroads, past open-fronted restaurants and a couple of souvenir shops. Danny was fit and fast. Bethany too. The General was older and slower, so they had to move at his pace. Mostly, pedestrians moved out of their way. Some didn’t. There were collisions and angry shouts. Danny ignored them all. He blocked out the shock of seeing Turgenev too. He was scanning left and right. Up ahead. His tactical mind making a hundred tiny decisions every second. Of the people around them, who was harmless, who was hostile? These were Wagner Group guys, so he was looking for white skin. Only male? Not necessarily . . .
They reached the crossroads and sprinted left into the street where they’d parked. Distance to the vehicle: six hundred metres. The street was much busier than before. Arabic pop music rang out of cafes. Crowds of young people were congregating on the pavements in the warm night air. There was a smell of grilled lamb and a party atmosphere. It was harder to get through them all. Slower. Tougher to identify threats among all these people. The younger crowd were reluctant to get out of their way. Twenty-something men trying to impress their women were bolshy and shoulder-bargey. Danny moved through them like a bullet through steel, gripping the General, aware of Bethany at his shoulder.
He saw the car up ahead. Distance: thirty-five metres. He upped his pace, his focus now all on the vehicle.
And that was why he missed him.
The shooter was standing in the doorway of an electrical equipment shop on the other side of the road. White skin, brown beard, backwards baseball cap. He had obviously been waiting for them, and Danny only noticed him in his peripheral vision a fraction of a second before he took his shot. He threw himself and the General to the ground at the exact moment that the retort echoed across the street. The bullet missed Danny. It missed the General. But it didn’t miss the old Jordanian guy they were passing at the moment. The victim was comfortably in his seventies and wore a cream dishdash. The bullet slammed into his stomach, and a red patch spread instantly across his clothes as he clutched the wound and staggered back. Danny was on the ground. He raised his Sig and aimed. He discharged three shots in quick succession. Each of them found their target and the gunman collapsed in the doorway.
Now there was real panic. Screams. Pedestrians jumping up from cafes and running from the scene. There were fifty or sixty people in their immediate vicinity. Danny hauled the General to his feet. Bethany was already halfway to the car and they sprinted after her. Danny made his gun very visible. It ensured any loitering pedestrians quickly moved out of the way. He half expected more shots, but they reached the vehicle unharmed after a few seconds. It had been boxed in by two other cars. Bethany was standing on the pavement, protected by the body of the car, her arms and weapon stretched out over the roof as she scanned left and right, searching for threats in the direction of Danny and the General. Danny found the car keys and quickly opened up. ‘Get in!’ he shouted. He pushed the General towards the rear passenger side, then opened the driver’s door and threw himself behind the wheel. He stowed his Sig in the door, well out of the General’s reach. Bethany took the seat behind him and the three doors slammed shut at the same time. He turned the engine over, revved it hard and knocked it into gear. He sharply nudged the car in front, then reversed into the car behind. Repeated the process twice to shift the vehicles boxing him in. Then, when it was possible to exit the parking space, there was a screech of wheel spin and the vehicle catapulted down the road.
