SIXTY-SEVEN
“Remember, we have to stop them from detonating that bomb,” Jack whispered with earnest concern. “Nothing else matters. We need to stop the guy sitting on that dead man’s switch from getting up. If he gets up from that chair, it’s over.”
Angela nodded. “I know what he looks like. I’ll find him.” She gave him a long, last look. “I’ve got this, Jack. Stay behind me and take care of anyone who tries to sneak up on me from behind.”
Jack answered with a single nod.
Angela took a last deep breath and then shoved the utility door open with her shoulder.
She burst into a semidark room. In the span of a heartbeat she took in the entire room, matching it to the memory in her head. Iron posts held up a network of overhead trusses. The ceiling above naked girders was broken open in places, letting insulation and corrugated tin panels hang down. The windows ringing the room were covered with cardboard. Two big skylights let in light.
The place was a tangle of dusty, broken, water-stained desks and chairs. Junk lay scattered across the floor among the desks. Nails, screws, iron fittings, torn metal scraps, soggy cardboard boxes, and lengths of pipe of every size lay toppled over one another, some with one end resting on desks.
She made note of it all, but mostly she took note of the men. She knew she would have to be careful not to trip over things as she focused on the men.
It felt like she was watching herself move in slow motion.
Broken glass lay scattered everywhere, reflecting flashes of light as she charged into the room. A counter to her left with a tile front looked like a truck had fallen on it and splintered it apart. Boards leaned against filthy walls to the right. Metal doors of gutted utility boxes stood open with wires hanging out.
Angela spotted the spherical bomb sitting on a square stack of cement blocks. Wires attached to brass studs stuck out from the metal casing here and there around the bomb. A narrow metal cabinet of some sort stood close to the bomb. Clusters of wires, reminding her of umbilical cords, sagged between the metal gray cabinet and the bomb. Rows of amber lights on the front of the cabinet flickered on and off.
In this filthy, abandoned ruin of a building, the bomb and the cabinet with flickering lights looked like nothing so much as an alien spacecraft.
There were men scattered throughout the room—some bent in prayer, some sitting in groups talking, some with their arms crossed as they leaned back in chairs against walls or posts. Some were gathered around desks or stools playing card games, some were on the far side of the room peeking out a window past a curtain of cardboard, while others paced in nervous boredom, anticipating their imminent martyrdom.
At the crash of sound Angela made plunging in through the metal door, faces everywhere turned toward her and froze in surprise.
As her heart beat a second time, her gun came up, slowly, slowly, yet as fast as she could possibly raise it. Angela felt as if she were mired in the agonizing slow motion of a deep dream.
Her boots crunched on debris. She heard glass snap as it broke. A board behind the door she’d burst through toppled. It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing else mattered anymore. The rest of her life up to that moment didn’t matter anymore.
Her heart’s second beat ended.
The closest man turned as he heard the glass break under her boot. Without conscious thought, he made the fatal mistake of reflexively looking down at her legs.
With his face frozen in time beyond the front sight of her gun, Angela pulled the trigger.
With that pop and metallic clack of the slide cycling in another round, it started.
As he dropped straight down, others in the dim room saw the flash from her gun and the man falling to the ground. They realized the sounds they heard hadn’t been one of their brothers knocking something over.
She saw men everywhere in the room going for AKs leaning against desks, chairs, iron columns, and construction debris.
Suddenly the whole room was moving with men, like when she used to flip on the light switch in the kitchen of the trailer where she’d grown up and cockroaches scattered.
Angela was already firing at targets.
Speed and violence of action.
This was what she had practiced for her whole life.
Now, she had a roomful of living triangles before her. They all bobbed and swayed beyond her front sight.
In her head, her grandfather’s fingers snapped as fast as he could snap them, a human metronome setting the beat for her as she fired her gun.
Angela was in the slow-motion trance of the zone. Any man who went for a weapon was a primary target. Men who were close and pulled knives were next.
She fired without pause. Men collapsed, their guns dropped to bounce on the floor as bullets ricocheted around inside craniums. As dead men fell, they flipped over chairs and stools being used as game tables. Playing cards flew up as tables broke.
Angela planted her boot on a chair as a man fell and boosted herself up and over him, into the heart of the storm.
She counted rounds. The instant the slide locked back she was ready and pressed her thumb down on the lever, dropping the magazine. Another was immediately slammed home. She racked the slide to load a round and she was already shooting again at the closest men rushing toward her.
Automatic fire suddenly broke out, filling the room with deafening noise and the raging scream of the man firing the weapon. She saw flashes from the gun rattling off rounds to her right. She could hear the bullets zipping past her head, flicking her hair as they passed close but just missed killing her.
Jack rolled through the debris on the floor and between desks, using them for cover. With a well-placed shot he took out the man firing the automatic weapon before he could take aim for another burst at Angela.
She hardly noticed. It was irrelevant. She was in her own world of converging chaos, firing into faces as fast as she could lock her sights onto them. When a man turned to reach for a gun on a desk, she put a round in the back of his head, right at the base of his skull.
She spotted the man she needed beyond the gray cabinet with the flickering amber lights. His eyes were still wide in shock.
The air was filled with the smell of gunpowder and blood.
It was intoxicating.
Angela had always thought there was a rhythm to shooting—a kind of metallic music. Bang, bang, bang. Pause. Bang. Bullets splashed into the center of those triangles, and men spiraled down toward the floor, dancing with her to that beat. Bang, bang, bang. Pause. Bang. Every bullet found its target. Men tumbled. Reload. Pop, pop, pop. Pause. Pop.
It was the rhythm of life. It was the rhythm of death.
Angela was firing in every direction to that beat. Men fell all around her as the unforeseen specter of death itself swept through the room.
Dust billowed up as men crashed down among debris. To her left, when a dead man landed on one end, a board flipped into the air, throwing up a cloud of dust. To the right pipes stacked against an iron post clattered down as a dead man fell into them. The room was pandemonium. Men everywhere were yelling.
Lost in her own world, Angela hardly heard them.
She didn’t need to watch men fall to know she had killed them. She could sense the bullet hitting home. She was focused only on taking out targets as fast as possible to get where she was going.
She didn’t need to look into the eyes of any of these men. They were all cold-blooded killers who had worked their entire lives toward their goal of mass murder. They didn’t belong among the living. Her only purpose was to exterminate them.
It was an orgy of annihilation.
Angela had already emptied three magazines in a handful of heartbeats as she charged through the terrorists, cutting a bloody swath, the dead falling all around her.
With a gun in her hand, Angela felt like she imagined knights must have felt with a sword in their hands as they scythed down an onrushing enemy. It felt intimately familiar, brutally liberating. It was positively exhilarating.
With a gun in her hands, these men weren’t bigger than her, stronger than her. With a gun in her hands she became more than their equal.
Terrorists liked to tout themselves as superhuman, as welcoming death. Despite their claims, they responded to shock, surprise, fear of death, and pain virtually the same as anyone would. She used that to her advantage.
Angela shot men as they were coming up out of chairs, killing some before they had the presence of mind to stand, as they went for guns, or pulled knives. Many were so surprised they froze as they stared at her in confused shock, at a woman with platinum hair suddenly there in their midst. It made no sense to them. Some saw her legs and were distracted for a fraction of a second—just long enough for her to make that the last thing they ever saw.
Automatic gunfire erupted from other parts of the room. Bullets splattered against iron posts. She felt the hot sting of one just clipping her left arm at the shoulder. She paused momentarily to put a bullet between the eyes of the guy firing at her. Jack took out others.
As a man fell in front of her she jumped on him to boost herself up onto and over a desk toward the man she was after—the man sitting on the dead man’s switch.
If he came up off his chair, the bomb would go off.
Suddenly no one else existed but her and that man in the chair. He was momentarily frozen, wide-eyed, in shock. His hands gripped the chair seat. Some of the wires from the metal cabinet ran to the bottom of his chair.
He was a deer in the headlights, wanting to run, wanting to detonate the bomb, waiting for a command from his leader. He was so confused and panicked by the ferocity of what was happening all around him, from seeing his friends falling dead everywhere, that for a fleeting moment he was paralyzed.
Angela didn’t pay any attention to anything else happening around her. If she died going after this target, then so be it.
Before the man could regain his wits and jump up off that dead man’s switch, Angela fired as she leaped over the desk. When she landed with her feet spread in front of him, she emptied a nearly full magazine into his face.
The bullets shut down his motor function so fast he hadn’t been able to move a muscle. Because the bullets didn’t have enough energy to physically knock him off the chair, he simply slumped in place.
Jack was already in midair, flying over men ducking aside.
He landed on the net of wires between the bomb and the electrical panel. Sparks showered through the room as the weight of his body ripped out that electrical umbilical cord.
When he hit the floor, he went still. Angela didn’t know if he’d been shot, stabbed, or electrocuted.
Her being distracted by Jack enabled a man to rush up in her blind spot, swinging a board. The stunning blow caught her on the side of the head.
The world went black.
The next thing she knew she was rolling through the debris on the floor. She lost her gun. A screaming man with a handgun fired wildly at her. Bullets shattered pieces of glass right beside her head as she tumbled across the floor.
As she rolled to a stop on her back, she saw her gun. She stretched and snatched it up, then ducked to the side. The man standing over her was trying to aim at a moving target. She fired first. It was the last bullet. The slide locked back. He dropped on top of her right leg. She kicked him over with her left foot and scrambled back to her feet.
As she dropped the empty magazine, she saw that the man who had been sitting on the dead man’s switch was slumped in the chair, feet straight out, his arms hanging at his sides, blood running down both sides of his mutilated face. He’d never had a chance to stand, leaving his dead weight slumped on the switch.
Now, thanks to Jack, even if someone else got to him and knocked him off the chair, it wouldn’t do any good.
Angela slammed home a new magazine just in time to fire into the face of a man with a knife charging up right in front of her and then another just behind him. Both men fell at her feet, one to either side.
She was disoriented from the blow to her head and didn’t know how many more men there were. She decided there was no point in trying to count them, she just needed to focus on the task at hand and shoot any of them still alive.
The shock of seeing so many of their companions falling dead so unexpectedly and so swiftly had more than a few of the men frozen stock-still, paralyzed by the fear. This wasn’t glorious martyrdom for Allah, this was simply being shot and killed for nothing. Focused as she was on shooting moving targets, she temporarily ignored the panic-stricken men to take out ones going for guns or racing toward her with knives.
During the rolling drumbeat of the rhythm in her head as she fired, she used some of those stock-still human targets for punctuations in the beat.
As three men charged her all at once from different directions, she took out two and then the slide locked back as her gun went empty.
As she was dropping the magazine the third man dove in to grab her free arm. She dropped the gun and used both hands to reverse his hold on her forearm. She bent his wrist to the side until she felt bones snap.
As Angela held his wrist bent over in an impossible position, he cried out, crouching down under the pressure, leaning over to the side to try to relieve the strain she was holding on his broken wrist.
When he grimaced up at her in agony, she recognized him from Cassiel’s memories. It was Rafael.
Keeping the tension on his wrist with her left hand, Angela pulled her second gun from the holster on her hip. She pointed the weapon down at his face.
“Shoot me! Go ahead! Shoot me!” he yelled. “Allah will welcome me! I will be a martyr! A hero!”
Angela smiled. “Okay, but don’t say you didn’t ask for it.”
She shot him in both knees. She released his hand to let him fall to the floor, thrashing and screaming in pain.
“What? Not so fun to be in pain?” she asked him. “You expected to be vaporized in a glorious, pain-free instant in the blinding light of a nuclear explosion? I guess things aren’t turning out so well for you, are they, Rafael?”
He reached for her with his free hand as he called her names in Farsi. She shot the hand stretching for her.
He flinched back with a shriek. “American whore!”
She grinned down at him. “Just think, Rafael, you’ve been beaten by a woman. Twice—with both bombs. Your whole plan, your life’s work, has been defeated by an American woman who has just proven she is better than you and all your men.”
A breathless Jack ran up beside her. “Sorry, that jolt knocked me for a loop. I think I must have been out for a few seconds.”
He looked around, gun in hand and ready. He couldn’t find a target. He looked down at the man groaning on the ground.
“This is Rafael,” Angela told him as she pointed with her gun.
“Well don’t shoot him,” Jack said. “He’s valuable alive for intelligence.”
“Fuck intelligence. If he’s dead that’s all they need to know.”
Jack pushed her hand aside. “No, really, Angela. We need to turn him over alive. US intelligence will need to know how they were able to pull all of this off.”
Angela looked around to see if anyone else was moving. She saw a man, covered in dusty debris, who had been pretending to be dead, trying not to be noticed as he slowly crawled away. Angela walked over and pointed her gun down at him as she told him to stay where he was. He looked back over his shoulder at her gun and did as he was told.
“This one looks like he wants to live,” she told Jack. “Let them have him, too. He’ll talk. Isn’t that right, Lobo?”
Jack yanked some wires out of the electrical panel and used them to tie up both Rafael and Lobo.
Angela looked around at all the dead lying everywhere.
It had only lasted seconds. It had lasted forever.
She wondered if her mother ever felt this high when she did a line.