Malloy pulled on the collective, having seen at least one good hit. In seconds, the Night Hawk was at three hundred feet, and the Marine turned to the right and looked down to see a wrecked and smoking car stationary in the middle of the road.
“Down to collect him?” the copilot asked.
“Bet your sweet ass, son,” Malloy told Harrison. Then he looked for his own flight bag. His Beretta was in there. Harrison handled the landing, bringing the Sikorsky to a rest fifty feet from the car. Malloy turned the lock on his seat-belt buckle and turned to exit the aircraft. Nance jumped out first, ducking under the turning rotor as he ran to the car’s right side. Malloy was two seconds behind him.
“Careful, Sergeant!” Malloy screamed, slowing his advance on the left side. The window was gone except for a few shards still in the frame, and he could see the man inside, still breathing but not doing much else behind the deployed air bag. The far window was gone as well. Nance reached into it, found the handle and pulled it open. It turned out that the driver hadn’t been using his seat belt. The body came out easily. And there on the backseat, Malloy saw, was a Russian-made rifle. The Marine pulled it out and safed it, before walking to the other side of the car.
“Shit,” Nance said in no small amazement. “He’s still alive!” How had he managed not to kill the bastard from twelve feet away? the sergeant wondered.
Back at the hospital, Timothy O’Neil was still in his van wondering what to do. He thought he knew what had happened to the engine. There was a three-quarter-inch hole in the window on the left-side door, and how it had managed to miss his head was something he didn’t know. He saw that one of the Volvo trucks and Sean Grady’s rented Jaguar were nowhere to be seen. Had Sean abandoned him and his men? It had happened too fast and totally without warning. Why hadn’t Sean called to warn him of what he did? How had the plan come apart? But the answers to those questions were of less import than the fact that he was in a van, sitting in a parking lot, with enemies around him. That he had to change.
“Lieber Gott,” Weber said to himself, seeing the wounds. One Team-1 member was surely dead, having taken a round in the side of his head. Four others right here were hit, three of them in the chest. Weber knew first aid, but he didn’t need to know much medicine to know that two of them needed immediate and expert attention. One of those was Alistair Stanley.
“This is Weber. We need medical help here at once!” he called over his tactical radio. “Rainbow Five is down!”
“Oh, shit,” Homer Johnston said next to him. “You’re not foolin’, man. Command, this is Rifle Two-One, we need medics and we need them right the fuck now!”
Price heard all that. He was now thirty yards from the van, Sergeant Hank Patterson at his side, trying to approach without being seen. To his left he could see the imposing bulk of Julio Vega, along with Tomlinson. Off to the right he could see the face of Steve Lincoln. Paddy Connolly would be right with him.
“Team-2, this is Price. We have subjects in the van. I do not know if we have any inside the building. Vega and Tomlinson, get inside and check-and be bloody careful about it!”
“Vega here. Roger that, Eddie. Moving now.”
Oso reversed directions, heading for the main entrance with Tomlinson in support, while the other four kept an eye on that damned little brown truck. The two sergeants approached the front door slowly, peering around corners to look in the windows, and seeing only a small mob of very confused people. First Sergeant Vega poked a finger into his own chest and pointed inside. Tomlinson nodded. Now Vega moved quickly, entering the main lobby and sweeping his eyes all around. Two people screamed to see another man with a gun, despite the difference in his appearance. He held up his left hand.
“Easy, folks, I’m one of the good guys. Does anybody know where the bad guys are?” The answer to this question was mainly confusion, but two people pointed to the rear of the building, in the direction of the emergency room, and that made sense. Vega advanced to the double doors leading that way and called on his radio. “Lobby is clear. Come on, George.” Then: “Command, this is Vega.”
“Vega, this is Price.”
“Hospital lobby is clear, Eddie. Got maybe twenty civilians here to get looked after, okay?”
“1 have no people to send you, Oso. We’re all busy out here. Weber reports we have some serious casualties.”
“This is Franklin. I copy. I can move in now if you need me.”
“Franklin, Price, move in to the west. I repeat, move in from the west.”
“Franklin is moving in to the west,” the rifleman replied. “Moving in now.”
“His pitchin’ career’s over,” Nance said, loading the body into the Night Hawk.
“Sure as hell, if he’s a lefty. Back to the hospital, I guess,” Malloy strapped into the chopper and took the controls. Inside a minute, they were airborne and heading east for the hospital. In the back, Nance strapped their prisoner down tight.
It was a hell of a mess. The driver was dead, Chavez saw. crushed between the large wheel and the back of his seat from when the truck had slammed into the guardrail, his eyes and mouth open, blood coming out the latter. The body tossed out of the back was dead as well, with two bullet holes in the face. That left a guy with two broken legs,and horrible scrapes on his face, whose pain was masked by his unconsciousness.
“Bear, this is Six,” Clark said.
“Bear copies.”
“Can you pick us up? We have an injured subject here, and I want to get back and see what the hell’s going on.”
“Wait one and I’ll be there. Be advised we have a wounded subject aboard, too.”
“Roger that, Bear.” Clark looked west. The Night Hawk was in plain view, and he saw it alter course and come straight for his position.
Chavez and Mole pulled the body onto the roadway. It seemed horrible that his legs were at such obviously wrong angles, but he was a terrorist, and got little in the way of solicitude.
“Back into the hospital?” one of the men asked O’Neil.
“But then we’re trapped!” Sam Barry objected.
“We’re bloody trapped here!” Jimmy Carr pointed out. “We need to move. Now!”
O’Neil thought that made sense. “Okay, okay. I’ll pull the door, and you lads runback to the entrance. Ready?” They nodded, cradling their weapons. “Now!” he rasped, pulling the sliding door open.
“Shit!” Price observed from a football field away. “Subjects running back into the hospital. I counted five.”
“Confirm five of them,” another voice agreed on the radio circuit.
Vega and Tomlinson were most of the way to the emergency room now, close enough to see the people there but not the double glass doors that led outside. They heard more screams. Vega took off his Kevlar helmet and peeked around the corner. Oh, shit, he thought, seeing one guy with an AKMS. That one was looking around inside the building-and behind him was half the body of someone looking outward. Oso nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand came down on his shoulder. He turned. It was Franklin, without his monster rifle, holding only his Beretta pistol.
“I just heard. five bad guys there?”
“That’s what the man said,” Vega confirmed. He waved Sergeant Tomlinson to the other side of the corridor. “You stick with me, Fred.”
“Roge-o, Oso. Wish you had your M-60 now?”
“Fuckin’ A, man.” As good as the German MP-10 was, it felt like a toy in his hands.
Vega took another look. There was Ding’s wife, standing now, looking over to where the bad guys were, pregnant as hell in her white coat. He and Chavez went back nearly ten years. He couldn’t let anything happen to her. He backed off the corner and tried waving his arm at her.
Patsy Clark Chavez, M.D., saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a soldier dressed all in black. He was waving to her, and when she turned the waves beckoned her to him, which struck her as a good idea. Slowly, she started moving to her right.
“You, stop!” Jimmy Carr called angrily. Then he started moving toward her. Unseen to his left, Sergeant George Tonlinson edged his face and gun muzzle around the corner. Vega’s waves merely grew more frantic, and Patsy kept moving his way. Carr stepped toward her, bringing his rifle up-as soon as he came into view, Tomlinson took aim, and seeing the weapon aimed at Ding’s wife, he depressed the trigger gently, loosing a three-round burst.