The comfort of the familiar surroundings of the helicopter was lost on Gerhard Dengler at the moment. He strapped himself in under the aim of Petra’s pistol, commanding himself to relax and be brave; as men did at such a time. Then he looked forward and felt hope. The pilot was the usual man, -but the copilot was not. Whoever he was, he was fiddling with instruments as the flight crew did, but it wasn’t him, though the shape of head and hair color were much the same, and both wore the white shirts with blue epaulets that private pilots tended- to adopt as their .uniforms. Their eyes met, and Dengler looked down and out of the aircraft, afraid that he’d give something away.
Goodman, Eddie Price thought. His pistol was in the map pocket in the left-side door of the aircraft, well-hidden under a pile of flight charts, but easy to reach with his left hand. He’d get it, then turn quickly, bring it up and fire if it came to that. Hidden in his left ear, the radio receiver, which looked like a hearing aid if one saw it, kept him posted, though it was a little hard to hear over the engine and rotor sounds of the Sikorsky. Now Petra’s pistol was aimed at himself, or the pilot, as she moved it back and forth.
“Riflemen, do you have your targets?” Chavez-asked. “Rifle Two-One, affirmative, target in sight.”
“Rifle Two-Two, negative, I have something in the way. Recommend switch to subject Furchtner.”
“Okay, Rifle Two-Two, switch to Furchtner. Rifle Two-One, Dortmund is all yours.”
“Roger that, lead,” Johnston confirmed. “Rifle TwoOne has subject Dortmund all dialed in.” The sergeant reshot the range with his laser. One hundred forty-four meters. At this range, his bullet would drop less than an inch from the muzzle, and his “battle-sight” setting of two hundred fifty meters was a little high. He altered his crosshairs hold to just below the target’s left eye. Physics would do the rest. His rifle had target-type double-set triggers. Pulling the rear trigger reduced the break-pull on the front one to a hard wish, and he was already making that wish. The helicopter would not be allowed to take off. Of more immediate concern, they couldn’t allow the subjects to close the leftside door. His 7-mm match bullet Would probably penetrate the polycarbonate window in the door, but the passage would deflect his round unpredictably, maybe causing a miss, perhaps causing the death or wounding of a hostage. He couldn’t let that happen.
Chavez was well out of the action now, commanding instead of leading, something he’d practiced but didn’t like very much. It was easier to be there with a gun in your hands than to stand back and tell people what to do by remote. control. But he had no choice. Okay, he thought, we have Number One in the chopper and a gun on her. Number Two was in the open, two-thirds of the way to the chopper, and a gun on him. Two more bad guys were approaching the halfway point, with Mike Pierce and Steve Lincoln within forty meters, and the last two subjects still in the house, with Louis Loiselle and George Tomlinson in the bushes right and left of them. Unless the bad guys had set up overwatch in the house, one or more additional subjects to come out after the rest had made it to the chopper . . . very unlikely, Chavez decided, and in any case all the hostages were either in the open or soon would be and rescuing them was the mission, not necessarily killing the bad guys, he reminded himself. It wasn’t a game and it wasn’t a sport, and his plan, already briefed to Team-2’s members, was holding up. The key to it now was the final team of subjects.
Rosenthal saw the snipers. It was to be expected, though it had occurred to no one. He was the head gardener. The lawn was his, and the odd piles of material left and right of the helicopter were things that didn’t belong, things that he would have known about. He’d seen the TV shows and movies. This was a terrorist incident, and the police would respond somehow. Men with guns would be out there, and there were two things on his lawn that hadn’t been there in the morning. His eyes lingered on Weber’s position, then fixed on it. There was his salvation or his death. There was no telling now, and that fact caused his stomach to contract into a tight, acid-laden ball.
“Here they come,” George Tomlinson announced, when he saw two legs step out of the house . . . women’s legs, followed by a man’s, then two more sets of women’s . . . and then a man’s. “One subject and two hostages out. Two more hostages to go . . .”
Furchtner was almost there, heading to the right side of the helicopter, to the comfort of Dieter Weber. But then he stopped, seeing inside the open right-side door to where Gerhardt Dengler was sitting, and decided to go to the other side.
“Okay, Team, stand by,” Chavez ordered, trying to keep all four groups juggled in the same control, sweeping his binoculars over the field. As soon as the last were in the open . . .
“You; get inside, facing back.” Furchtner pushed Brownie toward the aircraft.
“Off target, Rifle Two-Two is off the subject,” Weber announced rather loudly over the radio circuit.
“Re-target on the next group,” Chavez ordered.
“Done,” Weber said. “I’m on the lead subject, group three.”
“Rifle Two-One, report!”
“Rifle Two-One tight on Subject Dortmund,” Homer Johnston replied at once.
“Ready here!” Loiselle reported next from the bushes at the back of the house. “We have the fourth group now.”
Chavez took a deep breath. All the bad guys were now in the open, and now it was time:
“Okay, Lead to team, execute, execute, execute!”
Loiselle and Tomlinson were already tensed to stand, and both fairly leaped to their feet invisibly, seven meters behind their targets, who were looking the wrong way and never had a clue what was going on behind them. Both soldiers lined up their tritium-lit sights on their targets. Both were pushing – dragging – women, and both were taller than their hostages, which made things easy. Both MP-1D submachine guns were set on three-round burst, and both sergeants fired at the same instant. There was no immediate sound. Their weapons were fully suppressed by the design in which the barrel and silencer were integrated, and the range was too close to miss. Two separate heads were blown apart by multiple impacts of large hollowpoint bullets, and both bodies dropped limp to the lush green grass almost as quickly as the cartridge cases ejected by the weapons that had killed them.
“This is George. Two subjects dead!” Tomlinson called over the radio, as he started running to the hostages who were still walking toward the helicopter.
Homer Johnston was starting to cringe as a shape entered his field of view. It seemed to be a female body from the pale silk blouse, but his sight picture was not obscured yet, and with his crosshair reticle set just below Petra Dortmund’s left eye, his right index finger pushed gently back on the set-trigger The rifle roared, seeding a meter-long muzzle flash into the still night air
-she’d just seen two pale flashes in the direction of the house, but she didn’t have time to react when the bullet struck the orbit just above her left eye. The bullet drove through the thickest part of her skull. It passed a few more centimeters and then the bullet fragmented into over a hundred tiny pieces, ripping her brain tissue to mush, which then exploded out the back of her skull in an expanding red pink cloud that splashed over Gerhardt Dengler’s face-
-Johnston worked the bolt, swiveling his rifle for another target; he’d seen the bullet dispatch the first.
Eddie Price saw the flash, and his hands were already moving from the execute command heard half a second earlier: He-pulled his pistol from the map-pocket and dove out the helicopter’s autolike door, aiming it one-handed at Hans Furchtner’s head, firing one round just below his left eye, which expanded and exploded out the top of his head. A second round followed, higher, and actually not a well-aimed shot, but Furchtner was already dead, falling to the ground, his hand still holding Erwin Ostermann’s upper arm, and pulling him down somewhat until the fingers came loose.
That left two. Steve Lincoln took careful aim from a kneeling position, then stopped as his target passed behind the head of an elderly man wearing a vest. “Shit,” Lincoln managed to say.
Weber got the other one, whose head exploded like a melon from the impact of the rifle bullet.
Rosenthal saw the head burst apart like something in a horror movie, but the large stubbly head next to his was still there, eyes suddenly wide open, and a machine gun still in his hand – and nobody was shooting at this one, standing next to him. Then Stubble-Head’s eyes met his, and there was fear/hate/shock there, and Rosenthal’s stomach turned to sudden ice, all time stopped around him. The paring knife came out of his sleeve and into his hand, which he swung wildly, catching the back of Stubble-Head’s left hand. Stubble-Head’s eyes went wider as the elderly man jumped aside, and his one hand went slack on the forestock of his weapon.