AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was only then that he could turn his attention to Hurley and Gould.
They were pressed together face-to-face. Gould’s gun was shoved into Hurley’s stomach and he was emptying it into the man. The back of Hurley’s shirt was torn and wet with blood from numerous exit wounds. His face was buried in the side of Gould’s neck but Rapp didn’t understand why until his old friend finally collapsed to the floor.
Gould slapped a hand to the side of his throat but it did no good. Bright red arterial blood was flowing through his fingers and from his mouth. He swung his gun toward Rapp and pulled the trigger, unable to process the fact that it was empty. When the Frenchman finally realized that the weapon was useless, he lurched right, stumbling toward the door. He bounced off the jamb and was gone.
The sound of automatic gunfire was starting outside as Rapp crawled to where Hurley was lying on the blood-soaked carpet. His friend stared up at him and for one of the few times in his life, Rapp’s emotions made it difficult to speak. “What happened to the belt buckle knife you’ve been bragging about for the last twenty years?”
Hurley laughed, ejecting a sizable chunk of Gould’s neck from his mouth. “Got stuck. Can you believe it? I’m gonna get that old bitch who made it for me.”
Rapp stared down at the man, feeling a constriction in his chest that he told himself was the result of Gould’s bullet. “I’m sorry, Stan. This was my op. My failure.”
Hurley managed to press a bloody hand against Rapp’s shoulder. It might have been the first overt display of affection in their long relationship. “No. It was perfect.”
And then Stan Hurley—a man who had survived everything from the Soviets to the rise of Muslim extremism—died.
Rapp stood and slipped through the door with his Glock held out in front of him. The scent of chemical explosive was mixing with the gunpowder haze hanging in the air, creating an environment that he’d become all too familiar with. Outside, it sounded like Obrecht’s men had regrouped and were hitting Coleman’s force hard. The former SEAL would just have to hang on.
The trail wasn’t particularly subtle and Rapp followed it down the hallway until it turned into a bedroom on the right. He found Gould sitting on the floor propped up beneath a window. The Frenchman clawed for the empty gun next to him but didn’t have the strength to pick it up. His other hand was still clamped weakly to his neck but the entire left side of his body was drenched in blood.
Rapp took aim, thinking of Anna and his unborn child as the -assassin struggled to focus. A moment later, he lowered his pistol and went for the door. Even after everything Gould had done to him, this was the old man’s kill.
CHAPTER 28
SCOTT Coleman was in a prone position at the bottom of a shallow impression in the dirt. The bushes were dense enough to make him invisible from the mansion but he’d cut away a few to give him a view of the chaos he’d created.
The smoke had dissipated to the point that he could see the massive hole in the wall surrounding Obrecht’s property, but not enough for the cameras on Marcus Dumond’s drone to provide a reliable overhead feed. Flames were licking the blackened edges of the breach, and burning cinder blocks dotted the ground almost to the tree line.
He swept his scope along the newly created gap, noting two men down. The one lying facedown was still intact but in a grotesque position that suggested there wasn’t an unbroken bone in his body. The other was on fire.
“Targets?” he said over his mike.
Wicker and McGraw both returned negatives.
Based on the radio chatter, Rapp was alive and on the move. Hurley and Gould’s conditions were more ambiguous.
He activated his throat mike again. Rapp knew he was constantly broadcasting, but it was still unusual for him not to have made a specific report of his status.
“Mitch. Give me a sitrep.”
There was a delay long enough to make Coleman start to worry, but then Rapp’s voice came on.
“Gould, Stan, and two tangos down in the mansion. This frequency’s been compromised. Cut me out.”
Coleman let out a quiet breath and did as ordered, mentally assessing their situation. Hurley and Gould were dead. Rapp was running around the building with no way for Coleman to track his position or status. They’d just detonated a projectile that was loud enough to wake people in Madagascar. And, by his count, there were still eight serious shooters digging into what he assumed were hardened positions.
His earpiece produced a series of beeps in the eerie post-explosion silence, notifying him of an incoming encrypted call on his cell phone.
“Done,” Maria Glauser said, and then disconnected.
As their logistical support person, she’d carried out their contingency plan for covering up the rocket attack. Rapp had come up with the idea of filling a vacant house in a nearby subdivision with plastique. She’d blown it the moment she heard the blast created by the SMAW and now her people were calling in breathless reports of a gas explosion. It wasn’t a permanent solution by a long shot, but it would buy them a little time with the local authorities.
“Movement on the fence line,” McGraw said over the radio. “Are you both seeing this?”
Coleman eased his rifle left, finally finding a disturbance in the smoke at the top of an undamaged section of wall. It was too big to be a man and rising with the smooth steadiness of some kind of mechanical platform.
“Take cover!” Coleman shouted, though he knew his men in the trees had a limited ability to do so.
He flattened himself in the shallow ditch just as the familiar buzz of a Gatling gun started up. He could hear the shattering of wood and the crash of falling branches as rounds spewed from the weapon at a rate of three thousand per minute. When the bullet stream passed overhead, Coleman was forced to roll into a ball to protect himself from the debris raining down on him.
