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Some days it was hard for Robie to see where the machine ended and the human began. If the human was in fact still there. In Mississippi it had shown itself. Now? It had receded.
Maybe forever.
His face was lean and weathered, and his eyes deep-set and alert. His hair was always cut short because he had no time to bother with it. He had old wounds and scars over his torso and limbs; each told a story of near-fatal results he would rather forget.
As he walked along he moved his right arm in a slow circular motion. All surgically repaired, scar tissue removed, tendons and ligaments all tidied up, as the Brits would say. It was 99 percent of what it used to be, the docs had assured him. That was really good. But really good rarely cut it in Robie’s world.
They rebuilt me. But am I as good as I was? Or am I a slightly lesser version?
He would find out tonight if the missing one percent made the key difference between his walking away from this or remaining behind as a corpse.
Destination #2 was just up ahead.
If the Ducati had gotten him to Destination #1, what was coming up would get him back.
Alive.
He used a key to unlock a door set in the wall of the tunnel he was in.
Inside the small storage room revealed behind the door, he gunned up and put on his protective gear, which included the newest generation of personal armor.
His main arsenal consisted of an H&K UMP chambered in .45 ACP with a thirty-round box mag. He checked all working parts of the weapon and slung it over his shoulder. He slipped two extra mags into long pockets on his one-piece designed for just this purpose.
He figured if he couldn’t do the job with ninety rounds he didn’t deserve to come back. But just in case, there were twin M11s, each chambered in ten-millimeter with a laser sight built under the barrel. Where the dot hit so did the round.
He slipped the gun belt around his waist. Both pistols rode on the left side so he could pull with his dominant right hand, though if it came to it, he could kill ambidextrously with great efficiency.
A German-made KM2000 combat knife in its holder was attached to his belt.
Two M84 stun grenades were cradled in pockets on the rear of his belt.
Robie closed the door behind him and walked on.
Destination #3 was a quarter mile away.
In a fairly short time, Will Robie would know if he would get to see another sunrise or not.
Chapter
2
OXFORD CIRCUS.
It was one of the busiest stations on the London Underground, vying with both Waterloo and King’s Cross in a back-and-forth annual battle for the statistical title. It was in an upscale part of London with pricey and fashionable shops and buildings resting above it. The Underground carried nearly a billion and a half passengers per year and nearly a hundred million of them came through the Oxford Circus station annually.
The Underground had suffered a terrorist attack on July 7, 2005, when terrorists had blown themselves up on three separate train cars. A fourth device had been detonated on a London bus. In all, fifty-two victims were killed.
The explosive devices used that infamous day were powerful, but not nearly so powerful as what was currently being planned.
A cobalt bomb was at the center of this. One had never been detonated before. Also known as a salted bomb, it was a thermonuclear device designed to maximize the radiation fallout, leaving a large area contaminated for a hundred or more years.
Fortunately, it was a very difficult thing to accomplish.
Unfortunately, it was not impossible.
Even more unfortunately, one was now in London.
The speaker in Robie’s helmet relayed information to him as he walked along.
His final destination was just up ahead.
As he walked along he spun a suppressor onto the barrel of the UMP, then did the same for the twin M11s.
Stealth was called for tonight.
Until it wasn’t.
He reholstered the military-grade pistols and touched his chest. What was underneath there might end up saving his life tonight. He had the same protection on both thighs. Right below these shields were his femoral arteries, twin pipelines of massive blood flow. If those got pierced, he was a dead man. The bleed-out from a punctured femoral was almost never survivable.
Four people had given their lives in order for the intel leading up to the mission tonight to make its way to the Americans. The intelligence agencies had then shared it with the British, who remained one of the United States’ closest allies, regardless of who was in charge of the government at any given time. That had been the case ever since the English redcoats had burned down the American White House, which showed that strong friendship could indeed bloom from previously infertile ground. According to the information, the planned London op was merely a dress rehearsal for what would come later, in the United States.
Just like a manufacturer did in trying to commercialize a new product, terrorists needed to work the kinks out, too.
The kink was why Robie was now ascending a hundred feet to the surface.
His final destination was not another alley. It was a basement.
Of the four people to die in this operation so far, the third person had sacrificed her life to maneuver the target to stay in this building. Situated on the outskirts of London on a lonely street of a few modest residences, the structure had been used during World War II as a safe house and an operations center for senior government personnel. An escape tunnel and a bomb shelter had been paramount, and so they had been added. Over the last seven decades a floor had been put over the basement concrete and the trapdoor covered.
And forgotten.
It was no longer covered. And it was no longer forgotten.
London was an ancient city, and no one truly knew or understood all the passages and tunnels and labyrinths that lay underneath it, or how they all connected. A series of tunnels beneath that basement eventually intersected with a concrete pipeline that, with some minimal wall piercing, would allow one eventually to reach an equipment storage room under Oxford Circus Station. In that room the cobalt bomb was to be planted and detonated at the busiest hour of the day for the tube stop, when over a hundred thousand passengers would be in the station, with at least another hundred thousand pedestrians and vehicles immediately above. In all, over two million persons would be affected by the detonation as well as over a thousand buildings.
The place would be uninhabitable, for a century or two, at least.
Some dress rehearsal, thought Robie.
He didn’t want to see a far larger encore on American soil.
The terror cell he was targeting tonight planned to use the tunnel to their advantage.
Robie planned to use it to their supreme disadvantage.
The reasons that an army of police and special forces was not descending on this terrorist plot instead of one man were complicated but, distilled to bare essentials, easily understood.
Panic.
When an army moved, it could not be kept a secret.
But when one man moved, a secret could be maintained.
And to avoid revealing what had been planned to the world and causing just such a panic that the terrorists no doubt would have rejoiced over, they had sent Robie in to have a shot at taking the terrorists down. Alone.
The Brits had special-ops people who could have performed this mission. But the higher-ups had concluded that if things went sideways, having a non-Brit involved gave the home team the best grounds for plausible deniability.
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sp; However, nothing was being left to chance. There was a hidden army surrounding the home. If Robie failed, the army wouldn’t, panic be damned.
There were two homes on either side of the target. The residents in them had been prevented from returning home that night, so Robie had a bit of a buffer in which to operate and try to keep the mission out of the morning news broadcasts.
Hence the trio of suppressors on his gun barrels.
He finished climbing the rungs to the trapdoor. Though the people inside had no idea their mission had been compromised, they had taken standard protection procedures. The trapdoor was securely locked and also alarmed. But using three different tools provided to him, Robie ensured that it no longer was locked or alarmed.
He received one more communication in his headset.
