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.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Jack heard men on the floors below yelling “Clear!” as they went through everything along the way. He didn’t hear any gunshots. Angela had already cleared the floors below, as well as the lookouts, on their way up.
He leaned toward her. “Let me do the talking. Okay? Even though I’m the one who called this in, these men aren’t going to assume anything. With something of this nature they have to consider everything as a potential threat. They’re not going to take chances. It’s nothing personal.”