State Of The Union

There was the sound of splintering wood and groaning metal as the improvised battering ram struck its target head on and the fleur-de-lis grating tore from its moorings and fell with a crash onto the sidewalk below. Wheezing, Herman withdrew the dresser from the window and shoved it into the corner. Immediately, the sobbing man began scampering out the window.

“Hey,” yelled Harvath. “Get back here.”

Herman reached through the window, grabbed the man by his trousers and yanked him back in.

“Was?” implored the man.

“First of all, you’re welcome,” replied Harvath. “Secondly, do you speak English?”

“Yes, of course,” answered the man in a heavy German accent.

“Good. We’re going to need your help.”

“But this is the only way out. We already tried to go down the stairs. There is too much fire. Please, we must hurry.”

“We will hurry, but here’s what I want you to do. You and my friend,” said Scot as he nodded at Herman, “are going to gather up all of the mattresses you can from the rooms on this floor and throw them out the window so people have something to land on. Then I want you to let people in the hallway and the stairwells know they can get out this way. Tie the bedding together and use it to lower the injured.”

“What areyou going to do?” asked Herman.

“I’m going to find DeWolfe,”

“Be careful. All of this happening just after we arrived is a little too coincidental and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Neither do I,” replied Harvath, who inserted a fresh magazine into his H amp;K as he turned and left the room. “Neither do I.”

Chapter 33

The hallway was quickly filling with more smoke and more screaming people as Harvath swung the red dot of his pistol’s laser sight into every room looking for DeWolfe. Aside from the fact that the rooms seemed to have unusually low ceilings, there was nothing else very remarkable about them.

As he passed the panicked throngs, he instructed them in his best German possible to stay low to the floor and make their way to the bedroom he had just come from at the right front of the building. With each face he looked into, the realization began to grow in him that any one of them could be the killer who had started the fire, and he would never know it. He had to find DeWolfe.

Harvath fought his way up one of the public stairwells and found that the third floor was laid out much the same as the second. He checked each room, but there was still no sign of DeWolfe.

Back on the stairs, he could hear people below him, but the terrified tide making their way down from above had stopped. Hopefully, they had all gotten the message and had headed for the second floor.

After climbing two more flights of stairs, Harvath carefully pulled open the door and crept into what he expected to be another long hallway similar to those he had searched on the previous two floors. Instead, he found himself in a large chamber with rough sawn hardwood floors. Harvath quickly swept the filtered red beam of his flashlight around the room and realized he was in a mockup of some sort of Medieval dungeon. Chains hung from the ceiling and there were assorted torture devices scattered around the room.

As Harvath made his way to the lone door on the far side of the chamber, he heard a sudden noise off to his right. Dropping to one knee, he spun and pointed his pistol in the direction from which the sound had come. Raising his flashlight and depressing the thumb switch, Harvath illuminated a long leather couch and, as he tilted it upwards, he found the helpless form of DeWolfe, gagged and shackled against the wall but still struggling against his restraints. The man’s eyes appeared to be bulging out of their sockets and Harvath had no idea if it was from abject fear or fury.

Whoever had hung DeWolfe up like a trophy probably wasn’t too far away. He pulled the suppressor from his pocket and screwed it onto the threaded barrel of his H amp;K. Taking careful aim, he put two quick rounds into the hinges of the metal restraints that were pinning the communication expert’s wrists to the wall. Just as he lowered his weapon, someone punched him incredibly hard right in the small of his back. At least that’s what it felt like.

Without even thinking about it, Harvath released the thumb switch of his flashlight, plunging the room back into darkness and began rolling along the floor in the direction he had come. As he did, he could hear the pop of dry wood as a course of bullets from a silenced weapon tracked his progress, tearing up a straight line across the floorboards right at him.