The Enemy Within

She signaled DeGarza into position on one side of the half-open door and crouched on the other. Then she tugged a flash/bang grenade out of her leg pouch and looked across at the stocky agent. He nodded.

Counting silently to herself, Helen tugged on the grenade’s pull ring, slammed the door open, and lobbed the cylinder down the stairs, trying to bounce it around the bend. DeGarza followed the grenade down, taking the stairs two at a time. She hurtled after him.

They rounded the corner at high speed and took the last few steps into a long, low-ceilinged room lit only by the blinding strobes thrown by the exploding grenade. Helen sensed rather than saw motion in the far corner and yelled a warning. “Down!”

She and DeGarza dropped prone just as a third terrorist reared up from behind a sofa and fired a long, tearing burst from an assault rifle. He missed. They shot back from the carpet. Shredded by multiple hits, the man collapsed across the sofa, bleeding into the ripped stuffing and exposed steel springs.

Helen breathed out. These bastards were good good enough to shake off the effects of a stun grenade and fight back. Well, she thought wearily, maybe this one had been the last.

More gunfire rang out suddenly inside the basement, muffled only slightly by distance and closed doors. Crap.

Helen surged to her feet and sped down a hallway that led to the last two bedrooms and bath. DeGarza dogged her heels.

Without pausing, she kicked open the door to one room and rolled back away as the other HRT agent dove inside. She risked a glance and got a hasty impression of a small, starkly furnished room containing nothing but an unmade bed and a few closed suitcases. A bullet-riddled portable computer lay in pieces near the bed. That explained the gunfire they’d heard.

Damn it! They’d needed the information that shattered machine had once contained.

She swore again in sudden realisation. If the man who’d destroyed that computer wasn’t in there, then…

Helen whirled as the door to the bedroom behind her flew open. A fourth terrorist, this one a fair-haired man with pale blue eyes, stepped out into the hallway, already raising an AKM assault rifle in her direction. He was too close, and there wasn’t any cover she could reach in time.

The world around her slowed to a crawl. In the long, seemingly endless blink of an eye, she recognised the face she had stared at for so many weeks. The face captured in black and white by a Metro security camera. The cruel, arrogant face of the man who had planted the National Press Club bomb.

Reacting instinctively, Helen threw herself forward and slammed her submachine gun down across the AKM’s longer barrel, pushing it toward the floor. Her finger tightened on the MP5’s trigger.

Both weapons fired at the same time.

Helen felt something punch across her thigh and ignored it at first. Then she was falling backward as her leg buckled. She felt a second impact, as another steel jacketed round ricocheted off the concrete floor and slammed into her lower back below her body armor.

She tumbled to the floor still clutching her submachine gun. Clenching her teeth, she raised her head high enough to see the terrorist she’d shot. He lay propped up against the doorjamb. Her bullets had torn his chest open.

The fair-headed man stared back at her, breathing in shallow, gasping pants as the blood pumped out of his wounds. “A woman,” he whispered in amazement. One corner of his mouth twisted upward in a terrible smile and then froze. He was dead.

Helen shivered, suddenly horribly, terribly cold colder than she had ever been in her life. She could sense something wet spreading across her back, but she couldn’t feel anything below her stomach.

“Oh, my God.” DeGarza dropped to his knees beside her and smacked his hands over her thigh, desperately trying to hold back the blood spouting out of her severed femoral artery. “Hotel One, this is Sierra Two! I need a medic! Sierra One is down and hit bad!”

Helen slid slowly into an icy, black void.

HAT medevac Blight With an ashen Mike Flynn at his side, Peter Thorn pushed through the crowd of grim-faced policemen and FBI agents surrounding the Blackhawk. Medical teams were busy loading stretchers into the helicopter as it spooled up for an emergency hop to the trauma unit at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Blankets covered most of the faces. All four terrorists caught inside the shattered safe house were dead. Two members of the HRT assault force, Ricks and Emery, were also dead. Helen and Frank Jackson were still alive but only barely.