Collateral (Tier One #6)

Dempsey stopped shooting at the Russian missile transporter as it disappeared down the street.

“You gotta be kidding me,” he muttered and turned to look at Munn. The doc, who had taken a knee beside him, was sighting into the gaping maw where the warehouse’s garage door had been just seconds ago.

“Should we clear it?” Munn said.

Dempsey was so pissed off, he wanted to scream, but he checked his anger and got his head back in the game. Thank God Munn had kept his wits, because they hadn’t actually breached the warehouse and the Russians could have left shooters behind to ambush them. On the other hand, those sneaky bastards had probably rigged the building to blow instead.

“We ain’t going in there,” he said, backpedaling and waving Munn to do the same. “Catching that truck before it launches is the only priority.”

“Agreed, but I don’t want to get shot in the back, either. What if they left shooters behind?”

A high-pitched burst of static pulsed in Dempsey’s ear.

“I’m back, bitches!” exclaimed a triumphant Wang over the comms circuit.

“It’s about damn time,” Dempsey growled. “Please tell me you have eyes?”

“Does Superman have X-ray vision?” Wang quipped. “I’ve got a Predator in orbit and took control of the PIXIE swarm.”

“Are there any warm bodies left in this warehouse?”

“Negative,” Wang said. “It’s a black hole.”

“Zeus, are you up?” Dempsey said, glancing at Munn and chopping a hand in the direction of the fleeing Astrolog. Munn nodded and they both took off running down the street.

“Zeus is secured. Three and Four are coming to you,” Grimes said.

“We need wheels, ASAP,” Dempsey said, his arms pumping and boots pounding the pavement as he pushed himself to his maximum speed.

As if in reply, he heard the squeal of rubber in the near distance behind him.

“We got you,” said Martin. “Coming up on your left.”

Dempsey and Munn veered to the right side of the lane as the SUV came screaming up from behind. The vehicle passed them, braked to a hard stop ten meters ahead, and had the rear liftgate rising. Dempsey reached the vehicle first and dove into the rear cargo compartment, followed by Munn a second later.

“Go,” he shouted, and Martin hit the gas so hard, the acceleration nearly sent both of them tumbling out onto the street.

“Talk to me, Wang,” Dempsey said. “Where’s that launch vehicle going?”

“Guys, you aren’t going to believe this,” Wang said, “but that missile truck went into the hospital parking garage.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Munn said, screwing up his face.

“If he can get to the roof deck, it does,” Dempsey said. “He’ll have an unobstructed launch vector, and he knows we won’t take him out with a Hellfire because it’s a hospital. The risk of collateral is too high.”

Munn nodded. “Then we’ve got to get to him before he can get set.”

“No shit,” Dempsey said.

Martin, already driving at a lunatic pace, stomped on the accelerator. Dempsey clutched the headrest of the middle seat in front of him so he wouldn’t fall out as the SUV rolled and bounced violently.

“Guys, I think I saw Arkady Zhukov exit the warehouse,” Grimes said, turning to look at them, her calm and serious tone out of place given the tornado of chaos they were dealing with.

“What?” Dempsey said, his eyes going wide. “When?”

“Seconds before you guys got set for the assault. I couldn’t see his face, but I know it was him.”

“Wang . . .”

“On it,” came the clipped reply.

“I have confirming evidence,” Baldwin said, joining the party line for the first time. “We just registered a transmission from Zhukov’s mobile phone in the vicinity.”

“Where in the vicinity?” Dempsey barked.

“Triangulating . . .” came Baldwin’s cool reply. “We have him in a vehicle, presumably heading for the airport.”

This new wrinkle infuriated Dempsey. If they’d had comms during the op, this never would have happened. He would have been able to prosecute Arkady and stop the missile transport by . . .

By what? the voice asked in his head. Splitting the team?

He’d already done that.

Why did I release Chunk? Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .

“Guys,” Wang said with fresh tension in his voice. “The Russian driver is on the roof and extending the stabilizer skids in preparation to launch.”

“Are the missiles raised?” Dempsey asked.

“Not yet,” Wang said.

“How many levels is the garage?”

“Looks like five.”

“We’re never going to get to the top in time,” he said, looking at Munn.

“We could use ascenders,” Munn said.

“How do we get the lines up there?”

“We could use these grappling launchers,” Munn said, tapping one of the hard cases between them.

“I’m almost at the garage, guys,” Martin said. “Fifteen seconds.”

“We don’t even know if those fucking things work,” Dempsey said, shaking his head.

“They work, gentlemen,” came Baldwin’s reply.

“Have you tried them?” Dempsey said.

“Well, no, but I would not have procured them had the demonstration by the contractor not been convincing,” Baldwin said. “I was quite excited for you to try them.”

“Split the team,” said a new voice on the line, one that took Dempsey a second to register as belonging to Director Casey. “Three and Four, pursue Arkady. One and Two, use ascenders and stop the missile launch.”

A surge of hot anger exploded in Dempsey at the intervention, despite the fact that this very order had been poised on the tip of his tongue. Was he angry about the decision, or the fact that Casey had beaten him to it?

“Check,” said Munn, acknowledging the order for all of them, while flinging the hard case out onto the sidewalk in front of the parking garage.

The SUV skidded to a stop, with Martin braking and cutting the wheel into a slide. Grimes swung around in her seat and made eye contact with Dempsey, her expression asking the question: Are you sure?

“Just make sure you end that sonuvabitch,” he said through gritted teeth and jumped out the back of the Suburban.

The second his boots hit pavement, Munn tossed him an ascender, which he clipped to his kit. Then the SEAL surgeon picked up the shotgun-shaped grappling launcher and pointed the business end toward the top of the garage.

“Here goes nothing,” Munn said and squeezed the trigger. The launcher made a whump sound and fired a projectile with a Kevlar-woven, cut-resistant Novabraid cord seventy-five feet in the air. At apogee, spring-loaded tines popped out of the projectile. Then it arced down and disappeared from view behind the concrete wall on the upper deck of the parking tower.

“He’s raising the missiles,” Wang said. “Hurry.”

Munn ejected the spool-fed line magazine and tossed it to Dempsey. “Haul in the slack and go, dude,” he said.

Line in hand, Dempsey jogged to the base of the building and quickly worked the line, pulling in the slack until he felt the four-pronged hook catch. He pulled it tight, then checked the hold with his body weight. Another whump reverberated behind him—Munn launching a second line up to the roof deck—while he fed the nylon rope into his ascender’s serpentine drive mechanism. Then he clipped the safety traveler to the line below the ascender and squeezed the ascend trigger button. The pulley mechanism grabbed, took up tension, and jerked Dempsey a foot into the air.

“Go,” Munn said, working fast to get his line trimmed and ascender set. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Dempsey nodded, squeezed the trigger, and the ascender’s electric motor whirred to life. The compact battery-powered device defied gravity—rapidly hoisting him up the five-story elevation. Large air gaps between concrete levels made it impossible for him to “walk up” the side, so he let himself hang and instead used his feet to keep from spinning like a dangling yo-yo.

When he was six feet from the top, he eased off the ascender trigger and slowed. Here, against the top slab of the vertical concrete wall, the soles of his boots finally found purchase. Below, Munn’s ascender motor let out an electric whine and his Ember brother came zooming up to join him as he got into position just below the top of the wall.

“Talk to me, Wang,” Dempsey said, thinking that a status report would be nice before he stuck his head over the wall and had his melon split by a ready shooter.

Wang started to answer, but his words were drowned out by the roar of a missile booster igniting. The roof deck trembled. Smoke chased fire into the sky, and there was nothing Dempsey could do but watch as the Russian Iskander short-range ballistic missile streaked toward Mariupol at five times the speed of sound.