Predator One by Jonathan Maberry
Something hit me on the temple, and I pitched sideways, and before I could regain my balance the human tide carried me halfway into the tunnel. I tried everything I could to fight against the current, but, tough as I am, there’s no amount of martial arts or military or police training that offers an adequate response to thousands of people moving in blind panic.
I lost all track of Ghost.
The crowd spun me and turned me and pummeled me. Then I was falling backward through an open door into a small service corridor. I landed badly but scrambled instantly to my feet, calling for Ghost. There was no sign of him as a torrent of screaming people rushed past the open doorway.
There was another bang. Smaller, hollow, and in my disorientation I could not at first understand what it was. Then I saw one of the panicking people in the hallway go down, the side of her face blooming with bright red blood.
Then I understood.
I whirled and saw that the hallway behind me wasn’t empty.
There were two men there.
One of them had a big wooden crate on a hand truck.
The other was pointing a gun.
At me.
His first shot had missed me and hit a woman trying to run to safety.
The hall was sixty feet long and ended at a T junction. A service corridor for event staff. These guys were in the kind of nondescript coveralls you’d expect of maintenance staff or equipment handlers.
Except that they both had ski masks pulled down over their faces.
Oh shit.
The guy with the gun fired again. And again.
He emptied a whole clip at me.
I dove through the doorway of a broom closet, but the rounds passed me and punched into the people in the main corridor. I couldn’t see the hits, but I heard the screams.
Rage ignited inside my chest.
I spun as I drew my off-duty piece, knelt, reached around the doorjamb, and fired blind. Most rounds fired in any firefight do not hit a useful target. Ask any soldier. Especially when firing from cover. You can slant the odds in your favor by aiming center mass at average height.
I heard the scream as at least one of my rounds found something meaty.
The gunfire paused.
Then I was up and out, swapping magazines, bringing my gun up into a two-hand grip as I broke from the broom closet and ran toward the guys in ski masks. I saw one guy down on his knees, both hands pressed to his lower abdomen in a vain attempt to stop blood from pouring onto the floor. His gun lay in a spreading pool.
The other guy had abandoned the hand truck and was unzipping his coveralls to get at his pistol.
I ran at them full speed. Powered by rage and fear.
I shot him in the chest. Twice.
I shot the other guy in the face.
Fuck it.
As he pitched back, I jumped over him, skidded to a stop at the T juncture, and looked up and down the hall.
There were more of them.
Five more, pushing two more big crates on hand trucks. All of them in coveralls and ski masks.
Technically, I should have used the edge of the juncture as cover, identified myself as a federal agent, pointed my gun at them, and told them all to give up.
I didn’t.
I opened up on them.
Why? Because fuck it, that’s why.
People were still screaming, running, hurting, dying. The echo of that explosion was burned into my eyes. My father was here. So was my best friend. And so were a lot of innocent people, some of whom were now dead or wounded.
So, yeah. Fuck it.
They were thirty-five feet away. We were in a concrete corridor. Missing the target was harder than hitting it.
I hit what I aimed at.
Body shots. I wanted them hurt. I wanted them to scream. But later I would want them to talk. I would want them to give me some goddamn answers.
Two of them returned fire, but I had the advantage.
They all went down.
And, yeah, they screamed, too.
Suddenly, bullets whipped down the hall and chipped the wall a foot above my head. I threw myself backward, but my mind was replaying the flash image of two more men coming out of another door. Same kind of guys.
I dropped my magazine and fished for a replacement.
Which I did not have.
This was my day off. One loaded magazine in the gun, one spare. Both spent.
I heard the men running.
I took a risk and bent low to sneak a peek. They’d stopped beside the tangle of their bleeding comrades, but they weren’t offering first aid. Instead, they were tearing at the fastenings on the crates.
One of them saw me looking, and he whipped his gun up and fired. I ducked back with no time to spare as bullets tore the corner of the wall to gravel. Stone chips chased me backward. Then I got to fingers and toes and launched myself the way I’d come. The gun from the first guy I shot was useless. It was soaked with blood. I pulled the other guy’s coveralls open and stole the gun he’d failed to pull. A Glock 26. Two spare magazines. Nice.
As I turned back to the T junction, I saw something that made no sense at all.
A pigeon flew around the corner.
Then another.
And another.
Gray pigeons. Like you see everywhere in Baltimore and Philly and New York.
They flapped at full speed right past me, and I ducked backward out of the way. Three of them.
And then nine more.
I said, “What the fuck—?”
Four more flew past, rounding the corner from where the last two guys had been.
Raising the new pistol, I raced back and dropped to a crouch, leaned out, and pointed the barrel.
At nothing.
The two men were gone.
The two crates lay open and empty.
The men I’d wounded lay there, but none of them moved. Or ever would.
Each of them had been silenced with shots to the head. Cold, efficient, brutal.
It made no sense.
I tapped the earbud I always wore and tried to get Bug, but all I heard was static. Damn it. Probably damaged in the struggle outside. So, I pulled my cell and tried to call my office, the Warehouse.
I got no signal at all.
Nothing.
There was no way a professional stadium would have cell-phone dead spots, so this had to be something else. It had to be deliberate. Someone jamming the cell signals. Ditto for my DMS transmitter.
Shit.
Far behind me, nearly lost in the roar of the frenzied crowd, I heard a dog barking in wild panic.
Ghost.
I whirled and ran.
Chapter Twenty-five
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
March 29, 1:01 P.M.
The Gentleman hung like a spider in a web.
Sickly but venomous. Consumed by hate, but fed by it as well.
Diseased. Burned. Wasted. Repulsive even to his own eye.
The Gentleman. A joke that he had come to appreciate as much as Pharos and the rest of the staff did.
Gentleman. A shared absurdity.
He was neither gentle nor still a man. Not anymore.
He knew that he was a dead man. A pernicious ghost that would not fade until the blackest desires of his heart were fulfilled. It was melodrama, certainly, but it was a glorious melodrama. Operatic. The only thing he had left. The one thing he had to live for.
His bedroom was silent except for the screams that came from the television speakers. The wall in front of him was lined with HD screens, each turned to a video feed from a separate tiny camera. The images jumped and shook as the drones in which they were mounted flew, wheeled, turned. Exploded.
Some of the screens had already gone dark, their feeds terminated in just the right way.
Others kept running with real-time images.
People running.
People screaming.
People flying ap
And there, running along a corridor, gun clutched in a bloody fist, was a man.
Big and blond. Healthy and whole. Cold eyes and a brutal mouth.
Running toward the sound of screams.
The burned man raised a withered arm and extended one skeletal finger. “You see? That’s him.”
Beside him, his only companion leaned forward, elbows on knees.
“Oh, yes,” said Doctor Michael Pharos. “I see him.”
Chapter Twenty-six
National League Baseball Opening Day
Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia
March 29, 1:03 P.M.
The crowd hadn’t thinned much when I reached the doorway to the main corridor. The stadium had been packed, and there were thousands of people fighting their way from the stands through the halls that led to the parking lot.
As I pushed my way out of the corridor, I saw that many people were bleeding and bruised. How much of that was because of the blast and how much was because of panic was anyone’s guess.
Then I spotted Ghost. He was on the far side of the hallway, crouched down beside a pretzel cart that had been toppled onto its side. Ghost was barking at everyone and everything. There were some smears of red on his shoulders and muzzle. He saw me and became hysterical, snapping at people as he tried several times to enter the flow. Each time he shied back. Several people took swings at him. Nobody got near to his teeth. Ghost had lost several teeth during a mission in Iran. They’d been replaced by gleaming titanium fangs, and his broken jawbone had been surgically reinforced and strengthened. People couldn’t know that, but a hundred-plus pounds of shepherd with metal teeth wasn’t something to mess with. Not even when running for your life.
Getting to him would be like trying to cross a raging river.
I tried to yell at him to stay there, to hide in the shelter formed by the fallen cart and the wall, but he was too deep inside his own wildness. He lunged into the crowd in a mad attempt to get to me. Immediately, people collided with him and accidentally kicked him and fell over him. Ghost instantly turned and bit, more out of reflex and fear than anything. I saw blood.
I saw Ghost go down under the feet of the crowd.
I very nearly fired into the crowd.
No joke. I’m not proud of it, but I almost shot the people who were trampling my dog. He means that much to me. Brother in arms. Pet. A member of my family.
So, instead of committing wholesale murder, I flung myself into the throng and began fighting my way to him.
Within seconds, I was beaten down to the ground.
Kicked. Stepped on. Stomped. But I reached Ghost and wrapped myself around him to keep him from being stomped. And to keep him from killing anyone, because he was as far out on the ragged edge of panic as I was. We folded down, and the crowd crammed us into a cleft of wall and floor.
It was like being caught in a riptide and dragged through a rocky reef.
I screamed.
And I could not do a fucking thing about it.
The tide roared as it surged past.
All I could do was ride it out and wait for it to be over.
But it was not over.
Not even close.
Interlude Eight
Ha-Nagar Street
Above the Stein Family Falafel Shop
Ashdod, Israel
Two and a Half Years Ago
Aaron Davidovich sipped coffee and studied the code he’d just written, tapping a key to scroll the page. The coffee was excellent, better than any of the piss water his Agency watchdogs had provided for him at the safe house. The croissant he’d just finished was top quality, too.
He sipped his coffee and read.
One small part of his mind was detached from the meticulous process of reading computer code. That part stood to one side and observed. He was aware of it. Davidovich had always been aware of that part of his mind. The part that watched and evaluated everything he did. The nature of the observer shifted depending on mood. For a long time he imagined what Sherlock Holmes, with all of his deductive and inductive reasoning, would make of the little things that Davidovich did. Would Holmes properly interpret the smooth patches of dry skin on his wrists as the result of countless hours of resting on the metal deck of his computer? Would Holmes deduce his general fitness was the natural result of the sedentary habits of a member of an office-based nerd hive?
Sometimes the watcher in his mind was a cop. As when he was clearly over the legal limit of appletinis and was walking from bar to car.
Lately, though, since he’d come to live here with Boy, he imagined that they were watching him all the time. They. Whoever they were.
Even now, six months into his captivity, he didn’t know if he worked for terrorists, criminals, or a foreign government. Boy was not an American. Nor, he was convinced, were Mason and Jacob. That left a long list of possibles.
Over time, it mattered less who was watching and more that he give a good impression regardless of whether anyone was watching. He was very careful. He constructed his habits to convey acceptance of his new life, resignation to the situation, and diligence to his tasks.
Even now, sipping coffee and proofreading his code, he arranged his body so that he looked relaxed but alert, showing neither tension nor any of the physical tics of fear. By acting that role, he found, over time, that he actually was relaxed.
It was nice.
After that first horrible day, the whole situation had become …
He took a long sip of coffee as he fished for the word.
“Comfortable.”
He stiffened and set the cup down, staring at the screen but suddenly not seeing it.
“Comfortable”?
Really? Was that the word? Was that actually what he was feeling?
Suddenly conscious of his inner watcher and the real possibility of hidden cameras and actual watchers, he pinched his nose as if trying to prevent a sneeze. He made a presneeze mouth and took in a breath. Held it. Then sighed, long and with obvious satisfaction of having prevented the sneeze.
All good theater.
All to hide his reaction to his own thought.
Davidovich picked up his cup again and took another sip. It was damn fine coffee.
And, yes, damn it, he was comfortable.
He looked inside to try and read the expression on his inner watcher’s face. Would there be disappointment? Contempt? Self-loathing?
Shock and horror?
There should have been.
There probably should have been.
This should absolutely be a crisis moment, the precursor to a dark night of the soul.
Yes, sir.
Aaron Davidovich got up, crossed the room, and got a fresh cup of coffee. Added soy milk and sugar. Sipped, sighed, smiled.
And went back to work.
Chapter Twenty-seven
National League Baseball Opening Day
Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia
March 29, 1:05 P.M.
Ghost screamed.
Actually screamed.
It was a sound I’d never heard from a dog before.
Pain and fear, blind panic, and a total loss of faith in his pack leader to make sense of the world.
Then there was another sound.
Was it another explosion?
The whole crowd seemed to freeze for one moment to hear. It wasn’t behind them, not outside in the stands.
It was inside, in here.
Ahead of where the crowd was trying to go.
In that shocked half second, I struggled to my feet, the gun loose in my sweaty hands.
That sound could have been a gunshot.
Except it wasn’t.
There was a faint buzzing noise, and then there was a second bang.
Closer. Louder. A bigger and more hollow sound than either a pistol or rifle round. Way too small to be a shotgun.
It was somewhere ahead. Thirty, forty yards.
I couldn’t see what it was, though.
The tide of the crowd was caught between those still pushing from outside and the rest inside, who were trying to avoid whatever was ahead of us. So, I decided to make my move.
I raised my stolen gun and yelled, “Federal agent! Move, move, move!”
The people around me shied away. Ghost got to his feet, shaking and scared, but he was drawn by my attempt to take control back.
“Let me through,” I bellowed. “Federal agent, let me through.”
This time, with no clear direction in which to flee, they did. Now they needed an answer, and I was the only possible authority they could see.
Bleeding, battered, and wearing a baseball shirt from a different city. Didn’t matter. I had the gun, and I was using my best cop voice.
“Let me through,” I growled again.
Someone—a woman—screamed, “There’s another one!”
I couldn’t see what she was pointing at, but above the sudden upsurge in shouts I heard another motorized buzz.
And then …
Bang!
Forty yards in front of me, something exploded. I could see the flash and hear the bang, and then I saw blood and red pieces fly as high as the ceiling.
The crowd spun and slammed into me.
I went down again. Harder. Much harder. My head hit the concrete wall.
My gun went flying somewhere.
My legs buckled, and I slid down to the cold ground.
I felt feet running across my chest. My thighs. My groin. I curled into a ball and tried not to die.
I prayed that my dad was okay. Rudy and Patrick, too.
There were more buzzes.
There were more explosions.
And there was more death.
Maybe none of us were going to be okay.
Chapter Twenty-eight
National League Baseball Opening Day
Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia
March 29, 1:09 P.M.
James Wolcott Ledger stood his ground.
The mayor of Philadelphia knelt behind him, his face streaked with blood, his suit torn and covered in soot. Colonel Douglas lay sprawled. Maybe unconscious, maybe dead. All around him, the stadium seemed to blossom with vast red flowers. Pillars of smoke reached toward the blue sky like the arms of demons. The air was torn by screams, by explosions, by shouts.