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Volkov and Step had driven in first, so they’d be in place when the personnel drops began, at eleven o’clock.
Letty was sittingin her hole at midnight, chilly and bored, when her radio vibrated twice, the vibrations three seconds apart. Cartwright.
Cartwright said nothing, but Letty and Kaiser knew what the two vibrations meant: somebody was moving in the woods nearher. At that instant, Letty heard one piece of brush separated from another, a very quiet, but still audible, ripping sound; a moment later, a leaf was crushed.
Somebody was coming down the hill above her, traversing at the same time, so he would pass above her, headed toward the motel. The stalker was probably wearing night-vision goggles, she thought, because he was moving so confidently; she prayed they weren’t thermals, or he’d see her heat signature. Against that possibility, she slowly, slowly brought the Uzi around her body until the barrel was pointed in the direction of the sounds she’d heard.
Then, moving slowly as paste, she took her radio out of a pocket and squeezed the transmit button twice, as Cartwright had: another person in the woods. She got a single vibration back from Cartwright, in acknowledgment.
There were more light disturbances, all moving above and past her. Not like a squirrel, or a small animal; those tended to be noisy as they scavenged through ground litter for hidden food. This was careful, but larger and heavier. When the noisemaker had moved away, twenty yards, thirty yards, forty, Letty risked moving, slowly rolling over on one hip, then standing, keeping one of her trees between herself and the intruder.
She dipped back in her pocket, to the radio, and squeezed it three times, the signal that she was moving herself, so Cartwright and Kaiser would know.
The man in the dark stopped moving for a moment, and she froze. Then he started again, and she took a step from behind the trees, toward him. As long as he moved, she did, not trying to close the distance, waiting until he was approaching the motel, where he’d be silhouetted against the light.
She made three moves, tracking him. She was ultracautious,aware that there might be a third man in the woods, a spotter, looking for anyone who might interfere with the attack. She was behind a screen of saplings and underbrush when she caught a glimpse of the man in front of her, or his head, against the glow of the motel lights.
His head seemed almost round, and too large—a helmet, she thought—which meant that he’d also be wearing body armor. She waited a minute, motionless, then another minute, and he began to move again.
His head, or helmet, seemed to be floating; she couldn’t see his body, which meant that he was dressed all in black, or in dark forest camo. She moved again, hanging back, watching as he closed in on the motel.
A hundred yardsup the hillside, another man was moving more quickly, and less silently, down the hill. He loomed out of the darkness like some mythical golem, wearing black body armor, a helmet, and probably night-vision goggles, Cartwright thought.
Depending on the sophistication of the goggles, and their reaction to the lights of the motel, he might have taken them off, in which case he would be as blind as she was.
He moved in fits and starts, pushing brush out of the way with what probably was a longer weapon than the Minis that the hotel gunmen had carried. She was unmoving, low to the ground, behind the jumble of the trunk and branches of a fallen tree. The golem would cross the line of her weapon with a few more steps, and she reached into a pocket and found the radio and pushed the transmit button and held it down for a full five seconds.
She was signaling that she was preparing to take a shot. If the golem was wearing typical body armor, he would be vulnerablearound the neck, the armpits, and the lower body. He began moving, became more visible as he got close to the motel lights.
She waited, took a breath, adjusted her sight line, and when he stepped into it, fired a burst of three shotsbapbapbapinto his legs, knocking him down. He screamed involuntarily and collapsed, but she could still make out his helmeted head and she fired another burst at a point she believed would be below the rim of the helmet, then bounded toward him, and when ten feet away, fired another burst below the helmet.
“One down,” she blurted into the radio, and then ducked back under the cover of a two-trunked tree, sat and froze.
When the gunshotsblew out through the trees, three bursts in measured succession, the man Letty was tracking first did a crouch, and then he actually stood up, as if to see better to his left. Letty couldn’t see the front sights on her Mini as well as she might have wished, but with what she could see and what she could guess, leveled the weapon and fired a burst.
The man dropped—dropped, he wasn’t simply ducking—and almost certainly had been hit. She moved closer, using trees as cover, until she could see his body as a dark shape. She fired another short burst into his pelvic area, and a third into his neckline.
She dropped into the nearest cover and said into the radio, “Another one down here.”
The hackers freaked outwhen they heard the bursts of gunfire. Some rolled onto the floor, from their beds, some crawled to the hallway doors and looked out, to see if anyone knew what was happening.
Kaiser was in the hall with his M4 and he shouted, “Everybodyout of bed, into the hallway, stay below the level of the brick walls.” He shouted it three times, and in a few minutes, all the hackers and their friends and families were in the hallway, on the floor.
Catrin’s German shepherd took cover under a table, her tail curled tightly around her, and Catrin said, “She thinks they’re fireworks. She hates fireworks.”
Kaiser had awakened Bunker when Cartwright’s first alert came in, and she was sitting on the end of her bed, looking at the camera feeds, when she saw a man in SWAT-team black, with a black mask and a helmet, come out of the trees below the motel, moving carefully toward it between guest cars.
She shouted down the hall, “John, there’s a guy in the parking lot coming up to the guest wing, not the hack wing, the guest wing. He came up the hill from the front. He’s using cars for cover.”
Jane Longstreet stepped into Bunker’s room: “I heard that. We’re sure he’s a Russian?”
“He’s carrying a suppressed Mini,” Bunker said. “It’s down by his side, but it’s there. He has night-vision goggles up on his forehead. He must have pushed them up when he got close to the motel.”
The caretaker, awaked by the gunfire, came running down the hallway dressed in a white tee-shirt and boxer shorts, saw hacks moving into the hall on hands and knees, and shouted, “Hey! Hey! What’s the hell’s going on out there?”
Kaiser waved his weapon at the man: “Get down. Get down below the bricks.”
The man didn’t; he turned and ran the other way, disappearing into the center entry area. Longstreet ran after him, got to the corner and looked down the center wing, saw guests moving out of the far wing and toward the front desk. She shouted at them, “Go back! Go back! There’s an active shooter. Stay below the bricks...”
