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  “Vee-one.”

  It was the same call-out used by the aviation industry. Vee-one meant the aircraft had reached sufficient takeoff speed and there was no going back.

  Robie acknowledged that command and turned his comm pack off. From now until either he or his opponents were dead, there would be nothing more said.

  His helmet was fitted with a wireless camera so that his handlers could see everything that he could. They would either watch Robie win, or else see the bullets coming that would kill him.

  An M11 in his right hand, he opened the trapdoor and looked around.

  Nothing.

  He climbed up and quietly set the trapdoor back into place. The basement was what one would expect in an old, crappy house in a tattered neighborhood—it was dirty and smelled of mold.

  But there was one element of interest. In a far corner was a metal box about six feet in length. He slipped over to it, squatted down, pulled an instrument from his belt, and ran it over the box. He looked at the readout meter.

  Cobalt bomb confirmed. It wasn’t armed yet. They wouldn’t do so until they moved it to Oxford Circus.

  And Robie also knew that he would keep himself between them and the bomb at all times.

  He holstered his M11 and readied his UMP.

  He rose and moved to the wooden stairs. From his intelligence briefing on the house he knew that the fourth riser up squeaked, so he went from the third to the fifth.

  In addition to him, there were currently seventeen people inside this place.

  Robie’s goal was to kill sixteen of them.

  The fire selector on his UMP was set to two shots. One shot was enough to kill any man if placed properly, but Robie had left no room for chance.

  The basement door was partially open.

  He peered through it into the kitchen.

  Two men sat at a table drinking what looked to be cups of coffee. They apparently needed a stimulant at this late hour.

  He looked at his watch through his panoramic goggles.

  The second hand was just sweeping to twelve.

  Four…three…two…

  On cue, the lights in the house went out as the power was cut.

  Through his helmet Robie saw the two men clear as day jerk forward and then stand.

  Then he watched them fall from suppressed UMP bursts delivered to their chests.

  Two down, fourteen to go.

  Robie was through the kitchen in three seconds and then hit the hallway.

  His finger nudged the shot selector to full auto.

  He did so because darkness tended to make people congregate closer.

  Sure enough, coming down the narrow hall were three men, all with guns.

  They opened fire. With pistols.

  Robie pulled the UMP’s trigger, and two seconds and twenty-six rounds of concentrated fire later there were three more dead men on the floor of this humble abode. The UMP’s ejector sent the spent casings tumbling to the floor, where they sounded like metal pearls cascading from a broken necklace.

  Five down, eleven to go.

  He ejected the mag, slapped in a fresh one, and turned and rolled to his right as more gunfire came at him.

  He counted two heads through his goggles.

  He emptied half his UMP mag at them.

  Seven down, nine to go.

  Two more men appeared at the head of the stairs and fired down at Robie.

  He could see that they had on NVGs as well, so his tactical advantage had lessened.

  He pulled a stun grenade, released the pin, and threw it up the stairs at the same time he looked away.

  The stunning flash of light did not blind him, nor did the concussive sound paralyze him, since his helmet cushioned him from this effect.

  The two men at the top of the stairs could not claim the same.

  One tumbled down and landed at the bottom of the stairs.

  One slash across the neck from the KM2000 severed two critical arteries, and Robie added another to his tally.

  He reholstered the bloody blade.

  Eight down, an equal number to go.

  The other man slowly rose at the top of the stairs, but was obviously concussed. He then fell back down and lay unconscious. That was the only thing that saved his life.

  That and two men attacking Robie from his right and left flanks.

  The M11s came out, one in each hand. Robie aimed an M11 in each direction simultaneously and then trigger-pulled ten shots from each gun, sweeping up and down from chest to thigh, the arc of fire evenly spaced over a ten-foot radius. A kill zone field of fire delivered with max efficiency.

  Jacketed rounds tore through flesh. These sounds were followed by two thumps, as corpses hit carpet.

  Ten down, six to go.

  Since the cat was definitely out of the bag, he sprayed the stairwell using the rest of his second mag on the UMP. He then raced up the steps, after reloading his M11s.

  A bullet, fired from above, struck him in the abdomen.

  The liquid armor vest he had on hardened within a millisecond, catching the round and wringing out virtually all of its kinetic energy by forcing it to be displaced along the breadth of the vest.

  The armor then lost its rigidity and became flexible once more.

  Robie had no idea who had invented this stuff, but if he survived tonight, he would buy the person a drink.

  His second stun grenade flushed out the shooter. Robie shot him once in the knee with an M11 to incapacitate, then performed the kill shot to the head on the upper stairwell.

  Eleven down, five to go.

  He reached the upper hall, reholstered the M11, and reloaded the UMP with his final mag just as someone blindsided him. They tumbled back down the stairs. His attacker had a gutting knife and he managed to strike Robie in the thigh. His liquid armor once more seized up, and the knife didn’t even penetrate to the skin.

  Robie’s right hand clamped down on the wrist with the knife. He torqued himself around so that he was on top when they slammed into the floor at the bottom of the stairs. The man beneath him was stunned by the impact but for only a second.

  That was still a moment too long for survival.

  Robie had used the man’s own knife to slit his throat. Arterial spray danced across his visor.

  He hoped the handlers back in their safe space were enjoying the show.

  It wasn’t nearly as much fun on his end.

  Twelve down, four to go.

  He rose, turned, and rolled out of the way as a volley of machine-gun fire blew down the stairs, ripping off part of the handrail, shredding the wall, and exploding a slew of the risers.

  With his night vision, Robie could see where it was coming from.

  Instead of trying to attack back up the stairs, he moved to his left, where the upper part of the stairway was partially covered by the wall rising from the lower floor.

  He pointed the UMP at a forty-five-degree angle up and five clicks to the left. He pressed the trigger and fired half his mag. The ACP rounds blasted through the cheap drywall. Robie counted to three and watched as the shooter’s body rolled down the stairs and landed at the bottom and on top of the gent who’d had his throat slit by Robie.

  Robie made sure the shooter was dead with an M11 round dotting the man’s forehead.

  Thirteen down, three to go.

  And those three were upstairs.

  Now it became purely a tactical game. A chess match played with guns and battlefield strategy instead of molded pieces on a square board.

  The enemy had the high ground and Robie the low. For him to attack, he would have to move through a funnel where they could concentrate their fire, and he couldn’t count on the liquid armor to see him through.

  What Robie wanted was the high ground, and as he looked to his left, he saw a way to take it.

  He popped open the window, climbed out, and found handholds in the uneven brick surface. On past missions he’d scaled what appeared to be sheer rock walls, so this wa
s not a stretch for him.

  The window was just above. The floor plan of the house told him exactly where this opening would take him. He spent three seconds calculating, which was his allotted time to think at any interval during a mission such as this.

  Holding on to the windowsill with one hand, he jimmied the window with his knife. He did a controlled tumble through the opening and rolled up to a defensive position.

  Having seized the tactical advantage, Robie charged into the upstairs hall and saw one man peering cautiously down the stairs, unaware that his rear flank was fully exposed.

  His life ended with a pair of M11 rounds in his back.

  Fourteen down, two to go.

  The next man came out of another bedroom holding the exact same type of weapon that Robie held.

  It was UMP versus UMP.

  But not really. It wasn’t just about the hardware. A gun was a gun. The same models worked pretty much the same.

  What really mattered was the software.

  And the shooter was always the software.

  Robie threw himself through a doorway as the muzzle of the opposing UMP took aim at him.

  He transferred his UMP fully to his right hand, making sure by touch that his selector was still on full auto. The only part of him exposed was his gun and his hand. He used the lower part of the doorjamb as his fulcrum because the recoil kick on an UMP was not always kind if the collapsible stock was not firmly against one’s shoulder. That might foul the shot and Robie didn’t have the time for that.

  The UMPs fired at the same time.

  The man’s UMP managed to take a chunk of polymer off Robie’s weapon.

  Robie’s UMP managed to blow the head off the man.

  Robie dropped the UMP, his ammo exhausted.

  Fifteen down, one to go.

  But what a one it would turn out to be.

  The young woman stepped out of a room and into the upstairs hall.

  In her hand was not a weapon, at least not a conventional one.

  Clenched in her fingers was a dead man’s—or in this case a dead woman’s—trigger wired to the vest around her torso. Strapped there were six packs of connected Semtex. More than enough to collapse the house and kill her and Robie, and maybe crack the belly of the cobalt bomb in the basement and radiate the neighborhood until the twenty-second century.

  He understood at once. She was the designated fail-safe.

  She smiled at him.

  He didn’t return it.

  The bloodstained KM2000 flashed through the air.

  It severed the wire from the trigger to the suicide vest before lodging in the wall.

  The woman looked down at the useless trigger, then back up at Robie. She screamed at him even as her hand went to the vest.

  Robie did not wait for her to blow them up another way.

  He shot her in the head and she fell to the floor wrapped in her unexploded bombs.

  Sixteen down.

  None to go.

  Time clock punched.

  Sunrise coming.

  Ninety-nine percent was apparently good enough.

  Chapter

  3

  THE CLEANUP WAS quick and efficient.

  To keep things as secret as possible, they made use of the same tunnel that Robie had. The house was going to be leveled in the next week and the debris buried forever. The tunnel was being permanently plugged. Any complaints about the sounds of explosions or gunfire that night would be referred to the appropriate agency with instructions to bury it as deeply as the remains of the house.

  The concussed survivor was revived and would be interrogated until he gave up every secret he would ever have. Then he would disappear into the permanent shadows with no ability to harm anyone again.

  The cobalt bomb was removed and disarmed, and it would be reverse-engineered to see how the terror cell had done it. Neither the Brits nor the Americans were under the illusion that a terrorist cell alone had had the wherewithal to pull this off. This operation smacked of a serious institutional backer. Whether it was the Russians or the Iranians or even the North Koreans, they would trace this op back to its source.

  Then the diplomats would have their shot at de-escalating this sucker.

  If the statesmen failed, it would be the generals’ turn.

  And no one wanted that scenario.

  When the British tactical team had entered the house, Robie had taken off his helmet and was calmly sitting on the couch in the living room.

  The team took its time viewing all the carnage, including the suicide bomber, as Robie filled them in on how he had disarmed her. Bloody hells resonated from all corners of the house as the team saw firsthand the American’s handiwork.

  One armored assaulter had sat down next to Robie and asked him if he needed anything, politely addressing Robie as “sir.”

  Robie had shaken his head and said, “I’m good.”

  “You’re far better than good. In fact, you’re the bloody best I’ve ever seen, mate.”

  Robie appreciated the sentiment, but he had exited the house with no positive feelings, despite having defeated a maniacal attempt to throw the world off its axis.

  He was now wheels up on a private ride back to the United States.

  He rubbed his gut and then his thigh where the rounds and the knife had struck, respectively.

  Either one would have disabled him. And then he would have been fresh meat to kill. Just another corpse on the floor.

  And that made a person think.

  Robie closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But while slumber had come easily on the flight over, it was not so easy on the way back. He had killed sixteen people the previous night. And nearly been killed himself about a half-dozen times.

  It was all in a day’s work for him, on one level.

  On another level, part of him couldn’t process it.

  It wasn’t like an endorphin high after winning a Super Bowl or a World Series, chiefly because nobody died in those events. However, it was clearly a contest, of sorts. There were winners and losers in Robie’s world, only the losers left the field of battle in body bags.

  He opened his eyes, and his thoughts reached back to Mississippi.

  The reunion with his father. A reunion from hell. But the ending was what mattered. And it had ended better than it had begun.

  And he and Jessica Reel had been together, battered but together.

  Now nearly six months had passed and Robie hadn’t seen Reel in all that time. He had called, e-mailed, and texted. Nothing. She was still working for the Agency, that he knew, but he had no idea where. He had asked. And received not a single answer.

  After returning from Robie’s hometown of Cantrell, Reel—then in a wheelchair because of injuries sustained during their time there—had told Robie that they would always have each other. That they might fall, but together they were unbeatable.