Snake Eye Read Free Page B

then. The police officer shouted for him to stop for the third time, fired his 9mm, and saw the young man stumble. But then the terrorist was up firing a pistol as he staggered forward. I should have gone for the bastard’s head , the cop thought to himself, and was just about to squeeze off another round when Rossi fired her Glock. The bullet removed the top of Shaw’s skull, sprayed the area behind with gore, and hit Rigg Hall. The terrorist toppled over backwards, landed with an audible “thump,” and was left to stare sightlessly up into the night sky.
    Lopa lowered the camera and frowned. Rather than unfold the way it was supposed to, the sanction had been compromised by the female FBI agent, and that made him angry. Very angry. So angry that it might be necessary to cap the bitch. But that was for later. He had work to do.
     
    Unsure of how many more opponents she might face, and which direction they might attack from, the agent tilted the Glock up and turned a complete circle. She saw bystanders, television cameras, and firefighters all waiting to see what would happen next. The first terrorist, the one that she hadn’t fired on, lay wrapped in someone’s steaming raincoat. A medic tended to him while the other worked to revive his victim.
    Then, having completed her turn, Rossi realized that the fire department had water on the building, the police were pushing the crowd back behind yellow crime tape, and Kissler had arrived for work. He stood with his pistol pointed at the ground and a look of amazement on his moon-shaped face. “Jesus, Rossi, what the hell happened?”
    Rossi shook her head, wrinkled her nose in response to the odor of burned flesh, and felt a snowflake touch her nose. “Something bad, Kevin. Something really bad.”
     
    About a hundred feet away, toward the rear of the crowd, Lopa touched the camera’s power button. In spite of some initial misgivings, the sanction had gone fairly well and the day’s work was done. His van was parked on the west side of the U-district not far from the I-HOP. The terrorist stowed the camcorder in his pack, slipped his arms through the straps, and sauntered away. He had news to deliver.
    The morning sky was Seattle gray, a steady drizzle fell, and most people were on their way to work as Jack Dexter stepped out onto the street. Baghdad, Mosul, and Fallujah were thousands of miles away, his forebrain knew that, but his hind brain, the so-called reptilian brain, was alert to the possibility someone could fire at him from a passing vehicle, blow him to smithereens by triggering an IED (improvised explosive device), or kill him with a randomly fired mortar shell. That’s why the ex-SEAL had to force himself out of what he still thought of as cover.
    The leg , by which Dexter meant his left leg, was a little sore after the run the day before, but that was not only typical but hardly worth thinking about compared to the pain he had experienced when the so-called resistance fighters had ambushed his convoy. He and his team had been in the process of escorting four VIPs from the Defense Department out of the green zone to an Iraqi government building located near Haifa street when their vehicles came under attack.
    An IED had been used to destroy the lead Humvee, while the second vehicle, the one Dexter had been riding in, was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG.) He knew he was hit but didn’t realize how badly because there wasn’t enough time to think about it. The bad guys rushed in hoping to take hostages that could be sold to Al Qaida—but Dexter and his men had other plans. They sprayed their attackers with CAR-15, MP5, and M203 fire even as the rest of the convoy bull-dozed its way out of the trap and a crowd of Iraqi civilians began to throw rocks at the infidel occupiers.
    Unable to break through the defensive fire, and having suffered more than fifty percent casualties by that time, the black-clad fighters were already in the process of