Another cloud of smoke was about to obscure his aim. Greenburg had seen it too and got to one knee, getting ready in case he had to take the shot. But Mack glanced at the cloud, figured he had time, aimed fast and fired. Nobody even marked the sharp crack of the discharge, thanks to the pounding music. The bullet hit Finlay but it was hurried and what had been intended to punch a large hole in his forehead and shatter his brain had hit him lower.
He fell to the deck with a chunk of his throat splattered over the Gucci dress behind him. He was still alive, writhing, but Mack’s vision was obscured by the smoke and he couldn’t take the second shot. One of the spotters spoke urgently into his mic, telling Greenburg to hit him again.
The security guys on board were in chaos but the men on the back-up boat had heard Finlay scream through their own earpieces as he went down and they were scanning the cliffs with their night-vision goggles. One of them saw Greenburg on his knee raising his weapon and yelled in Croatian …
A sniper next to him panned fast, locked on to Greenburg and pulled. Greenburg – his own finger about to squeeze – took the round in his chest and fell, thrashing. I was closest and, knowing he was still alive, I sprinted towards him.
It was breaking all the rules – the priority was the mission, not the safety of the team – and I was supposed to wait for Control to shout an order. But Greenburg was lying on exposed ground and would be shot again and dead in seconds if somebody didn’t get him into cover.
Nobody knew where the hostiles were firing from, but Mack saw the danger instantly: if somebody at sea could target Greenburg, they could hit me. Screaming a warning, believing he was still obscured by the smoke, he crouched low and ran hard to intercept me and pull me to the ground. He liked me, we both worshipped in the house of blues and I think that played a part, but so did the fact that he was naturally a courageous man.
Halfway towards me the breeze ripped a hole in the smoke and the guys on the boat were very good – two bullets hit Mack just above the kidneys. But for the grace of God, it would have been me.
He dropped his rifle and went down screaming. I wheeled, got to him fast, threw my body over his and rolled with him – gunshots blasting the crumbling soil all around us – until we tumbled into the safety of a small depression. Partygoers were screaming – finally realizing that two men were shot and badly wounded – but they had no clue what was really happening, or where the shooters were located, and that made their panic even more acute.
Control had no such difficulty in pinpointing the source: he had been pacing the deck of the little cruiser when he caught sight of what he recognized as a muzzle flash through the smoke and shadows. When The Division had set out that morning, he’d had the good sense to throw on board a set of flashing blue-and-red lights, and he slammed them on the roof of the cabin and told the skipper to hit it.
The mercenaries on the back-up craft saw the fast-approaching boat with its flashing lights and immediately jumped to the logical, but incorrect, conclusion. In four different languages they yelled at the wheelman to plunge into the logjam of spectator craft, in the hope of losing themselves. They knew that, in a fair race, they wouldn’t have a chance, and the last thing any of them needed was a shoot-out with the Turkish cops.
Their boat skimmed between other boats and passed so close to two of them that it shaved paint from their hulls. The screams from their occupants told Control that the unidentified boat had fled, so he ordered the skipper to turn and head for Finlay’s mega-cruiser.
In the confusion, the flash bar allowed him to get so close to the back of the big boat he could see Finlay lying in a pool of blood. A couple of the women and a distraught crew member, believing that Control was a cop, screamed at him to get an ambulance or a Medevac chopper fast, but Control knew from the way Finlay was spasming and the big hole in his neck that they had done their job: he was in the last stages of bleeding out. He turned to his skipper and told him to get the hell out, and it was only as the supposed cop boat departed that the security chief realized he had just been face to face with the man who had ordered the hit. He didn’t care by then – his meal ticket had just been cancelled and he was already working out how to cross the frontier before the Turks took him into a room and told him to grab his ankles because the party had only just started.
Control had been listening to the reports from everybody on shore and, as his boat roared across the water, satisfied that the mission had been accomplished, he ordered the men at the base of the cliff to head fast for the jetty, where he would pick them up in three minutes. He then ordered me to go to the back-up plan.