Seal Team Six Hunt the Wolf(83)

“Good work.”

Crocker took the narrow metal steps two at a time, feeling the burden of responsibility to his men—all brave and willing to give their lives.

Volleys of automatic-weapon fire echoed through the stairway. Spotting a still body on the floor of the passageway of deck two, he gritted his teeth and prayed that it wasn’t Ritchie or Mancini. Taking a step closer, he saw a bearded face and expectant eyes—waiting for a dozen beautiful virgins, no doubt.

Acrid gray smoke poured out of a cabin behind the corpse. He heard someone calling out in Arabic from a higher deck.

Shielding his eyes, Crocker stepped inside the cabin and saw that it had been a lounge of some sort. A game console was in one corner, a small flat-screen TV on the far wall, a couple of old leather armchairs. There was also a box of nine-millimeter ammunition, shells scattered across the floor, and shards of glass everywhere.

All he could hear was the crackle of something burning inside, so he backed out quickly and hurried up to deck three.

The balcony there was a mess: pools of blood, part of an arm with a hand attached, flames shooting out of the cabins, walls blackened and pitted from an explosion.

The smoke blinded him and burned his throat. The metal under his feet was so hot that the soles of his boots started to melt.

Shielding his eyes with his arm, he was halfway up to deck four when he was deafened for a moment by an explosion. Then, without warning, someone running down the smoke-filled stairway crashed into him chest to chest, as had happened to him one of the few times he’d played rugby.

Crocker went down hard and quickly tried to pull himself up. Got partway when he blacked out, the wind knocked out of him.

He came to seconds later and reached for his weapon, which he couldn’t locate. His hands were seared by the hot metal.

Fuck!

He was getting to his feet unsteadily when the other man hurled himself on top of him. Had him in a headlock before Crocker could react.

The two men grappled in the narrow smoky stairway.

Impossible to see and difficult—painful, even—to breathe.

The man squeezed Crocker’s throat with one arm and reached for something with his other hand. A knife, most likely.

The American had no room to maneuver, and the metal through the back of his shirt was hot. His right arm pinned against the wall, his left grabbed the terrorist’s hair and twisted his head hard.

The man growled and swore in Arabic.

“Fuck you, too!”

He brought his knee up into the terrorist’s crotch. And again. And one more time, with vigor, until the bearded man groaned and loosened his lock on Crocker’s neck.

He pulled free. But a big intake of smoke-filled air clouded his head, and immediately the terrorist swung his right arm and Crocker felt a burning sensation travel along the top of his bicep.

Motherfucker!

The pain from the cut brought a tremendous surge of energy, which Crocker directed into his free left hand, which moved up the man’s chest to his beard. Grasping the mesh of whiskers, with all the force he could muster he shoved the man’s head back until it smashed into the wall of the stairway with the dull echo of a hammer.

The man struggled to raise his knife.

Crocker bashed his head into the metal wall one more time, harder. Then a third, until he heard the skull crack and the knife clatter down the metal stairs. He felt the fight drain out of him.

Round one. Or two. Or three, four, or five. He’d lost count.

His head spinning from the combat and the smoke, Crocker kicked the groaning man in the chest, then stepped over him and relieved him of the nine-millimeter pistol stuck in his belt. Crocker’s own MP5 had slid down the stairs when the men collided. There was no time to look for it now.

Pushing through the dense smoke and stepping over another body, he arrived on the top deck—the bridge. His lungs and chest burning. Blood from the cut across his bicep spilling down his arm.

He tore off a piece of his shirt and made a field tourniquet, tightening it around the top of his arm until the bleeding stopped. He figured he had a couple of minutes at best before he passed out from the smoke or loss of blood.

Righting himself against a metal doorway, he seared his left palm again.

Men were grunting and struggling nearby. Through the smoke he recognized the back of Mancini’s square head. Then the side of a stubble-covered face, the whites of someone’s eyes.

In a little oval window of visibility, he saw Mancini and a terrorist locked nose to nose, knife blades glistening, eyes bulging. Mancini shoved the terrorist against a dark blue instrument panel. Then his feet slipped out from under him and the two men fell.

Knives clattered across the floor.

Crocker lost the two men in the smoke.

“Mancini? Where are you?” His heart beating desperately.