the cab could see the flashing lights of police cars blocking the road there in front of a large nursing home.
The men looked at each other, exchanged a nod, and began chanting prayers to themselves as the driver pushed down harder on the accelerator.
* * *
• • •
In the sleeping berth of the tractor-trailer one hundred meters behind the first truck, Haz Mirza looked at the screen on his left and used the touchpad there to select ten targets. Three on the corner of Finkenstrasse and Clayallee, three more at the front guard shack of the ambassador’s residence, and four more in the park on the south side of the street.
Quickly he swung his head to the right; sweat dripped from his face, a result of how amped up he was at this moment, and he looked at the screen on the wall there. He selected ten more targets, all for the second strike of the first squadron.
This done, he heard a shout over the radio in the cab of the truck in front of the one he was riding in. “Thirty seconds!” It was the driver of the first vehicle, a Quds Force operator from Qom who had once driven moving trucks for a living and whom Mirza had personally taught how to operate a big rig in the past twenty-four hours.
The driver of Mirza’s own semi, seated next to the radio, shouted out, “Thirty seconds,” as well, but he did it into a walkie-talkie for the twelve men in the back of the second trailer.
Mirza counted off seconds in his head, from thirty to twenty, and then he pressed a command button on his laptop. With his heart pounding and his breath short, he continued counting down towards zero.
* * *
• • •
One hundred twenty meters above Finkenstrasse, the first squadron of Kargu drones had been hovering twenty meters apart in a rectangular pattern. Upon receiving their terminal attack orders from the satellite uplink, ten of their number dipped and then dove in various directions.
The local police officers charged with the Clayallee checkpoint had just let a Range Rover carrying the ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo through, and the eight officers leaned back against their vehicles and resumed their conversation about an upcoming Hertha Berlin soccer match a couple of the men had tickets to.
But not for long. A few seconds after the Range Rover drove off, one of their number pointed south on Clayallee. “Guck mal!” Look!
A semi-tractor-trailer approached at high speed; the light traffic swerved out of the way as the truck’s massive headlights bore down, blasting into rearview mirrors. One hundred meters behind it, an identical truck approached.
One of the cops reached for his radio while others hefted guns, but three seconds later all eyes turned away from the pair of big rigs and up instead into the dark sky. A whining sound came out of nowhere, grew and grew, and one man instinctively fired his Mossberg shotgun into the air at the origin of the sound.
The buckshot missed the streaking Kargu by several meters; then the device’s warhead self-detonated when it was five meters above the collection of police cars and police officers, and it sent shrapnel straight down onto the group of men and women.
One hundred pellets roughly the size of buckshot tore into bodies, killing some outright, but then a second and then a third device followed the first one.
The second device was antipersonnel, just like the first, but the third was high explosive. It did not detonate in the air; instead it slammed into one of the police cars, igniting the gas tank and causing the vehicles so close together to erupt into fire.
* * *
• • •
“That’s not good,” Hightower said into his earpiece.
Everyone had heard something, even over the music from a string quartet and the conversation about the art throughout the house. To the trained ears of the Poison Apple unit, it sounded like a gunshot an instant before a series of three explosions in quick succession. Court started to run after Zoya, but he saw she had already approached the Russian ambassador’s party and was moving them down a side hallway, presumably towards shelter.
Court himself began running through the living room towards the main gallery, but he only made it a couple of steps before more explosions, closer than the first ones, rocked the night.
* * *
• • •
The first tractor-trailer slowed on screeching tires before making the ninety-degree turn to the right. The neophyte