Two…one…
The M84 went off with a noise like a firework exploding.
Ethan sprinted towards where Bretta was waving at him and holding a door open. He rushed through it and she followed.
“That won’t hold them up for long,” Ethan said. “Can’t say for sure that I even incapacitated any of them, but it should make them tread a little more carefully. We came up two floors, so we need to get down two. Move!”
They jogged down the corridor, William on drag. Ethan’s head throbbed with built-up, unreleased body heat beneath the balaclava.
The Imam Hossein was about as tastefully decorated as most universities, with the interior decor focused more on longevity and budget than aesthetically pleasing. Cheap sofas were intermittently scattered about the place, along with garbage bins, low chairs and plain coffee tables, a few plants and the occasional high study desk with accompanying uncomfortable, high stools.
Ethan’s team hurried along this main, garishly carpeted artery, ignoring the doors to either side. He kept expecting members of campus security to show, considering his team hadn’t subdued them all, but none did. Probably a good thing. For campus security, that is.
“There!” Kiana said. She was pointing ahead to where the corridor opened into a sort of miniature atrium. Two wide staircases led from this area, one up and the other down.
“Contact six!” William bellowed a moment later.
Without any verbal communication, Ethan thrust Kiana at Bretta, who grabbed her by the arm and towed her towards the stairs. Ethan turned at bay, just as William flicked his SCAR to full-auto and let loose a shriveling burst of automatic gunfire. Ethan watched the three Kidon members that he could see scatter for cover.
He didn’t hear any of the answering shots––the Israeli’s suppressed weapons not being able to be heard over the closer onslaught of William’s similarly suppressed SCAR––but he did hear the tell-tale snap and whine of rounds passing close by his head. He ducked slightly and returned fire from behind the tall stone planter with a huge example of a monster deliciosa growing in it. His shots thudded into a column behind which one of the Kidon team was taking over, sending concrete fragments flying.
“Move, Death Adder!” he ordered, as Bretta laid down some suppressive fire from where she stood at the top of the stairs.
The retreat continued. Hurried in parts and slow in others, it was a surprisingly patient game played between Ethan’s team and the Kidon, with Ethan and the other three giving up ground, laying down cover fire and moving inexorably back, down to the next floor of the Physics Research Center. The Kidon team followed, peppering them with gunfire, harrying them, waiting for one of them to slip up so they could be picked off.
The team came across a slain campus security guard on the steps, his body riddled with bullets, a testament to the take-no-prisoners entrance of the Kidon. Ethan now realized why no further guards had shown up.
Going through a double door at the end of a short corridor that led off from the bottom of the stairs they had just descended, Ethan’s team found themselves on what was clearly the laboratory level. A massive room containing eight labs, separated with walls of plate glass stretched away before them. There were four labs on the left, four on the right and a corridor running between them to a door at the far end of the room.
Not much cover, Ethan recognized, scanning the environment as he flicked another spent mag from his rifle’s magazine well and slotted a fresh one home.
“All right, we’ve got to goddamn hustle through here!” he yelled into his mic. “I’m going to make a break straight through the labs with the HVT. Then we’ll cover and move like our asses are on fire. How’s everyone for ammo?”
“Getting low,” Bretta replied. “Not black, but low.”
“Likewise,” William said.
“Going in,” Ethan told them. He grabbed Kiana by the arm once again and the pair of them sprinted down the open passage that divided the two sets of four laboratories. They barged through the set of double doors at the other end and Ethan threw Kiana unceremoniously up against the wall and spun back to face the way he had just come.
“Maelstrom, haul ass!” he yelled, his head throbbing with heat. The balaclava felt damp from his perspiration, and he was worried his ballistic safety glasses would begin fogging—the eyewear was designed to be anti-fog, but sometimes that didn’t quite hold up in the field. He was prepared to rip it off if need-be.
Bretta sprinted halfway down the room, leaving William to cover the doors into the labs himself. Then she spun and knelt, pressed up against the glass wall and trained her weapon back at the doors.
“Go, Death Adder!” she said.
William charged down the hall, while Ethan drew a bead on the door behind his comrade’s back.
As William drew level with the third lab, the door into the room exploded outwards with a force that only a breaching charge could provide. The door actually came off its hinges and smashed through the first plate-glass wall, sending glass flying in all directions; a cascade of shards that briefly obscured the view of the door.
No doubt exactly what those clever bastards intended, Ethan thought, as gunfire crackled through the smoke left by the detcord charge.
Bretta ducked left, through the lab door and into the only cover available to her: the lab itself. William did the same, but one lab down from Bretta and on the right.
The Kidon team’s automatic fire strafed both ways, following the two contractors. Plate-glass spider webbed, distorted and fell in great glittering sheets to the floor with a noise that would have woken the dead.
“Jesus Christ!” Ethan said to himself over the din. He couldn’t make out much through the bedlam of smoke and shattering glass, and he sought futilely to catch a glimpse of Bretta or William.
Three black-clad figures darted out of the wrecked doorway and Ethan fired a few shots at them, but missed. The Kidon team members took cover behind one of the solid, Bunsen burner-topped workbenches, which also doubled as storage cupboards, in the first lab. There was no sign of the fourth team member.
William emerged out of the madness, a sprinkling of glass shards caught in the webbing of his vest and even in the fibers of his balaclava. He turned to fire back at the Kidon team, but his rifle clicked on empty. Not bothering to reload, he swung the pump-action shotgun off his shoulder instead and fired twice at the Israelis taking cover behind the workbench. It just so happened that one of the Kidon had popped up to release a burst in Ethan’s direction at the same time as William fired. The figure clapped a hand to its head and fell backwards. Probably a helmet nick.
Ethan squeezed off another couple of shots, his eyes still scanning the absolute carnage to see if he could spot Bretta.
He glanced over his shoulder at William. “Which way to the goddamn parking lot?”
But Kiana was the one who answered.
“That way!” she yelled, stepping out slightly from where she was pressed against the wall, and pointing off down a long, curving hallway to the right of them.
William tried to grab her back into cover but, as his large hand closed about her arm, there were a couple of significant snapping whines, a single, dull smack and Kiana doubled over, the breath whooshing out of her as if she had been hit in the stomach with a baseball bat.
“Shit!” William said, jerking the winded woman back to him.
Ethan sprayed an indiscriminate hail of gunfire in the general direction of the enemy, the rounds pinging and sparking off the many metal surfaces, keeping the attackers pinned.
“Is she hit?” he asked.
“Yes,” William replied, but his voice was far from confident.
“She either is or she isn’t, which the hell is it?” Ethan snarled, wiping dust from his ballistics glasses as a stray bullet punched into the wall a few centimeters away from his face.
“It’s––it’s a ricochet,” William replied. “Goddamn vest took it. Hasn’t penetrated.”
“All r
ight,” Ethan said, releasing the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, “Take her and get to the car. Keep your eyes peeled for the fourth Kidon prick!”
“Copy that!” William said, knowing better than to try and convince Ethan to let him stay. He pulled Kiana from the wall and pressed a couple of spare magazines into Ethan’s chest without a word.
“I’ll wait for Bretta.” Ethan fired a long burst at one of the Kidon members that had just made a run into closer cover. More glass shattered and nearby wood was chewed to slivers under the impact of his bullets. “Go!”
William practically carried the slight young scientist down the curving corridor and disappeared around the bend.
Ethan’s job, his task, was to get Dr. Avesta out of here in one piece. But he refused to leave any member of his team behind. He would rather die than abandon Bretta. And if that happened, his death would help delay the enemy long enough for William to escape with the HVT anyway.
Ethan’s rifle darted back and forward as he tried to keep the three Kidon members pinned down.
Come on, Bretta, where are you. Wh––
Bretta crawled out of a cupboard under the workbench closest to Ethan. She’d obviously entered from the other side. Her MP5 was slung over her shoulder and her Beretta Px4 Storm pistol was in hand.
She met Ethan’s eyes, then scrambled from the cupboard while he laid down suppressive fire. She took cover against the opposite side of the door frame where Ethan resided and gulped a ragged breath.
“You think Black Swan’s going to count this as a Charlie Foxtrot?” she asked, her glacial blue eyes glinting behind the balaclava.
“She might,” Ethan said. “Now, let’s get the fu––”
A grenade bounced through the doorway, hit the opposite wall and rolled toward them.
Ethan boosted right, Bretta went left. Ethan cannoned into a bright green sofa and flipped it while Bretta sheltered behind a concrete support pillar.
Ethan made sure to keep his mouth open as the blast ripped through the enclosed space so that the concussion wave didn’t burst his eardrums. The plasterboard was torn from the sections of wall closest to the explosion––the shrapnel leaving wounds across the floor and embedding itself in the column that Bretta had sheltered behind––and the ceiling in front of the doorway collapsed inwards in a cloud of dust and debris.
Ethan’s tinnitus was ringing afresh as he rolled out from under the sofa and surveyed the wreckage. The fallen ceiling had effectively blocked the door from the laboratory and, at the same time, stopped the Kidon team’s advance.
But, it had also separated Bretta from Ethan, William and Kiana.
6
Ethan Galaal was many things, but melodramatic was not one of them. He appraised the mass of fallen blockwork and shattered two-by-fours, the broken sheets of plasterboard and the smoldering insulation, and knew that Bretta was on her own.
“Maelstrom,” he said into his throat mic, the plaster dust tickling his throat and making his voice rasp, “do you copy?”
To his delight, Bretta’s voice came back strong and clear in his ear. “I copy. No way through. I’ll have to find an alt. I’ll meet you at the exfil as soon as I can.”
“Copy that,” Ethan replied. “Good luck.”
There was nothing more to be said, and no time in which to say it.
The Kidon will be moving, flanking, finding another way. They accidentally bought us a minute or so, but not more.
He just hoped Bretta wasn’t trapped with them.
Ethan took off down the corridor, his boots thumping across the debris-strewn carpet, dust and splinters of wood and glass falling from him as he ran.
“Death Adder, sit-rep?” he said into his radio. He skidded around the corner at the end of the curving hallway, accidentally knocking over a display stand and sending copies of the university magazine all over the floor.
“We’re almost at the exfil,” came William’s curt reply.
“Any contact?” Ethan pressed.
“Negative,” William said.
“When you get to the car, I want the engine running and the HVT’s head against the floor mats, got it?” Ethan instructed. “Maelstrom and I have been separated, and I’ve a feeling we’re going to be coming out hot.”
Ethan, following the overhead signs as best he could, jogged through weaving corridors of the Physics Research Center until he found another staircase leading down to the ground floor. He rounded a corner and almost tripped over something lying in the dimly lit hall.
He looked down and saw that it was the sprawled body of another security guard. From a perfunctory glance at the brown, drying blood that had sprayed up the wall and to the ceiling, Ethan could tell his throat had been cut in the methodical manner employed by special forces soldiers: the knife had been inserted well back in the neck and jerked forward so that the carotid artery on the side of the incision and the windpipe had been severed. Death would have come quickly.
Ethan entered a gallery displaying portraits of some of the Imam Hossein University’s more distinguished alumnae. Ethan actually recognized Dr. Kiana Avesta amongst the more recent photographs.
There was another corpse a little further along in the gallery—this guard had a neat bullet hole, just off-center, in his forehead, and a not so neat exit-wound in the back of his head. His brains were strewn across the floor like some sort of macabre confetti.
Hollow point ammunition, Ethan realized grimly. Designed to cause as much damage to its target as possible, because they mushroomed on impact, increasing the axial diameter of the projectile.
Ethan’s eyes left the grizzly scene and scanned the length of the corridor he found himself in. It stretched some way before opening up into a larger space beyond.
Hopefully the exit, he thought.
He edged along the corridor, hugging one wall. His rifle barrel was pointed at the opening ahead, one ear cocked for any sound of movement behind him. Once he reached the end of the corridor, he ducked quickly out, gun levelled, finger tight on the trigger. A quick glance was all he allowed himself before ducking back into cover.
There was no sign of the Kidon, or an ambush, though he supposed the first he’d probably have known about it, had there been one, was the sting of one of those hollow points of theirs.
He risked another peak. It was an atrium, as he’d suspected; a large banana-shaped reception desk up against one wall, a scattering of lounging chairs and low tables set around some sort of esoteric sculpture in the middle of the space. The far wall was made up of huge panes of glass that looked out onto a concrete courtyard punctuated by a few small lawns. Definitely an exit. He recognized his position.
At that moment, William’s voice sounded in Ethan’s ears. “We’re at the exfil point. I repeat we are at the exfil point.”
“Copy that,” Ethan replied. “I’m headed your way now, Death Adder. Keep your eyes open: I’m inbound on your position. Try to refrain from fragging me.”
“I’ll try my best,” the Texan drawled.
Ethan hurried across the atrium, feeling horribly exposed in the cavernous space. He reached for the handle of one of the glass swing doors, pulled it open and sped across the open ground until he reached one of the small trees that stood in the middle of one of the lawns. He got into cover, then turned and peeked out. There was no sign that he had been spotted or followed.
“All right,” Ethan said, his voice little more than a whisper. “Maelstrom, I need a status update.”
He sincerely hoped his signal would penetrate through to her position from here.
Bretta padded with the grace, quiet and veiled ferocity of a hunting leopard through a lecture room. As she moved, her silenced pistol raised and leading the way, she tried to construct an image of where she was in relation to the stairs that the team had come up when they arrived. Due to the twisting, meandering layout of the university building though, it was hard to even hazard a guess at where she might find a staircase.
<
br /> She had been listening to the exchange between William and Ethan and was glad that the two of them, as well as Dr. Avesta, seemed to be free and clear of the Kidon team. She couldn’t be precisely sure however, because their words had begun to cut out, thanks to the range, and the interference instilled by the building.
Her pulse picked up slightly at the thought of the Kidon assassination team. She, more than the rest of the team, knew exactly what those men and women were capable of. After all, she had joined the Mossad at the age of twenty-two and had just started to be vetted for the Kidon program herself when she had gone rogue and been disavowed by the Israeli government. She was acutely aware what that would mean for her, were she to be captured.
She had seen three of the Kidon in the abandoned laboratory area, that meant the fourth was still somewhere out and about. Perhaps that member had remained behind to help his or her companions, or perhaps he or she had repositioned in hopes of cutting off Bretta.
She made her way carefully through a whole suite of meeting rooms, study rooms and lecture halls. Every one of her senses was strained to the utmost. The hair on the back of her neck prickled with a nervous electricity. Edging open yet another door with her toe, she found a small café or canteen. A score of empty, dark wooden tables and their accompanying chairs sat gleaming dully in the light of a few dim lamps. What captured Bretta’s attention straightaway, however, was the sight of a set of sliding automatic doors leading out onto a raised patio area filled with more tables and chairs. From this area a set of broad wooden steps led down to a small lawn.
An exit.
A voice murmured in her earpiece. Digital warping made it hard to make out, and the words cut in and out. She thought it was Ethan.
“CLIP... Maelstrom... CLIP CLIP... status.”
“I’ve got an exit in sight,” Bretta replied. “I’m not exactly sure what side of the building I’m on, but there’s a road looping around the front of it. I’m in a canteen or lunchroom or little restaurant––big glass windows and an eating area out front. If I can make it outside is there any chance of a running pickup?”
Boiling Point (An Ethan Galaal Thriller Book 4) Page 6