“You talking from experience?” Aaron quipped.
Ethan thrust the binoculars at Aaron. “Shut up and take a look at these guys, will you. Who do you think they are? IDF?”
Aaron took the binoculars and focused them down onto their target area. He frowned.
“Nah, they’re not Israeli Defense Force,” Aaron said after a moment’s careful observation. “I don’t see the Spanish government letting Israel bring in their own troops just to guard or move a prisoner.”
“Who then?” Ethan asked.
“My best guess,” Aaron said, “is that the Mossad have struck some deal with the local Catalan government. Hired out for some of the Grupo Especial de Operaciones guys––GEO.”
“GEO?” William asked.
Aaron shrugged. “SWAT equivalent.”
There was the sound of a car door being closed carefully nearby followed by footsteps crunching over gravel. It was Huntsman, returning after a quick circuitous recce around the compound.
“They’re GEO,” Huntsman said, surprising Ethan by speaking with an unmistakable Australian twang. “I didn’t get out because I knew we were time sensitive, but I made it six men strung around the perimeter––all set close to main entrances. Maybe figure for two others on relief duty. Wouldn’t have a bloody clue about inside. Pretty thin really––bloody anorexic––but maybe the Catalan government had no more to spare, what with this flu going about.”
“Or, maybe, there are more inside, and the Kidon just don’t want to attract too much attention,” Aaron said. “Nothing screams that I’ve got something to hide or worth taking like an army of security.”
“Whatever the numbers,” William grunted, “we’re runnin’ out of time. They’ll be movin’ Maelstrom soon if they think that that fake deal is still on the table. I suggest we don’t go loud until we have to.”
Ethan cursed. “Why did they have to go and drag in the local cops?”
Aaron grunted. “It’s the Mossad, man. They don’t give a shit. Anything to get the job done.”
“Whoever they are,” William said, “I’d say we’re going to be about as welcome as an outhouse breeze.”
Ethan nodded. “I’d say you’re right.” He puffed out his cheeks and looked the two men over carefully, then glanced up at Huntsman who crouched nearby. The man held a Beretta M9A3 handgun at the ready, and kept watch on their immediate area.
“You sure he’s all right?” Ethan asked quietly. “I don’t want anybody on our side dying tonight.”
“You just worry about yourself, mate,” Huntsman said without looking away from the compound. His was the inimitable, casual tone of voice that seemed to be unique to Antipodeans.
Ethan turned a quizzical eye on Aaron. “Where did you say you picked this guy up from?”
Aaron grinned. “He’s former Australian SAS. Don’t you worry about him; he’ll pull his weight.”
Huntsman finally looked over at Ethan and gave him a wink. “Your friend is a smart bloke, mate, you should listen to him.”
Ethan smiled. He liked the Australian’s style. “Well, all right, then. Let’s get suited and booted, gentlemen.”
When they were back at the Nissan Patrol, parked in the shadow of a tower of abandoned shipping containers, Aaron swung up the trunk lid.
“Well, if that ain’t a sight to make a man as happy as a clam at high tide, I don’t know what is,” William said admiringly.
The large open trunk was piled with weaponry: a stack of rifles to one side, an old wine box filled with an assortment of handguns, loose packets of various ammunition; body-armor and webbing were tied together with a bungee cord. There was even a shopping bag full of different grenades.
“Nice to see all that good BCT advice from our Fort Jackson days, about keeping your gear organized and in good order, stuck with you,” Ethan remarked sarcastically. BCT stood for Basic Combat Training.
“I didn’t pack the vehicle,” Aaron said.
“Bloody hell, I didn’t realize you boys wanted everything alphabetized and arranged in size,” Huntsman said drily. He leaned forward and picked up the Carrefour grocery bag and pulled out a couple of black grenades encircled with a yellow stripe. Ethan recognized them at once as MK3A2 concussion grenades, designed to produce causalities in close quarter combat while minimizing the danger to friendly personnel. It was the shockwave that made them so uniquely effective––anyone within two meters was in for a very bad day. They were popular with troops breaching bunkers, buildings or other fortified positions.
“You got anymore of those things?” Ethan asked.
Huntsman tossed him the bag.
All four men loaded up with at least a pair of M84 flash-bangs, as well as a selection of M67 fragmentation grenades and AN-M83 white smoke grenades.
“What’s that you’re pocketing there, Death Adder?” Ethan asked William, watching the Texan attach a gray grenade with purple markings to his webbing.
“Incendiary,” William replied. “Just in case.”
William pulled out one of the pistols from the old wine box and whistled softly to himself. He turned a gaze of mingled respect and surprise on Huntsman. “You packed this?”
“Yeah, mate,” Huntsman replied, as he checked the spare assault rifle magazines he was slipping into his assault webbing. “You like that, do you?”
“A Dan Wesson Bruin? Hell yeah I like it!”
“Well, chuck it in your holster, mate. You won’t get much better when it comes to stopping power than that beauty. She’s a bloody ripper. That there takes ten-mil ammunition. I put a six-inch barrel on it too so the bullet gets a little more time to stabilize. Adds to the accuracy. A bloke knows when he’s been hit with one of those, trust me. Only thing is she only takes eight in the box and one in the pipe.”
William ejected the magazine, racked the slide a few times, then slapped the magazine back into the mag well and slipped the handgun into his holster.
Ethan picked out a FN FNX-45 Tactical for his sidearm and a Heckler & Koch G3 for his main battle rifle. Alongside this he wore the standard DIA issue body armor––type 3A protection, with SAPI pockets fitted with steel-coated ceramic plates––a pair of Gatorz safety glasses and a Gerber StrongArm Fine Edge combat knife.
“Any chance of some ear-plugs, Huntsman?” Ethan asked, poking through a bag of miscellaneous equipment. “If we’re fighting indoors things are going to get loud, and I have tinnitus bad enough as it is.”
The Australian soldier snapped his fingers. “Knew there was something else.” He walked round to the front of the Patrol and pulled another bag from under the front seat. “Got a bunch of different SOCOM suppressors for you lads to choose from, as well as these little beauties.”
He held his open palm out to William and Ethan. In it were, what looked like, two standard military communications earpieces.
“I think I’ve seen these before,” William said, taking the earpieces. “Ain’t ever worn them though.”
“They’re Invisio TCAPS earpieces,” Huntsman explained, answering Ethan’s questioning look. “Plug ‘em into your usual comms set and use them to talk to one another, no worries. What makes them cost a couple of grand a pop though, is the way that the tech inside them recognizes high-decibel sounds and reduces them to normal frequency, while picking up low-decibel sounds and amplifying them.”
“In a nutshell; you can hear radio chatter in the middle of a gunfight and, at the same time, not go deaf when shooting in tight spaces?” Ethan asked.
Huntsman nodded as he attached a suppressor to the barrel of his FAMAS. “Someone give this bloke a bloody PhD.”
Ethan didn’t need to be sold any more on that. He took a headset and a suppressor and affixed both to his loadout.
The other three men were similarly attired: assault rifles, pistols––along with plenty of spare ammunition for both––and knives for the going on the offensive, bulletproof vests, ballistic glasses and TurtleSkin utility gloves, which were resistant to pu
nctures and cuts, for protection.
“Hey, Huntsman, what are these doohickeys?” William asked. He held up something that looked a little like a handheld flare, except thinner and shorter; a cylinder a foot long and weighing about a pound.
“A, that’s a new bit of gear I picked up a while back. Bloody handy for having in the toolkit, boys,” Huntsman replied.
“Yeah, but what is it?” William pressed. He tossed one each to Ethan and Aaron.
“A thermal breach,” the Australian said. “You crack it and light it like a flare and then you get a flame that burns at a little over five-thousand degrees for twenty to twenty-three seconds.”
“No shit?” William said.
“I wouldn’t lie to you, big fella,” Huntsman said, grinning.
William held the little black stick between his gloved fingers. It looked particularly dainty in his big paw. “And it works?”
Huntsman nodded. “Goes through basically everything but tungsten steel. It’s bloody good for getting through padlocks, standard doors, chains and that sort of thing. Everything an enemy might rig up in a combat situation to slow you down.”
William nodded and slipped the Breachpen into a pocket of his webbing. “You ever cooked a prawn on the barbie with it?”
Without missing a beat, Huntsman replied, “Yeah, mate, whipped up a surf’n’turf with it the other night for a date I had over. You’ll have to ask your mum all about it.”
Aaron stuck his fist in his mouth and made a show of biting down on it.
“That’s low, man,” William said, though he was smiling. “So low, I couldn’t put a rug under it.”
Huntsman held up his hands, taking one palm off the grip of the French-made FAMAS assault rifle he had slung from his assault harness.
“Hey, mate, don’t blame me that your dear old mum’s got more curves than a bloody barrel of snakes.”
Aaron laughed. “Damn, Death Adder, we might have someone who knocks you from your perch as the DIA’s biggest shit-talker.”
“He’d be lucky,” the Texan retorted.
Ethan could feel the testosterone mounting up, as it often did before a firefight.
“All right,” he said, “that’s enough. Let’s get our heads on straight and do a comms check.”
After going over their own and each other’s gear once last time, the four DIA contractors gathered around into a loose circle.
“This is strictly off books,” Ethan said. “As we’re already black-ops, I’d say that it’s so far off the books that those particular tomes are still sitting in a forest somewhere with leaves all over them.”
Aaron snorted.
Ethan looked about at the three others: men who were unhesitatingly prepared to risk their lives to save one of their own.
“Only two rules today, guys,” he said. “We get Bretta out. Dead or alive, she’s coming home. That’s the first rule. Second, I don’t want to have to deal with any expectants today, okay?” Ethan shook his head emphatically––expectant was a tactful term that soldiers used when talking of a casualty that was not expected to survive. “Don’t anybody get dead today, got it?”
William, always unable to hold his tongue in moments of solemn contemplation, said, “Shit, I don’t know about any of you good old boys, but ain’t thinkin’ of tradin’ in my AK for a harp just yet.” He held up the AK63DS he’d pulled from the back of the Patrol and gave it a little shake.
“Good,” Ethan commented. “I guess we’ve said all we need to. We divide into pairs. You two have worked together before.” He pointed at Huntsman and Aaron. “So Death Adder and I will pair up.” He sighed heavily. “I’ve got nothing for you with regards to the layout of the structure, or where Maelstrom might be located. This means we’re going to have to infiltrate and then systematically clear the factory. We’re all meat-eaters––this is what we do. Things are going to get kinetic without a doubt. Remember, as far as those GEO guys are concerned, they haven’t ever seen the likes of you. I want you to teach them the meaning of pucker factor. Copy?”
“Copy,” the other three men repeated.
“Any questions?” Ethan asked.
“Yeah, where are we entering?” Aaron asked, triple-checking that he had a round nestled cozily in the firing chamber of his Heckler & Koch G41.
Ethan shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, really. How about you two take a door at the rear, we’ll head in through the front?”
“Done,” Huntsman said.
“Okay,” Ethan said, “let’s get in the truck, drive as close as we can, and then get in there and find Maelstrom.”
He didn’t mention the fact that there were still three lethal Kidon somewhere within that collection of buildings. He didn’t need to.
Keep them in the forefront of your mind, Ethan told himself, if you want to keep the forefront of your mind safely in your skull.
They piled into the Nissan Patrol and took off, blending in with the traffic of the still bustling port.
26
Ethan and William crawled carefully and slowly under the rusted-out semi-trailer that had been parked and left to rot in front of what proved to be an abandoned and neglected cement factory. The light was failing. The sky deepening at the zenith to an almost mauve color while, towards the western horizon, it was diffused with a light salmon orange as the sun prepared to call it a day.
The fact that there was a constant, perpetuating background din in the Zona Franca––a sort of elevator music made up of the crash and screech of tortured metal, the ringing of hammers, the clamor of men yelling at each other over a plethora of power-tools––had helped them in their approach of the target building. Now, the two of them lay, moving carefully through the refuse under the hulk of the semi-trailer, towards the GEO guard that stood between them and the nearest point of entry to the main building.
The man was leaning against the trailer, quite at ease, facing away from the two DIA operatives. Ethan could smell the beguiling and vaguely comforting scent of burning tobacco––a scent that never failed to remind him of his grandfather.
Jesus, he thought. This is the sort of scenario that comes back to haunt a man. Comes back in the form of nightmares to stalk you when you’re at your most venerable.
He pushed away these thoughts; the thought that this guy probably had a family waiting for him, the thought that he had taken this job because he had been assigned it by a commanding officer who was only taking orders in turn, the thought that he probably wasn’t even getting paid extra for this.
The only thing that matters is that he is holding a gun and that he would use that gun on you if he saw you, he told himself.
He and William were close enough to make out the ash as it dropped from the invisible cigarette and floated to the ground at the guard’s booted feet. Close enough to hear the man humming to himself.
Ethan quietly pushed his handgun back into its holster and slid out the seven-inch combat knife from its sheath. He nodded at William. The Texan put his own pistol away and crawled up next to Ethan. Then, on Ethan’s sign, both of them grabbed one of the guard’s ankle each and yanked it backwards as hard as they were able.
The GEO guard was taken so unawares that he didn’t even make a sound as his legs were ripped from under him. He landed hard on his front, his helmeted head striking the concrete with brain-scrambling force.
Ethan dimly noted that the man still had his half-smoked cigarette clutched between his fingers.
In the same movement they had taken the man’s legs from under him, Ethan and William dragged him under the cover of the semi-trailer, out of sight of anyone who might have been watching. In the next instance, Ethan raised his hand and brought the butt of his knife down hard into the base of the man’s skull, just below the rim of his helmet.
Instantly, the GEO officer went as limp as if he’d been boned.
William raised a silent eyebrow at Ethan. “No killing blow? You’re gettin’ soft in your old age.”
“You got your du
ct tape?” Ethan hissed back, busying himself with flexi-cuffing the man’s ankles to the rusted axle of the semi-trailer, and his wrists behind his back.
“Never leave home without it,” William muttered.
“Well, you just gag him then, all right? This guy’s out of the fight.”
“You’re going to shoot them if they shoot at you though, right?” William asked.
Ethan gave William a look that would have reduced a lesser man to red mist.
“Just checkin’,” William said defensively, as he wrapped the black duct tape around the man’s mouth and eyes.
Ethan turned back to survey the compound that was visible in front of them, while William finished trussing the guard and covered him with some soggy cardboard and other detritus.
“Constrictor, Huntsman, what’s your status?” he said quietly into his comms set.
The only answer he received was a deliberate and slow double-click, which told him the other two couldn’t talk at that moment.
“Do we go?” William asked.
Ethan shook his head. “Hold for their update.”
On the other side of the building Aaron and Huntsman crouched behind a forklift. For the past ninety seconds, Aaron had been watching a GEO officer walk up and down the same stretch of ground in front of a promising-looking loading bay. The man’s route took him directly across the quickest path from the forklift to the loading bay doors; moving from an overflowing dumpster to a miscellaneous pile of broken debris and back again, like a very sedate Ping-Pong ball. At each end of this run, he would turn and take a few moments to scan his beat before turning around once more.
A tap on his shoulder made him turn around. Huntsman was looking at him, holding a discarded electrical extension cord in his hand. He bent forward and whispered a few words into Aaron’s ear.
“All right,” Aaron said, “let’s do it.”
Using the extensive cover, as well as the deepening shadows available to them in the yard, the two operatives skirted carefully but quickly to the garbage bin that marked one end of the guardsman’s route. Once there, they crouched like a couple of patient spiders, listening to the crunch and scuff of the man’s approaching footfalls.
Boiling Point (An Ethan Galaal Thriller Book 4) Page 23