Bretta stumbled backwards with the inertia of the throw and let out an oomph as she ran up against the brick wall behind her. It was only then that she realized she had come away holding Mia’s Glock 20 in her hands. She pointed it at Mia, intent on at least expunging one of the Kidon from the world.
In front of her the scene seemed to have frozen into a sort of tableau, with guards scrambling in the direction of the gunfire, Celeste yelling something unintelligible in Spanish, Mia rolling to her feet with a speed that gave the impression that the air had turned to molasses, and Bedouin––
The brickwork a foot to the right of her head exploded, sending splintering stone shards scything across the side of her face, neck and forehead like shrapnel.
Bretta reeled away, understanding at once that Bedouin, of all the people in the room, had been the only one not focusing on the sounds of the distant gun battle. Instead, he had drawn a hasty bead on her and tried to take her out.
Clearly, he thinks this distraction is the same as what I hope it is: the fucking cavalry.
Driven by Bedouin’s incoming fire, Bretta lurched backward through the doors she had recently come through. She squeezed off a couple of desultory shots in Mia’s direction, but she had been half-blinded by brick dust.
Her feet went out from under as she crashed haphazardly through the double doors, and she hit the deck. Gunfire raked over her head, showering her with plaster dust, splinters of wood, and stone fragments from the corridor walls.
“Fuuuuck you too!” Bretta roared, firing recklessly back.
She managed to kick the doors closed, stared wildly around and saw a fire hose lolling on its metal reel next to an extinguisher and an axe in a cabinet fronted with safety glass. She grabbed the hose and frantically started to loop it through the heavy metal door handles, round and round and round. She had half the hose wrapped through the handles before the door was given an exploratory shake. Bretta continued to feed more hose through, the polyester and synthetic rubber of the hose providing more strength than any single person was capable of breaking through.
They’re going to have to drive the van through it. Or breach it with C-4.
At the thought of explosives, she hauled herself to her feet. With her Glock raised, she retreated down the corridor. She alternated her aim between the doors and the bend behind her, knowing that there could be others coming upon her position in an attempt to outflank her.
She reached the bend and peered past. Clear. Just before she ducked around it, she heard a body thump into the double doors and then the sound of a woman––Bretta thought happily that it was most likely Mia––cursing in Hebrew.
Bretta took a moment to catch her breath and assess her circumstances. They were, in a word, improved. Sure, she might not have had any idea where she was or the layout of the building, but she was free of the Kidon for the moment, and she could still hear distant gunfire, a sign that, she hoped, help was arriving. Oh, and she had a weapon.
Bretta ejected the magazine from the Glock and thumbed out the remaining bullets. She racked the slide and freed the round in the pipe. Nine bullets nestled in the palm of her hand. With a deftness and speed born of much practice, she reloaded the weapon and made sure it was ready to fire. Then, not knowing what else to do, she started making her way through the building, intent on getting as far away from the Kidon as she could and, hopefully, finding an exit.
Her body began to hurt as the initial burst of adrenalin subsided, but she mentally shoved aside the pain. It was, at that moment, a choice between ignoring the bills being presented to her by her body and hopefully paying them back with interest later, or being caught and killed.
And that was really no choice at all.
28
Ethan’s first shot went slightly high of his target, the 7.62mm NATO round punching into the wall at 800 meters per second to leave a nice, neat hole in the plasterboard. The second round found its mark, hitting one of the GEO officers in the shoulder. The force of the bullet spun the man like a top, sending him crashing back against the wall with a howl of shock and pain.
The man scrambled hurriedly back around the corner in an instinctive attempt to get away from the fire. His fellow did the same, but as he retreated he let loose a panicked burst of fire from his P-90.
Bullets sprayed out indiscriminately, peppering the opposite wall Ethan and William were pressed against. Ethan had been braced for the high-pitched ringing whine of his tinnitus kicking in, what with unsuppressed gunfire in such confined quarters, but instead he was left marveling at his TCAPS headset’s ability to deaden the sound.
“That you ringing the front doorbell, Copperhead?” Aaron’s voice came through his earpiece.
“Affirmative, we have contact,” Ethan replied.
Now that they had officially announced themselves, Ethan knew that time was no longer on their side. They had to find Bretta as quickly as possible.
William stood up, leaned from cover and returned fire systematically. His AK kicked in his hand as he unleashed half a dozen rounds, clustering them at the spot behind which the men hid. It was a common misconception that being behind a wall offered automatic protection. A brick wall? Sure. Cinderblocks or sandbags? Certainly. But internal plasterboard walls? Nope… protecting against bullets wasn’t a regulation that had to be satisfied by commercial builders in Spain.
William’s rounds went through both walls like they were made of paper. There was a dull thump and then quiet. Ethan moved up, fired at the same corner, and saw the crimson spray up the wall across from it.
When he reached the corner, Ethan found one man collapsed with a bullet in the neck. The other rested pale-faced on the floor, clutching his shattered arm. Ethan stepped over him and covered the hallway while William came up behind him.
“Encuentra un lugar para esconderte y quedarte allí si quieres volver a ver a tu familia! Esta no es tu pelea!” William yelled in the injured man’s face. He pressed the hot muzzle of his gun into the man’s cheek to emphasize his point and the man jabbered and nodded his head.
“What did you say?” Ethan asked over his shoulder.
“Just that this ain’t his fight. Ain’t worth dyin’ today.” William knelt down and secured the wounded man’s feet with flexcuffs, then wrenched his arms behind his back ––causing him to squeal in agony––and fastened those.
“Copperhead and Death Adder are Oscar Mike,” he informed his companions as he and William moved on.
“Copy that, Copperhead,” Aaron replied over the comm.
He and Huntsman had made their way through the pitch-black of the unlit loading bay and were now in some sort of storage area. It was stacked with abandoned boxes of nails, bags of sand, cans of powdered milk and other miscellaneous supplies that the owners of the factory had clearly not thought worth packing when they’d left.
The pair passed a swinging door and found themselves in a large canteen area, currently empty.
Huntsman took the lead and started to pace down the length of the long stainless-steel hooded worktop that must have once been the serving counter.
There was a not so distant crash of a door against a wall, the hurried footsteps of multiple people clattering down a nearby corridor and then three GEO officers hurtled through a set of doors on the far side of the room. They were chattering excitedly in Catalan, their weapons held ready in their gloved hands.
Hesitation did not play a prominent role in a spec-ops soldier’s life, not if they wanted to make it home in something other than a pine box. Aaron’s first round took one of the men through the chest, just as the party spied the two contractors. Whether or not the bullet penetrated the man’s level IV body armor Aaron didn’t have a chance to ascertain.
Sparks erupted across the steel counter as the enemy returned fire, the clatter of their MP5s resounding off the bare walls, Formica tables and steel serving counter like the cackle of a thousand bloodthirsty demons.
Aaron stuck his G41 over the edge of the cou
nter and fired off a few shots that did nothing more than shatter and knock over a couple of the spindly plastic chairs grouped around each table. Huntsman did the same: he flicked his FAMAS to full auto and sprayed a couple of bursts around the room, blowing out a section of the strip lighting overhead and causing the two GEO officers still on their feet to duck into whatever cover was available to them.
“I’ve got no line of sight!” Aaron yelled over the roaring chaos.
He glanced at Huntsman, who nodded and pulled the pin on one of his concussion grenades and lobbed it across the room.
Aaron didn’t hear the sound of the grenade bouncing off anything and he had no idea whether or not the GEO officers saw it in the flickering, confusing illumination of the damaged lighting system. There was a pause of a few seconds, where Huntsman and Aaron hunkered down against the serving counter as tightly as they could, making sure that their mouths were open so that any shockwave reflection didn’t burst their eardrums.
Then the grenade went off with an extremely loud but brief pop. Even with the counter acting as a deflective barrier, Aaron felt the shockwave of the concussion grenade as it detonated and washed over him.
All the remaining lights exploded under the sudden wave of overpressure; cheap furniture was flung in all directions and there was a loud crashing sound as something heavy smashed brutally into the stainless-steel counter.
Then, silence.
Aaron waited a moment or two for things to settle, then cautiously rose to his knees. The only light came from an adjoining corridor—the door that led to it hung off its hinges into the canteen.
Aaron, looking at Huntsman, counted to three on his fingers, then the two men peered over the edge of the counter and surveyed the carnage down their rifle barrels.
The room looked as if a localized tornado had gone through it. It was clear where the grenade had gone off: chairs and tables had been obliterated within a couple of meters around the detonation site, with the rest of the furniture scattered around the room. The three GEO men lay motionless on the floor. The man nearest the set of doors was surrounded by a puddle of blood, showing that Huntsman’s round had well and truly penetrated his body armor. The other two men had not a mark on them, but both were dead.
Aaron always found this remarkable, no matter how often he saw it. He still remembered the concise way in which his instructor had explained the effect of a shockwave on the human body to him during his basic training. The man had produced an orange from his pocket and held it up to the group. Then he had pummeled it a few times with his brawny fist and held it up again.
“You’ll notice that the skin isn’t broken, gentlemen!” he bellowed in his parade ground voice. “Nothing out of the ordinary externally.”
Then he peeled a segment of the skin off to show the pulped and busted fruit inside.
“Such are your innards if you get caught too close to a concussion grenade, gentlemen!” the instructing officer had roared. “Make a note!”
A key thing, when fleeing something, was to at least know in what direction safety lay.
Bretta was becoming more and more aware of this fact the further she penetrated into the winding corridors of the industrial building. All the hallways and rooms seemed to be almost completely identical. She had no idea what floor she was on. Judging by the van, she was inclined to believe ground floor, but there was no reason why there couldn’t be loading ramps or freight elevators capable of moving vehicles between floors.
Pistol raised in front of her, listening for the slightest out of the ordinary sound, she hurried through the myriad hallways as fast as she was able. The more she wound her way through the snaking corridors, the more her mind became divided.
If I head towards the gunfire, I head towards help, and the exit. Otherwise, I might as well hole up in a janitor’s closet somewhere.
The second option didn’t compute on so many levels with Bretta that she didn’t spare a moment to entertain it. If Ethan and William were out there risking their lives to rescue her, then she wasn’t going to hide in some broom closet somewhere. She’d rather die.
By chance she found herself at an interior stairwell and decided to take the ascending flight. She went up the stairs as quickly as she was able, and was three steps from the top of the staircase and about to turn the corner to the next flight––
––when she ran straight into two of the men she’d taken to be either mercenaries or IDF.
She made a note of the G.E.O acronym on the label affixed to the first man’s body armor before her ingrained survival training kicked in. She put a pistol round through the top of the surprised man’s kneecap, straight through the tendon that connected his quadriceps to his patella.
She lowered a shoulder and the screaming man, powered by his own impetus, went over her back and down the stairs. The man following almost got his gun pointed at Bretta before another one of her eight remaining bullets hit him in the groin. He screamed in turn, but was quickly silenced by a follow-up round that took him through the throat, sending a gout of blood across the floor. He performed a lazy spin, which Bretta dodged, as he fell down the stairs.
Bretta considered going back for the man’s P-90, but only for the second it took her to glance over her shoulder: she spotted the first man aiming his Commando assault rifle in her direction.
She flung herself around the corner of the stairwell and crawled up the stairs as 5.56mm bullets obliterated the walls, sending dust and debris raining down on her.
She barged through the doorway the led off from the stairwell. Abruptly, she found herself free of the confines of the hallways she seemed to have been bumbling around for hours, and stood now in a vast space. It opened wide around and above her, it also dropped away far below.
Bretta hated to leave a man alive behind her, but hoped she wasn’t going to be heading back the way she had come; besides, the GEO guy would be more worried about the hole in his leg than dragging himself after her.
Bretta’s ears, ringing painfully from the gunfire in the stairwell, were suddenly filled by the sporadic clatter and bark of small arms fire. Below her, a running gun fight was raging. She saw a few of the navy-clad GEO officers exchanging fire with two figures sporting assault rifles. Even from her elevated vantage point some five stories above the ground, Bretta recognized the scarily efficient movements of Ethan Galaal and William Hest.
She realized she was standing on a gantry ringing the silo filed room below. Motion drew her gaze to a man holding a SAKO TRG M-10 bolt-action rifle at the opposite side of the gantry. He was all of twenty-five meters distant from her along the suspended walkway, and looked as if he was trying to figure out whether or not she was a friendly or not. He was paused in the very act of aiming down at the two members of her team as they took cover behind a long conveyor belt.
It’s my all-black clothes that Mia gave me. He’s not sure if I’m Kidon.
It was a longshot––both figuratively and literally––with a pistol but, thanks to Sam’s exhaustive training, Bretta was somewhat of a long-range specialist when it came to shooting handguns.
Capitalizing on the sniper’s momentary confusion, she dropped to one knee and sighted along the Glock 20’s adjustable polymer sights.
Both eyes open, focus on the front sight, breathing steady and natural.
A grin tickled the corner of her mouth as she heard her thoughts spoken in Sam’s no-nonsense voice.
And squeeze the trigger so slowly that the shot breaking almost surprises you. Almost.
The Glock bucked in her hand.
Don’t release the trigger too early. Don’t jerk. If you’re firing again, feel the trigger reset and go from there––don’t start again from the beginning of the trigger action.
Bretta fired again. And again. And again. She didn’t even pay heed to whether she had hit her target until after she had fired for the fourth time.
The sniper staggered like a drunk against the railing, the rifle dropping from his hand.
Unbalanced, he leaned heavily against the balustrade, clawed feebly at his chest and then toppled over the side of the rail without a sound.
29
It was safe to say that the man falling out of the darkness of the rafters caught everyone by surprise, not only Ethan. With a sickening, meaty thud, the GEO officer smacked down onto the solid concrete of the factory floor; one of his legs twisted grotesquely back the wrong way at the knee, his helmeted head caved in at the back.
Ethan and William exchanged a look, glanced up at the invisible gantry and then went back to work. They were swapping fire with three GEO guards and in something of a stalemate, with each group of men peppering the other with enough bullets to ensure they remained pinned.
“Constrictor, Huntsman, position,” Ethan said.
“We’re pinned on the east flank,” Aaron replied. “Coming as quickly as we can.”
So neither were on top of the gantry…
“See any sign of the Kidon?” Ethan asked William as he ejected a spent mag from his G3 rifle and slotted in a fresh one.
“Negative,” William said, ducking his head reflexively as a strafing burst of automatic submachine gun fire snapped and pinged across the top of the conveyor belt. “And that shit makes me uneasy.”
“Likewise.” Ethan squeezed off a careful shot at one of the GEO officers, forcing the man back behind the pallet of cement bags he was using as cover.
“Nothing over here as well,” Aaron said over the comm.
Ethan fired off another couple of shots. “We can’t get bogged down here, damn it!”
William peered out, his AK pointing from one target to another as they peeked from behind their respective covers.
“Goddamn, they’re dug in like ticks all right,” he said over the sharps cracks of his weapon. “We can keep ‘em pinned, but a clean shot…?” He fired off three more shots, the shell casings glinting like fireflies as they spun away. “No, sir.”
Boiling Point (An Ethan Galaal Thriller Book 4) Page 25