Seeing the target, Reaper brought down his right arm in an elbow smash, knocking Amman down and putting his lights out with a hard blow to the sixth and seventh cervical and first thoracic vertebra of his spine. The shock of the blow traveled almost directly into Amman’s nervous system, causing immediate unconsciousness. If Reaper had struck his blow with a pointed elbow on a single vertebra, Amman would have died instantly from a severed spinal cord.
The fight had only lasted a few seconds, an eternity for Bear who hadn’t been able to get a clear shot around Reaper. As Reaper recovered his MP5K, the doorway on the south wall, the one they had missed in the darkness and confusion of the sudden assault by Amman, slowly eased open. The muzzle of an M4 carbine slipped forward just an inch past the door frame and moved to center on Reaper’s back.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bear saw the movement and recognized the threat. Snapping up his Beretta, Bear fired two quick rounds into the door. The heavy steel door stopped the subsonic EBR Hush Puppy rounds, but the impact of the bullets startled Nicholas. As he tried to dodge the bullets he thought were coming through the lavatory door, Nicholas pulled the trigger on his M4.
The stuttering burst of fire impacted next to Reaper who dove away from the stream of 5.56mm projectiles. Lying on the ground unconscious, Amman wasn’t able to roll away and he took the impact of half a dozen rounds. He never felt himself die.
Missing his target and shattering the noise discipline of the op, Bear dropped his suppressed Beretta, allowing it to dangle at the end of the Pistol Leash lanyard connecting the butt of the weapon to his belt.
As the Beretta hung at the end of its stretched coiled lanyard line, Bear released the Hi-port velcro strip with the thumb of his left hand. His right hand solidly held the pistol grip of the Jackhammer as he lowered the weapon down and into firing position.
Nicholas recovered from his surprise at the impact of Bear’s bullets. Swinging the muzzle of his M4 around, Nicholas knew that he had only fired a handful of rounds from the M4. He had loaded his carbine with a 100-round double drum Beta C-mag. Inside the magazine were more than eighty rounds of green-tipped M855 ball, the slugs having enhanced penetration from their steel-cored design. He knew it was more than enough ammunition to easily take out the interlopers.
Nicholas opened the steel door to the men’s lavatory only enough to see a good target. His sense of time seemed to slow down, causing the whole action to seem as if it was in slow motion as he aimed his M4. Through the barely four-inch-wide open slit of the doorway, Nicholas saw that the black-clad man in front of him had a Jackhammer! Where the hell did he get that from?
That became the last conscious thought Nicholas ever had as he watched a bright orange-red flame belch out of the end of the gun in front of him.
Bear knew that he would only have a small chance of hitting his target with any of the fifteen 0.33-caliber hardened-lead pellets in a shotgun load. But a burst of fire from the Jackhammer would make up for that by saturating a small target area with shot. As he saw the barrel of the weapon in the doorway swing toward him, Bear lined up his shot. As soon as he saw the silhouette of the man holding the gun, he squeezed the trigger.
The Jackhammer roared out a solid wall of noise, echoing in the huge room. The pellets smashed into Nicholas, penetrating his body up and down his torso and into his skull. Reaction to the shock caused his hand to clench on the trigger to his M4. Set on full automatic, the carbine ripped out a long burst of spinning death.
The unaimed bullets stitched across the room as Nicholas fell backward. The stream of slugs ripped open several of the plastic solvent drums on the other side of the room. The stench of ether and alcohol now started to fill the area as volatile liquids gushed from their pierced containers.
Inside the paint booth where he had been keeping a sleepy watch over his bubbling glassware, the young drug chemist Fazul Daoud was terrified by the sudden roar of gunfire. Diving under a lab table, Fazul heard the glassware above him shatter from the many steel-cored slugs tearing through the sides of the paint booth. Squealing and trying to cover his head while hiding under the table, Fazul never noticed the ether fumes thickening the air of the lab. The mewling sounds of fear in the small room faded and finally stopped as Fazul slipped into unconsciousness.
Fazul wasn’t the only one to respond to the sounds of gunfire on the sixth floor. In his apartment just off his offices, Arzee sat up in bed. He had no idea what had happened, but the cracking roar of a 5.56mm weapon, possibly Nicholas’s favored M4 carbine, had been followed by the deep booms of what might have been a shotgun fired unbelievably fast. Neither Amman nor Nicholas carried a shotgun. Aside from Fazul Daoud in his laboratory, they were supposed to be the only other people in the entire building at this hour.
Ishmael and his men had forced Arzee to send away the men who normally stood guard in the building. Only those men who were most trusted, Arzee’s own family, had been allowed on the upper floors. Down in the club, where Ishmael and his men had refused to go, just the bouncers had been enough to keep watch. It had been a mistake not to put the guards back on duty as soon as possible.
Getting up, Arzee picked up the AKMS-47 folding stock assault rifle that he kept at the side of his bed. Now that the last of the Sons of Ishmael had been sent to the island, he had felt that he could finally get some sleep and recover from the beating he had received in the car crash. His left arm pained him at the thought, the twinge deep inside the cast on the broken limb. He still couldn’t hear very well because of the ringing in his ears. He had even been forced to leave the office lights on, as a child might. His injured arm made him so clumsy that he now bumped into things if he got up during his restless nights.
Outside the offices, Reaper picked up his MP5K—PDW and snapped out its stock. The time for the quiet approach had ended. Reaper and Bear would now have to go through the offices as quickly as they could. The first target would have to be the office in the center of the far wall, the only one with light streaming out underneath the door. He turned to see if Bear was back on his six and covering his back. Reaper saw his partner stop and pick up the smoking M4 carbine and sling it across his back. Then he grabbed something else from the body of the man inside the doorway and slipped it into his pocket.
A quick look at the pile of meat on the floor told Reaper that the musclebound thug he had fought would never bother anyone again. He spared the second it took to bend over and pull out the familiar folding Emerson CQC-7BW he saw sticking out of Amman’s pocket. Bear came up to his side and silently squeezed his shoulder. The two SEALs moved forward to go through the door indicated by Reaper’s pointing finger.
Panicking inside the office, Arzee opened the combination lock on the secure filing cabinet and was trying to pull out the large salesman’s case in the bottom drawer. In his near terror, he twisted the case around and jammed it in the drawer. As he struggled to pick the case up, the door to his office shattered and two black-clad men stormed in, each of them heavily armed.
To pull at the drawer with his one good arm, Arzee had set his AKMS-47 down on the floor next to him. Now, while looking up at the cold, unblinking black eye of the suppressor pointing directly at his head, his own weapon seemed to be miles away instead of just inches. When he looked up past the muzzle of the unwavering gunbarrel, the eyes of the man holding it truly glowed more frighteningly than the muzzle of any gun. His gun simply promised a quick end to life. The smoldering orbs of the man holding it told of a long, lingering death for both Arzee’s body and soul.
The eyes of the man holding the weapon darted around the room before settling back on Arzee—who had as much chance of looking away as a bird did when facing a king cobra.
“Clear,” boomed a voice from across the room.
“Clear,” shouted the voice of the man in black in front of him, his voice muffled by the black hood he wore.
Someone out of his field of vision passed by without getting near Arzee or the man in front of him. Whoever
it might be completed searching the room and moved on.
“Clear,” came the other voice, this time from behind where Arzee knelt. Whoever the owner of that other voice might be, he must have just gone through to his apartment. The only other door in the office, on the other side of the room, led to the barracks room where the Sons of Ishmael had rested.
“Wh-wh-whhoooo are you?” Arzee finally managed.
Without a word, the man in front of him did something strange. Instead of answering, he stepped over to the window, grabbed the line, and pulled open the blinds. He then reached out and flipped open the window. Finally, the black apparition spoke, and Arzee wished that he hadn’t.
“War, this is Death,” the man said. Then he seemed to listen and finally said, “Roger that.”
After he returned to Arzee, the man in black reached up with his free hand, the muzzle of his weapon never wavering for an instant, and he pulled back the hood covering his face.
It was Reaper! In his entire life there had never been a man whom Arzee wanted to see less than the one standing in front of him.
“Where’s my family?” asked a voice as cold as death.
Pushing the muzzle of his weapon underneath Arzee’s chin, Reaper repeated, “Where’s my family? I won’t ask you nicely again.”
“Th-they’re not here,” Arzee said with rising panic in his voice. “No one’s here. But they’re safe. I swear they’re safe. No one has done anything with them. I can lead you to them. They’re up at the…”
In the smashed laboratory, Fazul Daoud was breathing the heavy ether fumes that filled the small room. The ether was gradually depressing Fazul’s breathing more and more. Ether fumes not only acted as an anesthetic, they were highly explosive.
Some of the smashed glassware had been filled with the ether solvent. Other parts were filled with water to cool and condense the solvent back into the extraction system. One of the smashed Freidricks condensers, a complex piece of expensive equipment that was now just glass shards, lay in a growing pool of water. The water crawled across the lab table, wetting down what it touched before dripping off onto the floor. Exposed wires torn from an electric heating mantle were touched by the pool of water and suddenly sparked.
The accumulation of volatile ether fumes were ignited by the spark. A huge roiling ball of flame exploded outward with a loud roar, engulfing the room and shattering the remaining glassware. The broken glass released even more ether to feed the explosion. The steel walls of the paint room tore away like cardboard from the force of the blast.
The office area was shielded from the bulk of the explosion by the cinder-block wall that separated it from the production floor. Tossed back by the explosion, Reaper escaped most of the blast. Glass shattered and sprayed from the door frame. Seeing what might be his only chance, Arzee snatched up his AKMS-47 and started to swing it one-handed over toward Reaper. Before Bear or Reaper could recover enough to fire, they heard a quiet thud.
Arzee dropped his weapon and staggered back against the filing cabinet. Before Arzee fell against the wall, a second thud was heard. From his sniper position, Max had fired as soon as he saw Reaper threatened with the weapon. There wasn’t time to make the shot a wounding one and the open window provided a perfect line of fire.
“No!” shouted Reaper, as he watched the man who could tell him where his family was fall against the wall. Then a second blast thundered through the building as more solvent drums caught fire.
In spite of the damage from the two suppressed shots, Arzee still had a single action left to him. He reached up with his uninjured hand and pulled down on what looked like a fire alarm switch on the side of the cabinet. Reaper dove forward to pull the man back from the wall, but his effort came too late. With a sudden pop and an acrid cloud of smoke, the M1A2 cryptographic document destroyer in the top of the filing cabinet ignited.
Reaper knew the device and the destruction its twenty-eight pounds of Thermate filler could do to the contents of a cabinet or a safe. The Thermate would burn for about a minute, producing a pound of molten iron and slag every two seconds. It would eat through the four drawers of the heavy steel cabinet—but with the top drawer closed, the papers in it would actually insulate the drawers below them for a few moments. The Thermate burned at four thousand degrees, but the paper still needed air to burn up completely.
Reaper thrust his hand in the open bottom drawer and tore out the heavy case jammed there, tossing it over to Bear. Bear threw a wastebasket at Reaper while he grabbed another one and turned to the big mahogany desk that dominated the center of the room. With no time to talk both SEALs collected every piece of paper they could and stuffed them into the plastic bags inside the trash cans. Reaper pulled open the drawers of the filing cabinet even as molten iron started to burn though the sides of its top. Files, papers, books, whatever he found got stuffed into the bags. They had lost their best source of information. Now they prayed they’d find some intelligence from around the room.
“Death,” Bear shouted, “it’s time to go!”
Bear twisted the top of his bag shut. Picking up Arzee’s AKMS-47, he unsnapped the hook that held the front of the sling to the weapon. He stuck the rifle through the hand loops on the salesman’s case that Reaper had tossed to him and snapped the sling back in place. Now able to hold it with a long cloth strap, Bear slung the case across his back and out of his way. The case must have weighed nearly fifty pounds but Bear handled it easily.
“Death, the fire,” Bear shouted. “We have to go—now! You can’t do Mary or Ricky any good if you burn to death!”
His partner’s shouting finally got through to Reaper as he desperately gathered everything that he could. Crushing the neck closed on his stuffed garbage bag, he took one last look at Arzee’s body lying on the floor then turned to Bear.
When they left the office, they could see the glow of the fire through the open doorway into the production area. They had no way to get back to their climbing site. The two SEALs turned to the stairs in front of them. As they ran down the dozen flights of stairs, Reaper shouted into his mike.
“Famine, Famine, Famine,” he said, “Evac, evac, evac.”
“Death,” came back over the earpiece, “Famine, I’m with War. Evac, evac, evac.”
What Reaper and Bear learned later was that Ben had seen the fire start to break out on the upper floor of the Factory and had decided to come up to the building. When he received Reaper’s radio call, he was positioned next to the billboard and ready to pick up Max. When Reaper and Bear burst out of the front doors of the Factory, Ben moved to pick them up. They swung into the open door of the camper and Max grabbed their arms, pulling the two men in.
As the truck moved away from the Factory building, the upper floor exploded outward in a ball of flame. The entire top of the building became a huge conflagration as the remaining intact solvent containers burst apart from the fire. The ether and alcohol explosion engulfed the building. Fire truck sirens could be heard approaching from off in the distance.
There would be nothing that the fire department could do to save the building. By the next day, the old auto factory would have collapsed into a pile of smoking ashes and rubble. The wooden block floors, soaked for decades in oils and lubricants and augmented by drug solvents, burned with a fierce, hot flame. The strong factory building acted as a furnace before collapsing in on itself. The flesh of the bodies of Arzee and his men were consumed in the heat, burned more completely than if they had been professionally cremated. The final fragments of bones had been crushed to powder and mixed with the rubble when the walls collapsed.
Chapter Twenty-four
The four horsemen didn’t hold a celebration or homecoming at the farm later that morning. The victory cigars still lay in their aluminum tubes—intact and unlit. The feelings of disappointment hung thick in the room as the men sat around the kitchen table. The group should have been rejoicing at the recovery of Reaper’s family. Instead they sat in quiet silence while th
ey decided on their next move.
A subdued Reaper got up from the table, went into the kitchen and started to get himself another cup of coffee. As he tried to pour the hot, black liquid into the mug, he sloshed some over the side and it spilled onto the counter. Only a little thing, nothing at all, really. But Reaper’s nerves were frayed to say the least.
“Goddamnit all to hell!” Reaper cursed as he picked the mug up and smashed it down on the counter. The porcelain coffee cup was strong, but not indestructible. It cracked and shattered under the impact, splashing coffee over most of the countertop.
None of the people around the counter even started at the outburst. It wasn’t as though they didn’t feel the same way. A major operation conducted with minimal support, too few personnel, and at lightning speed from conception to execution. They should have been proud, but they didn’t have the hostages. And the one among them who had every right to feel the worst was Reaper.
“Did you get it?” Bear asked calmly.
“Get it?” Reaper almost snarled. “Get what? I didn’t get anything.”
“The spider,” Bear continued in the same calm tone. “Did you get it?”
“What spider?” Reaper demanded. “What in the fuck are you talking about, Bear?”
“I figured you must have seen a spider there on the counter,” Bear said. “I know you don’t like them. And I would never think that you just wanted to smash up Deckert’s crockery.”
For a moment, Reaper stood there stunned at his friend’s words. Then he looked down at the busted coffee mug and the mess he had made of the counter. As he smiled, Reaper shook his head at his own reactions. Taking a deep breath, he blew it out.
Undeclared War Page 23