by Peter Nealen
The mercenaries were in the open, halfway across the helipad. There was no cover, no concealment. So Brannigan did the only thing he could, under the circumstances. Even as their presence registered to the lead Iranian rifleman, Brannigan snapped his AK-12 up and fired.
The two-round burst was a coughing bark amidst the thunder of the night, the rifle cycling faster than the recoil could push the muzzle off target. Flame spat from the rifle’s muzzle brake, and the Iranian crumpled. Brannigan gave him a second pair, just to be on the safe side, then switched to the next man to the right.
By then, the other three had joined in, cutting the rest of the Iranians down in a rattling storm of rifle fire. Muzzle blasts flickered in the dark of the outer courtyard, and then the four Iranians were down on the ground and the mercenaries were sweeping toward the still-open door.
As they passed, one of the Iranians stirred and groaned. Brannigan looked down to see the man clutching his midsection. His front was dark with blood, appearing black in the greenscale image.
Villareal hesitated, then knelt beside the dying man. Brannigan stopped, even as Hancock and Childress reached the door and set up on it, waiting for the rest before they made entry. He was about to whisper a warning to the doctor when all hell broke loose.
He heard a faint scuffling sound, then Santelli hissed a curse and grabbed Villareal by the med pack and hauled him off the wounded Iranian by main force. That was when Brannigan got a clear enough view of the man to see that he was trying to get a finger into the ring of a grenade. He quickly put his red dot, gleaming a brilliant white in his NVGs, on the man’s forehead and blew the top of his head off with another two-round burst. The dead man flopped, the grenade rolling away, the pin thankfully still inserted.
Santelli was pushing the doctor toward the open door, a steady stream of Boston-accented profanity hissing between his teeth. “What the motherfucking fuck were you fucking thinking, doc? You want to get your fucking head blown the fuck off?”
Brannigan ignored the situation for now. When they got in a room and got a breather, he could say something. Right at the moment, they were still exposed. They needed to get through that door, kill anyone on the other side of it, and find a hardpoint for the handful of seconds they could spare to get their bearings.
He got behind Hancock and bumped him with a knee. Hancock took the signal and launched himself in the door.
The double door was wide enough that two men could make entry abreast, without getting tangled up with each other. So Hancock went in first, Childress almost right at his shoulder, with Brannigan and Santelli behind them, their own weapons aimed over the first two men’s shoulders.
The entryway was a wide, high-ceilinged anteroom, with tiled columns running along each side. Several expensive couches and chairs lined the walls, a step up from the central floor, and woven wall-hangings, with Arabic inscriptions in gold thread were hanging on the walls themselves. The room was otherwise empty.
They pushed to the far door, Childress turning behind one of the columns to cover back the way they had come. They were in the middle of the enemy’s house now, and they had to expect threats from every direction.
Brannigan took a glance out into the hall, flipping his NVGs up as he did so. There were lights on inside, though it seemed as though the Iranians were keeping most of the outer rooms blacked out for the time being.
The hallway appeared to run through the center of the U-shape of the main Citadel building. Like the entryway, the ceiling was high, and there was tile on the floor and in spots on the white and green painted stucco of the walls. There were actual chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, framed by patterned moldings. So far, the hallway was empty, though that couldn’t be trusted to last. The Iranians had already sent shooters that they probably couldn’t spare to investigate the breach at the sally port; there would be more coming when they didn’t report back.
“Doc,” Brannigan ground out over his shoulder, without taking his eyes off the hallway in front of him, “I love you like a brother, and I know why you did it. But if you ever try to get us killed out of consideration for enemy wounded again, I’ll shoot you myself. Understood?”
“Roger that,” Villareal said hoarsely from somewhere behind him. From the tone of the man’s voice, he had been rattled by the close call. As well he might. He should have known better. “It won’t happen again.”
I shouldn’t have brought him along. As good as he was, I let my respect for his skill keep me from seeing just how deep the damage from Zarghun really went. I should have listened when he told me he couldn’t go back.
Of course, it was too late to do anything but roll with the punches. Villareal would rise to the occasion or he wouldn’t. They simply had no time for anything else.
The noise of the fighting in the Old City was now muffled by the thick sandstone walls, reaching their ears as only a dull, distant roar. It was deceptively quiet inside the old Citadel that the Al Qays had turned into a palace. That was the only reason that Brannigan could hear the crackle of a radio coming from the other side of the open door, where they’d left the bodies.
A tinny voice asked a question in Farsi. When it went unanswered, the question was repeated, more stridently.
“That’s it, we’re officially blown,” Brannigan muttered. There was no more time. He pushed out into the hall, his AK-12 up and his finger millimeters from the trigger.
“Stairway,” Childress called from behind him, where he was facing down the long end of the “U.”
“On you,” Brannigan replied. He stayed put, blockading the hallway, his rifle covering the corner ahead and the several arched doorways before it. He waited until a fist to the back of his shoulder announced that the last man was out the door and moving toward the stairs.
They did not know exactly where the hostages were being kept. The Iranian videos hadn’t shown enough detail to pinpoint any particular location inside the palace. Hell, they didn’t even have more than the vaguest floor plan for the Citadel. That it rose three stories above ground, with a deep cellar beneath was about the extent of it, though some digging on the Internet had turned up a video recording of a tour from a couple of years before. They thought that the likeliest places would be the grand hall on the second floor, the cellar, or the second grand hall, clear up on the third floor.
There were still innumerable places in that massive edifice where thirty people could be crammed, especially if their captors really didn’t care about their welfare. So, the mercenaries were going to have to search as quickly and as systematically as they could.
All of that had been covered in the planning phase. They were now moving according to the plan, as necessarily flexible as that plan had to be.
Few of the doorways lining that ground-floor hallway actually had doors in them, and of those that did, not all of them were closed. That made matters a bit easier; they could quickly check each room and blow past it once reasonably sure that their objective wasn’t inside. They swept down the hallway, heading for the stairs, visually clearing each opening as they passed it.
Brannigan was stopping and turning every few steps to check behind him. And it was a good thing, too, because two more Iranians, identifiable by their khaki fatigues and black Type 03 rifles, came jogging around the corner, probably intending to find out why the first group that had gone outside wasn’t answering the radio.
The first man saw the group of mercs as soon as he came around the corner. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to shout, dragging his Type 03 up from where he’d had the muzzle pointed at the floor.
He was too slow. Brannigan already had his red dot centered high on the man’s chest, and stroked the trigger.
His AK-12 rattled and roared in the confined space of the hallway, two-round bursts smashing into the first man just below the collarbone, then the second man in the face as the first one staggered.
The second man dropped like a rock, hitting the floor with a meaty thud, his rifle clatt
ering against the stone and hitting his companion in the back of the leg. The first man’s knee buckled under the impact, but even with two 5.45mm bullets in him, he still stayed upright, though he triggered a burst into the wall instead of at the mercenaries. Bullets chipped stucco off the wall, and one ricocheted down the hall with a vicious buzz, passing close enough that Childress flinched away as it passed him.
Brannigan shot the man four more times, and he finally fell, blood pooling on the tile floor beneath him.
“Come on!” Santelli barked. Brannigan turned to see the rest at the stairway, Hancock covering up the stairs while Santelli and Childress were aimed in down the hallway. Turning, he ran the rest of the way to the stairwell.
“Well, now they definitely know we’re here,” he said. “We’ll have to move quick. Doc, you’re with me and Roger; we’ll go up. Carlo, take Sam and go down, clear the cellar.”
He got terse acknowledgments from all of them. “Let’s go,” he said. “Hopefully we can get clear before they can recall enough of their shooters from the fight out in the city to give us a problem.” He kneed Hancock in the buttock, and the other man immediately started up the steps, Brannigan on his heels.
CHAPTER 13
Ortiz knew they were in trouble as soon as the shooting started out in the city, though he kept his face carefully impassive. Not all of his fellow hostages could face the grim facts of their predicament with as much equanimity as he could, and there was no sense in starting a panic.
In fact, the gunfire and explosions seemed to give some of them renewed hope. They probably thought that it meant there was a rescue mission on the way. They probably had visions of Navy Stealthhawks swooping in, full of Navy SEALs, poised to fast-rope in onto the Citadel and get them out.
Ortiz had lost any such hopes. When there hadn’t been an immediate, overwhelming, shock-and-awe op to break them out after Ulrich’s execution, he’d known that rescue wasn’t coming. They were stuck, just like the hostages in Tehran back in the ‘80s, waiting until either they were all slaughtered, or some humiliating diplomatic solution was found through negotiation, a resolution that would embarrass the United States and hand the Iranians a moral—and, quite possibly, monetary—victory.
He’d also been paying attention over the last couple of weeks, and knew that the shooting had come on the heels of increasingly restive riots. He’d heard the shouting and chanting down below for days, and had heard it again before the fighting started.
That was no rescue attempt. That was the Sunni demonstrators finally getting violent.
And though he wouldn’t give it voice, he also knew that, regardless of whether the noise out in the Old City was an actual rescue attempt or not, it only increased the likelihood that they would all be killed out of hand. Either the Iranians would kill them, to make sure that any rescue attempt, imaginary or not, couldn’t get to them, or the Iranians would get overrun by the Sunnis, who probably wouldn’t be much better. He didn’t figure that anyone in that mob was going to be of a particularly peaceable mindset by the time they reached the top floor of the Citadel.
“Everybody just calm down and shut up!” he barked. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“But, Captain,” Warren Beck remonstrated, “this could be it.” Beck was a fat, balding man. Not one of the Oceana Metropolis’ crew, he had been a tourist come to see the Persian Gulf. He should have stayed in Bahrain.
Ortiz glowered at him. “Yeah, it could be ‘it,’ all right,” he replied. “The question you should be asking yourself is, what is ‘it?’” He looked around at the rest, many of whom were still trying to climb up to see out one of the windows. Screw it, they should know anyway, since none of them has apparently thought that far. “If nothing else, ‘it’ could be the guards deciding to come in here and kill us all, just in case.”
The room fell silent at his grim pronouncement. A few widening pairs of eyes were turned on him. They evidently hadn’t considered that possibility.
When the door scraped open a moment later and Mehregan strode through, in his combat gear and with a rifle in his hands, it suddenly became less of a possibility and more of a reality.
“Against the wall!” the short Iranian said, a fevered look in his eyes. Ortiz recognized the look. The little killer had psyched himself up, and he was out for blood. He waved his rifle muzzle at the crowd of hostages. “Now!”
The hostages, however, were standing there, frozen like deer in the headlights, eyes wide and shocked. The combination of Ortiz’ warning and Mehregan’s sudden appearance had proved to be a bit too much.
“Do it!” Ortiz roared. “Do you want him to just gun you down while you stare at him like slack-jawed idiots?”
He wasn’t sure why he’d bothered. They were probably all dead, anyway. What did it matter if they bought a handful of seconds before Mehregan gleefully murdered them all?
A quiet, not-quite-so-cynical part of his mind thought ashamedly that he should have done more. Mehregan was alone. If they all rushed him, a few would probably get shot, but they’d get him.
But he couldn’t even voice the thought. When he looked into the fanatic’s glittering eyes, he saw only death, and could only think of how to buy the next few seconds. The truth of the matter was, he was deeply afraid of Mehregan, after what he’d seen the man do earlier. And he truly didn’t want to die, now that his world-weary cynicism was suddenly confronted by the very real imminence of his own brutal murder.
Under Mehregan’s basilisk glare, the hostages shuffled meekly to the wall. The Iranian had a look of maniacal, triumphant glee on his face now, as he raised his rifle, and shouted, “Allahu akhbar! Marg bar Amryka!”
He was cut off by the bark of a pistol.
The little man staggered, a faintly confused look coming into his dark eyes. He looked down at his side, where a growing red stain was starting to show on his khakis. Then he looked up, toward the door.
Esfandiari stood in the doorway, his Makarov in both hands, pointed at Mehregan.
He advanced into the hall, and the pistol barked twice more. Mehregan staggered as the bullets ripped into his midsection. The rifle fell from suddenly nerveless fingers, hitting the stone floor with a loud clatter. He sank to his knees, his shaking hands clutching the wounds in his belly.
Esfandiari stepped closer and stood over him, staring down at him impassively. Then the Iranian commander put the muzzle of his pistol to Mehregan’s forehead and pulled the trigger.
The pistol barked and Mehregan’s head snapped backward, a spatter of blood, brains, and bone blasting out of the back of his skull. He fell limply to the floor.
For a long moment, that couldn’t actually have been more than a few seconds, the hostages just stared in shock. Ortiz finally forced a tiny bit of spit into his dry mouth, enough to speak.
“Thank you, Commander,” he said.
Esfandiari turned pitiless eyes on him, and Ortiz instinctively recoiled. There was no human warmth in that gaze. Esfandiari’s eyes were as dead as a shark’s. “Do not think that your situation has changed,” the Iranian warned. “This Twelver lunatic was simply defying my orders.”
Ortiz looked at the floor, rather than meet the Iranian’s gaze. His relief at deliverance was waning fast in the face of the fact that their situation was as precarious as it ever had been, especially since Esfandiari now found himself and his men under siege. And there was no reassurance in the man’s gaze. While he remained as cool and collected as he had been from the beginning, Esfandiari was still a killer, in the service of a murderous ideology that viewed Ortiz and his companions as little more than barely-human enemies.
For a brief moment, he had the sudden, gut-wrenching impression that Esfandiari was about to make an example of him, too, if only to make sure that the rest of the hostages stayed in line while the fighting went on outside. He felt every wasted muscle in his body tense, waiting for the pistol to rise. The faint muzzle flash would be the last thing he ever saw.
But
Esfandiari suddenly snapped his head to one side, as if listening. Ortiz had heard more gunshots, but they had been hearing gunfire for some time by then, and he did not have the practiced ear to tell the difference between gunfire outside the walls and gunfire inside.
Esfandiari abruptly turned on his heel, barking orders in Farsi as he stormed out the door. The guards pulled the doors shut behind him, and he was gone.
Ortiz sank to the floor, shaking.
***
Hancock hit the second floor, going through the door with only the barest pause to make sure Brannigan was right behind him. The two men had both rifles trained down the hallway as they moved to opposite sides of the hall, maximizing their respective fields of fire. Villareal kept close behind Brannigan.
They moved fast, gliding down the hallway as quickly as they could move while still being able to shoot accurately. Their target room was around the corner, at the center of the “U,” and speed was their security. They simply didn’t have enough guns for any other course of action.
Eyes and rifle muzzles tracked across open doorways as they went past. Strangely, the Citadel, which had been the home of the Al Qays royal family and their retainers, appeared all but deserted. Brannigan could only assume that the Iranians had forced the original occupants out into the city. That had proved to be a bit of a strategic blunder on their part, since doubtless some of those displaced loyalists were presently among the mobs and knots of fighters out raising hell in the Old City. The Iranian soldiers who had replaced them were, presumably, out fighting the Loyalists and Al Qaeda jihadists.
Getting to the corner, Brannigan held just short, until he could see Hancock out of the corner of his eye, rifle aimed at the corner ahead of him. As soon as he knew the other man was in position, he moved, quickly hooking around the corner, his rifle snapping up and ready to engage.
The hallway on the other side of the corner was short, leading to an elaborately decorated, arched double door, flanked by potted palms. Brannigan moved the couple of dozen feet to the door, then paused, his muzzle pointed at the opening, waiting for Doc and Hancock as he listened for any activity on the other side of the doors.