by Chris Ryan
Spartak had a choice. Shoot, or dive for cover. He went for the first option, unloading four wild rounds at Bald. Two of the bullets spiderwebbed the glass frame next to the patio door. The others struck the jukebox immediately to Bald’s left.
Bald stayed perfectly still as he emptied another burst. The shots struck Spartak in the head with surgical precision. The guy plummeted like Bear Stearns stock. He was dead before he even hit the pool deck.
The rifle report was still echoing through the house as Porter heard more voices outside. One of them did most of the talking. Several other voices came back with single-syllable responses. An order being given, acknowledged by the subordinates. Then the heavy thudding of footsteps to the west of the house. More attackers were sweeping around to the back garden, Porter realised. Following the same route Ducati and Spartak had taken. They’d be sweeping into view any moment.
‘More X-rays moving towards your position!’ he shouted at Bald.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ Bald hissed. ‘How many of these bastards are there?’
I don’t know, Porter thought. But they’re committing a lot of firepower over a fucking sex tape.
He heard a crash at his twelve o’clock and swung back to the foyer as another attacker swept through the front door.
The metal clicker inside Porter’s head told him that he had expended six rounds on Testicle and Tracksuit. Which left him with fourteen rounds in the AR-15 clip, plus the forty in the two spare box mags.
He trained his attention on the X-ray bursting into the foyer. The guy was built like a powerlifter, clad in a digi-cam top and combats, with a tactical grenade belt strapped around his sizeable waist. Half a dozen hand grenades were held in place by elastic loops, secured with Velcro flaps over the top.
Powerlifter blasted from the hip as he swept inside the foyer, pissing bullets across the hallway, blasting chunks out of the wall as he stepped around the lake of blood spreading across the floor. He was panicking at the sight of his dead mates, firing more out of hope than anything else.
Porter blocked out his hangover. He shut out the voice in his head and focused solely on lining up Powerlifter’s torso. Gave the guy a three-round burst to the stomach, stitching his gut with bullets. Powerlifter made a tangled cry in his throat before he collapsed to the floor in a ragged heap.
Eleven rounds left.
At his six o’clock he heard Bald discharging rounds at the attackers sweeping across the ground to the rear. The two operators were working in tandem, like a well-oiled machine. They’d never lived in each other’s pockets but they both knew they could rely on one another in the heat and chaos of a firefight.
Porter knew what the Russians were trying to do. Push them both back inside the house, so that they could establish a foothold at the front and rear entry points. Once they’d breached the stronghold, they could gradually advance until Porter and Bald had nowhere left to run.
If that happens, we’ll be fucked.
And Street will be taken.
‘Fuckers throwing the kitchen sink at us!’ Bald yelled during a brief lull in the gunfire. ‘Three more coming this way.’
Five dead so far, Porter thought. With perhaps as many as fifteen more targets converging on their position. But there had been only five Russians in total on the snatch squad that had targeted Street, according to their briefing. ‘Where the fuck did the rest of them come from?’
‘Bastards must have sent for reinforcements,’ Bald shouted back.
Which made sense, Porter thought. The Russian mafia had a presence in every major city on the east coast. The snatch squad could have sent for backup from as far south as Charlotte, or Columbus or Cincinnati to the west. To the east there was Baltimore and New Jersey. Anywhere within a four-hundred-mile radius.
‘Keep them pinned down,’ Porter called out. ‘Don’t let the fuckers get inside.’
‘Doing my best here, mate.’
Just then Porter heard a flurry of noise from across the hallway. The sound of fracturing glass, coming from one of the rooms on the left side of the foyer. He looked across at his nine o’clock, at the ground-floor study on the other side of the foyer.
The door was ajar.
Through the gap he spied two figures breaking through the window above the computer desk, on the wall backing onto the east side of the safe house. Two guys in matching grey trousers and dark t-shirts, both wielding Benelli tactical twelve-gauge shotguns.
The first attacker jumped down from the shattered window. He had a thick, squat frame, a shaven head and a handlebar moustache. Broken glass crackled like ice beneath his Timberland boots. The second guy was clambering through the opening after his mate, swinging up his left knee onto the window frame. The less athletic of the two. The first guy had stopped and turned to help his mate climb through.
Porter sprang into action. He rushed over to Powerlifter’s corpse, almost slipped on the puddled blood and snatched one of the hand grenades from the elastic loop. Then he raced over to the study and dropped to a knee beside the door. He set down his Colt AR-15, pulled the firing pin and tossed the grenade inside the study.
Someone screamed in panic.
The grenade detonated.
The scream was drowned out by the tremendous crashing boom of the explosion. Porter felt the shudder in his bones as the shockwave ripped through the hallway like rolling thunder. There were anguished cries inside the room as smoke gushed through the opening, spewing out debris and bits of broken glass.
In the next instant Porter grabbed his rifle and swung round into the doorway. The blast would have killed anyone in a five-metre radius but he didn’t want to take any chances.
The room was hot with smoke and debris. The air stank of burnt flesh, incinerated fabric. Chunks had been ripped out of the ceiling. The walls were lacquered with blood. Handlebar lay on the ground in the middle of the room, his guts hanging out of a wide gash in his stomach in a glistening red coil. The other guy was slumped below the window. Both his legs had been blown off below the knee. His hands and face were pitted with shrapnel.
Through the clearing smoke Porter glimpsed a third guy attempting to climb through the window. Porter fired a two-round burst, hitting him in the chest. The guy buckled and lost his grip on the window, blood arcing out of his upturned mouth as he fell away.
Two more rounds used.
Nine left.
From the other side of the foyer came the sound of breaking glass. A cold sick dread twisted through Porter’s guts as he realised that the attackers were swarming through more entry points across the house. What the Americans called a full-court press. He burst into movement, the blood rushing in his ears as he made for the study door.
Porter estimated that the firefight had lasted sixty seconds so far. The Russians wouldn’t want to stick around for more than five minutes. Any longer carried the risk of running into the police. They were a mile from the nearest house but there was always a chance of a passer-by hearing the gunshots. And the sound of a rifle discharge travelled further on a clear night than during the daytime, when there was less ambient sound to cancel it out.
We’ve got another four minutes to hold out against the enemy, he thought.
It’s going to be tough to last that long.
He bulleted through the door, his shirt heavy with sweat. Porter glanced over at his three o’clock at the kitchen, ten metres south of his position. Bald was crouching beside the jukebox, loading the second clip into his rifle mag feed as three more targets swarmed across the garden towards the patio doors. Spent brass littered the floor around him.
Porter swivelled his gaze across to the foyer.
A guy stood outside the dining room, a metre to the right of the front door. Twelve metres from where Porter stood. He wore ball-hugging jeans with a leather jacket over a white tank top and a huge gold crucifix around his fat neck.
Porter glimpsed the broken window frame in the room behind Crucifix. Two more attackers were pouring through the br
each, desperate to press home their advantage. But Porter wasn’t focusing on those guys.
His eyes were locked on Crucifix. On the HK416 in his grip.
Aimed directly at Porter.
THIRTY
Porter waited to die.
He had no time to react. It would take him a whole second to raise his weapon and empty a shot at Crucifix. By which time the guy would have cut him in half with a burst from the rifle. He was out of options, and time.
Then a crack exploded at the far end of the hallway. From the direction of the kitchen. A bullet slapped into the wall three inches to the right of Crucifix, spitting out masonry.
Crucifix arced his HK416 away from Porter and turned towards the new threat at the other end of the hall. It took him an age to turn. All that fat and muscle, slowing him down. In the same instant Bald surged into view at Porter’s right, sweeping forward from the kitchen as he emptied three more rounds at Crucifix.
The bullets thumped into Crucifix, punching holes in his chest and jaw. The lower half of his face disintegrated in a claret mist, fragments of shattered teeth and jawbone splashing down his leather jacket as he dropped to the floor. He wouldn’t be needing a filling any time soon.
Bald looked briefly in Porter’s direction. Porter nodded at his mucker. There was no time to thank him as more shouts came from inside the living room, directly opposite the dining room. A guy in a Boston Red Sox baseball cap swept around the doorway, glass shards sprinkled across his shoulders from where he’d obviously crashed through the window. Red Sox let out a throated cry as Bald gave him a two-round burst to the chest. He did the dead man’s dance and flopped to the floor amid the tangle of limbs and brass.
‘Cover my six,’ Bald boomed at Porter, his voice barely audible above the shouts from the other attackers storming the safe house. ‘I’ll keep these cunts busy.’
There was no time to reply. Porter gave him a brief nod of acknowledgement and charged towards the kitchen, eight metres to the south of the staircase. Ninety seconds had passed since the Russians had opened fire, he figured.
Another three-and-a-half minutes to hold out.
He looked ahead and saw that the three guys who had been tearing across the garden had almost reached the pool deck. Two of them were in the lead, athletic guys decked out in puffer jackets and Adidas tracksuit bottoms. They were twenty-five metres away.
Porter ran on towards the kitchen with renewed determination. He dropped to a knee next to the jukebox, in the same spot where Bald had set himself up. His hangover had gone now, fear and adrenaline taking hold, smothering the voice in his head.
I’m not going to lose to these pricks.
Not today.
Porter levelled the Colt sights with the nearest of the Puffer Brothers. Put down a three-round burst as they swept around the swimming pool. The rounds didn’t hit the targets, but Porter didn’t need them to. Not at this range. He just needed to put the brakes on the enemy’s advance. Puffer One and Two dived behind the shed to the right of the swimming pool, narrowly avoiding the stream of incoming rounds.
The third guy continued running towards the patio. A lanky bloke, with a goatee and skin the colour of milk. Porter arced his sights over to the guy.
Then he spied the gun Goatee was holding.
It was the same type of HK416 that Crucifix and the others had been using. But with one major difference.
Instead of the usual box mag, a pair of cylinder mags had been inserted into the feed assembly on the underside of the receiver. The drums had a hundred-round capacity, Porter knew. In the Regiment, the guys called them street sweepers. Because when the selector was set to full auto, the rate of fire could clear a room all by itself.
At a range of twenty metres, the street sweeper was lethal.
Goatee fired. Porter shrank behind the jukebox as the street sweeper raked the kitchen with several booming staccato bursts. Round after round of hot lead chugged out of the modded rifle, decimating the tiled walls and taking chunks out of the breakfast bar, punching fist-sized holes in the cabinets, shattering the plates and glasses inside. Three rounds struck the jukebox above the coin chute. The plastic tubes glowed into life, in a rainbow of bright colours, as Starship’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ filled the air.
Porter waited for a lull in the fire. Past the jukebox, he glimpsed Puffer One and Two scrambling towards the patio door. They had used the covering fire of the street sweeper to push forward. Now they were eight metres from the entry point, loosing off rounds as they moved. Bullets glanced off the floor a metre to the right of the jukebox, chewing up the tiles. Goatee was six metres behind the Puffer Brothers, inserting a new cylinder mag into the street sweeper.
I can’t stay here, Porter thought to himself. I don’t stand a chance against that fucking thing.
Get moving.
Now.
Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick were singing about building dreams together as Porter stepped out from behind cover and fired a two-round burst at the Puffer Brothers, forcing them to hit the deck. Porter turned and sprinted back down the hallway towards Bald as Goatee let rip with the street sweeper once again. Bullets riddled the jukebox, reducing the song to a jittery warble.
Porter regrouped alongside Bald in the hallway. Bald was still concentrating his efforts on the front of the safe house, putting down suppressive fire on the doorways either side of the foyer. Porter dropped down beside him and trained his sights at the kitchen. The two of them were fighting back-to-back now, making their stand at the foot of the stairs.
Thirteen metres to the south of the staircase, Puffer One and Two were storming through the patio door, into the kitchen. Goatee had almost reached the sliding door too.
Porter gave them a burst from the AR-15, putting the brakes on their advance. The rounds smashed like fists into the tiled wall to the right of the door and sent Puffer One and Two diving for cover behind the bullet-riddled jukebox. Goatee scrambled to the side of the patio, out of sight.
Two minutes since the firefight started.
Three more to survive.
The clicker in his head told Porter that he had two bullets left in the magazine. Plus the two spare twenty-round clips. Which gave him forty-two rounds, total.
We won’t be able to keep these fuckers nailed down for much longer.
Bald emptied another burst at the front of the safe house. ‘More X-rays coming through the living room window. Bastards are getting closer.’
‘Shit!’ Porter hissed.
They were in serious danger of being overrun now. The Russians wouldn’t spare them once they’d cleared the safe house. That wasn’t their MO. They would slot everyone apart from Street.
There’s nothing for it but to stand our ground.
And hope the cops show up before we run out of ammo.
In the next instant Goatee stepped out from behind cover, ready to spray the hallway with 5.56mm brass. Porter aimed a two-round burst in the guy’s direction, nailing him in the ankle. Goatee crumpled to the ground in the kitchen doorway, screaming. Porter went to finish him off and got the dead man’s click as he reached the end of the clip. He thumbed the mag release and fished out one of the spare mags from his trouser pocket.
Inserted it into the mag feed.
Looked up.
One of the Puffer Brothers briefly edged into view from behind the damaged jukebox. The guy had something in his right hand, Porter noticed.
Grenade.
His breath trapped in his throat as he watched the guy roll the hand grenade down the hallway before shrinking back behind the cover of the jukebox.
Porter unfroze.
‘GRENADE!’ he roared at Bald as he shot to his feet, spinning away from the kitchen. ‘FUCKING MOVE!’
Bald was on his feet before Porter had even finished shouting at him. Porter instantly saw why. One of the attackers at the front of the house had also chucked a grenade down the hallway. A simultaneous attack, coordinated to ensure maximum damage.
The grenade rumbled towards Bald and bumped against the basement door, where it stopped dead.
The grenades were F1 types. Soviet-issue. Four-second fuse. Effective blast radius of thirty metres.
Four seconds to get to cover. Bald and Porter were at the bottom of the staircase, at the mid-point of the main hallway. There was no cover in sight around them. Nothing that would shield them from the grenade blast. The nearest room was the master bedroom, six metres away.
Too far.
For the first time that morning, Porter was thinking with a clear mind. He instantly gauged the situation and knew what they had to do. ‘Upstairs!’ he yelled.
Bald, grasped his intention. He turned and vaulted up the stairs to the first-floor landing. Porter ran after him, clearing the treads two at a time. On three seconds, Bald hit the first-floor landing. He careened to the right, diving towards the nearest guest bedroom.
Porter was two steps from the landing when the grenades detonated.
A blast of incinerating air surged up behind him, roaring inside his eardrums, scorching the skin on his back as the explosion ripped through the hallway. He heard the thwack of shrapnel studding the walls, the blasting of glass. Tendrils of smoke swept upwards, showering the stairs with debris and nicking the flesh on Porter’s hands and face.
He was stunned for half a second. Then the lizard part of his brain took over. He shook his head clear and crawled over to Bald in front of the guest-room door, six metres further down the landing. Ears ringing, lungs burning. Fumes stinging his eyes.
‘That was fucking close,’ Porter said, gasping for air as he took up a firing position opposite Bald.
‘It’s not over yet, mate.’
Both operators kept their AR-15s pointed at the top of the stairs. Their index fingers resting on the rifle triggers, ready to brass up anyone who charged up to the first floor.
This is it, thought Porter as he waited for the first X-ray to pop into view. No way out. We’re cornered on the first floor of the safe house, with at least half a dozen shooters downstairs armed to the teeth. It’ll take a miracle to survive this.