Anatoly calculated that the others within his view—the resort staff and the cargo workers from the Katie Starling—would pose little risk. They looked more like runners than fighters, which meant that they could be handled with less urgency. The one advantage Anatoly had now, which he did not have a half hour ago, was that the Katie Starling was firmly and securely moored to the pier. A quick escape was not possible.
Come to think of it, if the ship’s crew decided to hole up in their vessel and pose no overt threats, he’d be inclined to let them live. He might have trouble convincing the rest of his team, but maybe he could talk them into it.
In his peripheral vision, ahead and to the left, Anatoly caught sight of what might have been movement. If it was there, it was beyond the wash of the floodlights. He moved only his head to take a closer look. When that revealed nothing, he pivoted his rifle. Oh, so slowly, he moved his body with the barrel, never leaving the support of the tree branch. He kept his eye in direct line with his scope as his red dot swept open pavement, and then the utility and maintenance vehicles, which had either been brought tonight or stashed in the past.
Then there were the crates of boat bumpers and other dock equipment that had likely been there for years.
It occurred to Anatoly that if he were inclined to sneak up on an operation such as this, those crates would make for the ideal hiding place. He scanned the area, stared at it, willing himself not to blink as he looked for any abnormality. If he’d finally encountered the people who’d murdered his team, he didn’t know if he’d be able to marshal the self-discipline not to shoot them on the spot and risk the larger mission.
His men would love it, but his bosses would be furious.
Something was out there.
Yes, there. It was as if a shadow moved.
Anatoly slowly and carefully moved his left hand to the magnification ring on his scope and clicked up to 5X. It brought him closer, while at the same time narrowing his field of view.
Yes, there, behind the crate. Was that a bird resting on top of the nearest crate?
As soon as a gloved hand reached up to what wasn’t a bird, he recognized the object to be a night-vision array that had been pushed up, and now was being brought down.
It’s them, he thought. He looked back to the off-loading operations. He only needed a few more—
Blackness.
The mission was lost. He didn’t know how or why or by whom, but they were under attack by a force that brought night vision and was able to control the power supply.
Everything that followed from here would flow from the confluence of opportunity and pure luck.
Anatoly activated his muzzle light, and opened up on full auto.
* * *
Henry West recorded the darkness and the incoming fire as simultaneous. He dropped to the concrete as the crate they’d been using for shelter disintegrated under a withering fusillade of bullets.
“I’m hit!” Jolaine said. “Ah, goddammit, I’m hit bad, Conan.”
“I didn’t see where it came from!” Rollins shouted from the left and behind.
The world around the ships had become a chaotic mix of dancing muzzle lights, running and shouting people, and two-way gunfire.
“Where ya hit, She Devil?” Henry asked.
“Gut,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, that hurts.”
Henry dared a peek above what was left of their cover as he keyed his radio mic. “Team Yankee, Conan. She Devil’s hit,” he said. “Details to follow.”
The leading edge of the jungle, right where it transitioned to the pier, pulsated with muzzle flashes and rifle fire.
No one seemed to be shooting at them anymore, but they’d declared their intentions and Henry wasn’t going to wait. Where there was a muzzle light or a muzzle flash, a shooter resided two or three feet behind it. He shouldered his suppressed M4, rocked the selector to single-fire, and fired at the voids behind the flashes. He fired groups of two.
“Get She Devil out of here,” Henry said. “I’ll give you covering fire if you need it.”
“I can stay,” Rollins said. “You take her.”
“We’re not having this conversation. I was first to sign on. That gives me seniority, now follow orders.” Even as he spoke the words, he didn’t know if there was any logic in them, but that was his decision.
Rollins hesitated, but Henry kept his eyes focused on the threats. “She needs to be out of here.”
“I’m fine,” Jolaine said through a groan that exposed her as a noble liar. “You can’t fight them alone.”
“I’ll join you after you’re secure,” Henry said. It was probably a lie, but with luck it would get them off the X. He keyed his mic again. “Break, break, break. Torpedo, you there?”
“Still here. Sounds like things are getting bad.”
“Keep your traffic to a minimum,” Henry scolded. “Fire that bucket up and bring it to the exfil point. We have a wounded operator.”
“Oh, shit,” Torpedo said. “Who is it?”
“You have your orders,” Henry said. “It’s pedal to the metal time, kid.”
* * *
For a few seconds, Gail thought that the little boy had spotted them. She thought they were well concealed behind the shrubbery, but as he emerged from the open slider at the back of the bungalow, he walked directly toward them. He even made eye contact, she thought. But when he told the girl to stay at the door and not look, she understood the mission.
When it became apparent that he was going to piss on Tyler, she whispered, “Don’t you dare move.” And don’t you dare laugh, she told herself.
Through the radio bud in her ear, she heard Jonathan’s voice say, “Mother Hen, make it dark.”
Gail snapped her NVGs down over her eyes the instant blackness fell like a hammer.
In that same instant, Tyler reached through the foliage, grabbed the boy, and pulled him out and down. “We’re here to save you,” he said. “Stay here and stay down.”
“You stay here, too,” Gail said. “Keep him down and out of trouble.” Through the green light of her NVGs, Gail saw blooming pandemonium on the other side of the doors. The children yelled and cried, and she heard adult voices yelling at them to be quiet, but she couldn’t see a target to shoot.
“Advancing,” she said. She and Dylan moved together toward the doors, their suppressed rifles pressed into their shoulders.
An older girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, stood stunned on the patio, her hands pressed to her mouth.
“Get down!” Gail yelled at a whisper. “We’re rescuers.”
“There are three of them,” the girl said as she lowered herself to the ground. “They like to smoke cigarettes out front, too.”
Gail smiled. The kid had a future ahead of her as a spy.
“I don’t see a bad guy yet,” Dylan said.
Gail didn’t bother to answer. They were there somewhere.
Then one of the soldiers had the decency to switch on his muzzle light. “I said, everybody—”
Gail shot him in the face through the open door. He dropped straight down and landed hard on at least one child at his feet. The kid yelled. The fight was on.
She fired two quick shots into the ceiling of the bungalow through the tempered glass of the stationary panel of the door. The glass spiderwebbed and collapsed into a pile. Now Yankee Two had unfettered access to the interior.
“Everybody, stay down!” Gail yelled. “We are Americans and we’re here to rescue you.” In the cacophony of the screaming children, she wasn’t at all sure that she’d been heard. They were in the bungalow’s bedroom. She recognized the layout of the bungalow because it was the reverse design of the one she and Jonathan had occupied much more recently than it felt.
Yankee Two crossed the threshold together, with Dylan on Gail’s right.
Ahead and to the left, from what Gail knew to be the hallway that led to the rest of the bungalow, a soldier peeked around the corner, fired two quick shots, and ducked b
ack again.
Dylan returned fire through the wall.
“No!” Gail said. “Aimed shots, for God’s sake.”
Children were everywhere, on the floor, on the bed. All of them were crying. Two crawled toward Gail’s feet. “Down, down, down,” Gail shouted.
They moved quickly, their IR lasers tracing lines in the air. A closed door lay straight ahead. Gail pointed to it. “Bathroom.”
Gail swung left and dropped to her knee. The soldier who’d shot at them was still there, but with his muzzle light off, he could only shoot at movement and his two rounds went high. Gail’s return fire took him in the throat and the point of his chin. He sat back hard, but didn’t fall, so Gail shot him in the forehead.
“Check that bathroom,” she ordered. There were a lot of nightmare scenarios to play out during operations like this. Among the worst was having a shooter emerge from a room you didn’t check and shoot you in the back.
Dylan kicked the door.
She aimed steadily down the hall, trying her best not to be distracted by all the terrified children. They were everywhere, even on the floor of the hallway. The gunshots had spun them into a fury. “Children, stay down!” She really belted it out this time.
“Bathroom’s clear.”
“Moving,” Gail said. She led the way down the hall, stooped lower than she normally would, in order to give Dylan a clear firing lane.
The wall to her left erupted as the bungalow shook with the sound of rifle fire. The shooter was firing blindly, through the wall. Gail dropped to the floor. And made herself small as another full-auto rip tore through the wall.
“Where the hell is he?” Dylan yelled. He’d also hugged the floor.
“That’s the dining room,” Gail said.
“This is bullshit,” Dylan said. He rose to his haunches and duckwalked down the hardwood, firing long, full-auto bursts high along the hallway wall into the ceiling of the dining room.
Gail thought it was a brilliant way to keep the shooter’s head down without endangering any of the kids.
When Dylan got to the archway that led to the dining room, he rose to a knee, leveled his M4, and fired four shots.
He turned to Gail. “That’s three,” he said.
* * *
Jonathan led Yankee Three to the edges of the decorative plants around the upper pool and hunkered down. He broke squelch three times and heard two sets of two in return. He keyed his mic again and said, “Mother Hen, make it dark.”
The instant the lights went out, Yankee Three rose in unison, stepped over the planters, and fanned out. They still moved as a team, but with space between them so they never presented a unified target. Bad guys needed to know that to shoot one of them was to be shot by two others.
The first two were easy. A pair of soldiers had gathered near the tiled bar just off the edge of the pool. The sudden loss of light had alerted them, but they clearly didn’t know what they’d been alerted to. Jonathan double-tapped them both and they dropped.
“Don’t be selfish,” Boxers said. “Leave some for the rest of us.”
All around them, guests in various stages of undress and wakefulness surged in panic.
“Everybody, down!” Jonathan yelled. “We’re Americans and we’re here to take you home.”
Boxers fired twice and killed a guy Jonathan hadn’t seen.
“Keep yellin’, Boss,” he said. “Give ’em something to shoot at.”
Davey took out a soldier who’d been lounging against the lifeguard chair.
“Down!” Jonathan yelled, but his words seemed less than soothing to the hostages. Then he realized that those were exactly the instructions the terrorists had been shouting. These poor people were literally blind, and their world was coming apart. Maybe they didn’t need people yelling at them on top of it.
Besides, they weren’t listening, anyway.
“We’re the goddamn cavalry!” Boxers boomed. “Stay down and let us kill these assholes!”
His words brought instant compliance and more or less silenced the crowd. At least they knew now what was going on.
As they advanced toward the lower pool, Jonathan swept his IR laser over every face he saw, making countless shoot/don’t shoot decisions. How could he know if a bad guy had decided to camouflage himself as a hostage?
On Jonathan’s far right, Davey fired five or six shots in rapid succession, then ducked as return fire chewed up the trees and decapitated a statue of a Greek goddess.
“They’ve formed a skirmish line at the wall,” Davey said. “They can’t see a thing, but they’re shooting, anyway.”
“Good people are gonna die, Scorpion,” Boxers said.
He and Jonathan advanced on the line. The wall Davey talked about was a tile-and-seashell decorative piece that marked the beginning of the long, shallow-riser stairway that led ultimately down to the beach.
Jonathan swept the wall with his laser and keyed his mic. “Do you see my sparkle on the wall, Chief? Is this the spot you saw the bad guys?”
“Affirmative. But some good guys have sneaked into the mix. I’ve seen some taking off down toward the beach.”
They’re the smart ones, Jonathan thought. He keyed the mic again. “I’m going to bang ’em. Make them move and show themselves.” A flashbang grenade was a nonlethal noisemaker that was designed to disorient the enemy. One hundred eighty decibels and a million-candlepower flash will do that.
Jonathan ripped open the Velcro of a pocket on his vest, pulled out the tubular grenade, and pulled the pin. He keyed his mic. “Banger away.” He heaved the grenade in a lofting arc that sailed over the heads of the assembled bad guys. Even amid the gunfire, the explosion was world-rocking.
The five soldiers behind the wall all jumped. Two of them tried to bolt. All five of them died within seconds as Yankee Three’s bullets tore into them.
An unsuppressed gunshot from behind startled the bejesus out of Jonathan and he whirled in time to see a soldier grab a lady’s jaw in the crook of his elbow and lift her out of the chaise where she’d been sitting.
“I’m hit,” Davey said over the radio.
Shit!
“I swear to God, I’ll kill her!” the soldier yelled. He held the woman in his left arm while he swept the crowd blindly with the rifle he held in his right.
Jonathan said nothing as Boxers’ IR laser settled on the soldier’s right eye. The 7.62-millimeter bullet misted the soldier’s head. He dropped and the lady screamed.
“Talk to me, Chief,” Jonathan said.
“Got me in the plate,” Davey said. “I was stupid enough to silhouette myself, and he took his shot. I’ll be okay.”
“Hey!” Jonathan yelled to the crowd. “Where are the rest of them?”
“Who are you?” a lady asked.
“Inside the Plantation House,” a man’s voice yelled. Jonathan recognized the guy as Zach, the peg-legged vet that he’d chatted up at the pool. “Get me a light and I’ll come with you.”
“Roger that,” another voice said. This one belonged to an older guy. His name was Dan.
“Everybody just stay down,” Jonathan instructed as he led his team toward the beach. “This isn’t over. But if you want to do something truly noble, please cut those bodies down.”
CHAPTER 35
HENRY WEST HAD ALREADY DROPPED TWO OF THE RUSSIANS, BUT there were more. They’d all taken to ground in the darkness as they fired randomly into the night. The working lights from the Katie Starling provided enough illumination for the workers to scatter, but probably not enough to provide solid target pictures. The result was a wasteful spray-and-pray approach, which did little harm but wasted a lot of ammunition.
With the benefit of night vision, Henry could take his time and—
Madman’s voice in his ear said, “Conan, I need your help. She Devil’s in bad shape. I need help carrying her to the exfil site.”
There wasn’t a choice to be made. A team member needed his help. The guys on the dock would
get a bye.
* * *
Pressed as tightly into the mulchy floor as he could, Anatoly listened through his earpiece as his team came apart. Rescuers had somehow arrived and the body count was rising with startling speed. The pool had fallen, no one could raise Mike, Tango, or Whiskey from the children’s bungalow, and now this. The mission was a total disaster. It was time to switch to survival mode. He’d brought three of his men with him to the pier—Romeo and Sierra and Two-Bravo—and they were all dead now, though he was not sure who their killers had been.
The CIA team continued to pour fire onto his location, though they were not aimed shots, so they went wide. He sensed that the sustained fusillade was intended as covering fire to keep heads down and prevent retaliation.
And then the shooting stopped.
The pounding impacts of rifle fire had been replaced by the deep rumbling of heavy diesel engines. When Anatoly dared to peek up, he saw one of the heavy mooring lines arcing through the air and landing on the dock. None of the crew members of the Katie Starling were on the dock anymore. The ship was pulling out to sea.
In that instant, Anatoly saw his way out of this mess.
He keyed the mic on his radio. “Home Base, Home Base, Home Base, this is Alpha.”
He waited for the skipper of the Olympia 3 to respond, but got only silence in return.
He tried again. More silence.
Anatoly dared to stand, then stepped out onto the pier. He saw deckhands on the Olympia 3 moving about. The bridge was occupied.
The cowards were abandoning him.
The hell they are! Anatoly started running toward his ticket to safety.
* * *
She Devil had been hit. Jonathan didn’t know what that meant, but from the tone of Madman’s voice over the radio, it was serious. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said over the radio. “Launch medevac protocol. We have an operator down. Conan will provide updates.”
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