High Treason

by John Gilstrap

  “I don’t know, sir.” The watchman’s tone became more formal—more fearful—when he heard Dmitri’s distinctive voice. “All I know is I couldn’t raise them on the radio.”

  “Did you send anyone to look for them?”

  “Well, sir . . . no.”

  “Don’t you think that might be a good idea?” Len asked.

  “I suppose it would, yes. I’ll get right to it.”

  “Thank you.” Len pushed the disconnect button. He walked to his window and tried to look down to see the sentries, but couldn’t. Even if he opened the window, the bars over the opening would keep him from being able to look straight down.

  “Do you see them?” Dmitri asked.

  “The angles are wrong,” Len answered.

  Dmitri walked to the window for his own look. “I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t like the timing.”

  “I’m sure the watchman will tell us—”

  His phone rang again and he pressed the button to connect. “Have you found the sentries?”

  “Not yet, sir, but I’ve sent someone to find them. This comes from one of the drivers. He just radioed to tell me that he thought there might have some people lurking at the far end of the bridge. He thought he heard a radio.”

  Len felt something dissolve in his chest. One anomaly could be coincidence. A second almost certainly spelled trouble. “Wake everybody up,” he commanded. “Turn on the yard lights, and send a five-man team to the end of the bridge. I want that area scoured. I want to talk personally to whoever they find.”

  “Suppose it’s the police?”

  Dmitri said, “If it’s the police—”

  Len raised his hand to silence him. “If it’s the police, then we are done here, and we do all the damage we can do.” He hung up.

  “I’m proud of you,” Dmitri said.

  Len smiled and donned the coat that had been draping the back of his chair. “I told you dozens of times, my friend. Growing old and tired does not make me less committed to our cause.”

  On the wall opposite Len’s desk, a gun rack held three AK47s and two American M16s. Len walked to the rack and grabbed an AK and a bandolier of spare magazines. He gave it to Dmitri. “Speed is now of the essence,” he said. “We need to get the trucks loaded and back on the road as soon as possible. It could be that this is nothing, or it could be that we are under attack. Either way, the sooner we get the trucks rolling, the better off we’re going to be.”

  Dmitri racked the bolt to chamber a round. “And you?”

  Len gestured to the bank of computer screens on his desk. “I’m going to organize the defense. Let’s get this done.”

  The door on the far side of the vestibule opened onto a dimly lit hallway. Probably enough light for Yelena to see where she was going, but not enough to flare out the NVGs.

  “Clear,” Jonathan said of his view down the left-hand side of the hallway.

  “Clear,” Boxers said of the right.

  “Sidesaddle,” Jonathan said at a loud whisper. “On me. Now.”

  He never looked to confirm—instead keeping his eyes trained continuously on his segment of the kill zone—but he heard her footsteps as she cleared the jamb. Directly across from the vestibule door was the secured passageway that led to a cross hall that led to the cell blocks, the second largest one of which, designated Building Bravo, had reportedly been converted to barracks for the folks who minded the store here.

  Jonathan told Yelena to close the vestibule door behind her and put her hand on his rucksack.

  The door latched. Yelena said, “I can see all right.”

  “You’re arguing,” Jonathan said. “It’s not about what you can see. It’s about not shooting you because you get in the way. If your hand is on my ruck, I know where you are.”

  He felt the tug in his shoulders as she grabbed on. “Moving left,” he said. He led the way, his weapon at his shoulder, knowing that Boxers was moving as his shadow, in reverse, as they made their way past a heavily reinforced door on the right that led to the north-west quadrant of the yard. This main hallway served in the old days as the primary conduit from the north end of the prison to the south end. Since it was an administrative area, it lacked the internal security walls and gates that blocked free passage through the cell blocks themselves.

  Jonathan was still ten feet from the closed chapel door when he caught the first hint of the aroma of explosives. He’d heard others describe the smell as that of almonds, but that never resonated with him. As far as he was concerned, it was a chemical smell unique to itself. For the odor to escape the size of the door he was looking at, there had to be a shitload of them. In the slice of time it took to snap a finger, he’d begun to second-guess his own plan. It was one thing to create a diversion. It was something else to blow up a chunk of Canada.

  “I’m at the door,” Jonathan announced. He found the knob—actually, another ring—and he turned it. This time, while the lock turned, the deadbolt clearly had been set. The deadbolt actually looked new. “Hey, Big Guy. Take a look.”

  Boxers bent at the waist to get closer to the lock. Then he stood tall and looked at the hinge side of the jamb. “If you’re asking my opinion, I think the Mossberg is a waste of time on this.”

  “I agree. But a GPC—”

  “—is a bad idea. There’s a shitload of boom-boom in there. For all we know it’s stored right up against the door. I vote we use the irons.”

  “All right. Yelena, look at me.”

  She did.

  “Watch both ends of the hallway. If you see anyone, shoot them. And I mean anyone who’s not Big Guy or me.”

  She looked terrified.

  “You said you’ve done it before,” Jonathan reminded. As he spoke, he shrugged out of his ruck and laid it on the floor. “You go to hell for the first one. After that, the others don’t count. Can you do it?”

  “Of course.”

  Jonathan was learning that one of the most surefire ways to motivate Yelena was to imply that she was somehow soft. “Safety off, finger off the trigger till you need it, and don’t point that muzzle anywhere close to me.”

  Point made, Jonathan unstrapped the irons kit from the outside of his ruck. “Irons” was the collective name for a mini-Halligan bar, a five-pound sledgehammer. and a K-tool, a nifty device that resembled a stylized letter K, and was specifically designed to pull the cylinders out of deadbolts. It worked by sliding the K-tool to the edge of the lock’s keyway, and then seating it with a few sharp hits from the hammer. Once it was seated, you inserted the flat end of the Halligan into a slot on the K-tool and through pure leverage, you stripped the cylinder from the lock. After that, the rest was normally easy.

  The thickness of the door translated to the need for a lot of leverage. Jonathan’s first attempt proved to be light.

  “Get out of the way, little man,” Boxers said.

  “Bite me.” On the next try, Jonathan all but jumped on the end of the Halligan. It budged, but didn’t clear. The third try took care of it. The cylinder cleared the lock casing and launched across the hall with a metallic clang. With the mechanism exposed, the next step was some quick work with a pick, and the door floated open.

  “There you go,” Jonathan said. “Now, it’s your turn.”

  As Jonathan reassembled the irons, Big Guy scooted past with a huge grin on his face. Truly, Boxers was at his happiest when he got to blow shit up. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said.

  Boxers’ slice in the hierarchy of assault team assignments was the deployment of heavy weapons, the piloting of vehicles, and the placement of explosives. Big Guy was a true artist when it came to breaking things. He could fashion a shaped charge out of C4 if he wanted to poke a hole in steel, or he could turn a flat spot into a crater if shock and awe were the orders of the day.

  Tonight’s mission was all about using a small explosive to detonate a lot of explosives. There wasn’t much elegance to it, but it was astonishing what a few blocks of C4
connected by a few feet of detonating cord could do. Det cord was Jonathan’s greatest friend. Essentially a plastic tube stuffed with PETN, known to chemists as pentaerythritol tetranitrate, detonating cord could transmit an explosion from one charge to another at a velocity of about four miles per second.

  Jonathan stayed in the hallway with Yelena, watching the darkness.

  The dead sentry’s radio rasped in his pocket, “Central, the trucks are arriving.”

  The now-familiar Russian-accented voice said, “Unit One, go check on Units Three and Four. I can’t raise them on the radio.”

  Yelena’s eyes grew huge. “This is bad.”

  “As good a word for it as I can think of,” Jonathan said. He keyed his mike. “Big Guy, we’re in trouble. Step it up.”

  “Never rush an artist.” It didn’t sound like it, but that was Boxers-speak for “okay.”

  Thank God for satellite maps. Jonathan had already figured out the routes from one place to another, and unless he was woefully mistaken, the quickest way for the yard guards to access the front gate was to pass through the door that was just fifteen feet from the spot where he was standing.

  He used his arm to sweep the First Lady from the hallway into the chapel. “I need you to join Big Guy for a minute,” he said. Alone now in the hallway, Jonathan squatted to a rice paddy prone position, leveled his MP7 at the door from the yard, and waited. It didn’t take long.

  Unit One showed no sense of urgency as he pushed the big panel open and stepped inside. He pushed the door shut again, and as he looked up, he saw Jonathan and froze.

  Jonathan triple-tapped him, two to the chest and one to the forehead, in the space of a heartbeat. The target fell straight back, arms outward, and he flung his AK high. Jonathan cringed as it crashed to the thick wooden floor, half expecting it to discharge on impact. It didn’t.

  A second or two later, every light in the world turned on, igniting the yard in brilliant yellow, which flooded the hallway through the windows. In the distance, an alarm bell rang. It sounded like one of those rotary jobs that he used to hear in school.

  Into his radio, Jonathan said, “Now would be a really good time to announce that you’re finished.”

  Big Guy materialized out of the darkness behind him. Scared the shit out of him. “What the hell just happened?” He glanced down the hall and saw the body. “Oh, you shot a guy. Cool. You know, there’s a lot of shit in that chapel. They’ve got Stingers, mines, grenades, rifles. Some pretty advanced shit. All of it US military. Even saw a couple of mortar rounds, though I didn’t see any tubes. KFB, baby.” KFB was ka-fucking-boom.

  “How big a charge did you place?”

  “Big enough. Daisy-chained a couple of GPCs in all the right places. You wanted a crater, right?”

  Jonathan thought he heard a hint of teasing in Boxers’ voice, but there was no way to be sure. Big Guy was a professional, first and last, and even his lust for big bangs wouldn’t cause him to create more havoc than was necessary.

  “Where’s Yelena?”

  “Stuck in the doorway,” she said. There was a tremor in her voice that matched the one in her hands.

  Boxers moved aside to let her pass. “Oops,” he said.

  Jonathan pulled her close. “Same drill as before. Hand on my back. Big Guy, I’ve got point, you make a lady sandwich.”

  “Yup.”

  Jonathan more sensed than saw a lot of new movement in the compound. The bad guys had sounded the alarm. That blew the element of surprise, but only one part of it. They still didn’t know what was going on. Given the fact that the transfer of explosives was clearly being made tonight, they probably thought that was the focus. The wild card was how nervous would that make the Mishins’ guards. Nervous guards either shot too early or ran away too early. There seemed to be no middle ground. Jonathan was going with ran away, if only because it better served his priorities.

  Jonathan led the way to the door that would take them down the passageway to the cell blocks. The entry door was unlocked. It made sense, he supposed, that the internal doors would be unlocked. After all, Saint Stephen’s wasn’t a prison anymore. Soon, it would be hotel rooms and cocktail lounges, if the owners had their way.

  Jonathan predicted that the value of the real estate was about to drop precipitously.

  By Jonathan’s estimation, the greatest hazard lay directly ahead, at the end of this passageway. To go straight would be to take them directly to the cell block that served as the barracks. That meant that everyone who had just been rousted would be heading straight at them. Two and a half against many became far more daunting odds when the confrontation came head-to-head out in the open.

  With his NVGs flipped up and out of the way to accommodate for the wash of light, Jonathan noted in his peripheral vision just what terrible shape this place was in. The once whitewashed walls now looked cancerous with peeling paint, and the stone walls radiated cold.

  “I’m picking up the pace,” Jonathan said. He accelerated. If he could get to the end of the passageway and turn to the right, then they’d have a chance at remaining invisible. If they couldn’t—if they got caught here in the middle of the complex, they would have to fight for every step.

  Jonathan called over his shoulder, “Seriously, Big Guy, how far away do we need to be before you push the button?”

  “Farther than this,” Boxers said. The problem with pressure waves was that they didn’t give much of a damn about twists and turns and hallways. Physics was all about straight lines, and despite the fact that they’d covered an easy hundred yards on foot, they were still only twenty-five yards from ground zero when they initiated the charge.

  Jonathan and his team were still twenty-five feet from the end of the hallway when the door on the opposite end burst open to reveal would-be warriors stumbling out of bed and into action. A few were mostly dressed, but most were still assembling themselves. In Jonathan’s mind, somebody was beating these guys to quarters, but they were still thirty seconds from being fully awake.

  And every one of them was armed with a rifle. It was an offense that carried the death penalty. In a dynamic assault like this one, when the good guys were so vastly outnumbered by bad guys, there was no time to tell bad guys to drop their weapons and zip-cuff them into submission. The secret to survival lay in convincing the OpFor—opposing force—that the benefit of surrendering outweighed the benefit of fighting. It was a lesson hard learned by every first wave of defenders.

  The first group of three or four hadn’t even seen their enemy when Jonathan mowed them down. He flipped the selector to full-auto with his thumb and one-handed the MP7 as if it were a pistol, launching a full forty-round mag into the open door. Blood and tissue flew and people fell, and he felt another piece of his soul peel away. Intent notwithstanding, he’d just murdered those men. He told himself that given the chance, they’d have done the same for him.

  But they hadn’t. They didn’t even know they were in danger when they died. Jonathan fingered the mag release and even as the empty was hitting the floor, he had a fresh one in and a round chambered.

  As the bodies stacked at the doorway, panic spread to those behind. Jonathan recognized the ripple of fear and confusion as an opportunity to buy real time. The most terrified person in the world was the first survivor behind a line of people who had been killed. Splashed by blood, and maybe even cut by splintering bone, the will to fight evaporated. The effect is contagious, but the returns diminish as the line builds.

  That meant that Jonathan faced a unique opportunity to freeze these assholes in their tracks.

  “Yelena, get on the floor.”

  She dropped.

  The first man to die had blocked the door open, and through that open door, some brave souls were laying out a steady volume of fire. It was random and unaimed, but supersonic projectiles were supersonic projectiles. Even the ones that didn’t directly impact flesh fragmented when they impacted the stone walls, and those tiny bits of shrapnel could
be every bit as deadly as the bullets that sponsored them.

  Rather than shout above the din, Jonathan keyed his mike. “I’m going to frag them,” he said. “Cover me when I open the door all the way.”

  “Got it,” Boxers said. Covering fire had less to do with hitting targets than it did with making them take cover and say a prayer before looking up again.

  Jonathan half-carried, half-dragged Yelena to the end of the passageway, and slung her to the right, into the cross hall and out of the line of fire.

  The incoming fire had died significantly as Jonathan approached the door. He didn’t know if they’d lost their nerve, or if they were just changing out mags, but now they would pay for whatever caused their delay. As he pulled an M67 fragmentation hand grenade from its pouch, he hurried to the half-open door and hit it hard with his shoulder to bounce off anyone who might have been poised on the other side.

  He looked back to Boxers, who’d taken a textbook standing shooter’s position. He’d deployed his H&K 417, their portable cannon. “Just stay low,” Big Guy said.

  Jonathan crouched and pulled the safety pin on the grenade. He pulled on the door, and as it opened, Boxers let loose with one long, sustained string of 7.62 millimeter bullets. When Boxers paused, Jonathan heaved the grenade into the crowd, pushed the door shut again, and whirled to press his back against the door as he saw Boxers flinging himself to the ground.

  The explosion was bright and sharp, and immediately followed by the sickening high-pitched screaming of terrified, wounded men. It was their cue to move.

  “Hand on my ruck,” Jonathan said.

  Yelena stood there, staring at the smoking stairway and the bodies on the floor. “Oh my God,” she said. “How many people did you just kill?”

  “The hell do you care?” Boxers countered. “Move.” He nudged her forward.

  She resisted. “Oh my God.”

  Jonathan grabbed her by the front of her vest, under her chin, and pulled her close. “This is what you signed on for,” he said. He intentionally infused his tone with a hefty dose of menace. “Inside these walls, there’s only good guys and bad guys. Think of Nicholas and Josef and let’s finish what we started.”