by Bob Mayer
Zooming in, he noted that the prisoner on the left pole had a bandage over his shoulder. The prisoner on the right had his right hand encased in a cast. It didn’t take rocket science to figure out who they were: the two who’d tried to kidnap Sarah and had shot Chelsea, then showed up at Erin’s, only to be evicted by Gator.
No one matched the description that Chase had given for Karralkov, but that wasn’t surprising. They hadn’t expected the boss himself to be out here. The goal was rescuing Cole, not getting Karralkov.
Riley focused on the three huts. The door was open on one, shut on the other two. No padlocks or bars on the window, but that didn’t mean Cole wasn’t inside, chained to a stake, or in a cage.
Riley checked the time: 0252. He had less than a half-hour.
He keyed his radio. “Sitrep. Machine gun on end of dock in bunker. Assume it’s manned. Five men, two with AK74s, the others with pistols. They’re torturing two men tied to stakes. No sign of Cole yet. I’m going in to check the huts.”
He began to move to the right, circling the encampment.
* * * * *
Gator was enjoying the show. He keyed his radio in response to Riley’s quick summary. “The two on the poles are definitely the ones who I met. Guess Karralkov wasn’t too happy with their performance.”
He couldn’t hear the screams at this distance, but he could see the mouth of the man wounded in the shoulder open wide as the red-hot iron was pressed once more against his flesh.
One of the Russians produced a pair of pliers and a knife. Despite the desperate attempts of the prisoner to avoid it, the Russian eventually got the pliers into the man’s mouth. He probed about and got what he wanted.
The knife slashed as the Russian held the tongue extended.
He tossed the severed piece of flesh into the fire.
Guess they were done talking with him, Gator figured.
Then Gator shifted attention to studying the bunker at the end of the pier.
* * * * *
“We should help them,” Erin said without much conviction to Kono and Sarah as the Fina bobbed in Sapelo Sound, south of the objective, engines softly growling.
“We stay with plan,” Kono said. But even as he spoke, he was edging forward ever so slightly on the throttles, moving the patrol boat closer to the entrance of the creek that led to the Russian dock.
* * * * *
The huts were little more than plywood fabrications, hastily thrown together. They had no windows on the sides or back. Riley slung his HK416 over his shoulder, flipped down his night-vision goggles, and pulled out his pistol and his knife. He jammed his knife between two sheets of plywood, then waited. As another scream pierced the night, he levered the knife, pulling one sheet away from the two-by-four it was nailed to. Holding the plywood out, Riley peered inside the dark interior.
A dozen bunks scattered about. Some tables.
No place for Cole to be held.
Riley pulled his knife out. He could hear someone shouting in Russian, obviously a question. He got on his belly and low-crawled through the grass to the middle hut. Another loud moan, different than the scream.
The earpiece came alive with Chase’s voice.
“Five minutes to drop. Status?”
Gator was first to reply. “Ready to go hot.”
Then Kono. “In position.”
Riley whispered his response. “Checking middle hut. South one clear.”
The next scream was a howl, a different person. It was clear the torturer had switched victims. An equal-opportunity dealer of pain. There was almost a nonstop moaning in the background, a symphony of pain.
Riley scanned the interior of the second hut. A single table, totally clear of anything except a set of scales, a bill-counting machine, and several packages wrapped in cellophane. The exchange room.
Riley slid back down. One more to go.
A shot rang out.
* * * * *
Gator curled his finger around the trigger of the Barrett. “Scratch one of the guys tied up. South pole is dead. Shot to the head. He musta given a wrong answer. Guy is holding gun to second man’s head.”
Gator pulled his eye away from the scope and reached into his bag of tricks. He pulled out a second magazine of fifty-caliber rounds.
Special rounds.
And he placed that magazine ready next to him.
* * * * *
On board the Fina, Erin looked over at Sarah, but the other’s woman’s focus was straight ahead.
Kono was still edging them in, ever closer.
* * * * *
Riley bellied up to the rear of the last hut.
“One minute,” Chase announced, his voice deceptively calm. “Green for jump?” They’d discussed this in the operations order. Chase could jump and still get diverted above 4,000 feet by ‘driving’ his parachute out into the Sound and landing near the Fina. But there was a point at which gravity was going to rule, and he was landing in the camp.
“Green,” Riley said, scurrying even faster to the final hut.
A voice was shouting loudly in Russian. Demanding. Threatening. It sounded the same in any language. Someone was replying, begging, pleading. A different voice, the same tone.
After seeing his partner shot, Riley had no doubt the man was telling the interrogator anything he wanted to know, although Riley had a sense this was more an object lesson for the other Russians than a desire to acquire information—after all, what could the two thugs know, except to tell how they fucked up?
Riley slid his knife in between two boards.
“Airborne,” Chase’s voice came over the net.
* * * * *
Chase was having trouble getting stable.
This was not like riding a bicycle.
He tumbled in the air, trying to draw up the instincts he’d first learned in the freefall tower at Fort Bragg so many years ago, and then perfected at Yuma Proving Grounds.
He only had ten thousand feet to work with, which might have seemed like a lot, but wasn’t when accelerating toward the ground. If he opened his chute while twirling, he could get a streamer, and he’d slam in at terminal velocity.
Chase cleared his mind, focused, and then arms and legs akimbo, arrested his spin.
Late. He was at only six thousand feet.
Chase pulled his ripcord, and the opening shock jerked him upright. He quickly got oriented: Atlantic to the east was the big picture, land to the west.
“I’ve got about ten seconds of air before I’m committed,” he announced over the net.
* * * * *
The third hut was a jumble of boxes, crates, rolls of material; so much crap, Riley couldn’t make out much from the crack he’d opened in the plywood.
He heard Chase’s transmission, and knew lives were going to be determined in the next ten seconds.
Then he heard the distance echo of a big gun firing, informing him the decision had been made for them all.
* * * * *
Gator watched the head of the Russian holding the gun to the surviving prisoner evaporate into a mist. He was already shifting his aim.
“Contact!” Gator yelled into the radio as an afterthought.
The fact that he had initiated the contact wasn’t important.
* * * * *
Chase dumped air, descending faster now that he was committed to landing at the encampment. He could see the flickering flame from the firepit, and he steered his chute to land on the northern side, just outside the treeline.
* * * * *
Riley slid his pistol back in the holster and used both hands to grip the plywood. If the Russians had Cole in the hut, there was no doubt someone would come in here with a gun and finish the job, or at the very least, use him as a bargaining chip.
Riley cursed as the nails defeated his attempt.
* * * * *
At the sound of the fifty-cal rifle, Kono slammed forward the throttles and the Fina roared ahead, heading straight toward the red light o
f the dock. Kono accelerated the boat for six seconds, planing it out, then jerked the throttles back to neutral.
“Just steer straight!” he shouted at Erin as he let go of the controls and headed for the dual fifties. An arc of tracers erupted from the bunker at the end of the dock and hit the water twenty meters in front of the boat, then the gunner ‘walked’ the tracers up into the bow of the boat.
The sound of rounds punching into the hull mixed with that of the machine gun firing.
* * * * *
Cursing, Riley ran around the side of the hut, stock of the HK tight to his shoulder.
The Russians were confused, but the machine gun opening up on the dock gave them some focus, two of them running in that direction. Two more were running toward the huts.
Riley fired on instinct, four times, two bullets toward each of the Russians.
The lead one dropped like dead men do—abruptly and without grace.
The second one was unscathed, and fired a burst from his AK74 at Riley, semi-automatic, controlled, which indicated he wasn’t a rank amateur blasting away on automatic.
Riley was spun about as a round hit his body armor at an angle in the left shoulder. He went with the impact, falling to the ground, keeping his grip on the HK and continuing the roll, coming to one knee, weapon stock tight against his shoulder once more, grimacing in pain as he fired, this time pulling the trigger five times in an arc at the second Russian. Something hit, because he finally went down.
Riley didn’t want to test it. He aimed, noted his hands were shaking, took a deep breath, then put two more rounds into the body.
* * * * *
Chase flared at the last second, but still hit the ground hard. He’d watched the two that had been running for the huts drop. Still in his harness, he lifted up his MP-5 to fire at the other two.
* * * * *
Bullets sparked off the front of the Fina as Kono jumped into the forward turret. He grabbed the handles of the dual fifties, and his thumb hovered over the trigger when he realized the flaw in the plan: if he fired high, his rounds would go into the encampment.
* * * * *
Gator swapped out magazines without removing his eye from the scope and keeping the gun trained on his new target: the bunker. He slammed the new one home, wondering why Kono wasn’t firing.
Gator fired, the round that had been in the chamber a regular one from the old magazine, then immediately fired twice more with the special rounds in the new magazine.
The Norwegian government, home to the company which produced the unique bullets Gator had just fired, took the official stance that the Raufoss Mk 211 fifty-caliber round should not be used against personnel, but only material.
Right. Soldiers followed rules all the time.
Also, Gator was no longer a soldier.
The half-inch diameter bullet had an armor-piercing core, which punched through the metal plating surrounding the dock bunker. Then the incendiary and high explosive mixture surrounding that core exploded.
There were two Russians manning the machine gun.
The firing stopped.
There had been two Russians manning the machine gun.
* * * * *
Kono saw the right wall of the bunker crumble as the echo of three heavy shots floated across the water. He abandoned the guns and ran back to the cockpit, where Erin stood frozen, hands on the control.
“I got it,” Kono said. He throttled forward.
* * * * *
Chase hit the trailing Russian with a headshot, doing a Sergeant York, taking them down rear to front, and that was that.
“Clear,” Chase announced.
“Clear,” Riley echoed.
“All clear from out here,” Gator said over the net. “On my way in.”
Chase flipped up his night-vision goggles. Riley was standing in front of the last hut.
“Find him?”
“Not yet,” Riley said. He turned for the door. Chase joined him.
Riley kicked in the door, and they entered the room as they’d both been taught in the Killing House at Fort Bragg. Riley was low, Chase was high. They quartered it, searching for targets.
“Clear,” Riley said, slowly straightening up, grimacing in pain
“Clear,” Chase said, a sickening feeling beginning to coalesce in his stomach. “You okay?”
Riley nodded. “Yeah.”
They walked through, checking every box, every nook, every corner.
Finally Chase had to accept it. He heard the Fina pulling up to the dock, and knew Gator was on his way from the overwatch.
“Negative on finding the package in camp,” Chase said. “Cole isn’t here.”
Chapter Ten
Chase met Sarah at the end of the dock. She was staring in horror at the mangled remains of the two Russians who’d been manning the machine gun in the bunker. Gator’s two rounds had devastated both of them so completely, it was hard to tell whose body part was whose.
Maybe the Norwegian government had a point, after all.
Erin knew better than to check for vitals. “Anyone need me back there?”
“I think one of the prisoners is still alive,” Chase said.
Erin took off down the dock at a run, or as best she could, with her med kit and her body armor flapping against her thighs. Kono was tying off the boat.
“Where is he? Where is he? Where is he?” Sarah was repeating the question as if the number of times she asked would increase the odds of an answer.
Chase took her in his arms and held her tight. Her body collapsed into his. “We’ll figure it out. Karralkov must be holding him somewhere else.” He didn’t add that it was going to be a very pissed-off Karralkov, now that he had seven dead ‘soldiers.’ The clock was ticking, not only on the ransom deadline, but also on Karralkov finding out what had happened here.
The purr of an outboard engine grew louder, and Gator slid the Zodiac in to the end of the dock, just behind the Fina. He hopped out, automatic rifle in hand, Barrett over one shoulder.
Chase looked over Sarah’s hair, still holding her. “Why did you shoot?”
Gator leaned the Barrett against one of the wood pylons. “We were committed. You were coming down, Riley was in the camp, and they were killing people. What if the kid were here, and they were going to kill him next?”
“You couldn’t tell the difference between a kid getting dragged, and a man?”
“I was three-quarters of a mile away,” Gator protested.
Chase knew it was a waste of time pursuing this, and frankly, pursuing anything with Gator seemed futile. What was done was done. “You and Kono go help Riley. You need to do a complete search of the huts and the entire island. It’s not that big. Double-check for Cole, but also see if anybody here had a satphone or marine radio, and could have had contact with the outside world. I know we’re outside of cell phone coverage.” He let go of Sarah with one hand and checked his watch. “We don’t have much time to search and then sterilize this place as much as possible. Put the bodies, and what remains of the bodies,” he added with a nod at the bunker, “in that boat.” He indicated the cabin cruiser, and then felt a spark of hope and chastisement for missing something so obvious. “Hold on!”
Chase let go of Sarah and ran to the covered slip. He jumped on board the boat, HK at the ready. Gator and Kono were right behind him. It took Sarah a moment to understand, then she ran after them.
Chase kicked in the door to the cabin. Nothing. With Kono and Gator’s help, they thoroughly searched the boat. No sign of Cole, although they did find a row of large plastic containers holding hundreds of bundles of a white powder.
“Drugs?” Chase asked, pointing at the containers.
Gator peeled back one of the lids, stuck his pinkie in, and licked it. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and smiled. “Top-grade heroin. Good stuff. That’s worth a lot,” Gator said, pointing at the row of containers. “Pure heroin goes for around seventy-five thousand per kilo.”
“What if it had been poisoned?” Chase asked.
“Why would they have poisoned drugs on board?” Gator seemed genuinely mystified.
Kono stuck his head up from the keel-level hatch. “Nothing.”
Chase’s moment of hope flickered out.
“Where’s Mikey?” Chase asked as he led them off the boat.
“He never came up out of the cabin,” Kono said.
“See what he’s up to,” Chase ordered Gator and Kono, “and then help Riley search the island thoroughly.”
“Roger that,” Gator said.
Chase checked the bridge. The marine radio was off, and since no one had been on the boat, that meant the Russians hadn’t gotten a message out on it once the attack started.
Gator walked to the other side of the dock. “Yo, Mikey! Get your ass up here.” He hopped on the boat and disappeared inside. He reappeared a couple of seconds later, carrying a limp body over his shoulder. “Looks like Mikey caught one. You got a couple of holes in the bow of your boat, bud,” he added to Kono.
Without ceremony, he tossed Mikey’s body onto the deck of the cabin cruiser. “Let’s go searching and policing bodies.”
Kono and Gator headed down the long dock.
Chase gave Sarah a little shake. “Tune in, Sarah. We’ve got a lot to do. It’s not over yet. Okay?”
He waited until she nodded, then they, too, headed toward the island.
* * * * *
“He going to make it?” Riley didn’t sound optimistic with the question. He’d cut the lone survivor free of the ropes binding him to the pole, and laid him on the ground. He didn’t want to check his own shoulder. Bad bruising at the very least, and he knew there was no blood, so the armor had held. No broken bones, either, so he was functional for now.