by Michael Todd
The odds weren’t great, of course. While he had decent enough skill in long-range shooting, he had never really qualified as a counter-sniper. His business was usually conducted up-close and personal.
“I have a signal,” Anja said softly. “One of the radios near you is giving off a ready signal. It’s roughly to your northeast. Keep heading that way.”
It had to be his sniper, Savage mused. He could only hope that they hadn’t brought enough people to merit a spotter for the man. They couldn’t be more than five-hundred-yards away from the house, though. Why would they need a spotter?
“That’s right, Savage,” he grumbled under his breath. “Way to stay positive.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
He pressed on, his eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary. Ghillie suits these days could blend into almost any environment and he would have a hard time finding it. All he could really do was keep moving and hope he tripped over the man. He’d actually convinced himself that this was his only option when he spotted a small hump in the forest chaff. He froze and narrowed his eyes to scrutinize the shape, then grinned. A man lay prone with a big 50-cal sniper rifle.
Or, Savage thought with a small, ironic grin, just come out right on top of him. He inched closer, careful to watch where he placed his boots. The man wore no covering of any kind. He simply lay on a tarp on the ground and hugged his rifle close. The operative gritted his teeth at the implied insult. Anderson at least merited a proper hit. Did these guys really think so little of the man that they didn’t bother to equip their sniper properly?
Time seemed to slow as he edged forward with elaborate caution. The man seemed relaxed and even careless. There was nothing in his posture or attitude that suggested real alertness or focus. He was clearly not a sniper by trade. Jeremiah prepared the piano wire and grasped the handles firmly as he scowled his disapproval. The attitude was definitely disrespectful toward Anderson. He had been Special Forces, for crying out loud. Did they really think that half-assing it like this was the proper way to kill an ex-Special Forces colonel?
Savage launched onto the man, who hadn’t even noticed his approach. The sniper grunted in pain when his attacker’s elbow jabbed into his back. He tried to cry out to alert the team that he was under attack, but the garrote was already around his throat. It was thin but not thin enough to cut into his airways or even draw blood.
The target grabbed at the wire as his assailant planted his knee in his lower back and used that as leverage to pull upward. Odd ticks pulsed against the garrote’s wire as the man’s carotids tried desperately to supply his brain with oxygen. At this point, all training was choked out of his mind and his only instinct was to try to breathe again as the deadly tension cut off his airways.
Savage applied more and more pressure and tried to make sure neither he nor his victim made a sound. The sniper made a desperate grab for the rifle to get a warning shot off, but his attacker moved quicker and shoved the weapon with his foot.
There was an almost tangible sensation when the man’s brain ceased activity and he slumped forward. With no time to wait for him to die from the chokehold, the operative drew his knife and plunged it firmly into the broad back beneath him and twisted it roughly. He felt the man’s spine snap, and the would-be killer exhaled one last, dying breath.
“I take it you found the sniper nest, then?” Anja asked.
“You could say that.” He growled his response, a little out of breath as he rolled the man off the tarp and retrieved the cannon of a rifle he’d had to push away in the struggle. His grin wide, he cradled it into his shoulder.
“Well, hello, beautiful,” he said softly and almost intimately as he traced his fingers over the hard steel lines of the weapon. “Where have you been all my life?”
“Do you two need a room?” the hacker snarked.
“Despite what you may have heard on the Internet, Anja, bigger is better—at least when it comes to guns,” he retorted with a giddy laugh.
“Do you have an erection right now?” she asked. “Because…gross.”
“Tell Anderson that his house is about to be breached and that he has someone covering him from afar with a big-ass rifle.” Savage snapped back to reality. He made sure that there was a round chambered and that the safety was off before he aimed toward Anderson’s house.
“Already done, Kilgore.” Her chuckle definitely sounded sarcastic.
Savage ignored her. He wouldn’t let the hacker ruin this moment for him. Yes, he liked making his kills up close, but there wasn’t a man alive who couldn’t appreciate the sheer majesty of the 50-cal sniper rifle. Hell, he thought with a grin, with this thing, I could probably kill a building.
It was overkill from this distance, which he gauged at a little over five hundred yards. He ran the quick calculations that he remembered from his time training with long-distance shooting to account for the wind and the drop. The rifle itself was already zeroed in perfectly, so he didn’t need to add anything to that.
Satisfied, he settled in to wait but within a few seconds, a group of ten or so men broke from the foliage. Unlike the sniper, these were professionals. They moved smoothly in groups of three or four each, remained under cover, and never allowed their lines of fire to cross one of their comrades.
Their efficiency really was a pity. He’d hoped for the same shoddy attitude that had characterized the sniper. Savage took in a deep breath and released it slowly as he watched them proceed unerringly toward the house.
“Tell Anderson that his approach party is close,” he said, his voice calm. The cold control settled in his stomach and adrenaline pumped through his body. He welcomed the calm realization that he was ready for a fight.
“Will do, Savage,” Anja replied. He remained silent and tracked one of the men in the crosshairs of his rifle. He didn’t need to actually hit anyone—only grab their attention and slow their movements—but he really wanted to make this first shot count. His selection was the one who seemed to lead the group. He could tell that from the way that he motioned for the two teams of three to break away and flank the building as he and three others pushed across the last patch of open ground.
He breathed deep, exhaled slowly, and reached the end of the air in his lungs as he squeezed the trigger.
Bullets from a gun this big wouldn’t be stopped by the body armor these men wore, so he didn’t bother to try for a headshot. The body shot was effective, and the slug powered through the man and out the other side in a wide crimson spray. The ammo didn’t make much of a hole going in, but they were certainly showy on the way out.
The leader fell instantly, and from the blood that poured from the wound, his quarry wouldn’t get up again.
The group of three remaining men froze and looked at their leader before they spun in an effort to make out where the shot had come from.
Jeremiah yanked the bolt back, ejected the spent casing, and slapped another one in.
“Overwatch, come in,” one of the team yelled over the radio. “We have another sniper on our six. Repeat, we have another sniper on our six. Confirm!”
“No shit, dummies.” He grinned and aimed at the man who was talking and squeezed the trigger again. A quarter of a second passed before his target’s head exploded and Savage wondered if this was the shot that would alert the attackers that he was shooting at them from their now-dead sniper’s nest.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It wasn’t the perfect arrangement, but Anderson was aware of the fact that he couldn’t have his family caught in the crossfire of what was about to happen. There had been a moment of doubt when Anja had first contacted him some hours before to inform him of a possibility that there might be a heavily armed group of men headed his way.
It hadn’t been the right choice to stay there, in retrospect. It was actually one of the dumbest choices he’d ever made, and that wasn’t a low bar to clear. He’d made any number of serious mistakes in his time and he really
didn’t want to have to repeat them, not with his family involved.
He wanted to be able to blame his PTSD, and the inherent desire to stay in a place that his mind had somehow assumed to be safe was the kind of thing his doctors had told him might be a problem. Of course, they hadn’t really anticipated that he’d be in a combat situation again. Honestly, he hadn’t thought it would be an issue either.
Besides, blaming what had happened to him in the past wouldn’t help him save his family. He needed to act, and he needed to take precautions. The house had already been set up like a small fortress. The windows were all paned with bullet-proof material, the doors were all reinforced with steel bars, and he had weapons hidden throughout. He had been a fan of Kevin McCallister while growing up, and those had been the instincts that he’d drawn from when he’d designed this house. It had been as expensive as hell, especially on a government salary, but he’d managed to do most of the manual labor himself. It was a work in progress, though, and he could only hope that the effort he’d already put in was enough to help him hold these invaders at bay.
He gritted his teeth and listened for the click that told him his wife had locked her and their kid up in the basement from the inside. At least that way, they would be kept safe from any stray gunfire. For himself, a vest of ceramic body armor would have to do.
His hands shook when he heard the first gunshot. It was loud and echoed in the way that told him it had come from a long way out. Anderson drew in a ragged breath and tried to stop the tremors, but they seemed to have spread to his knees. While he hated the weakness, he couldn’t allow it to interfere.
Resolute, he ignored it and strode over to the section of his foyer that opened to a small gun rack. He removed the Beretta M9A5 and slipped it into a hip holster before he dragged out the M1020 combat shotgun he’d used so many times before. Well, not this one, specifically, but it was the shotgun assigned to men who were likely to head into close-quarters situations. The thick spread in the buckshot rounds that came with it was enough to clear a room in two or three shots and it was easy to load.
Anderson knew that because he had spent the last few hours mechanically going through the motions of loading every weapon in the house. All the while, he’d continued to hope that he wouldn’t need any of them.
We should have left, he told himself as a phantom tingle started in the burn scar on his arm. He closed his eyes and shook the sensation aside. Memories of his friends and comrades in arms devoured by the flames fed by the helicopter’s fuel tanks could not be allowed to take center stage.
“Oh, God, I should have left,” he said aloud and something akin to panic surged as the gunfire outside the house picked up momentum. Anja had told him that Savage had taken up a position beyond his house and would use a rifle to hinder their approach. That would definitely help, but with their sheer force of numbers, they would inevitably break in soon.
His heart thundered and he ducked behind the bar that had been reinforced with steel to provide proper cover. He drew in quick, shallow breaths, but the oxygen didn’t seem to register in his brain. It was an odd thing to know that you were having a panic attack but couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Time slowed and the room seemed to shift like he hovered above his body and watched himself go through the motions. That separated self hoped and prayed that he could get it together before the men broke in to kill him and his family. His fingers tingled and his mind drifted to all those times he’d walked out of dangerous situations alive. He made a list of all the places he’d gone into and escaped without so much as a scratch. They’d called him Old Ironsides in his battalion due to the fact that he almost never showed up with anything worse than a couple of scratches and bruises. He’d been lucky.
The realization slowed his heartbeat and he calmed enough for his mind to slip back into old patterns. People needed him to fight back. He needed to fight back and damned if he would die crouched behind a bar.
This driving need was new. It was never something he’d felt in the field and Anderson paused to consider it for a moment. These people attacked his home. They endangered not only his life but those of his family. There were certain lines you simply never crossed, and these men had already stepped way beyond what was acceptable or even explainable.
He wasn’t calm, he finally realized, he was angry—full of white-hot fury that exploded through his body from the inside. The shotgun settled solidly into his grasp. A whomp was immediately followed by an explosion. They had launched a grenade at his door. Not the front door—Savage would cover that and the side entrances. The big boom of a long-distance rifle still cracked every few seconds. He wouldn’t try to hit the men but rather, keep them away from the door, limit their options, and funnel them into the kill zone. That kill zone was what he had to use to protect himself.
A swift action pulled the bolt back to chamber the first of the ten buckshot rounds into the shotgun and he heaved himself up from behind the bar.
“Anderson, Savage tells me you have some hostiles approaching from behind the house,” Anja said and used the speakers of his house smart appliances to talk to him.
“How many?” he asked and scanned the room. Thankfully, none had managed to break in while he gathered his courage before he stepped out from cover.
“He’s not sure.” She’d apparently heard him, but he had no idea how. “It can’t be more than three or four, though. He says that he has four of the ten at the front dead, and the others are pinned down.”
“Roger that.” He kept low as he circled to the back door.
“Why do military people say, ‘Roger that’ over the radio anyway?” the hacker asked. It was odd to hear her talking as the house, but there were many things weirder than that in this situation that needed his attention.
“It’s a replacement for ‘okay’ in a conversation over the radio,” he explained, not sure why he had focused on that instead of the fighting outside. “It’s to avoid confusion during combat situations—much the same reason why they use the NATO phonetic alphabet.”
“Right.” He wasn’t sure if she said anything after that. She probably did, knowing her, but it was all drowned out by a loud explosion across the room. Anderson quickly regretted not having stashed any earplugs as he dropped hastily to the ground to avoid the splinters of shrapnel. What he assumed was a shaped charge entirely demolished the back door of his house.
The room instantly filled with thick, acrid smoke. He saw nothing but a thick, gray fog for a couple of seconds as he crawled prone and kept his shotgun pointed at the door, ready to respond the moment he caught sight of any movement.
A man stepped through the door and predictably, ran a sweep for anyone who might be standing up to face him. It was possible that the smoke was too thick to see someone crawling over the floorboards. Either way, he wouldn’t give the man any comfortable options. He steadied the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The intruder froze at the telltale sound of the blast, but his reflexes were too slow. The buckshot impacted him like a sledgehammer before he could react, and he stumbled back a few steps. The force shoved him outside the door, where his head suddenly exploded into a red mist.
“Savage says that these guys have body armor, so you might want to shoot for the head,” Anja said beyond his ringing ears.
She was telling him this now? Well, technically, the one telling him this now was Savage, but either way, it was good to know—better late than never. He couldn’t exactly aim for the head with a shotgun, thanks to the spread, but it would be something to keep in mind if he had to use his pistol.
Anderson rolled to the side and behind cover as more men came into view. They were more cautious and wouldn’t risk being shot like their comrade. Instead, they laid down suppressing fire without any methodical pattern. From the sound of the bullets, they used assault rifles—M24 carbines, most likely. They fired wildly and weren’t likely to actually hit anything. He realized that they simply tried to fill the air with as many bullets as po
ssible in the hope that something would find a target. The old spray and pray tactic could be very useful.
They maintained the steady barrage and a couple of men barreled in and used the cover fire to try to find their target inside the house as the smoke started to clear.
The ex-colonel found one of them first and smirked as the man’s head snapped back when nine pellets of double-aught pounded into his face. He staggered and fired uncontrollably in a reflexive trigger pull. The kill caught the attention of his teammates, who turned to face the defender.
Instinctively, he fell back a couple of steps and sprayed the room with as many rounds as he could while he retreated in the direction from which he had come. His ears had numbed to the loud noises. One of the invaders fell back and three more pushed forward into the gap as his gun clicked empty. Obviously, some of those whom Savage had pinned down must have pushed through to join the breach team. He dropped the shotgun and it swung from the strap as he drew his pistol.
The men were reloading their weapons as they stepped inside, which gave Anderson enough time to stumble back behind the reinforced bar. He’d stashed shotgun rounds there that he could reload with and an MP5 submachine gun in case he didn’t have the time. For now, though, he needed to dissuade them from a forward push. He jerked upright and fired his pistol in the direction of the men who clustered near the door. None of the bullets were kill-shots, which reminded him that he was still a little rusty, but his enemy fell back behind cover to regroup.
He used the time to good effect, located the case of shotgun rounds, and reloaded. It took ten rounds, which he fitted quickly, and he chambered the first. Thankfully, he didn’t have time to really consider what would happen if he couldn’t stop these men. The thought was ever-present and nagged at the back of his mind, a constant reminder that he needed to survive that fed the fire in his gut.
His jaw tensed and his fingers hoisted the shotgun with the ease of familiarity as he straightened behind the bar. He could no longer hear gunfire from outside and wasn’t sure whether that meant Savage had been taken down or not. Hopefully not, but he couldn’t focus on that either.