Dead Eye

FOURTEEN

Gentry scanned the face of the man in front of him. He was roughly the same age as Gentry himself, though his features appeared more chiseled and wind-worn than Court imagined his own to be. He wore a beard similar to Gentry’s; his brown hair was only a shade lighter than Court’s and Russ wore it a little shorter than Court wore his, but the two men appeared to be virtually the same height and build.

From the way he talked and an air about him Court picked up from years of experience, Court identified the man as a CIA asset, a tier-one spec ops operator, or some other brand of elite soldier or spook.

In short, to Gentry’s way of thinking, this Russ guy was trouble.

But not as much trouble as the assholes coming up the stairs.

Court backpedaled to his pack, keeping his gun on the man in the hall. Without taking his eyes off the stranger, he slung his backpack over a shoulder. His coat was threaded through a strap on the outside, but he didn’t stop to put it on. He glanced quickly outside the window overlooking the park, but again he could make out little save for the blowing snow and the darkness. He thought about his rope on the floor, considered using it to get to ground level, but if there were four men downstairs he thought it likely two of them would be at the back of the property, and he did not want to expose himself to them for the length of time it would take to climb down a rope.

No way. He was going to have to fight his way out of this with his new friend, whoever the hell he was.

“Okay,” Court said. “You got a piece?”

Russ whispered, “Waistband.”

“Don’t reach for it,” Court ordered, still weighing the dynamic situation. “Not yet. I need to think.”

“Do what you want, chief. But I’d say we’ve got less than fifteen sec—”

The window to Gentry’s left shattered. He turned to the sound and crouched at the same time, but he missed it; he did not see the small canister that penetrated the glass, banged against the far wall of the little room, and dropped, spinning to the floor in front of the bed, just behind him.

But Russ saw it. He turned his head away and shouted, “Nine-banger!” but it was too late to save Court.

It was a souped-up version of a flash-bang grenade, called a nine-banger, and in the space of three seconds nine two-hundred-decibel brain-hammering cracks battered the little room, along with nine brilliant flashes of light designed to disorient anyone in the vicinity. Court fell to his knees, dropped his pistol on the ground, and grabbed at his head. He’d shut his eyes before the first flash, but still the searing light had penetrated his eyelids and now he could barely see or hear.

Whitlock was fine, however; he had avoided the effects by turning away in the hallway. He drew his Glock from his hip and raised it at the stairwell. The first member of the Trestle team was just rounding the corner; only the suppressor of his HK was visible. Whitlock lined up his weapon and fired, striking the man between the eyes before he’d even fully turned into the hallway. He fell back, slamming into his three mates behind him, sending them all tumbling down the stairs.

Whitlock fired twice more up the hall to keep anyone in the stairwell from poking their head back out, and then he turned and grabbed Court by his black shirt, pulling him into a standing position and pushing him up against the wall. He retrieved Court’s Glock from the floor and stuck it into his own belt. He then grabbed Gentry again and led him along with him as he advanced toward the stairwell, his gun out in front. He shot out the two hall lights; both bulbs exploded in showers of sparks and the hallway turned dark.

As Gentry’s legs strengthened and he slowly regained his wits, Whitlock picked up the pace.

“Man down! Man down!” Trestle Actual shouted into his mic. He himself was on his back on the landing between the second and third floor. Trestle Three had been the first man into the hallway from the stairwell, but now he was on top of Nick; blood ran freely from his face and his goggles had a ragged hole in them, right between his eyes. Nick knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do for his man; all he could do was get himself and his two other teammates back in the fight.

He pushed Three to the side and started to climb back up to his feet.

Just then he saw movement at the top of the stairs. He lifted his weapon toward the movement but saw a quick series of muzzle flashes, moving left to right, as whoever was shooting crossed the stairwell in the hall.

He felt the slap of a handgun round on his Kevlar chest panel and sparks flew off his magazine stowed there. He dropped back to the floor of the landing. To his right and one step behind him, Trestle Six lurched backward with a grunt of surprise and stumbled back into the wall, ending up on the floor of the landing next to Three’s body.

Trestle Actual returned fire at the movement above, but the shooter was gone.

“I’ve got two men down! Get me two more in here!” Nick shouted as he returned to his feet. He scrambled back up the stairs with Trestle Five, leaving Trestle Three dead and Trestle Six wounded on the landing.

Court felt himself being pulled along, his shirt yanked by the right arm and his weak legs shuffling as fast as possible below his body. He slammed into the wall hard, only after he hit he realized he’d been pushed there, and he saw that the man named Russ had deposited him here so he could turn and shoot at something in the hallway behind them.

Court processed the gunfire as distorted low thuds, more felt than heard, as his ears still rang from the effects of the nine-banger. His eyes were whited out in the center of his field of vision, so he had to turn his head to the side to see what the hell was happening.

With a quivering hand he reached down to his waistband to draw his gun, but it was not there.

“Hey!” he shouted at the stranger, but Russ grabbed him again, and again they started running up the hallway.

There was a T intersection in the hall, and the other man led Gentry to the right. Just as they turned the corner, jagged holes tore into the wall in the main hall, and through his ringing ears Court barely heard a gun behind them firing suppressed rounds.

Court was getting the feeling back in his body now, and his eyesight returned slowly. He arrived behind his new partner as Russ stopped at the end of the hall, then leapt up and grabbed hold of a chain attached to a door in the ceiling to the attic. He pulled down a folding staircase, then turned around and knelt in the hall, training his weapon back up the hallway.

“My gun!” Gentry shouted, louder than he had to, and Russ pulled Court’s pistol from his pants and handed it over to him.

Russ fired a pair of shots up the corridor, then turned and moved up the attic stairs. Court covered him; he kept his blurred eyes locked on the corner and his shaky gun raised as Russ ascended the rickety and narrow wooden steps.

As Russ disappeared into the hole in the ceiling behind him, down at the end of the hall a man in a black helmet and goggles peered around the corner. Court aimed at the man’s forehead and fired once, grazing him in the left shoulder and sending him scrambling back around to cover.

Whitlock was in the attic now, but he positioned himself over the hole. Facedown he hung out from the waist, hanging upside down from the corridor ceiling, directly above Gentry. His body faced the threat at the end of the hall, and he pointed his gun toward the T.

“Move!” he shouted, and Court turned and climbed the attic staircase now, covered by the man hanging upside down behind him.

Two men in black tactical gear shot across the hallway ahead, trying to make it to the other side of the T. Dead Eye opened up on them, his Glock snapped three times, and a round struck one of the men in the side of his head.

Court climbed up to the attic, then turned and stomped down on the rickety folding stairs, breaking one of the hinges that held it to its frame. He then stomped on the other hinge, and the staircase fell to the hallway floor. It was now useless as a way to get up into the attic from the hallway, but he knew it would not slow the attacking force for long.

“Let’s go!” Russ said, and he grabbed Court by the collar again and pulled him along. While Russ reloaded his pistol they moved together through the long, narrow attic, holding their heads low as they ran to keep from bumping them on the bare support beams protruding from the sharply angled roof. Russ shouted into Gentry’s ear to be heard. “This attic connects with the building next door. We can get back down to the street from there.”

At this point Court realized he was just along for the ride. He stumbled across the low dark attic, following a stranger who seemed to know a surprising amount about not only the property, but the opposition, as well.

Trestle Actual had taken a round through the top of his left shoulder before he’d been able to focus on the threat at the end of the hall, and the impact had spun him around and knocked him to the floor. Two more of his men came up the hall from the stairs just after he assessed his wound. They’d been at the front of the building, outside in the snowstorm, and snow now fell from their black body armor as they ran past him to take up a position on the other side of the T. Nick climbed back to his knee pads and faced the opening to the T intersection just in time to see two of his men cross the space in a sprint.

Trestle Eight took a gunshot wound to the right side of the head as he ran. His helmet jolted and blood sprayed from the left side of his forehead and splattered on the wall and he tumbled down, his forward momentum pitching him into Trestle Seven, who fell to the ground just clear of the intersection.

Trestle Actual crawled to the corner, went flat on the floor, and rolled out with his HK in front of him. Ahead in the hall he saw a middle-aged couple in pajamas stumbling out of a room and toward his position.

He aimed at them, ready to shoot them dead to get to his target, but his target was no longer in the hallway behind them.

Just behind them he heard a gunshot and saw a set of attic stairs on the floor. Dead Eye had been wrong. There was attic access here on the third floor. Trestle Actual doubted Court would try for the roof. The roof of the building was pitched at sixty degrees and covered in several inches of ice and wet slippery snow. There would be no way he could maintain his footing well enough to escape by running across it, and if he had rope all he could do was rappel down the side, where other members of Nick’s team would be waiting for him.

Instead, Nick decided Gentry would try to make his way to an adjacent property by using the attic. There was a collection of private flats next door; Actual figured his target would try for those. Nick did not want to chase him through the attic; he knew that anyone climbing up through the hallway access would find themselves vulnerable and exposed to Gentry’s weapon.

Into his headset he shouted, “Two and Four, breach the building to the east of this location, Nine Kooli Street. He’ll be heading down the stairs from the attic.”

“On the move!”

Two and Four were on the other side of the building in the park; they would have to make their way through the back door of the apartments. Trestle Actual himself leapt up to his feet and began running back to the stairwell, followed by Seven and Five.