Dead Eye

SIX

The Gray Man stepped past the desk and fired a second round into the Russian mob boss; the body jerked and blood sprayed, twinkling in the firelight. And then Court turned away, holstering his pistol and moving to the long row of curtains. He yanked them down with a single pull to gain access to the window.

But there was no window. The curtains had covered a massive brick wall.

Sid had been so scared of Gentry he’d had the windows removed, bricking himself away from the dangers of the outside world.

Court ran back around the desk, vaulted Sid’s body and the pool of blood growing on the floor, and ducked into the bedroom.

There were no windows here, either.

Oh shit.

In an instant, Court’s escape plan evaporated. He had planned to break or blow the glass of the first window he found after killing Sid, and then just rappel or bungee down the side of the building, bypassing all the security inside the mansion’s walls.

But Gentry had not allowed for the possibility that there would be no windows.

Hope in one hand, shit in the other.

There was only one way out. He turned and faced the hallway door just as the sounds of shouting men came from up the hall.

At the same time, sirens began to wail around the property.

Court sprinted for the door, reloading his pistol with a fresh magazine from his chest rig as he advanced on the danger.

“It’s getting lively.” Jeff Parks had finished his call to Dead Eye and returned to watch the monitor. Now he stood at the back wall, just behind the seated Leland Babbitt. Together they watched the main display along with the rest of the signal room. Tiny white spots moved in ones and twos toward the main building, no real coordination evident, but all the figures were obviously responding to orders.

Parks gave his reading of the events. “The guys who found the microlight called it in, and now the compound is on full alert.”

A woman near the front of the room had been listening to the audio feeds from the bugs set up outside the walls of the dacha. She turned away from her desk with her hand to her earpiece and spoke into her microphone. “Sirens sounding at the target location.”

Someone else said, “It’s going loud.”

Parks muttered to himself now, although his mic picked up the concern in his voice. “C’mon, Court, old buddy. I sure as shit hope you have an exfil planned that’s cleaner than your infil.”

Babbitt sat next to him, his tuxedo straining against his corpulent frame. With absolute confidence he said, “He’s got a plan.”

Court did not, in fact, have a plan.

He ran headlong up the narrow corridor toward what sounded like a half-dozen men, just on the other side of the corner not fifty feet ahead. Bouncing flashlight beams pulsed around the turn, the throw of the lights narrowing as the men drew closer. Court was hoping to improvise, to find some way to avoid contact with that number of enemy, but as he closed on them, and they on him, he realized his chances for something other than a six-on-one gunfight in a narrow hallway were rapidly diminishing.

Court sprinted, his night vision lens providing him a narrow monochromatic view. He held his weapon steady and his eyes scanned past the front sight, ready to engage the first armed man he saw.

A door opened twenty feet ahead on his right, opposite the door the child had appeared from a few minutes earlier. A man stepped out, facing in the direction of the noise of the men around the corner.

Gentry closed on the man, his Glock at the ready, and he scanned the man’s hands. The right hand was empty, but the left hand swung out with a silver automatic pistol clutched in it.

Court pressed the palm of his left hand into the back of his Glock’s side, and it fired once at the target in front of him. His left hand kept his suppressed pistol from cycling, and this held the spent shell casing in the weapon. It also lessened the noise made by firing the gun.

The man pitched forward into the hall, tumbling onto the carpet with a muted thud.

Court leapt over the fallen man and through the doorway, then grabbed the legs of the dead body, and pulled it back inside. He reached out into the hall, scooped up the silver pistol, and retreated back into the room just as the crew of skinheads made the turn.

He shut the door not one full second before their flashlights trained on it, and they rushed past seconds later, hurrying to surround their benefactor in his office.

There were no lights on in this bedroom, but through his monocle Gentry scanned the empty space. The dead man was a cousin of Sidorenko and a lieutenant in his organization, but Court neither knew nor cared. He was looking for a window, and he found two. He ran to them, pulled back the heavy curtains, and saw thick iron bars.

Fucking Sid, Court muttered under his breath.

He cleared the spent shell casing from his pistol and reholstered it, then reached into the cargo pocket of his pants, pulled out a mobile phone, and lit up the screen. With the touch of a three-button code, made difficult by a slight tremor in his hand brought on by adrenaline, he sent a wireless message to the detonators of both strands of fireworks.

Within ten seconds cracks and booms began in the forest more than one hundred yards beyond the southern gate of the compound. He knew in forty-five seconds the igniter would initiate in the second strand, and mortars would fire all over the southern side of the building.

He headed back to the door, cracked it open, then launched himself once again into the hallway, turned the corner and ran toward the atrium. He saw no one ahead, so he holstered his pistol and pulled the small flare gun from a Velcro pouch on his chest harness. It was loaded with a single smoke grenade, and he raised the device and fired a cartridge with a loud pop. The smoke grenade arced up the long passage, flew over the balcony, and dropped into the atrium, four stories below. Before the first grenade hit the ground and began extruding its thick red billowing cloud, Court had slammed a second ballistic smoke into the gun and snapped it closed, and he fired again. Another champagne-cork pop echoed in the darkened hallway. He loaded a third smoke as he began running up the hall as fast as he could. He fired the third grenade, and he let the flare gun fall to the hallway carpet as he pulled his suppressed Glock once again.

Two men appeared at the balcony in front of him now; they were backlit with the dim glow from the glass dome roof of the atrium, and Court saw them easily in his night vision monocle, saw the rifles in their hands, saw them running in his direction.

Court, dressed in black and sprinting up a dark hallway, was invisible to the men. All they saw before them were a pair of bright orange flashes before both of their worlds went dark.

With less than fifty feet to the balcony Court reholstered his sidearm, then reached behind him and pulled a grappling hook from his hip bag. The spring-loaded spool spun as he drew out a length of bungee cord attached to it, looping it in his hand as it came out. As he ran he swung the hook in a forward motion, playing out longer lengths of the bungee with each whipping revolution.

Gentry heard shouting in the atrium, many men calling out to one another in confusion, fury, and resolve. They would see the red smoke, black in the dim light, and they would not know what it meant, but any men on the higher floors would have heard the pops of the grenade launcher or the supersonic cracks of the suppressed Glock, and they would know danger was seconds away.

They would be waiting for him, Court knew, and he could not prevent that. The only way he could help himself now was to do the unexpected, and to move as quickly as possible out of their line of fire.

Ten feet from the balcony he swung the grappling hook overhand, then let it go and dropped the loops. The weighted hook sailed away from him, drawing the springy black cord behind it.

With a loud metallic clang it hit the iron beam that ran the length of the dome over the atrium, then swung around over the top of the bar, where its claw grabbed the bungee.

Outside the building, to the rear of Court’s position, a series of low thuds began as the twelve Yanisars attached to the fuse ignited by the wireless signal began launching, skipping across the ground before booms as loud as shotgun blasts shook windowpanes, set off car alarms, and echoed off the walls of the property.

During this distraction Gentry shot out of the fourth-floor hallway and, vaulting high with a single bound, pushed off on the top of the balcony railing with his leading foot, then leapt off the balcony face-first, arms out wide with his pistol in his right hand, his body arcing over the atrium below.