End Game

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Jonathan almost regretted his decision not to let LeBron show him the clearing in the woods. Driving with the lights off and NVGs in place, it took two passes to find the spot.

“There it is,” Jonathan said, finally. It wasn’t the clearing he’d seen so much as the tire indentations that led to it. Once spotted, it was obvious. “Either they’re not the only ones, or they come here a lot,” he said.

“You ask me, every inch of this Godforsaken town is worn thin,” Boxers said. He threw the transmission into park. “You’re sure you want to go with full rucks?” he said.

Jonathan shrugged. “It’s the neighborhood. If gangbangers decide to break in, I don’t care if they take possession of the Raven, but I wouldn’t sleep well if we gave them explosives and detonators.”

“Call it urban renewal,” Big Guy said and he opened his door.

“Full soldier,” Jonathan said. “We don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into.” That was his term for full body armor, complete with chest plate and Kevlar helmet. It was unwieldy and heavy as hell. Boxers pointed to any opportunity he could find not to wear it, but the lack of push-back this time told Jonathan that he saw the risks, too.

When they were fully kitted up, they each carried their preferred rifles — Jonathan a suppressed M27 and Boxers a suppressed HK417—and a suppressed 4.6 millimeter HKMP7 holstered on their left thighs. Boxers also dangled a Mossberg twelve-gauge with a breaching barrel under his arm. No suppressor there, just a big bang.

With their four-tube night vision, the night had become day. Jonathan tied his gear in tight to limit any rattle, and then he was ready to go. “You all set?”

“Born ready,” Boxers said.

Jonathan turned a knob on his radio and said, “Mother Hen, Scorpion. We’re going hot and we’re on VOX.”

“I copy,” she said. “Do a good job.”

Jonathan smiled at that. He’d scolded her once for wishing them good luck when they were stepping out on an op because, as he said, luck was a thing to be managed, not victimized by. Since then, she’d been struggling to find the right phrase. For Jonathan, do a good job was just fine.

When they arrived at the fence, Jonathan understood why people had missed the presence of the hole. It had been wired up that well.

“Think there’s a little OCD in young LeBron?” Boxers whispered. It took less than two minutes to undo the patch and lift the section away.

Jonathan assessed the size of the opening. “You’d better be careful, Big Guy. Turns out you’re bigger than their truck.” He pulled an infrared chem light from a side pouch on his ruck, snapped it, shook it to bring it to life, and then dropped it on the ground to mark the makeshift gate. Chances were good that there’d be a lot more activity swirling around them on the way out than there was on the way in. He didn’t want to be feeling their way along the fence in the dark, looking for the back door.

They approached the black side of the building as a single shadow gliding through the dark, moving slowly and deliberately so as not to make unnecessary noise. Jonathan scanned continuously left to right walking forward, while Boxers moved in the same direction walking backward, scanning their six o’clock for bad guys.

“Contact at twelve o’clock,” Jonathan whispered. The two guards stood at their stations, flanking the back door. The embers of their cigarettes flared in his NVGs. “MP7,” he said.

The 4.6 millimeter round from the MP7 was a devastating bullet when shot well. Barely wider than a BB, it left the muzzle at over 2,400 feet per second, but because it was so small, it made far less noise than the larger, faster 5.56 millimeter round from his M27. With the suppressor in place, there was no discernible muzzle flash, and the noise was less than that of a ladyfinger firecracker. Jonathan didn’t know how Heckler and Koch continued to get it so right every time in the manufacture of weapons.

All of the team’s long guns and MP7s were fitted with infrared laser sights that cast a beam through the dark that only they could see, thanks to their NVGs. In Jonathan’s world, fair fights were for losers. “I’m right, you’re left,” he said.

“Roger.”

“On zero,” Jonathan said, as he settled his laser on his target’s forehead. “Three, two, one…” He didn’t bother to say the word because it was the cadence that counted. Their weapons fired in unison, and their targets dropped in unison, their bodies unplugged from their brains. “Two for two sleeping,” Jonathan said for Venice’s benefit.

They resumed their fore-and-aft advancing configuration as they closed the distance to the rear wall. Jonathan didn’t bother to check the guards for pulses. The spatter told him everything he needed to know. “Okay, Big Guy. You’re up.”

Jonathan pivoted to cover the rear — their only exposed side, now that they were up against the building — while Boxers wrapped a loop of detonating cord around the electrical box serving the freezer unit inside. Detonating cord was every operator’s best friend. Essentially a tube of PETN — an explosive with a detonation velocity that exceeded twenty thousand feet per second — a coil or two could drop a hundred-year-old oak. Just an inch or two would make ridiculously quick work of an electrical cable. While Big Guy did his thing, Jonathan holstered the MP7 and brought his M27 to his shoulder and continually scanned left to right and back again, one-eighty to one-eighty.

Thirty seconds later, he heard Big Guy’s voice in his ear. “Done. Redundant electronic fuse set on zero then a hundred milliseconds.” When the stakes were high, redundancy reigned as king. In this case, Boxers’ first detonator would blow the instant he pushed the button on his controller. If it malfunctioned, then the backup would initiate one tenth of a second later.

“Ready to advance?” Jonathan asked. He fought the urge to look at Boxers because Big Guy posed no threat. At this stage, all he cared about were threats.

“Ready to advance.”

“Advancing to Red.” In recent years, the special operations community had moved away from the color-coded sides, but it was in Jonathan’s DNA. White was front, black was back, and red was right. Compass points were far more precise, but who had a compass on them all the time?

They reassumed the same back-to-back posture as they approached the rear side, Jonathan leading and Boxers following. As they approached the end of the back wall, Jonathan said, “Corner.”

That expanded Boxers’ area of responsibility to a 270-degree radius as Jonathan concentrated on the threat that lay directly around the turn.

“Advancing right,” Jonathan said, and he turned the corner. His senses told him that there had to be guards here. It didn’t make sense otherwise. Why put sentries on some doors yet not on others? Since the loading dock was elevated, and the doors inset, it was difficult to get a line of sight. Advancing blind now, he moved much more slowly than before.

He heard voices from up on the deck. He didn’t understand the language, but they seemed to be chatting, unaware of danger. Jonathan eased away from the wall for a better look. He whispered. “I’ve got two more targets.”

They were standing next to each other, which to Jonathan’s perspective put them in the same plane.

“I’ve got a bad angle,” Jonathan said. “Swing out and tell me what you see.”

He felt Boxers pivot, swinging his rifle in a horizontal arc over his head. “I’ve got a left target if you want me to take it,” he said. “That would be the farthest from you.”

“On zero, then,” Jonathan said. He counted the cadence again, with the same result, except this time, because of the oblique angle and the backlight, he saw the aura of simultaneous brain-sprays. Both targets were neutralized. Jonathan had lost count over the years of the number of lives he’d taken, but it never got easier. To point a gun at Jonathan was a capital offense that that earned the perpetrator a guilt-free execution. But to die standing sentry — the most basic of soldierly duties — bore no honor or fanfare. In dispatching those, he always felt a burden of sadness. Nothing he couldn’t handle, but a sadness nonetheless.

With the lifeless bodies collapsed on the deck, Jonathan and Boxers moved together up the steps to the loading dock, where Boxers affixed the second charge of det cord to the electrical service. While he did that, Jonathan moved to the personnel door next to the roll-up overhead to see if it was unlocked. It was not. “I’m going to set a breaching charge,” he said. That meant pressing a GPC — a general purpose charge, which consisted of a wad of C4 high explosive triggered by a tail of det cord — into a three-inch trail where the door lock met the jamb. Typically, Jonathan preferred old-fashioned fuse (OFF) for the GPC, but to stay in concert with the charges Boxers had already set, he inserted dual electronic initiators into the detonating cord.

Jonathan asked, “Are you—”

An agonized scream ruined the night.

Teddy might have been on rails, he glided so quickly across the room, the short sledgehammer raised. His eyes were focused and hot. He seemed unaware of anything or anyone but Graham, who remained frozen in place. Teddy was still moving when he swung the sledge like a baseball bat.

Graham closed his eyes as the head of the hammer shattered his left elbow. The jolt of agony somehow unplugged his nervous system and he collapsed in a heap onto the icy tile.

“Remember,” Teddy said. “This is your deal. This is what you asked for.” With that, he launched a kick to Graham’s belly. As he doubled up on his side, another kick nailed him in the kidney.

Someone was screaming.

He’d just realized that the screams were his own when the building shook with an explosion and blackness fell.

The splintered jamb was still burning when Jonathan and Boxers squirted through the door. As was their tradition, Jonathan went in first and swept low and right while Boxers swept high and left. Their IR laser sights drew crisscrossing lines through the lingering smoke of the explosions.

The smoke confused the NVGs, potentially obscuring targets behind a veil of heated gases.

Jonathan and Boxers moved as one, in a crouch, their weapons at the ready and pressed against their shoulders. As their ears recovered from the concussion of the blasts — hearing protection could protect only so much — they heard the sounds of confused bedlam. Shouting voices combined with more howls of agony. Most of the shouting was in the same dialect that he’d heard from the guards.

“The noise is coming from two o’clock,” Boxers said.

“I agree.”

They pivoted together a couple of points to the right and continued to advance. Jonathan saw movement in the smoke, but before he could react, Boxers’ rifle barked twice and the silhouette dropped. Big Guy had switched to his cannon — the 7.62 millimeter HK417. Whatever his bullets touched instantly joined a parallel universe. Even with a suppressor attached, the gunshot rocked the building. With stealth no longer relevant, Jonathan holstered his MP7 and lifted his M27 from its sling. Similar in construction and weight to the venerable M4—but vastly superior in its performance, particularly in adverse circumstances — it wasn’t the perfect weapon for close-quarters battle, but it felt like an old friend. Because it was chambered in 5.56 millimeter, the people Jonathan killed wouldn’t be quite as dead as the people Boxers killed, but it would be close.

With their presence known, they stepped up the pace. The noise and the darkness had no doubt rattled their enemy, but the effects could only last so long. Close-in rifle fire had the tendency to focus the attention of the shot-at, and in a few seconds, if these guys had any clue what they were doing, they were going to mount some kind of defense.

“Threat left!” Boxers said.

Jonathan pivoted in time to see one of three approaching men drop when Boxers shot him. Jonathan took out a second, but the third disappeared behind the wall of an inner room that Jonathan recognized from the drawings as the meat freezer.

“Shit,” Jonathan spat. He was about to pursue the attacker when another scream echoed through the factory. “That’s coming from inside the freezer,” he said.

“The door’s on the other side,” Boxers said.

Another scream.

“Leave him alone!” a female voice yelled. In English.

“We’ll use the back door,” Jonathan said.

Graham thought he’d been knocked unconscious. The darkness came so suddenly and was so absolute, he couldn’t imagine another scenario.

But the pain kept coming, lightning bolts of agony that seemed to have no focus. Everything hurt, and he couldn’t breathe.

Another explosion.

Gunshot? It sounded for all the world like the rifles that had become so much a part of his life these past days.

The assholes all started shouting in Chechen. He couldn’t understand the words, but they were the sounds of panic, and they were accompanied by quick, heavy movement that likewise seemed to have no focus. Someone either kicked him or fell on him, and that really lit up his injuries.

His scream hurt his throat.

Two more sharp explosions — maybe three.

Definitely guns.

More shouting, and someone grabbed him by his shoulder and lifted.

Jesus God.

“Leave him alone!” Jolaine yelled.

In darkness he couldn’t be sure, but from the heavy thud, and the grunt that followed, he was pretty sure they’d hit her.

Amid a lot of discussion he couldn’t understand, Graham was passed among several people.

In the movies, people in excruciating pain passed out and got relief.

He was ready to live in a movie.

The freezer was a room within a cavern, roughly twelve feet square, and it had both a front door and a back door, presumably to allow the free flow of cow carcasses in and out without creating a traffic jam. Jonathan remembered the detail from the plans Venice had sent them. He sent up a prayer that the drawing be correct.

Through the NVGs, Jonathan saw the hinges before he saw the latch. And then he saw the massive padlock that had been placed over the latch assembly. “Shit,” he said.

“Outta my way, Boss,” Boxers said. He had a GPC in his fist, with a detonator already dangling from the det cord fuse. “Five-second delay,” he said, “so we’ll be inside in ten.”

Jonathan pivoted to make room for Big Guy, and he scanned the inside of the factory for more targets. He saw movement in the shadows to his right and he fired a long burst, got a yelp of pain in return.

“Fire in the hole,” Boxers said.

Jonathan turned away from the door and stooped to become a human soccer ball. The blast made the building bounce, and turned the heavy freezer door into a rectangular hole.

“All right, let’s—”

Automatic weapons opened up from behind them — from the direction of the loading dock through which they’d entered.

Boxers coughed and fell. “Ah, shit. Goddammit.”

Jonathan felt a stab of panic. “Are you hit?”

“Damn straight I’m hit. God damn it!” Boxers opened up with his 417, raking the area where the shots had come from. “Go!” he said. “Get the freaking PCs. I’ll kill these assholes myself. God DAMN it!”

Jonathan’s mind raced to push the panic away. Mission first, he told himself. He had to tend to the PCs. “I’ll be back for you, Big Guy,” he said, and then he slipped in through their newly opened door.

The opening was blocked with rolling racks and assorted shit, and floor was coated with ice. Through his green artificial light, Jonathan saw a scrum of activity ahead as beefy men tried to find their way to meaningful activity in the dark. Everyone he saw carried a long gun of some sort, and at least one had a sidearm. Through the tangle of dangling meat hooks, he had difficulty separating the PCs from the bad guys, until he heard yet another howl of pain, and he focused in on the kid who was being manhandled by one of the thugs.

“PC One is in the grasp,” he said over the air. Protocol mattered, even when your best friend had been shot. He let the M27 fall back against its sling and drew his MP7 again. “Switching to hollow point on the MP7.”

He released the nearly full mag of ball ammo and switched it out with a thirty-round mag of hollow points that he pulled from its pouch on his vest. The advantage of hollow-point ammo lay in the fact that the mushrooming effect of the hollow point expended much of the round’s energy on impact, thus making it less likely to overpenetrate and hit a good guy who might be standing behind the bad guy target.

He could tell that they were getting organized up there, and they had come to grips with the fact that their space had been breached. Two of the men had opened fire in Jonathan’s general direction, but in their darkness, they didn’t have the visual frame of reference to even come close.

He needed to disorient them even more.

Jonathan opened a Velcro fastener on his ballistic vest and removed a cylindrical stun grenade. Filled with magnesium and ammonium perchlorate stuffed into a cardboard tube, the grenade was designed to temporarily blind and deafen anyone within a few-yard radius, buying a few precious seconds for rescuers to work their magic.

Squeezing the safety spoon, Jonathan pulled the pin, then lobbed the grenade in the general vicinity of the bad guys.

“Flash-bang away,” he said. He turned away, closed his eyes, and pressed his hands against his ears. Two seconds later, the building shook again. Even with his eyes closed and his head turned, Jonathan could see the blood vessels in his eyelids from the flash. One second after the blast, while the disorientation was still pure, Jonathan moved on the bad guys.

Behind him, fully automatic fire continued to rip the silence from outside the freezer. “Engaging multiple targets,” Boxers said before an extended burst of gunfire.

Hearing Big Guy’s voice calmed Jonathan, reminded him that he had a half dozen targets of his own to engage.

“Hostages get down! Hostages get down!” Jonathan yelled. “Get the hell down!”

Predictably, two of the thugs swung their weapons at the sound of Jonathan’s voice and opened fire. Jonathan dropped to a knee and smoked the one on the left with three rounds to his chest. The one on the right dove for cover and saved his own life.

Goddammit.

Jonathan scooted to the left because some brainiac had done a study a while ago that demonstrated that absent evidence to the contrary, people assumed movement to their own left — Jonathan’s right — and he wanted to be unpredictable.

Outside, Boxers’ gun battle raged on.

As he moved, Jonathan’s laser beam stabbed a shooter in the ear. Jonathan judged the distance at fifteen feet, ten feet short of the distance the sight was zeroed to, so he lowered the beam to the top of the guy’s shoulder and pressed the trigger.

The head exploded.

Two down.

Boxers’ gunfight raged beyond the freezer door. From the sound of it, he’d employed his 417, and he was not being shy in his application of firepower.

“I will shoot the boy!” a man yelled from nearby. “Put down your gun or I will shoot the boy!”

Had the bad guy not shouted out like that, Jonathan would likely not have seen him. As it was, the target was maybe ten feet away, and facing in the wrong direction, presenting his back as he looked toward a direction where Jonathan had never been. The target held PC One in front of him as cover, his elbow cinched under the PC’s chin. The boy’s arm flopped oddly — clearly broken.

Seconds ticked.

At this range, hollow point notwithstanding, a head shot or a center-of-mass shot would probably overpenetrate and wound the PC. That was not acceptable.

Moving quickly yet silently, Jonathan slipped the MP7 into its holster and drew his KA-BAR knife from its scabbard on his left shoulder. Uncle Sam had tried a lot of different fighting blades since the KA-BAR was first introduced in 1941, but as far as Jonathan was concerned, none had even approached the elegance and raw lethality of the wooden-handled Marine Corps favorite.

Jonathan held the knife as an extension of his fist, blade facing forward, hilt against his thumb, and he closed the distance in just a few strides. The fact that the bad guy had a full head of hair made it so much easier. Jonathan grabbed a fistful of hair at the crown and pulled back just as he thrust the razor-sharp steel blade in to the base of his skull at a thirty-degree angle, effectively separating the man’s brain from the rest of his body. If he didn’t die instantly, he’d be dead soon. Either way, score another for the good guys.

As the man collapsed, Jonathan caught Graham at his middle and lowered him to the floor.

Graham felt unhinged, completely disoriented. So much sound and light. So much pain. Violence swirled from everywhere and without meaning.

“I will kill the boy,” Teddy yelled in his ear. And then a few seconds later, Teddy made a horrible sound and collapsed, bringing Graham with him.

And then Graham felt someone lower him gently to the floor.

“I’m here to take you home,” the stranger said. “Lie on the floor and try to be invisible.”

Graham was not prepared for the kind tone, and he certainly was not prepared for the kind words. While the manhandling was gentler, it was no less painful. Ten thousand questions formed in his head. Before he could form one well enough to ask, he’d been placed on the floor, and the stranger let go of him.

Lying on his stomach, he imagined himself dissolving into the concrete floor, becoming so small as to be an oil slick — not a target at all.

Then a bullet whipped past his ear and slammed into the floor behind him.