Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Court told himself it was time to leave, but he knew the truth; the real time to leave had been five minutes earlier, which was about the time he walked into the bar. These guys didn’t want him around, and any hope he had of leaning on one guy in a corner to get intel about Fitzroy’s missing men went down the toilet the second he realized everybody in the room was on the same team.

Plus, although he wasn’t sure what was going on out in the water on the Tai Chin VI, he was certain he wasn’t going to sit here drinking while some other group hit the cargo ship that he had discovered. He would do his best to clear out of here with apologies and then steal a boat.

After that… well, one thing at a time.

He fanned out a few HK dollars onto the bar, pulled his pack over a shoulder, turned to walk around the bar to head to the exit, and made it exactly five steps before the group of men moved directly between him and the exit. Court smiled and nodded, gave a little courteous bow, and then tried to manage his way through.

They just stood there, blocking the narrow pathway between the bar stools and the tables. A voice barked angrily from the group. “Who are you? What you want here?”

A man in his thirties stepped forward through the scrum. His hair was styled in short spikes, and he had the look of Triad lower-tier management. He had a blue tank top tight on his fleshy frame, and he wore a black short-sleeve shirt with orange dragons on the chest. His right hand was jammed in his front pocket. Court knew he could be hiding a weapon there, but with the baggy shirt he could not be sure.

Court looked past this man, counting heads and gauging the eyes of the others around, trying to judge their fervency to this cause.

The entire establishment fell into complete silence now, all eyes on the Westerner.

“Why are you here?” The man in the dragon shirt shouted even louder now.

Court knew he needed to lay on the charm, and quick. In his British accent he said, “I’m a tourist, from the UK. Is there some sort of a problem?”

“You here earlier. Asking about other gweilo and black man.”

Court smiled a little. “Right. Well, as I explained to that fellow right there behind the bar, I am looking for some mates who came by on Sunday night.”

This appeared to be exactly the wrong answer, as more men stood up from tables and joined the half dozen. Several men behind Court formed into a group and stood close there.

He could make a run for the railing, twenty feet off his left shoulder, where he could then leap off the side, but he’d have to kick out far enough to miss the dinghies floating below, and he’d have to push his way around several men still sitting at tables to even get to the rail. He could also try his luck fighting his way forward or backwards, or he could move over the bar on his right, and then shoot out the back door that he assumed he’d find off the kitchen.

The man with the dragon shirt drew a knife now, flicked the blade open, and held it up in front of his face. “Show me identification. Hand over your backpack.”

“Look, mate. Is that necessary? How about I just leave you gentlemen to your evening, head out the door, and go on—”

“Give me your bag!”

Court was not going to let them look in his backpack. His swim fins, mask, and small air tank and regulator device, along with his cameras and his scanner, weren’t going to exactly get him off the hook with these guys.

Instead he decided his only reasonable course of action was to feign compliance, to start to hand over the bag… and then to bash this fucker on the head with it.

If there were fifty able-bodied guys here, he’d cut into that number with his opening move. Not by an appreciable amount, but this wasn’t simply a game of numbers. No, there was another important factor at play.

Court had learned the power of applied aggression. Studies and papers had been written that were pored over in military and law enforcement circles, but it all boiled down to the concept that someone acting half-crazy and completely sure of himself, initiating a fight with disproportionate violence, could seriously degrade an opponent’s will to fight. Even a much stronger or larger opposing force.

And if this guy was, as Court assumed, part of the organization’s leadership, it might have even more of an effect.

Of course, Court put this all together in under a second. He’d undergone years of training and he had years more of application in the field. Now he compared the situation at hand to his knowledge base in an instant, and he chose his action.

Yes, the gangsters here were going to make him fight his way out of this shit hole, and the only way to do so successfully was to use shock and awe to slow down their reactions to his moves.

He’d crank it up to eleven and fight like a fucking madman.

With his left hand he slipped the pack off his shoulder and began extending it out in front of him while his right hand swept under the front of his black cotton shirt. The knife he’d bought in the dive shop hung in its scabbard there.

More men closed in on Court and he realized he wasn’t going to win this fight if they all came at him, but he saw no choice but to hope he could winnow away attackers and pray that the others would decide they didn’t think he was worth the trouble.

But from his evaluation of the men’s will by the looks they gave him, this wasn’t going to go his way. They looked like they wanted him to resist.

And then it happened. Just as he started to move his backpack around on his wrist to swing it, a five-round string of fully automatic gunfire rolled in from out in the bay. Court recognized it instantly as an AK-47 firing fully automatic.

The muffled blast of a shotgun followed close behind.

Court had been the only one in the establishment who had half expected to hear a battle rage on the cargo ship, so he was the only one who stayed on task when the firing started.

The other men’s heads swiveled towards the bay in surprise, giving the American a second to begin his attack.

Zoya Zakharova had been lying prone, deep in the high brush of the overwatch hide site on the far side of the bay, looking through the ten-power scope of the sniper rifle at the Tai Chin VI. All eight of her men had disappeared moments before when they moved in teams of four off the main deck and into the superstructure of the seventy-five-meter-long ship. She knew from the briefing held on the yacht earlier that they would break into teams of two inside to clear cabins and the engine room, with another team climbing up to the bridge deck. She could listen in to their radio network through her own headset attached to her walkie-talkie, but there was nothing to hear. Anna team was maintaining strict radio silence, and they expected the same from her.

So she just lay up here alone, watching the scene.

Suddenly staccato reports of a burst of rifle fire pounded in the night, rolling across the bay from the ship. Zoya recognized it as the unmistakable sound of an AK rifle, firing 7.62-by-39-millimeter cartridges in fully automatic mode. All the Zaslon men had suppressors on their weapons that fired a different caliber, so she knew this had to be a hostile actor inside the ship engaging her commandos.

Der’mo. Shit, she said to herself. She’d hoped she wouldn’t hear any noise out of the cargo ship at all.

The boom of a shotgun told her that another armed hostile was firing on the raiding party, and she started to worry that this operation was falling apart right in front of her.

Within one second of the shotgun blast, Court’s backpack slammed straight down against the forehead of the man brandishing the knife, and the five-pound air tank inside acted like a hammer striking flesh and bone. The man dropped down unconscious in front of the crowd tight behind him, while Court brought his right hand out, swinging his Kershaw knife. He made contact with three men in this first swing, cutting two men in the arm, and one deeply in his shoulder, opening his flesh to the bone. He brought the blade back around 180 degrees in the other direction, and this time he sliced across the hands of two more men, while all the others around him lurched back in surprise at the violence of the action that had just erupted from the gweilo who, two seconds before, had been meek as a field mouse and offering no hint of resistance.

Court couldn’t bypass the dozen or more Triad men between himself and the deck railing, so instead he leapt high, kicking his legs into the air. He landed on his back on the wooden bar, rolled off, and dropped behind it, pulling his backpack along with him. He ended up in a standing position and swung his pack at the astonished bartender, clocking him in the face with the air tank inside the bag, dropping the young man flat onto his back.

Nearly fifty men screamed in wild frenzy now; some made to leap upon the bar to climb over it, while others moved around to access it from the side closest to the entrance. Court saw knives everywhere in the scrum in front of him, but he saw no guns.

Bottles of alcohol rested in a well next to Court. He grabbed two full big one-and-a-half-liter vodka bottles, then shattered their necks on the side of a waist-high refrigerator. He spun in a circle, flinging their contents all around the bar, soaking some of the men climbing onto it. He snatched up the lighter he’d seen behind the bar and lit the whiskey-soaked washrag, which immediately burst into flames.

He took a step back towards the doorway to the kitchen, then dropped the rag on the floor of the bar.

The flames began instantly; the alcohol vapor in the air around the three liters of spilled spirits caused a brilliant flash in the low-lit room, even flaring past Court himself for an instant. Several of the men on the bar found themselves engulfed in flame, and they scrambled frantically, crashing into others while trying to get away. Court shot straight back into the narrow galley kitchen, slammed the completely inadequate door there, and reached for the lock, but didn’t waste his time with it when he realized it would just take a hard push to break the weak plywood door in, locked or not.

No one on the other side of that door was going to bother turning the knob; they’d come through hard and fast, and it would take no time before men began pouring at it, shattering it off its cheap hinges.

The fire behind the bar wouldn’t last, nor would it stop anyone who really wanted at him; it would just slow them down for a few seconds.

Court’s plan had been to dart through the back exit in the kitchen, but those hopes were dashed in an instant. He saw no exit that led back onto the footpath, only a closed door that, from its location at the southern end of the galley kitchen, meant it led out into the bar itself very near the main entrance of the building.

Court reached as high as he could and grabbed onto the top of a metal shelving unit full of goods right next to the door he’d just entered, and he pulled with all his might. He thought it would be difficult to tip the tall, heavy structure, but he just had to give the old rusted unit a hard yank off center for its legs to bend and buckle, and then the eight-foot-high assembly crashed down in front of the doorway just as the door started to push in behind the weight of several men who’d made it through the fire. The shelving unit was full of cans of spices, bags of rice, boxes full of bagged grease, and other heavy items, so it held the door shut, for a moment, anyway.

Court now sprinted for the other exit; it was only five steps away up the narrow galley, but after just three steps the door flew open and a pair of rough-looking young men appeared.

The first man lunged forward with his knife; Court continued his advance and sidestepped the thrust, pushing the man farther into the kitchen while the second attacker swung a switchblade towards him. The first man fell over the shelving unit while Court concentrated on the second. Court short-circuited this man’s attack by blocking him at the forearm, then took hold of the hand with the knife and spun behind the man. He pulled the man’s arm up high as he whirled behind him, and his own hands covered the man’s hand clutching the hilt of the knife. Driving down hard, Court forced this attacker to stab himself in the neck.

While he did this he kicked his right foot back behind him and slammed the particleboard door into the face of a third attacker as he breached the door frame. This knocked the man back into the bar, crashing him into two others just behind him.

In front of Court, another crash against the plywood door broke it down and over the smashed shelving assembly and its contents. Men fell into the center of the galley kitchen on top of one another, just a dozen feet away from the American assassin.

Flames still licked high in the bar area; these men had just been too wild with the thrill of the hunt to care.

Court concentrated on the man in his grasp. He pulled him back a step, then spun him down to his knees against the door.

With strength and efficiency, he ripped the man’s hands from the knife hilt deep in his neck, then rotated the blade across the kneeling man’s throat, sending a spray of arterial blood against the wooden door and killing him almost instantly in the process.

The gangster’s body crumpled against the door, holding it shut from men trying to open it.

Now Court turned back to the pile of undulating bodies lying in the doorway that led to the bar. The small fire from the bar area spread into the kitchen, fueled by frying grease and other items that had fallen from the crumpled shelving unit into the flames in the doorway. The pile of men — Court counted at least five so far, with more stumbling in through the dancing flames — kicked and scrambled to get up and away from the danger.

Court charged at them, reaching into his right front pocket as he did so.

Zoya Zakharova was pleased she hadn’t heard any more shooting from the cargo ship, but now a new sound caused her to pull her eyes out of the eyecup of the scope. The roar of shouts and screams of excitement came across the water, apparently from the only area of activity around the bay, the little dive bar.

Although she was 350 meters away here in her hide, the sound traveled easily in the night air over the still water.

She brought her binoculars up to her eyes to check it out and, to her surprise, she saw that some kind of a barroom brawl had erupted at the same moment as the raid. She knew it was possible the patrons had heard the gunfire from the cargo ship, but she doubted they’d be able to tell that was where it came from. If men on the Tai Chin VI had managed to contact their ten colleagues at the bar, they could have warned them, which might have brought the Vietnamese gangsters racing back to help their comrades, but she didn’t see how it would have led to a fight there.

She didn’t know what was going on, but any dustup might help slow the response from the Vietnamese and cover the actions on the cargo ship, so she was pleasantly surprised at this turn of events.

For a better look she shifted the entire sniper rifle so she could train its optic on the bar, and when she did so she saw the lighted covered deck, and a large mass of people moving around the poorly constructed building.

She squinted. A fire?

It appeared the bar area was ablaze, and smoke poured from the open-air building.

No one was down on the dinghy dock, which meant the Vietnamese weren’t heading back to their ship to investigate the shooting there — at least not yet — so she began to lift the rifle back up so she could scan the deck of the Tai Chin VI again, but she stopped herself suddenly and lowered her eye back to the scope. The crack of a gunshot was unmistakable over the quiet bay, and this gunfire had come from the bar, not from the ship.

She couldn’t see the shooter, she was too far away, but she felt like she should notify the Zaslon unit. She knew Vasily had called for radio silence and they were maintaining it, even though they were obviously engaging hostiles right now. Vasily had demanded she not transmit on the net unless absolutely necessary, but Zoya thought it prudent to tell them about shooting going on away from the cargo ship.

“All elements, this is Sirena. Be advised — there is gunfire coming from the bar on the northwestern shore of the bay. I can’t see who is shooting. There is a fire there, as well. There seems to be an altercation that might be unrelated to our operation.”

No one replied, but she hadn’t expected a response.

More gunshots from the bar now; the reports sounded to Zoya to be coming from pistols, at least two different weapons firing in close succession. She had no idea what the hell was going on over there, but she decided she’d focus on the bar, watching the action in case this melee caused the ten men from the Tai Chin VI to head back to their ship, right in the middle of the raid.