Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Court thought things couldn’t get much worse; then some asshole out in the covered deck area started shooting blindly into the galley kitchen.

Awesome.

As Court sprinted towards the men falling in front of him, braving the flames, stumbling over one another and the destroyed shelving unit full of cooking supplies, he heard the shots and saw holes appear in the thin wall, not far away. Court ran on, launched into the air, and planted his left foot on the edge of a metal grill. In full leap he pushed off, vaulting high over the men in the pile, and grabbed on to the single hanging bulb lighting the kitchen area. He crushed the bulb, shattering it and sending the kitchen into darkness save for the flames licking in from the bar, the light of which did not reach into the far end of the galley. Still, he stuck his landing at the northern end of the kitchen because he’d calculated his trajectory before the light went out.

Court spun around, turning on the tactical flashlight he pulled from his pocket. The taclight sent nine hundred lumens of blinding white light back in the direction of the men climbing over the shelves, cans, and boxes. He laid the five-inch-long device on a shelf over a sink just to his right so the beam would remain constant up the galley and hide Court’s actions.

Above the shelf he saw a stocked knife rack nailed into a wooden support beam. Court yanked a meat cleaver and a long carving fork off the rack, just as a man charged forward through the light, his eyes surely blinded, but either his adrenaline or his stupidity pushing him on. He held a stiletto in his hand.

Court dispatched the man with a parry of the knife with the carving fork and a brutal strike to the side of the neck with the meat cleaver. The man fell and writhed on the cement floor of the galley, and Court stepped back, nearly to the back wall, ready to take the next ten men to try their luck up the narrow aisle.

More Hong Kong Triads shielded their eyes and braved the danger of having no idea where the gweilo in front of them was.

Another crack of a gunshot caught Court’s attention, but he didn’t stop swinging as another man closed in the narrow space. He struck this man in the arm with the cleaver, causing the attacker to drop his blade and fall, clutching a long and deep slash.

The man just behind him stumbled over his fallen comrade and fell to the ground on his forearms and knees. Court drop-kicked this attacker in the face, spinning him 180 degrees before he fell in a heap.

Persistent gunfire cracked outside in the bar now. Court saw the holes in the walls getting closer to his position, and he knew he’d be hit in seconds if he waited around for the shooters to adjust their aim.

The walls!

Court had noticed earlier in the day that this dive looked like it had been put together with flypaper and baling wire. There was no way out of the corner he’d backed himself into… unless he made his own exit.

He heel-kicked at the wall behind him as hard as he could. It moved, shaking the entire kitchen, but the thin plywood held. As another man climbed off the pile and raced towards him with a blade, rushing out of the dazzling beam of light, Court kicked again, lower on the wall, trying to hit another of the weak boards at its least secure point.

This time he heard a crack, and the board separated from its fasteners.

The new man sprang on him, faked a kick that caused Court to commit to blocking, then barreled in with a jab of the knife. Court dropped fast to his knees, causing the blade to fire just inches above his upper back; then Court spun on his hands and kicked out hard, striking the man in the ankle on his weight-bearing leg. The appendage cracked and the man fell forward.

Court propped the carving fork on the floor, business end up. His attacker fell straight down onto it, killing him instantly.

On the ground now with men just feet away and surging forward like a flood, Court rolled out of his backpack, flipped onto his back, and kicked at the loose board in the back wall with the heels of both feet. After one hit it bent away and cracked again; a second try broke the board all the way through, sending it flying into a far corner of the bar’s back deck.

Just then, Court saw the beam of his tactical light whip around the kitchen as someone knocked it to the floor.

Court rolled onto his belly and scooted backwards, pulling his backpack behind him.

He scraped his back as he did so, but he barely felt it in his overwhelming desire to get away from all the men trying to kill him.

Here he sprang to his feet, finding himself back in the bar, in the corner behind where he had been seated just a couple of minutes earlier. He was around the corner from the main part of the bar, but there was no way out from here, so he had to head in the direction of the gunfire and his Triad attackers.

He chanced a look around the corner, knowing this wooden wall wouldn’t stop an air rifle from penetrating, much less a real pistol. He saw the near edge of the bar where he’d been sitting just a few feet away, and he knew there was a huge metal ice bin just on the other side.

He thought the ice bin would give him some cover from a handgun.

No one followed him out of the kitchen through the small hole because they knew there was a man on the other side with a blood-soaked meat cleaver in his hand, so by now men had begun flooding out of the kitchen doors, and word was surely getting out that the man pinned in the corner of the kitchen had managed to escape back into the open-decked bar.

As Court moved towards his cover behind the ice bin, he saw the man wearing the dragon shirt that he’d hit over the head with his pack to kick off the fight. He was sitting on the ground, bleeding from the head, and holding a silver automatic pistol in his right hand. He was only fifteen feet away from Court and facing away, and as Court watched, the man pointed his pistol over the bar and fired a round into the kitchen wall without seeing what he was shooting at.

He nearly hit one of his fellow Triads in the process.

Court sprang towards the man on the floor now, twisted the pistol out of his hand, and grabbed him by his spiked black hair. As men seemed to run around the entire dim establishment, some firing pistols themselves, Court began dragging the man backwards towards the relative cover of the ice bin.

He looked up as he did so, and it appeared that everyone in the room turned in his direction at the same time.

Twenty men charged, and Court found himself out in the open, pulling along a noncompliant hostage.

With her eye still in the scope, Zoya Zakharova pulled the charging handle back on the VSS rifle, chambering a 9-by-39-millimeter round.

She hadn’t envisioned using the weapon this evening at all, and she hadn’t fired a VSS since her sniper training four years earlier, but she had a target downrange now, and she was committed to killing him. She followed the man’s head with the crosshairs of the rifle, holding just a touch high to account for the characteristics of this bullet at this distance.

The Russian operative blew out half the air in her lungs, hesitated a moment to catch her body between heartbeats, and then pressed the trigger.

The sound of the round firing through the integrally suppressed barrel was akin to a bicycle tire blowing out. A pop and an expression of gases made less noise than the action of the weapon itself as the semiautomatic rifle ejected the spent cartridge and then rechambered a round.

The large bullet left the muzzle of the rifle at a thousand feet per second, then raced from the top of the hill and over the full length of the bay.

Zoya kept her eyes on her target, the forehead of a man in motion, and when the bullet struck home there was no doubt, because she saw the head snap back, blood mist behind it, and then the body dropped like a stone.

The man landed flat on his back in the fifteen-foot-long boat.

There were two more men in the tender rushing towards the Tai Chin VI, but neither of them was aware that the man kneeling just behind them had been shot through the head. The roar of the outboard motor had covered the zing of the bullet as it flew overhead, its impact with its target, and the fall of the man to the floor of the small watercraft.

Mere seconds earlier, Zoya had watched these three men race down the stairs of the bar to their boat, one of them with a walkie-talkie held to his ear. She took it as a given they were in communication with someone on the cargo ship, and were now rushing away from the fight at the bar and back to the fight on the ship. The men then leapt into the closest of the two tenders and fired the engines, while Zoya reported the action to the Zaslon team.

She hadn’t looked to see if Ruslan and Sasha, the two men Vasily had tasked with covering any counterattack, had made it back up to the deck of the cargo ship, out in the darkness off her left shoulder, and she wasn’t going to move her rifle now to find out.

But when she received no response from Vasily after fifteen seconds, she knew what she had to do.

After her first shot and the elimination of the first of the three threats to her mission, she quickly centered her crosshairs on the man just behind the operator of the tender, but this time she held her sights true to aim, because the fast-moving vessel had moved closer to her position, eliminating the need for the holdover.

Thump!

Another round left her weapon, but just as it did, the operator of the boat steered hard to starboard, apparently to avoid a buoy in the water in front of him. Zoya worried for an instant her shot would miss, but she watched through the scope while the round slammed into the target’s left collarbone, knocking the man backwards and flat in the tender.

Zoya’s weapon loaded the chamber automatically and her finger remained taut on the trigger. She centered her sights on the man at the wheel now, piloting the vessel at full throttle past a small fishing boat moored for the evening. The tender continued towards the cargo ship, still 150 meters off its bow.

She fired again, striking the operator of the tender straight in the nose, knocking him off the boat and then into the black water with a splash.

The tender slowed to idle, then veered to its left a little and began sputtering towards the rocky shoreline, across the bay from the dive bar and just under Zoya’s position on the hill.

She scanned for other targets, but the second tender of the Tai Chin VI remained tied up on the dinghy dock under the riotous fight in the bar.

Into her mic she said, “This is Sirena. Three hostiles are down.”

She’d shot the men back to front, dropping all three with only three rounds. And although the weapon had flashed up here at the top of the hill, no one would have heard the gunshots from any distance, so she felt comfortable that she was in the clear. More importantly to her, this small rescue mission to the Tai Chin VI had failed, even if any of the three had somehow managed to survive.

She spoke into her microphone again after triggering her radio. “Anna One, how copy?”

There was no response from the Zaslon team, but a lightning-fast three-round volley of gunfire from the waterside bar diverted her attention.

From the speed of the fire, Zoya knew that someone new was shooting, and whoever it was, they sure as hell knew how to operate a handgun.

Court fired three rounds over the far end of the bar, striking three men charging his way.

The mass of approaching men recoiled like a single living organism, and the attackers began diving behind tables and chairs and against the bar itself. A few even leapt over the deck railing down into the water below next to the little dock.

With one hand still grabbing hard to the sticky hair of the Triad boss in the dragon shirt, Court fanned the pistol around behind him, checking his six to make sure no one was there. A waitress lay huddled behind a table in the corner, just in his view. Court yelled at her to stay where she was, because he was afraid if she got up to run she would get shot by one of the Chinese or Vietnamese men pointing guns in this direction.

The Triad on the dirty deck, now pinned there by Court’s knee, looked up to him with blood all over his face. “Let me go! I’ll kill you if you don’t let me go!”

Court used his left hand to bang the man’s face down hard against the deck, silencing him for the time being.

A shout came from the men holding their positions just thirty or so feet away. “Hey! Gweilo! You gonna die, motherfucker!”

Court pushed harder with his left knee to hold his captive down, and then he released his left hand from the man’s hair. He dropped the magazine from the grip of the pistol, a Norinco Type 92, and saw he had eight rounds left. It wasn’t a particularly powerful weapon, but Court knew his marksmanship would go a long way to make up for any shortcomings of the 5.8-by-21-millimeter round.

His mind assessed his situation quickly. There were still easily twenty-five or so potential threats here in this bar, but from the sound of the gunfire there weren’t more than one or two pistols in the crowd other than the one in his hand. He wasn’t terribly worried about the knives now that he had a standoff weapon; unless they all charged him at once, nobody was going to get into a knife fight with the Gray Man if he had a gun.

He heard a boat fire up downstairs at the dinghy dock, and he wondered if it was one of the tenders for the cargo ship. He thought he’d heard one a minute earlier, as well, but it was hard to tell with all the action going on.

With the revving of an outboard motor’s throttle he was certain now he was listening to a tender racing away from the bar.

Another voice shouted out, startling Court and forcing his head down lower. This man spoke in Mandarin, and from the tone of his words it sounded to Court like he was barking out orders to underlings. A few other men replied, and it felt as if some kind of plan was being formed by the gang.

Not good.

Court didn’t have a moment to spare. The longer he stayed here, the braver the men plotting against him would get, and the more organized their next attack would be.

Suddenly, several shots rang out in quick succession. Court heard glasses behind the bar shattering nearby, the sound of the ice bucket taking fire — he even saw splinters of wood kicked off the corner of the bar a foot from his face.

Christ, Court thought. These guys didn’t have much concern about the well-being of the Triad boss on the floor under his knee.

Court reached the pistol around the side of the bar and fired two rounds without looking. The angle of the pistol was right to hit threats here in this target-rich environment, so even though he couldn’t see what he was shooting at, he figured he was doing some damage.

The gunfire from the crowd stopped, but the shouting, the ordering, and the callbacks all continued.

Court assumed they were coordinating some sort of plan that included covering gunfire to pin Court down along with a movement forward by all the men with the edged weapons.

He felt around the body of the man underneath him, desperately searching for another magazine, but found nothing save for a wallet and a cell phone.

Court took a quick half peek around the corner. He saw dead bodies and wounded men around the tipped-over tables, then movement a little farther back on the deck. He heard the rushed voices of several men. He grabbed the Triad roughly by the neck and climbed off the man’s back, staying low in a crouch, as if ready to launch.

The man Court held looked at him with a crazed grin now. “Stupid gweilo! They don’t care if they kill me. You use me as a hostage? Are you fucking crazy, man? I no hostage. They shoot anyway.”

Court looked to the railing of the deck, twenty feet across open ground. Upturned plastic chairs and tables lay in the way, but nothing he couldn’t bull his way through in a desperate situation.

And he was pretty sure this predicament qualified.

Court pulled the Triad up to his feet but kept him in a low crouch. Leaning into the man’s ear with his eyes on the railing, he said, “You aren’t my hostage, buddy.” Court looked straight into the man’s eyes now. “You’re my meat shield.”

The Triad leader cocked his head in confusion, and then Court propelled himself up and out to the left, using his strong thighs to haul the man up with him. With his gun arm out in front of him he used the man in the dragon shirt for cover.

Court opened fire, simultaneously pulling the man along with him as he went for the railing.

Cracks of return pistol fire filled the night; the zing of a bullet burned the air inches from Court’s ear. He pulled the Triad sideways as he moved. Three feet, five feet, ten feet. Straight towards the railing over the water, as fast as Court could go while yanking an unwilling man along with him.

The Triad boss lurched into Court as they shuffled quickly along like two men dancing badly; clearly he’d been shot. Then he lurched again a second later; another round in the back.

Court’s pistol emptied and he dropped it, using both hands now to pull his meat shield along with him across the floor. The dying man took another shot, this time to the back of his head, and his legs gave out, but Court didn’t let him drop.

Gunshots cracked across the room; Court both felt and heard a round scream by again, this time even closer to his own head, but he raced forward anyway, towards the edge of the deck.

Men with knives launched to their feet and gave chase now, getting in the way of the guns, and Court let the dead body in his arms fall, then turned and sprang onto the railing.

The closest blade was just two feet away and swinging fast as the Gray Man dove over the side, launching himself out past the dinghy dock.

He was going for a swan dive — it was the fastest and most efficient way to get himself in the water — but as he dropped, his legs rotated past ninety degrees and he hit the water with his outstretched hands, then his head, then his back and legs. It wasn’t pretty, but the lights of the bar above didn’t make it down to the water’s surface, so once he broke through, his momentum sending him deep, he knew he was out of the line of sight and the line of fire.

As long as he didn’t need to breathe.