Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Yevgeni took the lead in the tactical train as they moved along the rear wall of the villa, using shrubs that grew a few feet from the wall as cover. He took care to place each footstep as close to the wall as possible, knowing the men behind him would follow suit, and this would keep his team out of view of anyone at the back door until he was right on top of them.

When he reached the large rear porch, he stepped up onto it, still careful to move along the wall. He closed on the shallow alcove where the door stood, and upon taking one more step, through his NVGs he saw a PAVN soldier standing there, a rifle held around his neck by a two-point canvas sling.

Even though the light was bad, this sentry clearly sensed something in the dark, just a dozen feet away, and he began raising his weapon at the threat. As he did this he called out, and Yevgeni realized a second soldier stood there in the little alcove, as well.

Yevgeni danced fast to his left to make some room for his teammates, and he fired twice into the first man’s chest, knocking him back against the door and spinning him to the porch before the Vietnamese soldier even thumbed off his weapon’s safety.

Vasily was second in the stack, and he shot the other PAVN infantryman once in the forehead, splashing blood across the whitewashed wooden door.

Sasha and Pyotr raced past Vasily and Yevgeni and knelt over the bodies without saying a word. They grabbed the dead men’s ankles and dragged them off the porch, one on each side, even jumping down themselves to move the men and their weapons silently out of view behind the shrubs.

Just then Mikhail came over the team’s headsets. “Seven for all call signs. Sentry with a flashlight approaching southwest corner of target location in fifteen seconds.”

Before the sniper finished his warning, Yevgeni already had a hand on the rear door latch. Sasha and Pyotr quickly retook their positions as the third and fourth men in the stack, and then Yevgeni waited for a squeeze on his shoulder, a sign from team leader Vasily to breach.

Court knelt in the bushes by the generator, seventy-five feet away from the back door, and watched the tactical train through his NODs as they disappeared silently inside the villa. They performed the breach competently and quietly, and Court wondered if six men really could make their way through the entire building, grab Fan Jiang, and get out of there without alerting the soldiers on the road and kicking off a raging gun battle. He still thought the prospects for this unlikely, but he had to give them credit for a nice set of opening moves. The nine-man unit killed four men right in front of him, and the remaining God-knows-how-many armed defenders of this property didn’t seem to have a clue anything was going on.

Just then Court saw the beam of a sentry’s flashlight as the man turned to walk up the western portion of the property. Court was out of the beam’s light here behind the generator, and he knew the sentries had shown no interest in checking the bushes and trees for interlopers on their previous passes, so he would be safe if he stayed right here.

But he decided he would not stay safe, and he would not stay here. No, he had to act.

Court had been virtually paralyzed for the past ten minutes, caught in the line of fire of a sniper and then hidden in a ball while a team of commandos kept him pinned down.

But now he moved with purpose, because he had a plan, and he had a target in sight.

The sentry with the flashlight passed the generator fifteen feet from Court’s shoulder and swept his light left and right idly, illuminating swaths of the low grass at the back of the big dilapidated villa.

As soon as he passed, Court rose to his feet but stayed low and began closing on the sentry at a forty-five-degree angle from the man’s right. If his geometry was correct, Court would stay out of the scope of either of the two men lying prone at the canal to the south, as he would be covered by the southwestern corner of the villa and the big trucks parked in the parking area.

And if his geometry was wrong, Court was pretty sure he’d get shot in the back.

Court arrived within striking distance, and the sentry never heard a sound other than the humming diesel generator. Court took him from behind, closing off his windpipe with his left forearm, pulling up and tight, lifting the man violently off the ground. Simultaneously he shoved his four-inch blade hilt-deep into the sentry’s ribs from behind, jerking it hard to the right as blood poured over Court’s hand.

The man went limp, and Court let him drop to the ground.

Quickly he picked up the flashlight, turned it off, and dropped it in his pocket, then dragged the dead sentry backwards into the nearby shrubs.

Once down in the cover, Court took the rifle off the sentry’s body and quickly inspected the weapon. It was a Galil ACE, an Israeli-made rifle that he wasn’t trained on, but one he knew functioned much like the American M4, with which he was incredibly familiar.

He dropped the magazine and checked the bolt, finding the weapon was loaded with thirty rounds, and then he flipped off the safety and put the weapon in fully automatic mode. After a quick neck roll and a deep breath, he stood up to a crouch and began moving quickly through the shrubs along the wall towards the back door.

Just like that, the equation had changed, not just for Court Gentry, but for the Vietnamese, for this mystery team of paramilitaries, and even for Fan Jiang himself.

Everything was different now, because the Gray Man had a gun.

And as he neared the back door, he pointed his big unsuppressed weapon at the ground in front of him and placed his finger on the trigger.

The Zaslon force had successfully breached the three-story villa without making a sound, and now they moved in their train through a well-lit back hallway, closing on the sound of voices in a large room at the eastern end of the building. Vasily was fourth in line now; he and Sasha had cleared an empty storage room on their left, and now they all moved together, anticipating action ahead but careful to avoid any engagement until everyone was up close and had the room blanketed with complete fields of fire.

Vasily had hoped to find a staircase in the back of the house so he could begin a top-down clearing of the villa; experience had shown him that hostages and VIPs were normally protected vertically, meaning they were nearly always kept on or near the highest floor of a structure. But when the Russian officer found no way up at the rear of the villa, he realized he would not be able to clear this place without engaging the group of men talking to one another in the main front room. Still, with the Russians’ suppressed weapons, their tactics, and a little good fortune, Vasily felt confident he and his team could eliminate the men directly in front of them quietly without alerting the entire property.

After that he would find a stairwell to lead them up where, he assumed, Fan Jiang was being held.

He moved himself and the three men in front of him to the right-hand side of the wall, turned around to the members of his team behind him, and motioned for the last two in the stack to move to the left side of the wall to widen the coverage of the big room ahead when they made it to the doorway.

With hand signals he indicated he wanted a “wall flood,” a room-clearing tactic that had half the team pushing into the room to the right, while the other half went left. By staying along the walls all the way to the corners, the six-man unit could bring a great amount of suppressed rifle fire on the room with speed, hopefully fast enough to squelch any hostile from firing back and alerting the men outside.

Vasily was still in the process of giving this silent order, and a portion of his team was still in the process of focusing on their commander instead of on the threats ahead, when the entire dynamic of the operation changed in the space of a single heartbeat.

Just outside the back door, only twenty-five feet from the rear man in the stack there in the well-lit hallway, someone opened fire with a fully automatic assault rifle.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

It was a short burst, but impossibly loud in the still of the night. Everyone within a half mile of the villa would have heard it and identified it for what it was, and virtually everyone within a half mile, Vasily felt certain, had a gun of their own.

Vasily had no idea what had happened; he didn’t have anyone positioned back there. But all surprise was lost — any pretense of a covert entry just went out the window. The men in the rear of his formation spun around at the sound of gunfire, while the men in front began rushing up the hall, trying to close on the big room before the entire team was caught in the hallway, in the center of a “fatal funnel.”

Vasily ran with Andrei on his left, just behind Sasha and Yevgeni. The group was momentarily divided in their reaction to the threat when two Vietnamese men in civilian clothing appeared from the main room. They both carried shotguns, holding them waist high, and their eyes widened when they saw the big, wet, dark-clad, huge men with guns, and beards, all wearing night vision equipment stowed high on their heads.

Sasha and Yevgeni opened up with their AKS-74Us, firing in full auto, dropping the first two men, though one fired a single shotgun blast as he fell. The buckshot went straight up into the ceiling, but more gunfire came out of the room at the end of the hall.

Three members of the Zaslon unit arrived in the doorway now. They found themselves face-to-face with a half dozen additional men, most of whom were dropping down behind chairs and couches in the center of a large, high-ceilinged room with peeling wallpaper and wooden flooring. Four of the remaining men were PAVN infantry, the other two were Wild Tigers, and everyone was armed with rifles and shotguns.

The Zaslon men had no time to scan for targets to try to identify Fan Jiang. They fired their suppressed weapons in fully automatic mode, pushing into the room over the dead men in the doorway so that their colleagues behind could aid in the fight, and they did their best to lay waste to all threats in front of them.

The Russians executed their wall flood; Vasily pushed to the right while Arseny and Sasha went left with Yevgeni. Behind them, Pyotr and Andrei took knees in the hall and covered the back door, ready to confront whoever was shooting out there if they came through.

Zoya Zakharova raced across the open ground with her pistol out in front of her, her night vision goggles restricting her peripheral vision but helping navigate her way forward in the moonless night. The fierce gunfight inside the building caused her to leave her cover to attempt entry herself, even though her run risked putting her in the sights of the nearly two dozen PAVN soldiers fifty meters off her right shoulder.

Mikhail and Ruslan were still prone, still behind her on the far side of the canal, and they were scanning the area to the east, ready to open fire on the soldiers as soon as they began moving towards the house. But the Russians wouldn’t press their triggers until they had to. No sniper likes firing at night if he can avoid it, as the resultant flash from his weapon immediately announces his exact position to the enemy.

Zoya hit the southern wall of the villa and called over the tactical interteam radio, begging for a report from the men inside. The gunfire she heard was from shotguns, unsuppressed assault rifles, and handguns, but she knew her task force’s weapons wouldn’t be audible here because of their advanced suppressors.

Suddenly the crackle of rifle fire kicked off from the east. This told her either she’d been spotted somehow in the darkness, or else the Vietnamese army was engaging her task force members through the windows of the house. Not wanting to take a chance that she was under fire, she dove around the corner, tucking herself between the generator and the western wall of the villa.

Behind her Ruslan and Mikhail began firing their suppressed weapons; she looked back to the canal and could see the flashes from their muzzles as they engaged the numerically superior force by the road.

The battle raged on inside, as well. Even though she still couldn’t hear the sounds of Anna team’s rifles, it was obvious they were in the heat of a close-quarters war, and it was also obvious there was a huge chance they were going to kill Fan Jiang in the melee unless they watched what the fuck they were doing.

She worried that this op was disintegrating around her, and she wondered if there was some way she could get to Fan Jiang before the battle on the ground floor did.

She looked up at the wall above her. Through her NVGs she could see that the third-floor window, twenty feet above her head, was cracked open.

An idea came to her quickly. “Anna One, this is Sirena. Be advised. I’m going to make entry on a top-floor window in the southwest corner of the property. I’ll keep you updated on my location as able.”

She heard no response from the team inside the villa, but she knew they had their hands full. They were tier-one professionals; so long as they heard her she felt confident they wouldn’t accidentally shoot her when they made it upstairs.

She holstered her weapon, silencer and all, leapt up off the generator, grabbed on to the thick vines just below a decorative edge a few feet below the second-story window, and yanked herself up using just her upper body. Her feet swung in the air below her as her hands let go of the vines; she flew upwards, grabbed on to the windowsill of the second-floor window, and heaved herself up again.

Zoya scaled the corner of the three-story villa as the gunfire increased, both inside the villa and on the other side of the property. She moved as fast as she could, racing against time to find Fan Jiang before it was too late.

Court sat in the bushes with his back to the western wall of the big villa and his right shoulder against the porch up to the back door. His head was low enough that no one coming out the door on his right would be able to see him, but if someone exited the building via the back — with Fan Jiang in tow, perhaps — Court would see them from behind as they stepped off the porch onto the ground.

A dead PAVN infantryman lay here in the vegetation with him; the man’s eyes were rolled all the way back, a bullet hole marred his forehead, and a massive wound hinged his skull open at the back of his head. It was a sickening sight but something Court was trained to ignore, so he concentrated his attention on the sound of the battle in the house behind him.

He’d wanted to make sure the attacking force got busted in the act of raiding the house, and his plan had worked, but now he wondered if this shoot-out just might get Fan Jiang killed. Court thought it was certainly possible, and if it happened it would be his fault, since he was the one who exposed the attackers as they were in the middle of their stealthy infiltration of the site.

But what the hell could he do about it except wait here and hope a couple of the assaulters rescued Jiang alive and came through this door while making their escape?

He looked left and right in his NODs, and then he scanned up to see if any light was coming from windows on the southern side of the villa. To his astonishment he saw a figure effortlessly scaling the wall above the generator. The operator was clearly going for the same window Court had planned on entering originally, but this guy was doing it faster than Court himself could have executed the climb.

Who the hell is that?

Court sat there in amazement for an instant, and then his head cleared; he swiveled the Galil rifle around quickly, lined up the iron front post sight on the head of the target, and put his finger on the trigger.

But he just kept it there.

Was this the right move? He’d drop a Russian Spetsnaz officer, assuming that’s who this was, in a hot second if it meant grabbing the USA’s biggest intelligence coup since the inception of the People’s Republic of China.

But unlike the other guys in the villa, this one operator was not involved in the gun battle, and he was moving covertly towards his objective. Court realized slowly that he should be rooting for this little guy climbing the wall, hoping like hell he was the one who made it to Fan Jiang first instead of those gun monkeys shooting the hell out of the ground floor of the building.

If Court wanted his target to make it alive out the back door of the property, this spider monkey on his left was his best shot.

Court would then just shoot the spider monkey in the back when he and Jiang exited.

Court cocked his head now and rubbed his eyes, shoving his finger between his face and the eyecups of the night vision binos taped to his ball cap to do so. He only had a second or two to focus on the climber, but he saw the body shape of the operator. Slightly wider hips, a full chest under the raincoat.

In that brief moment he realized he was looking at a woman.

That was weird. Court knew of no tier-one paramilitary force in the world that employed women on their assault teams.

The climber slipped into the window on the third floor, and Court looked back to the western side of the property. He kept silent and still in his hiding spot, his rifle at his shoulder.

Woman or not, he still planned to shoot the operator if she left with Fan Jiang. The fact that she was female did not diminish the fact that she was in his way.