Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Fan had been lying there frozen in his bed, afraid to move a muscle even though the gunfight below him had been raging for over a minute. For most of the shooting, starting with the crashing automatic fire right below his window, the fight seemed to be at ground level, but it was clear from the progression of the gunfire and the screaming that whoever was attacking this place was now just one floor below him on the stairwell that ran up the center of the villa.

As he squinted his eyes to will away the danger, Fan’s door flew open suddenly and he turned to look. Tu Van Duc stood there wearing a white suit and tie and waving a silver .45 caliber automatic pistol around crazily.

He looked to Fan Jiang like a vision out of one of those Hong Kong action films he watched as a guilty pleasure on his computer.

Behind Tu, one of his men — Fan had been told the man’s name was Cao — had a semiautomatic pistol in each hand, and he held them both up in front of him while he watched the long hallway.

Tu raced into the room and pulled Fan away from his bed and up to his feet.

“Come with me!” Tu screamed in English. His eyes were wild with terror.

Fan saw that the Vietnamese crime boss was nearly as terrified as he was, which only scared Fan more, but the young computer hacker did as he was told. Together the two of them followed Cao down the hall. Tu pulled Fan Jiang by the sleeve of his black hoodie to keep him moving along as they ran past the stairs in the middle of the hall, all the way down to a large musty bathroom at the far end. Here Cao tucked one of his pistols in his underarm so he could open a small closet, pull out a plastic bag full of old towels, and then reach to the back wall. To Fan’s surprise, a hidden panel in the closet opened, and he could see a dark narrow stairwell, with wooden steps leading steeply down. Cao knelt into the closet and immediately began descending while Tu pushed Fan, urging him onward. Fan stepped in and found himself fighting claustrophobia almost instantly, and when Tu pulled the wall closed behind him to hide the entrance, Fan realized he could not see at all. The leader of the Wild Tigers did not turn on a light; instead he just shoved and shoved from behind as Fan began descending, doing his best to fight his welling panic.

Fan realized he was in a spiral staircase when his head hit the wall. He descended with the winding stairs, and soon he was level with the second floor of the building.

The cracking of gunfire had dissipated somewhat, but as the men got down to the ground floor, Fan heard a fresh energy to the battle that was now being fought above him.

Fan realized this odd stairwell went all the way down into the basement without stopping at any other floor. He thought it must have been some sort of secret escape route built by, or at least used by, the Vietcong who operated here fifty years earlier.

The basement was a small dark space with little in it other than standing water, a foul stench, and the splashing and scratching sounds of rats in the corner.

Here Cao jabbed both his weapons in his belt, then knelt and slid three cinder blocks out of the wall. By doing this he created a hole only three feet high and a foot and a half wide.

Cao said something to Tu, who immediately translated for Fan Jiang.

Tu said, “Cao will go first. Fan, you are in the middle. Hurry!”

Cao crawled into the black hole.

Fan knelt down but hesitated. He turned back to Tu and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I am afraid of small spaces.”

Tu snapped back, “And I am afraid of getting killed by the Americans! Hurry!”

“Americans? How do you know?”

“Because they aren’t Chinese. They must be Americans.”

Fan looked at the tunnel again, then back to the leader of the Wild Tigers. “Where does this lead?”

“There is a barn behind the house. It leads there. We can run into the rice paddies and hide in the trees until the Americans leave.”

“Why don’t we just wait here? They won’t find the entrance above, and we can just—”

Tu Van Duc pointed his silver automatic in Fan Jiang’s face. He said, “I will go, and I will not leave you behind alive so that you can reveal where I went.”

Fan turned back to the darkness and began crawling, his breathing audible and labored as his chest tightened.

The Zaslon unit had been in near-constant enemy contact for the past minute and a half, but they’d cleared the ground floor and half of the second floor, and now were outside a door at the end of a hallway. Yevgeni, Sasha, and Pyotr stacked at the closed door, while Vasily, Andrei, and Arseny moved up the stairwell. The team was relying on their two-man overwatch outside to notify them of any hostiles breaching the villa below; just because they’d killed everything that moved on the ground floor didn’t make things safe for them down there, since the soldiers outside near the road could always come in and reload the building with more hostiles.

Still, with only half a dozen men, Vasily knew he didn’t have the personnel to leave men on the ground floor.

Vasily had heard the call that Sirena had entered through a window on the top floor, and for this reason only he waited before going up the stairs. He called her on the interteam radio, but she did not immediately answer, and he assumed she was probably moving silently.

As he waited a moment, he turned to watch Yevgeni lead his three-man team into the room up the hall. Anna Two gave a squeeze on the shoulder of Sasha, the breach man in the group, and he kicked in the door, then pushed in with his weapon high.

Four Vietnamese men lay in wait, kneeling behind upturned tables across the room. They held rifles and shotguns pointed at the door, and they opened fire on the breachers.

Sasha moved away from the doorway so his teammates could help him engage, and while doing so he fired at the gunmen in front of him. His burst caught one man in the shoulder, but just after this a shotgun blast hit him in the knee, buckling the appendage and sending Sasha sprawling to the floor.

Yevgeni and Pyotr both riddled all remaining Wild Tigers with bullet holes as they entered the room.

Sasha lay facedown on the wooden floor by the doorway. From his position by the stairs Vasily could tell Sasha’s leg had been severed.

Just as Vasily started to move to help, another door on the opposite side of the hall flew open, and a Wild Tiger with a snub-nosed revolver appeared, the gun in his hand spitting smoke and fire.

The leader of the Russian SVR paramilitaries shot the man through the neck, sending him tumbling back into the room.

With constant gunfire below her, Zoya Zakharova stepped out of an empty bedroom on the third floor of the villa and looked out into a long hallway. Three lights in the ceiling ran down the length of the hall. She aimed at the one closest to her and pulled the trigger of her Glock. The weapon thumped as the suppressor absorbed much of the noise from the subsonic ammo, and the light blew out.

Quickly she shot out the other two lights in the hall, then pulled her NVGs back down over her eyes and stepped out, still covering her way forward with her weapon.

“Man down! Man down!” The call came from Vasily, spoken over the sound of close gunfire.

Things had clearly gone to hell below her, so all she could do now was hope that her target was safe, up here with her. She continued up the hall quietly but quickly, knowing time was not her ally.

Court heard shotgun and rifle fire one floor directly above where he sat next to the porch at the back door. Along with this, the chattering fire of multiple guns on the other side of the villa told him the snipers by the canal were probably having an incredibly busy and an incredibly bad evening.

He scanned around with his NODs while he sat there and was surprised to catch a hint of movement on the far side of the barn, fifty yards southwest of his position. He aimed the Galil at the motion but lowered it when he realized the action there was no threat to him.

Three figures ran from the back of the barn and over a large open field towards the line of trees that separated the compound’s property from a large flooded rice paddy on the other side.

Court cranked up the magnification on the night vision binoculars attached to his ball cap. Through the ten-power magnification, he could see the three men as if they were only fifteen or twenty feet away.

Court squinted as he tried to make out faces in the dim green glow of the NODs. The man in front turned back around to wave the others onward. He was young and fit with a beard and mustache, and he carried two handguns. The man in the middle was the smallest; his hands were empty, and he faced away. And the man in back wore an ostentatious white suit and carried a shiny automatic pistol.

Court scanned back to the man in the center and tracked him for a moment. Suddenly the small figure stumbled, then turned back to look at the man right behind him.

The American sitting against the wall of the villa sixty yards away saw his face clearly.

Softly Court spoke aloud now. “I’ll be damned. Fan fucking Jiang.”

No doubt about it. Court Gentry had positive ID on his target. The Chinese man wore blue jeans and a black hoodie, and he was running for his life with the two men armed only with pistols. Fan didn’t look like he had much experience running in a muddy field, or running at all, for that matter. And the men around him looked like Vietnamese gangsters. The guy in the back looked like he could be a serious player in the organization with his suit and tie and his shiny Colt .45.

Court looked around, quickly making sure there was no one else out here on the lawn, then he launched to his feet and took off across the property as fast as he could.

Zoya had cleared the entire third-floor hallway, save for the last room at the end. She used the tip of her silencer to push open the door, revealing a dark bathroom. She started to turn away but noticed a big bag full of old towels in the middle of the floor next to a small door. She opened this door, leveling her Glock in front of her. As she expected, it was a closet, but the items on the floor just outside caused her to reach around the area to check for a false wall or a false floor in the little space.

Just as she did so, Ruslan came over her headset. “Anna Eight to all call signs. I’ve got subjects fleeing the compound on foot to the west. Multiples… three — negative. Four subjects. They’ll be out of my line of sight in five seconds.”

Zoya raced across the bathroom to the back window, then looked outside. Through her NVGs she could see three men running together, and a fourth halfway between the villa and the men in the distance. The man in back was quickly gaining on them from behind.

She flipped up her NVGs, pulled a ten-power night vision monocular from her belt, and focused it on the group of three men in front.

She was certain in an instant.

Fan Jiang was in the middle of the three.

“All call signs, be advised. Target is in sight, one hundred meters west of Omega and running to the west.”

Ruslan spoke next. “I’ve lost visual. They are out of my field of view.”

Zoya knew she could run down the stairs and take off into the back, but the lower floor had not been cleared of hostiles. She could climb out this window and try to make her way down the wall, but by the time she hit the ground Fan and the other three would have entered a tree line another fifty meters from where they now ran, and by the time she got to those trees they’d be long gone.

She held the monocular to her eye with one hand and watched the men running away. With her other hand she keyed her transmit button, knowing the best thing she could do right now was to thin the herd, to remove Fan’s protection.

“Anna One, I need every gun I can get pointed out the back windows in the next fifteen seconds. The subject is in a black hooded jacket and blue jeans. Second from the front of the group approaching the trees. Eliminate all other hostiles in sight before they get into the concealment of those trees.”

Vasily responded quickly. “All Anna signs able. Engage targets to the west from the second-floor windows.”

And then, to Zoya’s astonishment, the man who had been running behind Fan and the other two stopped running suddenly, shouldered his rifle, and pointed it at the others. She had assumed he was one of the Wild Tigers protecting Fan, but before her eyes, his rifle flashed, and the first man in the trio in front of him fell to the ground.

The crack of a gunshot came just as a second flash came from the rifle.

The man in white running right behind Fan Jiang fell to the wet grass, the gunshot boomed back to the villa, and Zoya watched the man with the rifle run forward now and tackle Fan Jiang to the ground.

He was a much bigger man than the three figures with him.

She jabbed at her PTT button again. “All call signs! The target has been… he has been abducted! There is some other party here at the Omega, and they have the target in pocket. I just see one subject with the target at this time and they are heading west on foot towards the trees. The man with the rifle is now your primary. Shoot him!”

Vasily was confused by Zoya’s call. “Confirm your last, Sirena.”

Zoya shouted into her mic now. “All call signs at Omega! The smaller man is Fan Jiang! Do not shoot him! The larger man is a hostile. I repeat, the larger of the two is hostile. Drop him!”

On the second floor, while Andrei desperately tried to stop the bleeding on Sasha’s leg, Vasily, Yevgeni, and Pyotr arrived at separate windows at the back of the villa at the same time. They broke out glass with the suppressors of their AKs, then raised them to look through their red dot holographic sights. Through their night vision goggles they could make out the two figures moving in the distance, and they distinguished their objective, Fan Jiang, from their target, the unknown subject who now had Fan Jiang by the arm and was pulling him farther away from the scene.

The sights on the short-barreled rifles were not enhanced, but rather simple holographic red dots: good for close-quarters battle, but less effective at distance. Still, the Zaslon men had the skill to hit a man-sized target on the move two hundred meters away.

All three operators looked through their night vision goggles, through the optics on the top rail of their weapons, and they lined up their red dots on the larger man, switched their weapons to fire a single round when the trigger was pulled, and began tracking their target to judge his speed so they could aim accordingly.

Just as the three men were preparing to fire, they saw the larger man stop abruptly, spin around, and drop to both knees. Next to him, Fan Jiang stumbled, looked at the man with the rifle, and then started to run away, taking advantage of the hostile’s action.

The unknown subject raised his weapon now, but he did not point it at Fan Jiang. Instead he pointed it back in the direction of the villa, 185 meters away.

Pyotr said, “What the fuck does he think he’s doing?”

Vasily shouted out, “I’m taking the shot!” He slipped his gloved finger onto the trigger of his weapon. As he started to put pressure on it he saw the flashes of gunfire coming from the rifle of the man on his knees in his sights. Vasily wasn’t worried; he knew he was in no great danger. For this man to even see a man-sized target in one of the windows at this distance would be a hell of a feat. Hitting his target on his first try after running like that would take superhuman skill.

And Vasily knew the man wouldn’t get a second try. He’d be dead in one second.

But as the Zaslon team leader began to fire his AK, a fireball erupted right in front of him in his window, and his night vision goggles whited out, blinding him.

To his left Vasily heard Pyotr and Yevgeni scream in surprise, and all three men lowered their weapons, dove for cover, and lifted their goggles so they could see.

An incredible explosion, louder than even the shotguns involved in the firefight, roared through the night, and the darkness outside turned to daylight. Inside the villa, those few lights still on went out completely, enshrouding the entire building in a blanket of darkness.

Vasily lay on the floor rubbing his eyes with a gloved hand in an attempt to clear them.

“What the fuck was that?”

Zoya’s voice came over the net. “The son of a bitch shot the diesel generator at the back of the villa! He blew it up to blind our NVGs! I can’t see a damn thing! We need to exfil Omega and go after the target, now!”

Mikhail’s voice came next, transmitting from his sniper’s hide south of the canal. “Anna Seven to One! We’re blind over here with that explosion! Our night vision gear is toast. Can’t see the PAVN units approaching the villa. Suggest you egress to the west, now! We’ll lay down suppressive fire as long as we can, then we’ll have to retreat!”

Vasily was up on his knees now. His goggles would be whited out for several more seconds, maybe up to a minute, and he didn’t have time to wait, so he activated the flashlight on the rail of his rifle. As he began moving to the staircase with the other men he punched his transmit button. “Anna Two, call in the helo. Get them here in ten minutes.”

“Roger that!”

Back in the hallway, he found Arseny kneeling over Sasha. He wasn’t even rendering aid.

Vasily could see that the fallen operator had bled out from his catastrophic leg wound.

Vasily just said, “Get his weapon, but leave him. Move!”