Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER THIRTY

Court Gentry flipped his night observation device on his ball cap up and used his naked eyes to watch the huge fireball roll up higher than the roof of the villa, then fade to black in the moonless sky. He’d fired a dozen rounds from the levee into the diesel generator, hoping he’d get lucky, and the result was even greater than his highest expectations.

Diesel fuel was harder to burn than gasoline, but he knew a hot round puncturing the wall of the unit and sparking off metal in exactly the right part of the sixty-thousand-watt generator could ignite the pressurized fumes, and that explosion could lead to a catastrophic detonation of the entire two-ton device. He’d seen smaller diesel generators get hit by rifle fire in the field before, but he’d never seen anything like this explosion.

He was momentarily proud of himself and wished like hell somebody had been around to take a picture.

He hoped this move might slow down anyone chasing him out of the property and add to the chaos inside the villa, and since the paramilitaries who hit the house were all wearing night vision gear that would be sensitive to light, he knew that anyone near a back window when the big device blew would have to deal with annoying white-out conditions on their equipment for up to a minute or so.

Court’s own night vision goggles were flamed out for the next minute, as well, but he considered this a small price to pay.

Of course he had no idea he had been a second away from taking multiple rounds from multiple weapons when he blew the generator, but he did know he was not out of the woods yet, either literally or figuratively. There were still a lot of foreign commandos, and a lot of Vietnamese soldiers and gangsters, and they all wanted what Court had: the Chinese cyber warfare specialist.

Court turned away from the villa, still illuminated by the fire pouring out of the wreckage of the generator, and looked across the dark levee. Fan Jiang was barely visible in the bad light, but Court could see that he had fallen to his knees in a mud puddle. Fan climbed back to his feet and ran on, but Court caught up to the small man right at the tree line and snatched him by the arm, then pulled him on in the same direction, pushing with him through the thick brush and trees, though neither man could see more than a couple of feet in front of them.

The Chinese national stumbled several times; he seemed terrified, exhausted, and unable to keep up the speed Court demanded.

Court encouraged him along with curses and shoves.

The six surviving Russians in the villa raced out the back door, their weapons high, sweeping for threats in all directions. Zoya was last through the door, her pistol at her side, but she was the first to see a man in civilian clothing leaning around the north side of the house with a shotgun in his hands. She fired three rounds, hitting the man once in the arm and once in the chest, crumpling him dead to the grass.

A second man tried to fire blindly around the corner next to where his partner fell, but Pyotr dropped to his knees and fired a long burst at the old stone masonry there, tearing it away with hot brass-jacketed lead. It took fewer than twenty rounds to expose the shooter behind the wall, and just one more round through his heart to end the threat.

The Zaslon team and their SVR task force leader continued sprinting to the west across the wet field.

The two Russians lying prone south of the canal had fired a total of over 150 rounds at the PAVN soldiers positioned in low ditches by the road, killing a few, wounding several, and preventing the rest from leaving cover for most of the firefight. Mikhail had the scoped sniper rifle, so while he took fewer shots he had more hits, but without Ruslan there to help him by firing short bursts with his fully automatic AK, then crawling a few yards to the left or to the right and firing again, the much larger force of Vietnamese soldiers would have targeted the pair of them and cut them to pieces in the opening moments of the skirmish.

Still, some of the Vietnamese had by now crossed the road bridge over the canal, and they were moving up the tree line closer to the two Russian paramilitaries, so after hurling a pair of fragmentation grenades to the east, Ruslan and Mikhail took off to the west as fast as they could while still maintaining some cover in the thick foliage.

Their escape was helped when Vasily sent Arseny and Pyotr to the barn with orders to each dump a pair of thirty-round magazines at the Vietnamese force to the east, less to kill the remaining dozen or so men and more to keep heads down and force the PAVN soldiers to second-guess the wisdom of a counterattack.

The ploy worked, and soon all eight surviving members of the task force made it to the two bodies at the tree line on the levee at the western edge of the property. They made a quick examination of the dead men, not wanting to dally here for long at all because they were less than two hundred meters from more than a dozen armed soldiers who very much wanted to kill them.

Zoya ignored the dead body lying facedown next to a pair of pistols, and instead rolled over the older man in the suit and tie. She flashed a red light on his face — choosing this color on her tactical flashlight because red did not carry as far in the dark.

She said, “Tu Van Duc. The leader of Con Ho Hoang Da.”

Vasily grabbed her by the arm roughly and pulled her back up to her feet. “Nobody gives a fuck. The target isn’t here. Let’s move.”

They took off again for the tree line, in pursuit of their target and the unknown subject who’d stolen Fan out from under them.

Court Gentry and Fan Jiang pushed out of the tree line, and by now Court’s jerry-rigged NODs were operational again. Through them he could see the large flooded rice paddy to the west of the villa, a levee that ran west along the south of the paddy, and another tree line on the northern edge of the paddy, two hundred yards away to his right. Instead of jumping into the water and continuing west, Court jerked Fan Jiang’s arm to the right and continued north at the edge of the trees, knowing that anyone who came after the two of them would be able to spot them in the waist-high water for the ten minutes or so it would take them to slosh through to the other side. If they continued north in these trees they wouldn’t get as far away from the villa as quickly as he would have liked, but at least they’d be able to move with some cover.

Fan Jiang had muttered some words in Mandarin, but more than anything he just seemed in shock and completely spent from the effort of the past few minutes.

Court finally spoke to him now, leaning into the smaller man’s ear to do so quietly. “You are Fan Jiang, a Chief Sergeant Class Three in the PLA, Unit 61398. Your hacker name is Funky Monkey. I know you speak English. Listen very carefully. You are in a lot of danger, but not from me. I’m going to take you somewhere safe. Nothing bad will happen to you as long as you do what I say.”

“But… who are you?”

“Well, I’m not the Chinese, and I’m not the Vietnamese.”

“You are American, obviously.”

“I’m the good guy. Let’s just leave it there, for now.”

“Where are you taking me?”

Court did not answer for a moment, because he didn’t have much of a plan. He wanted to get himself and his “package” out of danger so he could call Brewer. She’d have to take care of their escape after that.

Fan repeated himself. “Sir? Where are you taking me?”

Court yanked the kid along, and as he did so, he said, “Cambodia.”

“Cambodia is to the west. We are going north, aren’t we?”

Court did not slow his hard march. “Right now, kid, west is a bullet in the back. We’ll get there eventually; just do as I tell you.”

Fan stopped talking as ordered, but his heavy labored breathing told the American holding him by the arm that this kid wasn’t going to jog all the way into Cambodia.

Within a minute Fan confirmed this. “I can’t keep moving like this! I’m tired!”

“Sure you can. You have no idea all the amazing things you are going to do tonight!”

“Amazing things? What amazing things?”

Court thought he heard a helicopter in the distance now. He couldn’t see it, and by the faint thump of the rotors it was still a couple of minutes away, but he had no doubt it was heading in this direction.

“Like not getting shot,” Court said. He pulled the man harder now. “That would be amazing.”

Fan said nothing else as the two men struggled through the vines and bushes along the edge of the rice paddy. After reaching the northern tree line, they stayed deep within that cover, Court stopping occasionally so he could listen for the approaching helo.

When the Russians crossed through the first tree line they found themselves looking over a rice paddy that must have been half a square mile in size. Zoya scanned with her night vision, and then again with her thermal optic.

She said, “Nothing.”

Pyotr said, “They entered these trees three minutes before us. How the hell did they cross this paddy so fast?”

Zoya looked around, again through her NVGs. “Impossible. They are either under the water or they stayed in the tree line. The canal is south. Maybe they went north.”

Vasily said, “We aren’t hanging out here, Koshka.”

Zoya turned to him, but before she could speak the copilot of the Mi-8 came over the radio and announced he would be overhead in two minutes. Vasily ordered the helo to pick them up in a dry clearing at the edge of the paddy, and then Yevgeni flipped on an infrared beacon and threw it overhand to the middle of the landing zone.

While they waited on the helicopter, most of the team pulled security, keeping their guns and their attention back to the east in case they were being pursued by the Vietnamese. Fortunately for both parties, the PAVN officers who hadn’t been killed inside the villa in the opening moments of the raid had the good sense to load their men into their trucks and bug out to the south, vowing to return with a company-sized force at first light to collect the dead. This would also give them time to come up with a story. The commander of the Ninth Military Region in Can Tho was on the payroll of the Wild Tigers, and this was his sector, but everyone here knew that if Hanoi found out the truth of what happened here — that a dozen uniformed military working security for a criminal organization had been killed or wounded at the hands of some foreign force — the implications, both foreign and domestic, would be massive.

Court could hear the approaching helicopter now, but he couldn’t see it through the impossibly thick strip of jungle here north of the big rice paddy. It sounded like it was coming in for a landing somewhere just a hundred yards or so southeast of his position, and Court hoped like hell it would load up with those tier-one shooters and just fly away.

Fan had been compliant as they humped through the trees, and other than his heavy breathing and grunts of pain when he cracked his shins against roots or bumped his forehead on branches, he’d been relatively quiet. That all ended suddenly when he pulled to a halt and leaned over to put his hands on his knees. “This is impossible. Are we continuing in the jungle the entire way to Cambodia?”

“Negative. We’ll have to get into the flooded paddies that lie between here and there. Trust me, you’ll miss walking in the jungle about two minutes after you start sloshing through that shit.”

Fan said, “We can’t just walk through the rice paddies.”

“Sure we can. I did it once tonight already.”

“But… will there be swamp rats? I heard rats in the basement of the villa.”

“Not too many in the paddies. The snakes killed them all.”

“Snakes!” Fan said it so loud Court put the young man in a headlock.

“Shhhh,” he said, holding the man in a vise grip. “Listen, Fan. I’m here to protect you, and I promise I won’t let you get killed by a snake. But I can’t promise you a Russian sniper or a Vietnamese mortar round won’t kill you if you make too much noise.”

Still in the headlock, Fan’s head rotated up. “Russians?”

“Those guys at the villa that tried to grab you tonight were Russian. I’m positive.”

“I don’t understand. I thought that was you.”

“No. We both came for you at the same time. I got lucky, and I got to you first.”

“Are you going to tell me you saved my life?”

“Not really. Those other guys wanted you alive, too.”

“If those people wanted me alive, it would be bad if they wanted me dead.”

Court conceded the point with a nod, and the men started walking again.

Fan said, “But… you are a killer, like them. You shot Tu and Cao like they were nothing.”

Court said, “If they were nothing, I wouldn’t have shot them. They were a threat to my operation.”

“It is so simple to kill?”

Court regarded the question while pushing through a thick portion of vines. “I don’t kill people who aren’t asking for it. Those guys were drug smugglers, and they were hiding one of the most powerful computer hackers to ever work against the interests of the United States.”

Fan stopped walking again, and he looked up in the darkness. “Really? Who?”

Court just grabbed him by the arm and pulled him on. “You, asshole.”

“You captured me because you think I have hurt the U.S.?”

“It’s not a capture. It’s a rescue.”

“This doesn’t feel like a rescue.”

“You think the Wild Tigers were going to just say, ‘Thanks for the help, and thanks for getting half our guys killed. You can go now’? No, that’s not how criminal organizations work. They would have used you as long as you could be used, and then they would have killed you because you knew too much.”

“I had to work with them. The PLA is looking for me.”

“You’re damn right he is. Colonel Dai sent a dozen men into the building in Ho Chi Minh City this afternoon.”

“Dai? No… he is a lieutenant colonel. He is the deputy director of the security of Unit 61398. The colonel in charge is named—”

Court said, “Dai got a promotion, because the other guy was put in front of a firing squad after you ran.” Court didn’t know why he said that. It wasn’t going to help this kid’s morale to know he was getting people killed for his actions, although to Court it seemed perfectly obvious.

But clearly Fan was under no illusions about the trouble he’d started by running. “A lot of people are dead now. All because of me.”

“Yeah,” Court agreed. “And the night is still young.”

The crew of the Russian Mi-8 racing in from Cambodia wore night vision gear, so they flew their helo straight to the LZ without lights, and they touched down without shutting off their engines. All members of the task force — save for Sasha, of course — quickly boarded the helo.

Just as the pilot lifted off and turned the aircraft back to Cambodia, Zoya Zakharova put a cabin headset on, and she spoke into the microphone. She ordered the pilot to run racetrack patterns over the massive rice paddy and trees that rimmed it.

Vasily put on a headset of his own.

“Three minutes! You have three minutes to look for the target, and then we are out of here.”

The helo crossed back and forth once over the huge paddy, then flew lower, closer to the tree line on the north. Here it began slowly following along the length of the trees, just twenty meters above the ground, while Zoya, the pilot, and the machine gunner all used their night vision and thermal gear to try to find any hint of two men hiding there.