Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Three floors down, bedlam and panic erupted in the Black Pearl. Flames licked up the walls of the club, young men and women knocked into one another racing for the exits, and over a dozen Thai gangsters, some armed with pistols but many only with knives, were in desperate combat with a group of men who’d attacked simultaneously from both the front entrance and the kitchen.

When the Chamroon men began shooting, Major Xi called for five of his men waiting outside to come through the front door, not knowing if he was in combat with Russians or Thai. Xi and the three others who’d entered the kitchen to start the fire were still at the rear of the club, near the stage, and they shot across the open VIP section and through the door to the stairwell there. One of their number had been shot through the leg, but Xi and two others began racing up the back stairs, thinking it likely the Chamroon gangsters would try to ascend to get away from the gun battle.

A pair of Chamroon gangsters stood on the second-floor landing. These were just young men here at the Black Pearl to party tonight — not official security men guarding the top brass of the organization. Consequently, they were only armed with revolvers, and they just managed to graze one of the Chinese assassins on the side of his head before both Thai men fell dead, killed by Xi and his two associates.

After passing the fallen men, Xi felt confident he was heading in the right direction. He used his handheld walkie-talkie to order more of his men to find stairs or elevators and to get to the top of the building, and he called his man hiding out in the west-side alleyway, telling him to keep an eye on the fire escape there, because the raging fire at ground level was already filling the stairway with smoke, and this might force anyone upstairs to use the exterior to descend.

Court had made his way from the roof to an employee-only area on the fourth floor of the building, taking a different route down than the Russians who preceded him, obvious to Court because they had blowtorched a locked door that led to a main hallway.

Court continued through the employee-only area and into a large labyrinthine part of the spa, essentially an extended bathroom/locker room with moody orange lighting and a warren of showers, saunas, massage rooms, and storage areas for clothing and towels.

He made a careful turn towards the sound of cracking gunfire and found a changing area with marble tile floors and walls and teak benches. A door on the far side of this room had a sign on it that said Roman Baths, and Court could hear screams and gunfire on the other side.

The gunfire had slowed in the last few seconds, so Court advanced through the changing area towards the doorway to the action, hoping like hell he could find Nattapong in the middle of the mayhem and get him out of the line of fire.

Vasily reloaded the magazine of his small submachine gun and leaned out from the stone fountain he crouched behind to search for a target. Through his night vision equipment he saw a few civilians at the far end of the pool; from their colorful and sparkling party dresses he assumed they were the hookers Fantom had mentioned over the radio a few minutes earlier. Most of them appeared to be alive, but one girl was facedown on the marble next to the pool.

Vasily did not have eyes on his target, and this worried him, because there seemed to be only a couple of shooters still alive downrange, and they both had small micro pistols. If one of these men was Nattapong Chamroon, it was going to be tough to take him alive.

Vasily was furious with that lazy fucker Oleg Utkin. When the Zaslon team came through the main door they’d expected to encounter three bodyguards in total, but by Vasily’s count they’d already dropped six to eight men, and the gunfire continued. This should have been a quick door-kick-and-suppressed-fire snatch and grab, but it was quickly turning into the same shit they’d seen in Vietnam.

But while Vasily had lied and claimed Sirena screwed up in Vietnam so that he could cover his own ass, his anger at Fantom was real. No doubt the bastard had not even bothered to move from his table to see how many armed hostiles headed up to the spa, and now Vasily and his men were paying the price for it.

Still, they were getting the upper hand. Yevgeni was halfway down the length of the pool on the right with Ruslan just behind him, and Andrei and Pyotr had gotten nearly as far on the left-hand side. Soon they would have three angles on the remaining shooters, and the fight would be over.

Into his headset he repeated his order: “Watch your targets! Do not hit Chamroon.”

Just as he finished his transmission he fired a long burst at the wall over the head of the man hiding behind a column, intending to keep him immobile so his operators could conduct their pincer movement. Marble tile broke off the wall. He was about to press the trigger again when he heard a transmission from Mikhail, just fifteen feet behind him, charged with covering the double doors in case anyone else came up the stairs.

“Contact rear!” Mikhail shouted, and his suppressed weapon began thumping in fully automatic mode.

Before Vasily could even turn to look at the threat, he felt an impact in the rear plate of his body armor, and it knocked him face-first into the deep end of the swimming pool.

Major Xi and his men were outgunned by the Russians around the pool, but they had them at a tactical disadvantage. The three Chinese shooters fired their pistols over and over into the dimly lit room, targeting the dark figures closest to them first. The return fire came almost instantly, showing Xi, himself a former special forces operative for the PLA, that the Russian unit had set up a rear guard even while in sustained contact from the far end of the pool.

He was impressed with their discipline, and it spoke to their training and skill, but while the Russians now scrambling for cover from both sides were certainly interested in bringing this fight to a close, Xi had one more sense of urgency they did not have. The Chinese operative was well aware that the building he stood in was burning to the ground.

One of the two men with Xi dropped dead in the hallway, and the other stepped out of the line of fire to reload his weapon. Xi himself knew he was down to the last couple of rounds in his pistol’s magazine.

But just as his gun ran dry, four more Chinese operatives in black business suits came running up the hall from the elevators, and they took up the fight at the double doors. Xi stepped back and out of the way to reload quickly, while his men sent a wall of lead into the darkness.

As Court hugged the wall of the changing room, a new surge of fighting rocked the pool area next to him. He flipped off all the lights in the room, lowered to the ground, and crawled forward to the door to the pool. Keeping well to the side of the opening so he’d be out of the line of fire, Court pulled it open, and looked into the blue light of the pool area. He saw Nattapong cowering behind a column just a dozen feet from where Court lay. The twenty-eight-year-old held his right knee, and Court could see glistening blood on his hands. An Uzi machine pistol lay by his side, but Nattapong appeared uninterested in the weapon, so Court assumed its magazine was empty.

Just another dozen feet to Chamroon’s right, the girl with the long blond hair and the muscular arms had her back to a column and her eyes on Court, and a few feet to her right and closer to the pool, four other women were hunkered down behind a pedestal holding a statue of a lion.

Court then saw the last of the six women who’d come up the stairs with Chamroon fifteen minutes earlier. The young-looking girl with the short hair was facedown by the pool, her body lying still.

Also lying about were at least half a dozen dead Thai bodyguards, and a couple of guards who seemed to be alive but out of the fight with grave wounds.

Court could see numerous muzzle flashes along both sides of the pool, down past the deep end, and out the double doors on the opposite end of the room from his position, and along with the sound of gunfire, the cracks of bullets impacting the marble and stonework at this end of the pool told him he, his target, and all these girls were downrange from the battle.

Court assessed the entire scene quickly. From the nature of the fighting on the far side of the pool he determined that the Russians were fighting it out with another group there — not Chamroon’s bodyguards. He wondered if Dai’s men had entered the building despite his begging that they wait outside.

Court’s target for this evening, Nattapong Chamroon, was close by, injured, and unarmed, and he wasn’t going anywhere, and neither the Russians nor the other group in the fight could make it down to this end of the pool without dealing with one another first.

Nattapong was so close Court decided to risk going for him. He ripped off his suit coat, rose to a crouch, and then sprinted out the doorway into the hazy blue light, taking just a few steps before he purposefully went down on his hip and slid along the marble all the way to the column behind which Chamroon hid.

Bullet strikes on the wall behind him knocked more tiles to the floor.

The young man next to him on the floor writhed in pain, still holding his bloody knee, and he did not even notice the American until he was on top of him. Court spun the young man around, grabbed him by the ankle of his pants because he wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes, and then stayed low while he dragged him the dozen feet back to the doorway to the changing area, while more supersonic rounds cracked above his head.

Court made it back with his prisoner, went down on his chest, and spun around on the floor to look back out the doorway. Just then a side door to the left of the big pool room opened, and several men in flashy suits filled the doorway, pointing pistols in front of them as they tried to figure out what was going on.

Christ, Court thought. These guys appeared to be more of Chamroon’s men. Court raised his pistol to shoot at them, but he saw they had opened fire in the opposite direction. He decided the more guys who were fighting in other parts of the room, the easier it would be for him to get himself and Nattapong Chamroon back into the employee area behind the massage rooms, back to the hallway, and finally back to the employee-only stairwell in the rear of the building.

As he started to turn away to do just that, he again made eye contact with the blonde behind the column by the hot tub. She had taken off her high heels and risen to a crouch; it looked to Court as if she was about to try to make a run to the relative safety of the changing area.

Quickly he put a hand up, commanding her to stay where she was.

The gunfire was bad enough when Court made the dash to the column and back, but now the additional guns in the room meant even more rounds were pocking the walls. If any of the women tried to make a break for it, either to the doors to the left or the right of the pool, or back here to the changing room and the employee exit, Court felt certain they would be cut down from one side or the other.

Their best bet was to sit right where they were and wait out the battle.

Just as he motioned to the other women, imploring them to stay where they were, a long spray of automatic fire ripped hunks out of the pedestal on which the lion above them sat, sending marble chips all around the girls.

“Stay down!” he shouted.

And then he saw the smoke. From the air ducts here in the changing area, a few big puffs of black smoke belched into the room, and this told Court that there must be a sizable fire somewhere in the building.

Oh… fuck me.

The smoke began pouring in steady and thick, and Chamroon saw it now, too. He started to crawl away, but Court just rose and moved to him and put his foot in the back of the man’s wounded knee, sending him into convulsions of pain.

Court chanced another look out into the pool area, saw flashes of suppressed gunfire, flashes accompanied by the sound of small arms, and determined that there had to be more than a dozen men ducked down in a dozen different locations in the big room in the middle of a protracted gun battle.

To his surprise the blonde who had been hiding behind the column had now turned in the other direction, and she ran under fire to the lion on the pedestal. This put her with the other four girls, and farther away from the changing area, but there was another door on the far side of the pool. Court didn’t know if she was trying to get to that exit or if she just wanted to die with her friends. Either way, he thought her plan to be idiotic. Her friends were in much more danger than she had been, and there was no way in hell any of them were going to make it fifty feet to the side door, which was right at the epicenter of the fight.

All five women looked his way now, and he turned away. He had Chamroon. He had a brief window of opportunity where he could get to a back stairwell, down to the third floor, and out to the fire escape, then down to the street. He had his own car just two blocks away.

Success in this mission had seemed so improbable when he realized he was following the Russians to the target, just minutes earlier, but now mission success was all but assured.

But to succeed in his mission, he’d have to leave these five innocent and helpless women behind in the middle of a gun battle and at the center of an inferno.

Nope. He couldn’t do it.

Court lay down flat, then reached out past the doorway and grabbed a twelve-inch square of marble that had fallen from the wall. It was chipped on one corner but otherwise intact. More importantly, it was a half inch thick. He knew it would stop most rounds from a handgun or a submachine gun, and it sounded to him as if everyone around here was firing one or the other.

Quickly he untucked his shirt and his undershirt, slid the cold marble under both and against his skin, and tucked everything back in. The tile would serve as a bulletproof vest to protect his chest cavity, but it wasn’t much solace to him considering what he was about to do, and how many times he’d have to do it.

Court slid the Glock into his belt, knelt down, and ran for the lion.