Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Vasily moved down a dark and smoke-filled hallway, his team around him. With one hand he held a pistol out in front of him, and with the other he held his walkie-talkie to his mouth. He spoke between coughs. “Anna One for Fantom, how copy?”

Oleg Utkin was standing in front of the Black Pearl in a crowd two hundred strong watching the activity as fire trucks pulled into position and men and women covered with soot continued staggering out the door.

“Loud and clear, Anna One. What is your status?”

“We’re fucked, Fantom! I’ve got one dead, one injured that we are carrying, and two walking wounded. We need to make a hasty exfil down the fire escape, but we can’t see down to ground level from our position. Get to the west side of the building and make sure the alleyway is clear of hostiles!”

“Roger that,” Utkin said, then he crossed the street to the west and peered down the dark alley. In the distance, out of the lights of the intersection, a few attractive young women staggered arm in arm out of the alleyway. He thought they might have been the hookers he saw with Chamroon earlier. Behind them the fire escape was clear, and he saw no one else in the alley.

“Anna One… confirm you are clear to the west.”

Utkin couldn’t be certain, but he wasn’t going any deeper in that alleyway to check it out. No, he’d been here waiting for a report from Zaslon, and now that he had it, so he knew he needed to get clear of the area before the cops started pulling people out of the crowd to ask what they saw. There was an emergency rally point for the Russian task force just two blocks away, and he’d go there.

Vasily came back over the radio. “How the hell could you have checked the alley that fast?”

Fantom snapped back at the macho asshole on the radio. “I said it’s clear. I’ll meet you at rally point Boris. I’ll get the van ready to roll. Out.”

The Chinese asset kneeling between the garbage cans in the alley on the west side of the building had been watching the fire escape for the past fifteen minutes, but other than a group of four half-naked soot-covered women in bare feet, no one had come down. He found this surprising because smoke poured out of the windows of the building, and he’d heard the transmissions from the men fighting on the top floor. There, a wounded but still-in-command Major Xi had announced that the Russians had egressed out of the battle, but the man between the garbage cans had not seen a trace of them.

Suddenly he heard the noise of squeaking metal, several stories above him. Seconds later, he detected movement up there in the darkness. One big dark form, moving very slowly down. It wasn’t until they passed the third-floor landing and started down to the second that he was able to see individual shapes in the mass. Still, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking at.

Finally he realized the men above him were big and Western-looking, he could see weapons among them, and they were carrying one of their number by his shoulders and legs.

The man squatting in the alley pressed the button on his radio.

“This is Yisheng, west side. I have six gweilo descending the fire escape. One is injured.”

The call came quickly. “Yisheng, this is Major Xi. Engage them. You will have to do it alone; we are escaping through the nightclub and still engaging the Thais.”

Yisheng was a Ministry of Defense operative and a former PLA special forces sergeant, and this, plus the fact he had a tactical advantage over the men descending the fire escape, made him confident in taking on the superior number.

But it didn’t matter if he was confident or not. Major Xi worked for Colonel Dai, which meant failure to comply with Xi’s order would mean certain death.

Yisheng sighted his fully automatic weapon on the head of the first man in the line, tracked it for an instant, and wondered if he was about to press a trigger for the last time in his life.

Yisheng opened fire.

Pyotr carried Yevgeni by the legs and was just looking back to make the turn at the landing that would take him to the ladder. The plan was to lower the injured man on Ruslan’s back, which would probably mean both would fall several feet into the alley.

But it was a hell of a lot better than staying in the burning building.

Just as Pyotr turned back and adjusted his grip on Yevgeni’s ankles, his head snapped to the side and he tumbled the half flight down, crashing onto the wounded man and pulling Ruslan over with him.

An automatic weapon boomed in the alleyway. Arseny took rounds to both legs, then fell off the side of the stairs, down two flights, landing on his shoulder, snapping his neck instantly.

Vasily saw the origin of fire below, down between the garbage cans, and he turned his B&T submachine gun to engage it, but before he could press his trigger he felt a hammer blow to his right hip. A second strike to his right thigh sent him tumbling forward on the staircase, tumbling over the top of Yevgeni and barreling down through Ruslan, who was just trying to get his gun up to fire after falling down where Pyotr had crashed into him.

In seconds the five Russian operatives fell into one massive heap on the first-floor landing. Every last one of them was dead or injured, but those with any life in them at all struggled frantically to get their weapons pointed at the source of the gunfire.

Oleg Utkin heard the shooting from the alley he’d just left. A single weapon firing automatically and unsuppressed indicated to his trained ear that his team had just been ambushed.

“Der’mo,” he mumbled to himself, then he picked up the pace. He’d get to the RP and he’d wait for the men, and if they didn’t show up he’d drive out of here, keep on driving till daylight, and get himself over the border.

This shit wasn’t his doing. He’d been ordered into a fucked-up operation in progress, so he wasn’t going to take the blame when it fell apart around him.

Court Gentry followed the blood trail of Nattapong Chamroon all the way from the changing area on the fourth floor down to the second floor. This would have been tough enough in any conditions, considering he was looking for individual drops of blood sometimes separated by ten or more feet. But compounding the difficulty was the fact that he had to keep a head up for hostiles, and the rooms and halls were roiling with noxious gray smoke.

In a hall on the second floor, which served as offices and storage for the nightclub below, he found the body of a gunman who appeared to Court to be Chinese. Rolling him over quickly, Court saw that the man had a pair of bullet holes center mass in his chest. Court also found the holster for a revolver under his jacket, but there was no sign of the weapon itself. In the man’s pocket Court found a speed-loader with five .38 Special cartridges.

Court assumed the woman who’d just stolen his Glock had also picked herself up a backup gun.

Court searched the body a moment more, passing on the man’s phone and wallet, but when his hands grasped hold of a black Montblanc pen, he pulled it out and looked it over quickly.

Yes, it was the same kind of scopolamine hydrobromide blowgun that the Chinese operatives had tried to use on him back in Hong Kong. He hadn’t taken one before when he had the chance, but now he slipped the device into his pocket, thinking it was possible it could come in handy as he tried to track down Fan Jiang.

Court continued following a blood trail, and it led him to the body of Nattapong Chamroon in a room full of tables and chairs. By turning on the overhead light in the smoky room he could see that the twenty-eight-year-old had been shot right between the eyes.

The American knew instantly the blonde had been after information from the man, and it seemed clear enough that she got what she needed.

And with this, Court knew what he had to do now. He had to find the blonde, because he was certain she’d been looking for Fan, and she now knew more than he did.

Court went back out into the hallway and started for the main stairs, but in seconds he was met by a group of firemen coming in his direction. One of the firemen placed a gas mask on Court’s face, and he sucked in the air greedily. While the other firefighters continued on through the second floor, Court and his rescuer moved down the hallway to a window on the eastern side of the building, where Court saw a red ladder truck. He crawled down the ladder, leaving the firefighter behind in the building.

Once Court was on the ground, a Thai police officer rushed up to him and frisked him perfunctorily. He felt the pen in his pocket but ignored it, and in seconds Court was being patted on the back by a sympathetic cop and directed to an ambulance that had just set up on the corner.

Court thanked the policeman and walked towards the ambulance, but when the cop turned away Court bypassed the vehicle.

Three minutes later he was climbing into his rented Toyota four-door up the street, wiping sweat and soot off his face, and drinking a bottle of water to clear his throat. He gave himself only forty-five seconds to rest, then he fired up the engine and headed back towards the Black Pearl.

Zoya Zakharova had made it all the way down into the nightclub carrying two pistols in her hands, but when she saw a purse left unattended on the floor by someone who’d raced out of the building, she scooped it up to hide her weapons. She then joined up with a group of civilian stragglers. Most had been hiding in a women’s restroom, and a few had taken cover behind one of the bars on the mezzanine. But firefighters and police had arrived, and Zoya blended in with the mixed crowd of both Thai and foreign clubbers, and the police cordoning off the building outside didn’t even glance at the blonde in the skimpy teal dress as she began walking barefoot down the street and away from the action.

She had no intention of leaving the scene, however. She knew from her intuition and experience that Vasily’s team would take the fire escape down to ground level if they felt they could do it covertly, or else they would try to use grappling hooks to cross the alleyway to the nearby roof. As soon as she noticed that the buildings on both sides were higher than the one that held the Black Pearl and therefore their roofs would be harder to reach, she felt sure they’d risk the fire escape.

She turned into the alleyway on the west side and found it dark and empty-looking, and she saw the metal stairs attached to the building some forty meters ahead. Smoke poured out of the windows on several floors, obstructing her view. As she looked on, a window exploded out on the second floor, showering part of the alley with broken glass.

She moved closer, waiting for a break in the smoke, and wondered if perhaps Vasily and his team were still caught inside.

Then she saw it; on the second-floor landing, she noticed a massive form lying there. Even from forty meters away she could tell she was looking at a pile of bodies.

Zoya slipped around a tape line erected by the fire department and sprinted barefoot into the alley.

By the time she made it around the broken glass and to the fire escape, she could see that three of the men from the Zaslon team were lying on the asphalt below the ladder, and three more were piled in a heap above her. Nearby, a Chinese man in a business suit lay against the wall of the building opposite the Black Pearl, between two garbage cans. He appeared dead, and an HK rifle lay by his side.

Zoya looked back over her shoulder quickly, making sure no one on the street behind her had entered the alley. When she saw the coast was clear, she lifted a suppressed Brügger and Thomet subgun from Arseny’s still form and shot the Chinese body twice in the head at a range of fifteen feet.

Dropping the weapon, she knelt over Arseny. The Russian operator was dead with gunshot wounds and a broken neck. She moved quickly to Ruslan and found him alive but unconscious. She saw that he had been shot on the right side of his pelvis, and his left arm was badly broken. Zoya wondered if he had fallen or dropped intentionally from the landing above.

Vasily was the third man lying in the alley. His legs and lower torso had been shot several times, and he was conscious, but barely.

As she leaned over him, he looked at her with confusion.

“Koshka?”

She pulled the medical kit from Ruslan’s tactical vest under his jacket and yanked out a tourniquet. With it she began cinching Vasily’s right leg, and while she worked she asked, “The others?”

Vasily looked up at the fire escape landing above him. He shook his head.

“You are certain they are all dead?”

He nodded now. Then he said, “What are you doing here?”

Zoya did not answer. She wrapped the tourniquet around his upper leg, tightened it just below his crotch, and then yanked as hard as she could to completely cut off the blood flow. Vasily yelled out while she tied it off, but she covered his mouth with a free hand.

When he recovered, the Zaslon commander said, “Fantom. Where’s Fantom?”

Zoya knew another officer from the SVR would have replaced her, but she was surprised to hear Vasily use the code name of Oleg Utkin. Utkin was known as a competent officer, but she’d personally never thought much of him as a leader. He was the guy SVR sent in to wine and dine foreign turncoats, not to run a task force of Zaslon snake eaters. She assumed he must have just been the closest, most senior operative at the time Zoya was relieved of command, so Moscow had sent him here to pick up the operation where she left it.

Fucking fools, she thought. Fan Jiang was too important a mission to hand over to Oleg Utkin.

She grabbed Vasily’s walkie-talkie off his belt and depressed the talk key. “Fantom, this is Sirena. How do you copy?”

She put down the radio and kept working on Vasily, then checked on Ruslan again. Finally Utkin replied through the little speaker. “What are you doing on this net?”

Zoya picked up the radio again. “I’m on Anna One’s radio. Where the fuck are you?”

“I’m at the RP.”

“You have a vehicle?”

“Of course we have vehicles. We have two here. The Anna team has a minibus, and I have a two-door Audi.”

Zoya replied coldly, “Well, you’ll only need the car. There are two survivors. Get to the alleyway west of the Black Pearl, now. Hurry!”