OUTCAST Ops: Red Ice

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

By the time they reached the fifth floor, the trio of OUTCASTs couldn’t see anything due to of the smoke. They slowed to a crawl, staying low as they moved up the stairs to the landing between the fifth and sixth floors. Without the masks, the smoke would have burned their lungs, as some of the chemicals that made up the smoke — Zinc chloride and chlorosulfuric acid — were toxic to humans.

With visibility reduced to only a couple of feet, they listened hard for the enemy as they moved forward, keeping the wall on their right as the team advanced.

When Tanner felt the corner where the two walls met, he heard shuffling, coughing and gasping. He aimed the MP5 in the direction of the noise and opened fire, moving the German-made weapon back and forth to widen the bullet sweep. Liam followed with a shorter volley of his own, as did Naomi. They heard a grunt and at least two people crashing down the stairs.

Tanner slid his feet across the landing floor until he felt a body with his feet. He pointed the MP5 down and knelt. The body was Asian, and from the bloody chest and unblinking eyes, he was dead. A MAC-10 was clutched in his dead hands. Still, Tanner pulled the weapon from the slack fingers, tossed it across the landing, and pressed his fingers to the man’s neck. There was no pulse. He stood and pressed forward again. “One down,” he said softly.

He saw another pair of legs and went to the head, kicking away a Skorpion machine pistol as he did so. He checked for the second Asian’s pulse. “Two down.”

Stepping past the body and starting up the stairs, the smoke was beginning to thin out, but was still a hazard. He heard coughing ahead of him. Near the rail and the top of the stairs, he took two more steps up and the smoke thinned just as a red-eyed man leapt at him from the landing above.

The knife-wielding fanatic took a step forward, but a hand gripped his other leg by the ankle and yanked. Danielle’s hand grabbed her pistol and pulled it clear of the holster. She saw Halverstaff, face twisted up in pain, but with an expression of determination, pull hard on the North Korean’s leg with his good hand. The commando hissed something and stomped down on Halverstaff’s wrist with his free leg; there was a sickening crunch as the wrist shattered under the blow.

But it gave Danielle the precious seconds she needed. She brought the pistol up and fired twice. Both .45 slugs slammed into the man’s chest with audible thuds. The man staggered and blood spread across his shirt. Still, he didn’t go down.

She adjusted her aim upward and fired twice more. This time, both rounds slammed into the attacker’s face, one in the mouth, the second right above the nose, both exploding out the back of his head. The nearly headless man collapsed instantly, knife still tightly gripped in his fist.

Danielle heard scraping from the landing above her and saw movement from the two men she had wounded in the legs. She turned and bolted up the stairs, taking them three at a time. She reached the landing just as one of the opponents, leaving a blood trail from his crawl, grabbed the MAC-10. Before he could swing the blocky submachine gun, Danielle fired twice, both slugs erasing most of the man’s face and dropping him hard. She swung her pistol toward the second foe, but from the way the man’s head was twisted, he was already dead from a broken neck.

She looked up, seeking another target, but there was nothing. She heard gunfire from below and launched herself down the stairs, her hand reaching for a fresh magazine for her pistol.

Seonwoo emptied a full magazine up the stairs, grinning with vicious pleasure as his target, the pesky woman, scrambled to safety. When the Uzi ran dry, he reached for a fresh magazine, only to find he hadn’t any left for the Israeli-made submachine gun. He dropped the now useless weapon, pulled out his Baek Du San and started up the stairs.

He reached the landing and kicked a strange-looking weapon into the corner. The woman, a short-haired redhead, was crawling up the stairs to the next landing. He stayed close to the railing and raised his pistol, but before he could fire, someone yelled, “Hey, asshole!”

The shout came from the stairs to Seonwoo’s right. He spun as three bullets struck him in the torso. His knees buckled, but he stayed up, eyes blazing with rage when he saw the shooter was John Casey, his target. He muttered a curse and raised his pistol, only to die when DuPree fired her own SIG Sauer P229 three times, each round finding its target in Seonwoo’s neck and head. The North Korean captain fell over the rail and dropped into the wispy smoke. He was dead before he hit the bottom of the stairwell.

If Tanner had been standing with both feet on the same stair, the charge would have knocked him down the stairs and possibly killed or crippled the OUTCAST leader.

Instead, his left foot was two steps higher than his right, giving Tanner a strong base with which to put his weight forward. So when the North Korean commando slammed into him, it was the commando who was off-balance. A knife appeared in the soldier’s hand and he slashed at Tanner, the blade bright in the still-smoky stairwell.

Tanner smashed the MP5’s barrel into the knifeman’s forearm, then fired off a burst into the man’s chest. The assailant writhed in pain, but managed to grab the MP5’s barrel with his free hand while thrusting at Tanner with the knife.

Two shots distorted the man’s face before exploding out the back of his head. The attacker dropped to the stairs like a puppet with cut strings. Tanner turned to see Liam reholster his pistol. He nodded to him and then moved up the stairs to the next landing, just as a shadowy figure fell past them beyond the rail and disappeared into the swirling smoke.

“Prime to Six! Who just fell down the stairs?”

“A Tango, Prime. We have one critically injured team member up here — Casey’s aide — and the Secret Service agent with us has a wounded hand.”

From somewhere below, doors opened and the clamoring of boots echoed up the stairwell. Tanner looked down and saw that the smoke had dissipated enough to see armed police officers racing up the stairs, as well as a body sprawled at the bottom of the stairwell.

“Police are here,” Tanner radioed.

“Casey says to get up here. He says it’s easier to explain to the police if we’re all together.”