Quantum

61

A few days ago, I was in the arms of a beautiful woman in Moscow, Dima thought as he spat on the ground near the cabin. Now, I’m in a godforsaken swamp.

Late Saturday night, he and another ex-soldier named Ilya had been flown halfway around the world to Canada, then driven across the Blue Water Bridge into Michigan. Now he was on patrol in a swamp while recovering from the combined effects of jet lag and a hangover.

Dima swatted another of the interminable parade of mosquitoes that had tormented him throughout the past day. As he rubbed the spot on his neck where the ferocious insect had bitten him, he noticed a flash of light from across the open marsh. He studied the small hill where he’d seen the bright flare of reflected sunlight, then there was another flash.

Dima crouched low alongside the levee. He’d seen light flares like that in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and they’d always been man-made.

‘Josef,’ he called into his lip mike.

‘Da,’ the Georgian answered.

‘It’s Dima. I saw a reflection flash on a nearby hillock, northwest of camp. Request permission to investigate.’

‘Granted. Hold position until I get someone out to replace you on patrol.’

Josef knew that the reflection Dima had seen was probably nothing, but to ignore even the most mundane observation on a mission like this invited disaster.

‘Ilya, take Dima’s post on patrol.’

Ilya got up from the ancient couch, slung a submachine gun over his shoulder, and walked out the cabin’s front door. When he neared the northwestern corner, Dima threw a short wave at him and crawled over the levee.

‘Hey, Gorski,’ Ahsan said quietly, ‘I think someone might have spotted that scope of yours.’

From beneath the lightweight camouflage tarp that concealed his prone body, Gorski pulled his face away from the telescopic sight on his sniper rifle and surveyed the area in front of him. As a two-man unit, he and Ahsan were collectively known as God because they could strike down like a bolt of lightning out of the sky.

‘I see him, about ten o’clock,’ Gorski replied, the long barrel of his custom-built .50-caliber rifle defining twelve o’clock relative to their position on the knoll.

‘Yep, he called out a replacement, then moved into that patch of woods. I’ll keep an eye on him; just wanted to give you a heads-up.’

‘I appreciate that,’ Gorski replied to his protector.

From the knoll, Gorski lined up a shot through the front window of the room where the two hostages were being kept. He rechecked the settings on his scope, making certain he had the distance and wind adjustments dialed in to his satisfaction.

Gorski’s earpiece crackled. ‘Angel to God, we’re moving.’

‘I read you, Angel,’ Gorski replied.

Gorski pulled back on the set trigger until it clicked into place. This step expended most of the energy required to fire the weapon, thus removing the slight tug induced by a cold trigger pull. At this distance, even the smallest shudder of Gorski’s rifle could easily throw a shot wide of the mark. If need be, death was now just a few ounces of pressure on the hair trigger away.

Using hand gestures, Edwards put Angel into action. The squad broke up into two fire teams — the first composed of Edwards, Rodriguez, Hepburn, and Gilgallon, and the second made up of Gates, Detmer, and Darvas.

As Edwards’s team clambered over the earthen levee and began moving toward the cabin, Gates took aim on the Tango patrolling near his team’s position. Two shots flashed in rapid succession from Gates’s venerable, government-issued 1911 Colt .45; a double tap of 230-grain ball ammo drilled a hole the size of a half-dollar in the Tango’s forehead. The man’s head snapped backward from the impact; the rest of his body followed, and he landed with a muffled thump on the ground.

A burst of automatic-weapons fire shattered the glass of a window in one of the cabin’s back rooms. Detmer answered with a fusillade from his .50-caliber machine gun that splintered the aging clapboard siding and removed both sashes of the double-hung window.

Protected by Detmer’s punishing cover fire, Edwards’s team reached the cabin’s back door. Rodriguez kicked it in with such force that the lockset ripped free of the wooden stile.

Edwards tossed a flash-bang grenade through the cabin door. The SEALs shielded their eyes as the grenade exploded inside with a nonlethal combination of a blinding flash of light and a sonic assault that knocked most victims senseless. The SEALs then poured into the smoke-filled cabin, each man training both his attention and the barrel of his weapon on a pie-shaped wedge of space that expanded in front of him. The overlapping wedges were each man’s field of fire, and each was responsible for what happened in his lethal zone.

The main room was clear. Edwards motioned for Gilgallon and Hepburn to check the rooms on one side while he and Rodriguez cleared the room on the other.

Josef had just zipped up his pants after relieving himself when he heard Misha firing from the rear bedroom and the back door crashing open.

‘Fuck!’ Josef cursed, realizing that they were under attack.

He pulled the 9-mm pistol out of his shoulder holster and began counting slowly, waiting for the inevitable explosion of a concussion grenade — a device he had used many times to immobilize people he’d been sent to capture rather than kill. Three slow seconds passed, then the wood-frame cabin shuddered from the grenade’s sonic assault.

The noise was still echoing off the plaster walls when Josef bolted from the bathroom, across the short hall, and into the far bedroom, where the hostages were being kept. Both women were still tied to their chairs, frightened but apparently unaffected by the deafening blast. Josef swept the room, looking for any armed targets; it was clear. Then, without hesitation, he raised his pistol and took aim at Elli.

Gorski saw the bedroom door fly open as a swarthy black-haired Tango entered the room where the Halos were being kept. With his pistol held chest high in a two-handed grip, the man swept the room from left to right. Then he turned his pistol toward the Halos. Gorski gently squeezed the hair trigger. With a satisfying crack, the .50-caliber round erupted from the barrel in a blast of expanding superheated gas.

Most of what had been Josef’s head splattered against the long wall of the room in thousands of tiny bits of bone fragments and gore. The pistol, which he had aimed directly at Elli’s face at point-blank range, jerked upward as Gorski’s round slammed home.

The bullet intended to end Elli’s life lightly grazed the top of her head, scorching a narrow groove in the thin layer of skin on her skull. Elli fell back when Josef’s pistol fired; the chair she was lashed to tipped against the twin bed. Josef’s nearly headless body collapsed sideways as if flung toward the doorway by an unseen hand.

‘Elli!’ Kelsey screamed as the elderly woman slumped in the inclined chair. Blood seeped out of her wound, drenching her gray-white hair with a bright crimson sheen.

Rodriguez caught a blur of motion in the hallway; someone had run from a room on one side of the hall to the room on the opposite side, where the hostages were. He held up his hand to let Edwards know that he’d seen at least one Tango. With Rodriguez providing cover, Edwards moved down the hall, positioning himself to cover Rodriguez as the point man leapfrogged past him toward the bedroom door.

Edwards heard a thundering crack inside the room, then a bloody spray exploded out of the open doorway.

‘God, was that you?’ Edwards asked into his lip mike.

‘Roger, Angel. Tango with Halos is down,’ Gorski responded as he slid back the bolt and chambered another round.

The Tango who’d taken over perimeter patrol from his comrade was now running back to the cabin. Gorski lined up the crosshairs on the back of the man’s head and fired. The view through the scope briefly went out of focus as a cloud of hot gas from the barrel floated across Gorski’s line of sight. In the distance, he saw the Tango crumple to the ground, dead.

‘Tango in front of cabin is down,’ Gorski announced with the emotional detachment of a surgeon excising a tumor.

Rodriguez and Edwards filled the bedroom doorway, each quickly surveying the room. Edwards sidestepped with his back to the wall, moving toward the corner of the room, where he’d have a clear view of the concealed side of the bed.

‘Clear,’ Edwards shouted from the corner.

Rodriguez holstered his weapon, stepped over the dead Tango, and moved to Elli. He placed two fingers on the side of her neck.

‘She’s alive,’ he told the other man.

‘One Tango down. One Halo wounded,’ Edwards announced.

‘One Tango down back here. All clear,’ Hepburn called back. ‘Corpsman is on the way.’

Rodriguez was cutting Elli’s bonds when Gilgallon entered the room. The two SEALs carefully lifted Elli off the chair and laid her unconscious form on the twin bed. Using his k-bar knife, Edwards freed Kelsey.

Gilgallon checked Elli’s eyes; both were responsive to light. He then inspected the bloody wound near the crown of her head.

‘Will she be all right?’ Kelsey asked.

‘The wound’s superficial; it should heal up with minimal scarring. Looks worse than it really is.’

The corpsman then cracked open a small packet of smelling salts and held it under Elli’s nose — her eyes immediately sprang open.

‘Vat? I?’ Elli said, startled, grasping for words.

‘Easy, ma’am,’ Gilgallon said calmly. ‘You’ve got a nasty scratch, but you’re going to be fine. Just relax and let me patch you up.’

‘Four Tangos down,’ Edwards reported. ‘Anyone got a line on number five?’

Dima was slowly working his way through the ankle-deep mire of the wetlands when he heard the sounds of gunfire from both the cabin and the knoll. An explosion shattered several windows in the cabin’s central room, followed by a cloud of thick, white smoke. Then he watched as Ilya’s dash to the cabin ended when a single round fired by a very skilled sniper obliterated the man’s sskull.

‘Yop t’voi yo mat,’ Dima muttered, the all-purpose Russian profanity fitting both his mood and the situation.

As he watched the cabin, three men dressed head to toe in black scaled the levee and quickly cleared the front of the cabin for targets. Dima’s remaining comrades appeared unable to offer any effective resistance to the assault team.

Dima crouched down into the swampy water.

If I can just keep out of sight, he thought, maybe I’ll get out of here alive.

With his peripheral vision, he caught some movement to his right. He turned in time to see a lightly built man rise out of the water, leveling an HK MP5 assault rifle.

He turned, but before he could bring his weapon around, Ahsan perforated his chest with a pair of two-round bursts. Dima continued to rotate on his right foot, spiraling down into the water.

‘Tango five is down,’ Ahsan reported as he watched the man drop facedown into the shallow water.

Inside the cabin, Gates holstered his pistol and walked back to the bedroom where Kelsey and Elli had spent the past few days in captivity.

‘Max?’ Kelsey said when she saw him in the doorway. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘U.S. Navy SEALs at your service, ma’am,’ Gates replied. ‘Compliments of Rear Admiral Jack Dawson.’

‘Is Nolan with you?’

‘No, but not because he didn’t want to be. All the guys here, except Lieutenant Edwards over there, served with Nolan. We promised him we’d get you and Miss Vital back safe and sound. You okay?’

‘Other than a little rope burn around my wrists and ankles, I’m fine.’

‘How’s your friend?’

‘Your medic says Elli will be fine, just a superficial wound on her head.’

‘Chief,’ Edwards called out, ‘we got all five.’

‘Hoo-yah!’ Gates replied.

‘Hepburn, give Heaven our sit rep,’ Edwards ordered.

On the bridge of the Sharon S, Dawson took the news with a mixture of pride and relief.

‘Bravo Zulu, Angel. Heaven out,’ Dawson said, acknowledging the squad’s situation report.

‘What’s the word, Admiral?’ Martin asked anxiously.

‘The news for the most part is good. Kelsey’s fine, and Elli suffered only minor injuries. The corpsman is patching her up right now, and we’ll get a doctor to look her over ASAP. Our men took out all the Tangos and came through without a scratch.’

‘Do you want me to move us in closer to shore now?’ Harsen Smith asked.

‘That would be fine, sir,’ Dawson answered.

Dawson then picked up his satellite phone and dialed Grin’s direct line at MARC. Grin picked up before the first ring faded.

‘Grin here.’

‘Grin, it’s Dawson. We freed the hostages. Pass the word.’

‘Gladly, Admiral.’

‘Mosley, they freed the hostages!’ Grin shouted as he cradled the receiver. ‘Kelsey and Elli are fine.’

‘Great! I’ll contact the Russians,’ Mosley said. ‘Let Nolan know.’

‘I’m already typing.’