Petrovich steadied the crosshairs, which had already been adjusted for the distance and a steady six knot breeze. The roof sentry touched his right hand to his ear for a few seconds, which was a tell that he had just received orders through an earpiece. It was a hard habit to break, even for a seasoned professional. The guard moved toward the far edge, and Petrovich was willing to bet he had just been ordered to keep a close eye on the areas behind the building. They already had three men watching the front.
He kept the red dot centered on the man's upper back and started his breathing drill. Slow, predictable breaths, allowing him to gauge the rifle scope's natural drift. He gently added pressure to the sensitive trigger, and the rifle bucked into his shoulder, the large suppressor barking a sharp hiss that was unlikely to attract any attention. The sentry lurched forward from the impact of the 175 grain hollow point projectile and disappeared over the edge.
He zeroed in on the second sentry and fired a hasty shot, knowing that the first round had passed over the remaining sentries, travelling at over 2100 feet per second, and the sound would be unmistakable. The second projectile struck the man center mass, and the wall behind the guard turned dark green in his scope. By the time he had quickly centered the crosshairs on one of the two guards near the SUVs, all three of the breach teams had reached the building undetected. Two of the teams ascended the stairs, and one climbed an affixed ladder on the far side and headed for the roof.
He fired two shots, quickly alternating between the guards on the ground, dropping each of them unceremoniously to the hard gravel. One of the SUV windows shattered, reminding Petrovich that the high velocity rounds seated in his rifle's magazine tended to exit humans at these ranges, unlike the smaller caliber hollow point projectiles fired from pistols. He checked the bodies for signs of movement. If one of them managed to operate their handheld radio, the breach team would have a big problem. He saw an arm move for one of the compact assault rifles lying in the gravel. Petrovich's rifle bucked, and the movement stopped. He quickly changed rifle magazines and aimed at one of the second-story windows, waiting for the lights to go out.
He didn't envy the teams tasked with entering the building. Everyone inside was heavily armed and anything could go wrong. He felt lucky to be lying on top of a quadruple stacked shipping container, nearly three stories up, well removed from the danger below. Things had worked out decently enough for Jess and him in Argentina, and he had no intention of taking a bullet to help Sanderson pay off a debt to one of his crony supporters.
Five minutes later, over six hundred miles away near the Chilean border, General Sanderson's satellite phone rang. He answered the call and listened for a few seconds.
"That's great news, Rich. See you back at the ranch." He leaned back in one of the leather chairs situated around the lodge's stone fireplace and relished in the team's success, the program's success…his success. He had sent twelve operatives into Buenos Aires to execute a high risk raid on behalf of Ernesto Galenden, their "unofficial" sponsor in Argentina, and it had gone off without a hitch. This was fantastic news, given that Sanderson had decided against fully stacking the team with their most experienced operators. With a number of them just over a year into their formal training, the newer recruits needed opportunities like these to hone their skills and instincts.
The final body count at the container yard had been eighteen. He suspected that the message would be received clearly by the remaining Chechen mafia heads, and if not, Sanderson would gladly send them another. He wanted to keep Galenden happy. The headquarters compound and surrounding training areas turned out to be ideal, and he needed at least another eighteen months in Argentina before he could start pushing the newest batch of operatives into their assigned areas of operation (AO). Presently, he could deploy most of the operatives into their AO's for short assignments, but they lacked the fine tuning necessary to ensure their longer term survival. Fine tuning that came with consistent practice and patience.
So far, the program's progress had exceeded most expectations, despite the challenges involved in getting the Middle East program off the ground. Viable recruits for this group had proven difficult to find and screen, especially candidates with prior military or law enforcement experience and most importantly, fluency in either Farsi or Arabic. Sanderson had overstated the program's Middle East capabilities when he struck a sudden truce with Karl Berg and the CIA two years ago. He knew that Berg had seen a healthy portion of the original Black Flag files and would believe that Sanderson had re-engineered a new program to face America's biggest perceived threat: radical Islam.
The fact that Berg had gone "off the books" to hire a covert assassination team had led Sanderson to believe that Berg was a player. He was an expert at reading people, and Berg struck him as the kind of career CIA officer who normally worked within the system, but who had enough salt to cross the line if the potential payoff was big enough. Sanderson had been correct in all of his assumptions, and once Berg accepted the deal over the phone, there was no turning back.
In less than two years, Sanderson planned to have the entire program fully capable of conducting sustained operations throughout the world, right on the doorstep of every pressing threat to U.S. national security. At that point, it would only be a matter of time before they stumbled onto something big enough to give him the leverage needed to pull his program back into the fold as a legitimate and necessary extension of the United States.
For now, he had the generosity of several wealthy and extremely influential powerbrokers who professed the same commitment to worldwide stability as Sanderson, but their support came with a price. The occasional "favor" had turned into a monthly distraction, which provided his operatives with real world experience, but also underscored the fact that he was no longer ultimately calling the shots. Sanderson's practical side had long ago come to terms with this arrangement, but for a man who had "run the show" for decades, it gnawed at him. The sooner he could break free from these shackles the better.
General Sanderson stood up and pushed the remaining glowing ashes around in the fireplace. The fire had long ago died, but the embers had kept him warm enough while he waited for word from the team. He turned off the light, relying on instinct to get him to the front door of the headquarters lodge, and opened the wooden door to step outside into the frigid winter night. A thin layer of snow covered the ground, illuminated by the first quarter moon that beamed through the valley at a low angle above the Andean foothills. The valley was deathly silent, except for the sound of water trickling past larger rocks in the exposed riverbed ahead of the lodge.
He stepped onto a worn path to his right and cleared the lodge, crunching the freshly fallen snow under his boots. He glanced around, confirming that all of the compound’s lights were out, except for the one he had expected to see shining through the thick trees of the forest. His last duty of the night would be to let Jessica Petrovich know that Daniel was fine.
The Petroviches remained somewhat of an enigma to Sanderson. He had never met two people more tightly connected than Daniel and Jessica. He had limited information regarding their relationship in Serbia, but he was convinced that something had happened in Belgrade to seal these two together forever, aside from their audacious plan to steal over a hundred million dollars from Srecko Hadzic. He wasn't overly concerned about their secret, but it kept him from fully trusting them.
He could already sense that Jessica was losing her interest in the program. Much to his surprise and pleasure, she had embraced her duties as an instructor with a raw eagerness that painfully contrasted Daniel's less than enthusiastic arrival at the compound. Gradually, they had reversed roles, and now he found Daniel deeply immersed in the program while Jessica was drifting, which wasn't the only thing that worried Sanderson. Lately, she struck him as less emotionally stable than when she first arrived. If he couldn't control — or at least predict — her behavior, she could quickly become a major liability. It was something for him to consider, and watch with a keen eye.