Gary Sheffield low-crawled down the blood-slicked hardwood floor toward the front door, urging his body forward against every survival instinct his brain had activated within the past five minutes. Another burst of machine-gun fire swept through the front of the house, spraying him with wooden splinters and bits of drywall. The sound of gunfire seemed closer than before. A second distant explosion had shaken the house less than a minute ago, yielding a temporary lull in machine-gun fire. The team had advanced to a new position inside of the fence line.
He stopped for a moment and leaned to the right, peering through the open front door, still unable to spot the shooters. He had no intention of taking a second look. The headless body lying several feet ahead of him served as a grim reminder that the ceaseless machine-gun fire wasn’t the only threat out there. Anyone who exposed a body part for too long or appeared in the same place twice inevitably attracted a .50 caliber projectile. Three members of his team had been gruesomely killed this way.
Satisfied that he wasn’t in their line of sight, Sheffield squirmed through the doorway on the left and surveyed the communications room. Greg Marshall’s bullet-riddled body sat slumped in a chair at the sensor station. He had been killed in the first full machine-gun sweep, along with Sheffield’s assistant. Both of them had been desperately trying to raise CIA headquarters to report the attack, but had not received a response. He suspected that the first few thunderous rifle reports had been directed at their communications dome, knocking out their encrypted satellite connection.
Even if they had managed to contact headquarters, reinforcements wouldn’t arrive for several hours. Protocol for this ultra-secret station didn’t allow them to contact local law enforcement. In the event of an attack, they were on their own until the CIA could arrange for a team to arrive. Under most conceivable scenarios, his security arrangement would have been sufficient to repel any attempted breach of the facility. This morning’s attack had been different, and he couldn’t shake the thought that the timing of Berg’s arrival had not been a coincidence. Greg Marshall’s last report confirmed that the second team had breached the fence line near Reznikov’s residence.
The rest of his survey confirmed that nothing salvageable remained in the room. Sporadic rifle fire erupted from the house, attracting another long hail of machine-gun fire and at least two sniper rounds. Several bullets punctured the north-facing wall, indicating a new threat direction and the arrival of the team sent to either kill or retrieve Reznikov. Disregarding the machine-gun fire that poured through the front of the house, he sprinted into the hallway and barreled into the kitchen, stopping at the back door.
“What do you have?” he yelled at the agent crouched in the doorframe.
“Another team moving across the middle. Four men. One of them is Reznikov!”
Son of a bitch. They were trying to break Reznikov out of his compound. The big question was how? He had no idea how they had arrived, but he figured that they had hiked in. It was the only way to approach silently enough to evade early detection. There was no way they could successfully hike back, with or without Reznikov, at this point.
The only other option involved commandeering vehicles based at the compound. He had personally disabled both SUVs with his rifle, which left them with the ATVs parked in the garage. They could use the ATVs to navigate the access road and hijack a car on one of the county roads, but this seemed like a flimsy exfiltration plan given what his intruders had already accomplished, and they were headed in the wrong direction. The garage was located in the opposite direction they were travelling.
“Is Berg with them?” Sheffield said, still not convinced the CIA agent’s arrival was a coincidence.
“Negative. Three shooters and Reznikov. Fuck! They have a clear angle on us!” the agent said, raising his rifle to engage the group.
Sheffield leaned through the door and sighted in on one of the partially exposed moving targets through the holographic sight attached to his HK416C ultra-compact. He fired in semiautomatic mode, striking the rocks just behind the shooter. The agent in the doorway fired a long burst at the same man, kicking up dirt and rock chips, but failing to score a hit. The two other agents stationed along the back of the house at the corners retreated toward the back door as return fire from the cluster of shooters started to tear into the west-facing side of the house.
A bullet snapped past Sheffield’s head, striking the doorframe above him and forcing his retreat into the kitchen. The rest of his agents piled through the opening as bullets started to slice through the wall, forcing all of them to seek cover deeper inside the house. They had learned the hard way that the structure’s exterior walls barely slowed the high-velocity projectiles fired at them. Firing directly through a window while standing near it only made things easier for the compound’s intruders. He’d lost at least half of his team to gunfire that passed effortlessly through the exterior walls. The compound’s designers clearly hadn’t anticipated the possibility of the team getting trapped inside the house.
Yergei threw himself down against the rocks and hugged the ground, wincing from the pieces of rock that peppered his face. The surviving members of the compound’s security team were putting up a spirited resistance. With this kind of incoming fire, there was no way he could risk directing the helicopter to land, and without the helicopter, they faced a long, arduous trek out of here by ATV. The helicopter was less than a minute away.
His machine gunner fired a five-second-long burst of 7.62mm projectiles through the north wall and stopped to reload while the sniper sprinted to catch up with the group escorting Reznikov. The scientist didn’t have a clue about tactical considerations in a firefight, and his men had to constantly force him down to avoid incoming fire. For a supposed genius, the guy didn’t have the situational awareness of a drunken street bum. When the machine gun started chattering away at the house, he called for their extraction on his handheld radio.
“Eagle, this is Mountain Man, over,” Yergei said.
“This is Eagle, over,” crackled a voice over the gunfire.
“Commence your run to the primary LZ. LZ is hot. I repeat. LZ is hot. All hostiles are buttoned up tight inside the gray, two-story house in the middle of the clearing. You are cleared to engage the house.”
“Roger that. We’re inbound. Thirty seconds.”
He scurried down the backside of the rocky outcropping, staying as low as possible, until he reached a point where he could see his entire team. His sniper had reached the main group a dozen meters away and grabbed Reznikov. With the scientist out of their custody, the two men turned their attention to the house, directing burst after burst of gunfire into the wood siding below and alongside the windows. He signaled for his machine gunner to catch up, and emptied the rest of his rifle’s magazine into the back door.
His gunner dropped to the ground next to him in a state of sheer fatigue from hauling the RPK-74S light machine gun more than three hundred meters over rough terrain.
“Take a break and set up here. I want continuous fire on the back of the house until the helicopter arrives. As soon as the helicopter touches down, you move. Good job so far,” Yergei said, slapping him on the shoulder.