“Dang, that is better,” her dad said, turning off the van’s radio and patting her knee with a smile. “You’re such a smart girl, you know that?”
Renee smiled as she remembered the feeling of acceptance she had gotten from that pat on her leg.
The radio on her vest came to life, shattering the memory.
“Five minutes,” J.T. said.
The men in the back conducted a final check of their weapons and gear and began standing up.
It was almost time.
The convoy turned off the main road and pulled into an upscale residential neighborhood. Renee could see the familiar two-story house appear ahead of them as the commander called, “One minute,” over the radio. It sat on a slight incline at the end of the street, dominating the avenue of approach. Any element of surprise was lost the moment they turned on the street.
“That’s the house right there.” She pointed the target out to Steve, who took his foot off the gas.
“Damn, they’re stopping right in the front yard,” he said as the lead vehicles jumped the curb and began unloading their squads in plain sight.
“Stop here, it’s too congested,” Renee said.
She’d done this too many times to be nervous, but her instincts were telling her that something bad was about to happen.
Once their van came to a halt, the team jumped out and moved to take up their positions. Renee could see J.T. standing in the open, directing his men over the radio. She counted twenty men, dressed in MultiCam, swarming loosely toward the house. It was a goat rope, and she found herself praying that everything would go according to plan.
J.T. called the breachers up to the door before the cordon was set, and they moved up to the breach point without a security element.
The idea was to hammer the pick into the iron door and once it was open, use the “ram” to breach the wooden door behind it. It was slow, especially when the men didn’t work together, and when the ornamental security door was finally forced open, they had been standing in front of the fatal funnel for ten seconds.
The “ram” was a heavy steel cylinder that had handles attached to the top. The breacher was too close to the door and couldn’t get any power out of his hips. So the first hit glanced off the sturdy oak door.
“Hit it again,” J.T. yelled over the net.
The man took a step back and hit the door right above the knob. The weakest part of the door was the locking mechanism, and the second blow tore it from the door frame with a groan.
The breachers moved off the porch as the point man moved up and tossed a flashbang into the open doorway. Instead of following it in, he waited for it to explode before entering the house.
“Get in there,” Renee muttered as she slapped the dashboard in frustration.
They were doing everything possible to give whoever was inside the upper hand. By not “riding the bang” into the house, they had once again failed to grab the momentum.
The team looked rusty and unsure. They needed to be the aggressors, but instead they were waiting. Whatever advantages J.T. had hoped to exploit had been squandered from the moment they pulled up on the objective.
Finally the point man made the decision to push into the house. He made entry, followed by four assaulters. Just as the last man crossed the threshold, though, a massive explosion erupted in the entryway.
The explosion created a vacuum at the breach point, as the overpressure sought the path of least resistance. The expanding gases hurtled out of the doorway in a ball of black-tinged fire. Renee watched as one of the operators was spat out of the doorway, a mangled heap of disjointed arms and legs.
As the smoke cleared, she could see that the shock wave had knocked the remainder of the assault team off the porch and singed the perfectly manicured azaleas that were planted near the front of the house. Burning wood and crown molding drifted slowly to the ground in the still morning air and then bright yellow muzzle flashes erupted from inside the house.
Windowpanes were punched out on the second floor as muzzles ported the glass and heavy machine-gun fire opened up on the team below.
Renee couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Five members of the assault team went down as heavy fire raked over the rest of the team. The radio was useless due to the heavy amount of traffic, and she could hear men yelling for help over the gunfire.
Ignoring the general’s warning to act as an observer, she flung open her door and stepped out into the street. Snapping her rifle up toward the house, Renee began firing controlled pairs into the upper window. She shot at the muzzle flashes but was unable to make out the shooters.
“Do we have any smoke?” Renee yelled at Steve, who sat wide-eyed in the front seat, watching the firefight unfold.
He was vapor locked, and Renee had to jump back into the van and punch his shoulder to get his attention.
“Steve, I need you to pay attention.”
Shaking off the initial shock, he tried to focus on what she was saying.
“Do we have any smoke? We have to go get those guys.”
“I think there’s some gas in the back.”
“Do something with this while I check.” She handed him the rifle before sliding into the cargo area. There were two rows of benches mounted on the thin metal walls of the van, and they hinged open to reveal storage space beneath them.
Renee found some gas masks and medical bags in the first storage bench, and she tossed them on the floor as she opened the second bench. She could hear someone firing in the backyard, but she kept searching until she found a forty-millimeter gas launcher and a row of green ammo cans. Frantically she pulled each can up so she could read the label and dropped them back into a heap until she found one marked “CS.”
The launcher looked like a huge revolver with a buttstock attached, and Renee snapped the breech open and began feeding munitions into the black cylinder. There were five chambers, and after she filled each one she locked the breech closed.
Taking a second to pull a mask over her head, she tugged down on the black straps until they were tight and placed her palm flat on the filter. Renee sucked in to ensure she had an airtight seal. She didn’t want to gas herself, especially since the bulky mask already cut down on her field of view. Sliding the left door open, she hopped out of the van and moved up behind Steve, who was shooting over the hood.
Tapping him on the back, she grabbed her rifle before handing him a mask. A man appeared in the burned-out doorway of the house and tossed a grenade at the agents in the front yard. The frag went off with a deep boom ten feet from where J.T. was hunkered on the ground. The explosion sent clods of dirt and grass showering down on him, but still he refused to move.
Once Steve had his mask on, Renee grabbed his shoulder and pulled him close. “I’m going to deploy the gas and then we go,” she yelled through the thick filter.
Her voice was muffled, but he nodded and hopped back into the driver’s seat while she brought the launcher up to fire. Unable to see the sight, Renee estimated the range and fired the first gas canister at the front door. The propellant from the munition left a white trail as it arced toward the target, but the round hit high above the door and bounced out into the grass.
Adjusting her aim, she fired the next round right through the doorway. The munition struck the shooter in the chest as he raised his rifle to fire on the van and backed him into the house.
Renee shifted fire to the second story, arcing two more rounds into the shattered windows. She knew there were only two more canisters left and decided to put them into the grass at the front of the house before jumping into the van.
Steve shifted into drive as the caustic white smoke began rising from the ground. Renee barely had time to get set before he floored it.