Two men appeared at the balcony in front of him now; they were backlit with the dim glow from the glass dome roof of the atrium, and Court saw them easily in his night vision monocle, saw the rifles in their hands, saw them running in his direction.
Court, dressed in black and sprinting up a dark hallway, was invisible to the men. All they saw before them were a pair of bright orange flashes before both of their worlds went dark.
With less than fifty feet to the balcony Court reholstered his sidearm, then reached behind him and pulled a grappling hook from his hip bag. The spring-loaded spool spun as he drew out a length of bungee cord attached to it, looping it in his hand as it came out. As he ran he swung the hook in a forward motion, playing out longer lengths of the bungee with each whipping revolution.
Gentry heard shouting in the atrium, many men calling out to one another in confusion, fury, and resolve. They would see the red smoke, black in the dim light, and they would not know what it meant, but any men on the higher floors would have heard the pops of the grenade launcher or the supersonic cracks of the suppressed Glock, and they would know danger was seconds away.
They would be waiting for him, Court knew, and he could not prevent that. The only way he could help himself now was to do the unexpected, and to move as quickly as possible out of their line of fire.
Ten feet from the balcony he swung the grappling hook overhand, then let it go and dropped the loops. The weighted hook sailed away from him, drawing the springy black cord behind it.
With a loud metallic clang it hit the iron beam that ran the length of the dome over the atrium, then swung around over the top of the bar, where its claw grabbed the bungee.
Outside the building, to the rear of Court’s position, a series of low thuds began as the twelve Yanisars attached to the fuse ignited by the wireless signal began launching, skipping across the ground before booms as loud as shotgun blasts shook windowpanes, set off car alarms, and echoed off the walls of the property.
During this distraction Gentry shot out of the fourth-floor hallway and, vaulting high with a single bound, pushed off on the top of the balcony railing with his leading foot, then leapt off the balcony face-first, arms out wide with his pistol in his right hand, his body arcing over the atrium below.
SEVEN
Gravity took him and he fell through the darkness, past the third-floor mezzanine, past armed men racing up the open staircase, past more men storming down the hallways on the second floor.
And into the thick red smoke.
The bungee had been set for a leap out a fourth-floor window; it was thirty feet long and would extend to exactly forty feet, which would leave him a short drop to the ground at full extension if he’d attached the hook to a fixture in a room on the fourth floor.
But throwing the hook over the bars below the dome meant he’d have a good ten-to-fifteen-foot drop at maximum extension.
There were eight men who conceivably could have gotten a shot off at Gentry as he fell past them, but no one fired. The darkness, the confusion, the early hour, and the brains addled by drink, along with the concern about firing and missing the target but hitting a colleague on the far balcony, put just enough hesitation into the trigger fingers of the men, causing them all to miss their tiny window of opportunity as the masked man dropped like a stone past their positions.
Court felt the gripping in his harness even before he disappeared into the smoke; the bungee pulled taut and he went from an eighty-mile-an-hour fall to a dead stop in less than twenty feet, wrenching the straps under his clothing at his inner thigh and across his chest. His night vision monocle fell off his head, and he felt gear straining from the weight of gravity in pouches and packs around his body.
At full extension he reached to his left hip to flip the wireless grappling disconnect lever on the control panel. A simple flip of an inch-long switch would send a wireless signal up to the grappling hook, causing its claws to pop open like an umbrella blowing up in high winds. This would release the hook and cause Court to drop to the floor below him.
He’d pulled this off in training dozens of times; the technology was solid and straightforward.
But this time it went wrong. The control panel had popped off his belt at some point in the action and it swung freely now from a nylon strap, knocking against webbing and pistol magazines on his chest. He had less than a second to find it, flip the lever, and free himself, not nearly enough time to root it out of all the gear on his harness.
Court had braced himself for a ten-foot free fall to the floor, but instead the bungee held tight, and he shot back upward like a marble in a slingshot, launching out of the protection of the dark smoke and back up into the dim atrium.
The four men on the first floor were obstructed by the smoke, and they had no time to react. Gentry shot past them, just a few feet away, and as he passed he swung his body around to try to get his gun pointed in their direction.
But neither Gentry nor the skinheads got a shot off in the half second between his emergence from the red smoke and his disappearance above them.
Now Court’s climb rate increased; he passed the second-floor balcony, propelled by his long fall and the spring of the bungee cord. There were two men here; both had their AKs sticking over the railing in his direction.
As Court rocketed upward he grabbed at the barrel of one rifle and knocked it away, then shot the other man once in the body armor on his chest. A second shot at the still-standing skinhead slammed into the man’s radio on his shoulder. The round penetrated just an inch or so through the Russian’s skin, cracking his collarbone and sending him back to the floor, more from the panic of being shot than any real momentum from the bullet.
Four men stood on the third-floor balcony, leaning over just as Court reached eye level. The shock in the Russians’ faces told Court he had the advantage. He opened fire, dumping round after round from the suppressed pistol at the men there, shooting two of the four dead and sending the other two diving for cover.
Court’s momentum had ceased at the third floor, and he hung in midair a moment before he began falling again. His pistol was empty now, so as he dropped, preparing himself to sail past the vertical gauntlet of guns once more, he let go of his Glock 19 and reached down to his right ankle.
On the second-floor balcony a group of gunmen ran out of the hallway directly in front of him. They saw their target dropping past them, not more than twenty feet away. One man fired a burst in Court’s direction as he fell by them, and the rest ran up to the balcony railing, readying to dump rounds on him from above.
Court was back in the smoke again, and he’d yanked his backup gun free of its ankle holster with his right hand and, with his left, he took hold of the stretching bungee cord that was attached to his lower back and pulled himself around to face it.
He had one chance to get this right. There was no way in hell he could spring back up again, now in the sights of a dozen rifles, without being torn to bloody shreds by AK rounds. As he bottomed out, his harness squeezed him tight again and pressed air from his lungs. At ten feet above the atrium floor he jammed the muzzle of the compact Glock 26 into the taut cord, one foot away from his body, and fired.