A crackle that resembled a human voice came over his earpiece. His hearing was returning, albeit slowly. The words were still muffled and distant.
Justin noticed someone stand up next to the rolled-over Toyota and fire a few rounds. They thumped against the Nissan’s body.
More bullets pounded the ground around him as Justin set up position by the front of the SUV and blasted round after round, dismantling the Toyota piece by piece. One of his bullets lifted off some sparks and the Toyota exploded into a large orange fireball. A man engulfed in flames burst out of the wreck and fell to the ground, twitching and twisting as if possessed by demons. Justin fired a single shot and ended the man’s misery.
Someone opened fire from the house where Svetlana and Justin had initially sought shelter. Their bullets shredded the fence and a few struck the Nissan’s doors.
More bursts of gunfire sprayed his position from the opposite side. Justin turned his machine gun to the new enemies and saw a man standing atop the terrace of a three-story house. Justin let off a couple of rounds, but the man kept shooting back, then dropped behind the roof’s parapet.
An RPG sliced the night sky with its amber streak. It came from behind Justin and it whooshed past the Nissan, blew through the fence and exploded a few feet away. Its shrapnel riddled the area and one or two struck the Nissan, bursting its right-side window glass.
Justin’s eyes found Svetlana stretched in a ditch on the side of the road, partly covered behind a wooden pole and a pile of rubble.
“Svetlana, punch us a hole,” Justin shouted at her.
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
Justin was glad to hear her voice loud and clear through his earpiece.
Svetlana reached for her grenade launcher.
A silhouette appeared at the window on the first floor, in Svetlana’s blind spot, with an AK in its hand. Justin pointed his machine gun at that target, but when he pulled the trigger he heard the hollow click. He stared at the ammunition belt. It had tangled as he dragged it across the mud and the snow on the ground.
“Svetla, get down,” he said on his mike.
A seemingly endless barrage drowned his words. The gunman’s bullets danced around Svetlana’s position. Justin grabbed his AK and returned fire, but the gunman kept blasting with his gun, this time toward Justin’s position.
There was a brief pause as the gunman’s magazine ran out. Justin came up to the other side of the Nissan and lay next to Ludomir. The man was no longer breathing. A couple of bullets had pierced his side and one had opened up a big wound on the side of his head.
Justin looked up at the window just as the gunman surfaced a second time. He raised his gun but before he could begin his barrage an RPG came from the ditch across the street. It smashed head-on into the gunman’s window, blowing him up along with a sizable part of the wall, leaving behind a truck-sized gap.
“Ludomir’s dead,” Justin said as he dashed toward the gap. “Clearing up the house.”
“Got you covered,” Svetlana said.
She unleashed a long volley beyond the Nissan, then turned her attention to the house behind her and fired a few more shots to her left. She reloaded her grenade launcher, shouldered the weapon, then squeezed the trigger. The warhead drilled a huge hole in the fence behind her, raced forward, then exploded somewhere inside the house.
Justin ran alongside the wall, leveling suppressing fire at the street in front of him. When he came near the gap in the wall, he pulled a couple of fragmentation grenades from his chest rig. He pulled the pin on one and held the grenade’s striker lever in place by wrapping his fingers tight around it. He counted to ten silently and tossed the grenade inside the room.
The explosion was almost instantaneous. Justin could not see it, but he knew the fragments from the explosion had showered the area inside the room with sharp metal pieces. If there were other gunmen hidden inside the room, they had been cut down by the shrapnel.
Justin waited a couple of moments, then climbed over the debris. He stepped next to the body parts of a gunman. It was probably the man Svetlana had pulverized with her RPG warhead. Another two dead bodies were sprawled a little further, buried under chunks of bricks and fragments of furniture.
He made his way into the hall and the next room, which was smaller than the first one. It was dark but for a sliver of moonlight slithering through a gap in between the drapes. Justin saw a couple of car toys next to a small bunk bed in the corner. Children. Are they still in the house?
He tiptoed back to the hall and entered the kitchen, his eyes flicking back and forth as he covered all directions so as not to be caught off guard by gunmen hiding inside the house. The kitchen was empty. No sign of other men or children.
Justin cleared the bathroom, then climbed upstairs. The two bedrooms were also empty. He studied the backyard for some time from the windows and then double-checked it when he returned to the kitchen.
“House is clear,” Justin said on his mike.
“Roger that,” Svetlana replied.
“Coming out through same route.”
Voices from the other team updated him on their status. Team Two was pinned down and was taking heavy fire. Team Three had yet to engage the enemy, but their advance had slowed down as a result of the fighting. They reported more gunmen rushing toward the location of Team One and Team Two.
“Svetla, we’re taking the Nissan as our transport,” Justin said as he stepped out into the back alley turned into a battleground. “Cover fire.”
“Yes, sir.”
Justin sprinted toward the bullet-ridden SUV. A couple of rounds hissed next to his feet, ricocheting off the walls and the ground. One bullet tore through his left leg, just underneath the knee. Justin cursed and fired against the enemies outnumbering him.
He shifted the weight to his good leg and leaned against the Nissan’s door. He fired again until he emptied his magazine, then slipped inside the car. He reloaded his AK and squeezed out almost half of the fresh magazine through the shattered rear window.
The keys were still in the ignition. Justin turned the car on and the engine roared to life. He had hardly expected the Nissan to still run after taking so many bullets.
“Svetla, time,” he said.
She fired a few more shots as she jogged backwards toward the Nissan.
Justin said, “Carrying in Ludomir.”
He got out and sprayed a long volley, providing some cover fire for Svetlana’s retreat. Then he limped to Ludomir and picked him up in a fireman’s carry over his right shoulder. As he turned around, a bullet thumped against Ludomir’s thigh. Blood spurted from the wound and a few drops landed on Justin’s face and chest. Even dead the Russian had protected him, and possibly had saved his life. That bullet could have gravely wounded Justin or even killed him if it had struck him in the head.
“Thanks, man,” Justin muttered as he laid Ludomir’s body over the back seats.
Svetlana climbed into the front passenger seat and kept shooting through the windshield.
Justin shut the back door, let out another rip of gunfire, and came around the Nissan.
“You okay?” he asked Svetlana.
Her face was bruised and bloodied, but she gave him a tired smile. “Fine, just scratches.”
Justin threw the car into reverse and gunned the engine. “Let’s get the hell out of this death trap and give Team Two a hand.”
Chapter Thirty-five
The back of the Nissan crashed against the burning Toyota. The force of the impact pushed it out of the way. Justin turned the wheel, changed gears, and flattened the gas pedal. The Nissan zoomed into the next back alley but they were not yet out of the kill zone.