Thirty seconds later, he heard Big Guy’s voice in his ear. “Done. Redundant electronic fuse set on zero then a hundred milliseconds.” When the stakes were high, redundancy reigned as king. In this case, Boxers’ first detonator would blow the instant he pushed the button on his controller. If it malfunctioned, then the backup would initiate one tenth of a second later.
“Ready to advance?” Jonathan asked. He fought the urge to look at Boxers because Big Guy posed no threat. At this stage, all he cared about were threats.
“Ready to advance.”
“Advancing to Red.” In recent years, the special operations community had moved away from the color-coded sides, but it was in Jonathan’s DNA. White was front, black was back, and red was right. Compass points were far more precise, but who had a compass on them all the time?
They reassumed the same back-to-back posture as they approached the rear side, Jonathan leading and Boxers following. As they approached the end of the back wall, Jonathan said, “Corner.”
That expanded Boxers’ area of responsibility to a 270-degree radius as Jonathan concentrated on the threat that lay directly around the turn.
“Advancing right,” Jonathan said, and he turned the corner. His senses told him that there had to be guards here. It didn’t make sense otherwise. Why put sentries on some doors yet not on others? Since the loading dock was elevated, and the doors inset, it was difficult to get a line of sight. Advancing blind now, he moved much more slowly than before.
He heard voices from up on the deck. He didn’t understand the language, but they seemed to be chatting, unaware of danger. Jonathan eased away from the wall for a better look. He whispered. “I’ve got two more targets.”
They were standing next to each other, which to Jonathan’s perspective put them in the same plane.
“I’ve got a bad angle,” Jonathan said. “Swing out and tell me what you see.”
He felt Boxers pivot, swinging his rifle in a horizontal arc over his head. “I’ve got a left target if you want me to take it,” he said. “That would be the farthest from you.”
“On zero, then,” Jonathan said. He counted the cadence again, with the same result, except this time, because of the oblique angle and the backlight, he saw the aura of simultaneous brain-sprays. Both targets were neutralized. Jonathan had lost count over the years of the number of lives he’d taken, but it never got easier. To point a gun at Jonathan was a capital offense that that earned the perpetrator a guilt-free execution. But to die standing sentry — the most basic of soldierly duties — bore no honor or fanfare. In dispatching those, he always felt a burden of sadness. Nothing he couldn’t handle, but a sadness nonetheless.
With the lifeless bodies collapsed on the deck, Jonathan and Boxers moved together up the steps to the loading dock, where Boxers affixed the second charge of det cord to the electrical service. While he did that, Jonathan moved to the personnel door next to the roll-up overhead to see if it was unlocked. It was not. “I’m going to set a breaching charge,” he said. That meant pressing a GPC — a general purpose charge, which consisted of a wad of C4 high explosive triggered by a tail of det cord — into a three-inch trail where the door lock met the jamb. Typically, Jonathan preferred old-fashioned fuse (OFF) for the GPC, but to stay in concert with the charges Boxers had already set, he inserted dual electronic initiators into the detonating cord.
Jonathan asked, “Are you—”
An agonized scream ruined the night.
Teddy might have been on rails, he glided so quickly across the room, the short sledgehammer raised. His eyes were focused and hot. He seemed unaware of anything or anyone but Graham, who remained frozen in place. Teddy was still moving when he swung the sledge like a baseball bat.
Graham closed his eyes as the head of the hammer shattered his left elbow. The jolt of agony somehow unplugged his nervous system and he collapsed in a heap onto the icy tile.
“Remember,” Teddy said. “This is your deal. This is what you asked for.” With that, he launched a kick to Graham’s belly. As he doubled up on his side, another kick nailed him in the kidney.
Someone was screaming.
He’d just realized that the screams were his own when the building shook with an explosion and blackness fell.
The splintered jamb was still burning when Jonathan and Boxers squirted through the door. As was their tradition, Jonathan went in first and swept low and right while Boxers swept high and left. Their IR laser sights drew crisscrossing lines through the lingering smoke of the explosions.
The smoke confused the NVGs, potentially obscuring targets behind a veil of heated gases.
Jonathan and Boxers moved as one, in a crouch, their weapons at the ready and pressed against their shoulders. As their ears recovered from the concussion of the blasts — hearing protection could protect only so much — they heard the sounds of confused bedlam. Shouting voices combined with more howls of agony. Most of the shouting was in the same dialect that he’d heard from the guards.
“The noise is coming from two o’clock,” Boxers said.
“I agree.”
They pivoted together a couple of points to the right and continued to advance. Jonathan saw movement in the smoke, but before he could react, Boxers’ rifle barked twice and the silhouette dropped. Big Guy had switched to his cannon — the 7.62 millimeter HK417. Whatever his bullets touched instantly joined a parallel universe. Even with a suppressor attached, the gunshot rocked the building. With stealth no longer relevant, Jonathan holstered his MP7 and lifted his M27 from its sling. Similar in construction and weight to the venerable M4—but vastly superior in its performance, particularly in adverse circumstances — it wasn’t the perfect weapon for close-quarters battle, but it felt like an old friend. Because it was chambered in 5.56 millimeter, the people Jonathan killed wouldn’t be quite as dead as the people Boxers killed, but it would be close.
With their presence known, they stepped up the pace. The noise and the darkness had no doubt rattled their enemy, but the effects could only last so long. Close-in rifle fire had the tendency to focus the attention of the shot-at, and in a few seconds, if these guys had any clue what they were doing, they were going to mount some kind of defense.
“Threat left!” Boxers said.
Jonathan pivoted in time to see one of three approaching men drop when Boxers shot him. Jonathan took out a second, but the third disappeared behind the wall of an inner room that Jonathan recognized from the drawings as the meat freezer.
“Shit,” Jonathan spat. He was about to pursue the attacker when another scream echoed through the factory. “That’s coming from inside the freezer,” he said.
“The door’s on the other side,” Boxers said.
Another scream.
“Leave him alone!” a female voice yelled. In English.
“We’ll use the back door,” Jonathan said.
Graham thought he’d been knocked unconscious. The darkness came so suddenly and was so absolute, he couldn’t imagine another scenario.
But the pain kept coming, lightning bolts of agony that seemed to have no focus. Everything hurt, and he couldn’t breathe.