Another explosion.
Gunshot? It sounded for all the world like the rifles that had become so much a part of his life these past days.
The assholes all started shouting in Chechen. He couldn’t understand the words, but they were the sounds of panic, and they were accompanied by quick, heavy movement that likewise seemed to have no focus. Someone either kicked him or fell on him, and that really lit up his injuries.
His scream hurt his throat.
Two more sharp explosions — maybe three.
Definitely guns.
More shouting, and someone grabbed him by his shoulder and lifted.
Jesus God.
“Leave him alone!” Jolaine yelled.
In darkness he couldn’t be sure, but from the heavy thud, and the grunt that followed, he was pretty sure they’d hit her.
Amid a lot of discussion he couldn’t understand, Graham was passed among several people.
In the movies, people in excruciating pain passed out and got relief.
He was ready to live in a movie.
The freezer was a room within a cavern, roughly twelve feet square, and it had both a front door and a back door, presumably to allow the free flow of cow carcasses in and out without creating a traffic jam. Jonathan remembered the detail from the plans Venice had sent them. He sent up a prayer that the drawing be correct.
Through the NVGs, Jonathan saw the hinges before he saw the latch. And then he saw the massive padlock that had been placed over the latch assembly. “Shit,” he said.
“Outta my way, Boss,” Boxers said. He had a GPC in his fist, with a detonator already dangling from the det cord fuse. “Five-second delay,” he said, “so we’ll be inside in ten.”
Jonathan pivoted to make room for Big Guy, and he scanned the inside of the factory for more targets. He saw movement in the shadows to his right and he fired a long burst, got a yelp of pain in return.
“Fire in the hole,” Boxers said.
Jonathan turned away from the door and stooped to become a human soccer ball. The blast made the building bounce, and turned the heavy freezer door into a rectangular hole.
“All right, let’s—”
Automatic weapons opened up from behind them — from the direction of the loading dock through which they’d entered.
Boxers coughed and fell. “Ah, shit. Goddammit.”
Jonathan felt a stab of panic. “Are you hit?”
“Damn straight I’m hit. God damn it!” Boxers opened up with his 417, raking the area where the shots had come from. “Go!” he said. “Get the freaking PCs. I’ll kill these assholes myself. God DAMN it!”
Jonathan’s mind raced to push the panic away. Mission first, he told himself. He had to tend to the PCs. “I’ll be back for you, Big Guy,” he said, and then he slipped in through their newly opened door.
The opening was blocked with rolling racks and assorted shit, and floor was coated with ice. Through his green artificial light, Jonathan saw a scrum of activity ahead as beefy men tried to find their way to meaningful activity in the dark. Everyone he saw carried a long gun of some sort, and at least one had a sidearm. Through the tangle of dangling meat hooks, he had difficulty separating the PCs from the bad guys, until he heard yet another howl of pain, and he focused in on the kid who was being manhandled by one of the thugs.
“PC One is in the grasp,” he said over the air. Protocol mattered, even when your best friend had been shot. He let the M27 fall back against its sling and drew his MP7 again. “Switching to hollow point on the MP7.”
He released the nearly full mag of ball ammo and switched it out with a thirty-round mag of hollow points that he pulled from its pouch on his vest. The advantage of hollow-point ammo lay in the fact that the mushrooming effect of the hollow point expended much of the round’s energy on impact, thus making it less likely to overpenetrate and hit a good guy who might be standing behind the bad guy target.
He could tell that they were getting organized up there, and they had come to grips with the fact that their space had been breached. Two of the men had opened fire in Jonathan’s general direction, but in their darkness, they didn’t have the visual frame of reference to even come close.
He needed to disorient them even more.
Jonathan opened a Velcro fastener on his ballistic vest and removed a cylindrical stun grenade. Filled with magnesium and ammonium perchlorate stuffed into a cardboard tube, the grenade was designed to temporarily blind and deafen anyone within a few-yard radius, buying a few precious seconds for rescuers to work their magic.
Squeezing the safety spoon, Jonathan pulled the pin, then lobbed the grenade in the general vicinity of the bad guys.
“Flash-bang away,” he said. He turned away, closed his eyes, and pressed his hands against his ears. Two seconds later, the building shook again. Even with his eyes closed and his head turned, Jonathan could see the blood vessels in his eyelids from the flash. One second after the blast, while the disorientation was still pure, Jonathan moved on the bad guys.
Behind him, fully automatic fire continued to rip the silence from outside the freezer. “Engaging multiple targets,” Boxers said before an extended burst of gunfire.
Hearing Big Guy’s voice calmed Jonathan, reminded him that he had a half dozen targets of his own to engage.
“Hostages get down! Hostages get down!” Jonathan yelled. “Get the hell down!”
Predictably, two of the thugs swung their weapons at the sound of Jonathan’s voice and opened fire. Jonathan dropped to a knee and smoked the one on the left with three rounds to his chest. The one on the right dove for cover and saved his own life.
Goddammit.
Jonathan scooted to the left because some brainiac had done a study a while ago that demonstrated that absent evidence to the contrary, people assumed movement to their own left — Jonathan’s right — and he wanted to be unpredictable.
Outside, Boxers’ gun battle raged on.
As he moved, Jonathan’s laser beam stabbed a shooter in the ear. Jonathan judged the distance at fifteen feet, ten feet short of the distance the sight was zeroed to, so he lowered the beam to the top of the guy’s shoulder and pressed the trigger.
The head exploded.
Two down.
Boxers’ gunfight raged beyond the freezer door. From the sound of it, he’d employed his 417, and he was not being shy in his application of firepower.
“I will shoot the boy!” a man yelled from nearby. “Put down your gun or I will shoot the boy!”
Had the bad guy not shouted out like that, Jonathan would likely not have seen him. As it was, the target was maybe ten feet away, and facing in the wrong direction, presenting his back as he looked toward a direction where Jonathan had never been. The target held PC One in front of him as cover, his elbow cinched under the PC’s chin. The boy’s arm flopped oddly — clearly broken.
Seconds ticked.
At this range, hollow point notwithstanding, a head shot or a center-of-mass shot would probably overpenetrate and wound the PC. That was not acceptable.
Moving quickly yet silently, Jonathan slipped the MP7 into its holster and drew his KA-BAR knife from its scabbard on his left shoulder. Uncle Sam had tried a lot of different fighting blades since the KA-BAR was first introduced in 1941, but as far as Jonathan was concerned, none had even approached the elegance and raw lethality of the wooden-handled Marine Corps favorite.
Jonathan held the knife as an extension of his fist, blade facing forward, hilt against his thumb, and he closed the distance in just a few strides. The fact that the bad guy had a full head of hair made it so much easier. Jonathan grabbed a fistful of hair at the crown and pulled back just as he thrust the razor-sharp steel blade in to the base of his skull at a thirty-degree angle, effectively separating the man’s brain from the rest of his body. If he didn’t die instantly, he’d be dead soon. Either way, score another for the good guys.