He aimed his gun at Zarif’s knee. The Iranian cried out in fear, and Chavez leapt forward for Riley’s gun.
Riley realized Chavez was coming for him, closing the distance in a single step, so he tried to swing the Beretta back in Chavez’s direction. Chavez grabbed Riley’s wrist and turned it away, pointed it toward the other armed man in the room, and the jolt of the move caused the Englishman to squeeze his hand. The gun fired a nine-millimeter bullet across the room at 1,100 feet per second, and it hit the Cuban high in his right shoulder, spinning him around and causing his gun to discharge into the wall over Chavez’s head.
Chavez head-butted Riley now, sending him to the cold tile floor, and he pulled the pistol out of Riley’s hands as he fell. Chavez raised the weapon toward the North Korean, but once he saw the man was not going for a gun of his own, Chavez swung around toward the second-floor landing. Above him he saw an armed Cuban leaning over.
Chavez realized Zarif was directly behind him, and likely in the Cuban’s line of fire. He turned and knocked over the Iranian in his chair, and while doing so fired back over his shoulder to keep the Cuban’s head down.
Out of the corner of his eye Chavez saw the North Korean making a run for the stairs that led from the living room to the upstairs landing, with Edward Riley right on his heels.
Chavez grabbed Zarif by his collar and started to pull him across the floor to cover from the second floor as a second Cuban arrived. Chavez saw both men rise over the railing of the landing and aim down toward him, and a third and a fourth man came through the entryway. Chavez knew he wouldn’t be able to engage all threats in a four-on-one gunfight.
Jack Ryan, Jr., and Dominic Caruso came through the doorway to the kitchen, their Smith & Wesson pistols snapping and smoking. Both men in the hall to the entryway dove for cover, but only one made it back to the safety of the wall. The other dropped on his back as blood splattered across the white tile.
The men upstairs fired down, but now Chavez had sighted in on one of them. While he continued to try to pull Zarif around the couch and out of the line of fire, he shot one of the men on the landing; then he dove behind the heavy couch as more men appeared from the entryway.
Sam Driscoll leapt from the branch of the pecan tree onto the second-floor balcony at the western side of the house. His landing was silent enough, so he drew his Smith and moved stealthily the first few feet for the back door, but when the gunfire erupted downstairs, faster than anyone on the team had anticipated it would, he picked up the pace.
There had been a man at the back tower, but when Sam moved around the corner to engage him he saw the man had passed through the sliding glass door, presumably to check on the source of gunfire in the house. Sam made it through the glass doorway, then moved quickly across an empty guest bedroom. He ducked his head quickly into the hallway to take a mental picture of what was there. To his left were several doors and a darkened hallway, to his right the hall ended at the landing. Protracted gunfire came from there, but from his sliver of view here he could see no one.
He stepped out into the hall at the exact same moment the Cuban who’d left the balcony earlier came out of the room to Sam’s left. The two men saw each other simultaneously, four feet apart, and as they both brought their pistols up, the weapons slammed into each other and bounced free.
Sam swung at the man’s face, but the Cuban stepped out of the way and drew a knife. Sam had a blade of his own, but he didn’t reach for it. Instead, he closed the distance and locked on to the other man’s arms. The two men slammed against both walls of the hallway, then crashed onto the ground. Sam ended up on top of the man, facing up, away from him. The Cuban pulled his knife down to the American’s torso, but Sam still had his hands on the Cuban’s wrists, and he pushed the knife back with all his might, desperate to keep it from plunging into his chest.
Ryan was with Caruso, firing from the kitchen, across the living room, and into the entryway, where several attackers had congregated. Ding was on his knees behind the couch in the center of the room, and Zarif was still taped to a chair on his side next to Ding.
Ryan knew Sam was all alone upstairs. They had accounted for all of the combatants, killing two men on patrol silently with knives and then moving toward the house when the other patrol was around front, but no one had figured on the North Korean agent and Riley both running upstairs. If they had weapons already, or if they picked guns up from fallen men on the landing, that would leave Sam seriously outnumbered on the second floor.
Ryan chanced a run for the stairs, but he had to cross the open ground of the living room. With only four bullets left in his nine-shot subcompact, he darted behind Chavez, exposing himself to fire from the men in the entryway. Chavez and Caruso both saw what Ryan was doing, so they exposed themselves to draw some attention from the shooters, then fired one round each before dropping back to cover again.
Ryan leapt onto the stairs, slamming into the wall to get out of the sightline of the gunners in the entryway, and then he began running up, his pistol high and sweeping back and forth.
John Clark slammed on the Durango’s brakes right at the front door to the mansion, and he rolled out onto the gravel drive as his vehicle started taking fire.
It had been his job to drive the getaway vehicle, but when Chavez started the gunfight early he knew the plan had not survived first contact with the enemy, so he decided to interject himself into the direct-action portion of the operation.
He rose up from behind the hood of the big SUV, and fired left-handed at a man on the balcony, striking him in the forehead and sending him tumbling over the railing and crashing on the roof of the Durango.
Clark then ran for the front door, and while doing so he called his position to his team so they didn’t shoot him upon entry.
Riley and the North Korean RGB officer had ducked into the first room next to the landing. Riley then prized open a window, but the North Korean wanted a weapon in case they met resistance outside. He ran back to the landing and saw both Cubans dead, lying still on their backs. They had been shot from the living room below. He grabbed one of the men’s pistols and headed for the upstairs hallway. He was looking for a window he could use to escape or, at the very least, a room where he could barricade himself to fight back the American agents.
He entered the hallway and saw movement ahead. He raised his gun to fire, and as he did so he saw a bearded American roll off a dead Cuban agent while scooping a gun up from the floor of the hallway. The man lifted it, turned toward the North Korean’s direction, and raised the pistol in a blur.
The North Korean fired. Instantly he felt the impact as a round slammed him in the chest, knocking him flat onto his back. He tried to breathe in but nothing happened. He felt his mouth fill with blood and his eyes began to feel impossibly heavy. Just before they closed he forced himself to lift his head, to look past his feet down the hall, and doing so gave him some peace, because the bearded American was down on his back as well, his own chest covered in blood.
Sam is down! Sam is down!” Ryan shouted into his earpiece as he leapt over the dead North Korean, stumbled over the dead Cuban with the knife in his chest, and then dropped to his knees next to Sam Driscoll. Sam’s eyes were closed and his mouth slightly open. There was no movement at all on his face or in his body.
“Sam!”
Ryan put pressure on the gunshot wound. It was right over the heart, and his training and his common sense told him it was unsurvivable, but he kept pressing down, called into his earpiece for some help.