Dominic couldn’t see any targets, but he could see his cousin crouched low with a spasming, bleeding man in his arms, and he heard the direction the last gunshot came from. He aimed his weapon to a point waist-high on the wall between himself and the hallway, and he pressed the trigger once, twice, three times, moving his aim laterally to the left toward the doorway while he moved his body laterally right toward his cousin and a better view of what was in the hall.
Ejected cartridges from his pistol arced through the air and bounced on the floor of the living room while he moved.
After five rounds he saw puffs of masonry and wallboard above his point of aim, and this told him the shooters there realized they were under fire from an unseen assailant on the other side of the wall and they had begun shooting back. Dom crouched lower and kept moving across the living room. He crossed in front of the crumpled body of Karel Skála on the floor in front of the sofa.
He fired nine rounds just as he stepped into the hallway, his weapon locked open as he pulled the trigger on the back of a North Korean fleeing through the door out of the apartment and in to the hall that ran down the spine of the building. It appeared more than one assailant had retreated into the main hall, but there were two bodies lying still on the floor by the door, plus the dead man at Ryan’s feet.
Dom stepped in front of Ryan, who was now down on one knee and drawing his weapon. Dom’s gun was empty, so he started to draw his one spare magazine from his Thunderwear holster. While doing so, however, he saw a North Korean lean back around into view from the main hallway, his pistol rising in front of him.
“Down!” Dom heard from behind, and he dropped flat on his chest.
Jack Ryan rose from his crouch over his cousin, his Smith & Wesson M&P Shield barking in his hand. The North Korean caught a nine-millimeter hollow-point round right in the forehead, an inch left of center, and he tumbled back, his pistol spinning through the air and bouncing into the hallway.
After the gun settled and Jack’s hot brass finished spinning on the floor, it was eerily quiet in the apartment. The smell of gun smoke was pervasive and a heavy blue tinge hung in the air, the result of twenty or so rounds being fired from multiple weapons in such a small enclosed space.
One of the men lying in front of Jack moved. His head lifted a little, and he reached out for a pistol lying on the legs of a dead man next to him.
Jack fired once, hitting the man in the back of the neck. Blood sprayed down the hall with the impact of the round.
Jack kept his gun trained on the open doorway. He said, “I count four down. How many more?”
Caruso reloaded quickly. “How the fuck should I know? I just got here.”
Jack looked over to Skála now. His eyes were open and rolled back. “Damn it. Target’s dead.”
Dom had his gun back in the fight and pointed toward the doorway. “Yep.”
Jack connected with Biery. “Gavin? Are you still with us?”
There was no reply.
“Gavin, do you copy?”
Nothing.
Jack shouted now. “If you can hear me, we’ve got squirters coming your way! Do not come in this building!” He climbed to his feet. Shouting to his cousin he said, “Get Skála’s laptop!” and then took off, leaping over the dead bodies in front of him on his way out the door.
Gavin was stuck in a slow-moving elevator in the office building on Baranova Street, and he realized he’d lost his mobile connection with the guys right at the worst possible time. It occurred to him, too late, that he should have taken the stairs; as well as being a mobile phone dead zone, the elevator descended at a glacial pace.
“Shit, shit, shit!” he shouted at himself.
When he finally got down to street level he ran outside, then down the sidewalk toward Skála’s Krišt’anova Street apartment building. While he ran he looked down at his phone and redialed into the conference call to reestablish his connection with Jack and Dom.
If they were still alive, that was. The gunfire he’d heard through his earpiece before he lost comms had been extraordinary, it sounded like a war was being fought in the building across the street.
As soon as he heard the call answered, he looked up and saw an Asian man running out of Skála’s building, directly across the street from him. Gavin stopped in his tracks and watched him; the Asian shielded a pistol inside his coat. Several other people ran out of the building all around the armed man, unaware this was one of the people responsible for all the gunfire that had them running for their lives.
Gavin said, “Jack? Dom?”
Jack’s breathless response caused Gavin to blow out a sigh of relief. “We’re here. Do not approach the building, there is at least one squirter heading down toward the lobby.”
“Is a squirter a bad guy running away?”
“Yes.”
“I’m watching him now. He is getting into a gray van with a man behind the wheel. They are leaving the scene.”
“Just let them go. We’ll be down in thirty seconds. You need to get us packed up and ready to get the fuck out of here.”
Gavin spun around, began running back to the office building. “I’m on it.”
The team had their hide site broken down, packed up, and loaded into the Mercedes in ten minutes flat. While Jack pulled the vehicle out of the underground parking garage, doing his best to keep from burning rubber to get out of the neighborhood, Dom called Adara from the backseat. She answered on the first ring. “Yes?”
Dom knew the encryption on his phone was good, so he had no worries about watching what he said. “You aren’t going to believe this.”
“You need another in extremis departure?”
“It’s becoming a thing, isn’t it?”
“Any wounded?”
“Negative. We’re okay, but we’ve got to get out of here.”
“What’s the opposition?”
“North Korean. I don’t know anything more than that, and I doubt they know who we are, but the local police are going to be looking for two guys matching the description of Jack and I as soon as they start taking statements at the crime scene.”
“Crime scene?” Adara asked.
“One dead local. Our target. Four dead foreign nationals. North Koreans.”
“Jesus, Dom.”
“Shit got crazy.”
“Just get here and I’ll get you out of the country.”
“Roger that.”
Dom ended the call and slipped the phone back in his pocket. Ryan called out from behind the wheel. “What did Sherman say?”
“She said she’ll be ready.”
Gavin spoke up for the first time. “Guys, I’m so sorry.” He explained what happened with the arrival of the building superintendent. Dom wasn’t in the mood to listen, he just closed his eyes and leaned his head back, but Jack paid attention.
When Biery had explained himself, Jack said, “If you had let us know you were leaving your overwatch we could have been ready, Gavin. You see that, don’t you?”
Gavin said, “Yeah. I see. It happened so fast. I… didn’t want to alarm you.”
Dom kept his eyes closed and his head back, but he said, “You know what really alarmed me? The half-dozen bastards shooting at me.”