Just then, Court saw the beam of his tactical light whip around the kitchen as someone knocked it to the floor.
Court rolled onto his belly and scooted backwards, pulling his backpack behind him.
He scraped his back as he did so, but he barely felt it in his overwhelming desire to get away from all the men trying to kill him.
Here he sprang to his feet, finding himself back in the bar, in the corner behind where he had been seated just a couple of minutes earlier. He was around the corner from the main part of the bar, but there was no way out from here, so he had to head in the direction of the gunfire and his Triad attackers.
He chanced a look around the corner, knowing this wooden wall wouldn’t stop an air rifle from penetrating, much less a real pistol. He saw the near edge of the bar where he’d been sitting just a few feet away, and he knew there was a huge metal ice bin just on the other side.
He thought the ice bin would give him some cover from a handgun.
No one followed him out of the kitchen through the small hole because they knew there was a man on the other side with a blood-soaked meat cleaver in his hand, so by now men had begun flooding out of the kitchen doors, and word was surely getting out that the man pinned in the corner of the kitchen had managed to escape back into the open-decked bar.
As Court moved towards his cover behind the ice bin, he saw the man wearing the dragon shirt that he’d hit over the head with his pack to kick off the fight. He was sitting on the ground, bleeding from the head, and holding a silver automatic pistol in his right hand. He was only fifteen feet away from Court and facing away, and as Court watched, the man pointed his pistol over the bar and fired a round into the kitchen wall without seeing what he was shooting at.
He nearly hit one of his fellow Triads in the process.
Court sprang towards the man on the floor now, twisted the pistol out of his hand, and grabbed him by his spiked black hair. As men seemed to run around the entire dim establishment, some firing pistols themselves, Court began dragging the man backwards towards the relative cover of the ice bin.
He looked up as he did so, and it appeared that everyone in the room turned in his direction at the same time.
Twenty men charged, and Court found himself out in the open, pulling along a noncompliant hostage.
With her eye still in the scope, Zoya Zakharova pulled the charging handle back on the VSS rifle, chambering a 9-by-39-millimeter round.
She hadn’t envisioned using the weapon this evening at all, and she hadn’t fired a VSS since her sniper training four years earlier, but she had a target downrange now, and she was committed to killing him. She followed the man’s head with the crosshairs of the rifle, holding just a touch high to account for the characteristics of this bullet at this distance.
The Russian operative blew out half the air in her lungs, hesitated a moment to catch her body between heartbeats, and then pressed the trigger.
The sound of the round firing through the integrally suppressed barrel was akin to a bicycle tire blowing out. A pop and an expression of gases made less noise than the action of the weapon itself as the semiautomatic rifle ejected the spent cartridge and then rechambered a round.
The large bullet left the muzzle of the rifle at a thousand feet per second, then raced from the top of the hill and over the full length of the bay.
Zoya kept her eyes on her target, the forehead of a man in motion, and when the bullet struck home there was no doubt, because she saw the head snap back, blood mist behind it, and then the body dropped like a stone.
The man landed flat on his back in the fifteen-foot-long boat.
There were two more men in the tender rushing towards the Tai Chin VI, but neither of them was aware that the man kneeling just behind them had been shot through the head. The roar of the outboard motor had covered the zing of the bullet as it flew overhead, its impact with its target, and the fall of the man to the floor of the small watercraft.
Mere seconds earlier, Zoya had watched these three men race down the stairs of the bar to their boat, one of them with a walkie-talkie held to his ear. She took it as a given they were in communication with someone on the cargo ship, and were now rushing away from the fight at the bar and back to the fight on the ship. The men then leapt into the closest of the two tenders and fired the engines, while Zoya reported the action to the Zaslon team.
She hadn’t looked to see if Ruslan and Sasha, the two men Vasily had tasked with covering any counterattack, had made it back up to the deck of the cargo ship, out in the darkness off her left shoulder, and she wasn’t going to move her rifle now to find out.
But when she received no response from Vasily after fifteen seconds, she knew what she had to do.
After her first shot and the elimination of the first of the three threats to her mission, she quickly centered her crosshairs on the man just behind the operator of the tender, but this time she held her sights true to aim, because the fast-moving vessel had moved closer to her position, eliminating the need for the holdover.
Thump!
Another round left her weapon, but just as it did, the operator of the boat steered hard to starboard, apparently to avoid a buoy in the water in front of him. Zoya worried for an instant her shot would miss, but she watched through the scope while the round slammed into the target’s left collarbone, knocking the man backwards and flat in the tender.
Zoya’s weapon loaded the chamber automatically and her finger remained taut on the trigger. She centered her sights on the man at the wheel now, piloting the vessel at full throttle past a small fishing boat moored for the evening. The tender continued towards the cargo ship, still 150 meters off its bow.
She fired again, striking the operator of the tender straight in the nose, knocking him off the boat and then into the black water with a splash.
The tender slowed to idle, then veered to its left a little and began sputtering towards the rocky shoreline, across the bay from the dive bar and just under Zoya’s position on the hill.
She scanned for other targets, but the second tender of the Tai Chin VI remained tied up on the dinghy dock under the riotous fight in the bar.
Into her mic she said, “This is Sirena. Three hostiles are down.”
She’d shot the men back to front, dropping all three with only three rounds. And although the weapon had flashed up here at the top of the hill, no one would have heard the gunshots from any distance, so she felt comfortable that she was in the clear. More importantly to her, this small rescue mission to the Tai Chin VI had failed, even if any of the three had somehow managed to survive.
She spoke into her microphone again after triggering her radio. “Anna One, how copy?”
There was no response from the Zaslon team, but a lightning-fast three-round volley of gunfire from the waterside bar diverted her attention.
From the speed of the fire, Zoya knew that someone new was shooting, and whoever it was, they sure as hell knew how to operate a handgun.
Court fired three rounds over the far end of the bar, striking three men charging his way.
The mass of approaching men recoiled like a single living organism, and the attackers began diving behind tables and chairs and against the bar itself. A few even leapt over the deck railing down into the water below next to the little dock.
With one hand still grabbing hard to the sticky hair of the Triad boss in the dragon shirt, Court fanned the pistol around behind him, checking his six to make sure no one was there. A waitress lay huddled behind a table in the corner, just in his view. Court yelled at her to stay where she was, because he was afraid if she got up to run she would get shot by one of the Chinese or Vietnamese men pointing guns in this direction.