“Roger,” said Yevgeni. “Anna Seven, are we clear to move?”
Mikhail still had the best overwatch on the scene. He responded from his position behind his sniper rifle. “All call signs: clear to move with caution.”
Vasily and Sasha rose next to Zoya and started moving around the front of the BMW. Zoya herself began to rise, but Vasily grabbed her by the arm, jolting her back down. He just pointed at her angrily without speaking, then shouldered his rifle, looked around the front of the building with his night vision goggles, and took off in a steady but quick clip. Sasha followed right off his shoulder. They met up with Arseny and Pyotr at the trucks, and then all four advanced on the villa. They kept their weapons up, scanning in front of them, each moving in an arc to maintain overlapping fields of fire while they ran.
Zoya took a knee and looked over the hood of the sedan. She wished like hell she could hit the house; even armed with just a pistol she felt she could have benefitted the team, plus if it went loud she could only help exfiltrate Fan under fire if she was somewhere near Fan when the firing began.
Here in the parking area all she could do was watch her task force advance on the villa and hope they got inside quickly and quietly, before the sentries returned or before anyone started looking for the two dead men dragged under the trucks.
She didn’t like the decision to continue on with the raid, but she couldn’t stop Vasily. She prayed he knew what he was doing.
Court Gentry saw a total of six men moving right towards him, two on his right from the barn, and four coming from dead ahead. They were forty yards out, but they’d be on him in seconds, so he knew he had to risk a move. It was perfectly dark in the shadows here, but he would be in plain view of anyone close by wearing night vision gear, and the gunmen heading his way approached as if they could see where they were going, so they must have been wearing NVGs.
Court remained low to the ground but began scooting back, using his feet and hands to move. The four operators covering the open ground were between him and the snipers, so he thought he would get out of the line of sight of the scopes of the long guns — for a few seconds, anyway.
He made it around to the back of the generator without getting shot, and once there he pulled his knife quickly. He couldn’t be certain of the intentions of the men coming his way; for all he knew some of them were planning on hiding out here behind the generator, and if that happened, he’d have to try to fight them off with his small folding blade.
He’d die, of course, but he’d die fighting.
He was glad to see a row of three-foot-high bushes growing down the length of the west wall to the back porch, giving him some cover to the west if he tucked himself into a ball. This he did, and seconds later he heard the light beat of approaching boots over the hum of the big device in front of him. Staying as low as he could, he tried to widen his eyes to take in as much of the minimal light as possible, and he waited.
But he did not have to wait for long. In the back lawn off his right shoulder he heard motion as multiple sets of boots, still moving quietly, began passing his position. Court lowered as close to the ground as he could get, and as he did four dark-clad gunmen passed the generator heading around to the back of the villa. Just before they disappeared from view, the two who had been approaching from the barn met up with them, increasing their total strength to six operators.
Christ, Court thought. Those guys are going to try to ninja their way into the villa to snatch Fan Jiang, while I just squat here and do my best impersonation of a fucking bush.
But as much as the predicament he’d found himself in pissed him off, he didn’t know what the hell he could do about it.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Yevgeni took the lead in the tactical train as they moved along the rear wall of the villa, using shrubs that grew a few feet from the wall as cover. He took care to place each footstep as close to the wall as possible, knowing the men behind him would follow suit, and this would keep his team out of view of anyone at the back door until he was right on top of them.
When he reached the large rear porch, he stepped up onto it, still careful to move along the wall. He closed on the shallow alcove where the door stood, and upon taking one more step, through his NVGs he saw a PAVN soldier standing there, a rifle held around his neck by a two-point canvas sling.
Even though the light was bad, this sentry clearly sensed something in the dark, just a dozen feet away, and he began raising his weapon at the threat. As he did this he called out, and Yevgeni realized a second soldier stood there in the little alcove, as well.
Yevgeni danced fast to his left to make some room for his teammates, and he fired twice into the first man’s chest, knocking him back against the door and spinning him to the porch before the Vietnamese soldier even thumbed off his weapon’s safety.
Vasily was second in the stack, and he shot the other PAVN infantryman once in the forehead, splashing blood across the whitewashed wooden door.
Sasha and Pyotr raced past Vasily and Yevgeni and knelt over the bodies without saying a word. They grabbed the dead men’s ankles and dragged them off the porch, one on each side, even jumping down themselves to move the men and their weapons silently out of view behind the shrubs.
Just then Mikhail came over the team’s headsets. “Seven for all call signs. Sentry with a flashlight approaching southwest corner of target location in fifteen seconds.”
Before the sniper finished his warning, Yevgeni already had a hand on the rear door latch. Sasha and Pyotr quickly retook their positions as the third and fourth men in the stack, and then Yevgeni waited for a squeeze on his shoulder, a sign from team leader Vasily to breach.
Court knelt in the bushes by the generator, seventy-five feet away from the back door, and watched the tactical train through his NODs as they disappeared silently inside the villa. They performed the breach competently and quietly, and Court wondered if six men really could make their way through the entire building, grab Fan Jiang, and get out of there without alerting the soldiers on the road and kicking off a raging gun battle. He still thought the prospects for this unlikely, but he had to give them credit for a nice set of opening moves. The nine-man unit killed four men right in front of him, and the remaining God-knows-how-many armed defenders of this property didn’t seem to have a clue anything was going on.
Just then Court saw the beam of a sentry’s flashlight as the man turned to walk up the western portion of the property. Court was out of the beam’s light here behind the generator, and he knew the sentries had shown no interest in checking the bushes and trees for interlopers on their previous passes, so he would be safe if he stayed right here.
But he decided he would not stay safe, and he would not stay here. No, he had to act.
Court had been virtually paralyzed for the past ten minutes, caught in the line of fire of a sniper and then hidden in a ball while a team of commandos kept him pinned down.
But now he moved with purpose, because he had a plan, and he had a target in sight.
The sentry with the flashlight passed the generator fifteen feet from Court’s shoulder and swept his light left and right idly, illuminating swaths of the low grass at the back of the big dilapidated villa.
As soon as he passed, Court rose to his feet but stayed low and began closing on the sentry at a forty-five-degree angle from the man’s right. If his geometry was correct, Court would stay out of the scope of either of the two men lying prone at the canal to the south, as he would be covered by the southwestern corner of the villa and the big trucks parked in the parking area.