And if his geometry was wrong, Court was pretty sure he’d get shot in the back.
Court arrived within striking distance, and the sentry never heard a sound other than the humming diesel generator. Court took him from behind, closing off his windpipe with his left forearm, pulling up and tight, lifting the man violently off the ground. Simultaneously he shoved his four-inch blade hilt-deep into the sentry’s ribs from behind, jerking it hard to the right as blood poured over Court’s hand.
The man went limp, and Court let him drop to the ground.
Quickly he picked up the flashlight, turned it off, and dropped it in his pocket, then dragged the dead sentry backwards into the nearby shrubs.
Once down in the cover, Court took the rifle off the sentry’s body and quickly inspected the weapon. It was a Galil ACE, an Israeli-made rifle that he wasn’t trained on, but one he knew functioned much like the American M4, with which he was incredibly familiar.
He dropped the magazine and checked the bolt, finding the weapon was loaded with thirty rounds, and then he flipped off the safety and put the weapon in fully automatic mode. After a quick neck roll and a deep breath, he stood up to a crouch and began moving quickly through the shrubs along the wall towards the back door.
Just like that, the equation had changed, not just for Court Gentry, but for the Vietnamese, for this mystery team of paramilitaries, and even for Fan Jiang himself.
Everything was different now, because the Gray Man had a gun.
And as he neared the back door, he pointed his big unsuppressed weapon at the ground in front of him and placed his finger on the trigger.
The Zaslon force had successfully breached the three-story villa without making a sound, and now they moved in their train through a well-lit back hallway, closing on the sound of voices in a large room at the eastern end of the building. Vasily was fourth in line now; he and Sasha had cleared an empty storage room on their left, and now they all moved together, anticipating action ahead but careful to avoid any engagement until everyone was up close and had the room blanketed with complete fields of fire.
Vasily had hoped to find a staircase in the back of the house so he could begin a top-down clearing of the villa; experience had shown him that hostages and VIPs were normally protected vertically, meaning they were nearly always kept on or near the highest floor of a structure. But when the Russian officer found no way up at the rear of the villa, he realized he would not be able to clear this place without engaging the group of men talking to one another in the main front room. Still, with the Russians’ suppressed weapons, their tactics, and a little good fortune, Vasily felt confident he and his team could eliminate the men directly in front of them quietly without alerting the entire property.
After that he would find a stairwell to lead them up where, he assumed, Fan Jiang was being held.
He moved himself and the three men in front of him to the right-hand side of the wall, turned around to the members of his team behind him, and motioned for the last two in the stack to move to the left side of the wall to widen the coverage of the big room ahead when they made it to the doorway.
With hand signals he indicated he wanted a “wall flood,” a room-clearing tactic that had half the team pushing into the room to the right, while the other half went left. By staying along the walls all the way to the corners, the six-man unit could bring a great amount of suppressed rifle fire on the room with speed, hopefully fast enough to squelch any hostile from firing back and alerting the men outside.
Vasily was still in the process of giving this silent order, and a portion of his team was still in the process of focusing on their commander instead of on the threats ahead, when the entire dynamic of the operation changed in the space of a single heartbeat.
Just outside the back door, only twenty-five feet from the rear man in the stack there in the well-lit hallway, someone opened fire with a fully automatic assault rifle.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
It was a short burst, but impossibly loud in the still of the night. Everyone within a half mile of the villa would have heard it and identified it for what it was, and virtually everyone within a half mile, Vasily felt certain, had a gun of their own.
Vasily had no idea what had happened; he didn’t have anyone positioned back there. But all surprise was lost — any pretense of a covert entry just went out the window. The men in the rear of his formation spun around at the sound of gunfire, while the men in front began rushing up the hall, trying to close on the big room before the entire team was caught in the hallway, in the center of a “fatal funnel.”
Vasily ran with Andrei on his left, just behind Sasha and Yevgeni. The group was momentarily divided in their reaction to the threat when two Vietnamese men in civilian clothing appeared from the main room. They both carried shotguns, holding them waist high, and their eyes widened when they saw the big, wet, dark-clad, huge men with guns, and beards, all wearing night vision equipment stowed high on their heads.
Sasha and Yevgeni opened up with their AKS-74Us, firing in full auto, dropping the first two men, though one fired a single shotgun blast as he fell. The buckshot went straight up into the ceiling, but more gunfire came out of the room at the end of the hall.
Three members of the Zaslon unit arrived in the doorway now. They found themselves face-to-face with a half dozen additional men, most of whom were dropping down behind chairs and couches in the center of a large, high-ceilinged room with peeling wallpaper and wooden flooring. Four of the remaining men were PAVN infantry, the other two were Wild Tigers, and everyone was armed with rifles and shotguns.
The Zaslon men had no time to scan for targets to try to identify Fan Jiang. They fired their suppressed weapons in fully automatic mode, pushing into the room over the dead men in the doorway so that their colleagues behind could aid in the fight, and they did their best to lay waste to all threats in front of them.
The Russians executed their wall flood; Vasily pushed to the right while Arseny and Sasha went left with Yevgeni. Behind them, Pyotr and Andrei took knees in the hall and covered the back door, ready to confront whoever was shooting out there if they came through.
Zoya Zakharova raced across the open ground with her pistol out in front of her, her night vision goggles restricting her peripheral vision but helping navigate her way forward in the moonless night. The fierce gunfight inside the building caused her to leave her cover to attempt entry herself, even though her run risked putting her in the sights of the nearly two dozen PAVN soldiers fifty meters off her right shoulder.
Mikhail and Ruslan were still prone, still behind her on the far side of the canal, and they were scanning the area to the east, ready to open fire on the soldiers as soon as they began moving towards the house. But the Russians wouldn’t press their triggers until they had to. No sniper likes firing at night if he can avoid it, as the resultant flash from his weapon immediately announces his exact position to the enemy.
Zoya hit the southern wall of the villa and called over the tactical interteam radio, begging for a report from the men inside. The gunfire she heard was from shotguns, unsuppressed assault rifles, and handguns, but she knew her task force’s weapons wouldn’t be audible here because of their advanced suppressors.