Suddenly the crackle of rifle fire kicked off from the east. This told her either she’d been spotted somehow in the darkness, or else the Vietnamese army was engaging her task force members through the windows of the house. Not wanting to take a chance that she was under fire, she dove around the corner, tucking herself between the generator and the western wall of the villa.
Behind her Ruslan and Mikhail began firing their suppressed weapons; she looked back to the canal and could see the flashes from their muzzles as they engaged the numerically superior force by the road.
The battle raged on inside, as well. Even though she still couldn’t hear the sounds of Anna team’s rifles, it was obvious they were in the heat of a close-quarters war, and it was also obvious there was a huge chance they were going to kill Fan Jiang in the melee unless they watched what the fuck they were doing.
She worried that this op was disintegrating around her, and she wondered if there was some way she could get to Fan Jiang before the battle on the ground floor did.
She looked up at the wall above her. Through her NVGs she could see that the third-floor window, twenty feet above her head, was cracked open.
An idea came to her quickly. “Anna One, this is Sirena. Be advised. I’m going to make entry on a top-floor window in the southwest corner of the property. I’ll keep you updated on my location as able.”
She heard no response from the team inside the villa, but she knew they had their hands full. They were tier-one professionals; so long as they heard her she felt confident they wouldn’t accidentally shoot her when they made it upstairs.
She holstered her weapon, silencer and all, leapt up off the generator, grabbed on to the thick vines just below a decorative edge a few feet below the second-story window, and yanked herself up using just her upper body. Her feet swung in the air below her as her hands let go of the vines; she flew upwards, grabbed on to the windowsill of the second-floor window, and heaved herself up again.
Zoya scaled the corner of the three-story villa as the gunfire increased, both inside the villa and on the other side of the property. She moved as fast as she could, racing against time to find Fan Jiang before it was too late.
Court sat in the bushes with his back to the western wall of the big villa and his right shoulder against the porch up to the back door. His head was low enough that no one coming out the door on his right would be able to see him, but if someone exited the building via the back — with Fan Jiang in tow, perhaps — Court would see them from behind as they stepped off the porch onto the ground.
A dead PAVN infantryman lay here in the vegetation with him; the man’s eyes were rolled all the way back, a bullet hole marred his forehead, and a massive wound hinged his skull open at the back of his head. It was a sickening sight but something Court was trained to ignore, so he concentrated his attention on the sound of the battle in the house behind him.
He’d wanted to make sure the attacking force got busted in the act of raiding the house, and his plan had worked, but now he wondered if this shoot-out just might get Fan Jiang killed. Court thought it was certainly possible, and if it happened it would be his fault, since he was the one who exposed the attackers as they were in the middle of their stealthy infiltration of the site.
But what the hell could he do about it except wait here and hope a couple of the assaulters rescued Jiang alive and came through this door while making their escape?
He looked left and right in his NODs, and then he scanned up to see if any light was coming from windows on the southern side of the villa. To his astonishment he saw a figure effortlessly scaling the wall above the generator. The operator was clearly going for the same window Court had planned on entering originally, but this guy was doing it faster than Court himself could have executed the climb.
Who the hell is that?
Court sat there in amazement for an instant, and then his head cleared; he swiveled the Galil rifle around quickly, lined up the iron front post sight on the head of the target, and put his finger on the trigger.
But he just kept it there.
Was this the right move? He’d drop a Russian Spetsnaz officer, assuming that’s who this was, in a hot second if it meant grabbing the USA’s biggest intelligence coup since the inception of the People’s Republic of China.
But unlike the other guys in the villa, this one operator was not involved in the gun battle, and he was moving covertly towards his objective. Court realized slowly that he should be rooting for this little guy climbing the wall, hoping like hell he was the one who made it to Fan Jiang first instead of those gun monkeys shooting the hell out of the ground floor of the building.
If Court wanted his target to make it alive out the back door of the property, this spider monkey on his left was his best shot.
Court would then just shoot the spider monkey in the back when he and Jiang exited.
Court cocked his head now and rubbed his eyes, shoving his finger between his face and the eyecups of the night vision binos taped to his ball cap to do so. He only had a second or two to focus on the climber, but he saw the body shape of the operator. Slightly wider hips, a full chest under the raincoat.
In that brief moment he realized he was looking at a woman.
That was weird. Court knew of no tier-one paramilitary force in the world that employed women on their assault teams.
The climber slipped into the window on the third floor, and Court looked back to the western side of the property. He kept silent and still in his hiding spot, his rifle at his shoulder.
Woman or not, he still planned to shoot the operator if she left with Fan Jiang. The fact that she was female did not diminish the fact that she was in his way.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
Fan had been lying there frozen in his bed, afraid to move a muscle even though the gunfight below him had been raging for over a minute. For most of the shooting, starting with the crashing automatic fire right below his window, the fight seemed to be at ground level, but it was clear from the progression of the gunfire and the screaming that whoever was attacking this place was now just one floor below him on the stairwell that ran up the center of the villa.
As he squinted his eyes to will away the danger, Fan’s door flew open suddenly and he turned to look. Tu Van Duc stood there wearing a white suit and tie and waving a silver .45 caliber automatic pistol around crazily.
He looked to Fan Jiang like a vision out of one of those Hong Kong action films he watched as a guilty pleasure on his computer.
Behind Tu, one of his men — Fan had been told the man’s name was Cao — had a semiautomatic pistol in each hand, and he held them both up in front of him while he watched the long hallway.
Tu raced into the room and pulled Fan away from his bed and up to his feet.
“Come with me!” Tu screamed in English. His eyes were wild with terror.
Fan saw that the Vietnamese crime boss was nearly as terrified as he was, which only scared Fan more, but the young computer hacker did as he was told. Together the two of them followed Cao down the hall. Tu pulled Fan Jiang by the sleeve of his black hoodie to keep him moving along as they ran past the stairs in the middle of the hall, all the way down to a large musty bathroom at the far end. Here Cao tucked one of his pistols in his underarm so he could open a small closet, pull out a plastic bag full of old towels, and then reach to the back wall. To Fan’s surprise, a hidden panel in the closet opened, and he could see a dark narrow stairwell, with wooden steps leading steeply down. Cao knelt into the closet and immediately began descending while Tu pushed Fan, urging him onward. Fan stepped in and found himself fighting claustrophobia almost instantly, and when Tu pulled the wall closed behind him to hide the entrance, Fan realized he could not see at all. The leader of the Wild Tigers did not turn on a light; instead he just shoved and shoved from behind as Fan began descending, doing his best to fight his welling panic.