Fan realized he was in a spiral staircase when his head hit the wall. He descended with the winding stairs, and soon he was level with the second floor of the building.
The cracking of gunfire had dissipated somewhat, but as the men got down to the ground floor, Fan heard a fresh energy to the battle that was now being fought above him.
Fan realized this odd stairwell went all the way down into the basement without stopping at any other floor. He thought it must have been some sort of secret escape route built by, or at least used by, the Vietcong who operated here fifty years earlier.
The basement was a small dark space with little in it other than standing water, a foul stench, and the splashing and scratching sounds of rats in the corner.
Here Cao jabbed both his weapons in his belt, then knelt and slid three cinder blocks out of the wall. By doing this he created a hole only three feet high and a foot and a half wide.
Cao said something to Tu, who immediately translated for Fan Jiang.
Tu said, “Cao will go first. Fan, you are in the middle. Hurry!”
Cao crawled into the black hole.
Fan knelt down but hesitated. He turned back to Tu and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I am afraid of small spaces.”
Tu snapped back, “And I am afraid of getting killed by the Americans! Hurry!”
“Americans? How do you know?”
“Because they aren’t Chinese. They must be Americans.”
Fan looked at the tunnel again, then back to the leader of the Wild Tigers. “Where does this lead?”
“There is a barn behind the house. It leads there. We can run into the rice paddies and hide in the trees until the Americans leave.”
“Why don’t we just wait here? They won’t find the entrance above, and we can just—”
Tu Van Duc pointed his silver automatic in Fan Jiang’s face. He said, “I will go, and I will not leave you behind alive so that you can reveal where I went.”
Fan turned back to the darkness and began crawling, his breathing audible and labored as his chest tightened.
The Zaslon unit had been in near-constant enemy contact for the past minute and a half, but they’d cleared the ground floor and half of the second floor, and now were outside a door at the end of a hallway. Yevgeni, Sasha, and Pyotr stacked at the closed door, while Vasily, Andrei, and Arseny moved up the stairwell. The team was relying on their two-man overwatch outside to notify them of any hostiles breaching the villa below; just because they’d killed everything that moved on the ground floor didn’t make things safe for them down there, since the soldiers outside near the road could always come in and reload the building with more hostiles.
Still, with only half a dozen men, Vasily knew he didn’t have the personnel to leave men on the ground floor.
Vasily had heard the call that Sirena had entered through a window on the top floor, and for this reason only he waited before going up the stairs. He called her on the interteam radio, but she did not immediately answer, and he assumed she was probably moving silently.
As he waited a moment, he turned to watch Yevgeni lead his three-man team into the room up the hall. Anna Two gave a squeeze on the shoulder of Sasha, the breach man in the group, and he kicked in the door, then pushed in with his weapon high.
Four Vietnamese men lay in wait, kneeling behind upturned tables across the room. They held rifles and shotguns pointed at the door, and they opened fire on the breachers.
Sasha moved away from the doorway so his teammates could help him engage, and while doing so he fired at the gunmen in front of him. His burst caught one man in the shoulder, but just after this a shotgun blast hit him in the knee, buckling the appendage and sending Sasha sprawling to the floor.
Yevgeni and Pyotr both riddled all remaining Wild Tigers with bullet holes as they entered the room.
Sasha lay facedown on the wooden floor by the doorway. From his position by the stairs Vasily could tell Sasha’s leg had been severed.
Just as Vasily started to move to help, another door on the opposite side of the hall flew open, and a Wild Tiger with a snub-nosed revolver appeared, the gun in his hand spitting smoke and fire.
The leader of the Russian SVR paramilitaries shot the man through the neck, sending him tumbling back into the room.
With constant gunfire below her, Zoya Zakharova stepped out of an empty bedroom on the third floor of the villa and looked out into a long hallway. Three lights in the ceiling ran down the length of the hall. She aimed at the one closest to her and pulled the trigger of her Glock. The weapon thumped as the suppressor absorbed much of the noise from the subsonic ammo, and the light blew out.
Quickly she shot out the other two lights in the hall, then pulled her NVGs back down over her eyes and stepped out, still covering her way forward with her weapon.
“Man down! Man down!” The call came from Vasily, spoken over the sound of close gunfire.
Things had clearly gone to hell below her, so all she could do now was hope that her target was safe, up here with her. She continued up the hall quietly but quickly, knowing time was not her ally.
Court heard shotgun and rifle fire one floor directly above where he sat next to the porch at the back door. Along with this, the chattering fire of multiple guns on the other side of the villa told him the snipers by the canal were probably having an incredibly busy and an incredibly bad evening.
He scanned around with his NODs while he sat there and was surprised to catch a hint of movement on the far side of the barn, fifty yards southwest of his position. He aimed the Galil at the motion but lowered it when he realized the action there was no threat to him.
Three figures ran from the back of the barn and over a large open field towards the line of trees that separated the compound’s property from a large flooded rice paddy on the other side.
Court cranked up the magnification on the night vision binoculars attached to his ball cap. Through the ten-power magnification, he could see the three men as if they were only fifteen or twenty feet away.
Court squinted as he tried to make out faces in the dim green glow of the NODs. The man in front turned back around to wave the others onward. He was young and fit with a beard and mustache, and he carried two handguns. The man in the middle was the smallest; his hands were empty, and he faced away. And the man in back wore an ostentatious white suit and carried a shiny automatic pistol.
Court scanned back to the man in the center and tracked him for a moment. Suddenly the small figure stumbled, then turned back to look at the man right behind him.
The American sitting against the wall of the villa sixty yards away saw his face clearly.
Softly Court spoke aloud now. “I’ll be damned. Fan fucking Jiang.”
No doubt about it. Court Gentry had positive ID on his target. The Chinese man wore blue jeans and a black hoodie, and he was running for his life with the two men armed only with pistols. Fan didn’t look like he had much experience running in a muddy field, or running at all, for that matter. And the men around him looked like Vietnamese gangsters. The guy in the back looked like he could be a serious player in the organization with his suit and tie and his shiny Colt .45.
Court looked around, quickly making sure there was no one else out here on the lawn, then he launched to his feet and took off across the property as fast as he could.