Over one third of Vasily’s force had been decimated by the Thais and the Chinese… and the motherfucking building seemed to be on fire.
He’d lost his headset somewhere in the pool, but his waterproof handheld walkie-talkie had survived. Into it he said, “Anna One, all signs! We are leaving via the fire escape on the west side. Exfil together. Keep your shape!”
His men rose from cover and began bounding back in retreat, engaging both the Chinese and the smattering of Chamroon men while they attempted to disengage from the fight.
Zoya Zakharova shoved Nattapong Chamroon hard over a stack of tables on the second floor of the building. The wounded man crashed down onto the floor, grabbed at his back and his leg simultaneously, and wailed in pain.
Zoya knelt over him with the gun pointed at his face. “I won’t ask you again!”
“I told you! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Then you and me are going to sit here until you figure it out, or until you burn!”
The two of them were closed off in a large storage closet for the nightclub two floors below the pool, and even though there were no air ducts in this room at all, the gray smoke swirling about made it hard to breathe. Zoya rubbed her eyes hard, smearing eye makeup, and the dark color only made her look more dangerous to her prisoner.
Nattapong screamed now. “My brother! My brother handles the computers! I just handle the girls!”
Zoya said, “Da, you handled me with your nasty fingers right between my legs as we walked up the stairs to the pool, didn’t you?”
“I’m… I’m sorry! It was just a touch!”
Zoya slammed her heel into the man’s bloody knee, and he screamed. “Where is your brother?”
“I… don’t know.”
“After this. After tonight? Where will he go? Where will he hide?”
Nattapong Chamroon cocked his head, thinking over the question. “I… I don’t know for sure.”
Zoya placed the barrel of the gun over Chamroon’s crotch now, and she pulled his mobile phone out of his front pocket. “Why don’t we get him on the phone right now. You will tell him you have been attacked by the Chinese, who are looking for Fan Jiang, and you will tell him they are coming for him next. That will force him to make a move from where he is, and he will take Fan with him as a bargaining chip.”
She handed him the phone, and then she said, “Di chan poot tai dai.” I can speak Thai. It wasn’t true; she’d studied Thai for a grand total of two days, but she was a polyglot with skill and technique at picking up the important components of a new language quickly. And she knew if Nattapong thought she could speak his language, he’d be less likely to try to trick her when talking to his brother.
He cocked his head. “Khoen kauwtsjaaj phom maaj?” He was testing her, asking her if she understood him.
She did not, but she played a hunch on what she thought he was saying. “Ka,” Yes, she said, “but speak English to me.”
Chamroon looked at the smoke filling the room. “The building is burning down! There is no time for this.”
“Then let’s not wait any longer. Call your brother. Find out where he is, where he is going, and no fucking tricks. Khao jai mai?” Do you understand?
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
Vasily moved down a dark and smoke-filled hallway, his team around him. With one hand he held a pistol out in front of him, and with the other he held his walkie-talkie to his mouth. He spoke between coughs. “Anna One for Fantom, how copy?”
Oleg Utkin was standing in front of the Black Pearl in a crowd two hundred strong watching the activity as fire trucks pulled into position and men and women covered with soot continued staggering out the door.
“Loud and clear, Anna One. What is your status?”
“We’re fucked, Fantom! I’ve got one dead, one injured that we are carrying, and two walking wounded. We need to make a hasty exfil down the fire escape, but we can’t see down to ground level from our position. Get to the west side of the building and make sure the alleyway is clear of hostiles!”
“Roger that,” Utkin said, then he crossed the street to the west and peered down the dark alley. In the distance, out of the lights of the intersection, a few attractive young women staggered arm in arm out of the alleyway. He thought they might have been the hookers he saw with Chamroon earlier. Behind them the fire escape was clear, and he saw no one else in the alley.
“Anna One… confirm you are clear to the west.”
Utkin couldn’t be certain, but he wasn’t going any deeper in that alleyway to check it out. No, he’d been here waiting for a report from Zaslon, and now that he had it, so he knew he needed to get clear of the area before the cops started pulling people out of the crowd to ask what they saw. There was an emergency rally point for the Russian task force just two blocks away, and he’d go there.
Vasily came back over the radio. “How the hell could you have checked the alley that fast?”
Fantom snapped back at the macho asshole on the radio. “I said it’s clear. I’ll meet you at rally point Boris. I’ll get the van ready to roll. Out.”
The Chinese asset kneeling between the garbage cans in the alley on the west side of the building had been watching the fire escape for the past fifteen minutes, but other than a group of four half-naked soot-covered women in bare feet, no one had come down. He found this surprising because smoke poured out of the windows of the building, and he’d heard the transmissions from the men fighting on the top floor. There, a wounded but still-in-command Major Xi had announced that the Russians had egressed out of the battle, but the man between the garbage cans had not seen a trace of them.
Suddenly he heard the noise of squeaking metal, several stories above him. Seconds later, he detected movement up there in the darkness. One big dark form, moving very slowly down. It wasn’t until they passed the third-floor landing and started down to the second that he was able to see individual shapes in the mass. Still, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking at.
Finally he realized the men above him were big and Western-looking, he could see weapons among them, and they were carrying one of their number by his shoulders and legs.
The man squatting in the alley pressed the button on his radio.
“This is Yisheng, west side. I have six gweilo descending the fire escape. One is injured.”
The call came quickly. “Yisheng, this is Major Xi. Engage them. You will have to do it alone; we are escaping through the nightclub and still engaging the Thais.”
Yisheng was a Ministry of Defense operative and a former PLA special forces sergeant, and this, plus the fact he had a tactical advantage over the men descending the fire escape, made him confident in taking on the superior number.
But it didn’t matter if he was confident or not. Major Xi worked for Colonel Dai, which meant failure to comply with Xi’s order would mean certain death.
Yisheng sighted his fully automatic weapon on the head of the first man in the line, tracked it for an instant, and wondered if he was about to press a trigger for the last time in his life.
Yisheng opened fire.