He used his arm to sweep the First Lady from the hallway into the chapel. “I need you to join Big Guy for a minute,” he said. Alone now in the hallway, Jonathan squatted to a rice paddy prone position, leveled his MP7 at the door from the yard, and waited. It didn’t take long.
Unit One showed no sense of urgency as he pushed the big panel open and stepped inside. He pushed the door shut again, and as he looked up, he saw Jonathan and froze.
Jonathan triple-tapped him, two to the chest and one to the forehead, in the space of a heartbeat. The target fell straight back, arms outward, and he flung his AK high. Jonathan cringed as it crashed to the thick wooden floor, half expecting it to discharge on impact. It didn’t.
A second or two later, every light in the world turned on, igniting the yard in brilliant yellow, which flooded the hallway through the windows. In the distance, an alarm bell rang. It sounded like one of those rotary jobs that he used to hear in school.
Into his radio, Jonathan said, “Now would be a really good time to announce that you’re finished.”
Big Guy materialized out of the darkness behind him. Scared the shit out of him. “What the hell just happened?” He glanced down the hall and saw the body. “Oh, you shot a guy. Cool. You know, there’s a lot of shit in that chapel. They’ve got Stingers, mines, grenades, rifles. Some pretty advanced shit. All of it US military. Even saw a couple of mortar rounds, though I didn’t see any tubes. KFB, baby.” KFB was ka-fucking-boom.
“How big a charge did you place?”
“Big enough. Daisy-chained a couple of GPCs in all the right places. You wanted a crater, right?”
Jonathan thought he heard a hint of teasing in Boxers’ voice, but there was no way to be sure. Big Guy was a professional, first and last, and even his lust for big bangs wouldn’t cause him to create more havoc than was necessary.
“Where’s Yelena?”
“Stuck in the doorway,” she said. There was a tremor in her voice that matched the one in her hands.
Boxers moved aside to let her pass. “Oops,” he said.
Jonathan pulled her close. “Same drill as before. Hand on my back. Big Guy, I’ve got point, you make a lady sandwich.”
“Yup.”
Jonathan more sensed than saw a lot of new movement in the compound. The bad guys had sounded the alarm. That blew the element of surprise, but only one part of it. They still didn’t know what was going on. Given the fact that the transfer of explosives was clearly being made tonight, they probably thought that was the focus. The wild card was how nervous would that make the Mishins’ guards. Nervous guards either shot too early or ran away too early. There seemed to be no middle ground. Jonathan was going with ran away, if only because it better served his priorities.
Jonathan led the way to the door that would take them down the passageway to the cell blocks. The entry door was unlocked. It made sense, he supposed, that the internal doors would be unlocked. After all, Saint Stephen’s wasn’t a prison anymore. Soon, it would be hotel rooms and cocktail lounges, if the owners had their way.
Jonathan predicted that the value of the real estate was about to drop precipitously.
By Jonathan’s estimation, the greatest hazard lay directly ahead, at the end of this passageway. To go straight would be to take them directly to the cell block that served as the barracks. That meant that everyone who had just been rousted would be heading straight at them. Two and a half against many became far more daunting odds when the confrontation came head-to-head out in the open.
With his NVGs flipped up and out of the way to accommodate for the wash of light, Jonathan noted in his peripheral vision just what terrible shape this place was in. The once whitewashed walls now looked cancerous with peeling paint, and the stone walls radiated cold.
“I’m picking up the pace,” Jonathan said. He accelerated. If he could get to the end of the passageway and turn to the right, then they’d have a chance at remaining invisible. If they couldn’t — if they got caught here in the middle of the complex, they would have to fight for every step.
Jonathan called over his shoulder, “Seriously, Big Guy, how far away do we need to be before you push the button?”
“Farther than this,” Boxers said. The problem with pressure waves was that they didn’t give much of a damn about twists and turns and hallways. Physics was all about straight lines, and despite the fact that they’d covered an easy hundred yards on foot, they were still only twenty-five yards from ground zero when they initiated the charge.
Jonathan and his team were still twenty-five feet from the end of the hallway when the door on the opposite end burst open to reveal would-be warriors stumbling out of bed and into action. A few were mostly dressed, but most were still assembling themselves. In Jonathan’s mind, somebody was beating these guys to quarters, but they were still thirty seconds from being fully awake.
And every one of them was armed with a rifle. It was an offense that carried the death penalty. In a dynamic assault like this one, when the good guys were so vastly outnumbered by bad guys, there was no time to tell bad guys to drop their weapons and zip-cuff them into submission. The secret to survival lay in convincing the OpFor — opposing force — that the benefit of surrendering outweighed the benefit of fighting. It was a lesson hard learned by every first wave of defenders.
The first group of three or four hadn’t even seen their enemy when Jonathan mowed them down. He flipped the selector to full-auto with his thumb and one-handed the MP7 as if it were a pistol, launching a full forty-round mag into the open door. Blood and tissue flew and people fell, and he felt another piece of his soul peel away. Intent notwithstanding, he’d just murdered those men. He told himself that given the chance, they’d have done the same for him.
But they hadn’t. They didn’t even know they were in danger when they died. Jonathan fingered the mag release and even as the empty was hitting the floor, he had a fresh one in and a round chambered.
As the bodies stacked at the doorway, panic spread to those behind. Jonathan recognized the ripple of fear and confusion as an opportunity to buy real time. The most terrified person in the world was the first survivor behind a line of people who had been killed. Splashed by blood, and maybe even cut by splintering bone, the will to fight evaporated. The effect is contagious, but the returns diminish as the line builds.
That meant that Jonathan faced a unique opportunity to freeze these assholes in their tracks.
“Yelena, get on the floor.”
She dropped.
The first man to die had blocked the door open, and through that open door, some brave souls were laying out a steady volume of fire. It was random and unaimed, but supersonic projectiles were supersonic projectiles. Even the ones that didn’t directly impact flesh fragmented when they impacted the stone walls, and those tiny bits of shrapnel could be every bit as deadly as the bullets that sponsored them.
Rather than shout above the din, Jonathan keyed his mike. “I’m going to frag them,” he said. “Cover me when I open the door all the way.”
“Got it,” Boxers said. Covering fire had less to do with hitting targets than it did with making them take cover and say a prayer before looking up again.
Jonathan half-carried, half-dragged Yelena to the end of the passageway, and slung her to the right, into the cross hall and out of the line of fire.
The incoming fire had died significantly as Jonathan approached the door. He didn’t know if they’d lost their nerve, or if they were just changing out mags, but now they would pay for whatever caused their delay. As he pulled an M67 fragmentation hand grenade from its pouch, he hurried to the half-open door and hit it hard with his shoulder to bounce off anyone who might have been poised on the other side.