Kyzinski hurried up to the locked door. His primary weapon was an M-4 carbine — smaller cousin of the M-16— with a highly modified Remington 860 shotgun mounted underneath the carbine's barrel ahead of the curved, banana-clip magazine. He pointed the weapon at the door's lock and squeezed the trigger. The shotgun blast rang off the stone walls; the sixteen-ounce slug smashed through lock and doorknob, splintering the wood beneath. The door flew open and Randall tossed the flashbang through. Both SEALs turned away as the basement beyond flared and dazzled, for an instant brighter than the sun, and a chain of seven deafening explosions thundered from below.
Randall was first down the stone steps. A Hezbollah guerrilla groped blindly on hands and knees. The SEAL put two rounds through his skull, then scanned the rest of the basement. It was filled with crates, barrels, and piles of canvas, but two more solid-looking doors sat side by side in the west wall.
Kyzinski racked the slide on his Masterkey shotgun and took out the lock on the door to the left. Randall banged through the door into the tiny room beyond….
Empty. Horrifyingly, disappointingly, infuriatingly empty.
A single straight-backed chair lay on its side in the middle of the bare stone floor. In one corner was a doubled-over mattress, large rents leaking white ticking, and a glazed stoneware jar, a honeypot, possibly, rested in one corner. A naked bulb dangled from the high ceiling. The bare, windowless room reeked of urine, sweat, and vomit.
He could feel the room's last occupants, but there was no one there now.
Another shotgun blast echoed from next door. An instant later, Kyzinski joined him. "Dry hole, sir. Someone was being held here, and not too long ago, either…. "
"So I see." Kneeling by the wall, he reached out and lightly touched some crude scratch marks on the stone. Someone had used a small chunk of rock, or an eating utensil, possibly, to scratch a terse handful of numerals and letters.
T WAITE C OF E 6-20-87
"Let's get the hell out of here, Kizzy. There's no one home. No one we want to meet, anyway."
"Aye aye, sir!"
They pounded back up the stairs, then out the front door, ducking low as they emerged into the night.
Gunfire stuttered and cracked, as muzzle flashes stabbed from the darkness. "Alfa Two, Alfa One!" Gallagher called over the tactical channel. "We've got tangos coming from the west buildings!"
"Alfa Leader, this is Alfa Two," Randall called over the command channel, now that his Motorola was out of the stone-bound basement. "Dry hole. The packages are not here, repeat, not here."
"Copy, Alfa Two," Gallagher replied. "Rendezvous at Objective Kentucky."
Kentucky was the front gate, but that was going to be a problem. More and more guerrillas were emerging from cover, laying down a steady, vicious fire that swept the open courtyard. A green-lit figure moved behind a pile of wooden crates twelve meters away, trying to get a good position under cover from which to open fire. Randall flicked the selector on his H&K to full auto and hosed the crates, sending splinters and fragments hurtling as near-silent 9mm rounds sliced through them. AK-47 rifles, still wrapped in plastic and Cosmoline, spilled onto the ground, as the lurking Hezbollah gunman toppled out from behind his less-than-adequate shelter and lay shrieking on the ground.
Randall tapped a mercy round into the man's head as he ran past.
"Alfa, Starbase," the command channel voice called. "You've got shooters on the wall, shooters on the wall to the west!"
"Tell us something we don't know," Kyzinski replied. "Damn it, Starbase, talk to us when we're not busy," Gallagher added. An explosion lit up the darkness.
Randall zigzagged across the courtyard toward the front gate, dropping to cover behind a stack of oil drums as bullets snapped and sang above his head. Rising, he aimed at a muzzle flash on the west wall and sent a burst winging toward it. "Come on, Ski!" he called over the tactical channel.
"Cover fire!" Kyzinski called back. "Moving!"
Kyzinski dashed across the courtyard as Randall put down a covering fire, driving two tango gunmen in the west to the ground. On the south wall, a Hezbollah tango suddenly stood on tiptoe, then toppled over, cut down by an unheard bullet. Hernendez and Lederer were still on guard, picking off tangos when they could get a clear shot.
At the front gate, at his back, he heard the loud, shrill whoosh of a LAW being fired, followed an instant later by a loud explosion. Glancing back, he saw the fireball, dazzling against the night, momentarily overwhelming his night-sight optics. The tango convoy with the BDRM-60 must have reached the top of the hill; QM2 Van Dorn had just taken it out with his Light Antitank Weapon, a single-shot, shoulder-launched weapon effective against all but the heaviest armor.
He turned back as Kyzinski dropped to cover behind the oil drums. "Getting a mite hot out tonight," Ski observed, dropping a dry magazine and snapping home a fresh one.
"Just a bit." Randall loosed a string of three-round bursts at muzzle flashes and green shadows. Some of the tangos were using red tracer ball ammunition, which helped pinpoint their positions.
It also confirmed how damned many there were of them. Where were all these people coming from? Still firing, he began backing toward the fortress's main gate. Kyzinski and Hughes covered him.
"Starbase, Alfa leader," Gallagher's voice called. "It's a trap! There are no packages, repeat, no packages for pickup, and we are encountering heavy force!"
"Alfa, Starbase. Copy. Abort the mission. Proceed to primary extraction point for pickup and evacuation."
Randall reached Gallagher's position, sheltered behind a pile of rubble and sandbags. The gate was wide-open, the BDRM and a canvas-covered truck burning wildly in the night outside.
"Ah, that's negative on primary LZ, Starbase." Gallagher was shouting now, as a heavy machine gun opened up somewhere out there in the night. "We have Sierra Alfas crawling all over it! We are falling back to secondary LZ for extraction. I say again, we are proceeding to LZ Sacramento for pick-up. Over!"
"Copy that, Alfa Leader. Disengage and evade to LZ Sacramento for extraction."
The primary LZ, designated LZ Green Bay and designed to facilitate pickup with rescued hostages in tow, was only a few hundred yards north of the fort, on a level area partway down the hill, but Randall could see what Gallagher had been talking about. The whole north side of the hill was alive with muzzle flashes and moving figures.
Sierra Alfas. That was the phonetic code name for Syrian Army troops. They were going to just love that back in Washington.
"We need air cover here," Gallagher went on, consulting a small, plastic map pulled from his pocket. "Coordinates one-seven-three-five-five by two-zero-zero-seven-one-niner!"
"Roger that, Alfa. We'll pass it up the line."
Pass it up the line. Meaning that the Pentagon REMFs would be chewing over the SEALs' request for an air strike.
An explosion detonated just outside the gate… probably a rocket-propelled grenade.
"We're not getting out that way," Gallagher said, "and we'd better not sit on our asses waiting for the folks back home to bail us out."
"Over the wall?" Randall asked.
"That's a roger. Same way we came in." Gallagher touched his microphone. "Alfa Team, Alfa Leader! We're going over the south wall! First Squad provide cover. Second Squad, go! Rendezvous at LZ Sacramento! Let's do it!"
"Let's go, Alfa Two," Randall added. "South wall. Watch your fire, Longarm, we're coming over the top."
"Copy, Alfa Two," Hernendez replied. "We're watching for you."
SEAL extraction tactics had been worked out through years of experience, and constant training, and they began putting those lessons into practice now.