“Dragon Two to Dragon Leader. Armed intruders below us.”
Seonwoo scowled. He stood in the eighth floor hallway with Yuh. “Kill them.”
“We are trying! The enemy is—” Gunfire drowned out Yoon’s words.
“Dragon Two! Are you there?”
“S-still here, Dragon….Leader. I am wounded, but I can still fight.”
Seonwoo considered the facts and made a decision. “All Dragons, this is Dragon Leader. Kill the target and anyone with him. Dragon Two, keep those intruders from getting past you. Dragon Seven, press them. Leader, out.”
He looked back at Yuh. “We’re moving.”
“Yes sir.”
They ran down the hallway to the stairway entrance. They heard the gunfire echoing while they closed in on the door. A door ahead of them opened and a man stepped out. Before he could say anything, Seonwoo fired his Uzi from the hip, ripping the man from stomach to throat from a distance of twenty feet. As the bloody figure slumped to the hallway floor, Seonwoo and Yuh ran past him, reaching the stairwell door. After a glance though the window to make sure it was clear, the two charged out onto the landing.
Below them, Seonwoo saw blueish smoke hiding the stairwell below the eighth floor. He felt his throat begin to burn. “Dragon Two! What is happening?”
No answer.
Seonwoo stifled a curse and snarled at Yuh. “Up the stairs!”
“But Sergeant Yoon and—”
“Dead or almost. Now move.”
“Smoke below!”
Danielle glanced down and saw the smoke filling the stairwell wafting up the shaft. “It’s my people!”
They were between the ninth and tenth floors, DuPree on the landing between floors, Casey and Halverstaff on the stairs and Danielle on the tenth floor landing. The sporadic gun battle had worn away both their nerves and their ammunition.
DuPree saw two armed men racing up the stairs from the eighth and opened fire, sending a dozen 4.7mm rounds downrange. Some struck the railing, but the rest hit the trailing man in the leg, hip, chest, and arm. The combatant stumbled sideways, smashed into the wall and buckled at the knees.
“We need to get out of here!” Halverstaff screamed. He turned and ran back up the stairs, bumping into Danielle and knocking her off balance. She stumbled to her left just as gunfire from above struck the floor where she had been standing. The aide screamed as bullets smashed into his left leg and arm, spinning him around in a pirouette as he went down.
Danielle regained her balance in time see three gunmen race across the landing between the eleventh and twelfth floors, firing over the rail in her direction as they ran.
“They’re charging us!” she shouted as she ducked and stepped back under the cover of the landing.
DuPree was forced back from the railing as the man she had just wounded opened fire, despite the amount of blood he was losing. She yelped as hot steel struck her gun hand, and the P-90 fell from her hands.
On the landing above, Danielle changed magazines, pulled the MP5’s bolt back and moved to her right, standing in front of the staircase going up. She heard the men on the landing above, heading for the stairs that would take them down to the next landing and the staircase she stood in front of.
As soon as she saw the legs on the stairs, she opened fire with her MP5 on full auto. Sparks flew as the steel railing was pummeled by a number of bullets. Enough of them ripped into the enemy’s legs to take them down, sending both men tumbling to the landing, twenty feet from Danielle.
The third North Korean dropped from the landing above onto Danielle’s landing. The soldier landed off-balance, his hand slamming into the rail. His Skorpion machine pistol flew out of his hand and disappeared over the rail.
She swung her MP5 around and pulled the trigger, but the “click” of the hammer falling on an empty chamber sent a sharp adrenaline jolt through her system.
Her intended target went for the pistol in his belt. Danielle hurled the MP5 at him and the spinning machine gun struck the gunman in the arm with an audible crack. The man’s eyes to “widened in pain as his pistol went flying out of his hand. His expression morphed into to hardened determination as he pulled a dagger from a belt sheath.
Danielle was scared shitless. Fear. She had her SOCOM on her hip, but the knife-wielder was only seven feet away and he would be on her before she could draw and fire.
Her hand went for her pistol anyway.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
By the time they reached the fifth floor, the trio of OUTCASTs couldn’t see anything due to of the smoke. They slowed to a crawl, staying low as they moved up the stairs to the landing between the fifth and sixth floors. Without the masks, the smoke would have burned their lungs, as some of the chemicals that made up the smoke — Zinc chloride and chlorosulfuric acid — were toxic to humans.
With visibility reduced to only a couple of feet, they listened hard for the enemy as they moved forward, keeping the wall on their right as the team advanced.
When Tanner felt the corner where the two walls met, he heard shuffling, coughing and gasping. He aimed the MP5 in the direction of the noise and opened fire, moving the German-made weapon back and forth to widen the bullet sweep. Liam followed with a shorter volley of his own, as did Naomi. They heard a grunt and at least two people crashing down the stairs.
Tanner slid his feet across the landing floor until he felt a body with his feet. He pointed the MP5 down and knelt. The body was Asian, and from the bloody chest and unblinking eyes, he was dead. A MAC-10 was clutched in his dead hands. Still, Tanner pulled the weapon from the slack fingers, tossed it across the landing, and pressed his fingers to the man’s neck. There was no pulse. He stood and pressed forward again. “One down,” he said softly.
He saw another pair of legs and went to the head, kicking away a Skorpion machine pistol as he did so. He checked for the second Asian’s pulse. “Two down.”
Stepping past the body and starting up the stairs, the smoke was beginning to thin out, but was still a hazard. He heard coughing ahead of him. Near the rail and the top of the stairs, he took two more steps up and the smoke thinned just as a red-eyed man leapt at him from the landing above.
The knife-wielding fanatic took a step forward, but a hand gripped his other leg by the ankle and yanked. Danielle’s hand grabbed her pistol and pulled it clear of the holster. She saw Halverstaff, face twisted up in pain, but with an expression of determination, pull hard on the North Korean’s leg with his good hand. The commando hissed something and stomped down on Halverstaff’s wrist with his free leg; there was a sickening crunch as the wrist shattered under the blow.
But it gave Danielle the precious seconds she needed. She brought the pistol up and fired twice. Both .45 slugs slammed into the man’s chest with audible thuds. The man staggered and blood spread across his shirt. Still, he didn’t go down.
She adjusted her aim upward and fired twice more. This time, both rounds slammed into the attacker’s face, one in the mouth, the second right above the nose, both exploding out the back of his head. The nearly headless man collapsed instantly, knife still tightly gripped in his fist.
Danielle heard scraping from the landing above her and saw movement from the two men she had wounded in the legs. She turned and bolted up the stairs, taking them three at a time. She reached the landing just as one of the opponents, leaving a blood trail from his crawl, grabbed the MAC-10. Before he could swing the blocky submachine gun, Danielle fired twice, both slugs erasing most of the man’s face and dropping him hard. She swung her pistol toward the second foe, but from the way the man’s head was twisted, he was already dead from a broken neck.