One lobbed the grenade into the room underhanded. Two, Three, and Four stepped to the edges of the cabin to avoid the blast. The grenade left the leader’s hand and disappeared into the dark, but the sound of the missile’s impact with a hard surface came too early. As the leader made to turn away from the door, the grenade reappeared in his night vision goggles, bounced out of the cabin, and landed in the snow in front of the door.
Fortunately for the Libyans, all four saw the sputtering grenade in time. They dove for cover, either to the snowy ground or around the edges of the cabin. The explosion whited out the goggles of the three men facing in the weapon’s direction, and a fourth man was hit in the elbow and knocked down by a small piece of shrapnel. Collecting himself quickly, the leader ripped his now-useless goggles from his eyes, returned to the edge of the door, and entered, firing into the dark. Number Two and then Three followed, but within two seconds the leader’s shout made the others stop dead in their tracks.
“Mantrap!”
SEVENTEEN
Moments before Gentry had dropped exhaustedly to his sleeping bag for the night, he’d slid the large wall of rusty mesh to its position two feet inside the front door. The seven-foot-high contraption weighed over two hundred pounds and slid along a three-foot track on the floor. On each end of the fence there was a hinged wing, and each wing locked to a clasp on either side of the door. This effectively created a barricade capable of slowing down a breaching team, forcing them to bottleneck at the most dangerous point of any breach, the doorway. The mantrap was here when Court inherited the cache, and he had not placed much value in its capabilities due to the fact that it could easily be blown apart with explosives or knocked over with a battering ram or even a few serious blows from a boot heel, but as he leapt out of his sleeping bag to a crouch after the grenade went off out the front door, he immediately knew the rusty old barricade had just saved his soundly sleeping ass.
Frantically he kicked the two duffels of gear by his sleeping bag back down the hole to the tiny basement. He grabbed the Brügger & Thomet and fired a full magazine at the front door with one hand before sliding down into the hole. Once in the six-foot-deep cellar, he reached above and pulled the floorboard lid over himself.
Number Three knelt over bloody snow to the left of the shack’s entrance. The grenade fragment had hit him squarely in the elbow and passed through both meat and bone. But he was a disciplined soldier; he made little noise and quickly packed a handful of snow on the wound, wincing only with the shock of cold on skin, because he could not yet feel the pain he knew was soon to come.
Number One ignored his injured man as he ordered Two to set the fuse on his entire stock of breaching explosives and toss them through the doorway. A few seconds later a tissue-box-sized block of Semtex came to rest at the edge of the mantrap’s slide rail on the floor. The three uninjured Libyans at the front of the shack turned to run, and numbers Two and Four each grabbed Three under an arm and lifted him off the ground as they scrambled for cover.
It was quiet in the black forest for a few seconds. The only sounds to be heard were the gentle hiss of snow-flakes striking pine needles and their fallen brethren already on the ground, and the panting of the kill squad from Tripoli, now tucked tightly behind a fallen oak.
The black night and the soft sounds were replaced with a white flash and an earsplitting explosion that made the earlier hand grenade blast sound like the pop of a champagne cork. The doorway to the cabin, from the floor below to the slat roof above, blew to pieces, and lumber and fresh pine trees blew forward, landing as far away as one hundred feet from the building.
Bits of burning debris floated down with the snowfall through the pines as One, Two, and Four penetrated the wreckage of the cabin. Each man fired a burst or two as they entered the torn hole in the front wall. One went to the right, Two to the left, and Four moved straight through the small building. They used the light from burning fabric and paper to negotiate their footfalls over a blown-down metal fence, a smashed bookcase and table, several boxes and cooking utensils, and myriad unrecognizable objects.
Once the three were sure there was no one alive in either the main room or in the little bathroom, they began kicking over and through the debris on the floor, searching for the scorched and shredded body that surely must lie among the ruins. Five checked in to confirm all was quiet at the back of the cabin as the three Libyans inside began to worry. It was a small shack. Even in the deep shadows from the fires, it took less than ten seconds to verify there was no body to be found.
One looked to the ceiling. In a second he determined there was neither a loft nor an attic. Slowly he looked down to his feet.
“There’s a trapdoor here. Find it.”
Two did find it, next to the overturned furnace, after kicking a few coal bricks away. The fires were burning themselves out, so One turned on an electric lantern that had fallen from a shelf but had miraculously survived the explosion. He placed it on the floor next to the trapdoor.
“Careful. He may have set a surprise for us. Unless there is a tunnel through this mountain, he is trapped.”
Two and Four nodded; their confidence grew. The Gray Man was hiding like a rat below them.
Number Five stood behind a thick pine at the back of the structure. Twenty feet in front of him was the padlocked storage shed. It stood five feet high, alongside the cabin, but it was clearly not attached to it. He checked in with the men inside. They were about to lift the trapdoor with a long metal pole. Then they would toss grenades in, follow that with rifle fire, and then finally climb down to cut off their target’s head.
Five was missing all the action. He cursed aloud at the snow around him. His Skorpion waited at the low ready.
Suddenly he heard the coughing of an engine coming to life inside the cabin. No, not inside the cabin. In the storage shed. Just as his eyes moved down to the doors of the shed, a loud boom barked through the forest, the padlock blew forward and off, and the doors flew open wide. Number Five had just begun to lift his submachine gun to his eye when the motor noise screamed, and a large figure launched into the air from the darkened recesses of the small shed.
The young Libyan soldier had never before seen a snowmobile.
The bullet-shaped vehicle crashed back to the ground a few feet in front of him, and he dove to the side, rolling in the snow and slamming his back hard into a fallen stump. He looked up in time to see a human form on the back of the vehicle, leaning forward with a mask on his face and a large pack on his back. The image in his night vision goggles was a blur, and the blur was gone in a single second.
The Libyan scrambled for his submachine gun, but he’d lost it in the fallen needles and accumulating snow. By the time he’d gripped his weapon and lifted it to his face, the black shadow was disappearing over a tiny rise, tearing through snow and shrubbery and small saplings and flinging everything in its path to the left and right of its skids.
“Five! Report!” came One’s scream through the earpiece.
“He’s here! He’s back here! He’s heading up the mountain!”
“Shoot him!”
Five began running up the hill. “Come help me! He’s on a motorcycle with skis!”
The Gray Man knew he had to turn the snowmobile around and go right back down past the hit squad. The forest ended abruptly at a huge rocky wall on the top of the hill. He could perhaps find a place to hide in the woods for a while, but he knew all of Guarda was awake and calling the local constabulary a few kilometers away in Chur. It would take them a while to get there and most of an hour to get a real force in all the way from Davos, but Court had no intention of waiting around for minutes, much less hours.