It was a damning indictment of the misery he had been through but it represented a reborn, tougher Ryan. As he pulled a cigarette from a crumpled pack in his jeans’ back pocket and fired it up, Kim declined his offer of a smoke. Like the others in the team, she quietly wondered where the young man’s transformation might end.
“Wait, I see something,” Lea said. She was tracking a Jeep Cherokee as it entered the community and drove in the direction of Kruger’s mansion. It pulled up at his property and the doors opened. “Looks like someone’s paying Dirk a visit.”
Four men climbed out of the Jeep and walked to the house. One of them was casually resting a pump-action shotgun on his shoulder. They all had gun holsters. A moment passed and then the door opened and they made their way inside, one of them stopping to spit in a potted palm at the side of the porch.
“Why the extra muscle?” Camacho said. “You think Kruger got word about our arrival in South Africa?”
“Maybe,” Lea said. “Remember, he’s a black-market arms trader. He spends his life with mercs and gunrunners. They could be anyone like that.” She changed the subject. “Everyone familiar with the schematics?”
They were. Alex Reeve over in Washington DC had easily located them online and everyone had studied the house’s blueprints inside out. The only question that remained was if their intel was good and whether or not Kruger really was storing the Sword of Fire in there.
“Things could get out of hand tonight,” Kim said, casting a big sister’s eye at Ryan. “We need to stay focused.”
“Why are you looking at me?”
“Because you’re the only one without any formal military training.”
He scoffed. “I’ve been through more than most soldiers.” He dragged on the end of the cigarette and casually flicked it to the ground. “These days I’m built for fighting.”
Lea laughed out loud.
Ryan looked momentarily hurt but pulled out of it before saying something he would regret. He had presumed his dramatic turnaround would buy him some more credit with his ex-wife, but all she could see was the geek she had first met all those years ago. He didn’t know what it would take for her to take him seriously and these days he didn’t much care. The smartass reply he thought of was already forgotten and the simple smile he gave her turned out to be much more devastating.
“I’m sorry, Ry. That was a stupid thing to say.”
“Forget it. We have work to do.”
Lea gave him a smile, and was pleased to be working with him again. Since reading the shocking truth about her family in the letter left to her in her grandmother’s box, she had been pensive and introspective and it felt good to get back out on a mission. The fact the letter had told her that her grandmother was in fact her sister, and her father had discovered a source of the elixir of life had rocked her world, and getting stuck into another op like this was what she needed more than anything to get her head straight again.
“Right.” Camacho checked his watch. “And on that, Hawke’s team should almost be in China by now.”
Lea huffed and rolled her eyes.
“What, Jack?”
Ryan leaned over to the former CIA man and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial hush, making sure to keep it just loud enough for everyone to hear. “They’re still not talking, old boy.”
“You’re like a couple of stupid teenagers,” Camacho said.
Lea opened her mouth to launch some kind of defense, but before she could utter a word, he spoke again.
“Okay, kids — let’s hit the road.” He took in the subtropical twilight, now rapidly fading into night. “It’ll be dark enough by the time we’re on site.”
“And I’m on point,” Lea said.
After putting on tactical raid vests and lightweight plate armor, they loaded up with HK MP5s, M4 carbines, spare magazines and stun grenades. Camacho slipped a chest rig over the top, fully laden with even more spare ammo and some CS gas canisters. Finally, he grabbed a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun. Last on were the ballistic helmets and night vision goggles.
Camacho hit the gas and steered the Chevy TrailBlazer around the bends in the road leading down from the hills they had used to survey the property. Cruising into the luxury estate, he gained speed and aimed directly for Kruger’s perimeter fence.
The chunky grille of the two-ton vehicle smashed through the electric fence with ease and sent a shower of sparks into the hot, night air. The twisted, bent fence panels clattered to the ground behind them as he swerved the TrailBlazer around the pool and skidded to a halt a few meters from Kruger’s back door.
They all jumped out of the Chevy — the tactical assault on Kruger’s place was well-rehearsed and they were keen to get on with it. Their arrival had already been noticed by the men inside the house. A merc in an upstairs window leaned out and fired on them. He was using a Browning bolt-action shotgun with saboted slugs. They slammed against the wall as the sabots sprayed down on them and the rounds punctured the Chevy’s steel roof.
So far, the mission had taken forty seconds.
Camacho took the Mossberg 500 to the door, swiftly dispatching three rounds on the top, middle and lower hinges. He blasted the door to matchwood and then kicked it down inside the room with a heavy riot boot. “Go, go, go!”
Fifty seconds.
Lea, Ryan and Kim instantly entered the house under Camacho’s cover and fanned out into their attack positions. Two mercs charged into the kitchen with handguns raised. Camacho spun around the doorway and fired on them with the shotgun, blasting them to hell. One slumped down on a marble countertop with his head hanging in the sink and the other flew back over the island and crashed on top of a wheeled kitchen cart.
One minute.
The fighting intensified. Another merc took up a position behind an enormous Polar double-door refrigerator and starting playing games with a Beretta twelve-gauge Magnum shotgun, knocking chunks out of the ceiling and tearing the cabinetwork to shreds.
In a vicious hail of splinters and flying lead, Kim and Ryan looked at the cart and exchanged a smile. She swung around onto her back and kicked the cart with both boots as hard as she could. It raced off down the center of the expansive kitchen and Ryan rolled down into its cover, firing off a few rounds in the direction of the man with the twelve-bore.
Two minutes.
The young hacker from London took heavy fire and the shotgun made short work of the little pine cart, but Ryan already saw his destination: the basement stairs. The cart was almost gone now, with only one side and the framework left in place. He raised his MP5 and obliterated the basement door’s lock in seconds. Incoming gunfire from the shotgun flew either side of him and traced over his head as he leaped to the door and shoulder-barged his way through it.
Ryan lowered the night vision goggles into place and leaped over the banister, his riot boots slamming down hard on the polished concrete floor. Scanning the basement, he saw the fuse box exactly where Alex had told him he would. He sprinted across the concrete until he was in range and then raised the MP5. Much better suited to short-range work, the young man squeezed the trigger and let the lead fly.
Three minutes.
The shaft of light shining down from the kitchen above the stairs instantly died and plunged the basement into darkness. It didn’t last long and soon the subterranean space was lit up with the sudden, violent strobing of a muzzle flash from the far side of the basement. Someone was at the top of a second flight of stairs on the far side of the basement.
It happened as fast as lightning. The bullets chewed into the polished concrete floor and spat and pinged across to Ryan faster than he could take cover. The muzzle flashed. Chaos reigned. Empty shells clattered to the floor like metal sleet. The bullets traced past his head with a stomach-churning crack crack crack and buried themselves in the plasterboard wall ahead of him.