True’s heart thunders as she growls at Felice, “Let’s go.”
With her weapon held ready to fire, it’s a two-second sprint to the door. During that span the alarm cuts out and True hears a shout from inside the house. Over comms she hears glass shattering and Chris yelling: “Go, go, go!”
Chris is at the opposite corner of the house, detailed to breach a window into the downstairs room where Fatima is believed to be, and likely Hussam with her.
True reaches the fallen sentry, glances down. He’s on his back, legs bent, eyes staring in fixed, unblinking horror. Two mayflies are pinned to his cheeks by the barbs at the end of their whip tails. The toxin they deliver is nonlethal, fast-acting, and good to keep a man down for thirty minutes—though she isn’t sure how a double dose will play out. Papers she’s read indicate residual neurological effects, but that’s better than a bullet to the brain.
Lincoln says, “Blackbird reports all targets accounted for.”
“Roger that.” She stoops to close the sentry’s eyes with a gloved hand. Then she moves up to the door, with Felice right behind her, a hand on her shoulder.
“Breach it, Mama,” Felice whispers. “You got the big gun.”
True half-smiles. “Gonna try it first.” Surveillance showed sentries moving freely into and out of the house. She’s got a hunch the door is not secure.
She reaches out, works the latch. The door opens. She kicks it wide, steps in, swings right, hunting for opposition. Her visor easily gathers enough light to show her a large room beautifully furnished in sofas, upholstered chairs, and tables of fine, dark wood. The MARC’s threat assessment function finds nothing to highlight. No one in sight. No shots fired. She’s conscious of Felice covering the room’s left side.
Jameson and Rohan dart in, pivoting right and left.
“Clear!” True yells.
In the back of the room, a stairway climbs to the next floor. To the left, a wide passage leads to the rear of the house. Gunfire there. Following their assigned roles, Felice and Rohan move toward the sound.
On the right, a closed door hides what they believe to be an office. True advances on it, gets ready to enter. Jameson kicks the door open. True pivots inside, Jameson right behind her.
No one’s there. Just electronics filling the room with the glow of ready lights.
“Clear,” she says.
Jameson is standing in the opposite corner. She meets his gaze. They hear shouting from the back of the house. Footsteps running on the floor above. “Let’s go.” Jameson says. She nods and follows.
Gold Team has been assigned to enter the empty quarter of the house, but Red Team is entering hot, so Lincoln centers the video feed from Chris’s MARC on the big monitor and follows him virtually as he explodes into a downstairs bedroom.
Inside, beneath the window, is a low bed, occupied by a couple, both of them scrambling to be elsewhere as Chris comes in on top of them. The bedroom door is closed. A man—naked, bearded, loose heavy black hair to his shoulders—spills out of the bed, rolling, coming up on one knee with his finger on the trigger of an assault rifle. Friday identifies him with a name tag: Hussam El-Hashem. The woman is screaming, protesting in Arabic, “La’a! La’a, seeboo fi haloo.” No, no. Leave him alone. Hussam gets off two shots into the mattress before Chris plants a boot in his face, knocking him to the floor.
But Chris doesn’t go after him. He loses his balance, staggers on the bed. Looks down. The woman is there at his side, hanging on him, one hand on his arm, one on his weapon. She’s dressed in a thin white shift. Her long black hair is loose, her dark eyes wide with terror.
“We will all die!” she screams in English. “All of us!”
Chris’s gloved hand comes away from his weapon, closes into a fist. He’s about to hit her. Lincoln can feel it. He wants to shout at Chris to back off. Friday tags the woman with a name: Fatima Atwan.
Gloved hands grab Fatima from behind, haul her off of Chris and out of the way. She keeps screaming, begging, as if the apocalypse will be ignited if any further disrespect is shown to Hussam El-Hashem—who is up again, hunched over his assault rifle, blood running from his nose and lips as he raises the muzzle of the weapon.
Lincoln hears a three-round burst as Chris jumps off the bed. He can’t tell where the bullets hit. “Fucker,” Chris swears as he kicks Hussam in the gut, kicks his weapon away. Spares a glance for the door.
Nate gets there just as the door opens. A rifle muzzle pokes in. Nate grabs it, shoves it down as shots are fired. Holes explode in the floor. But he doesn’t shoot back. Lincoln’s gaze shifts to the feed from Nate’s visor as he yanks a boy, no more than eight years old, into the bedroom. He separates the boy from the assault rifle and heaves the rifle out the window.
From the end of the hall, Rohan is shouting in Arabic, Drop the gun! Drop the gun!
Then shooting erupts.
True and Jameson move up the stairs to the first landing. Whispering voices from above give them a moment’s warning. “Back against the wall!” True shouts. There’s a flurry of shots, bullets buzzing down the stairs, shattering the tiles on the floor below. Jameson pulls a flash-bang. True leans out, squeezes off six quick shots to suppress enemy fire, ducks back. Jameson heaves the grenade. It goes off in a shattering of light and noise. They hurl themselves upstairs.
True’s visor highlights four figures in the hallway. One lies prone, his weapon dropped. Two hunker against a wall, still clinging to their assault rifles. And the other staggers away, blinded and confused by the explosion.
Jameson and True go after them while they’re still disoriented. Jameson takes the lead. He skips the first one, the one who’s already down, using swift kicks to unseat the next two, wresting away their weapons.
True squeezes past him, pursuing the one still on his feet. The air stinks and she’s breathing hard, as much from adrenaline as from exertion. She catches up to the man, swings her KO, and hammers him in the shoulder. He drops with a pained yelp, and she follows him down, groping in a pocket for zip ties. They spill out beside her. She puts a knee in his back. He tries to get up. She punches him in the ear, growling, “Not a good idea.”
“How you doing, Mama?” Jameson asks.
“Having a fucking heart attack.”
“That soldier give you any problems, put a bullet in his head.”
“No need for that,” she says in a low, hostile voice as she works to zip-tie his hands together. “He’s just confused.”
They secure all four men, hand and foot. Then they clear the rest of the rooms on the way to the closed steel door at the end of the hall.
Behind that door is a storeroom that must have been intended as a vault for gold or weapons or something of value. But not people. Standing outside of it, True smells the stink of the sump bucket. She tries the latch for the hell of it. Of course it’s locked.
Lincoln looks at the 3-D map of the house. Only one room left to secure, three defenders inside. Rohan and Felice are hunkered down at the end of the hall, taking fire but not returning it. If they return fire, they run the risk of stray bullets and shrapnel penetrating the room where Chris’s team is located.
He tells Chris, “Stay where you are. Shelter the prisoners.”
He shifts to Rohan’s video feed. All he sees is the large front room. Somewhere out of sight, a flash-bang goes off. Rohan pivots. He charges into the hall. Reaches a door. It’s ajar. He punches it open, pitches another flash-bang inside, drops back, drops flat to the ground.