He’d warned the kid to stay away. Getting just one of them inside the grounds had been risky enough.
Ten minutes passed and nothing bad happened. Decker remained perfectly still, his body aligned in the moon shadow of a tall chimney, rendering him nearly invisible. He couldn’t see where Alty had ended up once the kid got close to the building. He got to hoping that Alty had just snapped a few photos with his iPhone and then hightailed it back over the fence that encircled the estate. It was possible. Decker couldn’t see every potential exit route, even from the roof. He might have missed Alty’s departure.
But then a bark came from one of the well-lit outbuildings. Decker flipped up his night vision goggles, slowly raised his camera to his right eye, focused the telephoto lens on the building, and watched as a guard released two German shepherds. He checked his watch — it was exactly midnight. Probably the time the dogs were let out every night.
He remembered the conversation he’d had with Alty a few hours earlier, when they were casing the estate. He’d specifically asked Alty about dogs.
“No dogs.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The mullahs think dogs are dirty.”
“I’m not talking about people’s pets, I’m talking about guard dogs.”
“Is against Islam.”
“But I saw dogs in Turkmenistan.”
“No dogs.”
But evidently there were.
And if Alty was still on the property, at ground level, he was screwed.
On the front lawn of the mansion, two dim swaths of light spilled out from ground-floor windows. Alty had run toward the light on the left. Decker flipped his night vision goggles back down, stuffed his equipment into his waterproof gear bag, strapped the bag tight to his back, and then crawled on all fours, spiderlike, silently down the gentle pitch of the roof. When he reached the section directly above where he suspected Alty was, he extended his head past the copper gutter and scanned the area below him.
Alty was wedged between a hedge and a Greek column that marked the edge of the raised portico in front of the mansion. His iPhone was held up to the window.
“Alty!” Decker called down in a loud whisper.
Alty’s head snapped around.
“Look up. It’s Deck!”
“Deck?”
“Get the hell out of here. There are dogs.”
“No dogs.”
“Yes, dogs! I saw them; they’re loose. Run!”
“You see dogs?”
“Two of them. Big ones. Run!”
Alty finally got it, because now he stood up, pocketed his iPhone, took a quick look at the lawn in front of him, and began to sprint toward the distant perimeter fence. But he’d only gone maybe twenty feet when the frantic barking started. A second later, one of the German shepherds rounded the corner at full speed.
When Alty saw the dog, he spun around and headed back toward the house.
That fucking idiot is going to try to climb one of the columns, Decker guessed. Which might save him temporarily from the dogs but will ensure that he’ll be captured.
Ditch him. You can make it out on your own.
Alty reached the column and tried to shimmy up it, but the dog was right there. It sank its teeth into Alty’s calf and didn’t let go. Decker eyed the perimeter fence.
I can be over that fence in less than thirty seconds, dogs or no dogs…
Alty screamed.
Shit.
Decker unsheathed his SOG SEAL Team knife, swung his body off the roof, dropped twenty feet, and landed directly on the back of the dog. A second later he slit the dog’s throat.
Alty was still frantic, trying to shimmy up the column. Decker grabbed his belt and yanked him to the ground. “Run for the fence!”
Alty tried to run, but his wounded leg kept giving out on him, so Decker half dragged him across the lawn. When the second dog tore up, crazed and barking wildly, Decker offered his left arm, which the German shepherd took in its jaws. With his right arm, Decker plunged his knife deep into the dog’s chest, twisting it as he heaved up. He threw the dog several feet up in the air and left it writhing on the ground.
A guard ran out, gun drawn, from a grove of limbed-up plane trees not far from the main entrance gate. The perimeter fence was still a good hundred feet away. Decker hadn’t wanted to escalate matters by using his gun, but as the guard took aim at them, he pulled a Sig Sauer P226 from his nylon thigh holster and shot the guy in the chest. He grabbed Alty around the waist just as a volley of shots rang out.
Alty’s body jumped. Decker returned fire, but he didn’t have a good sense of where the new threat was coming from. A quick glance at Alty’s neck told him the kid was either dead or would be within seconds.
More shots rang out. Decker felt a bee-sting-like prick as a bullet grazed his left shoulder.
Time to get the hell out of here, buddy.
Using Alty’s body as a shield, Decker tried to advance toward the border fence. By now, he’d figured out that whoever was shooting at him was doing so from behind a low stone wall near the front of the mansion. Then someone started shooting at him from another angle.
One of the shots hit the slide of Decker’s Sig.
Decker didn’t drop the gun, but when he went to fire it, nothing happened.
Goddamn motherfucking sonofabitch…
He started pulling Alty back toward the house, still using the kid as a shield. No way he could make the front fence, not unarmed with two guys taking potshots at him.
He’d try for the back fence instead. It was farther away, but the forest of trees in the rear of the estate would provide cover. He got to a row of hedges in front of the mansion, ripped Alty’s iPhone out of the kid’s back pocket, let the boy drop, and sprinted on all fours, behind the hedges, toward the back of the mansion.
Decker was remarkably fast for such a big man, and the wild shots into the hedges all missed their mark. But then a third security guard ran out from the rear of the property. And then a fourth, blocking yet another avenue of escape.
With a working pistol, it wouldn’t have mattered. Without one, he was trapped.
Or maybe not.
Earlier that night he’d scaled the roof from a secluded alcove on the side of the mansion. Using the hedges in front of the mansion for cover, Decker sprinted to that alcove now, grabbed a vertical copper gutter with both hands — pulling it partially out of its wall anchors — and began to climb. Near the top, someone shot him in the thigh. For a moment he thought he might fall, but with one last Herculean burst of strength he lifted himself over the lip of the roof.
He scrambled as fast as he could up the tiles, dove into a wedge between the roof and one of the five chimneys, and pulled a tourniquet off of his stripped-down chest rig, snapping the rubber band that had held it in place. After determining that the bullet hadn’t hit his femoral artery, he used the tourniquet to hold a pressure dressing in place, being sure not to completely cut off the flow of blood above the wound.