The team had hoped to execute this takedown after Zha left the club with his minders, and they had been waiting a few blocks up the street to do just that. But the two men Meyer had tasked with following Zha had reported that another pair of Americans were here, two suited and blow-dried guys from the consulate, by the looks of them, and they worried that Zha would be rushed away under heavy guard.
So Meyer exerted his execute authority to do the unexpected and snatch the target right here in the back of the club by the alley.
It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a perfect situation. DEVGRU normally operated with a much larger force, with better command and control and communications, and a much better sight picture of the target area. But this was what was referred to in the business as an “in extremis op,” a rush job, to be sure, and the first rule of in extremis ops was to make the best of an imperfect situation.
The two-man SEAL recon team had left the building not five minutes earlier, but it became clear to Meyer almost instantly that things had changed in the past five minutes. Where he expected to see four or five bodyguards at the round corner booth, he now saw ten.
They were tough, jacketed men with short haircuts and hard stares, men standing around the table with no drinks in their hands.
Meyer then heard a shout from one of his men on the right, and it was the last thing he had hoped to hear tonight from his men scanning the crowd.
“Contact front!”
Things went bad quickly. A single 14K soldier back by the bar near the entrance was partially shielded by a group of businessmen standing there, and he took the opportunity to yank a.45 pistol from his waistband. With the protection of the cover provided by the civilians, he raised his weapon and squeezed off two rounds at the first armed gunman through the door, grazing the man once on the left arm and once squarely on the ceramic body-armor plate on his chest.
The Navy SEAL closest to the wounded operator dispatched the Chinese shooter with a three-round burst of tiny but hard-hitting 4.6x30-millimeter bullets to the forehead, blowing the top of the man’s head off and over the crowd of men around him.
Within the next two seconds, throughout the strip club some twenty 14K Triads went for their guns.
And all hell broke loose.
When Chavez found himself in no-man’s-land as the firefight started, he did the only thing he could — he went into self-preservation mode. He dropped flat on the floor, rolled to his left, knocking chairs and people down along the way, trying like hell to get himself out of the crossfire between the Americans and the Triads. Along with other men who had been sitting along the raised dance floor, he made his way through the tables there and then pressed himself tight against the edge of the riser.
He wished like hell he had a pistol. He could pick off some of the opposition and help the JSOC men in their mission. But instead he covered his head as men in tailored suits and dancers in thongs and body glitter crashed on top of him, desperately trying to scramble away from the gunfire.
Through this he did what he could to maintain his situational awareness. He peered into the crazed crowd, saw pistols and sub-guns firing here and there, and heard the mammoth boom of a shotgun blast from up near the bar. The crowd looked like rats scattering in the amber lighting, with the SEALs’ red laser targeting devices and the sparkle from the disco ball providing additional frantic movement to the scene.
Chief Petty Officer Meyer realized in seconds he had led his team into a hornets’ nest. He had been prepared for resistance from Zha’s bodyguards, but he intended to mitigate that resistance with speed, surprise, and overwhelming violence of action. But instead of a manageable fight against an equal number of bewildered opponents, Meyer and his force of six other operators found themselves in the middle of a shooting gallery. Adding to this, the large number of civilians in the club, in the crossfire, forced his men to check their fire unless they saw a gun in the hand of one of the figures moving in the dark of the club.
Two of the chief petty officer’s men had already pulled Zha over the top of the big round table in the corner and onto the floor in front of the booth. The spiky-haired Chinese man was down on his face on the ground; one SEAL jammed his knee in the back of his neck to hold him still while the SEAL’s rifle scanned for targets across the club at the long bar near the entrance.
He fired two quick bursts at the origin of a gunshot near the entrance, then dropped his rifle to its sling and went back to work on securing his captive, while Meyer himself took a 9-millimeter round to the chest plate of his body armor, tipping him back for a moment. The CPO recovered, went prone on the floor, and then fired at the flash of a handgun blast back at the bar.
Jack Ryan found Adam Yao “tagged and bagged,” still struggling against his bindings next to his vehicle. The Mitsubishi’s passenger door was unlocked, so Jack reached in and grabbed a folding knife from Yao’s backpack, and he cut the CIA officer’s wrist bindings free in seconds.
Popping handgun fire and short, disciplined bursts from automatic weapons came from the nightclub. Ryan pulled the hood off Yao and then yanked the smaller man to his feet.
Jack shouted, “Any guns in the van?”
Adam pulled the tape off his mouth with a wince. “I’m not issued a weapon, and if I got caught with—”
Ryan turned and ran unarmed toward the back door of the club.
Chavez had found fair cover from the crossfire, flat on his face, pressed up against the side of the stage. He was completely out of view of the SEALs, and completely exposed to armed Triads who had taken positions of concealment or cover behind tables, at the long bar at the front of the establishment, or mixed between the civilians in the crowd. As the gunfire raged around him, Ding was not a combatant in this, and he looked and acted like any of the other terrified businessmen huddling in the center of this maelstrom, trying to ride out the gunfight by thinking small.
Ding wondered if the commandos would be able to make it back down the hall, up the stairs, and out into the alley before they were cut down by all the 14K shooters. Their original objective, capturing Zha Shu Hai alive, seemed out of reach from his admittedly poor view of the action.
Chavez figured that if they could exfiltrate at all, they would be exfiltrating back out through the hall and up the back staircase. He shouted into his earpiece between bursts of fire in the room.
“Ryan? If you are out back, get your ass to cover! This shit looks like it’s about to spill out into the alley!”
“Roger that!” Ryan said.
Just then, a Triad armed with a stainless-steel Beretta 9-millimeter pistol crawled up beside Chavez, using the stage to remain hidden from the American commandos.
Chavez recognized that the man could make it to within ten feet of where the JSOC snatch team was positioned by the back hall without them seeing him. There, he could simply stand up and dump rounds from his Beretta at point-blank range into the men who would be more focused on all the shooters at the long bar some hundred feet away from them.
Chavez knew the young tough with the pistol wasn’t going to squeeze off more than a few of his gun’s seventeen rounds before he was sawed in half by return fire, but it was a good bet he’d kill an American or two first.
The 14K goon rose to a crouch, his tennis shoes just inches from Chavez’s face, and he started moving closer to the commandos, but Ding reached out and grabbed the man’s gun hand, pulled him off balance and then down onto the floor. Ding yanked him back behind an overturned table, fought for the handgun from the surprisingly strong Chinese man, and finally rolled on top of him, twisted the Beretta back, broke two of the Triad’s fingers in his right hand, and peeled the gun free.