Rounded the blind corner. All six Russkies were down. Scan. Breathe. Gun pointed toward the threat.
And then—
Peripheral vision. Movement. Swing the MP5 left and bring it down.
Two shots. Loud—ergo Russkie. Oh, fuck. Behind me, a cry of shock. Sight picture fuzzy. Squeeze trigger at the motion. Squeeze trigger again. And then it hit me. WTF: I’m not some goddamn neurosurgeon.
I flicked the MP5’s fire director to full auto and hosed all the Russkie bodies on the ground. No use taking any chances here.
I may have killed the sonsofbitches, but I was still fuckee-fuckeed. We’d lost surprise. And lost it long before I’d wanted to. No time to waste now. I looked back at Boomerang. “Blow the fucking charges,” I said.
He reached for his radio transmitter. “Fire in the hole,” he giggled.
You could feel the vibration as the charges went off, coming closer and closer to the castle. Now I heard shouts of alarm from beyond the doorway.
I wheeled to check on the casualty. It was Baby Huey. He’d been hit in the bicep. It was a clean wound, and from my quick examination no veins or arteries had been hit. But he was still going to be in shock soon, unless we handled things RIGHT NOW.
Duck Foot was over his shipmate, his hands fumbling in the fanny-pack first aid kit. He whipped out a thick wad of gauze pads, and a tube of antiseptic dressing, slapped those on the wound and wrapped Baby Huey’s upper arm with the last of the surgical tape. The pressure would help. He started to prepare a Syrette of morphine, but Baby Huey knocked his hand away. “I’ll be okay,” the big kid growled.
Duck Foot stowed the morphine. “Your call, asshole.”
BH rolled over, struggled to his knees, and finally pulled himself to his feet. “Too much work to do,” he said, his face wet with perspiration, his teeth clenched against the pain. “No time for that shit.”
So far as I was concerned, Baby Huey had just earned his fucking spurs. At that instant, I stopped thinking of him as the FNG. He was one of us now: blooded in combat. And as I looked at this big, bruising, beamish boy struggling and persevering, a shudder of wonderment ran through my body. Oh, yes: it is watching Baby Huey’s kind of commitment, my friends, that makes officers like me weak in the knees, and I took a couple of seconds to marvel at the birth of the latest Warrior to be forged in my image on the anvil of pain and dedication. But I didn’t take long. My reverie was interrupted. Lights were coming on all over the fucking Schloss. We had to move.
0117. We hit three more pockets of Ivans before we came to the doorway I’d targeted during my recon, and ammo was beginning to run low. That’s a problem on an op like this one. You have to maintain fire discipline, because you can only carry so many magazines. Tonight, I had six thirty-round MP5 mags, and eight fifteen-round USP mags stowed on my body, totaling three hundred rounds available. I’d used two USP mags and two MP5 mags so far. It didn’t leave me a lot of breathing room.
I took a radiation reading. I was getting closer to my atomic grail—and the fucking door was bolted tight. Lemme tell you something about castle doors: they tend to be big and heavy. That’s why they had all those medieval battering rams, I guess. We hadn’t brought a battering ram—but we did have a couple of slivers of John Suter’s C-4. Duck Foot took one small piece from Nod, gimped up to the door, and placed the charge around one of the wrought iron strap hinges, ran a pencil detonator and a long piece of quick-burning fuse, ignited it, and scampered back as best he could on his game ankle.
He hadn’t even finished shouting the requisite “Fire in the hole . . .” when the fucking door blew. The hinge shattered, sending shrapnel back at us.
“Anybody hurt?”
Duck Foot answered for everybody. “Just fucking move, Skipper—”
I pushed the shattered door aside, charged through the smoking door frame . . . and found myself in a huge, pentagon-shaped antechamber, with a vaulted ceiling supported by hand-carved stone ribs formed into the shapes of stars, or perhaps flower petals.
I did a TVE. Fuck: it was a blind alley. The only entrance to this place was the one we’d just come through.
And then, a weird sensation washed over me. I’ve been here before.
MP5 still held at low ready, I took the time to look—really look—at where I was. There were narrow, faux-arched windows framed by weathered beams. Between the windows was a display case of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pistols. The far wall was painted with coats of arms, each set into a trompe l’oeil “frame” of gold and faux painted wood. There were ornately carved tables; heavy wood chairs; pikes and halberds displayed in racks. There were crossbows.
I might have experienced a complete sense of déjà vu all over again as my eyes scanned this perfect Warrior’s haven. Except it wasn’t déjà vu. I’d been in this room before. Not here—but the doppelgänger89 of this room: the faux-antique antechamber to Lothar Beck’s office in Düsseldorf.
Which means, my friends, that there was a hidden doorway in this room. And that secret entry led somewhere important, just as it did at BeckIndustrie headquarters.
I strode to the wall covered with coats of arms, and probed. It took me less than ten seconds to find the door. I ran my fingers around the cleverly concealed portal.
It was time to make my entrance. I pried the hidden door open, checked to make sure there were no unfriendlies waiting, and beckoned my guys to follow me.
We moved quickly down a short, wide stone staircase into a huge, vaulted foyer. There were two sets of double doors: one port, one starboard. Radiation detector time. The signal grew stronger as I swiveled to my right. I gestured for Gator, Duck Foot, and Baby Huey to go left.
With Boomerang tight on my right shoulder, and Nod behind him, I retrieved a DefTec No. 25 flashbang from my thigh pouch, kicked in the right-hand doors, averted my gaze, and tossed the distraction device into the room.
The nice thing about the DefTec is that it is so fucking loud and so fucking bright. The flash just about imprinted on my eyeballs right through the goddamn castle wall.
MP5 ready, I bulled my way through the smoke.
Boomerang’s voice was loud in my half-deaf right ear: “Boss Dude—threat, Red Four.”
Yes, I know that in a three-man room clearance, the lead man usually moves to the left, but the most basic operational rule for all room clearance is: you take the most immediate threat first. I edged right, toward the Color Clock position Boomerang had shouted.
Scan. Breathe. Don’t tunnel. I used as much of my peripheral vision as I could (it was pretty fucking dark in here) to make sure we weren’t being outflanked. Shit: there was a wide archway off to my left, and a staircase off the rear, which told me this humongous chamber was only a small portion of the area we’d have to clear. “Take the green side and clear it,” I shouted. “I’ll cover this room. We’ll meet up at the staircase.”
Oh, yeah. Right. My favorite Chinese tactician, General Tai Li’ang, once wrote: “Never steal more chain than you can swim with.”
Guess what? Glub, glub. The room was immense: fifteen yards long, perhaps ten yards wide, and filled to overflowing with heavy medieval furniture, suits of armor displayed on pedestals, eighteenth-century flintlock rifles and all their accessories displayed in glass cases, and there, amidst all the cacophony of museum-quality stuff, perhaps half a dozen computers, all tied together by cables and wires.
GNBN. The good news was that this had to be Lothar’s ops center, so I was pretty close to the belly of the beast. BN was that, even in full daylight, the place was an ambusher’s dream, and a room-clearer’s nightmare. Now, in the dim light, the shadows made it nigh on impossible to pick anything out. Target acquisition was gonna be tough.
From off to my port side I heard firing. Nod and Boomerang had engaged, and I was on my own. As if on cue I saw vague movement through the smoke. I fired a three-shot burst, and heard a scream. Smoke cleared. Movement at eight o’clock. Fired two more three-shot bursts, then let a s
econd barrage go, too. Did a shadow go down? Couldn’t tell. Damn. Changed mags and advanced toward the threat. Moved cautiously between a pair of full suits of armor standing atop pedestals. One, two, dead Ivans stared up at me from the stone floor. A third was crawling away. I stitched two three-round bursts into his head.
A metal fragment cut my cheek, and I ducked instinctively as small arms fire from somewhere on my six pinged off the armor. Shit. Turned to the new threat but couldn’t make anything out. Swept the room with my MP5. My fire was returned. Fuck—this was getting old, fast. I retrieved the last of my flash-bangs, pulled the pin, hunkered as low as I could get, shut my eyes, tried not to think about the pain I was about to cause my eardrums, and softballed the fucking device into the center of the room, toward the general direction I’d been taking fire from.
Oh, damn, but those things are loud. I saw nothing but bright orange spots, which gradually gave way to bright green spots. I rubbed at my eyes and was finally able to focus long enough to make out stuff shattering and sparks erupting as one of the computer screens twenty or so feet away exploded.
The green spots turned to dark blue. My head wouldn’t stop Big Ben-ing. And things were still too fucking fuzzy. But not so fuzzy that I didn’t sense the automatic weapons fire coming my way from behind one of the big glass display cases of antique weapons.
When in doubt, shoot back. I rolled away, spray-and-praying toward the flintlocks, which is when the goddamn thing exploded, sending shards of glass all the fuck over the place, including into moi.
What had I done, you ask? From the intensity and brightness of the explosion, I’d scored a direct hit on one of Lothar’s antique black-powder flasks is what I’d done. Hadn’t he once told me he kept all his weapons loaded? God, that’s stupid. You never want to shoot anything into black powder. Black powder is fucking unstable.
Then the ringing in my ears and the bleeding of my face was interrupted by a solid thwock, followed by a new volley of shots in my direction. I watched as the big, thick refractory table in the center of the room was upended.
Even in my altered state, I realized, The threat’s gone behind the fucking table. I brought the MP5 up and shot at the hufuckingmongous table. No reaction. Fired again, one, two, three three-shot bursts through the glossy, dark wood surface. I could see the splinters fly as I advanced on the cockbreath, whoever he was, making sure I was keeping his head down—if I hadn’t killed the sonofabitch already.
That’s when the MP5 ran dry. There are a lot of key elements to remember in situations like this one. One of the most key elements is to count your fucking rounds, so you don’t do what I just did. Because if you forget to count rounds, you will end up with an empty fucking weapon, and the bad guy will wax your ass.
No time to reload—but I had to react. I released the MP5, letting it fall away on its combat sling. I threw myself off to the left and rolled onto the floor—slamming my damaged knee quite brutally in the process, I might add—my right hand frantically groping my tactical thigh holster for my USP.
Which is precisely when Franz Ulrich vaulted the table and charged at me. In his hand was a huge, lethal, and altogether much-too-familiar fucking knife.
Familiar? Oh, yes: almost twelve inches in length; flat-ground, geometric clip, fully serrated, chisel-tipped blade. It was the very same Mad Dog Taiho I’d left behind in Düsseldorf.
21
HERE’S THE SITUATION mit “einem Wort, kurz gesagt.”90 Eins: Franz was coming at me hot and heavy. He had his War Face on, too, which made him even uglier than normal, especially as the cut I’d inflicted on his neck hadn’t quite healed yet. Zwei: there was going to be no time to grab my pistol, which was stowed securely in my tactical holster.
Tactical holsters aren’t built for quick-draw. Indeed, mine was a doubly secure, SAS model, built by the former SEALs at Blackhawk Industries in Virginia Beach. It was a spec-ops holster designed for both parachute and maritime ops. It had a restraining strap, as well as a flap that covered the entire butt of the pistol.
And guess who’d forgotten to unsecure the flap. That was all I had a chance to perceive—and tell you—before the big, Kraut bastard was on top of me. After all, it doesn’t take more than a second to cover five yards at a dead run, and Franz was at a dead run, my long lost but still very lethal Taiho knife held in a striking position.
Now, I have said this before and I will say it again: if you get caught in a knife fight without a weapon, the probability that you will get cut is just about 100 percent. But those odds are not necessarily detrimental. Consider two additional elements. The first is mind-set. Your attacker is overconfident because he has the weapon and you do not. The second is that the body itself will give you an additional boost. Your adrenaline will be off the fucking charts. Endorphins,91 your body’s natural painkillers, will be working overtime.
Combine those elements with one more factor: the Warrior Spirit, and the ABSOLUTE WILL TO WIN, honed through innumerable training sessions, and YOU WILL NOT FAIL. That is, of course, all contingent on whether or not Mister Murphy happens to be out of the room at the time.
Franz came straight at me, the knife’s sawtooth serrated blade horizontal, held in what’s known in the trade as a hammer grip. I sidestepped and managed a blow to his neck as he went past. But he was fast: that fucking knife whipped around and slashed at my hip. I reacted with an elbow to the back of his head.
Good news: I fucked with his marksmanship. The blade deflected away from my body and caught on my web gear. Bad news: the Taiho, especially the serrated blade version, is a very efficient knife when it comes to cutting multilayered, tactical nylon—things like seat belts, and web gear. So Franz’s misdirected blow sliced clean through my pistol belt and my MP5 strap. The fucking subgun fell away, clattering to the floor. The pistol belt, weighed down by all the extraneous goodies hitched to it by Alice clips, hung useless, still attached to me by the pair of single elastic straps wound around my left and right thighs. It was like being restrained by an absurd garter belt. My tactical holster and the combination MP5 mag and flash-bang pouches were Velcro’d firmly to my thighs, keeping me from moving freely. While Franz pranced freely, I was restrained by this ungainly, perverse, ballistic nylon hobble.
Doom on Dickie, because Mister Murphy was indubitably along for tonight’s ride. I backpedaled, and frantically tried to fix the damage. But the damage was unfixable—at least right now. And why was that? It was because Franz had found his balance, whirled, and was coming back at me.
But this time he didn’t charge. His face contorted with rage, his eyes filled with hate, the scar on his cheek bright red, he moved like a bullfighter, his left arm balanced in front of him as if it had a muleta over it, his right holding the big, thick, tanto-bladed Taiho flat against his arm in a Ninja grip, so he wouldn’t telegraph his deadly intentions.
He whirled, slashed at my right arm—and missed. I stepped under him, trapped his knife arm, turned so as to hyperextend it, then brought him across my body with a nasty hip throw. Lemme tell you, friends, that the simple act of throwing him, combined with the fact that he caught in my tactical holster strap, which put pressure on my already swelled knee, made the pain in that damaged joint crescendo to a previously uncharted level on the Rogue scale. But let me also tell you that my endorphins must have been pumping opiates by the quart—because pain didn’t fucking matter right then. I just kept going. I dropped him flat, elbowed him in the face, raked at his eyes, and tried to detach his ear with my teeth.
He screamed and called me unprintable names in Deutsche while he tried to wriggle his trapped arm free, slamming and slapping and kicking and punching like some fucking dervish. The activity didn’t do him much good. After all, I outweighed the S.O.B. by maybe twenty-five or thirty pounds.
But I’ll give him this much: the asshole didn’t drop the knife. Instead, he quit playing around and caught me with a finger to the eye that got my attention good. And, as I slapped my hand to my injured face
, he executed a well-timed snap and roll, separated from me, flipped back onto the balls of his feet, and kicked out—snap!—catching me whap in the cheek with the sole of his boot.
The impact knocked me backward into a goddamn suit of armor. I went sprawling, tangled up in the fucking armor. Here is something I never knew: they tie the goddamn separate pieces onto a fucking wire frame. But the suit itself is not whole, just wired together. So when I collided with the goddamn thing it kind of exploded, all the pieces coming loose—but still joined by wire. It was like somebody threw a fucking fishing net over me.
Franz has never been one to lose an opportunity. He was on me, blade first, like stink on shit. He stabbed through the breastplate. The fucking chisel point of the Taiho cut cleanly through the polished steel.
I grabbed hold of the pauldrons and wrestled the torso to keep the point of the blade from coming directly toward my face.
He yanked the knife out and struck again—this time the fucking blade punctured the elbow protector. I bent the elbow up—and trapped the goddam blade in an improvised metal vise, then popped Franz a quick double-tap with the front of the chestplate, catching him in the nose with the rondel that sits right at the shoulder joint.
That rocked the ScheiBkerl92 back a foot or two. I heaved the armor off me, launched myself at Franz, and grabbed his knife arm at the wrist with both hands, and managed to turn it aside before he brought his left hand up, fingers extended, and tried to rake my eyes. I managed to turn away, and he missed my eyes—but from the way my cheek burned (endorphins or no endorphins, that hurt), the motherfucker must have had pieces of flesh under his fingernails.
I broke free and used my elbow to catch him in the face. There was a satisfying crunch of cartilage as I broke his nose, and I heard a stimulating grunt (it was stimulating to me, at least) from him as my arm impacted one more time, and he realized he had to bring his free hand up while trying to protect himself and breathe at the same time.
Option Delta Page 30
