by Mark Greaney
Again a burst of life from the comms, clearer now. They looked towards the open gate at the front of the little airfield. “I’m coming hard! Hold your fire!”
Dulin replied into the comm. “Your signal is intermittent. Say again your location?”
A pop of static. “… Northwest.”
Just then they heard a crash to the north and a honking horn. Everyone had been looking to the south. They turned their heads and gun barrels north to the sound of the noise and saw a civilian pickup truck, one headlight dead and black, smash through the fence and bounce out of the sand and onto the tarmac. The truck was moving at an incredible clip, directly towards the L-100.
The voice came over the comms again. “I’ve got company!”
Just then, headlights appeared along a wide track behind the wildly bouncing vehicle. First two sets, then four, then more.
Dulin assessed the situation for one second. Then he called out to his crew over the engine’s whine, “Up the ramp!”
* * *
All five were aboard, and the L-100 was already rolling down the runway when an armed man in dirty gear and body armor sprinted up the back ramp. McVee grabbed the “package’s” gloved hand and pulled him up the steep incline, and Markham slammed his hand on the hydraulic lift lever to close the ramp. Dulin gave a command to the pilots on the cabin intercom, and the four turboprop engines gunned for takeoff.
With the ramp sealed shut, the package dropped onto his kneepads in the middle of the bare cabin. His M4 rifle was slung over a general issue chest harness missing most of its ammunition and a brown Nomex tunic torn in several places. The man’s face was covered with goggles, smeared greasepaint, and sweat. He pulled his helmet off, dropped it to the floor of the cabin, already inclining during its takeoff rotation. Steam poured from a sopping mat of thick brown hair, and his beard dripped perspiration like a leaky faucet.
Dulin lifted the Gray Man from the floor and put him on the bench along the cabin’s skin. He secured him to the bench with a belt and sat next to him.
“You hurt?” he asked.
The man shook his head.
“Let me help you get your gear off.” Dulin shouted over the engines.
“I’ll keep it on.”
“Suit yourself. Just a forty-minute flight. Once in Turkey, we’ll go to a safe house, and tomorrow night Fitzroy will have instructions for you. We’ll watch your back till then.”
“I appreciate it,” said the filthy man through labored breaths. His eyes stayed on the floor as he spoke. His arms draped over the top of the black rifle hanging from his neck.
The other four men had strapped themselves into the red mesh bench lining the side of the fuselage. They all stared at the package, trying without success to reconcile the average-looking operator next to them with his superhuman reputation.
The Gray Man and Dulin sat by a pallet of gear strapped with webbing to the middle of the deck.
Dulin said, “I’m going to call Fitzroy, let him know we’re wheels up. I’ll grab you some water and be back in a second.” He then turned and climbed the steeply ascending aircraft to the front of the cabin. He pulled out his satellite phone as he walked.
* * *
It was just after three in the morning in London, and on the sixth floor of a whitewashed office building on London’s Bayswater Road, an aging man in a wrinkled pinstripe suit drummed his fingers on his desk. His face white, perspiration ran down his fleshy neck and soaked his Egyptian broadcloth oxford. Donald Fitzroy tried to relax himself, to remove the obvious worry from his voice.
The satellite phone chirped again.
He looked again, for the twentieth time, to the framed photograph on his desk. His son, now forty, sitting on a hammock on a beach, his beautiful wife beside him. Twins, both girls, one in each parent’s lap. Smiles all around.
Fitzroy looked away from the framed photo and towards a sheaf of loose photographs in his thick hands. These shots he had also given twenty looks. It was the same four, the same family, though the twins were slightly older now.
It was typical surveillance quality: the family at a park, the twins at their school near Grosvenor Square, the daughter-in-law pushing a shopping cart through the market. Fitzroy detected from the angles and the proximity to their subjects that the photographer was sending a message that he could have easily walked up to the four and put a hand on each of them.
Lloyd’s implication was clear: Fitzroy’s family could be gotten to at any time.
The sat phone chirped a third time.
Fitzroy exhaled fully, threw the photos to the floor, and grabbed the nagging device.
“Standstill. How copy, Fullcourt?”
* * *
“Five by five, Standstill,” said Dulin. He pressed his ear tight into the earpiece of the satellite phone to drown out the engine’s roar. “How do you copy?”
“Loud and clear. Report your status.”
“Standstill, Fullcourt. We have the package and have exfiltrated the target location.”
“Understood. What’s the status of your package?”
“Looks like shit, sir, but he says he’s good to go.”
“Understood. Wait one,” Fitzroy said.
Dulin rubbed a gloved hand over his face and looked to the back of the cargo airplane at his four operators. His gaze then centered on the Gray Man, sitting at the end of the bench. Goggles, a beard, and greasepaint hid his face. Still, Dulin could tell the man was exhausted. His back rested against the wall of the fuselage, and both arms hung over his M4. His eyes stared into the distance. Dulin’s crew was on Gray’s right, all geared up in a nearly uniform manner but segregated from the package by a few feet of bench.
Thirty seconds later, Donald Fitzroy came back on the line. “Fullcourt, this is Standstill. There has been a change in the operation. You and your men will, of course, be remunerated accordingly.”
Dulin sat up straighter. His brow furrowed. “Roger that, Standstill. Go ahead with the update to the op specs.”
“I need the delivery of the package canceled.”
Dulin’s head cocked. “Negative, Standstill. We can’t return to the airfield. It’s crawling with opposition and—”
“That’s not what I mean, Fullcourt. I need you to… destroy the package.”
A pause. “Standstill, Fullcourt. Repeat your last?”
The tone of voice over the sat phone changed. It was less detached. More human. “I have a… a situation here, Fullcourt.”
Dulin said, his own voice losing the clipped cadence of radio protocol, “Yeah, I guess you do.”
“I want him terminated.”
Dulin’s head was propped in his gloved hand. His fingers began strumming on the side of his face. “You sure about this? He’s one of your guys.”
“I know that.”
“I’m one of your guys.”
“It’s complicated, lad. Not how I normally do business.”
“This isn’t right.”
“As I said, you all will be compensated for this deviance from the original operation.”
Dulin’s eyes stayed on the package as he asked, “How much?”
* * *
Five minutes later, Dulin looked towards his men while reaching for his radio’s selector switch on his chest rig. He turned the dial a few clicks.
“Don’t say anything. Just nod if you copy.” Barnes, McVee, Perini, and Markham all looked up and around. Their eyes found Dulin up at the bulkhead and they nodded as one. Unaware, the Gray Man stared blankly at the pallet of equipment in front of him.
“Listen up. Standstill has ordered us to waste the package.” Across the thirty feet of open space in the well-lit cabin Dulin saw the stunned reaction on his men’s faces. He shrugged, “Don’t ask me, boys. I just work here.”
The four men on the bench with the package looked to him, saw him to be closest to the ramp, strapped in, with his M4 rifle on his chest and his bearded face gaz ing at the floor of the cabin.
/> They looked back to their team leader and nodded slowly as one.
SIX
Court Gentry sat alone near the closed ramp of the aircraft, listened to the engines whine, and tried to catch his breath, to get control of his emotions. His ass was on a mesh bench in the back of an L-100-30, but his mind was back down below, in the dark, in the sand.
In the shit.
The operator closest on his right got up and moved around the pallet, sat down on the bench facing him. Idly Gentry glanced to his right, noticed the extraction team’s leader adjusting his gear. He began to look to the other guys, but his head returned to the man at the bulkhead.
Something wasn’t right.
The team leader’s back was ramrod straight, and he had an intense expression on his face, though he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. His MP5 was across his chest; he adjusted the glove on his right hand.
And his mouth was moving. He was transmitting into his close quarters radio, giving orders to his men.
Gentry looked down at his own Harris Falcon radio set. He had been on the same channel as the rest of the team, but now he could not hear the transmission.
Strange.
Court turned to the three men next to him on the bench. From their posture, from their facial expressions, Gentry determined that, just like their leader, they weren’t decompressing after the tension of the extraction from the hot zone. No, they moved and looked like they were about to go into action. Gentry had spent sixteen years in covert operations, studied faces and evaluated threats for a living. He knew what an operator looked like when the fight was over, and he knew what an operator looked like when the fight was about to begin.
Surreptitiously he unhooked the strap securing him to the bench and swiveled in his seat to face the men around him.
Dulin was up at the bulkhead; he was no longer transmitting. He just stared at Gentry.
“What’s up?” shouted Gentry above the engine’s roar.
Dulin stood slowly.
Court shouted again across the noisy cabin, “Whatever you’re thinking about doing, you need to just—”
Markham turned quickly on the bench, spun towards the Gray Man, his pistol already rising in front of him. Gentry pushed off the wall under the bench with his sandy boots and launched himself across the cabin, tried to put his body behind the pallet of gear lashed to the floor.
The fight was on. The fact that Court didn’t know why the fuck his rescuers had turned on him was a nonissue. He did not waste a single brain cell pondering the turn of events.
Court Gentry was a killer of men.
These were men.
And that’s all there was to it.
Markham got a shot off with his Sig Sauer handgun but missed high. Before Gentry disappeared behind the cargo, he saw Markham and Barnes quickly unhooking their bench harnesses.
McVee was the only man on Gentry’s left as the Gray Man crouched behind the pallet and faced the cockpit doors, thirty feet away. Dulin was up by the bulkhead wall near the doors, and the other three operators were ahead and to his right. Court knew that if he put down the man to his left, he would eliminate one of their fields of fire, so he rolled onto his left shoulder, emerged from behind the pallet with his M4 raised, and fired a long burst at the operator. The man’s goggled face slammed back against the wall, and his HK dropped away from his fingertips.
McVee fell back on the bench, dead.
Gentry had killed him, and he had no idea why.
* * *
Immediately every man in the back of the L-100 began firing his weapon; four guns poured metal-jacketed lead at Gentry’s position.
Court tucked tight down behind the equipment cache as the fuselage wall behind him began to scream, whistling as the holes made by a dozen rifle rounds allowed pressurized air to race out of the aircraft. The flight crew in the front of the cargo plane could not hear the shriek from the compromised skin, but they obviously heard the gunfire behind them, because they put their L-100 into a nosedive to drop to thicker air in order to lower the pressure differential and, hopefully, keep their aircraft from tearing to pieces.
The nosedive created a seemingly weightless environment for Gentry and his four remaining would-be assassins. Court’s body rose away from the relative safety of the pallet and rolled in a pair of reverse sum mersaults, finally landing on the ceiling of the cabin and scooting along its back to the rear ramp, which was now the highest point of the cargo compartment.
Two of the gunmen lifted into the air as well, firing above them at their target.
Gentry felt a pair of nine-millimeter slugs from an MP5 stitch across the armor plate in his tactical vest. The force of the impact knocked him off balance for an instant, but from his position completely upside down, he saw one of the operators had not unhooked his bench harness, and he kicked frantically in the air, strapped to the wall to Gentry’s right.
The man was a sitting duck.
Gentry shot Perini in the head with his M4. His body went limp, his arms and legs danced with the weightlessness of the plane’s rapid descent.
For the next ten seconds the four men still alive in the cabin spun through the air like socks in a dryer. The team leader, Dulin, was below the others. He had managed to grab hold of some webbing on the forward bulkhead and hook his arm securely through it, and now he tried to aim his submachine gun at Gentry thirty feet above him. But Markham and Barnes bumped into Gentry as they all swirled through the air, completely out of control. Buttstocks, boots, and fists flew each time a target moved too close to engage with a rifle.
Though the men had a sense of weightlessness, they were, in fact, hurtling towards earth, dropping through the sky at maximum velocity. Only there was an airplane surrounding them and dropping as well, so they could see no reference points to prove to them that they were falling like stones.
In the chaos, the screaming and the confusion of losing hold of terra firma, Court spun backwards again, and his hand slipped from the grip of his rifle, and its sling slipped over his head. The weapon twisted out of reach. He drew his Glock-19 pistol, raised to fire without sighting, but he felt the sting of a bullet as it tore into his right thigh. The impact kicked his leg back like a hammer’s blow. He ignored the injury, and his feet found purchase again on the rear ramp. He looked up, which was now straight down, and found Dulin in his sights. The extraction team’s leader had one arm wrapped in the bulkhead webbing, and he held his submachine gun over his head with the other, pointed up towards the Gray Man. Court fired six quick rounds and saw the operator’s body react as the bullets slammed into Dulin’s groin and lower torso.
Gentry next turned to get a bead on Barnes and Markham, his final two targets, but McVee’s dead body sailed across his field of fire. Just then the pilot apparently decided he’d seen enough sand in his windscreen, and he pulled quickly out of his dive. All passengers in the back, the dead and the living alike, now dropped through the air, slammed hard into the steel flooring of the transport, and rolled like bowling balls towards the front bulkhead of the aircraft. Court’s pistol flew free of his hand on impact, and he bounced forward, the sting from the gunshot wound in his thigh burning with each jolt.
Court rolled towards the netting on the front bulkhead as the plane leveled, almost got a handhold, but the pilot put the L-100 back into a climb. Gentry’s momentum pushed him forward for a while, but as the cargo floor became a steep incline, passing forty-five degrees now, he lost the last of his inertia, and his fingertips just barely managed to tickle the nylon webbing next to Dulin’s motionless form.
Then the Gray Man went backwards. He rocked back on his heels first and fell down, then slid, then rolled, and finally Court went airborne halfway down the length of the cabin. The pain in his thigh was compounded when he landed on his hip at the rear of the plane, but this pain paled in comparison to the excruciating crush of Markham’s body as he slammed into Court’s chest. Markham faced the other direction and was even more stunned th
an Gentry by the violent impact, so the Gray Man easily got his arms around the operator’s head. With a merciless twist, Markham’s neck snapped, wrecking his spinal cord and killing him instantly.
The dead operator wore his rifle around his neck on a one-point sling, essentially a necklace with an automatic assault weapon dangling as its charm. Court tried to remove it, but the sling was caught on the operator’s load-bearing vest. Court pulled the gun up to the dead man’s shoulder, tried to quickly sight on the last remaining extraction team member, who was using the legs of the long bench as a ladder to climb up the cabin to the forward bulkhead loadmaster’s galley.
Court pulled the trigger, but the weapon clicked empty. He fumbled around Markham’s chest rig for another magazine and slammed it into the MP5’s magazine well. He readied to fire at his target just as the man disappeared into the galley. The plane leveled off again, and Court’s gravity returned to normal. He stayed low behind the pallet towards the rear hatch, waiting for Barnes to peek back around the door.
Without warning, Gentry heard a loud noise and felt the rear cargo ramp behind him move. The wind roared.
Barnes had activated the ramp from the front of the cabin. A second later, the aircraft began another steep climb.
As Court scrambled to grab on to the netting over the pallet on the floor in front of him, Barnes appeared near the bulkhead. The dark-clad operator had slung a parachute rig onto his back. Apparently he figured this plane had taken all the damage it could, or perhaps he worried the pilots were dead from stray gunfire. Barnes held the bulkhead webbing with all his might and fired burst after burst in Gentry’s direction, one-handed, with his M4 as the ramp opened fully behind the Gray Man.
Court reached behind him with his free hand and stripped the gun off Markham’s neck just before the dead man rolled out of the plane and into the darkness. The pilot continued his climb, and soon McVee’s body slid past Gentry and out into the night. Perini’s body was lashed into his seat, and Dulin’s corpse was still secured in the bulkhead webbing.
Gentry and Barnes were the only two left alive.
