by Dalton Fury
“Why are you still crying?” Kolt asked as he did a brass check on his Glock.
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen a man killed like that. He was staring straight at me,” Cindy said, wiping the tears with her left sleeve.
“Okay, first off, he’s not dead. Second, get your shit together.”
The gate closed automatically behind Raynor.
“I know, I know,” Cindy quickly said. “I’m good. Really, I am.”
“Look, this could get real ugly in the next few minutes. Guns kill. You saw that back at the Agency house. Decide right now if you have my six, or head back to the van. Your call.”
“No, no, Kolt. I’m okay. I’m over it. First-game jitters, I guess.”
“Okay. I need your head on a swivel in there. How about opening that gate again?”
As the gate opened the second time, Raynor slung his HK around his neck along with his backpack full of magazines. He passed the sentry’s radio to Hawk and drew his suppressed Glock. She turned the volume low and attached it to her weapon’s sling up near her ear, and then extended the stock on the MP7.
The two ran forward into Maadi Land and Sea, with Raynor leading the way with his silenced pistol.
* * *
Digger and Slapshot made short work of the metal gate between the pier and the property of Maadi Land and Sea. With their handheld NVGs they could make out both the static and the patrolling sentries, so they timed the noisiest part of their cutting of the metal links for when the guards were farthest away. Digger snapped links with his bolt cutters while his mate held the gate to minimize rattle, and when they had a large enough opening from the bottom of the gate up to peel it back to allow a man to slide through, they stopped and pushed their bodies and equipment into the grounds of the Libyans’ property.
As a sentry closed on their position, both men fast-crawled up the reedy embankment to a low concrete retaining wall around a small drainage pipe. This gave them cover from the three sentries in the back of the warehouse property, but a guard on the roof of the three-story office building would be able to see them here if he shone a flashlight on them.
A set of cement steps cut through the center of the property, ahead and twenty-five yards to the right of the two Delta operators. They led to the parking lot behind the warehouse, and by utilizing them they could continue up the hill to the warehouse wall.
But in looking over their surveillance photos they’d noticed devices along the walkway that looked like they might be motion detectors. So the men pivoted to the left, moved low through the weeds, and then headed up toward the warehouse.
Slowly and carefully, and with one eye on the patrolling sentries in the distance.
They almost made it.
They hit the parking lot twenty yards from the wall of the warehouse, and then a bright white light on the roof of the low building flashed on, illuminating them like they were center stage on Broadway. Their night-observation devices whited out, and they flipped them up on their helmets to see. Behind them, their shadows reached all the way into the Nile. Neither man waited around to see if the motion-activated light would be noticed by the security forces at the rear of the property or not. They both sprinted toward the wall of the warehouse.
Digger had been keeping track of the nearest sentry — the man with the Kalashnikov was at the northwest corner of the warehouse near the loading bay. The American slowed just slightly to bring his weapon’s red dot sight up to the area, and he found his target. The wide-eyed sentry was lifting his rifle up toward the men in the light in front of him.
Digger squeezed off a pair of bursts toward the man’s position, but he was moving too fast to be certain he’d achieved any hits. He ran to the wall while Slapshot slowed to fire at a target to the south.
* * *
Kolt and Hawk had made it to the wall of the office building, and they were using it, and a line of cars and SUVs parked there, for cover as they headed to the warehouse.
They flattened themselves in front of the Mercedes S-Class sedan as a sentry passed by on the other side of the vehicle.
Kolt and Hawk hadn’t heard the suppressed gunfire but did hear the radio call from Slapshot. “Contact!” Kolt knew the call meant one of his men had pulled the trigger on a bad guy, but the neighborhood had not started scrambling just yet.
Then loud bursts of automatic AK fire from the rear of the property echoed through the parking lot in the front.
“Shit,” Raynor said. He knew it was going to go loud tonight, but he had hoped to make it farther than this before the lead started flying.
As the sentry on the other side of the car shouted into his radio for an update as to what was going on, Kolt pulled his black matte-bladed knife from his waistband. He started to rise to take down the sentry from behind, but Hawk squeezed him on the ankle. He looked back over his shoulder quickly, and found Hawk flat on the cement shaking her head no. She pointed ahead, to the north, and Raynor followed her finger. Two more sentries were standing by the front door to the warehouse, thirty yards away. Their weapons were at their shoulders and they were scanning the night.
If Raynor had stood and revealed himself, it was likely he and Hawk both would have been cut down by AK fire.
Kolt just lowered back flat in the shadow of the Mercedes and waited for all three sentries to run off to the north.
Over Kolt’s earpiece he heard, “Boss, it’s Digger.”
“Go,” said Kolt, his voice barely a whisper.
“We dropped two sentries back here, but we’re pinned. We’re behind an AC unit taking fire from the roof of objective Stone. We can’t make it around to the loading dock until we suppress that position. Sounds like two shooters on the northwest corner of the roof.”
“Roger that. We’ll enter Stone and take them from behind. Will alert you when to check your fire.”
Kolt turned to Cindy. “Into the building and up the stairs.” He stood, drew a nine-banger flash-bang grenade from his duffel, and pulled the pin.
Cindy had no idea what he was going to do with the distraction device here in the open parking lot.
Raynor threw the grenade hard away from them, and then he turned around to the window of the office. As the flash-bang detonated, he smashed and raked the window with the muzzle end of his HK. The grenade’s detonation masked the sound of the breaking glass, and it also set off the car alarms on the long row of luxury cars and SUVs. It would bring trouble in seconds, but it might help take some of the pressure off of his two mates battling it out with sentries on the other side of the property.
“Inside!” Kolt shouted as he took a knee and raised the other one. Cindy stepped on Kolt’s right knee and climbed quickly but carefully through the broken pane.
Kolt followed close behind.
If Cindy had any issues with Raynor taking liberties with his mission orders from Webber and making entry on the office building, she kept those reservations to herself. She kept tight on her commanding officer’s shoulder as they moved through a darkened office. They opened the heavy door and then advanced up a quiet linoleum-floored corridor. Ahead of them they heard shouting from multiple rooms.
Kolt held his suppressed Glock out in front of him with his right hand, but in his left he held on to the MP7. This way, if any single threat presented itself ahead he could, theoretically at least, eliminate it with his silenced pistol. But if several enemy appeared at once and he needed to rock and roll, he could get his short-barreled PDW up in half a second.
As they passed a door with a sign on it, Cindy nudged Kolt.
“Stairwell,” she said softly, tipping her head toward the sign.
Kolt nodded and he let his MP7 hang from the sling around his neck as he opened the door with his left hand.
Just on the other side of the door, a man in a suit and tie leapt down the last three steps of the staircase, running toward the door. He held an unslung Kalashnikov with a folded stock in his right hand.
Kolt shot the surprised Sa
leh confederate three times in the chest with his Glock. Raynor still had to spin sideways and take the dead man’s forward impact against his shoulder.
The Libyan dropped to the floor on his back. Hawk kicked the man’s AK away from his body.
Kolt then kicked his attacker between the legs to make sure he was dead.
In the stairwell the suppressed.40-caliber rounds echoed off the steel of the staircase, but Raynor had been at this long enough to know that no one else in the building would perceive anything they might have heard as gunfire.
Hawk and Kolt closed themselves in the stairwell, and began heading up to the roof.
TWENTY-SIX
Digger fired a series of short bursts at the northwest corner of the warehouse. Twice a sentry leaned around the corner to fire his Kalashnikov at the two Delta men pinned down behind the large air-conditioning unit that protruded from the building’s wall twenty meters away. Digger and Slapshot wanted to head in that direction, to make a right around the corner and enter the warehouse at the loading bay, but there was no way they could run across the parking lot along the wall without getting cut down from above and behind by the men on the roof.
“What about breaching this wall right here with C-4?” Digger shouted to Slapshot as he reloaded. “We can make a big enough hole to get inside the warehouse.”
“No place to safely hunker down while we detonate it. Plus, what if there is a stack of Grinch rockets propped up against the other side of this wall?”
“Shit.”
Slapshot stepped out from cover for a moment to fire at the roof. As he did so he saw a group of Saleh’s men approaching across the parking lot of the office building. He directed his fire at them, sending them scrambling for cover.
He’d not fired more than a few rounds before asphalt in front of him kicked up in dusty, flying chunks, the result of a long burst from an AK three floors up firing down on his position.
Slapshot spun back behind the AC unit and dropped to a sitting position.
“We give Racer another minute to suppress the roof or we’re going to have to try for the loading dock, one at a time while the other covers.”
Neither man thought that was a tactic with a high probability of success, but the longer they stayed rooted to one position, the faster their chances here would spin down to zero. Just then Racer came over the interteam radio’s headsets.
“Check your fire to the roof.”
“Roger that,” said Digger.
The sentry at the northwest corner was joined by a second gunman. One at a time they leaned out with their rifles and took undisciplined shots at the two men taking cover.
Slapshot said, “I’m gonna thin this herd,” and he knelt on one knee and aimed his weapon carefully to the north. He kept perfectly still, waiting to place his red dot on the next piece of flesh to expose itself around the corner, not even flinching when one of the men stuck his AK blindly around and fired a three-round burst that clanged the steel machinery just above Slapshot’s head.
Then the second sentry leaned out quickly for a better look.
Slapshot calmly broke the four-pound trigger on his weapon, and pink mist, shiny in the artificial light of the parking lot, erupted from the sentry’s forehead.
The body fell from behind the corner into view and his AK-47 tumbled away from him.
“Sweet,” Digger said, looking back over his shoulder. Then he leaned away from the protection of the green AC unit and fired again at the five men near the rear entrance of the office.
He struck one of the five in the leg.
As Digger tucked back in to reload, Kolt came over the headset. “The roof is clear.”
“Thanks, boss,” said Slapshot. And then to Digger, “Let’s go!”
* * *
Hawk and Raynor had each shot one of the men on the roof, killing them both instantly. Now they were back in the stairwell, heading down to the third floor. Cindy was listening in on the transmissions between the different members of Saleh’s organization. With their frantic shouted radio calls, the constant cross traffic, and her limited knowledge of a different dialect of the language, not to mention the adrenaline racing through her body, it was hard for her to make out much of the conversation.
But as they entered the third floor of the office area, she grabbed Racer by the shoulder. She whispered, “One guy sounds like the boss. He says he’s called the police and they will be here in five minutes. He’s saying something about the BMW. I think he’s going to go for the BMW and escape.”
“The hell he is,” said Raynor.
The pair turned to head back for the stairs, but a door opened down the hall in front of them. Two men dressed in assault vests over white button-down shirts stepped out into the hallway. They were carrying their Kalashnikovs at the low-ready. Raynor and Hawk both lifted their short-barreled PDWs and opened fire, dropping one of the armed men before he was able to get a shot off.
The second man spun away and back into the office.
Raynor charged up the hallway, Hawk moving backward behind him, covering the stairwell and the doors to the other offices.
As Raynor moved closer he heard the sound of sirens approaching up the Kornish al Nile.
At the open doorway to the office Kolt dropped to his knees next to the dead man. He spun into the room low, and a burst of shots went well over his head. He found the shooter, the same man who had just escaped from the hallway, and Raynor shot him dead at fifteen feet.
But there was another man in the room. A silver-haired Arab in a wool sweater and slacks. The man stood behind a walnut desk at the far wall. He held a briefcase tight in each hand. A gold-plated .45 pistol rested on the blotter of the desk in front of him.
It was Aref Saleh.
Raynor rose to his feet, his HK held out in front of him like a pistol. “If you go ahead and reach for that gun, you’d make shooting you a little less complicated.”
Saleh looked at the American dressed in black. Hawk backed up to the door now, still looking up the hallway. A woman with bare arms carrying a machine gun. Saleh could not process this strange sight before him.
The Libyan spoke with a quavering voice. “I offer no resistance. I will go quietly.”
Raynor raised his weapon to shoot the man through the head. He’d love to take him for any intelligence value, but hauling those two briefcases that Saleh considered so important would probably be almost as good as hauling Saleh himself, and a hell of a lot less troublesome.
Just as Kolt was about to fire, his earpiece came alive with Slapshot’s voice.
“Racer, it’s Slap. You read me?”
“Go,” said Racer.
“We are inside Rhine. No joy on the cargo.”
Raynor lowered the gun slightly as he brought his hand to his earpiece. “Say again?”
“Got a few crates of RPGs. A shit ton of AKs and such. But negative on the SA-24s.”
“You gotta be sure, Slap. No time to back-clear the warehouse,” Kolt said.
“We’re sure. Dry hole!”
Behind Kolt, Cindy heard the same message in her earpiece. “Dammit,” she muttered.
Raynor looked at Saleh. “Okay. Change of plans. You’re going for a boat ride.”
* * *
By the time they’d tossed Saleh into the dinghy and climbed in behind him, the sound of shrill police sirens was deafening. There were choppers approaching, as well, which made crossing the open ground at the rear of the property more of a rush job than a controlled exfiltration. Kolt and Hawk pushed Saleh along the southern wall and then north along the fence to the hole in the gate, and Digger and Slapshot threw mini — smoke grenades before exiting the warehouse at a sprint, avoiding a few rounds fired in their direction from surviving security men around the property.
The wooden dinghy was designed for four, so they struggled to get all five aboard, but soon enough they were headed upriver, with Digger holding the outboard motor’s throttle wide open as he piloted them close to the
shoreline to help hide them from the skies.
Slapshot zip-tied Saleh’s arms behind his back at the wrists and elbows, and then he used a small nylon sack he kept stored in the utility pouch of his chest harness as a hood, placing it over Saleh’s head as they neared their destination. Hawk had already shoved a scarf in his mouth to keep him quiet.
It took them only fifteen minutes to make it back to their panel truck upriver at the launching point of the dinghy. Curtis was unconscious when they began loading up, but he awoke with the noise. When Slapshot pushed a man into the back of the truck next to him and then shut the door, Curtis looked up to Kolt.
With a voice even weaker than before he said, “Holy hell. Is that who I think it is?”
“Yes.”
“So much for the covert hit, huh?”
“Didn’t go exactly as planned,” Raynor admitted.
“And the SAMs?”
“Gone.”
“You guys blew them? How many were there?”
“No. Gone as in dry hole. Hence our visitor here.”
Curtis’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the man in the hood. “We need to find out where they are.”
The truck began moving as Raynor said, “No shit. How’s the leg?”
“Numb.”
“Good. We’re going to our safe house to the south. We can drop you at a hospital, or we can take you to our place and have a helo pick you up and get you to the embassy.”
Curtis reached for his phone. “I’ve got to figure that black American spies probably will have a long wait at the local hospital, so I’ll go to the embassy.”
* * *
At the Delta safe house on Gamel Abd El Nasir, the panel truck rolled right into the single-vehicle garage and the door was lowered behind. While Digger stayed with Curtis in the vehicle, Kolt took a flex-cuffed and hooded Aref Saleh out of the truck and up the steps, then all but dragged him through the house and into an empty bedroom. He shoved him to the floor, and then stepped out into the hallway. Here he and Slapshot covered their faces with local kaffiyeh head wraps, and Hawk donned a hijab, a traditional head covering for women, which she drew across her face below her eyes.
