by Ross Sidor
As he jumped off the conveyor belt to clear space for Flounder’s entry, Poacher took the nearest Pakistani technician with two shots through the back of his head as he attempted to flee, then Poacher shifted aim and double tapped an Afghan as he threw the rifle that had been slung across his chest into firing position.
Simultaneously, coming off the conveyor belt, Flounder dropped onto one knee and eliminated another Uzbek guard.
Avery came around the conveyor belt. A blur of movement registered in his left peripheral, and he shifted his pistol around. Ali Masood Jafari kept his head low as he ran for the metal staircase, yelling in Dari along the way. Avery popped him twice between the shoulder blades and put another round through the back of his head as he hit the floor.
A pair of boots entered Avery’s upper field of vision. He flicked his eyes upward, off Jafari’s body, up the stairs, and onto an Uzbek who had just appeared at the top of the landing. Avery raised his aim, steadied his arms, and fired. His first shot whipped past the Uzbek mercenary’s shoulder, and he brought up his AK-74 carbine and crouched down, presenting a smaller target profile. Avery’s shot ricocheted harmlessly behind the Uzbek.
Determined to take the fucker out before he could fire his AK and alert everyone in the whole place, Avery adjusted aim, took and held a deep breath to keep his body still, and put a .45 through the Uzbek’s chin, shattering the lower half of his skull and spraying blood into the air.
Meanwhile, fourteen feet from Avery, one of the Pakistani technicians hurled a wrench at Poacher in a desperate last act of defense. The ex-Delta NCO easily sidestepped out of the way of the wrench and double-tapped the technician, while Flounder weaved a path between the industrial machinery. Finding the remaining two Pakistani scientists, he shot them down.
The team swept the rest of the factory, moving fast, knowing that there were still two more targets on the loose somewhere.
Then they heard the sound of metal and locks disengaging. From their respective positions across the assembly floor, the CIA soldiers converged on the source of the sound as Mullah Arzad heaved open the main doors and ran outside. Nearby was a large, vertical air duct behind which he’d been hiding. The remaining Uzbek fighter was behind him, near the duct, with his rifle covering the mullah. The Uzbek broke cover to follow Arzad, and that’s when Flounder took him, shooting him three times in the back.
The CIA men made no move to go after Arzad, knowing full well what he was about to run into.
Outside the mill building, Mockingbird held his Mk 23 level in front of him from five feet away. The Taliban commander stopped in his tracks, surprised at the sight of the black-clad operator in front of him, the white of his eyes apparent through the darkness. Mockingbird lowered his aim and gut shot him twice.
Arzad groaned, stumbled back a couple steps, and, overtaken by the pain, collapsed onto his knees with one hand pressed against the floor, the other held tightly against his bleeding, burning intestines. Mockingbird let him suffer in agony for another couple seconds before finishing him off with a shot through the top of his head. The Taliban commander collapsed face first onto a puddle of his own blood, with a small section of bloody brain exposed through his cracked skull.
Maintaining his firing stance, Mockingbird stepped over Arzad and into the factory. When he spotted Flounder, he lowered his weapon, squatted to grab Arzad’s body by the robe, and dragged it inside. Flounder shut the doors behind Mockingbird and gave him a thumbs-up for being the one to take out one of JSOC’s most wanted HVTs.
Avery and Poacher continued their sweep of the factory floor and, after announcing that it was clear, re-joined the others while maintaining ready positions with their weapons and keeping the doors and stairwell covered.
The takedown of the assembly floor took only eleven seconds. Most importantly, none of the armed tangos had been able to get a single shot off and draw the attention of everyone else inside the building.
Avery hand signaled what he wanted everyone to do next.
Mockingbird would hold the first floor. Poacher and Flounder would take the second floor, while Avery took the third.
01:33. Mockingbird covered his teammates as they scaled the skeletal stairs. They took slow, light steps so that their boots didn’t clatter off the metal surface of the stairs.
At the second level landing, they split up. Avery continued following the stairs up, while Poacher and Flounder charged down the second floor corridor.
The corridor was brightly illuminated with fluorescent lighting set in the high ceiling and was about thirty feet in length, with four doors, two on one side, one on the other, and the fourth set in the end of the corridor. The corridor was cold and looked sterile and clinical. Without knowing what lay on the other sides of those doors, they’d need to systematically clear every room one by one.
Poacher gently tried the latch on the first door. It was unlocked.
Flounder covered him as he opened the door, threw a flashbang into the darkened space, pulled the door closed, waited for the thunderous detonation, and kicked the door in on its hinges.
Inside the large open room—about thirty-by-forty-five feet, with sinks, a couple square tables, chairs, two refrigerators on the far end, and two dozen cots laid out in rows, half of them occupied—one Russian, five Pakistanis, and four jihadist-looking Afghans or Uzbeks sat up in their cots.
The Russian, the way he moved and acted, looked like a civilian or scientist-type without military training, and so did the Pakistanis. Unlike the Afghans and Uzbeks, they didn’t reach for weapons, but that wasn’t going to save them.
Poacher and Flounder put down the Afghans and Uzbeks first as they reached for AKs on the floor beneath their cots. Reeling from the disorientating effects of the flashbang, the Taliban fighters’ movements were clumsy and uncoordinated. Their weapons never cleared the floor before .45 hollow points split their skulls apart, one after the other, like targets lined up in a shooting gallery.
Poacher shifted aim onto the Russian as the man stumbled out of his cot, tripping over a sheet that was still tucked in beneath his mattress, while Flounder calmly dispatched a Pakistani who was also on his feet, staggering blindly toward a wall.
Without a second’s hesitation, Poacher and Flounder proceeded to coldly and systematically execute the remaining scientists and technicians with one or two shots to the head, even as one pleaded in heavily accented English that he wasn’t armed.
When they were finished, four seconds after entry, Poacher and Flounder stepped back into the corridor and replaced magazines.
Poacher was a soldier. Usually, he’d view killing a non-combatant as cowardly and immoral. But he experienced no qualms or guilt about those scientists and technicians. Those men had probably never held a gun in their lives, but they were knowingly and willfully working to create weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands, and for a WMD operation like this, the scientific minds, and the knowledge they contained, were even more valuable resources than the mechanical equipment and components.
That’s why Israel assassinated civilian Iranian nuclear scientists. With time and money, Tehran could replace a cascade of centrifuges, but they couldn’t replace skilled and knowledgeable human beings quite as easily.
Poacher and Flounder continued their sweep of the second floor, moving faster now, aware that the flashbang had surely given them away.
The next door down the line was locked.
Flounder blasted the lock with a three round burst and kicked the door in. Inside was a large, empty utility room filled with electrical panels, air handlers, and whirring machinery involved in the operations and maintenance of the building, but Flounder still gave the room a thorough walk through in case someone was hiding. The last thing they needed was to keep going down the corridor and have someone pop out behind them.
The next room’s lock also needed to be taken out. This was an IT room filled with banks of computers and blinking lights, and one frightened Pakistani, huddled over a k
eyboard, who Poacher calmly double-tapped.
While Flounder went to the end of the corridor to the last door, Poacher likewise blasted the lock on the third door, and barged in. He followed his SOCOM pistol—the tactical light beneath the barrel now turned on—into the darkened room and swept the light’s beam left to right.
The room was small, looked more like a closet, and there was a single cot with a figure stirring on it. Poacher reflexively took aim on the figure, shining his light over it. He directed his barrel toward the floor and relaxed his finger over the trigger when he saw who it was.
Poacher looked around the walls, found a light switch, and flipped it.
Aleksa Denisova’s wrists were handcuffed to the metal framework of the cot on either side of her, and she looked battered and bruised, a lot worse than when Poacher had last seen her in Dushanbe. She looked up at him and jumped. Her eyes were bloodshot, dilated, and glossy. She’d been drugged, Poacher thought. Well, that wasn’t nearly as bad as other interrogation methods they could have employed against her. He pulled up his balaclava mask to show her his face. After a couple seconds, he saw the recognition in Aleksa’s eyes.
“You were with Avery in Dushanbe.”
“That’s right.”
Poacher knelt beside her and examined her wounds.
“I’m okay. They didn’t hurt me. How did you find this place?”
Poacher ignored the question and said, “How many people are here?”
“I don’t know. They kept me in here the whole time. I’ve only seen the American from Minsk and a couple Russians, but I’ve heard Pasthun or Dari coming from outside a couple times.” She frowned. “Where are we?”
“We’re at the processing plant in Gorno-Badakhshan. Everything’s going to be all right. Avery’s here.” Poacher snipped the chains on her handcuffs with his bolt cutters. “You’re safe now, understand? We’re going to get you out.”
Aleksa started to respond but was cut-off by Flounder calling out to Poacher from outside.
“Stay right here. I’m not going far,” Poacher told Aleksa, standing up and heading back out. When she protested, he stopped to look back at her and said, “We’ll be back for you. I promise. Stay here and keep quiet.”
The last room at the end of the corridor was unique. It was a heavy vault of reinforced steel with a cipher-lock keypad. Suspecting what the vault contained, Flounder selected his handheld radiation detector from his vest, switched it on, and swept it over the door. The steel was thick, but the detector still picked up faint gamma traces.
Flounder turned to Poacher and nodded.
They’d located the HEU.
But still no sign of Cramer.
___
01:33. Half a minute before Poacher tossed the first flashbang and broke the mission’s stealth profile, Avery took the stairs to an identical corridor on the third and top level. Nearing the landing, he at once heard footfalls against the metal floor. He held the Mk 23 in front of him in both hands. Taking another step up, Avery’s eyes cleared the landing, and he saw a Russian, in black jeans and a t-shirt with a holstered pistol, and a Pakistani in a lab coat with protective goggles walking in his direction from about two dozen feet down the corridor.
And they saw him too.
The Russian pushed the Pakistani back with his left hand, placing himself in front of the scientist, while the right reached for the pistol holstered beneath his left armpit. His voice bounced off the walls as he shouted something out to whoever else was nearby. Avery didn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear; he was announcing the presence of an intruder, and one intruder meant the whole place was under attack.
Springing up the remaining stairs two at a time, Avery sighted the Russian first and hit the trigger twice, catching him center mass in mid-draw. The big Russian staggered back a couple steps, reeling from the bullets, blood forming at his mouth, but he was still in the fight. He continued raising his pistol and got off a single shot, aimed too wide, before Avery gave him a third round of .45 ACP, below his throat, this time putting him on the deck.
Avery shifted his sights over the bewildered Pakistani scientist.
But before he could tap the trigger, Avery heard the thunderous blast coming from below and felt the floor shudder beneath his feet. He hesitated for a microsecond, until his mind registered the sound as a flashbang grenade—Poacher and Flounder—then he shot the Pakistani, who held his hands up in the air in surrender.
Before stepping into the corridor, Avery quickly reloaded and then holstered the SOCOM pistol and switched to his M4. He knew he wasn’t the only one to have heard the stun grenade—the damned thing was loud—and it was time to sacrifice stealth for firepower.
He barely had the rifle to his shoulder before a door thirty feet down the corridor flew open into the hallway with enough force that it looked like it would snap off its hinges. Two big, shaved-headed Russians in armored vests and carrying AK-12 assault rifles poured out, looking determined to kick ass.
Before they caught sight of him, Avery fired a three-round burst in their direction. Poorly aimed reactionary fire, these shots plinked off the surface of the heavy steel door, which, open, took up a third of the corridor’s width, and the Russians opened up with their brand-new Kalashnikovs, sending a torrent of 5.45mm forty feet down the corridor toward Avery.
As Avery retreated back down the stairs, one round smacked against his vest. He felt it even through the layered ceramic plates, like taking a blow from a baseball bat. His upper body bucked against the hit, and he nearly fell off his feet. He heard the whip-like crack as another supersonic round broke the air inches past his head. Then another searing hot round cut through the flesh and meat of his left biceps. His left hand went instantly slack, giving out beneath the barrel of his rifle. His vest caught another bullet, knocking him down the last couple stairs to the landing, in the temporary safety of the stairwell.
Catching his breath, Avery became conscious of the warm, sticky sensation of blood pouring over his arm. He’d been shot before. Once, while in the army, and he hadn’t even known until after the enemy contact, when another soldier spotted and pointed out the hole in the fabric of his BDUs. The pain didn’t bother Avery, the adrenaline and endorphins took care of that, for the short term, but he didn’t much care for the thought of the dirty, fragmented led embedded inside his torn muscle, hindering his ability to fight, leaving him susceptible to infection.
But there was nothing to be done about that now.
FIDO, as they said in 75th Rangers, Fuck it, drive on.
More 5.45mm spat above him into the upper stairwell wall behind him.
They couldn’t see him, but the Russians were determined to keep him pinned down until they reached his position to finish him off.
Avery replaced his left hand beneath the barrel of his M4, squeezing his grip tight through the pain in his arm. He sucked in a couple deep breaths to oxygenate his body and clear his head. Then, when there was a lull in the incoming fire, he sprung up, breaking cover, and fired back at the Russians from the stairs. One of them yelled out, but not because he’d taken a bullet. Avery’s shots had gone past him, but his weapon jammed, as AKs were prone to do.
Avery’s eyes caught a flash of movement some ten feet behind the Russian shooters. Squinting against the cordite and smoke haze burning his eyes, he saw Cramer and Litvin, along with three bodyguards, who were kitted up like spetsnaz, as they stepped out from behind the open door and ran down the corridor in the opposite direction.
As Cramer’s group disappeared through another door at the end of the corridor, Avery ducked his head below the floor level, against more incoming fire. He heard the footsteps of the first two Russians coming closer. He heard the confidence in their voices that they’d wounded him and would corner him and finish him in the stairwell.
Avery dropped his rifle, letting it clatter down the steps, and switched back to his SOCOM pistol. The pain in his arm worsened, and he was no longer able to sup
port the M4 sufficiently. He rested the pistol on the stair next to him, selected a flashbang from his vest, released the pin, waited a second, reached up, rolled it down the floor, and flinched when a round of 5.45mm struck the floor barely an inch from his hand, kicking off sparks.
A split second later there was the tremendous ear shattering blast made louder by the close confines and the acoustics of the corridor. Even in the stairwell, through his clenched eyelids, Avery still saw the brilliant white flash, and took comfort in knowing it was a thousand times worse for his opponents.
Avery sprung up from the stairs, extended his right arm with the SOCOM pistol level in front of him, left leg bent with that foot on the next step in front of him. He tracked his targets, his mind making the split-second assessment of their threat potential and determining the order in which to eliminate them. The pain in his left arm grew in intensity, but if he let the pain hinder him, he was dead.
One Russian had moved farther back down the corridor, away from the stun grenade, but his wide, glazed-over, flickering eyes stared right at Avery without seeing him. Disorientated, he was in the process of shouldering his rifle, hoping to get a lucky shot, knowing that Avery would be coming back up the stairs any second.
The second Russian was on his knees, barely five feet away from the destroyed shell of the stun grenade. His hands fumbled around on the floor for the AK-12 he’d dropped, and he nearly fell over.
The first Russian fired his AK-12 blindly and randomly, but his aim was too high and off-center. The shots went wild and sparked off the walls and ceiling, not coming within four feet of Avery, who was calmly advancing down the corridor, closing the gap between them.
He shot the first Russian twice in the face. He dropped his rifle and collapsed as Avery shifted his aim down and to the right and pulled the trigger on the second Russian as the man’s fingers graced the butt of his rifle on the floor. His head snapped back, and his body went instantly limp.
The corridor cleared, Avery planted his back against the wall, hit the mag release with his right hand while his left reached painfully for a new magazine from his vest. He clumsily reloaded and chambered a round before proceeding down the corridor, hoping that Poacher or Flounder would catch up with him soon.
