by Mark Greaney
Gentry shot Gregor Sidorenko through the forehead. Blood sprayed across the portrait of Stalin behind him as his head snapped back. He spun away, tumbled out of his chair behind his desk, and came to rest faceup, eyes wide open, dead on the cool wooden floor.
Court hadn’t come all this way to listen to Sid talk.
SIX
The Gray Man stepped past the desk and fired a second round into the Russian mob boss; the body jerked and blood sprayed, twinkling in the firelight. And then Court turned away, holstering his pistol and moving to the long row of curtains. He yanked them down with a single pull to gain access to the window.
But there was no window. The curtains had covered a massive brick wall.
Sid had been so scared of Gentry he’d had the windows removed, bricking himself away from the dangers of the outside world.
Court ran back around the desk, vaulted Sid’s body and the pool of blood growing on the floor, and ducked into the bedroom.
There were no windows here, either.
Oh shit.
In an instant, Court’s escape plan evaporated. He had planned to break or blow the glass of the first window he found after killing Sid, and then just rappel or bungee down the side of the building, bypassing all the security inside the mansion’s walls.
But Gentry had not allowed for the possibility that there would be no windows.
Hope in one hand, shit in the other.
There was only one way out. He turned and faced the hallway door just as the sounds of shouting men came from up the hall.
At the same time, sirens began to wail around the property.
Court sprinted for the door, reloading his pistol with a fresh magazine from his chest rig as he advanced on the danger.
“It’s getting lively.” Jeff Parks had finished his call to Dead Eye and returned to watch the monitor. Now he stood at the back wall, just behind the seated Leland Babbitt. Together they watched the main display along with the rest of the signal room. Tiny white spots moved in ones and twos toward the main building, no real coordination evident, but all the figures were obviously responding to orders.
Parks gave his reading of the events. “The guys who found the microlight called it in, and now the compound is on full alert.”
A woman near the front of the room had been listening to the audio feeds from the bugs set up outside the walls of the dacha. She turned away from her desk with her hand to her earpiece and spoke into her microphone. “Sirens sounding at the target location.”
Someone else said, “It’s going loud.”
Parks muttered to himself now, although his mic picked up the concern in his voice. “C’mon, Court, old buddy. I sure as shit hope you have an exfil planned that’s cleaner than your infil.”
Babbitt sat next to him, his tuxedo straining against his corpulent frame. With absolute confidence he said, “He’s got a plan.”
Court did not, in fact, have a plan.
He ran headlong up the narrow corridor toward what sounded like a half-dozen men, just on the other side of the corner not fifty feet ahead. Bouncing flashlight beams pulsed around the turn, the throw of the lights narrowing as the men drew closer. Court was hoping to improvise, to find some way to avoid contact with that number of enemy, but as he closed on them, and they on him, he realized his chances for something other than a six-on-one gunfight in a narrow hallway were rapidly diminishing.
Court sprinted, his night vision lens providing him a narrow monochromatic view. He held his weapon steady and his eyes scanned past the front sight, ready to engage the first armed man he saw.
A door opened twenty feet ahead on his right, opposite the door the child had appeared from a few minutes earlier. A man stepped out, facing in the direction of the noise of the men around the corner.
Gentry closed on the man, his Glock at the ready, and he scanned the man’s hands. The right hand was empty, but the left hand swung out with a silver automatic pistol clutched in it.
Court pressed the palm of his left hand into the back of his Glock’s side, and it fired once at the target in front of him. His left hand kept his suppressed pistol from cycling, and this held the spent shell casing in the weapon. It also lessened the noise made by firing the gun.
The man pitched forward into the hall, tumbling onto the carpet with a muted thud.
Court leapt over the fallen man and through the doorway, then grabbed the legs of the dead body, and pulled it back inside. He reached out into the hall, scooped up the silver pistol, and retreated back into the room just as the crew of skinheads made the turn.
He shut the door not one full second before their flashlights trained on it, and they rushed past seconds later, hurrying to surround their benefactor in his office.
There were no lights on in this bedroom, but through his monocle Gentry scanned the empty space. The dead man was a cousin of Sidorenko and a lieutenant in his organization, but Court neither knew nor cared. He was looking for a window, and he found two. He ran to them, pulled back the heavy curtains, and saw thick iron bars.
Fucking Sid, Court muttered under his breath.
He cleared the spent shell casing from his pistol and reholstered it, then reached into the cargo pocket of his pants, pulled out a mobile phone, and lit up the screen. With the touch of a three-button code, made difficult by a slight tremor in his hand brought on by adrenaline, he sent a wireless message to the detonators of both strands of fireworks.
Within ten seconds cracks and booms began in the forest more than one hundred yards beyond the southern gate of the compound. He knew in forty-five seconds the igniter would initiate in the second strand, and mortars would fire all over the southern side of the building.
He headed back to the door, cracked it open, then launched himself once again into the hallway, turned the corner and ran toward the atrium. He saw no one ahead, so he holstered his pistol and pulled the small flare gun from a Velcro pouch on his chest harness. It was loaded with a single smoke grenade, and he raised the device and fired a cartridge with a loud pop. The smoke grenade arced up the long passage, flew over the balcony, and dropped into the atrium, four stories below. Before the first grenade hit the ground and began extruding its thick red billowing cloud, Court had slammed a second ballistic smoke into the gun and snapped it closed, and he fired again. Another champagne-cork pop echoed in the darkened hallway. He loaded a third smoke as he began running up the hall as fast as he could. He fired the third grenade, and he let the flare gun fall to the hallway carpet as he pulled his suppressed Glock once again.
Two men appeared at the balcony in front of him now; they were backlit with the dim glow from the glass dome roof of the atrium, and Court saw them easily in his night vision monocle, saw the rifles in their hands, saw them running in his direction.
Court, dressed in black and sprinting up a dark hallway, was invisible to the men. All they saw before them were a pair of bright orange flashes before both of their worlds went dark.
With less than fifty feet to the balcony Court reholstered his sidearm, then reached behind him and pulled a grappling hook from his hip bag. The spring-loaded spool spun as he drew out a length of bungee cord attached to it, looping it in his hand as it came out. As he ran he swung the hook in a forward motion, playing out longer lengths of the bungee with each whipping revolution.
Gentry heard shouting in the atrium, many men calling out to one another in confusion, fury, and resolve. They would see the red smoke, black in the dim light, and they would not know what it meant, but any men on the higher floors would have heard the pops of the grenade launcher or the supersonic cracks of the suppressed Glock, and they would know danger was seconds away.
They would be waiting for him, Court knew, and he could not prevent that. The only way he could help himself now was to do the unexpected, and to move as quickly as possible out of their line of fire.
Ten
feet from the balcony he swung the grappling hook overhand, then let it go and dropped the loops. The weighted hook sailed away from him, drawing the springy black cord behind it.
With a loud metallic clang it hit the iron beam that ran the length of the dome over the atrium, then swung around over the top of the bar, where its claw grabbed the bungee.
Outside the building, to the rear of Court’s position, a series of low thuds began as the twelve Yanisars attached to the fuse ignited by the wireless signal began launching, skipping across the ground before booms as loud as shotgun blasts shook windowpanes, set off car alarms, and echoed off the walls of the property.
During this distraction Gentry shot out of the fourth-floor hallway and, vaulting high with a single bound, pushed off on the top of the balcony railing with his leading foot, then leapt off the balcony face-first, arms out wide with his pistol in his right hand, his body arcing over the atrium below.
SEVEN
Gravity took him and he fell through the darkness, past the third-floor mezzanine, past armed men racing up the open staircase, past more men storming down the hallways on the second floor.
And into the thick red smoke.
The bungee had been set for a leap out a fourth-floor window; it was thirty feet long and would extend to exactly forty feet, which would leave him a short drop to the ground at full extension if he’d attached the hook to a fixture in a room on the fourth floor.
But throwing the hook over the bars below the dome meant he’d have a good ten-to-fifteen-foot drop at maximum extension.
There were eight men who conceivably could have gotten a shot off at Gentry as he fell past them, but no one fired. The darkness, the confusion, the early hour, and the brains addled by drink, along with the concern about firing and missing the target but hitting a colleague on the far balcony, put just enough hesitation into the trigger fingers of the men, causing them all to miss their tiny window of opportunity as the masked man dropped like a stone past their positions.
Court felt the gripping in his harness even before he disappeared into the smoke; the bungee pulled taut and he went from an eighty-mile-an-hour fall to a dead stop in less than twenty feet, wrenching the straps under his clothing at his inner thigh and across his chest. His night vision monocle fell off his head, and he felt gear straining from the weight of gravity in pouches and packs around his body.
At full extension he reached to his left hip to flip the wireless grappling disconnect lever on the control panel. A simple flip of an inch-long switch would send a wireless signal up to the grappling hook, causing its claws to pop open like an umbrella blowing up in high winds. This would release the hook and cause Court to drop to the floor below him.
He’d pulled this off in training dozens of times; the technology was solid and straightforward.
But this time it went wrong. The control panel had popped off his belt at some point in the action and it swung freely now from a nylon strap, knocking against webbing and pistol magazines on his chest. He had less than a second to find it, flip the lever, and free himself, not nearly enough time to root it out of all the gear on his harness.
Court had braced himself for a ten-foot free fall to the floor, but instead the bungee held tight, and he shot back upward like a marble in a slingshot, launching out of the protection of the dark smoke and back up into the dim atrium.
The four men on the first floor were obstructed by the smoke, and they had no time to react. Gentry shot past them, just a few feet away, and as he passed he swung his body around to try to get his gun pointed in their direction.
But neither Gentry nor the skinheads got a shot off in the half second between his emergence from the red smoke and his disappearance above them.
Now Court’s climb rate increased; he passed the second-floor balcony, propelled by his long fall and the spring of the bungee cord. There were two men here; both had their AKs sticking over the railing in his direction.
As Court rocketed upward he grabbed at the barrel of one rifle and knocked it away, then shot the other man once in the body armor on his chest. A second shot at the still-standing skinhead slammed into the man’s radio on his shoulder. The round penetrated just an inch or so through the Russian’s skin, cracking his collarbone and sending him back to the floor, more from the panic of being shot than any real momentum from the bullet.
Four men stood on the third-floor balcony, leaning over just as Court reached eye level. The shock in the Russians’ faces told Court he had the advantage. He opened fire, dumping round after round from the suppressed pistol at the men there, shooting two of the four dead and sending the other two diving for cover.
Court’s momentum had ceased at the third floor, and he hung in midair a moment before he began falling again. His pistol was empty now, so as he dropped, preparing himself to sail past the vertical gauntlet of guns once more, he let go of his Glock 19 and reached down to his right ankle.
On the second-floor balcony a group of gunmen ran out of the hallway directly in front of him. They saw their target dropping past them, not more than twenty feet away. One man fired a burst in Court’s direction as he fell by them, and the rest ran up to the balcony railing, readying to dump rounds on him from above.
Court was back in the smoke again, and he’d yanked his backup gun free of its ankle holster with his right hand and, with his left, he took hold of the stretching bungee cord that was attached to his lower back and pulled himself around to face it.
He had one chance to get this right. There was no way in hell he could spring back up again, now in the sights of a dozen rifles, without being torn to bloody shreds by AK rounds. As he bottomed out, his harness squeezed him tight again and pressed air from his lungs. At ten feet above the atrium floor he jammed the muzzle of the compact Glock 26 into the taut cord, one foot away from his body, and fired.
The rope snapped in two; Court dropped like a stone, breaking his fall with his arms and legs, but still he slammed into the ground next to the fountain on his right side.
The wind was knocked from his lungs, but he knew he could not stay there. Instead he began rolling; he’d dropped the Glock on impact, but he felt for it and grabbed it up, kept rolling, still not breathing, and he banged into tables and chairs, knocking them out of the way as he crawled forward and then scrambled to his feet. He could not see the way ahead in the thick red smoke but he moved anyway, still struggling to catch a breath.
Above him he heard the rattling gunfire, and all around him he heard cracking strikes of the 7.62-millimeter rounds.
He ran out of the smoke choking the atrium floor and into a large banquet room that ran off the north side, hoping like hell he could either find an exit or make one.
“That one! There! Where is he going?”
Jeff Parks ran to the screen in the front of the signal room, and he used the tip of a ballpoint pen to point to a single white-hot heat signature that exited a side entrance on the north side of the massive dacha. The lone figure passed two men rushing toward the entrance, and they did not break stride.
“He walked right by them!” someone shouted.
Parks said, “That’s him. He must have clothing that matches what the goons on the ground there are wearing.”
The figure continued walking. All around the signal room, commands were given to the drone pilots to tighten up on the figure, to the audio techs to focus mics hidden in the forest on the north side, to those in contact with Trestle Actual to let him and his unit know that it appeared the Gray Man was hoofing it off the X in some sort of disguise.
On the screen figures poured out of the building now, mostly through the main door on the south side but some on the west and north. Men ran in one direction and then another; the audio picked up cracks and booms and shouts and barking dogs and then the sounds of gas engines firing up, but soon the tap-tap-tap-tap of cyclic Kalashnikov fire piped through the tiny surveillanc
e mics. Someone was blasting his AK on the south side of the building, apparently at nothing in the darkness.
One of the signal room techs counted twenty-four pax moving about the property and announced it through the commo net. But the one lone heat signature walked on, first between a metal shed and an uneven row of snowmobiles, and then straight toward the north gate, where three men stood at the wall next to the guard shack, facing in his direction.
“Tell the UAV operator I want it as tight as he can make it,” Babbitt demanded. “Don’t worry about image quality; I want to see this up close.”
A moment later the camera zoomed in on the lone man approaching the guard shack along the wall at the north gate. For the first time signal room personnel could make out folds in clothing, could see a hood over the man’s head, and they could also see that his hands were empty.
A female voice muttered into her mic, “He’s gonna try to talk his way through—”
A male voice with a southern drawl spoke over her. “He ain’t talkin’ his way through shit.”
The room fell silent as the figure closed to within ten feet of the armed men at the gate. He did not stop, just kept moving toward them. The three guards had been holding their guns at the low ready, but something must have alarmed them because all three raised their weapons at once and backed up; one bumped against the wall. The approaching man moved the last ten feet in the blink of an eye, knocked the first AK to the side, and drove his arm up; it looked like his open hand connected with the first guard’s throat, but it was hard to tell. The Russian left the ground, kicked back, and fell into the second guard; two rifles were on the ground and Gentry—of course this was Gentry—leapt forward, pushed off the stone wall with his right leg to give himself more lift, and launched himself on the third man. He got inside the guard’s weapon just as he fired, a flash of light from the barrel and a thump of noise through the surveillance microphone in the forest to the north. But the round missed; the Gray Man had the guard in a violent embrace and they spun in the snow, the AK twirling through the air. The guard flailed, but the Gray Man got his arms around the man’s head, turned him around, and shoved him violently, face-first, into the wall.
