Echo Platoon (40 page)

As we moved straight for the corridor leading to the north side of the hotel, Digger vaulted over the reception desk, followed by Nigel. I heard “Office clear” in Nigel’s Limey accent.

He was cut off. “Skipper—twelve o’clock!” Nod’s voice. Urgent.

A
byk’
s shaved head popped up the staircase at the
back of the lobby, along with the snout of a machine pistol. I shoved Ashley to the deck as Nod’s MP5 laid down a long burst of suppressive fire, and bullets and huge, sharp pieces of marble caught the sumbitch right in the face. His head disintegrated, and the rest of him went flying backward and disappeared from sight.

I grabbed Ashley by the back of her dress and pulled her along the floor as we moved toward the threat. She shook free of my hand and rolled away, then scrambled to her feet. “I’m okay, Dick—you do your work.”

That was okay by me. I pulled a frag grenade from the pouch on my harness, pulled the pin, yelled, “Fire in the hole!” and let it bounce down the stairs. I dropped to my knees and got out of the way fast. I heard it bounce one-two-three-four times on the stone, then it went off, sending shards of stone, metal, and wood everywhere. I pulled myself off the floor and checked the staircase.

Nothing moved. I shouted, “Clear,” and we headed to our left, moving closer to the corridor.

Two
chornye
came through the hotel door, AK-74 miniguns up and firing. They were obviously of the “spray and pray” school, because they began shooting before they saw anybody. That’s what tunnel vision does to you, friends.

“I got ’em—” I swung around to the first target, painted him with my front sight, squeezed off three shots—and missed him completely. Shit, I wasn’t leading the s.o.b. by enough.

Well, if I was fucking up, Digger and Ashley could take care of business. She fired three times and slowed the motherfucker down. Digger let loose a
full-auto burst of MP5 that cut the lead shooter in half. The second
chornye
was harder to hit, because he dove behind a heavy wood table. I swung my sights and fired half a dozen shots in his direction to keep his head down while Nod stitched the table with his MP5. You cannot hide from 147-grain Hydra-Shok slugs behind a table—or even most walls.

Ah: the welcome sound of silence. Nigel sprinted over to the far side of the lobby, put a double-tap in each of the
byki
to make sure they’d stay where they were, and took one of the
chornyes’
AKs for Ashley.

I could hear the welcome chatter of automatic weapons fire from outside, which meant my boys were landing and swarming. They knew where they had to go—the barracks and staff quarters—and what they had to do, which was to bottle things up and make sure no one got out and bothered my snatch team.

00:03:31 My watch told me we were currently way behind schedule. I gestured toward the corridor, and Nod’s MP5. Nod’s face told me he understood exactly want I wanted him to do. He dropped the mag out of his sub-gun, replaced it with a fresh one, and gave me an upturned thumb. He was good to go.

But where the fuck had Oleg gone? Well, shit, there was no time to worry about that now.

00:03:39 We all stacked at the end of the corridor. It was clear, the doors all closed. The stairway was maybe two yards from where we stacked, on my left. The door pulled outward. I rolled a DefTec into the corridor, and when it blew, we moved through the smoke to the doorway and I reached toward the handle.

The fucking thing was almost in my gloved hand
when a withering burst of automatic weapons fire came through the door, sending me hurtling backward.

Fuck. I recovered and we pulled back. I returned fire through the door to keep whoever was behind it well back. Meanwhile, Nod knelt. He retrieved one of the tri-folds of plastic sheet and det-cord from his knapsack. He crawled along the corridor past the door, then pulled the tape, attached the plastic to the door on the hinge side, removed a six-foot length of wire, plugged it to a connector on the plastic, then rolled back to the wall, attached the wire, screamed, “Fire in the fuckin’ hole,” and blew the door.

The blast sent the big metal door inward. Digger charged through, his MP5 up and ready. I followed, my USP giving his blind side protection.

Scan. Breathe. The smoke was fucking opaque. I saw a shadow in the stairwell corner and put two quick shots into it. As I got closer I saw I’d just killed what was left of the door. The stairs went down as well as up. Well, fuck down—we’d have to take our chances. I changed mags, dropping the spent one, and started up the stairwell.

00:04:10 I hate stairwells. They are nasty places in which to have to fight. Bullets ricochet. Noise is amplified by the tight surroundings. The visibility is always bad. And whether you are going up or coming down, the bad guy always has the advantage, because he knows where he is and where you are, and you only know where you are. Stairwells are a goatfuck waiting to happen.

But as you can probably imagine, I didn’t have to like this fucking stairwell, I just had to assault it. And assault it I did.

Back to the wall, I began the climb, one step at a time, pistol up and ready, scanning and breathing, looking for any telltale shadows or hints of shadows that might give the bad guys away.

I made it to the first landing without incident. Nod was behind me, his sub-gun covering my blind spot. Ashley had the third slot. Behind her, Digger filled the gap. And behind Digger, Nigel backed up the stairs one at a time, his spine against Digger’s, working the rear-guard slot so we wouldn’t be surprised from behind.

The door was on my left. It opened inward. I waited until we were all in position, with Nigel covering the landing below, and the muzzle of Digger’s MP5 pointed toward the blind spot above.

Nod tapped me on the left shoulder to tell me he was ready to go. I reached forward, toward the big door handle.

“Holy fuck—grenade.” Digger’s scream cut through my concentration. He fired past me, three quick three-round bursts.

But that wasn’t the focus of my attention. I was searching for the fucking grenade that the Russkie had tossed. My peripheral vision picked it up as it bounced off the wall six feet above me, hit the lip of a step, and, like a stoopball Spaulding, bounced in a big, high trajectory over my head.

Frozen in time and space, I followed the fucking thing with my eyes. It floated slowly in the air. It had been well thrown, too: caromed off the wall above us, so it would hit the stairs and explode over our heads, impossible to catch and toss back. The fuses on these things run five and a half seconds. But I didn’t know how long the motherfucker’d held on to it before he let it go.

Well, just in case I never told you, I was the stoop-ball king of New Brunswick, New Joyzey—and there was never a Spaulding I couldn’t shag. I dropped the pistol and launched myself toward the grenade, using the closest step as a starting block and stretching as high as I could, because I knew that if I could get my hands on it, I could deflect it down the stairwell, which would reduce the damage the fucking thing was going to do to us.

It’s more convenient when these things happen in Slo-Mo, because they are easier to describe. So here’s what happened. I launched myself up and out, toward the grenade as if it were a Hail Mary pass, the wide receiver was about to grab it for the winning touchdown, and I was a free safety with my job on the line. My arms went out, my fingers stretched, and I tapped the grenade, slapping it down the stairwell, away from us, directing it toward the wall, so it would veer away, not settle in the corner of the stairwell and explode, which would be bad for Dickie’s health, not to mention the rest of us.

I sent the fucking thing spinning down the stairwell. That was the good news. The bad news was that I was now moving in the same direction as the grenade, and given my weight, my speed, and the prevailing laws of physics, I had to change direction fast, or I’d become a grenade sponge. I hooked my left foot through the rail to catch a baluster and stop my forward motion. It worked. But it also brought Dickie-San to an abrupt halt.

Abrupt? Yeah, abrupt. Like a WWF
slam!
One of those tooth-jarring, bone-crunching, back-cracking moves the prime-time boys love to do. My Roguish toe snagged one of the balusters, I stopped cold and
spun around, wrenching my already tender leg somewhere in the vicinity of 160 degrees in the process, then came down hard, washboard gut first, on the flat newel of the landing. My face made audible contact with the newel post.

Which is precisely when the fucking grenade exploded twenty feet below us. The concussion blew me back off the banister, and slammed me into the stairwell wall. I groaned. I spat a tooth chip. I wiped blood from my forehead. And then I pulled myself onto my knees, and from there onto my feet, and I struggled back up the stairs, carefully stepping over the corpse of the Ivan who’d tossed the fucking grenade, so we could continue our DV odyssey and Get There Already.

Have I owned up about the Big Lie in my life? Have I mentioned that GTINFFAA? I have? Good, because it is the truth, the whole fucking truth, and nothing but the fucking truth: Getting There Is No Fucking Fun At All. And we still had the blankety-blanking hallway to clear.

00:04:13. O
H, WE WERE WAY BEHIND SCHEDULE.
I
RETRIEVED
my pistol and attached it to the goddamn lanyard so I wouldn’t lose it again. Then I hit the door, Nod behind me. Warily, I cut the pie, checking the hallway inch by inch as I eased around.

It was empty. But oh, fuck: one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight doors to the suite. They were all closed. Here is a rule of hallway clearing: you do not go past a closed door unless you can make sure it can’t be opened. And since all these doors opened inward, we’d have to blow ’em all, so we could make sure that Steve-o hadn’t stashed any
byki
or
chornye
or other miscellaneous
badniki
to do us bodily harm.

And then, as so often happens in these kinds of books if the hero, i.e.,
moi,
is a Very Good Rogue: the cavalry arrives. I heard Boomerang’s distinctive voice as he led a trio of SEALs up the stairwell.

The lanky master chief was followed by Gator, Timex, and Mustang, and best of all, their automatic weapons.

“Yo, Boss Dude—funicular’s blown and the help is all corralled, so I thought maybe you could use a little backup.”

I am truly blessed, because God has given me men like these to command and lead into battle. But there was no time for either gratitude or small talk. I gave the orders I wanted carried out. I changed mags because, to be honest, I’d forgotten to count rounds—and I wasn’t about to play this particular game with a half load. Then we stacked, we made ready, and then we moved out flank speed. I mean, the term “Dynamic Entry” took on a whole new meaning. The fucking thing was fluid. Blow the door. Toss the flashbang. With two-man clearing teams working opposite sides of the corridor, and Ashley fielding an MP5 as rear guard, we were slicker than shit. Obviously, Mister Murphy’d heard us coming and he’d snuck out of the building.

00:05:12. The big, heavy carved wood suite doors were in front of us. I gave Nod the high sign, and he affixed the plastic sheets, inserted the detonator, we took cover, and since we all knew there was about to be fire in the hole, he didn’t have to tell us, so he simply dropped the hammer and blew the fucking doors off their hinges.

I tossed a pair of flashbangs into the smoke, let them detonate, and then charged, my USP up and ready. The DefTecs had blown a couple of windows, because the smoke was venting pretty fast.

Steve’s French bodyguards were waiting. They were operators, too, because they’d known enough to take cover as the doors blew. And they’d obviously cross-trained with SEALs, or with Delta, at one point, because they knew how we’d make entry: first man moving to his left, second to his right, and third man covering the first.

I cleared the doorway, kept my back against the wall, and moved to my port side, my USP scanning.

Movement at seven o’clock, between the settee and corner table. Here’s what you do: you advance toward the threat. You suck the air out of the target’s living space. I moved forward and fired twice. There was the
thwock
of bullet shattering plaster as double-taps whistled past my right ear.

Getting shot at is less fucking fun than Getting There, and as you know, GTINFFAA. I dropped low and hurled myself at the settee, knocking it back into the corner table, taking away the Frog’s ability to move. From behind me and to my right there was more firing. That would be Nod and Digger engaging, with Boomerang backing them up.

Well, they were big boys and they could take care of themselves. Me, I was currently occupied, too.

Shit—I finally saw his gun hand, and fired at it. Hit him, because I heard him scream, and the weapon fell away.

Now I pulled the couch clear of the wall and went after him. He was a little cocksucker in a double-breasted suit, and in the instant that I jumped his bones I knew that we’d surprised everybody because he wasn’t carrying a sub-gun, just his everyday Walther P-99, seventeen shots of 9-mm joy in an ergonomic package. But since he’d lost his pistol, and the use of his right hand, he’d decided to bid me
bon jour, comment ça marche
with the very nasty folder in his left hand.

He slashed at me, knocking me ass over teakettle across the settee. Then he dove for the Walther.

Fuck, there was no time to fool around—or even aim. I cranked off four rapid shots from a shooting stance that might be called the pretzel position. Two missed him altogether. One caught him in the knee,
sending him sprawling, and the last one slammed him through the cheek.

You say how come I didn’t double-tap him with two pair of dead-on hit-the-three-by-five-card-every-single-fucking-time hammers right through the head? Hey, assholes, I’ll take what I can get when I’m shooting for real and the other guy has a gun. It ain’t my job to be a brain surgeon when it comes to combat shooting. Sloppy and messy is just fine with me, so long as it does the job.