The six Sentinel men who’d just arrived here on the property had been positioned out at the front gate, their weapons at the ready, pointed down the hilly residential road.
All nine of the Dragons had been re-armed, and they took positions on the lawn, down behind fountains, behind massive planters, even up at the guard shack, replacing the two Chinese security men who had just gone back inside.
Tremaine shouted to everyone at the front of the property. “I’m expecting company, an American and his wife. They should be here before the military. They have something I need with them. When they get to the front gate, kill them both, and then I will come out and find what I’m looking for.”
He turned to Junior now. “Those kids are just a compromise now. We don’t need them.”
Junior just looked at his boss. Finally, he said, “I’m not gonna kill those kids for you, Condor.”
Tremaine eyed him a moment. “Okay. Fair enough. I’ll go do it. You can stay here with the others and fight the fucking army.”
He stormed back into the house, leaving the wounded contractor behind to face off against a military attack.
Chen Jia had finished boxing and stacking all her equipment to take down to the covered lot below the house where all the passenger vans had been parked since they’d arrived here in country, and she looked around to see who else needed help, but she also stole a glance out a back window. She wouldn’t be able to see where the children climbed down from upstairs, but she could see the bushes farther away from the house, and she wondered if the Americans were hiding in there already.
Just as she brought her attention back inside the building, Kang stormed into the den carrying his laptop bag and a backpack. He shouted to the room. “We need to be in the vehicles in five minutes!”
She knelt down to pick up as much of her gear as she could carry in one haul, and then she saw the mercenary leader storming his way across the den. He arrived at the stairs and began marching up, and as he did so, she saw him reach for the big knife secured in the webbing on his chest above his body armor.
She let out a little gasp, and her hands shook.
Josh Duffy put his boot on the thigh of Isaac Opoku. The Ghanaian police officer had his back to the southern wall of the property, and he braced himself for Duff’s climb.
Duff kicked his other foot up, put it on Isaac’s shoulder and rose over the edge of the fence.
There were trees just inside the fence line here, and they covered his view of the home, but they also covered the home’s view of him.
Quickly he reached back behind him, Nichole handed him his rifle, and he climbed onto the top of the wall and scooted over. Hanging down behind the trees, he dropped and lifted his gun.
He couldn’t see the house from here, but his objective at the moment was to simply help his wife and Isaac as they came over.
Nichole dropped down next to him a second later. In her hand she carried a length of rope, and she handed it off to her husband.
Duff wrapped it around his back, then lay down, facing up and holding the end of the rope in front of his body.
Immediately he felt the hard tug of a man using the rope he held to climb with.
Isaac dropped down next to the Duffys, and when he did so, he winced in pain.
Nichole whispered to him. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. It’s the wound. It’s nothing.”
Duff rolled onto his stomach and crawled forward a few feet through the trees so he could see the house.
Conrad Tremaine passed the Russian Sentinel officer named Yuri, and he reached for the door to the bedroom where the kids were being held. Yuri didn’t speak English, but Tremaine didn’t need to tell him anything, because he was already holding the big knife in his right hand.
Yuri eyed the weapon, then gave a little smile, visible even under the balaclava, as his boss opened the door.
Tremaine didn’t see the kids, so he walked over to the closed bathroom door. He started to knock, but instead he just tried the handle.
The door was locked.
Without hesitation, Tremaine brought his big boot up and kicked in the door.
Seconds later he was running back into the hall, passing Yuri.
Mandy and Huck Duffy crawled on their hands and knees between a row of palm trees and the outer wall around the property grounds. They were trying to find a gate to go through, but so far they weren’t having any luck, so Mandy told her brother to stay silent, and then she crawled out from the palms and looked around at the huge backyard.
Almost instantly, a hand appeared from nowhere and grabbed her by the arm, lifting her up into the air.
She screamed.
Her brother shot out of the trees to help her, and he himself was grabbed by another man.
The two Chinese security officers began dragging the kids back towards the house.
Duff heard the bloodcurdling scream of his daughter just as he moved through some papaya trees. He scooted forward a few more inches, and then he saw the back of the home. Mandy and Huck were being carried by two men in white polos who wore pistols on their hips, taking them towards a sliding door on the ground level.
Duff raised his weapon. He was just thirty yards away or so, an easy shot, but he didn’t have a plan for how to get the kids once he shot the two people holding them, so he kept his finger off the trigger of his AK.
The sliding door opened, and Duff watched as a big man with a thick mustache stormed out. He was a Sentinel man, Duff could tell from the equipment he wore, and he grasped a long-haired Asian woman wearing a sweatshirt by the back of her head, clamping down on her hair at the scalp and pushing her forward.
Duff felt movement next to him, and Nichole crawled into a prone position, her own rifle forward. She took one look at the scene in front of her and said, “Oh God, no.”
Duff climbed to his knees, and she did the same. Behind them, Isaac was already up.
Conrad Tremaine stood on the back patio holding the female Chinese contractor by the hair as he approached the kids. The two Chinese security men put the children down, and then Krelis and Yuri stepped out from the house and moved behind the Americans, shooing away the Chinese. They put hands on their shoulders so they could not move.
Tremaine said, “First things first, little ones. Who helped you two get out of the house?”
Mandy reached out and covered Huck’s mouth. “We aren’t going to tell you anything.”
“Was it this bitch?” He shook the woman he held back and forth. When the kids said nothing, Tremaine said, “I don’t have time for this shit.”
He nodded his head at Krelis, and the South African moved forward, pulling the little boy closer to Tremaine, but before Krelis had taken him more than a few feet from his sister, Mandy raised her finger and pointed.
At Yuri, the Russian Sentinel man.
“It was him,” she said.
She grabbed Huck and pulled him away from the mercenary; Krelis was so stunned he let her do so, and then she put her arms around her brother’s neck and leaned into his ear. “It’s okay, Huck. Don’t worry.” Then she leaned closer and whispered much more lightly now, “Don’t say anything.”
Tremaine cocked his head in surprise, then looked to the Russian. The man didn’t seem to understand what was going on, and Tremaine was about to question the little girl further, but the sound of men shouting from the front of the property took his attention for a moment. His radio came alive, Junior relaying that the army trucks were approaching.
Tremaine looked back to the Russian mercenary, then drew his pistol and raised it, pointed it at the man. Yuri looked confused, but quickly Tremaine pulled his knife again and handed it over to the man.
Yuri took it, and Tremaine motioned towards the two kids, both now held by Krelis again.
The Russian understood. He moved towards the kids, raising the knife as he did so.
A gunshot rang out from the rear of the property, not the front, and Yuri went flying back; blood splattered the window behind where his body fell onto the patio concrete.
Another shot boomed, and Tremaine felt his vest catch a rifle round. It knocked him backwards, off balance but not all the way down.
He spun away and ran back into the house, and the Chinese security men raced in, as well.
Instantly the sound of machine guns rocking fully automatic at the front gate filled the air.
Krelis was left alone with the Chinese woman and the two kids. He spun away from the three of them and then lifted his gun towards the tree line.
He squeezed off just a couple of rounds before he was hit in the thigh, then the shoulder. He fell to his knees and flipped the selector switch on his Vektor to fully automatic, but before he could lay down on the trigger, another round caught him in the mouth, blowing out the back of his head.
The Chinese woman took the kids by their hands and ran with them back inside.
Duff left the tree line at a sprint, his AK up on his shoulder. Nichole was behind him on his right, Isaac on his left, and all three of their weapons swept back and forth, looking for targets. The fight raged in front of the house, however, and no one else seemed to be back here.
Duff was mad at himself for his shot on Tremaine. He knew he’d smacked the man dead center in his chest, several inches below where he was aiming and right in the middle of his armor plate, but the round had been fired under unimaginable stress, so he’d pushed the shot low.
They approached the two bodies by the back door; Duff fought the urge to shoot them again because he didn’t want to give their location away. Passing them by, Duff entered the home first, finding a large den with boxes stacked all around but no people.
Behind him, Nichole said, “The stairs.”
Duff nodded and covered for his wife while she headed to the staircase up to the second floor. She was halfway there when Duff registered movement on the mezzanine overlooking the den.
An Asian man held a submachine gun and pointed it down at Nichole.
Duff fired twice, hitting the man in the chest with both shots, and he fell out of view.
Two Chinese men with pistols came out of the corridor and raised their weapons towards Duff and Nichole. Nichole was covering up the stairs as she ascended and Duff still had his gun up on the mezzanine, so the Chinese men had an insurmountable tactical advantage.
Duff realized they were both about to be shot.
A long burst of AK fire from behind reminded Duff that Isaac was with them, too. Both Chinese gunmen spun back into the corridor, each hit multiple times.
Chen Jia ran down the stairs with the two children, heading for the parking garage under the house. She knew the only way out of here was to make it into one of the vans that would exit out a side gate, to the west and not the north where the army was attacking.
She sprinted into the garage, saw Kang in the back of a van loaded with people and equipment, and took one step towards it, but then the van raced off on squealing tires, shot across the driveway, and headed for the side exit—where it rammed the metal gate and turned onto the road, speeding to the left, away from the heavy fighting.
Another twelve-passenger van was there, but no one was behind the wheel. She ran to it and checked for keys but found none. Looking around the garage now, she saw a table with several sets of keys on it, and she ran to grab them all to try to fire up the van.
Nichole reached the second-floor mezzanine, keeping her big rifle shouldered as she walked past the man her husband had just shot. As she passed, she kicked the subgun away from the obviously dead man’s hand. She swiveled into an open bathroom, saw no threats, and was just about to move back into the hall when her husband and Isaac both passed her position, continuing on towards the other doors on this floor.
Nichole had never trained in close quarters battle. She’d used a rifle once in anger, in Syria after her Apache was shot down and she was attacked by insurgents, and she hadn’t fired one again before last night.
But while this felt very foreign to her, she could tell that her husband was fully in his element. He led the way confidently, his weapon an extension of his body.
Intense, close-in gunfire rocked somewhere ahead of them on this floor, and this sounded like a response to all the shooting outside. Nichole wondered if there were gunmen up here firing out the windows at the approaching army. If there were, and the children had come this way with the Asian woman holding them, then she knew she had to get them away from the windows immediately.
In front of her, Josh put his hand on a door latch, looked back to Isaac and her, and then opened it.
He moved into the room quickly to the left, making space for Isaac to flood in behind him to the right, and Nichole took this as her cue to advance straight ahead.
She swung her rifle into the room, saw a masked mercenary at the window spinning around towards the movement behind him, and squeezed her trigger.
A second man was at a window on the left, and simultaneous to his wife’s gunfire, Duff opened up on the man.
Both overwatch shooters went down in a hail of bullets, but then return fire from outside ripped into the room, shredding the ceiling just in front of the three of them.
Duff dove onto his wife, Isaac collapsed to the floor to get out of the line of fire, and then they all three crawled out of the room and back into the hall.
Duff shouted to the others. “That was the army out front. We have to stay away from the windows or they’ll mow us down.”
“We have to get the kids!” Nichole shouted.
Quickly they checked the other doors on this floor, they found no threats, but when they entered a bedroom at the end of the hall, they saw that the TV was on and cartoons were playing. Duff rolled into the bathroom with his gun up and saw the open window.
Isaac said, “The rest of the upstairs is clear. The children must be downstairs somewhere.”
Duff said, “Let’s go this way.”
Duff climbed out and dropped down onto a terrace on the west side of the house. He saw that the landscaping reached almost to the house here, and he quickly kicked a leg over the railing and leaned out to put his hand on the trunk of a mahogany tree.
Isaac and Nichole followed him down, the sounds of bullets snapping overhead as soldiers trying to fight their way into the property battled the safe house’s security contingent.