Besieged

That was his code to open fire on the most threatening target to them. Unfortunately, the man who had everything didn’t have sound suppressors, or silencers, for his rifles. Mahegan heard two shots in relatively close succession. They were single-shot explosions and disrupted the tranquil evening. There was no way that the men inside the compound had not heard them. But, on the upside, if McCarthy could kill a gazelle that was running forty miles per hour, Mahegan was pretty sure he could handle two tired Persians.

His next two shots seemed angled higher, based upon the cracking sound.

McCarthy’s text confirmed this. Three of four.

Mahegan interpreted this to mean that he had one enemy on the roof to confront and whoever remained inside. But the remaining Persians would most likely be unaware of their exact location, so Mahegan used the opportunity to get moving. Based upon Mirza’s casualties over the past three days, he was working with ten as the approximate number of enemy fighters left. If McCarthy had killed or wounded three, that left one outside and six somewhere else. The odds were beginning to level out.

He felt his phone buzz with the unique alert from the Zebra app. It was a message from Patch.

Savage package includes four Little Birds to port. Mirza Iranian Olympic wrestler/martial arts expert.

Four MH-6 helicopters, or Little Birds, could carry four operators apiece on the bench seats, which meant Savage was sending a force of sixteen men and four armed helicopters to deal with four ships carrying the Iranian Army. These helicopters would be of no use to him in the R & D compound fifteen miles away because they would be consumed with preventing a single Iranian soldier from disembarking.

The intel on Mirza’s background was not surprising. In many Middle Eastern countries, weight lifters, boxers, and wrestlers were renowned special operators, as well. The same could be said for the United States Army, especially when it came to boxers.

He lifted Misha to carry her on his right side, keeping his body and the rucksack in between the building and her. Casey was wearing her rucksack and was moving on his right, protecting against any unknown threat to the north from the main Cefiro building. They made a V as he held Misha a little behind him and Casey closed in for tighter protection. He understood the risks. Misha’s glasses held tight to her face, and he wondered exactly what she was seeing.

The ground was uneven and bumpy, making the dash difficult. Casey seemed to be having an easier time than Mahegan. They made it to the corner of the building, where a motion-activated security light came on. McCarthy must have noticed this, because six smoke grenades whipped past their heads and tumbled along the north side of the building. Mahegan heard another burst from the nonlethal gun and heard canisters land on top of the building and tumble across the roof. A couple of canisters thudded into the side of the metal wall facing the river and clanged like an Asian gong.

So far, Mahegan had not questioned his decision to take this axis of advance, which might have seemed like a frontal assault but gave them the most flexibility. The other two avenues inside were the tunnels from the ammunition depot, and those would be covered with snipers or machine gunners or trip wires with improvised explosive devices. He was sure of that.

Those routes might be viable escape routes, but that wasn’t the plan, either.

Breathing heavily against the wall of the R & D compound, Mahegan knew that there were two ways into the building and that both would now be covered. He texted McCarthy the signal for him to fire six stun grenades at the door facing the river. If they were lucky, one of the first ones would penetrate and the others would explode inside the compound. While these could technically damage the computers Misha needed, the stun grenades were a better option than fragmentary grenades, which would send shrapnel everywhere.

It was a risky move because they needed the computer gear to work so that he could get Misha to deprogram the autonomous systems, but he also needed the diversion. If the grenades got anywhere near the computers, then they might have to improvise. He heard the rapid whump-whump-whump from the grenade launcher, which was their cue to run along the north side to the door that Misha had opened when she had “toured” the facility two days ago. Mahegan got to the door about the time the grenades blasted against the east-facing door, sounding like a lightning strike next door. The noise was deafening, and he felt Misha flinch, but now was her turn to do her first task.

She knew what to do, and she was clamoring to get out of his grasp and execute. She stood in front of the door’s keypad and quickly tapped in the code. The keypad LED indicator remained red.

Had the Persians changed the code? Mahegan, Casey, and Misha were vulnerable, and he heard the noise a fraction of a second too late.

One of the Persian commandos flew down from the roof as he fed out nylon rope, upon which he performed an Australian face-first rappel. The Australian rappel allowed the Persian to brake with his non-shooting hand and use his other hand to spray pistol fire in their direction. It was the perfect ambush.

While the Persian’s shots were not well aimed, given the fact that he was sliding down the rope, his hand reached out and grabbed Misha by the collar of her sweatshirt as he landed on the ground.

Mahegan used his knife to slash the attacker across the arm while he was still tangled in his rope. He was a big man in a black jumpsuit, with black paint on his face. He spun toward Mahegan, tugging at Misha’s collar. She tumbled backward and turned toward him, then lifted her arms as he pulled her sweatshirt, which came off cleanly, leaving her in a T-shirt.

Misha ran toward Casey, who was reaching out for her as Mahegan closed on the man, then stabbed him in his gut. His blade bounced off body armor with a sickening clank. They were turning and spinning, and Mahegan was concerned about firing any rounds, as strays could hit Misha or Casey.

The Persian lifted his pistol as Mahegan grabbed the slack in his rope and looped it around the Persian’s neck. He pulled the rope in opposite directions with each hand. The rope tightened around the man’s throat. As Mahegan reached up to pull at the rope, he turned and used his own back to lift the man off the ground, accentuating the choke by allowing the attacker’s body weight and Mahegan’s arms to work in tandem.

After a minute the Persian stopped struggling, and Mahegan felt him go limp. He slid the Persian off of his back, and the man flopped onto the ground. Mahegan quickly stabbed him in the throat and hoped that Casey had shielded Misha’s eyes.

He stood and saw she had done just that, but something was wrong. Misha was violently flailing her arms and began shouting, “Glasses! Glasses!”

He looked at the sweatshirt, and the glasses were crushed. Mahegan figured that one of them must have stepped on them during the fight. The cord was still tied to the sweatshirt, but Misha’s quick reaction to escape the attacker’s clutch had resulted in her sweatshirt and the attached glasses being ripped from her body.

He picked at the broken glass and metal. The stems were broken, and one of the lenses was shattered. Misha’s filter to the world had just been removed. It was a major blow to the plan. Could she even operate the computer without the glasses?

“Jake, we need to do something,” Casey said.

She was holding Misha, who was stomping her feet and waving her arms and sobbing now. As if a switch had been flipped, she’d gone from controlled to out of control. He remembered that when he held her, she seemed to calm down.

He pocketed the glasses and reached out to pull Misha toward him. She struggled, but he embraced her and held her. The tighter he squeezed, the less frenetic she was. He was on one knee, squeezing her hard, and she began a slow sob, stopped flapping her arms, and put her arms around his neck.

“Can’t do,” she said. “Need glasses. Daddy going to die.”

That was her logic. She needed to save her father. She needed her glasses to do so. And without them, he would die.

He refused to let that happen.

“You’ve worked the computer before without your glasses, Misha. You can do it again,” he said.

She didn’t reply, and for a second, he thought he was squeezing her too hard. Then she nodded against his shoulder.

“Will try,” she said.

“I’ve got this guy’s access card,” Casey said. “We need to move.”

She was right.

“Hug Misha and protect her. I’ve got the bag,” he said to Casey. Lifting his rucksack onto his shoulder, he took the card from her hand and held it up to the reader, which turned green. They heard a buzz and a snick, and he quickly pulled the door open and led with the MP5 he had stuffed in his rucksack. The Tribal was tucked in his wet-suit pouch, and he saw one guard turn in their direction. A burst from the MP5 to the guard’s torso, neck, and face dropped him in place.

The interior team was still focused on the destruction and mayhem caused by the stun grenades. Apparently, one of the grenades had breached the interior, as the entire far corner exactly opposite them was blackened. A small fire burned in the corner. He saw four men staring at it. Two were on the cement floor near the crash test wall and track, and one was standing in the stairwell where Mahegan had observed the assault team open the container doors and attack. The last man was standing in the middle of an elevated command center with computers and monitors in a semicircle facing the east wall.

Darius Mirza. The commander.

The advertised effective range of an MP5 was one hundred to two hundred yards, but the weapon was accurate only closer to fifty given the short barrel. The bullet would still travel a couple hundred yards, but aim was the issue. From his vantage, he was about fifty yards from Mirza’s command center and at least seventy-five yards from the three other men. His calculations told him that there were still one or two men who were unaccounted for, but he hadn’t had a firm number to begin with, so he wasn’t sure.

Mahegan moved quickly to a row of lockers to the right, near a series of doors that opened to offices along the western portion of the building. Casey was hugging Misha and carrying her pressed to her front. The crash test wall was up, and oddly, it was at this end of the building, instead of where Mahegan had seen it before and where Misha’s video review had placed it.

There was a large sea-land container backed up to the base of the wall, which also seemed odd. Looking up, he saw the nose of a missile protruding from the open roof of the container. It was angled up at about sixty degrees, which would point it directly into the ceiling of the warehouse. This was no small missile and changed his calculus. He still needed to disarm the swarming autonomous systems, but was this missile already programmed to launch, and how would it blow through the roof?

Then he thought, Football stadium. The roof most likely had been built with the missile scenario in mind and would retract enough for the missile to launch cleanly through it. The crash test wall wasn’t a crash test wall at all. It was a nonflammable heat-absorption device to prevent the facility from burning down or melting.

And they were kneeling directly behind it.

From the Zodiac boat raid he had kept the hand grenades that the Iranians had generously provided, and it now seemed like a good time to use one. Three of the five men had gathered at the breached door and were walking slowly, with weapons raised, toward the charred area. He pulled two grenades from his rucksack and waved a hand at Casey, then pointed at Misha. The message was to stay with her. He exited out the other side of the blast wall and followed the missile container to its end, keeping himself out of the line of sight of Mirza in the command center. Standing in between Mirza and the three men was Colonel Franco, the bearded Cuban whom he had seen on the video of the fake exchange that Misha had set up.

The three guards were about fifty yards away. He figured he could throw the first grenade thirty yards or more, and it would roll the rest of the way. He pulled the pin and hurled the round hand grenade as hard as he could. He immediately repeated the process with the second one.

The pin pull, the spoon release, the flight, and the landing all took less than five seconds, but the process was loud in the deathly quiet warehouse.

Franco spun around and saw him immediately.

Mahegan had his MP5 up and aimed through the iron sights at Franco. The weapon purred with efficiency, and he saw Franco take a knee. He kept the weapon aimed at him and was readying to pull the trigger when he felt the container next to him ping with bullet spray.

Mirza.

The grenades he had tossed finally exploded. He didn’t have time to see if they had done their job, but at least he had winged Franco, if not more.

The enemy knew he was inside, and Mirza could command and control his fight with his remaining troops. Worst case, the grenades had been ineffective, and it was four against two, not counting Misha.

Best case, the grenades had incapacitated the three-man crew, and it was two of them against Mirza, plus whomever he had outside the gate, men he was most likely now calling back in.

Lots of variables. What wasn’t a variable was their precarious position. All Mirza had to do was launch the missile, which was facing north, and he would melt them. But Mahegan presumed that the commander had a schedule, a synchronized plan, and that he had spent a lot of resources trying to keep his plan on track. Mirza’s ego had led him all over Wilmington and the surrounding areas, chasing Misha and Mahegan.

So now Mahegan imagined that Mirza’s ego was satisfied, his appetite whetted. He had them cornered behind a blast wall for what looked like a short-range ballistic missile. How the hell had that passed muster with the Homeland Security geniuses who were here just two days ago? Mahegan wondered.

While it had seemed like an eternity, things had been quiet for about ten seconds. Mahegan slid past Misha, who was staring at him, and Casey, who was holding her Beretta at the ready and watching the opposite direction, covering his back. He didn’t like that Casey was holding Misha and a pistol at the same time. Dr. Hallowell’s worst fears seemed close at hand. Nonetheless, he had to drive on.

He peeked around the corner to see Mirza typing and punching buttons.

Franco was on one knee, with a rifle leaning against a chair in the command post. Franco fired a shot that snapped past Mahegan’s head and pinged into the glass of one of the offices behind him. The glass shattered, and Mahegan continued to stare at what Mirza was doing for another second, before ducking behind the blast wall as a second shot grazed its edge and ricocheted into another glass window.

The door that they had entered through opened, and a limping man dressed in black, like all the other soldiers in the Persian Quds Force, lifted his MP5, but he was not quick enough. Mahegan buzzed a dozen rounds into his body, and the man slumped against the wall.

He was doing the math in his head. Maybe there were two more out there somewhere, but he couldn’t be sure, of course.

He knelt in front of Misha, who was staring over Casey’s shoulder, and looked at her without her glasses. Her eyes were wide, and she looked very different without them, a knight without her armor.

“Ready, Misha?”

She was rocking and swaying again. He could tell she was processing at lightning speed, trying to sort through all her sensory input and focus on the important things.

“Will try. Daddy back?” she asked.

He thought of how all of this had started for him.

No broken promise.

“I promise.”

“Alive?” she asked.

Casey looked at him, as if to warn him off from committing to something he wasn’t sure he could pull off. Her father might already be dead, for all they knew.

“I promise,” he said.

Casey grimaced, but he saw her resolve settle in like something tangible. Her face registered the severity of their situation. She was a nurse and was used to seeing carnage every day, but he had the feeling she was on a mission to make up for losing Carver, her marine. This was her way of honoring his memory.

“You know the plan,” he said to Casey.

“I know the plan.”

Then he heard simultaneously the roof retracting like in a football stadium and the buzz of propeller aircraft outside the building.