SEVENTY-ONE
Zoya Zakharova had followed the Russian ambassador and his protective detail as they hunted for shelter, making their way towards the western wing of the old mansion. But once she saw that his men had the right idea about getting him to safety, she turned around and began running back towards the front of the home, hoping to link up with Court.
Then the truck exploded outside, and this knocked her off her feet, even though she was still a long way from the front of the house. When she climbed back up, she made her way through the dust billowing in from the outside, desperate to find some fresh air.
She found a shattered window and stuck her head out; she was facing east, towards the walls of the next mansion on the northern side of the road, but when she looked to her right she saw a little bit of Finkenstrasse down the hill through the trees. Just as she focused her attention on a police car speeding west towards the explosion, she saw something arc down from the sky at speed, then a bright light flashed above the patrol car, which immediately became engulfed in a ball of fire. The sound of a bomb’s detonation followed. The car careened to the left, bumped up over the curb, and began rolling slowly through Finkenpark, its driver obviously dead.
Zoya turned back into the smoke and began running up the hallway.
She shouted into her earpiece for Court, but received no response. Ditto for Zack. She was about to call for Hanley when the DDO came over the net.
“Anthem, what is your location?”
She answered at a sprint, fighting her way through well-dressed men and women desperately trying to push their way out into the back garden. “I’m heading for the front door. You need to be inside, not outside!”
“Why?” he asked.
“They’re using armed drones!”
Hanley said, “Now we know what al-Habsi’s force multiplier is. I’m going for the ambo, he’ll be in a safe room upstairs in his office.”
“Roger that. I’m heading out front to salvage a weapon. There will be a lot of dead security there.”
Zack had run out into the front yard when, through the smoke and fire at the bottom of the hill, he could just make out another tractor-trailer skidding wildly to a stop in front of him, just behind the burning truck at the bottom of the driveway where the guard shack had been. The rear doors of the trailer burst open, and a flood of men, all dressed in black, leapt out.
The firelight glinted off the metal of their AK-47s, and though Zack didn’t have a clue where Mirza had scored himself a platoon of armed terrorists, he didn’t worry himself with this gap in his knowledge. Instead he dropped to a knee, brought the red dot optical of the MP5 up to his eye, and sighted in on the lead man, now picking his way through fiery wreckage heading towards the breach in the wall of the property.
But before he could squeeze off a round he heard a screaming noise above him. It passed over, heading west, and he tried to track it with his eyes. The fires from the burning vehicles ahead illuminated a meter-square quadcopter as it raced for a group of armed RSO men on the lawn, and then it exploded, its airburst sending shrapnel into all four men.
Another high-pitched shriek passed over Zack’s head, then something detonated right at the front door to the mansion behind him as a group of men staggered outside with pistols and long guns.
Zack was alone on the driveway, and he figured this was the only thing that had saved him so far. He wasn’t enough of a target compared to the groups of men the quadcopters went for.
As men in black breached the property wall just twenty-five meters away from him, spreading out in a not altogether coordinated fashion as they ran, he turned and sprinted back towards the house for cover.
Zack shot up the stairs, ten seconds after the drone peppered the men there with hot metal. The dead and dying covered the steps in front of the door. The Poison Apple asset leapt over a body at the threshold and entered the mansion to find a still slightly disoriented Court slinging an MP5 rifle around his neck and pulling a pair of extra magazines from the inside jacket pocket of a middle-aged security man who was quite clearly dead.
Zack shouted as he ran by Court, his voice broadcast on the communication network as well as across the room. “Dozen-plus armed pax coming up the lawn, wearing black! They’ve got drones with warheads, too. I’m heading for the roof to engage.” He ran up the circular staircase, his rifle swinging in his right arm.
Court heard him through his ringing ears, but he still wasn’t clear. Drones? Did he say drones? “You’re going to engage the terrorists?”
“Negative! I’m engaging the fuckin’ killer robots, Six! Those tangos are your problem!”
Court’s MP5 was slick with the previous owner’s blood, but he chambered a round and brought it to his shoulder as more explosions crashed outside the residence.
Haz Mirza’s men had all left the trailer behind him; he could hear their outgoing gunfire just outside the cab, but he sat where he was, tapped a few more keys on his keyboard, and then closed his laptop and tossed it into a backpack staged there on the bed next to him. He’d just set the remaining UAVs, some twenty-five in all, to autonomous mode, meaning they would identify and attack targets on their own.
The UAE tech who had programmed the weapons had set their autonomous mode to launch strikes against any vehicles moving towards the ambassador’s residence in a fifty-meter radius. Any force responding to Mirza’s attack by vehicle would be identified by the squadron’s computers, then destroyed.
This bought Mirza and his men the time they needed to focus on the ground battle.
Slipping the pack over his shoulder, Haz hefted his rifle, checked to make certain his chest rig holding his AK magazines was in place, then opened the little door to the cab.
Immediately he saw his driver slumped over in his seat. The man was alive, but barely, bubbles of blood popping from his lips. The man had done his job, and Mirza had no time for him now, because he had to go do his job. He climbed out of the sleeping berth, leapt down from the passenger door, and brought his AK to his shoulder. Scanning ahead through smoke and fire, he saw his men already running up the driveway, firing at any armed person they could find.
Mirza’s radio was attached to the shoulder of his vest, and it crackled with traffic, but he couldn’t hear over the noise as he ran forward, through the fire, trying to catch up with his advancing force.
His objective was the ambassador, and Mirza knew he didn’t have to capture him in the opening assault, but he did have to have some access to the man so that he could communicate with him, so he pressed the talk button of his radio as he ran up the driveway. “Faster, brothers!”
The first men were at the entrance now, with others moving to both the east and west sides of the property to enter there.
Mirza himself broke left and began running through the yard behind a group of his men. Civilians ran from the home in all directions. As instructed, his men didn’t waste time or bullets on anyone who clearly posed no threat, and the runners ran so frantically and haphazardly, they hardly looked like they’d be posing any defense.
He did see a man peer through a second-floor window with a pistol in his hand. Mirza raised his AK and fired, sending the man diving back inside, the glass shattering above him, and the curtains billowing in all directions from both the breeze and the gunfire.
But he did not stop. The ambassador was tonight’s goal. Nothing else mattered.
And above him twenty-four Kargu drones remained, loitering at two hundred meters. Some were antipersonnel, some were high explosive, and a few were armor piercing. And they all scanned the ground below, looking for something to kill.
Court had wanted to get to the front door, or to one of the front windows, to engage the men Zack had warned were coming up the drive, but when another dive-bombing drone crashed through a front window and detonated its high-explosive warhead in the next room, he thought better of this plan. Instead he retreated north on the ground floor, through the long east–west gallery, and then up a little hallway that led to the expansive living room at the rear of the home. Here he took a knee, his MP5 to his eye.
This was as good a place as any to die, he told himself. He assumed the attackers would know they could flank the defenders by entering from the back or side of the house, or moving left and right from the front door along the gallery, out of Court’s view. But he didn’t know what else he could do other than defend this location until some coordination to the defense materialized.
The explosions outside seemed to stop, but there was still gunfire in the front. He’d heard no shooting from any other direction, but he expected that to change in seconds.
And it did. A volley of fully automatic AK fire came from his left, booming up a hall he’d seen Zoya run down a minute earlier when following the Russian ambassador.
In seconds a group of men in business suits and women in dresses ran out of the hallway into the large living room. Court shifted his weapon in their direction, but only for an instant, because he knew men could be coming up the hall in front of him. The group of civilians passed him by to run through the kitchen for the back door, but then someone knelt down next to him.
It was Zoya. She had a pistol in her hand, and she held it in the direction of the side hall. “Why aren’t you responding on comms?”
Court looked at her. “What?”
She understood. He could barely hear. It would come back, but for now she had to shout into his face. “They breached a window on the east side.”
Court nodded. He was hearing better, and the fog in his head was clearing. “That’s what I’d do, too. Where did you get the pistol?”
“I pulled it out of the holster of a security man. He wasn’t going to need it.”
“Right.”
“What’s happening outside?”
“Zack said he saw a dozen pax. He says Mirza is using armed drones.”
“Yeah,” Zoya said. “They’re going to take out any reinforcements.”
Court just nodded. Anyone who responded to the scene would be in danger as long as there were still drones in the sky.
Zack climbed out of an attic window onto a flat roof and looked to the dark evening. A helicopter circled; he took it as a friendly but he had no way of knowing for sure unless and until it began shooting at him.
But he pushed that worry out of his mind in favor of a dozen more certain dangers, and he moved over to a pair of men lying motionless near the southern side of the roof. It was nearly pitch-black from the smoke from the burning truck blowing over the edge of the roofline, but Zack found what he was looking for.
A dead sniper lay halfway over his rifle, an M110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System. This SASS had a ten-round box magazine attached and, to Zack’s great pleasure, a long-range thermal night vision sight, which would make target acquisition of a small machine in a dark sky easier than just looking through magnified glass. Zack dropped to one knee and then rolled the body off the weapon to heft it and move back near the attic window in case he needed some cover.
He paused an instant to regard the young man below him. Probably half Hightower’s age, he was a DSS sharpshooter whose only mistake had been to be present at exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. The man’s spotter lay a few feet away; he groaned as if he were barely conscious, but Hightower knew he could either render aid or try to do something to blunt the attack from the air.
It was a call similar to those he’d often had to make as a Navy SEAL, as a CIA Special Activities Division team leader, and now as an off-book Poison Apple operative.
And though it was an ugly call to make, to Hightower, it wasn’t a tough one. He opened the bolt far enough to make certain a round was chambered in the rifle, checked the safety to ensure the weapon was ready to fire, and then ran back to the window to the attic.
There had been no more explosions in the neighborhood, and already Zack could see police cars approaching up Clayallee in the distance. He wondered if the drone attack had been limited to the initial breach of the building, but he told himself to assume nothing and to scan the sky as best he could.
He hefted the weapon over his head and began looking at the black sky through the thermal sight on its lowest magnification.
And, to his surprise, it didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. A single quadcopter hovered over the park across the street, maybe one hundred yards higher than Zack’s position.
The device was alone, which was good news, and it was low enough and perfectly still, which was even better news. This rifle had been sighted for another shooter, the dead kid on the roof thirty feet away, and Zack could only make assumptions about how it would shoot. But he’d snagged his share of battlefield pickups in his day, so he knew he would make the weapon work well enough for his needs.
He wrapped the sling hard around his forearm to steady the gun, and then he drew in a breath. He blew it out halfway, then held it. His finger pressed the trigger slowly, and soon a round pounded its way out of the gun.
At first he didn’t know if he’d hit the device or not, but a quick flash of movement over the park caught in the firelight from the burning vehicles out front showed him something dropping from the sky. It slammed into the grass and broke apart.
“Too fuckin’ easy,” he muttered to himself, then continued his scan.
He soon realized tiny pinpricks of white in the thermal were not stars above; there was too much cloud cover tonight for that. He zoomed in the full five-power magnification available to the thermal setting on the scope, and by holding the weapon almost perfectly still, he could count over a dozen, perhaps two dozen, additional quadcopters. They were much higher in the sky; he estimated from their size at this magnification that they had to be three hundred meters above him, and they hovered in a large grid pattern.
Three hundred yards nearly straight up was an all but impossible shot, and one no sniper even trains for.
His hearing had come back to him, more or less, so he took the opportunity to call the others on the commo link. He heard plenty of gunfire below him, still, and he didn’t know if Matt, Zoya, or Court was still alive. “One for Six. Six, you reading me?”
To Zack’s relief, Court came over his earpiece. “I got you. What’s the situation on the roof?”
“To be honest, dude, the fun factor is dropping and suck factor is rising. It’s just like any other day with you. I took down a sentry quadcopter, but I am seeing another fifteen to twenty-five loitering in the sky above.”
“Oh, fuck,” Court muttered. “A drone swarm.”
“Ain’t that a bitch?”
“How long can they hover before they lose power?”
“The hell you asking me for? I just shoot the fuckers. That’ll make them lose power.”
“Get off the roof before you get spotted.”
“I’ve got some cover in the attic window. I gotta stay up here to try to thin this flock before the cops arrive en masse. What’s your status?”
“Anthem and I are down here, shooting at fuckers, too.”
“Roger that.”
Zoya had fired half a magazine at threats on the east side, wounding a man and keeping him pinned down behind a heavy oaken chest in the hallway there. She’d heard the majority of Zack’s transmission through her earpiece, and she leaned back to Court.
“If they have that many drones, then we’re on our own in here.”
“Yeah. Travers needs to stay the hell away. He’s got a helo, but there’s no reason those UAVs couldn’t target air-to-air threats.” Court added, “This is what they call, at the CIA, a lack of imagination on our part.”
“Matt’s listening in,” she warned him.
“It’s not just Matt. It’s me, too. I saw Mirza hitting us hard, but I didn’t see him dropping bombs on us. Should have been ready for that curve ball.” Court added, “I’ve got it covered here. Why don’t you drop back and link up with Hanley.”
She didn’t move; this he could see in his peripheral vision.
“No?” he asked after a moment.
“No,” Zoya said. It was clear to Court she wouldn’t be following any orders of his that she took as him trying to keep her out of danger.
Fresh gunfire erupted in the gallery in front of him; Court saw flashes of light but no targets as of yet, and he held his position and his focus. He recognized that there were a lot of good guys with guns here in the building, as well as the bad, and he knew he’d have to identify friend from foe from noncombatant in the blink of an eye if he was going to get out of this.
Hanley’s voice came over the net finally. “The ambo is secure in his citadel. Second story, top of the west wing staircase. I’m outside in the office with two armed DSS guards. There are a dozen other dips and vips in here with us, but only the two guns.”
“How far out is Travers?” Zoya asked.
“Ten minutes.”
“Matt,” Court said, “they’ve got weaponized drones.”
“Yeah, I heard. Can Zack really shoot them down?”
Court thought it over. “Doubtful, boss.”
Apparently Zack had been listening in to the transmissions from up in the attic. His low voice grumbled over the net. “Ye of little faith.”
Zoya interrupted. “I’ll contact Brewer and tell her to hold Travers back until the threat from the air is neutralized.” She began doing this, keeping her gun steady on the hallway while she dialed the number.
Zack said, “See, Six? Anthem has faith.”
Court and Zoya made eye contact, and she just shook her head.
Just then, two men in black swung into the hallway from opposite sides, twenty feet from Court, eliminating any chance Zoya had to communicate with Brewer. Court opened fire from his kneeling position, struck one man high on his chest, and sent him falling to the hardwood flooring. The second man disappeared back around his side, chased to cover by 9-millimeter rounds from Court’s MP5.
“One down, God knows how many to go.”
Zoya still held her weapon on the east hallway. She said, “I need a bigger gun.”
But before Court could respond, they both heard gunfire on the west side. Hanley’s voice came back over the net. “Enemy in the west wing. Say again, zips in the wire.”
“Roger that,” replied Zoya. “East wing, as well.”
“Watch out for flanking maneuvers.”
“No shit,” Court mumbled.