Devil's Fortress, page 32
In the next split-second, Flynn shoved himself back to his feet and sprinted down the corridor, bringing his submachine gun up to his shoulder and opening fire on the move. He hurdled over a couple of bodies sprawled across floor. Cooke and Kossak followed close behind him while Van Horn and the others boiled out of the stairwell in their wake. Attacking while any surviving Raven Syndicate troops were still trying to shake off the effects of that explosion was the correct tactical move.
He burst through the open door and veered to the right. Amid the churning smoke and dust, Flynn glimpsed a Russian staggering upright behind an overturned leather couch. He swiveled that way and squeezed off two rounds. The man fell backward.
Cooke slid through the door to the left, engaging half-seen targets in that direction. Kossak took the middle and vaulted over the splinter-torn reception desk. He landed on his feet on the other side and shot a third Raven Syndicate guard who’d ducked into cover to avoid the grenade blast.
Flynn spotted movement out the corner of his eye and whirled toward it, already knowing he was reacting too late. Another Russian had reared up from behind a desk at the back of the office. His blood-streaked face was set and utterly intent as he leveled his submachine gun at the American. And then he folded over, hit repeatedly in the chest and stomach by several 9mm rounds fired at close range.
Flynn half-turned and saw Van Horn lowering her own Vityaz-SN. Her hands flew across the compact weapon, dropping out its spent thirty-round magazine and inserting a full one with a couple of quick, highly efficient moves. “Looked like you could use some help,” she remarked.
Not trusting himself to speak just yet, Flynn only nodded his thanks. A rapid check of the large room, which Kondakov had identified for them as Voronin’s outer office and reception area, showed only corpses. Between their earlier exchange of fire, his grenade, and this swift, brutal assault, they’d accounted for around half a dozen of the Raven Syndicate troops.
“I caught sight of a couple of them high-tailing it that way,” Cooke told him, pointing down another shorter corridor out of the office.
Flynn nodded. “Yeah, and they’ll be back soon enough, probably with friends.” He found Vucovich and pointed him toward the large steel door set in the middle of the far wall. It should be the entrance to Voronin’s private office. “See about getting us through that door,” he ordered.
“Roger that, sir,” Vucovich agreed. He took the bag containing their remaining explosives from Hynes and moved to examine the door.
More rapid-fire orders from Flynn posted Van Horn, Cooke, and Hynes on guard in the outer office with clear fields of fire down both corridors. The three began hauling couches and chairs into position to create rough, improvised barricades across each doorway. The piled-up furniture wouldn’t stop bullets, but it should impede any attempt by the Russians to force their way back inside. “You have to hold here long enough for us to breach that security door,” Flynn told them. “As soon as we’ve got it open, Tad, Wade, and I will assault in and take out Voronin.” Their heads nodded. That was how they’d planned on handling this part of the mission, assuming they’d made it this far without taking significant losses.
“Uh, sir,” he heard Vucovich say hesitantly. “About that door?”
Flynn turned to him. “Yes?”
“We can’t breach it,” the other man told him regretfully. “Not with the demolitions gear we were able to bring with us. It’s a bank vault-type. The door’s made out of reinforced steel several inches thick, and it’s got solid locking bars . . . the works. We could bang away on it all day without getting anywhere.”
Hynes turned away from the barricade. “You owe me five bucks, Wade,” he said with an undisguised note of triumph. “Told you that scumbag Voronin wouldn’t cut corners when it came to protecting his own hide.”
Flynn raised an eyebrow. “Should I assume that you have a solution for this problem, Cole?” he asked mildly. “Because otherwise, I’m not sure winning a five-dollar bet offsets the total failure of our mission.”
“Yeah,” Hynes said confidently. “We’ll use the Gatecrasher on one of those places instead.” He indicated the stretches of wall to either side of Voronin’s armored door. “Behind all the fancy wood paneling, the wall is probably reinforced concrete. Sure, that stuff’s pretty strong, but―”
“Not nearly as strong as that armored door itself,” Flynn suddenly understood. The Gatecrasher was a modular, water-tamped breaching charge that blew man-sized holes through concrete and brick walls. It consisted of linear cutting charges contained in separate, cylindrical, water-filled jackets that were Velcroed onto a backing material that could then be propped up against a targeted wall section. The water surrounding each charge helped direct the force of its explosion and reduced the kinetic energy of any bits and pieces of shattered wall hurled away from the blast—making it somewhat safer for use in more confined areas. In its essentials, the Gatecrasher system was a smaller and more portable version of the improvised array of tiny C4 charges and water-filled plastic bags Cooke had used earlier to blast their way through the ceiling of the Raven Syndicate–owned 45th floor.
Hynes nodded. “You got it, sir.”
“We’ll need water to fill those module jackets,” Flynn pointed out. “Which could be a problem, since what’s left in our personal hydration packs won’t cut it. And I don’t want to wander these halls looking for the nearest restroom and hoping there’s enough water still in the pipes.” When they cut the Mercury City Tower’s electrical power, they’d also knocked out the pumps used to lift water to the skyscraper’s higher levels.
Hynes directed his attention to a glass-fronted case in one corner of the office. It contained dozens of bottles of the finest Russian brands of mineral water. “Well, there you go, sir. Courtesy of our host, Pavel Dumbass Voronin,” he said. “Kind of ironic, huh?”
Flynn nodded. “So it is.”
“Contact! Contact!” Cooke yelled suddenly from his post at the doorway to the corridor they’d come from. “I count three-plus Tangos pushing out of the stairwell.” He opened fire, squeezing off single, carefully aimed shots. The counterattacking Syndicate troops shot back, punching holes in their barricade of furniture. Fragments of leather and stuffing flew away. Rounds ricocheted off steel coils, throwing sparks. Cooke burned through the rest of his magazine, dropped it out, and pulled another from his assault vest. He inserted it, but then glanced back at Flynn. “I’m just about dry,” he reported calmly, meaning that he was almost out of ammunition.
Flynn checked his own equipment. He was low on ammo, too, but he still had three full magazines left. He yanked out two of them and tossed them underhanded to Cooke, who caught them and stuffed them into his vest before swiveling back to the barricaded doorway to continue the fight. In the interval, Hynes leaned in and began shooting, joining Cooke to suppress the attackers before they could try a rush.
Tight-lipped, Flynn swung toward Vucovich and Kossak. “Start prepping that demolition charge ASAP. We’re short on time and long on bad guys.” They nodded. Vucovich began pulling the separate components of the Gatecrasher system out of their equipment bag, while the Pole grabbed handfuls of water bottles and carried them over. Flynn hurried to join them. Readying the breaching charge in time was going to take all of them working together.
“Tangos in my sector, too!” Van Horn abruptly reported from the other doorway. Her submachine gun crackled. She ducked back as incoming fire tore away chunks from the doorframe, and then leaned back out to shoot again. “One down!” she reported triumphantly. Her weapon ran dry, and she loaded another magazine. “Nick!” she called softly.
Flynn looked up. Van Horn flashed him a hand signal indicating that she, too, was almost out of ammunition. Feeling cold, Flynn fished out his last full magazine and lobbed it over. They had burned through most of their available ammo and almost all their grenades. Sure, they could probably scavenge some additional 9mm magazines from the handful of dead Syndicate guards littering the outer office, but if this close-quarters battle went on for much longer, they would be down to fighting with pistols and knives and bare hands against enemies armed with automatic weapons. And that would be a situation with only one probable outcome—a fatal one.
Gritting his teeth, Flynn grabbed more water bottles and started twisting off caps, before handing them to Kossak to pour into the breaching charge’s flattened black nylon tubes. As water filled them, the tubes began to expand, gradually taking on the shape of full cylinders. He quickened his pace. He would be damned if they went down before breaking through Voronin’s last line of defense.
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
outside voronin’s private office
a short time later
Flynn watched Vucovich carefully set the Gatecrasher’s tactical sleeve against the wall a few feet to the side of the door into Voronin’s inner office. The sleeve was a thin sheet of black nylon cloth with Velcro attachment points for the two water-filled cylinders containing the device’s shaped explosive cutting charges. Then, while Vucovich held the assembled breaching charge in place, Kossak slotted a metal stake into a notch at the top of the black sleeve and solidly wedged the other end against the carpeted floor. He stepped back. Satisfied that the Gatecrasher would now stay where they wanted it, Vucovich pulled his hands away, too. He knelt, fitted a detonator into a slot at the bottom of the sleeve, stood up again, and backed away toward a far corner of the large outer office, slowly unreeling the attached line of det cord as he went.
Flynn and Kossak followed him. They’d piled more office furniture into that corner to form a crude barricade against backblast from the controlled explosion Vucovich was about to set off. They waited while he finished connecting the det cord to its trigger mechanism. He looked up. “We’re good to go.”
Flynn nodded. His eyes sought out Cooke, Hynes, and Van Horn. The three were crouched near the doorways they were guarding, still exchanging fire with the Raven Syndicate troops. So far, the enemy had tried a couple of rushes and been driven back with losses. More bodies now littered both corridors. “Hunker down!” he called. “Fire in the hole!” All three immediately went prone, curling up and pulling in their arms and legs to bring as much of their bodies as possible under the protection of their helmets and armor.
Flynn dropped behind their improvised barricade beside Kossak. Vucovich crouched next to them with his thumb on the trigger switch. He looked at Flynn, who nodded. “Blow it, Wade.”
Vucovich squeezed the switch.
An enormous, echoing blast rocked the room. Chunks of shattered concrete and splintered wood paneling flew away from the wall—slamming into their improvised furniture barricade and smashing against the other walls and ceiling. A thick cloud of whitish-gray smoke mushroomed outward, enveloping the entire outer office in a choking fog.
Flynn shook his head to clear his ringing ears. Holy crap, he thought dazedly. That had been even louder than he’d imagined it would be. Lesson Number One, he guessed, was to try your damnedest not to detonate powerful explosive charges in enclosed spaces. Or if you had to, at least make sure you were a long, long way off when they went up. Without the tamping effect of the water surrounding the Gatecrasher’s charges, he suspected they’d all have been permanently deafened—and quite possibly dead or badly injured by the backblast.
He stood up from behind the barricade. “Everybody okay?” he called loudly. Van Horn and the others yelled back, reporting they were shaken but not seriously hurt. They uncurled and rolled into position again near the doorways, on guard against the next Syndicate attempt to break in.
Flynn turned to Kossak and Vucovich. “You ready to go hunting?”
“Count me in,” the Pole replied, checking over his submachine gun. “I have been looking forward to this for a long time.” Vucovich nodded and hefted his Saiga tactical shotgun.
“Then let’s go,” Flynn said, moving toward the smoking hole they’d just blown through the wall. The jagged bottom was about a foot off the floor and the whole thing was around three feet high and three feet wide. Lengths of rebar curled inward, snapped in the middle and bent out of the way by the sheer force of the explosion. Bending low, Flynn squirmed through the gap and then immediately straightened up. He angled to the right to clear the blind spot there while staying close to the wall. The muzzle of his submachine swept from side to side as he scanned Voronin’s office for targets.
Kossak followed him in and went left. Vucovich was the last one through, and he took the middle.
Flynn’s eyes narrowed, taking in a scene of luxury turned upside down. A fan-shaped field of smoldering debris stretched across the palatial room. What had been an elegant mahogany desk lay partially buried under a heap of cracked and blackened concrete rubble. A desktop computer monitor had been torn loose from its cabling and tossed aside by the shockwave. Modernist paintings, most probably priceless originals, had been blown off the walls and scattered across the carpet with broken frames and ripped canvases. The enormous floor-to-ceiling windows that formed the far wall were cracked and splintered—but were, astonishingly, still intact. He nodded to himself. Kondakov had claimed the glass was strongly bullet- and impact-resistant, and the Russian had been right.
“Clear!” he snapped, confirming that Voronin’s inner office itself was empty. The others echoed his call. There were two other doors, one on each of the shorter walls to the left and right. Flynn jerked his head at the one on the left. “Check that one first,” he commanded.
Kossak and Vucovich nodded and moved in that direction. Flynn covered the other interior door and headed around the debris field toward Voronin’s desk. The computer’s monitor might be toast, but he’d bet the machine itself was intact—shielded by the desk from any fragments and the blast wave. He lowered his right hand long enough to pull a multitool out of one of his vest pouches. Besides the chance to put a bullet in Voronin, this was a golden, intelligence-gathering opportunity he didn’t plan to pass up.
Over by the left-hand door, the Pole leaned over, angled his submachine gun, and put a couple of rounds through the latch. It sagged open. Vucovich kicked it all the way in, leaned around the doorjamb, and pumped 12-gauge buckshot rounds from his shotgun into the room beyond. He pulled back. “Nothing,” he reported. “Just a fancy bathroom.”
“Presumably inoperable now,” Kossak said with a straight face.
Vucovich grinned back at him. “Afraid so,” he replied, equally deadpan. “Sure hope you can hold it.” Weapons up, they both headed across the office toward the right-hand door.
Over by Voronin’s ruined desk, Flynn finished popping the solid state drive out of the oligarch’s personal computer, bagged it, and slid it safely away into a sealed pants pocket. Through the hole they’d blown in the office wall, he could hear Cooke and the others shooting more rapidly. The Syndicate’s security troops must be making another determined attack. His jaw tightened. They were running out of time fast. Galvanized into action, he rose and joined Vucovich and Kossak at the other interior door. “Hit it,” he said. The Pole nodded and fired a burst into the lock. The door broke free and swung open.
Without waiting, Vucovich slammed the door with his boot, driving it inward. He pivoted through the open doorway and into what had to be a private dining room. A solid-looking white oak table occupied the center of the room, surrounded by several ornate chairs decorated with gold leaf. More paintings lined the walls, along with a couple of small abstract sculptures. Shotgun at his shoulder, Vucovich opened fire, blasting buckshot rounds into the room as he turned through an arc. Splinters flew away from the table and chairs. Paintings exploded, shredded into bits of torn canvas and smashed frames. He squeezed the trigger again and heard a click as the weapon fell silent. He’d expended the last of his current magazine’s twelve shells. “Ah, crap,” the ex-GI said conversationally. He thumbed the release lever on the shotgun and reached for a reload on his vest.
And in that exact moment, Pavel Voronin, narrow-eyed and wholly focused, leaped up from behind the cover of the massive white oak dining table. He was already shooting his compact, black polymer pistol—pulling the semi-automatic weapon’s trigger as rapidly as possible to fire a lethal fusillade of 9mm bullets.
Several rounds punched into Vucovich’s ballistic armor. Their impact was absorbed or deflected. But one tore through his exposed throat. Bright red blood sprayed high. Choking, Vucovich slumped against a shocked Flynn, knocking him off-balance. Momentarily locked together, the two men staggered backward.
Voronin’s pistol fell silent, either jammed or out of ammunition. Snarling, his face contorted in rage, the Russian hurled it at Kossak’s head before he could bring his weapon on target. The Pole ducked, and, without hesitating, Voronin lunged around the table at him with a wicked-looking combat knife held low and ready to strike upward, aiming to stab up under his ribs and deep into his heart. Desperately, Kossak whirled away, narrowly dodging the Russian’s first attack. But he collided with a chair in his haste and stumbled forward, briefly losing his grip on the submachine gun slung around his neck and shoulder.
Oh my God, Flynn thought—appalled by the Russian’s inhuman speed and fury. He swung the dying Vucovich aside and charged Voronin. At the last second, Flynn leaned sideways and saw the blade flicker past his face in a lightning-fast thrust. He blocked a second quick strike but took a gash on his left arm. Flynn clenched his teeth hard against the sudden agony, and then viciously slammed the barrel of his own submachine gun into the side of the Russian’s face—crushing his cheekbones.
Spewing curses, Voronin reeled back against the dining room table. His face was a mask of blood, with the white of bone now showing under torn flesh. Watching his opponent closely, Flynn moved forward again, barely evading another knife strike. But this time, taking advantage of Voronin’s split-second loss of balance as he lunged, Flynn hooked the other man’s ankle and swept his legs out from under him. Voronin stumbled and went down. Before he could get back up, Flynn stomped hard on his right wrist—smashing the delicate bones. The Russian swore loudly.
