Greg Rucka - Patriot acts

The second was the sound of the front door closing.

It was these things that provided the warning, or, more precisely, provided Alena with the warning at the same time that Vadim, in his tree house and with his rifle and his night-vision goggles and his phone, saw the two Suburbans coming quickly down the road towards the house, their headlights off. Being a good boy, and being trained by his father, he did what he was supposed to do. He got on his radio and told Dan that the house was about to be hit.

It was then that Vadim heard the front door closing, and turned just in time to watch Illya run for the trees.

(Vadim, who had disconnected himself from his iPod long enough to listen to what Alena was telling me, was eager to offer his version of events at this point, interrupting to say, "I asked Dan if I should shoot the little shit-eating motherfucker." His English was flawless, his accent pure Brooklyn. "Dan said not to, he said Illya wasn't the problem, and he told me to stay down and out of sight until the fuckers who'd arrived started into the house.")

Many things began happening at once, then, Alena told me. She heard movement downstairs, and Dan shouting for the guard at the back, Yasha, to get ready, that they were about to be hit. She heard Natalie running, already starting to climb the stairs. Miata, too, had realized that something was wrong, and had gotten to his feet, following Alena as she had half hopped, half limped out of her room and into the one of the guard next door, Tamryn.

Alena shouted to Tamryn to get the fuck up, then grabbed his shotgun and spun back around to take a position at the top of the stairs. The shotgun was another Remington 870, the same make and model that Yasha and Illya had been issued by Dan ("He got a deal on them," Vadim explained), but unlike Illya's, both Yasha's and Tamryn's had been loaded with three-inch double-ought buckshot, which would be more effective at close range, inside the house.

Tamryn had scrambled out of bed, drawing his secondary weapon, a Smith amp; Wesson 910 semiauto ("How do you know that?" Vadim asked her, and Alena looked at him as if the question was beyond idiotic, and answered, "Because I saw it, Vadim." She was always very precise in matters of equipment and gear, not because she was particularly obsessive about the tools of the trade, but because she felt it was her professional obligation to know and understand what each tool was, and what it could do), and rushed to follow her out. By the time they'd each left the room, Natalie had reached them, and Dan was close at her heels. On her way to the stairs, Natalie had grabbed Illya's discarded shotgun, which she now tossed to Dan.

None of them had managed to take any reasonable, or even effective, defensive position at this point, which was unfortunate, because it was at this point that the people who'd arrived to kill them entered the house.

("They poured out of those Chevys like their dicks were on fire," Vadim told me. "All gung ho, 'Let's go, Marines!' attitude and shit, but professional about it; they were trying to keep it down, at least until the shooting started. I really don't think they thought anyone was going to be shooting back at them, you know?")

They came through the door in good entry formation, Alena said, covering their angles. The lights were still off in the house, and they tried to be quiet about it. From where she, Natalie, Tamryn, and Dan had been trying to take position, they could see the shapes of their attackers in the ambient light. But they had all still been in motion at the breach, and that made them easy to spot, and it was the attacking force that opened fire first.

There was an initial barrage of fire from the MP5s, eerily quiet since the weapons were suppressed, and maybe as a result, their voices had seemed so much louder.

"Target, top of the stairs!" one had shouted. "With the shotgun, take her, take her!"

From the volume of fire that poured in Alena's direction, she had no doubt they were referring to her, and not to Natalie.

Tamryn went down almost immediately, before he could get a single shot off. He'd been on Alena's left at the top of the stairs, and one of the first bursts meant for her had gone wide, and taken him instead. Alena, Natalie, and Dan had all returned fire, but none of them had scored hits. This didn't bother Alena, since it wasn't the object of the exercise, as far as she was concerned.

The object of the exercise, so to speak, was to get herself, Natalie, Dan, and Miata out of the house alive. If they could force the assault team back out the front door, then they would have secured an effective crossfire, and Vadim could pick their attackers off at his relative leisure. Outside, in the tree house, Vadim had been lining up his first shot as the assault team had been taking up their formation. Three of the team had broken right, away from him, looking to go around the back of the house, but the rest of the group-there were eight in all-had taken up positions for the entry.

Now Vadim heard the barrage of fire from inside the house, and he felt that qualified as permission to do some shooting of his own. He fired, and put a.308 round through the head of the man furthest back in the assault team. His rifle wasn't suppressed, and everyone heard the report, and this threw the entry team into chaos. One of them tried to immediately reverse direction and make for the cover provided by the Suburbans. The remaining three continued trying to gain the house.

"They went total bugfuck when I took their first guy down," Vadim said. "They were all shouting to each other, trying to keep some sort of control of the situation. I only wish I'd been quicker, you know?" Back on the stairs, Dan, Natalie, and Alena were continuing to lay down fire. The initial furious exchange of bullets had abated, and Dan had dropped his shotgun and dived past Nat and Alena, to where Tamryn had gone down. One of the assault team tried to capitalize on the move, coming around the door frame again, and Alena and Natalie both opened up on him simultaneously.

The man fell, and Alena said she was certain it was Natalie who had made the kill.

(I found that hard to believe, but did not say so. If Alena thought that crediting Natalie with the kill would somehow make me feel better about what happened to her, she was wrong. It didn't mean I couldn't appreciate the effort, or see it for what it was, but she was wrong.)

Then Dan threw the smoke grenade that Tamryn had been carrying, and it landed in the front hallway just as Yasha entered from the kitchen, firing wildly with his own Remington. The second shooter at the door put a burst straight into his chest, and Yasha fell at almost the same moment the grenade detonated and began filling first the hallway, then the house, with white smoke. Again, Natalie and Alena returned fire, and the man who'd killed Yasha pitched forward and didn't move again.

At which point Natalie dropped the shotgun, switched to the Sig Sauer I'd returned to her, grabbed hold of Alena's left arm, and said, "We are getting you out of here now!"

Dan took hold of Alena's right arm, handing her the little Seecamp.380 he kept in his pocket, and together with Natalie, they hoisted her to her feet, and began working their way down the stairs, planning to exit at the rear of the house. They still didn't know how many people they were dealing with out front, and they didn't know if more would be arriving.

What they did know was that Alena had been verbally identified as the shooters' primary target. To deny the enemy that target meant they had to get out of the house, and that meant going out the back. In the tree house, Vadim was having trouble getting a good shot on the two shooters he still had to deal with. He'd fired off two more rounds, each to no effect, now leaving him with only four in the rifle before he'd have to switch to the revolver his father had given him. He didn't have a reload for the rifle in the tree house with him, because none of them had considered that they might need to repel an attack of this magnitude.