Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

He sprinted toward it, noticed the sliding tracks. There were biochip readers on the wall, like at Club Energie, one on his side of the gate, one on the stair side. But Kali’s lock hack wouldn’t work twice; their man would have changed his biometric database after the Bucharest raid.

It was nothing Carmody hadn’t foreseen.

He shot a glance around at Begai.

“We need a big hole,” he said.

The sapper nodded. “Big hole coming up.”

He reached into his pack, his hand coming out with a C-4/thermite breaching charge like the one Dixon’s element used at the perimeter fence. He affixed it to the gate’s upper track and placed a second on the lower track and waved for the others to back down the passage. Joining them, his arm in the air, he ticked off a countdown with his fingers: five, four, three, two, little finger down.

A sharp crack, and the charges flashed into flame, blowing the gate off the tracks. It hung from the ceiling a second, teetering precariously in a cloud of smoke and masonry dust. Then gravity tore it free of the upper track, and it clanged down the flight of stairs.

Carmody led the men past the toppled gate and down to the pitch-dark hallway below.

But his eyes didn’t see a hallway. They saw a linear, narrow, dangerous piece of terrain—and a potential killing ground. Longer and wider than the upper passage, it doglegged to the right some fifty feet ahead. Its floor was covered by a plush carpet runner, and the right-hand wall was draped in tapestries of ancient battle scenes—armored warriors, swords, and galloping horses. There were a couple of closed doors on the left.

He waved his men toward the side that was opposite the doors. They lined up behind him single file, heads up, eyes up, weapons at their hips, moving, moving, moving through the corridor. Their assault plan was to clear every room.

Carmody was still three or four feet short of reaching the first door when he heard footsteps up ahead—coming from the intersecting hall. Then the muzzle of a rifle angled around the corner of the wall.

The shooter opened fire, his gun chattering.

Carmody yanked a grenade from the hard-shell trigger pouch on his vest. He’d used flashbangs in the 22nd Special Tacs, but this was a different species. Thermobaric, rectangular instead of round, it didn’t roll away from the target but stayed where it landed. Nor did it blow outward so everyone around, including the thrower, felt the effects. When the grenade went live, an interior computer scattered a combustible cloud around the bad guys and then ignited it. The noise and light were directed inward.

“Coming out.”

The men averted their eyes as he released the spoon and lobbed his grenade up the hall.

The flash part of flashbang was a brilliant 10,000 candelas, five hundred times brighter than a police spotlight. It would cause rapid pupil constriction and photobleaching of rhodopsin, or retinal purple, the same pigment Fox Team’s NV-capable smart glasses exploited for light amplification. The effect was full but temporary blindness.

The type of bang it made depended on where you were, relative to the detonation. To Carmody’s men, the noise was a mildly startling thump like someone slapping his palm down on the hood of a car. But within the five-foot cloud radius, it exceeded 180 decibels. That was louder than the roar inside a 737 jet turbine, and louder than a pound of exploding TNT. At 180-plus decibels, glass shattered, balloons popped, and the atmospheric PSI jumped ten percent from the compression wave. At 180-plus, vision blurred, and it became hard for a person to breathe or swallow. He would get nauseous, dizzy, and disoriented.

Carmody raced up to the turn and swung around it with his bullpup at his hip. There were two hostiles in the intersecting hall. Both held assault rifles and wore body armor and night-vision goggles. They were staggering, out of it, and probably seeing spots and sparkles. But in seconds they would recover enough to become lethal threats again.

One of the prime rules he’d learned as an operator was to never give an enemy extra cracks at you.

He shot them between the eyes, clean double taps. Blood misted onto the wall from the backs of their heads as he turned and looked back around the corner. Thumbing Schultz and Sparrow toward the first door, he signaled for Long and Begai to follow him, then broke into a fast trot along the branching hall.

It ran straight for about forty paces. Halfway down its length, a niche in the thick fortress wall displayed antique suits of armor resembling those pictured in the tapestries. Mounted behind them on the wall were lances, pikes, maces, and swords. Immediately to the right of the niche, a flight of carpeted stairs climbed to an upper story or tower. To the left at the far end of the hall was another staircase.

Two to choose from.

Carmody gazed at the ancient battle array, noting a metal crest mounted on the wall above it. The wolf-jawed dragon with three tongues again.

He blinked his right eye twice to snap a photo with the goggles. Then, “Pickles, identify.”

The AI searched its web of databases. A moment later Carmody’s head-up showed the results:

Dacian Drago. The Wolf-Dragon. Standard of the ancient Eastern European Dacian army. Seen on Trajan’s Column in Italy. Word origin: Drago derived from the Greek gazing or to watch with a sharp eye.

Carmody gestured toward the right-hand set of stairs. Easy bet.

He dashed up the eight or ten steps to the landing, the others close behind him. At the top, a short hallway curved toward two doors, one on the left, another straight ahead at the end of the passage. The first was stainless steel, a biometric reader alongside it. The door that faced them was old, high, and arched, with large wood panels. A lever-type handle and thumb latch. Carmody saw a pencil-thin strip of light underneath.

He squeezed Long’s shoulder and pointed to the wooden door. Long nodded, went to the hinge side, Carmody and the others stacked up behind him. Shifting to the opposite side, Begai reached across for the handle, pulled it open, and made first entry. Long moved in next.

Carmody went last, dead center through the doorway. The extended stock of his MP7 pressed against his arm, he scanned the room, quick sweeps of his eyes.

It was a large, oval parlor. No one inside. A lofty, raftered ceiling, wide casement windows, and antique furnishings: an oriental rug, wing chairs, side tables, sconces, elaborate curtains and wall hangings.

Then Carmody saw an interior door across the room, arched like the entry door, but narrower.

He sniffed the air. A sweet fragrance hung in it. Resinous, musky...

Incense , he thought. Oud , the expensive stuff. Iran, Sudan, Birhan. Arab royals liked using it as an aphrodisiac.

He gestured toward the door, and they moved fluidly over to it, Wheeler taking the left-flank position, Begai going right, Carmody hanging two steps back with his gun upraised. This one had a knob, and Begai reached for it, turned it, and pushed.

As he stepped through the open door, Carmody saw a woman spring out of a chair near the bed, a shocked, agitated expression on her face. She was in her late twenties or early thirties. A long fur coat unbuttoned over a short black bodycon dress that hugged her like a second skin and showed plenty of leg. Spike heels, dangle earrings, she was sitting there alone, looking like that, at one o’clock in the morning.

What was wrong with the picture?

His gaze flicked to an incense burner on the night stand. It was polished brass, a half-burned clump of the dark, tarry oud in its bowl.

Alone now, yes , he thought. But she hadn’t been.