Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

He turned and faced the men. They looked uneasy, and how could he blame them? Those rumblings were getting louder by the second.

“All right, listen up,” he said and then sent a pair of them into each of the diverging passages with clipped instructions. He kept one with him. A tough, black-haired Siberian named Illya. He hardly seemed bothered by the noise.

Krask spun around and got back on the move, waving for him to follow.

Those rumbling sounds. Like bundles of TNT going off at a massive demolition site. Like buildings coming down. Krask felt confined and uncharacteristically threatened. Trapped, almost. The faster he got rid of the Americans, the sooner he would get out of these tunnels.

As far as he was concerned, it could not be soon enough.

It went down with lightning swiftness.

Krask led the way in. He had designated himself the number one, Illya his number two. The other pairs would enter almost simultaneously, each through a separate door.

His Kalashnikov in his right fist, his left arm leaning against the door, Krask gave Illya a nod and pushed the handle down and shouldered the door open, squeezing the carbine’s trigger, pouring bullets in ahead of him. He went through the door, pivoted to the left, still shooting, his eyes sweeping quickly around the well bottom.

He didn’t see the Americans.

He stood there, his carbine raised. His eyes darting to the left and right as Illya followed him in and moved to the opposite side of the door. He was keyed up. Jacked on adrenaline. The rumbling noise suddenly seemed very distant. Like it was coming from the far end of a tunnel. Like it was barely of consequence. Only the immediate mattered. The close-by. The world within the radius of the kill zone. He took in the workstations, the partitions, the entire peculiar juxtaposition of modern computers, medieval stone, and mystical symbols.

He noticed two of the desks were out of position. One of the partitions. He’d riddled them all with bullets. If the Americans had been crouching behind them, they would have been cut to ribbons.

But he didn’t see them.

He stood there a second. Illya stood there a second. Flanking the door. Both of them looking around. Looking at each other. Looking mutually puzzled. They didn’t see the Americans. More doors flew open around the circle. The rest of the men were entering in twos, about to pie the bottom of the well with fire.

Then a thought lit through Krask’s mind like a flare-gun round. He looked up at the stairs winding around the sides of the well, saw the barrel of a rifle angled directly down at him. Behind it, a masked face. The mask adorned with fierce daubs and streaks of color.

At that very instant a 5.56 mm NATO full metal jacket round whistled from above and struck the left side of his neck, drilling into his portrait tattoo of Vladimir Putin, opening a channel dead center between its eyes and mouth. The bullet tore through his throat and jugular vein, grazed his collarbone, and punctured his right lung before lodging in the C7 vertebra of his spine to end its slanted downward trajectory.

As Krask sank to the floor with a mouth full of blood, the penultimate thought of his life was that he was drowning. His next and final thought before dying was that it could not be.

Two hundred feet up, on the third of the staircase’s nine landings, Stafford Sparrow angled his Mk 12 carbine to the right, his eye pressed to its scope, resting its forestock on the rough stone handrail. He had taken off one of his gloves and slipped it between the forestock and rail to keep the gun from bouncing or pulling off.

Now the black-haired guy who’d stormed in second was in his reticle. Aiming slightly below the middle of his ribs, accounting for the kick of upward recoil, he took a breath and fired on the exhale. There was a sharp crack, and the guy staggered backward, blood flowering from his chest and splashing from his back as the bullet seared clear through him. He fell in a boneless sitting position, sliding down against the wall with his legs straight out on the floor tiles, smearing a wide, vertical trail of blood down over the wall’s gray stone surface.

Sparrow’s shot was still echoing in the air as Wheeler stepped from the archway on the eighth landing of the staircase, directly above the rose’s north cardinal point. At the same moment, Begai emerged from the ninth and lowermost landing, just above the south cardinal point. Below them, four more freelancers had poured into the circle, two through the east door, two through the west.

They had inadvertently run themselves into a textbook cross fire.

Wheeler and Begai opened up with their MP7s in full-automatic, spraying the well bottom with bullets. All four went down without triggering a round, or even really knowing what hit them. It was over in seconds.

Wheeler looked down at the sprawl of bodies. He’d emptied his magazine. Fired a full load. Begai, too. Not a pretty sight.

He felt his legs shaking. It happened to soldiers after every battle. It happened to boxers after every fight. Jelly legs. The heart rate returned to normal, the elevated hormone levels and blood pressure dropped, the increased circulation to the lower limbs was reduced.

He lowered his gun barrel, started down the fifteen stairs to the well bottom. And then suddenly realized it wasn’t his legs—or only his legs.

Before, he’d only been able to hear it. But now he could feel it. The rumbling. The rolling tremors underfoot.

The well was shaking. The whole damned well.

He reached the floor of the well, turned toward Begai and Sparrow as they came down the final few stairs and gathered around him.

“Those passages,” he said to Begai. “Did the Wally give you an idea what they look like?”

Begai nodded. “That one the first couple of guys came through...it’s a main tunnel.”

“How do you know?”

“It long and straight. I’m thinking it goes on pretty far. The sonar doesn’t pick up where it ends.”

“And the other ones?”

“They branch off it, maybe thirty yards in.”

Wheeler glanced past the two dead bodies toward the open archway door. He could see only a few short feet beyond it into the passage. It looked like it had been cut through solid rock.

RMMMMMMMMMMMBMMMBBBBBMMM ...

The ground shook. It made the blood around the bodies tremble.

He turned toward the computers. Saw solid green lights on the three transmitters he hadn’t yet collected.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s finish up. And then get the hell out of here.”

Wheeler led their dash through the passage, Begai a step or two behind him, Sparrow bringing up the rear. The walls shuddered and shook as if they were about to tumble down around them.

They found the elevator a hundred fifty yards from the well bottom. It was a single stainless-steel door with an RFID/bioreader set into the stone wall alongside it.

Wheeler pulled his snoofer from its hard case and held it straight out in front of him like someone taking a selfie. The device instantly injected its software and then began running key codes and biometric identifiers.

The three men waited tensely. The walls shook. The floor shook. It felt like fault lines were about to convulsively stretch and pull apart under their feet.

Wheeler glanced over his shoulder at Sparrow. The kid was studying his smart watch. He’d switched his real-time tracker from GPS to an IPS, or Indoor Positioning System, based on ultrawideband radio transmissions. It was the faster and more accurate option in enclosed and underground spaces.

“Location?”

“We’re under the castle,” Sparrow said. Then looked at him. “ Right under it. It’s like the place is coming down on top of us.”