Марк Грини - One Minute Out

Rodney gets off the wall and we stack up in a three-man train, then begin heading down to the first floor, but before we make it more than a couple of steps, a group of three armed Latino males spin into view below us. They are looking for threats, but they hesitate an instant as they size us up as targets.

Kareem, Rodney, and I each fire a controlled double-tap, two into each man, and all three tumble back down to the ground floor, dead.

We start down again, but Kareem grabs me by the shoulder just as Rodney tosses a flash bang grenade past my ear. All three of us turn away as it detonates below us in the entry hall of the ranch house.

We descend the rest of the way, where we stumble upon two white men in plain clothing on their hands and knees, disoriented from the banger. Kareem knocks them both flat to the floor while Rodney and I cover back up the stairs as well as the ground-floor hallways leading into both the east and west wings, and a doorway from the entry hall into the kitchen.

The first man on the floor who Kareem checks is unarmed, but the other is lying next to a Heckler & Koch semiautomatic pistol, and under his coat we can see the telltale imprint of a radio on his belt.

Kareem says, “He’s hostile. What do I do with—”

Without speaking, I shift my AK and shoot the man once in the back of the head.

“We don’t have time to give quarter to these motherfuckers.”

Kareem, who is now kneeling on a dead body, just says, “Works for me,” and then he rises and drops back down over to the unarmed man, wincing with back pain as he does so.

This civilian is in the fetal position; he’s pissed his pants and he’s crying like a baby. He’s obviously expecting to lose his life, just like the man on the floor six feet away has.

He is a john, a rapist, likely a pedophile, and my first inclination is to kill him. But he’s not a threat to me. Kareem obviously gets it, because he leans into the man’s ear. “You lay yo’ ass right the fuck here, facedown, and you don’t move till you see daylight through that window. You feel me?”

The man turns and presses his face into the floor, and he continues crying uncontrollably.

The front door to the building flies open now and the three of us find ourselves twenty feet away from multiple armed men. We shift aim to the doorway and open up in bursts, and the attackers dive from view. I don’t know if we made any hits, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t expecting to get shot at the instant they opened the front door, just a couple of minutes after we inserted on the roof and the third floor. They can’t possibly know how many of us are in the building, so I expect they’ll take a minute or two to reassess the situation before making a second breach attempt.

Rodney runs to the door, shuts and locks it, then reloads while Kareem and I cover the entire area.

Another plainclothed Caucasian, this one young and very fit looking, steps into the entry hall from the kitchen on our right, and he raises his empty hands upon seeing us. “Shit! Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!”

Kareem speaks softly to me. “That ain’t no john.”

Before either of us can react, however, the man drops hard to the wooden floor. Behind him, two more men, one Caucasian and one black, spin into view with HK MP-7 Personal Defense Weapons at their shoulders.

I fire as Rodney dives for cover behind a massive planter by the front door. Kareem and I shoot the armed men, but both of our rifles run dry simultaneously.

As we transition to our pistols, the man on the floor draws from his hip and aims our way.

He gets off a single shot before Rodney rolls out from behind the planter and dumps a dozen rounds from his SCAR into the prone attacker, killing him instantly.

I look next to me and see that Kareem is hit. His right shoulder glistens red, and he stumbles back a step but does not fall.

He looks down at the wound. “Dammit!” he shouts, in anger, but not in pain.

I’ve been shot before. Pain comes later.

I reach for the medical kit on his chest rig to patch him up, but he just shakes his head. “I’m good to go. First things first; we ain’t got much time till those cartel boys bust back in. Rodney and I will get the girls together upstairs; you go check out that grotto.”

“Roger.” I sprint off to the west side of the building, my rifle in front of me, as the two other men make their way back up the stairs.

FIFTY

Jaco Verdoorn, White Lion One, and Duncan Duiker, White Lion Seven, knelt in the kitchen with pistols pointed towards the doorway to the hall. They’d just seen three of their colleagues killed right in front of them, and the kitchen shot up around them, bullets from the entry hall tearing through everything in sight.

They couldn’t see the shooters from here because of the angle. Verdoorn imagined the Gray Man and his cohorts were no more than fifty feet away from him now, but he wasn’t racing into the “fatal funnel” of the doorway to find out.

Duiker turned to Lion One. “We thought he’d sneak in low profile, but he came in a fookin’ helicopter and he brought a platoon of men with him. Who does he think he is?”

Verdoorn boiled, angry at Gentry, angry at himself. He’d misjudged the American assassin, took his previous stealthy modus operandi as a predictor of his future actions, and now Jaco realized he’d pay a terrible price for it. He couldn’t raise any of his men on the radio, and it now seemed likely that he, Duiker, and Loots, who had driven off with Cage, were all that remained of the original ten White Lion men.

Verdoorn made a decision while still squatting behind the table. “We’re gettin’ out of here before the police come. We have to get the Director out of the country till the heat from all this recedes.”

“What about the Mexicans on the property?”

“What about them? There’s twenty-five of the bastards, or there were, anyway. Let them take their best shot at Gentry and his mates.”

The two South Africans backed out of the kitchen, their pistols still pointed at the doorway to the entry hall, and then they sprinted for the row of luxury cars outside driven here from LA by the guests.

• • •

I find three young women in the grotto hiding behind a faux waterfall, one no older than sixteen. Four johns, all of them unarmed, are with them. They’re hiding, too, and even more terrified than the hostages. I search the men quickly, then leave them behind as I lead the women to the main stairs.

I don’t like going back in the entryway; there are a lot of entrances to cover, but I don’t see that I have any choice.

As I advance carefully up the east wing hallway, one of the girls grabs me by the arm.

“What?” I ask, annoyed.

“Where are we going?”

“Upstairs.”

“Wouldn’t the back staircase be safer?”

I spin around and reverse my direction. “A hell of a lot safer. Show me where.”

We encounter one more hostile on the rear stairs, and I dump a half dozen rounds of 7.62 into his back before he sees me. A minute after this we are back on the second-floor landing, looking down the main staircase at the entry hall and the front doors. Kareem and Rodney are with us now, along with all the hostages they’ve rounded up.

Roxana is not here. I call out to the group. “Who knows Maja?”

One girl says, “The Romanian. I know her. I came with her yesterday.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sofia.” She shakes her head, then says, “Nora. My real name is Nora.”

“Where is Maja now?”

The hostages confer a moment, and then the young girl from the grotto says, “The tall bald man from South Africa dragged her downstairs and outside. Just after the Director left. I don’t know where they went. I ran into the grotto.”