Tier One Wild (30 page)

Across the street and on the other side of the entrance to Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Cindy Bird staggered slightly on the sidewalk. She wore a black tank top that showed a hint of her cleavage and muscular bare arms, and dark blue jeans. Her hair was strewn across her face. She was crying openly, using the back of her arm every few yards to wipe hair and tears from her eyes as her thick sobs echoed on the quiet street.

A white woman with bare arms and partially bared breasts stumbling and weeping down a predawn street in Cairo. It grabbed the attention of the sentry at the front gate of the shipping concern, to say the least.

She stepped onto the tree-lined sidewalk and up toward the freestanding gatehouse next to the driveway.

A suspicious guard with a heavy mustache and angry eyes stared at her while fingering the MP5 sub gun on his chest. He picked his walkie-talkie off the table in front of him and brought it to his mouth.

“
La mo’axza,
” she said.
Pardon me.
It was not the customary Muslim greeting, but it showed the man that the woman spoke Arabic.

He took the walkie-talkie away from his mouth and hooked it back to the strap of his weapon and, with his hand still on the grip of his submachine gun, he watched her from the shack.

Cindy wiped tears from her eyes and smiled meekly at the guard. The man noticed her easy demeanor, but even more he noticed her bare shoulders. His eyebrows rose slightly, even as his eyes remained dark. “What do you want?”

In Arabic Cindy replied, “Yacht Club? Is this the Yacht Club?”

The guard shook his head, and his hand lowered from his rifle. “No.”

“Yacht Club?” she asked again.

Now the guard stepped out of the shack and pointed up the street in the direction of the Yacht Club.

“I have been attacked, I need help,” Cindy said in Arabic, bursting into a fresh bout of sobs after doing so.

The guard hesitated, and then brought his walkie-talkie back to his mouth.

As the guard pressed the talk button on the side of his radio, Kolt Raynor appeared behind him, having slipped through the darkness along the gate. As Cindy watched, Kolt grabbed the guard from behind as he slapped a tight rear naked choke to cut the guard’s airway. After three seconds of trying to shake Kolt off, the guard’s knees gave, and the Egyptian jolted forward, his eyes fluttering. Cindy half caught them both as they fell, and then she and Raynor rolled the unconscious man back into the guard shack.

Hawk pressed the button to open the gate, and by the time she stepped out of the shack Raynor had both MP7s out of his bag. Hawk took one, along with a small shoulder pack with six extra magazines of 4.6mm ammo, and her interteam radio and earpiece.

“Why are you still crying?” Kolt asked as he did a brass check on his Glock.

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen a man killed like that. He was staring straight at me,” Cindy said, wiping the tears with her left sleeve.

“Okay, first off, he’s not dead. Second, get your shit together.”

The gate closed automatically behind Raynor.

“I know, I know,” Cindy quickly said. “I’m good. Really, I am.”

“Look, this could get real ugly in the next few minutes. Guns kill. You saw that back at the Agency house. Decide right now if you have my six, or head back to the van. Your call.”

“No, no, Kolt. I’m okay. I’m over it. First-game jitters, I guess.”

“Okay. I need your head on a swivel in there. How about opening that gate again?”

As the gate opened the second time, Raynor slung his HK around his neck along with his backpack full of magazines. He passed the sentry’s radio to Hawk and drew his suppressed Glock. She turned the volume low and attached it to her weapon’s sling up near her ear, and then extended the stock on the MP7.

The two ran forward into Maadi Land and Sea, with Raynor leading the way with his silenced pistol.

*   *   *

Digger and Slapshot made short work of the metal gate between the pier and the property of Maadi Land and Sea. With their handheld NVGs they could make out both the static and the patrolling sentries, so they timed the noisiest part of their cutting of the metal links for when the guards were farthest away. Digger snapped links with his bolt cutters while his mate held the gate to minimize rattle, and when they had a large enough opening from the bottom of the gate up to peel it back to allow a man to slide through, they stopped and pushed their bodies and equipment into the grounds of the Libyans’ property.

As a sentry closed on their position, both men fast-crawled up the reedy embankment to a low concrete retaining wall around a small drainage pipe. This gave them cover from the three sentries in the back of the warehouse property, but a guard on the roof of the three-story office building would be able to see them here if he shone a flashlight on them.

A set of cement steps cut through the center of the property, ahead and twenty-five yards to the right of the two Delta operators. They led to the parking lot behind the warehouse, and by utilizing them they could continue up the hill to the warehouse wall.

But in looking over their surveillance photos they’d noticed devices along the walkway that looked like they might be motion detectors. So the men pivoted to the left, moved low through the weeds, and then headed up toward the warehouse.

Slowly and carefully, and with one eye on the patrolling sentries in the distance.

They almost made it.

They hit the parking lot twenty yards from the wall of the warehouse, and then a bright white light on the roof of the low building flashed on, illuminating them like they were center stage on Broadway. Their night-observation devices whited out, and they flipped them up on their helmets to see. Behind them, their shadows reached all the way into the Nile. Neither man waited around to see if the motion-activated light would be noticed by the security forces at the rear of the property or not. They both sprinted toward the wall of the warehouse.

Digger had been keeping track of the nearest sentry—the man with the Kalashnikov was at the northwest corner of the warehouse near the loading bay. The American slowed just slightly to bring his weapon’s red dot sight up to the area, and he found his target. The wide-eyed sentry was lifting his rifle up toward the men in the light in front of him.

Digger squeezed off a pair of bursts toward the man’s position, but he was moving too fast to be certain he’d achieved any hits. He ran to the wall while Slapshot slowed to fire at a target to the south.

*   *   *

Kolt and Hawk had made it to the wall of the office building, and they were using it, and a line of cars and SUVs parked there, for cover as they headed to the warehouse.

They flattened themselves in front of the Mercedes S-Class sedan as a sentry passed by on the other side of the vehicle.

Kolt and Hawk hadn’t heard the suppressed gunfire but did hear the radio call from Slapshot. “Contact!” Kolt knew the call meant one of his men had pulled the trigger on a bad guy, but the neighborhood had not started scrambling just yet.

Then loud bursts of automatic AK fire from the rear of the property echoed through the parking lot in the front.

“Shit,” Raynor said. He knew it was going to go loud tonight, but he had hoped to make it farther than this before the lead started flying.

As the sentry on the other side of the car shouted into his radio for an update as to what was going on, Kolt pulled his black matte-bladed knife from his waistband. He started to rise to take down the sentry from behind, but Hawk squeezed him on the ankle. He looked back over his shoulder quickly, and found Hawk flat on the cement shaking her head no. She pointed ahead, to the north, and Raynor followed her finger. Two more sentries were standing by the front door to the warehouse, thirty yards away. Their weapons were at their shoulders and they were scanning the night.

If Raynor had stood and revealed himself, it was likely he and Hawk both would have been cut down by AK fire.

Kolt just lowered back flat in the shadow of the Mercedes and waited for all three sentries to run off to the north.

Over Kolt’s earpiece he heard, “Boss, it’s Digger.”

“Go,” said Kolt, his voice barely a whisper.

“We dropped two sentries back here, but we’re pinned. We’re behind an AC unit taking fire from the roof of objective Stone. We can’t make it around to the loading dock until we suppress that position. Sounds like two shooters on the northwest corner of the roof.”

“Roger that. We’ll enter Stone and take them from behind. Will alert you when to check your fire.”

Kolt turned to Cindy. “Into the building and up the stairs.” He stood, drew a nine-banger flash-bang grenade from his duffel, and pulled the pin.

Cindy had no idea what he was going to do with the distraction device here in the open parking lot.

Raynor threw the grenade hard away from them, and then he turned around to the window of the office. As the flash-bang detonated, he smashed and raked the window with the muzzle end of his HK. The grenade’s detonation masked the sound of the breaking glass, and it also set off the car alarms on the long row of luxury cars and SUVs. It would bring trouble in seconds, but it might help take some of the pressure off of his two mates battling it out with sentries on the other side of the property.

“Inside!” Kolt shouted as he took a knee and raised the other one. Cindy stepped on Kolt’s right knee and climbed quickly but carefully through the broken pane.

Kolt followed close behind.

If Cindy had any issues with Raynor taking liberties with his mission orders from Webber and making entry on the office building, she kept those reservations to herself. She kept tight on her commanding officer’s shoulder as they moved through a darkened office. They opened the heavy door and then advanced up a quiet linoleum-floored corridor. Ahead of them they heard shouting from multiple rooms.

Kolt held his suppressed Glock out in front of him with his right hand, but in his left he held on to the MP7. This way, if any single threat presented itself ahead he could, theoretically at least, eliminate it with his silenced pistol. But if several enemy appeared at once and he needed to rock and roll, he could get his short-barreled PDW up in half a second.

As they passed a door with a sign on it, Cindy nudged Kolt.

“Stairwell,” she said softly, tipping her head toward the sign.

Kolt nodded and he let his MP7 hang from the sling around his neck as he opened the door with his left hand.

Just on the other side of the door, a man in a suit and tie leapt down the last three steps of the staircase, running toward the door. He held an unslung Kalashnikov with a folded stock in his right hand.

Kolt shot the surprised Saleh confederate three times in the chest with his Glock. Raynor still had to spin sideways and take the dead man’s forward impact against his shoulder.

The Libyan dropped to the floor on his back. Hawk kicked the man’s AK away from his body.

Kolt then kicked his attacker between the legs to make sure he was dead.

In the stairwell the suppressed .40-caliber rounds echoed off the steel of the staircase, but Raynor had been at this long enough to know that no one else in the building would perceive anything they might have heard as gunfire.

Hawk and Kolt closed themselves in the stairwell, and began heading up to the roof.

TWENTY-SIX

Digger fired a series of short bursts at the northwest corner of the warehouse. Twice a sentry leaned around the corner to fire his Kalashnikov at the two Delta men pinned down behind the large air-conditioning unit that protruded from the building’s wall twenty meters away. Digger and Slapshot wanted to head in that direction, to make a right around the corner and enter the warehouse at the loading bay, but there was no way they could run across the parking lot along the wall without getting cut down from above and behind by the men on the roof.

“What about breaching this wall right here with C-4?” Digger shouted to Slapshot as he reloaded. “We can make a big enough hole to get inside the warehouse.”

“No place to safely hunker down while we detonate it. Plus, what if there is a stack of Grinch rockets propped up against the other side of this wall?”

“Shit.”

Slapshot stepped out from cover for a moment to fire at the roof. As he did so he saw a group of Saleh’s men approaching across the parking lot of the office building. He directed his fire at them, sending them scrambling for cover.

He’d not fired more than a few rounds before asphalt in front of him kicked up in dusty, flying chunks, the result of a long burst from an AK three floors up firing down on his position.

Slapshot spun back behind the AC unit and dropped to a sitting position.

“We give Racer another minute to suppress the roof or we’re going to have to try for the loading dock, one at a time while the other covers.”

Neither man thought that was a tactic with a high probability of success, but the longer they stayed rooted to one position, the faster their chances here would spin down to zero. Just then Racer came over the interteam radio’s headsets.

“Check your fire to the roof.”

“Roger that,” said Digger.

The sentry at the northwest corner was joined by a second gunman. One at a time they leaned out with their rifles and took undisciplined shots at the two men taking cover.

Slapshot said, “I’m gonna thin this herd,” and he knelt on one knee and aimed his weapon carefully to the north. He kept perfectly still, waiting to place his red dot on the next piece of flesh to expose itself around the corner, not even flinching when one of the men stuck his AK blindly around and fired a three-round burst that clanged the steel machinery just above Slapshot’s head.

Then the second sentry leaned out quickly for a better look.

Slapshot calmly broke the four-pound trigger on his weapon, and pink mist, shiny in the artificial light of the parking lot, erupted from the sentry’s forehead.

The body fell from behind the corner into view and his AK-47 tumbled away from him.

“Sweet,” Digger said, looking back over his shoulder. Then he leaned away from the protection of the green AC unit and fired again at the five men near the rear entrance of the office.