Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition) (30 page)

A pair of boots
entered Avery’s upper field of vision. He flicked his eyes upward, off Jafari’s
body, up the stairs, and onto an Uzbek who had just appeared at the top of the
landing. Avery raised his aim, steadied his arms, and fired. His first shot
whipped past the Uzbek mercenary’s shoulder, and he brought up his AK-74
carbine and crouched down, presenting a smaller target profile. Avery’s shot
ricocheted harmlessly behind the Uzbek.

Determined to
take the fucker out before he could fire his AK and alert everyone in the whole
place, Avery adjusted aim, took and held a deep breath to keep his body still,
and put a .45 through the Uzbek’s chin, shattering the lower half of his skull
and spraying blood into the air.

Meanwhile, fourteen
feet from Avery, one of the Pakistani technicians hurled a wrench at Poacher in
a desperate last act of defense. The ex-Delta NCO easily sidestepped out of the
way of the wrench and double-tapped the technician, while Flounder weaved a
path between the industrial machinery. Finding the remaining two Pakistani scientists,
he shot them down.

The team swept
the rest of the factory, moving fast, knowing that there were still two more targets
on the loose somewhere.

Then they heard
the sound of metal and locks disengaging. From their respective positions
across the assembly floor, the CIA soldiers converged on the source of the
sound as Mullah Arzad heaved open the main doors and ran outside. Nearby was a
large, vertical air duct behind which he’d been hiding. The remaining Uzbek
fighter was behind him, near the duct, with his rifle covering the mullah. The
Uzbek broke cover to follow Arzad, and that’s when Flounder took him, shooting
him three times in the back.

The CIA men made
no move to go after Arzad, knowing full well what he was about to run into.

Outside the mill
building, Mockingbird held his Mk 23 level in front of him from five feet away.
The Taliban commander stopped in his tracks, surprised at the sight of the
black-clad operator in front of him, the white of his eyes apparent through the
darkness. Mockingbird lowered his aim and gut shot him twice.

Arzad groaned,
stumbled back a couple steps, and, overtaken by the pain, collapsed onto his
knees with one hand pressed against the floor, the other held tightly against
his bleeding, burning intestines. Mockingbird let him suffer in agony for
another couple seconds before finishing him off with a shot through the top of
his head. The Taliban commander collapsed face first onto a puddle of his own
blood, with a small section of bloody brain exposed through his cracked skull.

Maintaining his
firing stance, Mockingbird stepped over Arzad and into the factory. When he
spotted Flounder, he lowered his weapon, squatted to grab Arzad’s body by the
robe, and dragged it inside. Flounder shut the doors behind Mockingbird and
gave him a thumbs-up for being the one to take out one of JSOC’s most wanted
HVTs.

Avery and
Poacher continued their sweep of the factory floor and, after announcing that
it was clear, re-joined the others while maintaining ready positions with their
weapons and keeping the doors and stairwell covered.

The takedown of
the assembly floor took only eleven seconds. Most importantly, none of the
armed tangos had been able to get a single shot off and draw the attention of
everyone else inside the building.

Avery hand
signaled what he wanted everyone to do next.

Mockingbird
would hold the first floor. Poacher and Flounder would take the second floor,
while Avery took the third.

01:33.
Mockingbird covered his teammates as they scaled the skeletal stairs. They took
slow, light steps so that their boots didn’t clatter off the metal surface of
the stairs.

At the second level
landing, they split up. Avery continued following the stairs up, while Poacher
and Flounder charged down the second floor corridor.

The corridor was
brightly illuminated with fluorescent lighting set in the high ceiling and was about
thirty feet in length, with four doors, two on one side, one on the other, and
the fourth set in the end of the corridor. The corridor was cold and looked
sterile and clinical. Without knowing what lay on the other sides of those
doors, they’d need to systematically clear every room one by one.

Poacher gently
tried the latch on the first door. It was unlocked.   

Flounder covered
him as he opened the door, threw a flashbang into the darkened space, pulled
the door closed, waited for the thunderous detonation, and kicked the door in on
its hinges.

Inside the large
open room—about thirty-by-forty-five feet, with sinks, a couple square tables,
chairs, two refrigerators on the far end, and two dozen cots laid out in rows,
half of them occupied—one Russian, five Pakistanis, and four jihadist-looking
Afghans or Uzbeks sat up in their cots.

The Russian, the
way he moved and acted, looked like a civilian or scientist-type without
military training, and so did the Pakistanis. Unlike the Afghans and Uzbeks, they
didn’t reach for weapons, but that wasn’t going to save them.

 Poacher and
Flounder put down the Afghans and Uzbeks first as they reached for AKs on the
floor beneath their cots. Reeling from the disorientating effects of the
flashbang, the Taliban fighters’ movements were clumsy and uncoordinated. Their
weapons never cleared the floor before .45 hollow points split their skulls
apart, one after the other, like targets lined up in a shooting gallery.

Poacher shifted
aim onto the Russian as the man stumbled out of his cot, tripping over a sheet
that was still tucked in beneath his mattress, while Flounder calmly dispatched
a Pakistani who was also on his feet, staggering blindly toward a wall.

Without a
second’s hesitation, Poacher and Flounder proceeded to coldly and systematically
execute the remaining scientists and technicians with one or two shots to the
head, even as one pleaded in heavily accented English that he wasn’t armed.  

When they were
finished, four seconds after entry, Poacher and Flounder stepped back into the
corridor and replaced magazines.

Poacher was a
soldier. Usually, he’d view killing a non-combatant as cowardly and immoral.
But he experienced no qualms or guilt about those scientists and technicians.
Those men had probably never held a gun in their lives, but they were knowingly
and willfully working to create weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands,
and for a WMD operation like this, the scientific minds, and the knowledge they
contained, were even more valuable resources than the mechanical equipment and
components.

That’s why
Israel assassinated civilian Iranian nuclear scientists. With time and money,
Tehran could replace a cascade of centrifuges, but they couldn’t replace
skilled and knowledgeable human beings quite as easily.

 Poacher and
Flounder continued their sweep of the second floor, moving faster now, aware
that the flashbang had surely given them away.

The next door
down the line was locked.

Flounder blasted
the lock with a three round burst and kicked the door in. Inside was a large,
empty utility room filled with electrical panels, air handlers, and whirring
machinery involved in the operations and maintenance of the building, but
Flounder still gave the room a thorough walk through in case someone was
hiding. The last thing they needed was to keep going down the corridor and have
someone pop out behind them.  

The next room’s
lock also needed to be taken out. This was an IT room filled with banks of
computers and blinking lights, and one frightened Pakistani, huddled over a
keyboard, who Poacher calmly double-tapped.

While Flounder went
to the end of the corridor to the last door, Poacher likewise blasted the lock
on the third door, and barged in. He followed his SOCOM pistol—the tactical
light beneath the barrel now turned on—into the darkened room and swept the
light’s beam left to right.

The room was
small, looked more like a closet, and there was a single cot with a figure
stirring on it. Poacher reflexively took aim on the figure, shining his light
over it. He directed his barrel toward the floor and relaxed his finger over
the trigger when he saw who it was.

Poacher looked
around the walls, found a light switch, and flipped it.

Aleksa Denisova’s
wrists were handcuffed to the metal framework of the cot on either side of her,
and she looked battered and bruised, a lot worse than when Poacher had last seen
her in Dushanbe. She looked up at him and jumped. Her eyes were bloodshot,
dilated, and glossy. She’d been drugged, Poacher thought. Well, that wasn’t
nearly as bad as other interrogation methods they could have employed against
her. He pulled up his balaclava mask to show her his face. After a couple
seconds, he saw the recognition in Aleksa’s eyes.

“You were with
Avery in Dushanbe.”

“That’s right.”

Poacher knelt
beside her and examined her wounds.

“I’m okay. They
didn’t hurt me. How did you find this place?”

Poacher ignored
the question and said, “How many people are here?”

“I don’t know.
They kept me in here the whole time. I’ve only seen the American from Minsk and
a couple Russians, but I’ve heard Pasthun or Dari coming from outside a couple
times.” She frowned. “Where are we?”

“We’re at the
processing plant in Gorno-Badakhshan. Everything’s going to be all right. Avery’s
here.” Poacher snipped the chains on her handcuffs with his bolt cutters.
“You’re safe now, understand? We’re going to get you out.”

Aleksa started
to respond but was cut-off by Flounder calling out to Poacher from outside.

“Stay right here.
I’m not going far,” Poacher told Aleksa, standing up and heading back out. When
she protested, he stopped to look back at her and said, “We’ll be back for you.
I promise. Stay here and keep quiet.”     

The last room at
the end of the corridor was unique. It was a heavy vault of reinforced steel
with a cipher-lock keypad. Suspecting what the vault contained, Flounder
selected his handheld radiation detector from his vest, switched it on, and
swept it over the door. The steel was thick, but the detector still picked up faint
gamma traces.

Flounder turned
to Poacher and nodded.

They’d located
the HEU.

But still no
sign of Cramer.

___

01:33. Half a minute before Poacher
tossed the first flashbang and broke the mission’s stealth profile, Avery took the
stairs to an identical corridor on the third and top level. Nearing the landing,
he at once heard footfalls against the metal floor. He held the Mk 23 in front
of him in both hands. Taking another step up, Avery’s eyes cleared the landing,
and he saw a Russian, in black jeans and a t-shirt with a holstered pistol, and
a Pakistani in a lab coat with protective goggles walking in his direction from
about two dozen feet down the corridor.  

And they saw him
too.

The Russian
pushed the Pakistani back with his left hand, placing himself in front of the
scientist, while the right reached for the pistol holstered beneath his left
armpit. His voice bounced off the walls as he shouted something out to whoever
else was nearby. Avery didn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear;
he was announcing the presence of an intruder, and one intruder meant the whole
place was under attack.

Springing up the
remaining stairs two at a time, Avery sighted the Russian first and hit the
trigger twice, catching him center mass in mid-draw. The big Russian staggered
back a couple steps, reeling from the bullets, blood forming at his mouth, but
he was still in the fight. He continued raising his pistol and got off a single
shot, aimed too wide, before Avery gave him a third round of .45 ACP, below his
throat, this time putting him on the deck.  

Avery shifted
his sights over the bewildered Pakistani scientist.

But before he
could tap the trigger, Avery heard the thunderous blast coming from below and felt
the floor shudder beneath his feet. He hesitated for a microsecond, until his
mind registered the sound as a flashbang grenade—Poacher and Flounder—then he shot
the Pakistani, who held his hands up in the air in surrender.  

Before stepping
into the corridor, Avery quickly reloaded and then holstered the SOCOM pistol
and switched to his M4. He knew he wasn’t the only one to have heard the stun
grenade—the damned thing was
loud
—and it was time to sacrifice stealth
for firepower.

He barely had
the rifle to his shoulder before a door thirty feet down the corridor flew open
into the hallway with enough force that it looked like it would snap off its
hinges. Two big, shaved-headed Russians in armored vests and carrying AK-12
assault rifles poured out, looking determined to kick ass.

Before they
caught sight of him, Avery fired a three-round burst in their direction. Poorly
aimed reactionary fire, these shots plinked off the surface of the heavy steel
door, which, open, took up a third of the corridor’s width, and the Russians
opened up with their brand-new Kalashnikovs, sending a torrent of 5.45mm forty feet
down the corridor toward Avery.