door, for one thing. And if you looked carefully, you’d see evidence of more careful and skillful construction.
Stone pointed to the door, and then glanced at Benny, who consulted a handheld GPS unit and gave a thumbs up. Stone gestured at another team member, Blake, who examined the door and picked the lock open within seconds, shoving the door open with one hand. Stone rolled through the opening in a tactical crouch, HK MP5SD-N at the ready. His night vision goggles revealed a figure in the small room, and he had a matter of milliseconds to determine if the target was hostile or not.
The AK in his hands made the decision easy. He tugged the trigger twice, and the suppressed automatic submachine gun fired with a whispering click of a bolt. The tango dropped to the ground in a heap.
And then all hell broke loose.
AK fire racketed in the tiny space, shouts in Filipino. Shouts in English.
“Ambush!”
Benny was next to Stone, MP5 clicking, tangos dropping. The shanty was a front, leading to a maze of interconnected buildings. An AK-47 blasted, and Benny dropped, dead. Stone gave the order to retreat, but the street behind them was already bathed in the blood of his fireteam.
There was only Blake, Stone, and Nancy—Jimmy Naninsky—left. They were cut off from the street by the blaze of suppressing fire.
Blake had the door to the street open and was picking off muzzle-bursts with unerring and methodical accuracy. Nancy covered Stone, offering suppressing fire as Stone tried to come up with a plan that would get his remaining three men home alive. The second fireteam was in place still, covering the extraction zone a few miles north. But Benny, Dozens, and Zane were all down. Dozens and Zane hadn’t had a chance, mown down from behind at the initial onslaught of the ambush.
Half his men.
Friends, men he’d served with for the last five years. Men with families.
Stone pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the problem at hand. He reached for a flashbang, pulled the pin, and tossed it through the entryway. It went off with a deafening bang and a disorienting flash of light, and shouts told Stone he’d bought them time. Nancy was already through and covering the door, so Stone loped in, dropped the first three tangos in view, bam-bam-bam. Blake came next, leap-frogging to the next doorway, kicking it in with a boot next to the handle.
It caved in, revealing half a dozen terrified girls, all naked and starvation-skinny, huddling on the floor. A tango had one in a hostage-hold, his arm around her throat and a gun to her head. Stone didn’t hesitate: a single full metal jacket slug entered the tango’s forehead and exited in a spray of gore. The girl slumped to the dirt floor, sobbing silently. Blake herded the girls through the open doorway and out into the street, rejoining Stone and Nancy as they leap-frogged through the maze of connected shanties. They found a few clusters of girls, and set them free. They burst through another closed door, surprising a young man in the act of raping a girl no more than fourteen. He had an automatic pistol in one hand, and as Nancy burst through the door, he lifted it and fired blindly. Nancy dropped him with two slugs through the skull, but took a round to the knee in return.
Stone felt something stinging his eyes, and wiped blood away with his gloved hand; a ricochet had grazed his forehead. He ignored the sting and shoved the dead man away from girl, cursing under his breath when he saw the ragged ricochet-hole piercing her throat.
Through another doorway, moving blindly, hoping to find an exit to the street. Another group of naked, terrified girls. Then, in a cell in the floor, dug into the dirt and covered over with a thick piece of sheetrock, a group of Caucasian girls. Seven of them, blond and brown hair and blue eyes and green, naked, dirty, blood- crusted, beaten. As he lifted them from the cell, Stone heard a laugh and the thump of something heavy hitting the dirt. He rolled to one side and saw the grenade.
He lunged to his feet, shoved Blake and Nancy through the doorway, shielding the rescued girls with his body as the grenade detonated. He felt the explosion first, a crumping pressure, then heard it, a sound so loud his hearing popped. And then he felt rockets of agony burst through him, fires burning in his leg. His thigh was exploding, giving way, but he couldn’t fall. Wouldn’t.
Stone clutched the doorway, his MP5 held in one hand, peering through the mask of blood across his face. He saw a short, squat form, and unleashed a hail of lead. The body twisted and fell, and Stone pushed through the pain, watched the girls scrambling to their feet, watched Nancy wind a belt around his knee.
He was dizzy and disoriented, and he knew he had to do something, but couldn’t remember what. He felt something happening to him, glanced down to see Blake wrapping a bandage around his thigh. His leg was a ruin. It was bad. He knew it was bad. Nothing to be done now, though, except keep going.
One of the Caucasian girls was chattering in what sounded like German or a Slavic language, pointing at another door, and then to the floor. Blake, the only one uninjured, followed her and returned a few seconds later with another knot of naked, bloody, frightened girls. Few were older than eighteen. Among them, he saw the target, Lisa, a young blonde barely recognizable from the photo they’d been shown during the brief.
Around him, the maze of shanties burned. Voices yelled. Screamed. Stone shuffled behind the now-sizable group of girls, limping as he tried to avoid putting weight on his destroyed left thigh. A jagged shard of shrapnel was embedded in the muscle, shifting with every step, causing pain so fierce Stone could barely see through the blurry haze.
He couldn’t stop, though. He heard voices behind them, caught enough of the Filipino to know those approaching weren’t coming to help.
Run.
He pushed the girls ahead of him, pushed at Nancy and Blake. Run. There were too many.
They navigated the maze slowly, following the doorways, ducking through curtains of beads, and then they were out in the dim charcoal light of pre-dawn, three bloody men in tactical gear and at least a dozen naked teenaged girls.
A blast of AK-47 fire came from behind them, and Nancy twisted, stumbled. Stone caught him as Blake returned fire. The girls scattered, screaming. Stone staggered under Nancy’s weight, his wounded leg unable to support himself, let alone someone else.
Get to the extraction point, he told himself. Blake took Nancy’s weight, shouting and gesturing at their frightened charges, pointing them north. Stone was wet, covered in blood.
Nancy was gone.
He heard sounds behind them, let himself lean against a rickety shanty wall, aiming his submachine gun at waist height. The bolt clicked, sending a three-round burst whispering into the darkness, racketing off walls. Pained screams in Filipino told him he’d hit someone. Return fire shattered the silence, a blinding muzzle-burst giving Stone a target. He sent another three-round burst into the shadows above the muzzle-burst, and was rewarded by another scream.
He waited a beat, then shoved himself away from the wall, dragging his useless, agonizing leg behind him as fast as he could manage. Ahead of him, Blake carried Nancy’s limp form over his shoulder, arms and legs dangling and flopping, dripping a trail of blood. The girls were huddled together, moving in shuffling knots, holding on to each other, mumbling in a plethora of languages.
Stone’s leg was hot, tingling. A glance down revealed that it was seeping through the bandage. All he could do was limp onward and hope he didn’t bleed out before they reached the extraction point.
His head was spinning and each step cost him pain, and he stumbled several times, but then black-clad figures were swarming around him, taking his rifle and catching his weight on strong shoulders.
“What the fuck happened, Stone?” Miguel, his voice a low rasp.
“They were…waiting for us.”
