Court was forced to use was not ideal to his needs. The Colt rifle in his hands wore iron sights; there was no scope or holographic sight like the high-tech wizardry Gentry preferred on his weapons. As he broke through the mist, the chateau forming clearer in front of him with each labored footfall of his sprint, he made out the turret of the tower above. He knew this would be a sniper’s hide, and he knew this man would have the best skill and the best scope and the best rifle and the best chance to put a stop to Court’s ridiculous one-man assault.
So the Gray Man raised his rifle to his shoulder, still at a dead run. Targeted fire with the iron sights while running was impossible; his goal was to simply pour as much lead as he could at the tower to keep his enemies’ heads down until he could make it to the building’s wall. Court knew there was no one in the house with as much close quarters battle training or experience as he. He just had to survive long enough to make it to close quarters to have any sort of chance of success.
The sniper saw the target shoot out of the fog in front of him. Wisps of vapor swirled in a vortex behind him as he ran. The thirty-year-old Belarusian adjusted his aim and placed his crosshairs on the sprinting man’s chest. He brought his finger to the trigger for a quick center-mass shot. He noticed body armor under the tactical vest and lowered the buttstock of the big Dragunov a millimeter to move the crosshairs up to the sprinting man’s forehead. As his fingertip began to press on the tight trigger, he sensed more than saw his target’s primary weapon rise in front of him. Flashes from the muzzle of the weapon and the cracks of rifle fire. The sniper heard pops and explosions in the stone and wood of the turret and smoky dust filled the air around him as high-speed metal jacketed rounds collided with hundreds-year-old masonry. His spotter cried out to his left, but the sniper was disciplined. He did not remove his cheek from the rifle; he did not remove his eye from his scope.
Confidently he pulled the trigger at the man storming towards him.
THIRTY-FOUR
Gentry had fired almost an entire thirty-round magazine at the tower looming above him as he closed on it as fast as possible. He wanted to finish the magazine with a couple of more accurately placed shots towards the tower, so he brought the black rifle up to eye level in front of him to make an attempt to get some sort of a sight picture through the round ghost ring sight on the gun’s carry handle. Just as he did so, the rifle slammed back into his face, ripped out of his hands, and flipped up through the air.
Court ran on, empty-handed.
After no more than four or five steps across the wet lawn, his face burning from the blow of his buttstock below his eye, he realized his M4 must have been hit by a round from a high-powered rifle. Though he’d lost his primary weapon behind him, he understood the gun had saved his life, deflecting a sniper’s bullet to his head. Without a loss of stride, he reached down and pulled the squat MP5 submachine gun from its resting place on his chest. He fired again at the tower, now no more than one hundred yards away. The MP5 was about as effective as a fly swatter for a sprinting man covering open ground and engaging a tiny, distant window without a sight picture, but he hoped it would at least keep some heads down.
The sniper had seen the running man reel from the impact of his shot, and then he lifted his head away from the scope to attend to his partner. The spotter had taken a piece of stone masonry to his face. His glasses were broken, and he was bleeding from the forehead, but he was coherent and not badly hurt. Just then, more gunfire erupted from the back garden. With surprise, the Belarusian sniper looked back down and saw the man he was sure he’d just put a bullet through continue his charge. From the reports of the gun in his hand, the man in the tower knew the Gray Man had switched to a nine-millimeter submachine gun. Quickly he sat back at the table behind the Dragunov. Took up his position behind the scope in under two seconds. Suddenly new cracks of rifle fire erupted, this time from behind him on the other side of the chateau. For a moment he did not understand what was going on, until the voice of one of his countrymen below came over the radio on the table.
“It’s the Libyans! They’re at the front gate! Tower, take them out!”
Reluctantly the sniper lifted the big Dragunov from the table and took it to the front portal of the tower. The Gray Man was someone else’s problem now; he needed to engage the distant targets, the Libyans.
The Gray Man was no longer distant. He was close.
Just outside the sniper’s tower, the black Eurocopter hovered low above the roof’s walkway. Four heavily armed Saudi operators in tactical gear poured out and dropped the six feet to the flat eastern roof. They ignored the gunfight now raging at the front of the building. Instead, they all took up positions behind the decorative battlements overlooking the back garden and the lone man running towards them over open ground.
As Gentry closed on his objective, he redirected his fire from the tower above the chateau to a first-floor window where bright muzzle flashes flickered. Gentry emptied his first magazine at the window in front of him. The walls around the window pocked, granite snapped off in dusty chunks, glass shattered, and the lace draperies whipped left and right as a few lucky shots from Court’s rifle found their mark though the space. It was difficult firing at a full sprint, impossible to accurately aim. Court saw no more muzzle flashes from the window but instead noticed the sleek, black Eurocopter above and in front of him, and the men who leapt from it.
“Fuck!” He was still seventy yards from cover. He pushed his legs even harder to get as close to the chateau as possible before the men now exiting the black chopper could get in position to open up on him. Here on the flat lawn he’d be a sitting duck to aimed fire.
Gentry pulled a fragmentation grenade off his vest as he ran, yanked the pin out with his teeth, and let the spoon fly. A large, blond-haired figure appeared in a window on the third floor directly in front of him, raised a handgun, and shot through the glass. Court dove forward at the wet, green grass to avoid the fire, landed on his right shoulder, and executed a forward roll. As he came out of the roll, he rose to his feet. His running and his somersault had given his body an incredible amount of momentum, momentum he used to throw the grenade as high and as far as he could. From forty-five yards away the potato-sized bomb whizzed through the air in an arc, rose over the edge of the parapets, and exploded, just missing the Eurocopter, which escaped into the sky, fleeing from the fight as fast as possible. The blast above the Saudis’ heads killed one man outright and injured one more in the neck and back. The other two had found cover in time, but they’d missed their opportunity to get an open shot on their target on the lawn.
At the front of the house, two Belarusians and two Libyans were already dead. The guards from Minsk were killed not far from the front gate. They’d been running back to the safety of the chateau when the vanload of operators from Tripoli busted through the ironwork, the Middle Eastern men firing their Skorpion machine pistols from the moving vehicle. The two Libyans were felled as the van screeched to a stop in the gravel drive. The sniper in the tower took out the operator in the front passenger seat with a round to the face, and the first man out the sliding back took three AK rounds from the only pair of Belarusians still outside the chateau.
The two remaining Libyans killed the men on the driveway and closed on the front door to the chateau. They poured automatic fire from their Skorpions into the windows on either side, kept disciplined distance between one another, and shouted calls for cover as they reloaded and repositioned.
Number Two fired half a magazine at each of the two hinges of the heavy oaken door, and then kicked it open. As he reloaded, it crashed into the building in front of him, and he caught a double-tap from a Northern Irish guard in the foyer, spinning the Libyan dead to the ground. The last living Libyan answered the Ul sterman with his Skorpion; blood and tissue splattered across the white wall behind the man in the foyer as he went down.
