37
After hanging up, I vaulted the fence and raced to the vantage point I had found earlier. Crouching in the woods, I waited, trying to see one of the guards patrolling the exterior grounds. I focused my eyes on the brick wall surrounding the compound, vaguely lit up enough to allow me to make it out. I used my peripheral vision to pick out movement, knowing that it was better in the night than my primary eyesight. Soon, I spotted a guard moving down the wall.
I moved in a crouch on a path to intersect the guard, covering the terrain as rapidly as I could without making enough noise to alert him. I closed within fifteen meters of his back and began stalking my prey. When I was five feet away, I closed the distance at a sprint. I wrapped my right arm around the guard’s neck and pressed my shoulder into the back of his head, forcing it down. Kicking the back of his knee, I flung myself backward, pulling him horizontally toward the ground. Our bodies separated like a pair of scissors. We both hit the earth at the same time, the guard on his back and me on my stomach. The force of the fall generated enormous leverage applied through my shoulder directly into the man’s neck, snapping it cleanly. I sat up, grabbed the dead man by his equipment vest, and dragged him thirty feet into the darkness. I began stripping the body, ripping away all of the junk to get to the ammunition for the 416.
Jennifer lay on her stomach inside the warehouse. She was still clothed, but her shoes had been removed to hamper any escape attempt. She could see the implements of torture in the gloom, along with dark brown stains at irregular intervals along the walls. In the corner she saw a pile of clothes and recognized her uncle’s shirt. She began shaking uncontrollably.
The thumb drive worked perfectly, surprising Bakr. In his heart, he hadn’t thought they would actually get the data, and in their rush to get to the hotel, he hadn’t planned a next step.
As soon as they had arrived, they had seen a red Jeep driven by a man matching the description given by Jake. They watched him and a woman enter the hotel and had barely begun to discuss their options when the man exited alone less than five minutes later, giving them an opportunity they couldn’t ignore.
Now they had the GPS location to the temple, but they didn’t have a GPS. Bakr didn’t want to return with the data to Miguel’s house, but somehow they needed to get one of the GPSs inside their test package, along with the 3M respirators. While mulling the options over dinner, Bakr decided he would be the only one who went back. Sayyidd would remain in the restaurant with the data, waiting for him to return.
I finished kitting up and conducted a functions check on the weapon, relieved when it appeared to work fine. I had stripped the man of his assault vest, then stripped the vest of the clutter it held. To my surprise, the guard had a plate-hanger underneath his vest, complete with front and back Level III armor plates, rated to stop everything up to 7.62 x 51mm, the primary round used in NATO sniper rifles and light machine guns.
I ditched just about everything the man had, throwing away a ton of bullshit accessories that might be useful on Batman’s utility belt but would do me no good. The one thing I wanted that the guy didn’t have was a radio, but that in itself gave me some relief about Machete’s security posture.
For weapons I took the H&K 416 and a Cold Steel push knife, a nasty instrument with a three-and- three-quarter-inch double-sided cutting edge and a “T” handle perpendicular to the blade.
Satisfied that I had all I wanted from the dead guard, I began to move toward the front gate, using the wall as cover, all the while scanning for cameras or other early warning devices. So far, no alarm had been raised, but it was only a matter of time before the guard I had killed was missed.
I held no illusions of what I was about to attempt. The standard operating procedure of my last unit prohibited entering a room as an individual. Two people could enter for extreme situations, otherwise three was the minimum, with four or five preferred. I was now going to assault the
As bad as that was, it was the least of my problems. Depending on how many men had left to go chasing shadows at the Plaza Mayor, I was outnumbered upward of twenty to one. In order to succeed I would have to maintain what we called relative superiority, attacking each man individually, or at most two at a time. Should an alarm go up, forcing me to fight a concentrated mass, I would lose.
Continuing down the wall toward the front gate, I heard a commotion on the other side. A man with a UK accent was shouting instructions in English against the background of multiple vehicles being loaded. I grinned.
I waited until all the vehicles had left and was about to scale the wall when I heard movement to my right. I pressed against the brick, trying to squeeze into the shadows. Another guard came sauntering down the wall, moving without a purpose, his weapon slung and his hands in his pockets. I started breathing in a shallow pant, hoping he couldn’t hear it, even though it sounded like an industrial fan to me. He came within five feet, then stopped and turned around, as if he was going back to the gate.
Before he could make up his mind about where he was going, I closed on him, trapped his head, and stuck the push blade into the left side of his neck, slicing to the right and ripping out his windpipe and both carotid arteries. I held him upright, aiming the jet of blood away from me, then lowered him to the ground.
I quickly scaled the wall and raced to the first door I could see, a side entrance away from the massive, ornate entryway in the front of the mansion. I tried the knob and saw that it was unlocked. I paused, mentally preparing for what was to come, my conscious mind screaming for me to flee. Taking a couple of deep breaths, I knew that my next step, like a parachutist jumping out of an airplane, would be irreversible.
38
Lying on the floor, Jennifer stared warily at the men who had entered. So far, none of them had done anything against her, apparently because they were waiting on the word to start the fun. She had no idea what she should do.
