Straits of Power

further obscured the view outside his mask. There was a sizzling blue-white flash and all the lights went out.

The fuse box must’ve been hit.

Muzzle flashes punctuated the dark.

Felix flipped down his night-vision goggles.

“Second floor clear,” Porto shouted.

The surviving Germans had retreated to the top floor.

The top floor, Mohr said, held his clean room and tools.

“Go! Go! Go!” Felix yelled. Four SEALs dashed up the rickety stairs, Costa and Porto tossing two more flash- bang tear-gas grenades. Felix heard the Kampfschwimmer coughing.

They got a strong dose already, even if they’ve pulled on gas masks by now.

Felix and his three other men rushed to a spot on the second floor and reloaded with custom armor-piercing ammo. Felix gestured upward to exactly where they should shoot. They began to fire straight through the ceiling. They were creating a wall of enfilading fire, to keep the Kampfschwimmer from moving into Mohr’s equipment clean room — if they hadn’t reached it yet.

But I can’t stop the Germans from firing into there, and my men must be very careful. Mohr’s modules aren’t bulletproof.

A body tumbled heavily down the stairs to the third floor. Felix kept pumping rounds along a perimeter in the ceiling. His magazine ran empty. Again he had to reload.

A stream of bullets came back through the ceiling. The man next to Felix was struck on the top of his bulletproof helmet, so hard he was knocked out. He fell, reflexively squeezing his trigger; his MP-5 fired as Felix ducked. Another burst from upstairs stitched the unconscious man’s chest. Rounds were stopped by his flak vest, but one leg jerked when it took a hit.

Felix had to keep firing through the ceiling at all costs. He was running low on ammo. He was afraid his armor-piercing rounds would punch through the roof, despite their reduced propellant charge, and come back down through the air and hurt or kill an innocent person somewhere. A main cross beam, too splintered, snapped, and part of the ceiling sagged.

“Cease fire! Cease fire! Third floor clear! Roof clear!” That was Chief Costa, still using Portuguese.

“Man down, second floor!” Felix shouted.

Da Rosa, the SEALs’ first-aid specialist, hurried from above and went to work on the wounded man’s leg.

“Sir,” he reported, “we lost a man.”

Oh, Jesus. Even through the gas mask, Felix could hear da Rosa’s distress. “Who? Where?”

“Fernando, sir.” Fernando Gabrielli, one of Felix’s enlisted SEALs. Da Rosa said he’d been shot twice in the head as they’d assaulted the top floor.

That was him tumbling down the stairs.

Felix had no time for grief or regrets. His breathing inside his own mask was very ragged now.

“Find Mohr’s modules! Find his tools!” Without them, all this carnage would have been for nothing.

“We’re in the clean room!” Chief Costa’s voice came from upstairs. “Tool kit looks okay! No modules up here!”

“Check again!”

“We did, sir! Negative modules on roof or third floor!”

Felix felt a stab to his heart. What if they’d left the field gear somewhere else, as a security measure?

Felix’s men from upstairs clambered down. Chief Porto was clutching a bullet wound through his forearm. Da Rosa helped him bandage it. Another SEAL held a box by the handle: Mohr’s tool case. One man just stood there in the dark. Even through his night-vision goggles, Felix could tell he was in a daze.

That’s one dead and two wounded. At least I didn’t see arterial blood spurt from either wound. But I think the chief’s got a broken bone in that arm.

He saw that da Rosa was putting a splint around Porto’s wound.

And where in hell are the modules?

“Switch to flashlights!” Felix pulled one out of his equipment vest and checked that it still worked. He raised his night-vision goggles on their bracket attached to his helmet front. Felix started to look around on the second floor.

He found the modules.

All four stood together on the debris-littered floor, on the far side of bullet-riddled couches. A German corpse lay draped across the computer boxes, as if the Kampfschwimmer died shielding them with his body.

Felix pulled the corpse off the modules. They were covered in blood.

“Sir,” Costa called. “There’s too much smoke… Something’s burning.”

“Find it,” Felix snapped. “And find a fire extinguisher.”

Felix left the drying blood where it was on the computer modules, so as to tamper with them as little as possible. He hefted each of the modules into a separate waterproof sack, to protect them and camouflage what they were.

“Chief! Did you find what was burning?”

“The fuse box, sir! I turned off the main. That stopped it sparking and smoking. I dug around with my knife, no sign of hot embers.”

“Get a body bag.” SEALs never left a man behind, dead or alive.

Gabrielli was placed in the body bag, one of a pair the team had brought just in case. As the shifting flashlight beams from Felix’s men weirdly lit the smoke and floating dust and lingering tear gas, he went into the kitchen. The plumbing was shattered, and water was spraying under the sink, forming a widening puddle on the floor. He looked around for a bucket or big pot that didn’t have a hole in it. He found one and managed to fill it with water.

He walked back to the body bag. His boots crunched on broken glass and splinters of wood. Spent shell casings clinked as he kicked them aside; they lay everywhere, the brass glinting brightly in his flashlight beam.

He used the water to wash the outside of the body bag of Gabrielli’s blood and brains. He and the others used more water to wash the blood and gore they’d stepped in off of their boots.

The SEAL with the leg wound, de Mello Vidal, had revived from the blow to his head. He complained of seeing double and feeling nauseous.

Concussion.

Between two wounded men, a full body bag, four heavy computer modules, and one tool-kit case — and all their weapons — Felix’s team had a lot to carry. They helped de Mello Vidal to stand up. His concussion didn’t seem too serious, but he needed to lean on da Rosa to be able to walk.

They went down to the first floor and left the building.

Felix was sure they were being watched from some of the darkened windows around them.

With luck it will take someone a while to call the police. After all, so far as they know we are the police.

Salih came up from the steps down to a basement apartment in the building next door. That little stairwell, which Mohr had told him about, had served as an effective foxhole during the raid.

Felix saw him do a head count and look at the body bag.

Salih said nothing.

“Could you hear us shouting in Portuguese out here?” Felix whispered in English. The real police were meant to think the attackers were splinter-group partisans.

“Plenty. Especially when your men were on the roof.”

“Hear any wounded civilians?” Felix noticed broken window glass on the sidewalk in front of the building.

“No signs of human activity at all, actually. I heard some ricochets, but I don’t think they hit anyone.”

“Okay, good.”

“They knew to keep their heads down. This sort of area, stray bullets are not unique to tonight, believe