There was nothing, only a build-up of dust.
A gun went off outside and Piotr rose up with a violent jerk. He plucked his knuckle dusters off his hands and tossed them onto the bed then fumbled with his pistol as he took it out of his pocket. Two more bullets fired outside. He bolted out of the room and into the hallway. His heart was thumping like a drum. Moonlight was now coming through the laundry door, and a breeze blew inside. Outside had fallen eerily silent. It was too dangerous to go out that way, he figured. He turned back for the front door and carefully stuck his head outside, looking both ways. With agonisingly slow movements he stepped out onto the porch and went right in the direction of the gunshots, ducking below the windows as he passed them. At the corner of the house he stopped again and listened. The sheer adrenaline made him suddenly dizzy, and he had trouble focussing his eyes. The thought of going out there caused his hands to begin shaking uncontrollably. He pushed his back against the wall and tried to take a calming breath with no effect. The shaking spread to his entire body and his teeth began chattering. He worried that if he stayed there any longer, he would pass out. He remained frozen, paralysed by fear. Only the even greater fear of death forced him to act.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered.
He sprinted out from his position and into the open. The gunshot that immediately came from the back fence was terrifyingly loud but he continued forward, propelled by pure instinct. The man was crouched in the corner between the shed and the fence, shrouded in moonlight and pointing his gun forward. Piotr went out of his mind and fired a flurry of bullets. The man seemed to jerk, and Piotr fired one final shot as he came near. The man slumped over to his side. Piotr slowed to a halt and lowered his gun, gasping for air, barely able to feel his body. The man remained motionless on his side, wearing only shorts. It occurred to Piotr then that he had been running at an angle the whole time, which had probably saved his life. He also had no idea which of his bullets had struck the man, or how many shots the man had fired during that time.
He remained at a distance, not daring to move any closer, terrified of seeing the man’s lifeless stare judging him from the beyond. He turned away to the side instead, and found Ralph’s body on the grass, his neck and chest covered in blood.
“It’s escalating,” said Gerricks, his head cocked to the side. “Look. Here and here.”
Scheffler leaned forward and paid close attention to the screens. A soldier with a body camera had just burst into a warehouse when at least a dozen armed men swarmed him with rifles. The camera shook, and the soldier fell to the ground while the armed men continued past him. Another two soldiers were escorting someone out of a building before the footage turned chaotic, the camera spinning in all directions. A crowd of people in a public square in Stockholm ran away screaming as a gunfight broke out. Another screen showed only smoke.
“Doesn’t look good,” said Gerricks.
Scheffler looked into space while rubbing his chin. Most of the targets were supposed to be shocked from their slumber and taken in with minimal fuss. Instead, mayhem had broken out almost from the get-go.
“How many casualties?” said Scheffler.
“Hard to tell. There’s too much going on. Fifty? Hundred? It’s climbing.”
Scheffler tapped his fingers on the desk while grinding his teeth. If he was going to call in reinforcements, now was the time. There would be no victory without them, and Scheffler wanted to triumph more than anything. Everything he did for The League was in service of that goal. There was just one problem: if he did call in the reinforcements, all-out war would break out on the streets. The fall-out would be horrific. Civilians would surely enter the crossfire. Unforeseen consequences would ripple for days and weeks, possibly longer. It was a nightmare in the making. The greatest weakness of their plan was that they had no idea of the strength of their enemy.
Scheffler was forced to think back to his first mission in Kosovo, the one that ‘never happened,’ where hostilities between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Yugoslavians were raging, and an undercover MI5 agent remained trapped in the Drenica Valley. The untested Scheffler was a last-minute addition to the unit of five men tasked with extracting the MI5 agent in a nighttime operation. Scheffler could still vividly see the faces of his fellow soldiers in the dark, glistening with sweat and adrenaline in their eyes after they had been forced into the forest by unexpected heavy bombing. Their mission was off the books, so they had no way of calling in help, and both the KLA and Yugoslavian Army
