The next building was the kitchen. We passed it and sloshed through rain puddles onto a wide porch across the front of our third building. Four wood rockers sat forlornly in the dark under the overhanging roof. I looked at Mitch and nodded as I reached for the door knob. The door pushed open but scraped noisily on the bare wood floor.
We rushed inside as two loud gunshots rang out in the distance. Mitch and I were six feet into the room standing side by side firing at four targets. We'd almost trampled several kids playing in the middle of the room. Two men and two women fell in bloody heaps under our weapons.
I turned my attention to four small children who looked at us in terror. Mitch checked the two back bedrooms. No one was lurking there. The kids were between three and six, I judged. We herded them to the porch. That they were afraid and confused by what they'd seen was obvious. I glared at them and gave harsh orders for the older ones to hold the hands of the youngest. They looked eager to escape, so I told them to run for the woods or I'd find them and punish them for disobeying me. Obviously, they understood punishment, and they'd felt its pain before. They left the porch. One boy stopped and turned to glance back at me. Three fast steps toward him convinced him to yelp and run harder as he pulled the younger girl with him.
Mitch and I trudged off in the direction where Richard and Byron should be. More loud gunshots signaled a fire fight between Richard and Byron and our targets. We had to get to them fast. I figured Mitch and I had dealt with six men and seven women. We had no idea how many were left. Obviously enough enemies remained to give Richard a hard time.
We were stooped and scurrying through the mud under dimming light when I motioned for Mitch to stop. We stood next to a cabin wall and changed thirty-round magazines.
Mitch and I had cleared the barn and three cabins. Enough time had passed that Richard had surely been through his first two targets. The unsilenced shots must have been from his last destination. Luckily, that was our sixth and final one.
The rain had slowed but still fell steadily as the final vestiges of dusk faded into darkness. Gunshots became fewer as we reached the end of the cabin. I peeked around the corner and saw a muzzle flash from a window at the sixth cabin. Two subdued bursts from a silenced weapon shot at the shooter and moved him away from the opening. Our man was under the porch of the adjacent cabin. In the deepening shadows, there was movement between the two buildings in front of us. A figure slinked along the cabin wall where our people had taken cover under the porch.
Mitch said, "I've got him." He sent a barrage on full auto before the man screamed, fell to his knees, and keeled over sideways in the wet muck.
Bullets immediately hit the corner of our building. I flipped the MP-5's selector switch to single fire and aimed the iron sights at the window where the shooter had last fired. Four fast shots from left to right stitched across the glassless opening.
I told Mitch, "Stay here and provide cover fire for Richard. I'll work my way around several of the cabins and get to the rear of number six. Don't shoot me when I cross that open space where you shot that guy on the ground."
He replied, "Be careful, there's almost no light left. It's nearly impossible to know friend from foe."
I grinned in the dark. "I'll fix that."
Five minutes later, I'd sloshed through the muck as fast as my slipping and sliding feet would let me. Seven loud shots had been fired during that time. I couldn't imagine what was going through the minds of our backup crew waiting to help us. They had no way of knowing if any of us were wounded, captured or dead.
The space where Mitch shot the sneaky interloper loomed before me. If this cabin had a large living room space in front and two bedrooms behind that like the others, I knew how to drive the occupiers outside. Pushing off from the wall beside me, I crossed the open space as fast as possible. Under my parka, I grasped an M-67 fragmentation hand grenade, then pulled the pin. The barrel of the MP-5 poked through the glass, then the grenade was lobbed inside.
While squatting low behind the cabin's wall, I felt for and found an incendiary grenade. Seconds after the initial blast, there was the sound of gunfire from within the room. That was my cue to launch the phosphorous grenade through the opening. I hated those things because of the extra short fuses they carried.
I was squatting low again when white hot phosphorus shot through the window opening and momentarily lit the area in front of me for several seconds. A terrible scream emanated from within the cabin from someone trapped in the fire zone. I rose, and through the smoke and flames fired a full automatic blast into the room until the magazine was empty. The screams stopped and
