Wasner continued. “Forester, you will be interpreting for us as needed with the Koreans. Trooper Wyatt will be back up for that. Be ready to do it like we did back at the cabin, but we have to work faster this time. It’s also possible there are some Albanians involved here, too. Mojo ran into a couple Eastern European tango-types just before he got us involved. If you need an interpreter, Mojo here also speaks that talk like a native, so we have that area covered well.” He stopped and looked around. “Any questions?”
“Uh, Chief?” Miller asked.
“Yeah, what is it, Miller?”
“I gotta pee.”
“What?” snapped the Chief.
“I gotta pee so bad, I can taste it!”
“Tie it off and get out of here!”
Miller was joking. He had made quite a show earlier of peeing while Wasner and Johnson were checking out the house. He was surprised at the fact that his little friend had instantly felt the extreme cold on being exposed and tried to shrink itself back into his snowsuit before he could get started with the bladder-emptying operation. The negative-forty air temperature froze his urine solid by the time it contacted the ground. He made a two-inch-high pile of pee on the road.
A quiet eruption of snickers rustled through the group as they moved into the trees around the house. They made their way through the knee-deep snow swiftly and quietly. Moments later, the group had gone around the house and were in position fifty feet from the back door.
Marcus and Wasner and their team waited in the ditch beside the road. Once the back door team was in place, they would advance swiftly across the open ground of the front yard. Wasner’s radio hissed with the sound of Forrester’s voice.
“Chief, we’re in position, and ready move on your command.”
“All right, on my mark, advance to the doors. SERT, are you on target?”
“SERT is on target and ready for your advance.”
“SEAL team, move,” Wasner whispered into the mike.
At that instance, five SEALs and Staff Sergeant Beckwith rose in the back, and five more with Wasner and Johnson rose in the front. They scuttled across the open yard. Eyes open. Alert for anyone looking out the windows. Their steps left long, wide trails as they crossed the deep snow. They made no attempt to cover their tracks. This wasn’t a recon. This was an assault on a house full of armed men.
Three seconds later, Forester’s voice came on the headsets. “Team two in position.”
“Team one in position,” came the response.
“On three.”
The men tensed. They had all done this before. Little thought occurred once the process started. It was all reaction and training once they kicked in the doors.
“One.”
Their senses were fully alert.
“Two.”
Breath held.
“Thr…”
Motion sensor lights exploded to life at both the front and back porches simultaneously. The lights, reaction times dulled by the extreme cold, bathed the entire yard in bright, full-spectrum light.
The men inside shouted alarms. The sound of motion scrambled.
“…ee! Go! Go! Go!”
The doors were kicked in. Flash-bang grenades split the night with deafening explosions. Glass shattered on the cabinet doors as the concussion boomed and shook the air in the room. The light of a thousand suns blinded anyone who looked toward the door.
The SEALs rushed in, weapons up.
One man in the kitchen recovered and whipped his arm up and around. A pistol extended toward the figures entering the back door. The man quaked as three times, dark red dots burst on his chest before his finger closed on the trigger. His body slammed into the counter top, head banging on an open cupboard door. A shelf inside tipped, sending a dozen ceramic coffee mugs crashing to the floor. The Korean soldier slumped in a quickly spreading pool of his own blood.
“One down. Kitchen clear,” Forester spoke into the radio. His voice was calm and detached, clinical.
Wasner’s team swiftly filtered into the front room and saw no one.
“Living room clear,” Marcus said.
Wasner ordered, “Boone, Harold, clear the garage!”
“I’m going up,” Forester said. His team moved to the staircase at the end of the house. The stairs went up six feet to a landing, then turned 180 degrees and led toward the center of the house. A handrail ran along the open left side of the stairs.
Noise and voices came from the garage.
“He’s running!” Boone shouted into the mike. “Snipers! Man out of the garage!”
“Try to keep him alive!” Marcus called.
One of the North Korean commandos sprinted out the side door of the garage. He lunged for the Suburban. A loud pop cracked from the trees at the end of the driveway.
“Suspect down!”
“Two SEALs coming out the garage! Don’t shoot us!”
The North Korean soldier writhed in the snow. Blood surged in streams from his right shoulder. A mass of bone jutted out of the skin. The man bellowed in pain as he twisted and flailed on the freezing ground.
Boone and Harold were nearly on him. The man managed to find his pistol with his left hand and raised it to his temple. A bright explosion lit the darkness like a camera flash. Blood and brains sprayed over the surface of the snow. The man’s agonized twisting and shouting came to an abrupt stop. His limbs twitched spasmodically, then fell still. His face was still intact, but the bullet had hollowed his skull.
“Damn! He killed himself, Cchief!”
“All right, let the CSI guys take it from there. Come back in and finish clearing the house.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Inside, the men tried to use the heat-imaging capability of their night vision glasses. The heater in the house was too high. Random reflections and ghost images seeped up into their view. They couldn’t tell
