Reflexive Fire - 01 (40 page)

   His first shot slammed into his plate carrier, the body armor easily absorbing the impact but staggering him back a few steps.  Deckard's follow-up shots were better placed, striking him in the chin and cleaving away half of his jaw bone.

   A grenade exploded to his side, peppering one of the Kazakhs with debris as blazing hot shrapnel tore through the leafy growth just inches above them.  On his other side, JF shifted toward an enemy who was kneeling behind another concrete planter.  The mercenary was sweeping his muzzle through the forested area, making bold corrections to seek out their positions with a flurry of 5.56 tungsten penetrators.

   The Frenchman milked the AK's trigger and the merc collapsed, the side of his skull emptying its contents across the cobblestone in a crimson smear.

   The lull in fire lasted for scant seconds but was enough time for Deckard to roll forward. Dropping into the rocky depression that the artificial stream flowed through, he came up on a knee.

   A flash caught his attention, another grenade exploding, this time inside one of the restaurants.

   More American mercenaries poured into the park from multiple entrances.  Carbines and light machine guns were tucked into their shoulders, trigger fingers curled and ready.

   Using the depression as cover, he popped up and delivered a double-tap, his reflex sight centered on an enemy's face, before ducking back down.  He did so in the nick of time as automatic weapons fire crisscrossed the space he had previously occupied.  Staying low he changed positions, moving laterally, sloshing his way upstream.

   The Kazakhs slithering into the stream behind him, Deckard tore a fragmentation grenade off his chest rig.  Pulling the pin, he hurled the bomb into a circular area created by manicured hedges with park benches inset under them.  The grenade bounced and rolled into the sitting area where a mercenary with a Ranger scroll tattooed on his forearm and a heavily muscled man holding a belt-fed machine gun were firing from sporadically.

   The grenade blasted the two freelancers.  The former Ranger was blown backwards into a wrought iron gate outside a restaurant, killed instantly by the impact.  The machine gunner was actually thrown into the air, both arms cleaved off his torso and sent flopping into the stream.

   Glancing down, the Kazakhs grimaced as the clear water flowed around their shins, now tinged with red.

   “Bound!” Deckard ordered.

   Stepping out onto the path, he pivoted at the hips, changing his direction mid-stride.

   His muzzle was already creeping upwards as he felt as much as he saw something in his peripheral vision.  Squeezing the trigger, a two round burst crashed into a Serb standing in one of the balconies overlooking the park.

   Both shots shattered through the glass banister, taking the Serb low in the pelvis.  Pitching forward, the Eastern European fell through the shattered glass.  Flailing through the air, his body screamed through the wooden latticework over the dining area of a bistro, toppling tables and chairs underneath with a wet
thwack
.

   Shifting again, Deckard pointed his rifle at a camo-clad shooter farther down the path.

   The buzzcut American brought his M4 into play almost simultaneously with him.  Pulling the trigger, the hammer in Deckard's AK-103 struck on an empty chamber.  All out of quarters in that video game, he thought.  No way would he be able to snatch his side arm out of its holster in time.

   With a snarl, buzzcut pulled his weapon in tight, trigger finger flexing, when he suddenly fell to his knees.  A half dozen AK rounds pounded into his unprotected side, the exposed area under the armpit.

   Spinning, Deckard saw the second group of Kazakhs emerge from a restaurant.  They had ducked into it and moved through the facade, using it as cover to get deeper into the park.  Smart move.  One of them nodded to Deckard, his barrel still smoking.

   The sound of shattering glass drew their attention back to their front.

   The staccato bursts of machine gun fire drove them back down to the ground.  A trio of general purpose machine guns had been moved into position behind the glass doors at the end of the park.  A wall of hot lead streamed over their heads, the grazing fire designed to chop soldiers off at knee height.  Once again, they had stalled.

   Both groups of Kazakhs began to maintain cross coverage, pulling security on the balconies as more and more Serbs popped out of the cabins, making another attempt to dominate the high ground.  Behind them, Deckard could hear occasional gunshots crack.  Advancing soldiers attempting a recon by fire, shooting at suspected positions that his men might be occupying.

   They had been cut off and encircled.

   Chuck shotgunned the door jamb a final time, the buckshot devastating the locking mechanism before he reeled back and slammed a size fourteen boot into it.  The cabin door flew open, bounced off the wall, and was in the process of slamming shut again as an assault team of Samruk mercenaries pushed through to clear the room.

   Gunfire emanated from within as the former SEAL moved on to the next door, another assault team stacking behind him.

   Bravo Company was moving fast.  Three decks of passenger and crew cabins had already been cleared.  Adam was one deck above, and Sergeant Major Koran one deck below.  Ship seizures had been Chuck's bread and butter when he had been in the Navy, but the scale involved in this operation was ridiculous.

   The idea of using an entire SEAL team to take down a single ship was pretty much unheard of.  Tonight they were using an entire battalion and it still wasn't enough.  The Crown of the Pacific was mind-boggling in size.

   Shotgunning open the next door, he stepped aside, letting the Kazakhs go to work.  Screams sounded inside.

   It was grisly work.

   It was a slaughter.

   They were technically non-combatants.  Not soldiers or officers but puppet masters.  They were bankers, CEO's, foundation members.  The world's self-appointed elites.

   The floor tilted at an angle beneath his feet.  The waters were getting rough outside.

   Chuck shucked the Remington 270 shotgun once again.

   Grisly or not, the work would get done.

Thirty Three

   Deckard was considering exactly how fucked they were, when something in front of him moved.

   At the far end of the park, just in front of the glass doors was an oval-shaped bar surrounded by stools and a few tables, all of which were now lowering and disappearing.  Crawling forward, he barely believed what he was seeing.

   The entire bar was on an elevator platform.

   With the bar slowly sinking downwards, Deckard reached for his chest harness, pulling free a smoke grenade canister.  Yanking the pin, he threw the cylinder over the bar where it landed and rolled next to the glass doors.  Thick white smoke sprayed from both ends of the grenade with a hiss, obscuring the machine gunner's line of sight. 

   For the next thirty seconds they would be firing blind.

   Motioning for the Kazakhs to follow, Deckard took the lead.  He scrambled forward on hands and knees, still attempting to stay as low as possible with machine gun fire traversing and searching for human targets.

   Pushing off the ledge, he fell down towards the bar before landing on the balls of his feet.  The remnants of Charlie Company didn't need any prodding to escape from the hell zone they had been trapped in.  The strange layout of the ship had ended up saving their lives.  He never would have suspected that there was an elevating bar in the middle of the ship, where patrons could grab a refill while moving to a lower deck.

   Trying to catch his breath, Deckard loaded his final magazine into his Kalashnikov.

   White smoke continued to obfuscate the view above them as the elevator platform touched down.  Coughing and hacking, the mercenaries found themselves surrounded my neon lights and deep hues of blue and purple.  The deck underneath the park was a two-tiered shopping mall.

   “Let's go,” Deckard said.  “Fan out, they'll be here any second.”

   Leaving the elevator, the ten man squad was all that was left of an entire company.  They spread out in a wedge-formation, walking down the promenade, headed deeper into the bowels of the ship. 

   Music greeted them from each shop they walked past.  The scene was hyperreal, a bizarre exaggeration of a regular shopping mall, with flashing lights and deeper colors splashed on the walls.  There were more bars, restaurants, designer clothing stores, video game arcades, music shops, and whatever else for wealthy Americans to indulge upon.

   Walking briskly towards the atrium, they could see at the end of the mall.  The mercenaries scanned their sectors, wary of threats.  A news ticker scrolled across a LED screen as they passed, the text reading something about Hollywood. 

   Deckard took some solace in the fact that life was continuing as usual elsewhere in the world.  If the plague had been released, the news would have been reporting on the articles Adam had shown him, prepared and ready to go months in advance.  Instead, the news was covering some celebrity's latest panty shot.

   At the end of the mall, one of the elevators stopped at their floor, and the doors pinged open, revealing a quartet of mercenaries who were bristling with weapons.  This time Deckard's crew acquired the upper hand as the entire squad raised their weapons in unison.  Sparks flung in every direction as the elevator was turned into a death trap.  Kalashnikovs rattled, actions cycling back and forth, sending 7.62 bullets scorching through human bodies.

   For a moment everything was quiet.

   The elevator attempted to close but the doors shut on a bloody arm before retracting back open.  Muzak was piped through the mall's sound system, ambling on in the large empty space.

   A half dozen elevators pinged, doors sliding open, contractors ready for a fight.

   The Samruk mercenaries dove to the ground.  A fresh fusillade of gunfire stormed through the shopping mall.  Taking cover wherever they could, Deckard found himself behind a clock tower situated in the middle of the mall with another Kazakh.  Others took refuge behind a bar and concrete tree planters near a fountain.

   The enemy advanced, moving in bounding overwatch, one group covering the other.  Leaning from around the clock tower, Deckard targeted the oldest looking shooter.  He was a survivor, probably a retired Special Forces or Delta Force Sergeant Major.  More than likely in charge of the element he traveled with.

   The gray-haired man was barking orders, when Deckard triggered a shot, the steel core round tearing a baseball-sized chunk of flesh out the side of the man's face.  The return fire from nearly forty enemy combatants was devastating.  One of the Kazakhs crouched behind a metal trash receptacle, it being the only piece of cover nearby.

   In seconds, hot metal had sliced through the metal slats and struck the Samruk trooper down.  He fell to his side screaming when another shot caught him.  With his head kicked back, the mercenary lay still, a bullet having stabbed through his eye socket.

   “Right flank!” Deckard screamed over the gunfire.

   Picking themselves up, the remaining gunmen ran to their side, heading into a pizzeria.  The chain restaurant was their only chance to escape the onslaught.  Continuing forward simply wasn't an option.  Knocking over chairs and tables, Deckard ran to the far wall.

   A C4 general purpose charge was retrieved from one of his pouches and slammed against the wall.  The thin bulkheads wouldn't stand a chance against plastic explosives.

   Initiating the time fuse, Deckard took refuge behind the pizza oven with the rest of his men.

   “What's the plan?” JF wanted to know.

   German troops had encountered a similar problem while fighting the Soviets in built-up areas.  The streets were turned into kill zones by Russian machine guns and skilled sharpshooters.  The German troops had no other option to advance other than to use explosives to blow through the walls connecting each building and house to move across city blocks.

   “Stalingrad,” Deckard answered.

   The Composition Four roared, the blast tearing metal and plaster to shreds.

   Nikita dumped the smoking hot M4 carbine.  He had fired it until the barrel glowed.

   The top deck of the ship was covered with swimming pools and hot tubs for guests, currently unoccupied.  Maybe it was the approaching thunderstorm.  Maybe it was the firefight.  The deck was also littered with dead bodies.

   His spotter, Askar, hadn't made it.

   The rain was starting to come down in sheets of icy water, the super-liner rocking steadily from side to side in the choppy water.  The Pacific Ocean seemed to be acting contrary to its namesake at the moment.

   Resting his bolt action rifle on the railing, he dialed down the magnification on his scope for a two hundred and fifty meter shot.  From the looks of things he had arrived right on time.

   The sleek-looking executive helicopter was ready to go, rotor blades cutting through the downpour.  A small procession walked towards the bow of the ship along a catwalk, heading for the helipad and their last chance to escape the carnage.

   Talking a deep breath, Nikita pulled the stock into the pocket of his shoulder.  Using the cross hairs in his scope, the sniper targeted the portion of the helicopter where the rotors met the fuselage of the aircraft.  Letting half of his breath out, he squeezed the trigger, the rifle bucking hard and jarring his teeth.

   The large caliber bullet flew on a nearly perfect straight trajectory before striking the helicopter.  The rotor blades continued spinning but now a tower of black smoke was rising off the aircraft.

   Through his scope, Nikita could see the pilot freak as his dials went crazy and the aircraft began to shutter.  His shot had wrecked something critical, and now the entire helicopter was beginning to oscillate back and forth in place before ever taking off.

   Using the reticle inside the scope, he split the pilot's face into quadrants, the portion where the two cross hairs met resting comfortably on his cheekbone.  The follow-up shot was drowned out by thunder crashing overhead.

   The interior of the cockpit was sprayed with crimson, the helicopter now pilotless.

   The small party that had been attempting to flee froze in place when the first shot was fired.  After the second, they turned and ran back down the catwalk, desperate to get back inside the ship as they had been to leave it moments before.

   The group had several bodyguards escorting them to the helipad who were attempting to get their clients back inside, pushing and screaming to drive them towards the door.  Nikita focused on the armed men first, firing and rapidly sliding the bolt back and forth.  Three dead mercenaries decorated the catwalk before he reloaded a fresh magazine.

   One of the older members of the group was falling behind, old age having caught up with him.  Samruk's intelligence section had printed off pictures of the three High Value Targets expected to be found on the Crown of the Pacific.  Nikita winced.  Unfortunately, he wasn't one of them.  Taking up the slack in the trigger, the .300 WinMag boomed.

   Shifting to his next target, he lined up his sights on another old man, this one stepping over the body of one of his late bodyguards.  It was with grim satisfaction that the sniper watched the man's head disappear when he fired his next shot.  The oligarch's lifeless body fell to the metal grating where blood dripped to the deck below.

   Nikita's eyes went wide as he spotted the third and final target.  He was one of the HVTs on the target deck handed out prior to the mission.  He had studied the pictures during the flight from Astana, committing every detail to memory.  He recognized the deep wrinkles around the corners of deep dark eyes. 

   His name was Jarogniew.

   The sniper's finger tightened around the trigger.

   Taking up the slack, he expected the stock to kick back into his shoulder in fractions of a second, when the entire ship suddenly rocked, pitching far on its keel to one side as a wave pounded into the super-liner.

   The rifle cracked as Nikita slipped across the deck, the shot going wide.

   Deckard was the first through the smoking gap he had created in the wall.

   He emerged into a clothing shop full of overpriced jeans and t-shirts.  Mannequins showed off the latest fashions in the display windows, and art deco pieces were hung on the walls.

   The last of the Kazakhs were climbing through the breach as Deckard placed his second charge on the opposite wall where it held in place on its adhesive.

   “Fire in the hole!”

   The charge blew out the facade.  The overpressure swept over tables full of the fancy patterned t-shirts, spilling them everywhere.  Outside they could still hear gunfire in the mall.  It wouldn't be much longer before the American contractors figured out what their game was.

   Coughing through the smoke, Samruk mercenaries crossed into the next commercial venue, a medium-sized bookshop.  At the sound of the blast, the enemy contractors turned towards the sound, trying to figure out what was going on just a moment too late.

   From the bookstore Deckard and his men were parallel with the enemy's fighting positions behind a bar and a large fountain situated in the center of the mall's promenade.  Taking cover behind the bookshelves, the Samruk team started firing on the contractors who still thought that their opposition was somewhere down range.