Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition) (10 page)

Flounder woke up
Poacher and showed him what they had. Avery suggested, and Poacher and Flounder
concurred, that they go into the house that night.

They continued their surveillance of the
house throughout the remainder of the day and observed nothing else of interest.
Discouraging, they also saw and heard nothing to confirm whether or not Cramer was
on the premises.

Avery wasn’t
going to contact Dushanbe station or sit around waiting for the green light
from Culler. In the meantime, Cramer could be completely brutalized and beaten
to within an inch of his life, placing more assets at risk. The worst would be
to wait another day, go in, and find Cramer’s freshly slaughtered corpse.

 As far as Avery
was concerned, there was no other option, not with a life potentially on the
line, and this is what they’d come here to do. If Cramer wasn’t present, then
Babayev’s crew almost definitely knew where he was or what happened to him and
could provide the next piece of vital intelligence. Either way, the only point
forward now was through that house.

There were five
people inside the house. From experience in hitting torture houses in Iraq and
Afghanistan, three or four terrorists and one or more prisoners sounded like the
normal ratio. The prisoners were usually kept in a locked, boarded up room, a
basement or cellar, if there was one, or even in a cage like an animal. The
terrorists would be spread out, to have all entrances covered and have a good
lookout.

The team would
try to take as many of the house’s occupants alive, if possible, which should
not be difficult if they caught them completely off-guard and roused them out
of their sleep. The terrorists would likely have weapons readily available,
within reach, but they would also feel confident that they were safe here and
wouldn’t expect a rescue team to make entry. If Cramer wasn’t inside, then
killing all the terrorists would only bring them to a dead end. They needed at
least one alive to question.

If anyone posed
a threat, either to a member of the team or Cramer, then Avery and his crew would
put them down with two, three rounds through the head, no questions asked. If
they were IMU, then Avery expected them to put up a fierce fight.  Like Avery,
Poacher and Flounder had gone up against IMU forces before. The Uzbeks were
some of the most vicious and disciplined fighters the US and its allies
encountered in Afghanistan, second only to the Chechens. Cornering them and
engaging them within close quarters could turn nasty. That’s why they’d need to
utilize to full effect what Flounder’s shipmates from Dev Group called “speed,
surprise, and violence of action.” They would move in fast, hit hard, secure the
advantage, and the IMU cell wouldn’t know what hit them until it was over. That
is, if any of them were still breathing.

Avery, Poacher,
and Flounder by now had memorized the floor plan of the house. Each man could
practically close his eyes and visualize the entire layout, complete with
dimensions and distances. On pencil and paper, they’d spent the afternoon
preparing and perfecting plans for entry and takedown. The only factor they
couldn’t take into account was any potential traps or hazards inside the house,
so they would need to be cautious, alert, and ready for anything.

Going into the
front door, which outwardly faced east, there was a small entryway space.
Turning left, or south, this led directly into the largest room in the
structure, probably what served as a living room in Tajik houses. Opposite the
front door, on the north side of the house, there was a wide, almost square-shaped
hallway leading into four rooms, two on either side. The two larger ones were
the presumed bedrooms. The other two were smaller, the size of Western closets.
From the pipes running into these rooms from the outside it was surmised these
were the bathroom (houses here didn’t have toilets; they had a hole in a cement
floor) and shower room. The west end of the hallway led into the kitchen and eating
areas. Combined, these occupied roughly a third of the entire floor space. Finally,
at the far west end of the house was a back porch area with boarded up windows
and the back door. There was no basement or cellar, which would be the ideal
place to hold a captive, so Avery surmised that Cramer, if present, would be
held in one of the two bedrooms. There were no windows to these rooms, making
it an easily secured space to hold a prisoner.

They waited
until 2:00AM and geared up. All light sources were again out in the nearby
houses by this time. Also, at this hour, the human body’s senses and reflexes
are naturally operating at their lowest levels of alertness and are least effective.
It was the ideal time to execute a raid like this one. Even if someone was
awake and on guard duty, his body would not be operating at full efficiency,
his senses dulled and weary.

Avery dressed in
5.11 tactical pants and wore a lightweight, black ModGear vest, with light
armor plates, over a navy blue t-shirt. He secured his Glock in the vest’s fast
draw holster over his left side and carried three spare magazines for the
handgun. He threaded the Atlas Universal Typhoon silencer/suppressor onto the
end of the M4’s barrel and inserted two spare magazines of M193 Ball ammunition
into his vest’s pouches. He fastened the M4 to his sling mount, securing the
carbine over the front of his body. Poacher also gave him two M84 flashbang
grenades, which he secured to the D-ring clips on his vest, and he seated his
Cold Steel Tanto knife into the sheath on the vest’s belt.

Poacher and
Flounder were similarly dressed. They tucked their pants into their Adidas
GSG-9 boots. Poacher wore military standard issue digital camouflage and
Flounder black cargo pants. Poacher wore a gray, cable knit sweatshirt,
Flounder a desert camou t-shirt, beneath their vests. Poacher also wore knee
and elbow protectors. Unlike Avery, the two SAD officers carried silenced,
compact Heckler & Koch MP5SD submachine guns with 9mm subsonic hollow point
ammunition.

The MP5 is
specially made for close quarters combat and one of the favorite weapons of
SEALs, Delta operators, and SWAT shooters. Although larger and heavier, Avery
still preferred the M4 and, going back to his Ranger days, had the most time on
that weapon.

For side arms,
the two CIA operators were equipped with Mk 23 .45 ACP SOCOM pistols, specially
made by Heckler & Koch for US Special Operations Command. Although phased
out of service in 2010, many special operators still favored the Mk 23.

Avery and
Poacher also wore black balaclava masks over their faces, leaving only their
eyes visible, while Flounder preferred black grease paint and a black watch cap.
They also wore Hatch ultra-thin Nomex/Kevlar gloves with removable index
fingers for trigger pulling. They were equipped with AN/PVS-21 low profile
night vision devices. For communications, they were wired with encrypted Motorola
CP185 easy-access tactical throat microphones.

Before leaving
the observation post, they checked their gear and comms, making sure everyone’s
earpieces and mikes were transmitting.

Then Avery made another
pass around the house, with the Radar Scope. He pin pointed the locations of
each of the house’s five occupants—two in the front living room, one in a
smaller room on the right side of the house, and two in the back room. He took
his time, checking to see if there was any activity inside the house. The
motion detector indicated that except for one man in the back of the house,
perhaps getting something to eat, the other four occupants were stationary, so
Avery surmised the others were asleep.

Poacher covered
Avery while Flounder drove the van, with the lights off, around the block,
pulled over near the target house, and put the van in park. He left the keys in
the ignition and the doors unlocked. The van needed to be easily accessible to
make a fast getaway. They stashed all of their additional gear in the van and
made sure that they’d be leaving nothing behind in the observation post.

By 3:45AM, they
were ready to go and took up pre-assigned positions around the house.  Avery
would breach the front door, while Poacher and Flounder simultaneously made
entry through the rear.

Flounder, the
team’s demolitions expert, had applied a line of detcord—thin plastic tubing packed
with a PETN high explosive core—down the side of each door near the hinges.
Flounder carried the detonator and would simultaneously blow both doors.

The doors were
massive, heavy and thick. They had no way of knowing if the doors were
reinforced on the other side, and they weren’t equipped with breach grenades or
specialized rifle grenades, so the quickest way through was to blow out both
doors. Then they would enter the house simultaneously from both ends and sweep
it clear.

The only problem
was that this temporarily left Avery in the open, exposed. He waited in a
crouch in front of the Uzbeks’ pickup truck, approximately seven feet from and
to the side of the front door. He cradled the M4 in front of him, finger
indexed over the trigger guard.

He tapped the
transmit button on his throat mike twice in quick success to indicate that he was
in position and ready to go and immediately heard the “
tsk…tsk”
response, indicating Poacher and Flounder were also in position.

This close to
the house, before the assault, they wouldn’t talk over the radios. Although
encrypted and secure, it was always possible someone with the right gear could
listen in. There was also the risk that prolonged transmissions could
potentially interfere with television, radio, or phone reception, thereby
alerting anyone still awake that someone was nearby.

Avery tapped the
transmit button three more times in rapid succession—the signal to Flounder to
blow the doors—and braced himself and turned his head away from the door.

Three seconds passed.

The explosion
sounded, a sudden thunderclap with accompanying bright flash lasting less than
a second. The door simply flew outward and off its hinges, over the porch, along
with splintered wood and a few small chunks of debris, and landed several feet
in front of the house. A cloud of gray smoke lingered in the space of the
doorframe.

Avery exploded
onto his feet and sprinted the distance to the front door. He kept his rifle in
the low ready position, letting the barrel lead the way toward the entrance of
the house.  Closer, he prepared to pull a flashbang from his vest’s D-clip,
igniting the 2.3 second fuse and hurl the grenade into the darkness.

But two muzzle
flashes lit up from somewhere inside the darkened house.

The AN/PVS-21
night optics responded instantly to the flashes and automatically switched off
the night vision, so that Avery now looked through the clear lenses of the
goggles. It was a life-saving feature over older models of NVGs, which would
have left him blinded and subsequently dead meat. There was the sound of
automatic weapons fire within the small confines of the living room. The shots
penetrated the wall and doorway in front of him. He returned his left hand
beneath the barrel of his M4 and released a three-round burst in the direction
of the one of the muzzle flashes, pivoted his aim, and fired at the second
target’s position.

As he took a
step back, to get to a safe position from which to throw the flashbang, Avery felt
something punch against his vest, low on the right side of his body, like
someone whipped a hammer at him, and he grunted and tensed and stumbled back a
step before catching his balance, hoping the armor plate in the vest wasn’t
penetrated.

The muzzle
flashes continued, closer now as the enemy advanced on him.

Avery fired another
three round burst to push the attackers back as he pivoted left, out of the
open space of the doorway and slid behind the wall and squatted low. He started
to reach again for the M84 stun grenade.

Bullet holes
opened up in the wall in front of him, just inches over his head. He turned and
launched himself to the left, out of the way of the open door space, as two
constant streams of full automatic fire chewed through the wall he had just been
positioned behind.

Avery smacked
hard against a patch of dirt. The gunfire stopped from the house. There was
quiet, and he imagined the men inside were reloading, having each just emptied
their magazines against the wall, spraying and praying that they’d hit him.

So much for
catching the fuckers in their sleep.

Movement caught
Avery’s attention. A shadowy man-sized shape materialized in the doorframe and
stepped out of the house, a submachine gun held in front of him as he pivoted
and swept left-to-right looking for a target or, more agreeably, a dead body.
He spotted Avery lying on the ground, adjusted his aim, shouted something out
in Uzbek to the man still inside the house, and tapped the trigger. 

Avery rolled
across the dirt, skirting out of the way of incoming bullets. The rounds bored
into the ground, kicking up a dry cloud of dirt and dust. He aligned his sights
over the target’s torso, pressed back on the trigger, once, twice, and felt the
recoil.

Despite the
attached suppressor, the carbine still made a perfectly audible and sharp,
whip-like
thwack
, resembling a muffled firecracker and not at all the
silent
pfffttt
in movies (though Poacher and Flounder’s silenced MP5s
firing subsonic ammunition came close).