Collateral (Tier One #6)

PART III

The only thing I am ever certain of is uncertainty. But that has never stopped me from trying, and it will not stop me now.

—Arkady Zhukov

Rail Car Loading Tower

300 Yards South of Mariupol Maritime Logistics

0422 Local Time

Grimes shifted her right leg where the metal diamond-deck flooring pressed uncomfortably into her knee as she scanned through the TANGO6 sight, her right cheek hard into the butt stock of her Sig Sauer 716G2 DMR. If things went to hell, she would need both speed and accuracy, and the Sig—with its twenty-round magazine, precision-milled barrel, and composite design—was the perfect instrument for tonight’s mission.

From her perch, she enjoyed an almost panoramic view of the rear of the target building, as well as the approach road to the west. Her heart rate ticked up a notch as she watched the decoy black Suburban—piloted by Munn, Yankee Three—cross the rail yard on an overt approach to the main entrance of Mariupol Maritime Logistics. Meanwhile, the other two SUVs—with Dempsey and the SEAL called Bart in one, and Chunk and Riker in the other—were sneaking around the back of MML for the real extraction. The fourth SUV was standing by to pick up her and Saw. If the decoy SUV drew enemy fire, then they would know the MML building was being covered by ground forces and they would adjust in real time. But if the Russians were surveilling them from above—with drones, satellites, or other spooky watch-tech Ember didn’t know about—then they were already blown and Dempsey’s elaborate shell game was a pointless exercise.

She shuddered at the thought.

After her near-death experience in Jerusalem, she’d managed her fear and feelings of tactical inadequacy by becoming the team sniper. No, not by simply becoming overwatch . . . by embracing the role. Since then, she’d survived a half-dozen deadly moments by channeling her inner calm—that paradoxical conviction in her capacity to protect her boys because Ember truly owned the night. The enemy was blind to Ember’s presence and true capabilities, and in this blind spot was where she thrived. Ember’s tactics, methods, and technological superiority kept her lethal out to a thousand yards; she was a night hunter, and her enemy, the hunted. But now she could practically feel the Russian thermal image cameras probing her, studying her from somewhere up above. The itch between her shoulder blades, that was the crosshairs from the smart bomb on the Russian drone overhead, ready to atomize her at a moment’s notice. With all the willpower at her disposal, she resisted the urge to scratch that itch and look skyward for the invisible death she was certain was circling above . . .

Home Plate has my back, she told herself, trying to chase away her anxiety over things she could not control.

She exhaled and resumed her survey of the buildings across the street, looking for shooters and spotters in windows. Her scan led her to one particular building, about one hundred and fifty yards northwest of the target, that would be an ideal spot for an enemy sniper roost. She had line of sight to the roof, but not enough height to see down onto it.

“Zeus One, Two—you have height on the building bearing three-forty-five from the X? I can’t see the roof.”

After a pause, Saw came back, his soft whisper amplified in her earpiece. “Two, One—all clear.”

Saw was set up atop a four-story building thirty degrees to her right and nearly even with the target building. From his vantage point, she expected he had angles on the front of the MML building and the approach to the north. Equally important, he had a line to cover her six if a threat emerged behind her.

Munn’s decoy SUV braked to a stop at the front entrance. Grimes pulled away from her rifle, lifting her head to look through a separate spotter scope she had set up with a wider field of view. The feint was on, and Munn and Martin were the live bait. If the Russians were going to make a move, now was the time. On this thought she turned left and began scanning the dozens and dozens of dark rail cars scattered throughout the yard, wondering why she hadn’t checked them before.

Hiding in ambush inside the vacant boxcars is the kind of thing JD and Munn would come up with, she thought, but didn’t see anything moving in the shadows.

She swiveled back to check on Munn and Martin. She thought about the Hellfire missile strikes Ember had ordered on the Russian SUVs in Kiev the other night and imagined a fire streak from the sky vaporizing the Suburban where it sat idling.

And then SAD would be just JD and me . . .

“Stop it,” she murmured, trying desperately to get out of her own head.

We’re all good. No Spetsnaz troops have burst from the rail cars. No convoy of military vehicles loaded with little green men are rolling in . . . It’s quiet.

We’re alone.

She pressed her cheek back into the butt of her weapon to resume scanning through the TANGO6. With a twist of the dial, she increased the magnification from 30x to 56x. Then she exhaled long and slow to bring her heart rate beneath her already low baseline of fifty-five beats a minute.

And she waited.

And waited . . .

“Clear,” Saw said.

“Clear,” she echoed.

Seconds ticked by, and the decoy SUV loitered—engine running, with Munn and Martin inside, waiting to be assaulted. And when she couldn’t stand it anymore, Dempsey finally called the approach.

“Liberty, Yankee One—thirty seconds.”

“Roger, Yankee,” came the CIA security lead’s reply.

“Thermals, Mother?” she whispered, still feeling paranoid.

“Same as before,” came Baldwin’s reply. “We have thermals throughout the surrounding neighborhoods, as we reported, but none clustered like a large, organized force. The warehouse complex northeast has multiple thermals in the largest building, nearly a dozen, but they appear to be working, moving back and forth within the building. The rail yard to the west would be a delightful place to hide a large force, but we see no thermals in the rail cars and only two thermals walking the yard—night watchmen, we presume. The building Yankee is circling now shows no thermals, but the entire building is blue, suggesting it may be a refrigerated storage facility. Refrigerated warehouses are not unusual at a major rail hub for short-term storage of produce and the like.”

“Man, he’s a talker,” Saw whispered in her earpiece.

“Talks when he’s nervous,” she whispered back.

“I most certainly do not. I’m just . . . never mind,” Baldwin said, taking the hint.

She watched Dempsey’s SUV circle behind the cold storage facility now and emerge on the other side, Chunk’s vehicle in trail. On that cue, she pressed back into her long gun.

Come on, Dempsey. Be the luckiest son of a bitch on earth just one more time . . .

Dempsey’s SUV accelerated on the approach, cruised past the van backed up to the rear of the building, and braked hard. He executed a precision backing maneuver, pulling beside the cargo van’s driver’s side and leaving just enough room to open the Suburban’s rear door. She watched as the second SUV made the same maneuver in mirror image on the passenger side of the van.

With slow, four-count tactical breathing, she kept her pulse rate from rising as she scanned for threats. Time slowed while the two SUVs idled like bookends on either side of the van.

Nothing else moved.

A cool breeze across the rail loading tower kissed at the sweat on her neck and sent a shiver down her back. A plastic tarp in the loading area beneath her rustled, and she looked down, then back up.

It’s nothing.

“Liberty, Yankee is in position,” Dempsey reported.

“Copy, Yankee—stand by for the Ricky Bobby exfil.”

“Home Plate—SITREP?” Dempsey called for a final check.

“Good eyes in the sky,” Wang reported. “And no concerning chatter, encrypted or otherwise.”

“I concur,” Baldwin said, unable to remain quiet after his short pout.

“Zeus One—all clear,” Saw said.

“Zeus Two, I concur,” Grimes said, smiling at her mimicry, which would likely be lost on Baldwin. Perhaps only Munn noticed, if anyone.

“Liberty, you’re a go for exfil. Use both side doors and into the trucks. One pro on each side, please, and divvy up half and half.”

“Liberty, check.”

A sliver of light appeared behind the van and grew into a door-shaped glow on the pavement behind the van, whose back doors were already hanging wide open. She watched through her rifle scope as the first evacuee shot the gap and jumped into the cargo van. He quickly opened the van’s slider doors, first the left, then the right.

Grimes scanned again—the rail cars, the building across the street, and finally the cold storage building. All quiet. She returned her gaze to the cargo van, and watched the second CIA evacuee, a woman, shoot the gap from the building. A split second later, the same woman moved from the van into Dempsey’s SUV.

But as she crossed the gap, a halo exploded around her head and she pitched sideways, crumpling in a heap on the ground between the vehicles. Grimes gasped, the kill looking so much like a shot from her own weapon that she checked that her trigger finger was, indeed, outside the trigger guard.

“Contact . . . contact!” one of the SEALs hollered.

“Taking sniper fire from the south,” Dempsey said, his voice cold steel.

“I see nothing,” Wang said in a panic. “Where the hell is it coming from? I have no thermals anywhere except Zeus One and Two.”

A starburst appeared on the windshield in line with Dempsey’s angry, contorted face. The SEAL called Bart, who was sitting next to Dempsey, opened the front passenger door, sighting through the gap between the door and window frame to provide covering fire. Grimes, for her part, repositioned on a knee looking south.

“Zeus One—anything?” she hollered, searching where the sniper fire seemed to have originated.

“Negative,” Saw said, his voice still ice.

She scanned through the spotter scope, surveying every window in green-grey night vision.

Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing. What the hell?

More sniper rounds echoed, coming faster now.

“He’s shooting through the roof of the van—move, people, move!” The last call was not meant for radio, but instead came from Chunk screaming into his hot mike for the CIA evacuees to get their asses into the SUVs, where they would be protected by the up-armored walls and roofs.

Grimes continued her search for the shooter, forcing herself to be slow and deliberate, just as she’d learned.

But how the fuck are there no thermals?

“Man down,” Dempsey hollered in her ear. “Got a Yankee down.”

It’s Bart, she thought, but continued her slow scan.

She came to another building, and beside it stood two structures—radio-style towers, but with what looked like smokestacks in the center. And there, atop a scaffolding platform on the farthest tower, she sighted a shiny blob. When she zoomed in, she could just make out the barrel of a rifle sticking out from underneath what looked like a Mylar thermal-reflective blanket.

“I have the shooter,” she said, forcing calm into her voice.

She was going to tell Wang not to look for a heat signature—but instead, she shifted to the scope on her sniper rifle, her gloved hand expertly clicking in adjustments for the one-hundred-and-sixty-yard shot. The breeze was now coming from her left since she’d turned, and she accounted for that in the adjustments with a rough mental calculation. She put the red crosshairs of the sight on the head-shaped bump in the silver blob.

Exhale.

Trigger squeeze.

Her bullet tore through where she’d guessed the sniper’s head to be, and the shooter’s rifle barrel abruptly dropped. A heartbeat later, a body tumbled out from under the silver tarp, bounced off the scaffolding twice, and then silently slammed into the ground.

“Sniper down,” she called.

“Nice shot, Two,” Saw said. “Where there’s one, there’s more. Haul ass, Yankees.”

Grimes spun back around, elbow laced through the sling of her rifle, and put the spotter scope back to her right eye in time to see Dempsey hoisting a slumped and motionless Bart into the front passenger seat.

“We’ve got eight packages secure,” Dempsey called, pulling the passenger door closed from the inside. “But we have casualties. Lots. Recover Zeus and let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Hold, One,” Saw said. “We got a new problem, bro. Check the building just east of you . . .”

“Where?” Wang cried. “I see nothing. I have no thermals.”

Grimes looked toward the building Baldwin had called a refrigerated warehouse, and saw a twenty-foot-wide, garage-style door rolling up, revealing three old military-style Ural-375 trucks.

Oh shit . . .

The trucks rolled out en masse, each carrying a complement of armed soldiers in the open back trailer beds.

“Other way, Yankee,” she hollered into her mike.

“There is no other way!” Dempsey reminded her.

She watched in horror as the three trucks spread out across the only road out of the rear approach to the target building and the shooters took up firing positions, all aiming at the two SUVs.

“We’re coming around to help,” Munn called out, and she saw his SUV on the move.

“Negative,” Dempsey said. “Head north, Three.”

Grimes watched Dempsey’s SUV executing evasive maneuvers, but she didn’t know where he could go. With some luck, they might be able to breach the fence and then make it across the railroad tracks. But even if he managed that, she doubted he could clear the ditches beyond. And if he got stuck, they were dead for sure.

“Home Plate, we need close air support right fucking now. You see our issue, right?” Dempsey hollered.

“Calling in the fast movers to clear a path, Yankee,” Wang said, his voice more in control now than before.

“Zeus One, Two,” she said. “It’s up to us now.”

“Roger that,” Saw came back, as she threw herself prone.

With steady fingers, she made two small adjustments on her scope, sighted in on the lead enemy truck, and went to work.

Hang in there, guys . . . I got your back.

Exhale . . .

Trigger squeeze.

Sight . . .

Exhale . . .

Trigger squeeze.

Sight . . .