“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 where the men were. They flipped the lenses up and out of the way. They had to do this one low-tech, old-school style.
As they topped the staircase, two of the balaclava-masked SEALs poked their weapons over the ledge. They swept their muzzles side to side across the flat landing. They carefully peered down the wide-open hallway that ran the length of the upstairs area. Two more men passed the first pair and took opposite kneeling positions at the top of the stairs.
Six identical doors lined the hallway, three to the left, two to the right and one at the end, directly facing the stairway. Presumably, three were bedrooms, one was a bathroom, and one was a linen closet. Which was which had to be determined the old-fashioned way. They would need to open each, one at a time.
Forester and Beckwith passed the two pairs of SEALs in a fast, crouching walk.
The first two men who had reached the top, Bell and Stingle, stayed where they were to guard the approach from below and keep an eye on the doors down each side of the hallway. The others started with the nearest door on the left.
They tensed, took a deep breath, and paced their heart rate. Forester put his hand on the knob and slowly twisted. He shoved the door open and Beckwith burst in, Forester right behind him. It was a small bedroom with a window at the back, and an empty closet with a broken door that hung open on a twisted hinge. A bed and a small nightstand were the only objects in the still room. No people.
“Room one clear,” Forester whispered into his microphone.
The two men backed out. Philips and Miller swung open the next door, which turned out to be a linen closet with no place to hide a man.
“Room two clear,” uttered one of the men.
Forester and Beckwith passed them and took the door across the hall to the right. They got on either side. Philips and Miller covered them across the hall as Beckwith put his hand on the doorknob.
A sound like wood and metal clacking together came from the end of the hall. Stingle shouted from the stairwell. “On the left! Freeze!”
Something small, dark, and hard thumped heavily at the top of the staircase, bounced into the air, and halted on the carpet between the six SEALs.
“Grenade!”
Bell sprung forward and wrapped his body snugly around the baseball-sized mass of deadly steel. A muffled explosion thumped through the house. A bright flash of light shot out from under Bell’s body. Beckwith turned and fired two short bursts in the direction of the door. From the room, a man let out a scream, followed by a heavy thud.
“Medic! Get the medic up here!”
Stingle immediately turned Bell onto his back and started to pull off his body armor when he realized there was no need. Bell’s death-dulled eyes stared blankly into space. Blood ran in streams from the open armholes of his vest and out of his mouth and nose. The Mormon boy from Utah was going to get the hero’s funeral that would make his mother proud.
Forester and Beckwith kicked in the nearest door while Philips and Miller rushed the end of the hall. The room on the right was another empty bedroom, and they quickly cleared it then rushed to the room from which the grenade had come. Philips and Miller had already entered and found the body of a dark-skinned Caucasian man lying facedown in a pool of blood on the floor next to a bed. He held a pistol in one hand. Another hand grenade, pin still in place, lay on the floor nearby. A metal box with an electronic keypad lay on the bed. It looked like a land mine. They cleared that room and went to the last one at the end of the hall.
Forester put his hand on the doorknob. The others tensed up. A dozen holes suddenly appeared in the wooden door and nearby Sheetrock as a burst of gunfire rang out from inside the room. Splintered bits of wood from the door stung the men’s faces, and a shard of wood cut into Forester’s left arm through a gap in his armored vest just below the shoulder. Miller grunted and stumbled backwards as one of the rounds struck him full in the chest. It crunched into his armored vest, sending him backwards, and knocked the wind out of him. He landed flat on his butt.