"No. We've got two men inside. One pocket of three bad guys don't want to give up. Lincoln is moving up on them with a pair of fraggers."
"Keep it wired."
Murdock saw more winking flashes from the second story. It might be harder than they thought to drive these guys out. He had no idea how many there were.
He flipped down his NVG. They turned the night into a soft greenish hued dusk. He scanned the face of the two story embassy and spotted a man coming out a window on the far end on a rope. He figured the range, 80 yards at the most. They all had taken the sound suppressors off their MP-5 submachine guns for more range. They were good without the silencers for 150 yards.
Murdock sighted in and fired a three-round burst, then another. The man shook when the last three rounds hit him, and spun off the rope. He jolted hard into the ground. Murdock watched him through the NVGs, but the Kenyan didn't move.
Jaybird Sterling charged along the stone front of the embassy. He was so close no one inside could see him. He ducked under first-floor windows, and came near the front door. Just then a machine gun began hammering away out the front entrance. Murdock and three other shooters put a hail of fire into the opening, but the weapon kept slamming bullets out at eight hundred rounds a minute.
Murdock ducked as the rounds drew slow stitches across his protective car. Jaybird had gone flat on the ground next to the building near the front door when the MG started firing. Then, as the friendly fire tapered off, he crawled forward, pulled a fragger from his harness, and jerked out the safety pin. He squirmed another few feet, then rolled the grenade into the front-door opening.
It was 4.2 seconds later when the hand bomb went off. Sandbags toppled, and the machine gun on a tripod tipped over with its smoking muzzle on the floor. The gunner sprawled in death with one arm blown off and his chest tattooed with shrapnel.
For a moment all firing stopped. Then, in a rush, three Kenyan soldiers charged out the front door heading for the open gate. Jaybird put one of them down from behind with his MP-5. Kenneth Ching nailed the second one with three rounds from his M-4A1.
Doc Ellsworth dropped the third one with a throaty blast from his Mossburg pump action shotgun throwing out double ought buck.
The radios spoke to the 16 man SEAL team. "Rear secured, we're moving inside," DeWitt said. "Haven't heard any firing on the second floor lately. We'll move to the top and clear it as we come down. You can be sure it's a bad guy target if anyone comes out the front door or a window. We'll stay inside."
7
Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed DeWitt waved at his two most experienced men, Scotty Lincoln and Miguel Fernandez. Both had traded their usual weapons for MP-5 submachine guns. They had lots of experience training in the Kill House back in California. Both men wore NVGs, and flipped them down and nodded.
Fernandez went in the rear door first, angling to the right. He saw nothing move in the green-tinted world. It was a storeroom of sorts on the ground floor.
Before he could move, Lincoln bolted in and covered the other half of the room.
"Clear," Fernandez whispered into his throat mike.
A door led off to the right, and another one to the left. Lincoln took his side, and Fernandez went to the right. Fernandez dropped to the floor and looked around the doorjamb from ankle level. The room ahead was a meeting space, with tables and chairs. Something moved on one of the tables. A man lying flat. Fernandez stared at the figure through the night-vision goggles. The man lifted a weapon.
Fernandez hosed him down with two three-round bursts, and saw him take the 9mm rounds and roll off the table. Another form down the way sprinted for the far door, and made it before Fernandez could bring his weapon around.
He checked the rest of the room area by area. No more bad guys. "Second room right clear," he said into the mike. He came to his feet and sprinted for the next door. Three rounds came through it and he dove to the left, and skidded against the wall three feet from the opening.
He pulled a hand grenade from his harness, popped the safety pin, and threw it into the room. The explosion brought a pair of screams that trailed off. Then silence.
This time he looked around the side of the door about three feet off the floor. Inside was an office with two desks. Two bodies lay sprawled in the aisle between the wooden desks. A form lifted up beside a filing cabinet and fired three rounds from what Fernandez figured was an AK-47. The rounds missed.
Fernandez sighted in on the side of the cabinet where he had seen the Kenyan and waited. Almost a minute passed, but Fernandez held his sight. Then the Kenyan leaned quickly out from the steel filing cabinet, but before he could fire, Fernandez nailed him with three rounds from the "room sweeper," and the Kenyan slammed to the rear with half his throat shot away.
The SEAL ran into the room with his MP-5 ready, but he found no more living Kenyans. He hurried to the far door and looked around the doorjamb. He saw a figure lunge up from behind a line of file cabinets and throw something.
A grenade.
It hit once in front of the door, bounced true, and Fernandez tracked it through the open door on his nightscope. He caught the hand bomb, and in the same motion threw it back the way it came. He jolted against the wall outside the room, and a second later the grenade went off with a blast.
Fernandez heard no human sound from the room. He edged around the door again and looked. File cabinets against the walls, some down the center of the room. He saw a bloody head on the floor halfway along the files. A moment later he touched his mike. "Clear three right," he said. Lincoln's hurried call came just after his message. "We may have a problem in room two my way. I hit a staircase, and somebody is up there covering the whole damn room but gives me no target."
"Hang tight," Fernandez said. "I'm out of rooms and on my way."
A minute later, Fernandez slid to a stop beside an open door. Lincoln was by the other side. Fernandez checked through the door, and jerked back at once. Two slugs drilled through the air where he had been.
"He's got some night vision too," Lincoln said.
"What's in the room?"
"Stores, looks like lots of food and office supplies. No good cover down there. Except maybe that stack of what looks like boxes of paper halfway down to the left."
Fernandez took a look from head height. "Yeah." He put a slug into the boxes and jerked back. They never even wiggled. "Cover," he said. "You spray that stairwell top and I'll get to the boxes. That'll give me a good angle to shoot straight up the stairs and nail the bastard."
Lincoln pushed a fresh thirty-round magazine into his MP-5 and nodded. He poked out the muzzle and pounded off three rounds, then adjusted and nodded at Fernandez. Twelve rounds on full auto slammed into the top of the staircase as Fernandez charged the fifteen feet to the stack of cases of paper, then rolled to a stop below them out of sight of the stairway.
Lincoln kicked six more rounds up the top of the stairs. Then Fernandez added his firepower, with the advantage of the angle. He slapped twelve rounds out of his weapon, and heard a scream from up the stairs.
Fernandez saw a hand appear at the top of the stairs holding a grenade. Before it could be thrown, Fernandez drilled the arm with three rounds, and the small bomb dropped out of the Kenyan's hand and three seconds later exploded.
Fernandez looked back at Lincoln and nodded. He sent covering fire up the stairs until he felt Lincoln slide into place beside him.
"No response up above," Lincoln said. "Might just have solved our little problem."
Fernandez used the mike again. "L-T, we could use about four good men in here. The stairs is ours."