His partner had already stopped several meters back, having found a thick tree stump to support his .50 caliber sniper rifle. They would both start engaging targets as soon as it became apparent that the alarm had been sounded. The RPK would be used against security personnel, while the .50 caliber sniper rifle would initially target the building’s communications array. Based on the second team’s progress, they would breach the fence and provide close-up support as requested.
Nearly on cue with his arrival, three men spilled out of the front door onto the gravel driveway. One of the men peeled left and crouched against the front bumper of a black SUV, aiming an assault rifle in his general direction, while the other two took off in the opposite direction. He fired a sustained burst through the fence at the man next to the truck, kicking up gravel around the truck and connecting with the SUV’s metal frame. The man flailed backward, obviously hit by at least one of the rounds, so he shifted his aim to the two men fleeing toward an outcropping of dark ledge near the house.
A massive detonation sounded in the distance on his right, rippling the fence as his next burst of bullets caught the first man and sent him tumbling to the ground in a tangle of collapsed limbs. His partner stopped and crouched low to return fire, but was struck in the head by a well-aimed, short burst from the machine gun.
The RPK’s longer and heavier barrel, designed to allow accurate, sustained automatic fire in an infantry support role, combined extremely well with the combat telescopic sight to yield an effective sharpshooting weapon. He reacquired the front door of the house and demonstrated the light machine gun’s true purpose on this mission, pulling the trigger and cycling through the remaining seventy seven rounds of 5.45mm in long sweeping bursts that raked the front of the house from top to bottom, splintering the cedar siding and shattering all of the windows.
Karl Berg’s hand froze when he heard the first muffled staccato burst of gunfire. His first thought was that Sheffield had picked a really shitty time to conduct target practice for his security team. He dismissed that thought when the house shook violently, followed immediately by the thunderclap of a nearby explosion. He put it all together before the next burst of gunfire tore through the compound. Reznikov had somehow led the Russian mafiya to Mountain Glen.
He fumbled with the Velcro flap in his briefcase, almost missing Reznikov’s sudden attack. The thick bottle of vodka he’d given the scientist appeared overhead, plunging toward his head. Berg abandoned the effort to draw his pistol and raised the briefcase upward to deflect the heavy glass bludgeon. With most of his hand-to-hand combat training years behind him, the CIA officer’s instinctual response was far from graceful.
The bottle crashed into his forearm with a sickening thump, driving his arm down below his head. Reznikov raised the bottle to strike him in the head, but Berg kicked him in the sternum, disrupting the attack. The Russian stumbled backward, dropping the bottle onto the hardwood floor, where it shattered. Berg considered trying to retrieve the pistol from the briefcase at his feet, but Reznikov charged the door, and he had no intention of losing the Russian that easily.
The Russian grabbed the doorknob with both hands, unable to defend himself from Berg’s front kick, which was aimed at his hands. Berg’s sturdy hiking boots crushed Reznikov’s fingers against the brass knob, causing the Russian to recoil from the front door, howling in agony. Less than a second later, a klaxon sounded in the house, and Reznikov threw himself at the door, screaming. Now Berg understood why he had been so focused on the door. The house could be put into lockdown mode from the security station, which would complicate whatever plan the lunatic had conjured.
Reznikov yanked at the door to no avail and quickly scrambled left to one of the picture windows. Berg glanced at the window to his immediate right and saw metal shutters descending outside of the windowpanes. He heard glass shatter and turned his attention back to Reznikov. The crazed scientist had cracked the other window with the base of a table lamp. Judging from the shutters’ rate of descent, Berg wasn’t worried about Reznikov escaping through the window. The security shutters next to him had already blocked most of the light from the outside. In a fit of rage, the Russian repeatedly struck the window frame in an ineffectual display of fury, yelling orders to his hidden rescuers.
Berg decided that this would be a good time to grab his pistol. Trying to ignore the excruciating pain in his left arm, he opened the flap and withdrew the pistol, just as a fusillade of bullets tore through the door and the drywall next to him. The CIA officer dropped flat against the floor and fired three hastily aimed shots through the cloud of obliterated drywall dust at Reznikov’s silhouette. Another long burst of gunfire penetrated the front of the house, ripping through the furniture and collapsing the closest end table.
He hadn’t fully processed Reznikov’s verbal tirade, which had obviously directed indiscriminate automatic weapons fire into the left side of the house. He needed to get clear of the free-fire zone before Reznikov directed the next barrage right onto him. Searching for a target with his pistol, Berg scrambled forward, quickly reaching the archway to find the library room empty. He heard a chair scrape across the kitchen tile and turned his attention to the doorway leading out of the library and deeper into the house.
Before he could process the thought any further, he heard two separate Russian voices outside of the house yell, “Clear!” Berg’s options at this point were extremely limited, but one of them wasn’t standing in the library, exposed to the front door. He passed through the doorway less than a millisecond before a small explosion shook the house. The explosion cleared his mind and engaged some of the mind processes buried under years of bureaucratic deskwork at Langley. He hoped this temporary reboot would be enough to keep him alive.
He’d been one of the CIA’s premier case officers in Europe during the Cold War’s final decade, sidelining as a “black ops” field supervisor long before retired Special Forces operators filled those roles. He knew what would come through that door, and that his chances of walking out of here alive were poor, but Berg was a survivor, and he still had plenty of fight left in him. He immediately started forming a strategy.
Reznikov’s Solntsevskaya benefactors would have used highly trained professionals for this job, most likely former Russian army Spetsnaz, which didn’t bode well. Spetsnaz operators were notoriously savage and barely restrained by rules of engagement within the Russian military. As hired guns for the Russian mafiya, there would be no limit to their brutality. The only factor working in his favor at this point was an intimate familiarity with Special Operations tactics.
Special Forces teams worldwide could attribute their incredible success rate to training. Repetitive training. Especially in close-quarters combat. There was little variation in training and tactics, which is why he wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear metal objects hit the hardwood floor somewhere in the front of the house. Flashbangs. He glanced toward the staircase off the kitchen and made a quick calculation. He had at this point all but forgotten about Reznikov, who was nowhere in sight.
A long burst of distant gunfire preceded the multiple flashbang detonations inside the house, reminding Yergei that the compound’s security team was still in play. He didn’t need to cue the two men that flanked the door. They had practiced this drill hundreds of times together as a Russian Spetsnaz direct-action team and several dozen more times as private contractors. The only real difference between the two was that he routinely got paid more for one of these privately funded operations than he made in an entire year as a Russian army sergeant.