He pressed the vented muzzle against the top hinge and pulled the trigger. The Mossberg boomed and the hinge disintegrated. He shucked the forestock to chamber a new round, pressed the muzzle against the bottom hinge, and fired. The door hung awkwardly from its lock now, and Jonathan used his shoulder to crash it open.
The door gave, but not all the way, hanging up against the bolt that extended deeply into the jamb on the other side. “Big Guy, give me a hand.”
Boxers grabbed the back of his ruck, pulled him out of the way, and demonstrated Newton’s Second Law of Motion: force equals mass times acceleration. He put everything he had into the shoulder-blow to open the door. The door never had a chance. It swung open and half-collapsed, still hung up on its bolt, but with enough space for people to slip through.
With the Mossberg back at rest, and his MP7 back against his shoulder, Jonathan led the way. He squirted through the opening and took a couple of steps to leave room for the rest of the team. Then he took a knee and surveyed the interior of the cell block. He faced an interior alley with at least twenty cells on a side, for a total of at least forty cells on this floor. Looking up, he saw a ceiling constructed of iron grating that served as the hallway floor for the rank of cells above, and so it continued upward for another three floors.
“Nicholas Mishin!” Jonathan yelled. “Josef Mishin! Shout out! We’re here to bring you home.”
A burst of gunfire from behind made Jonathan jump and whirl. He saw Boxers with his H&K 417 at his shoulder, firing down the length of hallway they’d just traveled.
“They’re on us,” Big Guy said, and he fired another long burst.
This was bad. There were too many moving parts between now and all they needed to do to have OpFor nipping at their heels. Jonathan said over the net, “Take out every light you see and go to night vision.” He started things off by shooting the five bare lightbulbs that illuminated the first floor of the cell block. Though suppressed, the sharp pops of the MP7 still rattled the senses inside this stone canyon.
The darkness was refreshing, but far from complete as light from the floors above still shone down through the metal floors, creating a spiderweb of shadows. It would have been nice to kill those lights as well, but there was no clean shot through the steel grates.
Behind and to his left, he heard Boxers firing single rounds, and when that hallway went dark, they regained some measure of advantage.
“Yelena,” Jonathan said. In the green hue of the NVGs, he saw that she’d drifted somewhere in her head. He took a step closer and smacked her helmet to get her attention. “Yelena!”
She jumped, nearly brought her rifle to bear on him.
He caught the barrel with his palm. “Get your head in the game, ma’am. Be scared and distracted on your own time.”
Boxers fired another burst, this one shorter. “Hey!” he shouted. “Can we get some work done here?”
Jonathan said, “Yelena, go find your family. Floor to floor, door to door. When you find them, get on the radio and tell us where they are. We’ll be there as soon as we can. You just wait.”
She looked horrified. “Where will you be?”
“Buying time,” he said. “Go. And once you go up a level do not come down again for any reason, understand? You can move up and out, but never down. Got it?”
She nodded.
“Say it.”
“Once up, never come down.”
Boxers unleashed again.
“Go. We’re almost to the goal line. Don’t drop the ball.”
Jonathan turned his back on the First Lady and joined Boxers. He put a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. “I’ll take over here,” he said. “Set some charges we can hold the stairs with.”
Big Guy smiled. “Roger that.” He peeled away, and Jonathan slipped into his spot in the gap in the door. Peering down the corridor, he counted three bodies on the floor, all of them clustered at the far end. Jonathan scanned for targets with his infrared laser. For the time being, the attackers were all hidden away. He’d like to think that they had run away, but that kind of luck ran counter to what they’d been experiencing.
A more reasonable conclusion was that they’d been spooked. Or they’d found another way.
Shit. They’d found another way.
Josef’s eyes grew huge at the sound of their names being called. Nicholas didn’t know whether to be elated or terrified. The extended burst of machine gun fire that came immediately after tilted things more toward terror.
“Are they coming for us?” Josef asked.
They’d shed their blankets and stood, instinctively moving farther away from the door. “I think so,” Nicholas said.
“Do they want to save us or hurt us?”
Now, that was the million-dollar question. Nicholas tried to make sense of it. If Tony Darmond had had them kidnapped in the first place, what was the likelihood that he would authorize a mission to rescue them? But someone was clearly attacking this place — whatever this place was — and who else but the American military would have the resources to do that?
We’re here to take you home.
That’s what the voice had said. That could be a trap, he supposed, but wouldn’t their enemies — presumably the ones who had brought them here in the first place — know where they’d put them? Why would they need to shout their names to confirm their location?
More gunfire.
Nicholas sank to one knee and took his son’s shoulders in his hands. “Look at me,” he said.
In the light that spilled into their cell from the high window, the eyes that looked back at him were wet, with irises so brown as to be black. They were the eyes of a boy who would become a handsome man if he ever got the chance.
“I don’t know what’s about to happen,” Nicholas said, “but I think it’s going to be big. I need you to be brave.”
“Are we going to die?”
Nicholas started to answer with a reflexive no, but stopped himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “But if we are, let’s both die bravely.”
There were in fact two entrances to every floor to Building Delta. That meant two additional levels from Building Echo whose corridor he was now covering, and three from Building Charlie on the east side.
Jonathan keyed his mike even as he started to move. “Big Guy, set and arm your charge with a motion fuse and mark it with an IR chem light. I think they’re also coming at us from Charlie.” He sprinted toward the east end of the hallway. “Set and mark charges at the west end of every level. I’ll set them on the east ends.”
In the old days, when they did this kind of work for Uncle Sam, they worked in teams of two dozen operators, with support from hundreds of logisticians and planners, with reinforcements only a radio call away. Every contingency was planned for and every bet was hedged. If Jonathan had had the benefit of additional trained manpower, he would have had all of the stairways and entrances covered, just as he would have had individual operators assigned to breaching duties and PC rescue duties. Tonight, they’d rolled the dice on going undetected until the diversion of blowing up the chapel gave them an edge.
As it was, the edge still existed, but the enemy was adapting. He needed to cover the eastern side of the building as well as the western side.
The arrangement of the doorway and the stairs on the east end was the mirror image of the one on the west. While the bad guys had probably gotten a head start, they had to travel two sides of a large square to get there, while Jonathan could travel from point to point in a straight line.