Liam shook his head. “Which means the entire place could be rigged.”
“Plan doesn’t change.” Tanner straightened up. “We just hit them even harder and faster.”
The team turned and charged into the tunnel. Shouts came from ahead, only a few at first, but swelling as more and more people added their voices to the cacophony. There were words in the babble of voices, but none in English, and the percussive assault of metal striking metal punctuated the vocalizations.
One of the guards closest to the tunnel saw the OUTCAST unit charge out of the tunnel. He screamed and spun toward the team only to go down as Tanner triggered the grenade launcher and sent a load of buckshot into him. The blast also smashed into another guard, shredding his arm and leg and knocking him to the tunnel floor.
The rest of the team opened fire, the flurry of 9mm rounds cutting through the guards’ bodies before any of them could get a shot off. As the last guard fell, Tanner reloaded his M203 while he moved across the chamber, Liam behind him and to his left. The rest of the team followed. To either side, the prisoners shouted at the infiltrating squad, arms thrust between the bars to plead for release.
“Should we let them go?” Dante asked, pausing to look into one of the overcrowded cages. He wanted to free them.
Tanner shook his head. “They’re safer here for the time being. Let’s keep moving.”
Stopping long enough to retrieve the drone, the team raced into the next tunnel.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The assault on the ranch house was the worse Sarah Vessler had ever experienced.
The suspects were not strung-out druggies with stolen, half-functioning weapons, but hardened soldiers with military-grade weapons and a willingness to fight to the death. As the task force began deploying from the Bradleys and MRAPs, heavy gunfire greeted them from the ranch house and barn.
An RPG was launched from the ranch house’s second floor. It shot across the dark field, where it struck one of the MRAPs, rocking the fourteen-ton vehicle and blanketing the assault team with shrapnel. The M2’s opened up again, raking the house and barn with more .50 caliber rounds.
Vessler crouched in the shadow of the Bradley. Despite the MRAPs suppression fire, the enemy wasn’t giving up.
“OUTCAST Six to Striker. Are you all right?”
Vessler remembered the drones overhead. “OUTCAST Six, this is Striker. We need those party favors onboard the Cobras.”
“Copy, Striker. Moving Cobra Bravo to cover the barn. Dropping party favors from Cobra Alpha in three, two one…”
A hundred feet above the ranch house, Night Cobra Alpha hovered silent and invisible in the night sky. The drone’s camera pointed at the house below, giving Danielle, who was five hundred yards away, a real-time update of the situation. Using the tablet, she adjusted the drone’s position and released three of the flash-bang grenades. The incendiary devices struck the roof, bounced off, and exploded in mid-air, bright flashes of light and sound stunning the defenders.
As soon as the flash bang grenades were released, Danielle dropped three CS canisters. All three struck the roof, rolled down the sloping steel and fell to the ground. As they landed, they began spewing thick, acrid smoke. Rifle and machine guns from inside the house fired blindly into the heavy smokescreen. Danielle moved the Cobra and repeated the drop sequence, releasing the other half of the mini-drone’s cargo onto the structure. In a few seconds, the house was shrouded in tear gas.
She checked Night Cobra Beta, saw it had reached its new position over the barn, and dropped its entire load at once.
“OUTCAST Six to Striker. Party favors have been passed around.”
Vessler watched as the mix of smoke and flash-bang grenades hammered the ranch house and barn. The Bradleys, which up to now had not been involved in engaging any target outside of ICEHOUSE, rotated their turrets in opposite directions and fired their autocannons. Each burst sent ten 25mm APDS-T rounds into the ranch house and barn, ripping into concrete, wood, glass, steel and flesh.
By now the tear gas had spread, entering the house and barn through the damaged windows and walls. The gunfire from both locations was lessening, the defenders either unable to continue, or waiting for better shots.
From the strike team, half a dozen more CS canisters were blasted into both the house and barn, obscuring both structures even more.
“Striker to all Sun elements: Move it, now!”
Over at the barn, the single usable DShK and the six defending North Korean engineers blindly traded fire with the MRAPs, which replied with long bursts from CROWS-mounted M2s, the .50 rounds ripping through the wooden walls and into multiple defenders. Under the covering fire of the M2s, the agents assigned to secure the barn raced toward it. The rest of the task force charged the ranch house. They triggered off short bursts from their own weapons as the M2s continued shooting into both buildings.
Despite the firepower of the Bradleys and MRAPs, several agents went down as the strike team stormed the buildings. A three-round burst from one of the Bradleys obliterated the ranch house’s front door. The barn doors, riddled with both 25mm and .50 caliber rounds, fell apart and tumbled to the ground.
At Vessler’s command, a dozen flash-bang grenades sailed through the holes in HEDGEHOG. The multiple explosions of light and sound seem to last for hours, but in fact lasted less than ten seconds. As the explosions died away, the team stormed inside.
Gunfire met them, dropping two of the first agents inside the house. The strike team replied with their own gunfire, all thought of arrest or seizing evidence replaced with instincts of survival. No quarter was asked or given, even the badly wounded suspects tried to continue the fight, forcing the strike team members to kill them.
The fighting was room to room, gunfire exchanged at point-blank range — and when guns ran dry — hand to hand. More than one agent was killed or injured by the well-trained North Koreans in hand-to-hand fighting, as knives became the preferred close-in weapon of choice.
Five minutes of savage fighting saw the ground floor in task force hands, but at a heavy toll; none of the defenders survived, and the number of injured and dead agents was into double digits. Vessler ordered the wounded to be taken outside onto the covered porch while she considered her next move.
Vessler knelt at the base of the stairs. Splattered with blood from both friend and foe, she was stressed, her joints and limbs aching. She and half a dozen agents had been ready to charge up the stairs, but after the fight on the first floor, none were eager for round two.
“Striker, this is Gandolf. HAYBALE is secured. Three friendlies dead, four wounded. No prisoners. SOBs went down fighting.”
Vessler exhaled slowly. “Copy, Gandolf.”
“Striker, there’s tons of fertilizer in here, along with three trucks, explosives, fuel oil, and what looks like the parts to several detonators. Looks like these bastards were constructing Oklahoma City-sized truck bombs.”
Vessler felt herself get cold. “Ramrod, did you—”
“Copy, Striker,” Mulkerin said. “I have my OD guys on their way. Gandolf, don’t touch anything without my boys’ say-so. If any of that stuff goes off, there won’t be enough of you left to fit into a thimble.”
“Copy, Ramrod. We’re staying away from it all.”
Vessler took deep breaths to steady herself, then felt nauseous as she inhaled the smells of blood, smoke and other smells of combat. “Striker to OUTCAST Six…”
“OUTCAST Six here.”
Vessler felt a surge of anger at Danielle’s calm demeanor, but dismissed it. The tech specialist had done her share of fighting, but her skills were needed elsewhere on this battlefield. “I need you to run Cobra over for a look-see at the second floor of HEDGEHOG. We have the first, but the cost was high.”