On his second step across the floor, Avery shot down a nearby Uzbek and tracked for more targets.
As he jumped off the conveyor belt to clear space for Flounder’s entry, Poacher took the nearest Pakistani technician with two shots through the back of his head as he attempted to flee, then Poacher shifted aim and double tapped an Afghan as he threw the rifle that had been slung across his chest into firing position.
Simultaneously, coming off the conveyor belt, Flounder dropped onto one knee and eliminated another Uzbek guard.
Avery came around the conveyor belt. A blur of movement registered in his left peripheral, and he shifted his pistol around. Ali Masood Jafari kept his head low as he ran for the metal staircase, yelling in Dari along the way. Avery popped him twice between the shoulder blades and put another round through the back of his head as he hit the floor.
A pair of boots entered Avery’s upper field of vision. He flicked his eyes upward, off Jafari’s body, up the stairs, and onto an Uzbek who had just appeared at the top of the landing. Avery raised his aim, steadied his arms, and fired. His first shot whipped past the Uzbek mercenary’s shoulder, and he brought up his AK-74 carbine and crouched down, presenting a smaller target profile. Avery’s shot ricocheted harmlessly behind the Uzbek.
Determined to take the fucker out before he could fire his AK and alert everyone in the whole place, Avery adjusted aim, took and held a deep breath to keep his body still, and put a .45 through the Uzbek’s chin, shattering the lower half of his skull and spraying blood into the air.
Meanwhile, fourteen feet from Avery, one of the Pakistani technicians hurled a wrench at Poacher in a desperate last act of defense. The ex-Delta NCO easily sidestepped out of the way of the wrench and double-tapped the technician, while Flounder weaved a path between the industrial machinery. Finding the remaining two Pakistani scientists, he shot them down.
The team swept the rest of the factory, moving fast, knowing that there were still two more targets on the loose somewhere.
Then they heard the sound of metal and locks disengaging. From their respective positions across the assembly floor, the CIA soldiers converged on the source of the sound as Mullah Arzad heaved open the main doors and ran outside. Nearby was a large, vertical air duct behind which he’d been hiding. The remaining Uzbek fighter was behind him, near the duct, with his rifle covering the mullah. The Uzbek broke cover to follow Arzad, and that’s when Flounder took him, shooting him three times in the back.
The CIA men made no move to go after Arzad, knowing full well what he was about to run into.
Outside the mill building, Mockingbird held his Mk 23 level in front of him from five feet away. The Taliban commander stopped in his tracks, surprised at the sight of the black-clad operator in front of him, the white of his eyes apparent through the darkness. Mockingbird lowered his aim and gut shot him twice.
Arzad groaned, stumbled back a couple steps, and, overtaken by the pain, collapsed onto his knees with one hand pressed against the floor, the other held tightly against his bleeding, burning intestines. Mockingbird let him suffer in agony for another couple seconds before finishing him off with a shot through the top of his head. The Taliban commander collapsed face first onto a puddle of his own blood, with a small section of bloody brain exposed through his cracked skull.
Maintaining his firing stance, Mockingbird stepped over Arzad and into the factory. When he spotted Flounder, he lowered his weapon, squatted to grab Arzad’s body by the robe, and dragged it inside. Flounder shut the doors behind Mockingbird and gave him a thumbs-up for being the one to take out one of JSOC’s most wanted HVTs.
Avery and Poacher continued their sweep of the factory floor and, after announcing that it was clear, re-joined the others while maintaining ready positions with their weapons and keeping the doors and stairwell covered.
The takedown of the assembly floor took only eleven seconds. Most importantly, none of the armed tangos had been able to get a single shot off and draw the attention of everyone else inside the building.
Avery hand signaled what he wanted everyone to do next.
Mockingbird would hold the first floor. Poacher and Flounder would take the second floor, while Avery took the third.
01:33. Mockingbird covered his teammates as they scaled the skeletal stairs. They took slow, light steps so that their boots didn’t clatter off the metal surface of the stairs.
At the second level landing, they split up. Avery continued following the stairs up, while Poacher and Flounder charged down the second floor corridor.
The corridor was brightly illuminated with fluorescent lighting set in the high ceiling and was about thirty feet in length, with four doors, two on one side, one on the other, and the fourth set in the end of the corridor. The corridor was cold and looked sterile and clinical. Without knowing what lay on the other sides of those doors, they’d need to systematically clear every room one by one.
Poacher gently tried the latch on the first door. It was unlocked.
Flounder covered him as he opened the door, threw a flashbang into the darkened space, pulled the door closed, waited for the thunderous detonation, and kicked the door in on its hinges.
Inside the large open room — about thirty-by-forty-five feet, with sinks, a couple square tables, chairs, two refrigerators on the far end, and two dozen cots laid out in rows, half of them occupied — one Russian, five Pakistanis, and four jihadist-looking Afghans or Uzbeks sat up in their cots.
The Russian, the way he moved and acted, looked like a civilian or scientist-type without military training, and so did the Pakistanis. Unlike the Afghans and Uzbeks, they didn’t reach for weapons, but that wasn’t going to save them.
Poacher and Flounder put down the Afghans and Uzbeks first as they reached for AKs on the floor beneath their cots. Reeling from the disorientating effects of the flashbang, the Taliban fighters’ movements were clumsy and uncoordinated. Their weapons never cleared the floor before .45 hollow points split their skulls apart, one after the other, like targets lined up in a shooting gallery.
Poacher shifted aim onto the Russian as the man stumbled out of his cot, tripping over a sheet that was still tucked in beneath his mattress, while Flounder calmly dispatched a Pakistani who was also on his feet, staggering blindly toward a wall.
Without a second’s hesitation, Poacher and Flounder proceeded to coldly and systematically execute the remaining scientists and technicians with one or two shots to the head, even as one pleaded in heavily accented English that he wasn’t armed.
When they were finished, four seconds after entry, Poacher and Flounder stepped back into the corridor and replaced magazines.
Poacher was a soldier. Usually, he’d view killing a non-combatant as cowardly and immoral. But he experienced no qualms or guilt about those scientists and technicians. Those men had probably never held a gun in their lives, but they were knowingly and willfully working to create weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands, and for a WMD operation like this, the scientific minds, and the knowledge they contained, were even more valuable resources than the mechanical equipment and components.
That’s why Israel assassinated civilian Iranian nuclear scientists. With time and money, Tehran could replace a cascade of centrifuges, but they couldn’t replace skilled and knowledgeable human beings quite as easily.
Poacher and Flounder continued their sweep of the second floor, moving faster now, aware that the flashbang had surely given them away.
The next door down the line was locked.
Flounder blasted the lock with a three round burst and kicked the door in. Inside was a large, empty utility room filled with electrical panels, air handlers, and whirring machinery involved in the operations and maintenance of the building, but Flounder still gave the room a thorough walk through in case someone was hiding. The last thing they needed was to keep going down the corridor and have someone pop out behind them.