The suppressed HK gave a sharp-edged cough, and the shot punched through the man's forehead just as he turned to say something to his partner on the truck. The impact slapped him back across the roof of the UAZ's cab with a neat, round hole just beneath his hat brim; his friend was just starting to turn to face the dead man, not even aware yet that something was wrong, when a second round drilled through the base of his neck, shattering vertebrae with a crack that sounded larger and louder than the shot itself. Murdock followed that shot with a second make-sure round to the back of the falling man's head, then shifted targets.
With Murdock's first shot the signal, all five SEALs were shooting now, sending round after round snapping into the bewildered, close-packed gaggle of militia troops in a sudden, devastating fusillade. The sound-suppressed shots were far louder than television thrillers portrayed them, reminding Murdock of the noise made by someone beating a rug, but without the ear-splitting crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier.
The man demanding Gypsy's papers dropped to his knees, as Gypsy, his glasses and face and overcoat splattered with blood, screamed. The other armed militiaman spun toward the gunfire, his AK coming up to his shoulder just as Brown punched two rounds squarely into his chest.
The SEAL volley scythed through the Serb militiamen, dropping them one after another. A soldier in greatcoat and steel helmet fumbled for his AK, then slumped against the truck's flag-painted door; the camo-garbed man next to him gave a gasp that ended in a strangled gurgle as blood sprayed from his opened throat. A bearded soldier back-lit by the fire fumbled with the AK slung muzzle-down over his back; by the time he had the weapon twisted around to where he could use it, four rounds from two different directions had slammed into his chest, pitching him back against the fifty-five-gallon drum, and then drum and body together hit the pavement with a thud and a clatter, spilling burning wood across the ground. Nearby, the big soldier on top of the naked girl lurched to his knees, his trousers bunched ridiculously around his ankles as he yelled something that could only be an obscenity and groped for a rifle, and then three bloody holes popped open across his face in one-two-three succession. The back of his head exploded; the girl shrieked hysterically as he collapsed in a bloody-headed sprawl across her legs. The soldiers holding her let go and rose in a confused tangle, colliding with one another and then going down, as splatters of their blood flicked across the stones at their backs. Two broke and made a dash for the cemetery wall off to the right. Murdock pivoted, taking careful aim, leading his target. His first round missed; his second caught the lead runner and flopped him facedown in the grass. His companion leaped over the still-rolling body, raced for the wall, then spun kicking as Doc opened up from the trees to the right with a well-aimed, three-round burst.
In front of the monastery door, a bearded soldier had grabbed the older woman from behind. Now, using her as a shield, he was edging sideways up the steps and toward the monastery door, but before he could reach it a bloody third eye winked open just above the bridge of his nose, and he flopped back against the massive wood door of the building in a gory splatter of blood and brains. SEALs trained long and hard to make difficult shots past the shoulders of human shields.
Murdock shifted his HK left and right. No clear targets… no clear targets…
"Razor! Boomer!" Murdock called over the tactical channel. He thumbed his magazine release, dropping a partly full mag, snapped a full one into its place. "With me! Bounding overmatch!" Rising, he stepped from the brush, HK held tightly against his shoulder as he rushed forward, thumbing his HK's selector to three-shot-burst mode. He reached the closest truck, then waited as Boomer and Razor dashed up from the treeline, weapons at their shoulders. Bodies lay everywhere. Most were motionless, but a screaming militiaman writhed head-down on the monastery steps, both hands clutching at a baseball-sized hole in his stomach. His shirt and the stone steps beneath him were covered with blood that looked black through the NVDs. Murdock fired once, putting three closely spaced rounds through the wounded man's skull, and the screaming stopped.
That particular scream, at any rate. The naked girl was still alternately shrieking and gasping as she struggled to free herself from beneath the dead weight of the man lying across her legs. Gypsy was kneeling beside his jeep, eyes wide and staring, moaning and rocking back and forth. The other two women were leaning against one another on the blood-smeared monastery steps, sobbing hysterically. "Mac!" he yelled over the tactical channel. "Get Gypsy down and safe!"
"Right, L-T!"
Some part of Murdock's mind had been keeping track of targets going down, just like in the Fun House back at Little Creek. He'd counted fifteen floppers… was that right? Four… eight… ten… right. Fifteen down. That left three. Sound-suppressed shots snapped out nearby.
"Blue five," Boomer's voice sounded over the radio. "One flopper. He's down."
Shit! Where were they?
There! A shadow breaking from beneath one of the trucks, running toward the left. Murdock fired, missed, and fired again. The burst smacked chips from the monastery wall close by the corner of the building. The militiaman lurched to a halt, spun about, and thrust his arms into the air. "Molim!" the Serb shrieked, his hands waving above his head. It was the young one with the attempt at a mustache. He didn't look any older than the girl he'd been pawing… a teenager, seventeen or eighteen, Murdock thought. He was babbling incoherently, tears streaming down his face, plainly terrified of these black apparitions that had materialized out of the night. "Ne! Ne! Molim!"
"Sorry," Murdock said, and he squeezed the HK's trigger once more. "Nothing personal."
He checked his watch. The firefight, from first shot to last, had taken just fifteen seconds.
3
"Jesus!" Roselli said. "L-T, you killed him!"
"Damn straight." Murdock checked the kid's right hand. On the back of his wrist were the letters CCCC–Cyrillic initials that stood for "Only Solidarity Can Save the Serbs."
So much hatred in this land. "Doc! Professor! I think we're still missing one. Any sign of him?"
"Negative, L-T," Doc's voice came back.
"Same here, Sir."
"Okay. Doc, you come in and help Mac. Professor, you swing around to the rear of the building. Magic, you go with him… and check inside the building too. Look sharp and stay together. Mac? How's Gypsy?"
Mac had the CIA contact flat on the ground now. The man was trembling, his face and coat covered with blood.
"Shaken up, but I think he'll be okay. All that blood's not his, thank God. He got splashed by the bad guy next to him."
"Roger that. Anybody in the squad hurt?"
"Hell," Roselli said. "I don't think the sons of bitches even got off one shot."
Hadn't they? In the adrenaline-pulsing heat of the firefight, Murdock hadn't even noticed. Now that he thought about it, though, he realized he hadn't heard any unsuppressed gunfire… just the harsh thumps of the SEAL HKs and M-16s.
Doc came trotting up as Murdock peeled off the NVDs, now grown intolerably heavy. "Doc, check our boy out."
"Right, L-T."
Murdock and Roselli went to the women next, freeing the one still trapped on the mattress, then using their SEAL diving knives to cut the twine that had been used to bind the wrists of all three. Roselli produced a relatively clean overcoat from somewhere and draped it over the girl's shivering, bony shoulders. "Silovana sam," she said in a low and trembling voice, repeating the words over and over. "Silovana sam."
"Take charge here, Razor," Murdock said. "See if any of them speak English, see if you can get sense out of them. Check with Doc if you think they need meds or anything."