The hard-drive utility reported that it had finished its work on time, which Kyra thought was no small miracle. She powered the machine down, pulled the removable hard drive from its chassis, and fed it and the sat phone’s crypto card into the industrial shredder in the storage closet connected to the room. The sounds of grinding metal were, at once, the most hideous and beautiful noise Kyra had ever heard as the shredder turned the drive platters into shavings. The shredder finished dining on the storage device and the card, and Kyra powered it down.
She ran for the garage.
It truly was an enormous house by Russian standards, and if it was a CIA safe house, Anton Semyonovich Sokolov could not fathom why the Americans had chosen it. The gates and fence provided no true security from the security forces, as the Spetsnaz had just proven by climbing the iron spikes, and the relative wealth on display could only draw attention. Perhaps the Agency had expected that to deflect suspicion, a daring move in a mind game that had stretched on for decades. Or, perhaps, some mindless bureaucrat had simply had money to burn. Whatever the logic, Lavrov’s source had rendered it moot and cut through the illusions that had kept the building secure.
The sun was behind the trees and the house itself cast a long shadow that reached to the gate, giving the Spetsnaz a dark trail to follow as they ran across the lawn, carbines raised. There was no obvious movement inside the house itself, which was mostly dark. There was a light visible on the upper floor and one in the kitchen, but the rest of the windows were black. The size of the building itself had required every man at his disposal for the raid and two dozen, four teams, were moving into position to enter the house, the rest positioned on the ground to catch anyone who tried to run.
“All teams in position,” the team leader called out over the radio.
Sokolov frowned. “No response from inside?”
“Nyet, Colonel.”
The GRU officer scanned the compound, then looked through his field glasses at the house itself. The light inside let him see into a room on the upper story, and some secondary illumination cast a glow into one of the front rooms on the main level, but there was no movement anywhere. He pursed his lips. Something was amiss, he was sure, but he could not see it.
“Proceed,” he said, finally giving the order.
At the front, the team leader nodded to the officer heading the stack of four positioned by the door. The lead man nodded, drew back with the heavy sledge in his hands, and slammed the breaching tool forward into the knob. The door shuddered, but held fast. The man pulled back and swung the sledge again, this time battering it against the middle hinge. The door shook again but stayed fixed in place.
“Front door is reinforced,” the team leader reported, speaking into the microphone clipped to his uniform.
“Rear entry is reinforced,” his radio announced. The team behind the house was having no better luck.
“Side entry is reinforced.” A different voice this time, same report.
“Garage door breached, garage entry to the house is reinforced and door is secured with a keypad.”
So it is a safe house, Sokolov told himself. Or the owner is very paranoid. Probably a criminal who should be arrested anyway. He raised his field glasses. Still, there was no movement inside the house.
“All teams, proceed with ballistic breach—”
“This is team four,” Sokolov’s radio announced. “The doorframe of the garage entry is reinforced with heavy metal. Hinges are nonstandard. Ballistic breaching round likely will not penetrate. Permission to perform explosive breach.”
Sokolov’s eyebrows went up. The teams all had specialized breaching rounds that vaporized on impact to protect the shooters and teams from ricochet. “Team four, is solid slug an option?”
“Nyet. The first slug almost certainly would not penetrate, and likely would ricochet. I would prefer not to risk that, given that we are standing in an enclosed space.”
Sokolov’s eyebrows went up at that news. They had not run into this particular problem at any of the other reported safe houses. Those had all had wooden doors, solid oak to be sure, but nothing the men hadn’t been able to breach with sledges or shotguns. The specialized shotgun rounds were preferable, as a solid slug fired point-blank from a twelve-gauge shotgun could overpenetrate a door, blowing through the wood and killing a suspect on the other side. That assumed the door was even composed of wood. Someone willing to install a hardened metal doorframe likely would not use a wooden door. The entry likely was a metal plate covered with wood veneer. His teams were trained to fire two rounds at a knob, three at a hinge, just to be sure the chosen weak point of the door was destroyed. Fired into a metal door, those rounds might go in every direction but into the house itself.
Armored against a ballistic breach? Someone is paranoid indeed, he thought. A metal door suggested that they had found one of the Main Enemy’s primary facilities outside his embassy. “All teams, prepare for explosive breach at your discretion,” he ordered through his own mic.
The team leader in the mudroom pulled a flexible linear charge from his pack. Doing the math in his head, he began to run lines of detonation cord the length of the door, top to bottom by the hinges. One line would have taken apart a hollow door, two would tear apart anything made from particleboard, and three could cut through solid wood. Not knowing how thick the metal core at the door’s center might be, he opted to tape six lines onto the barrier. If that failed, getting through the door would require a specialist to cut through the door with a plasma torch. His team would have to resign itself to guarding the room and preventing any escape while the other teams swept the house.
He ordered his men out of the mudroom, attached the blasting cap, and connected the firing line.
The team leader at the front door nodded to the stack lead and the line of men while he pulled a two-inch-square block of Semtex from his pack. He fastened the putty brick to the doorknob with a loop of detonation cord connected to the explosive with uli knots. Loose ends of detcord hung down and he tied them into a square knot. He tied in the blasting cap and connected his own firing line, then fell back to his own safe position. Then he tied the detcord line into the fuse initiator.
“First team, breaching charge in place. Standing by to breach.” The other teams reported back within seconds, their own charges fixed and ready to fire.
“Go,” Sokolov ordered.
The team leader ripped the cotter pin from the initiator, a hard, sharp pull.
The detcord ignited, followed by the Semtex, and flames and smoke exploded from the door, with simultaneous eruptions coming from the rear and side of the house. The explosion inside the garage was deafening and the team leader out front hoped that his counterpart hadn’t miscalculated the explosive required. Overloaded breaching charges had deafened more than one soldier performing such duties.
The front door slammed open and the stack of soldiers rushed forward, carbines raised. They entered the house, pushing through the gray haze—