“Find us a safe place to let us off and then get out of here,” Avery instructed Major Warner over the cabin’s intercom.
Below, he saw the wreckage of the FAST team’s Suburbans still smoking, bodies scattered around them, and puddles of blood in the street. He saw the ragtag Empresa shooters scattered along the street, behind cars and between buildings, firing their weapons at the helicopters.
Avery glanced back to see the crippled Blackhawk limp away through the sky. Its flight sputtered and wavered, and it looked like the helicopter would go down any second. That chopper carried two of Aguilar’s men, reducing the rescue force almost by half, leaving Avery with just Aguilar and Diego.
When he looked to them, Aguilar nodded, indicating they weren’t backing out.
The idea of abandoning them did not sit well with Warner. She started to object, but Avery cut her off.
“You’re our only ride out of here once we get the FAST team. We need to keep this bird intact.”
“Roger that,” Warner reluctantly agreed. “There’s a park barely half a klick directly north of here.”
“I know where it’s at.” Avery recalled the park from the maps.
“I’ll set her down there. It’s the only suitable LZ on the whole damn island.” Warner turned the cyclic and put the Blackhawk into a sharp turn, steering them about half a block from the target building, over the back alley, and cut their altitude by fifty feet. “Just get our people out of there, okay?”
“Roger that.”
Avery didn’t rate their chances well. He wasn’t being pessimistic, just realistic, but however grim it looked, he wasn’t going to turn away now and abandon Layton’s agents. He’d bring them out, or he’d die with them.
At least in the meantime, the arrival of the helicopters seemed to have taken some of the heat off Layton’s team as the Empresa forces became fixated on the more immediate threat circling overhead.
“Where do you want me to set you down?” Warner asked. “We don’t have a lot of options here.”
Avery disconnected from his safety harness. He stood up and kept his head low as incoming 5.56mm continued to rain against the Blackhawk. He leaned forward into the cockpit, holding onto the airframe to support himself, peering past the pilots’ shoulders through the windscreen.
“That rooftop over there,” he shouted to be heard over the rotor wash and the thundering rattle from the mini-guns. He pointed to a four-story building five doors down from the apartment where Layton’s team was held up. The building had rooftop access and, slightly taller than the other buildings, provided good line of fire onto the street below.
“You got it.”
Avery felt the Blackhawk come around in a sharp turn as Warner positioned it over the selected drop zone, and hovered. There was the steady, unrelenting braying of the mini-guns in his ears as the door gunner blasted a rooftop RPG gunner in the process of taking up aim.
One of the Blackhawk’s flight crew already dropped two strands of thick, braided, nylon climbing rope attached to winches mounted to the low ceiling of the cabin. The bottom several feet of the ropes lay over the building’s rooftop.
Aguilar came up beside Avery. Both men took a strand of rope and wrapped their gloved hands around it. They stepped out of the cabin, pressed their boots together with the rope between their legs, knees bent, and rode the ropes down like fireman’s poles.
Avery had fast-roped so many times before as a Ranger, it was second nature. As the square, concrete surface came up fast toward the soles of his boots, he swept his eyes along the street below and the surrounding rooftops and windows, mentally noting the positions and concentrations of enemy fighters. He heard the cracks of gunfire, but the shooters in the narrow street below didn’t have good line of sight to the fast ropers, and the rounds struck the side of the building or went too steep and came nowhere near them. The Empresa shooters on the rooftops across the street, the more immediate threat, fell back and took cover from the Blackhawk’s mini-gun.
Avery landed harder than he’d intended, jarring his ankle, and he felt the tight strain in his knees, but it didn’t slow him down. He snapped his M4 off his vest, bringing it up into the ready position, and sprinted several steps forward to clear space for Aguilar and Diego.
With all of the team safely dismounted, the Blackhawk broke away.
Diego ran the twenty feet to the front of the building, dropped prone, extended the NG7’s bipod legs, rested the barrel of the machinegun over the roof’s low parapet, and opened up. He directed a stream of 5.56mm two hundred feet through the air to the rooftop across the street and shot up two Empresa as they attempted to take up firing positions.
Twelve feet away, Aguilar and Avery picked off more shooters across the way, including one tango attempting to retrieve an RPG from a pulverized corpse.
“I got this!” Diego shouted to his teammates between firing bursts on the machinegun. “Get your asses down there.”
“Let’s go!” Avery called out to Aguilar.
Avery hopped onto his feet, feeling the pain shoot up his ankle with each step as he dashed across the roof to where the access hatch was set. He blasted the lock with a single shot, pulled the hatch open, and peered down into the small maintenance storage room inside. It was dark, empty, and smelled of chemicals.
Avery saw a shadow move across the rooftop and felt a hand pat his shoulder, Aguilar letting him know he was here. Avery slipped through the hatch and shimmied down the ten foot tall ladder. Three feet off the floor, he jumped the rest of the way and swept his rifle around. The room was clear. He waved up at Aguilar, and the Colombian climbed down.
They emerged from the maintenance room into an empty hallway with doors leading into residential units on either side.
There was the sound of a lock disengaging and voices.
Both men immediately spun in the direction of the sound, and trained their weapons on a door as it slowly opened, revealing a middle-aged man with a young girl cowering behind his legs, clinging to him and peeking out into the hallway.
“Get inside and stay the fuck down!” Avery shouted.
There wasn’t time to be nice in situations like this. The sooner people obeyed the better, for their own safety, and people moved faster when there was a loud, crazed man with a gun, screaming orders at them.
The man obeyed, and the little girl cried.
Diego’s voice filled Avery’s and Aguilar’s earbuds. “I see several tangos converging on the building. They’re coming up after us, and a truck just pulled up. Eight more tangos are dismounting. These fuckers are everywhere.”
Avery exchanged looks with Aguilar, but neither man was fazed by the grim news. The latter hit his push-to-talk to acknowledge Diego’s transmission, while Avery hit his mag release and inserted a fresh clip into the bottom of his M4.
They continued down the hallway.
Turning the corner, they came to the stairwell.
Aguilar held out a hand to stop Avery from going further, a worried expression on his face. “I don’t want to get caught in the fucking stairs.”
Avery shared the sentiment. Stairwells were death traps during close quarters battle. They were physically exhausting, and every corner before the next landing was a blind one. Hallways were bad, too, known in the trade as fatal funnels, for their narrow, open space and lack of cover.
They heard the Empresa coming through the front door, into the foyer, four floors below. The intruders shouted, stomped their feet, fired a couple rounds to announce their presence, slammed doors, and barked orders at some poor bastard who crossed their path. These guys didn’t care about stealth.
Avery looked around. There was another apartment unit seven feet directly behind.