Viper: A Thriller (24 page)

“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.

“Agreed, but we
have noncombatants up here. I don’t want some fucking kid catching a stray
round. We’ll stop on the third floor landing, and hopefully catch them coming
up.”

While Avery kept
his M4 angled down the stairwell, trained at the third floor landing, Aguilar
stepped over to the apartment door and pounded his fist against it. In Spanish,
he shouted out, “Get in the fucking bathtub and stay down!”

A woman’s voice
yelled something back, but Aguilar had already walked away and came back up
beside Avery.

“Ready?” Aguilar
asked Avery.

They could hear
wooden stairs creaking under the weight of footfalls coming up.

“Let’s do this.”

Aiming their
rifles on down angles, they descended the eight steps onto the landing, stopped
there, and stacked up against the wall, pointing their barrels down the next
section of stairs. They could hear the rowdy voices and footsteps of men coming
up the stairs from below.

Avery swung his
rifle left, aiming down the second floor hallway, ensuring it was clear. He next
selected an M84 stun grenade from his vest. He snapped off the pull ring and
squeezed the safety lever in his right hand, while Aguilar dropped onto one
knee, three feet from Avery’s side, covering him with his Galil.

Avery gave the
M84 a curved throw, tossing it around the corner and down the stairs.

A voice shouted
in Spanish and was cut off by the thunderous, 180 decibel concussion of the
grenade’s detonation.

Even from behind
the corner and through clenched eyes, Avery saw the radiant flash of bright
white. He felt the walls shake around him and the floor shudder beneath his
feet.

“Go!” Avery
shouted.

He and Aguilar
readied their rifles and stepped around the corner.

A black Empresa
shooter opened fire immediately with his Uzi. He sprayed blindly, his rounds
going high above Avery’s and Aguilar’s heads, drilling the walls and ceiling.
Avery sighted his target and tapped his trigger twice.

Another blind,
disorientated Empresa man staggered into a wall, lost his footing, and fell
over onto the second floor landing. Aguilar aimed low and stitched him in his exposed
upper back and shoulders. The body twitched with each hit, and splashes of blood
rooster-tailed into the air as the 5.56mm bullets passed through him.

The gunshots
were amplified within the tight confines of the stairwell. Ejected shell
casings arced through the air, rolled, and clattered down the stairs.

Two more Empresa
were caught on the second floor landing, on a six-foot downward slope from
Avery and Aguilar. One had his M16 raised and waved it left to right while he
blinked his eyes madly, trying desperately to restore his vision. The other had
his rifle aimed upward as he bent over and reached down with his free hand to
feel for what had just landed in front of him, unaware it was the body of the
man Aguilar just shot.

Avery and
Aguilar instantly acquired their targets and fired simultaneously before either
Empresa knew what hit him. The bodies became piled up at the bottom of the stairs.

Avery and
Aguilar continued down the stairs, stepping over the bloody bodies and turning
the corner of the second floor landing onto the stairs going onto the ground
floor. A gray smoke haze hung in the air, carrying the stench of nitroglycerin
and graphite.

Two more Empresa
waited on the ground floor. Upon seeing the American and Colombian operators
appear on the second floor landing, one managed to get off a burst from his M16
that went too low and bore through the stairs beneath Avery’s feet.

 Avery fired
back too fast, missing his target, before he and Aguilar retreated back behind
the corner of the landing, where Avery pulled his remaining M84 from his vest. He
tugged the ring and let the grenade fly around the corner, down into the first
floor foyer. They waited for the detonation, and charged back around the
corner, following their rifles down the stairs.

One Empresa
shooter had been standing too close to the grenade when it went off, and the
bottom of his pant leg was on fire. He tried desperately to put it out,
presenting an easy target, and Avery shot him through the top of his head,
splitting the skull like a melon and spilling blood over the floor.

Avery stepped
clear of the stairs with Aguilar behind him.

There were two
more shooters in the foyer. One was far back, near the front doors, and seemed unfazed
by the stun grenade. He had his AK shouldered and hit the trigger the second he
saw Avery emerge from the stairwell. Avery sidestepped right as he came into
the foyer, out of the way of the 7.62mm, so close he could feel the shots
streak past him through the air, and he shot the Empresa man three times in the
chest and once in the head.

Coming into the
foyer right behind Avery, Aguilar took out the remaining Empresa attacker, who
had dropped his rifle, his eyes unfocused and flickering madly, and was now on
his knees with his hands held up in the air in a futile show of surrender.

They swept the
rest of the ground floor, and a raspy, wheezing cough caught Avery’s attention.
He followed the sound to its source and crouched down to flip over a body. A
wounded Colombian stared up at him, bleeding rapidly from the hole in his chest.
His body felt like limp, deadweight, but he still clung to his Uzi. Avery
pulled the gun out of the Colombians hand and tossed it aside.

“Fucking gringo
pigs,” the man breathed. He spit blood onto Avery’s pant leg. “Bunch of fucking
pussies.”

Avery took a
couple steps back. Aiming low from three feet away, he discharged a single shot
into the Colombian’s crotch. Blood exploded across the Colombian’s lap, and he
screamed uncontrollably. After kicking away a nearby M16 to ensure there were
no weapons within reach, Avery turned and walked away, leaving the gangbanger
to painfully bleed out.

With Aguilar, he
proceeded out the side door, and headed into the alley. Additional gunfire sounded
around them as the DEA team continued to hold off the Empresa and Diego laid
out more fire from the rooftop above.

Avery and
Aguilar leap-frogged the length of the alley to the building where the DEA
agents were held up, and Avery alerted Layton over the radio that they’d be
coming in through the back in about one minute. He gave Layton a description of
what he and Aguilar were wearing. Layton acknowledged, relief in his voice, and
urged them to hurry.

The alley was
narrow. Brightly colored, crudely rendered graffiti decorated the walls of the
buildings. All manner of trash littered the ground, pouring out of overfilled
and overturned receptacles.

Approaching the
target from the alley, two Empresa men were crouched down firing into the
blown-out open spaces of the building’s door and windows. Turning a corner,
Aguilar saw them first, their backs to him, and he held up a hand to warn Avery
and signal him to slow down.

Avery took
Aguilar’s cue, saw the shooters, shouldered his M4, and drilled one of them
through the back, just below the neck, from thirty-five feet away, severing the
spinal column. As the body went immediately limp and collapsed, like someone
flipped his off switch, his partner started to turn around, leading with his
rifle. He was too slow, unable to bring his weapon to bear before Aguilar’s
finger tapped his Galil’s trigger twice, hitting him in the eye and cheek, blowing
out the side of his head.