Authors: Ross Sidor
The lead pilot,
a female US Army major named Toni Warner, jumped down from the open cabin of her
Blackhawk as Avery approached. She stepped out from under the rotor wash of the
blades and lifted her helmet’s visor.
Terse
introductions were made, handshakes exchanged.
“Your people been
briefed?” Avery asked.
“We have,”
Warner replied, her gaze wavering, “and I should mention that I don’t exactly
have proper clearance or rules of engagement from my chain of command to do
what you’re asking.”
“You’re assigned
temporary duty to this DEA task force. Right now, we have agents under fire,
and we have flight clearance from the Colombians.”
Daniel had
pulled some strings to arrange for that, much to Rangel’s chagrin.
“Roger that,
Carnivore, but you guys don’t look like DEA, and…the thing is this is still way
outside of my mission profile.”
Exasperated, unable
to tolerate more rear echelon bureaucratic mêlées searching for any reason to
justify inaction, Avery started to react, but the pilot sharply cut him off.
“So I’ve sent a
message up my chain of command stating that unless otherwise directed, I’m
taking my birds up to the Colombian coast to bring out some DEA shooters, and
that while going to all possible lengths to avoid enemy contact, I will take
whatever action is necessary to defend my aircraft and crew. Unfortunately,
I’ve been having radio trouble, so they may have difficult time getting back to
me.”
For the first
time in over a week, the barest vestige of a smile parted Avery’s lips.
“So I reckon we
should be on our way,” Warner said.
They were in the
air three minutes later at 08:04.
__
“What do you see out there?” Layton
asked Harris, who was crouched low near the building’s front window.
It was quiet
now. The shooting had let up a couple minutes ago.
Tyson was positioned
at the end of the rear hallway covering the back entrance into the apartment’s
ground floor. So far, he’d reported no activity from the attackers on his end,
but no one expected that to last—if the Empresa was going to make entry, they’d
flank the building. Plus Tyson’s only view into the outside world came through
a small, dirty, dusty window. He rested on one knee, his MP7 held at the ready
in front of him.
Layton kept
inside the foyer, pacing the floor space and the length of the hallway, keeping
tabs on all of his men, burning pent-up energy.
Weaver watched
over Sean Nolan and Foster in the foyer. Foster, despite the crude tourniquet
applied to his left thigh, which he kept elevated above his heart with his leg
leaning upright against a chair, continued to rapidly lose blood. Layton talked
to Foster, told him to keep his eyes open, trying to keep him awake, but he
knew they were losing him.
Nolan sat
cross-legged on the floor with his head resting back against the wall. He
hadn’t said a word. He appeared bored and disinterested with how events
unfolded, confident that he would soon be a free man, or at least transferred
into the hands of La Empresa, at which point he could simply buy his freedom.
Weaver was on
the Globalstar satellite phone again with the ops room at the airport,
struggling to hide his frustration with those who were three dozen miles away
and trying to tell his team what to do. Weaver held his MP7 in his right hand
and kept his attention focused on Nolan the entire time.
“They’ve got
reinforcements coming,” Harris called out. “A van just pulled up. Seven guys
getting out. One has an RPG. I count thirteen…no, fourteen tangos total on the
street, plus an unknown number on the rooftops; I can’t see too high up from
here. A couple of them are standing around smoking joints.”
“Well, at least they
don’t seem intent on attacking us at the moment,” Layton observed. And his team
didn’t have the firepower or numbers to repel them and make an escape on foot. Not
with their wounded. Not in a city where the neighborhoods that weren’t
controlled by La Empresa were occupied by Los Urabeños.
“Oh fuck, boss,”
Harris’s voice cracked. “The cocksuckers are dragging Rob and Dwight’s bodies
into the middle of the street. They’re pouring a bottle of something over them…Christ;
those fucks are lighting them up! I’ve got clear line of fire, boss. I can take
them out right now.”
“Negative,”
Layton ordered. “Hold your fire, Paul. Conserve ammo. They’re trying to provoke
us.”
“Roger that,
boss,” Harris affirmed, but his voice indicated his displeasure.
A couple minutes
later, the stench of burning flesh carried through the open space of the window
frames and into the foyer. Through the shattered glass, Layton saw the smoke
rising into the sky from outside. At that moment, Layton wanted to kill those
fuckers more than he ever wanted anything else in his life.
“They’re forming
in a half a circle around the building now,” Harris said three minutes later. “They’ve
got some cars spread out all over the street for cover. It looks like the
mother-fuckers-in-charge are huddling, trying to put something together.”
Harris was quiet
for a couple minutes as he observed the scene outside.
“They’re
spreading out now, moving in different directions. Eight of them are staying
out front. Looks like four others are slipping around to the back.”
“Roger that,”
Tyson called out from thirty-five feet away, not taking his eyes away from the backdoor.
Layton had been
waiting for this. The Empresa soldiers were obviously moving into position to
make entry. They’d run out of patience and knew they couldn’t stand around in
the streets much longer before the Colombian army arrived in armored vehicles
and gunships.
Layton opened
his mouth to respond, but was cut off by the sudden, loud popping of Harris’
MP7 as he fired a three-round burst out the window. In response came the
distinctive crackle of an AK-47 from outside, hammering the wall.
“It’s okay,
boss,” Harris assured Layton. He let off another burst. “Two of the fuckers tried
sneaking up on us from behind the Suburbans. I smoked one, and scared his
friend off.”
“They’re probing
our defenses,” Layton said.
“You may be
right. They’re falling back now, and the mother-fucker-in-charge just pulled
out his cell phone, talking to his buddies up on the roof maybe.”
“We’ve got
choppers en route, with back up,” Weaver reported, having just gotten off the
phone with the ops room. He shoved the phone back into his pocket. There was a
collective sense of relief among the other agents, and Weaver waited a second
before delivering the bad news. “ETA is sixteen minutes.”
Sixteen minutes
may just as well have been an hour. A hell of a lot could happen in that time,
very little of it good. More important, Layton knew that Foster didn’t have sixteen
minutes.
There were
groans and murmurs of disappointment.
“We’ll just
have to hold out,” Layton said.
“I don’t think
they’re gonna give us that chance, Tom,” Tyson called out from down the
hallway. He stood up on his feet, staying low in a half crouch, to present a
smaller target, and took a couple steps back from the door. “I’m hearing voices
and a lot of a noise out here. We’re going to have visitors.”
Almost
immediately the sound of gunfire started up from the front street, along with commands
shouted in Spanish.
Harris ducked
his head low and stayed behind the brick wall as 5.56mm and 7.62mm streamed in through
the window.
A second later,
a barrage of shots splintered the front door. The Empresa shooters fired from
about a dozen feet away, crouched behind and firing over the hoods of cars,
covering the approach of five more gunmen as they advanced toward the front
door of the apartment building.
“Front contact!”
Harris called out.
“Weaver, cover
Tyson,” Layton instructed. “We’ll take the front. These fuckers do
not
get through, you hear me!”
Weaver promptly obeyed,
treading carefully down the hallway, with his shoulders packed and upper body
leaning in, MP7 held forward in the ready position. He announced his presence
to Tyson and lightly tapped the agent’s shoulder as he came up from behind.
Standing side by side with a foot between them, the two men filled the width of
the hallway.
In the foyer, Foster,
looking white as snow, with almost lifeless eyes, and on the verge of
unconsciousness, sat up, taking his leg off the chair, and leaned against the
wall. He heaved his MP7 to his shoulder and put his sights on the front door. He
tried to hold the weapon steady, but his hands wavered and felt numb. There was
no pain—there was at this point no longer any need for his body to transmit
pain, and it instead released endorphins to minimize the body’s discomfort—but
he felt weak and soft. He concentrated on taking deep breaths, oxygenating his
blood and brain. He still had some life left in him, and he was sure as hell
going to cover his teammates’ backs while he was still here.
Six feet away,
Layton moved in closer to the front entrance on the right side of the couch
barricading the door. He dropped onto one knee, near the side of the couch, and
plucked a stun grenade from the clip on his vest.
Harris
maintained position seven feet away, left of the door and the couch, near the
blown-out window. He flipped his selector switch to single-shot to conserve
ammo. He peered through the window frame, then sprung up on his feet, aimed,
and tapped his trigger twice, dropping one of the approaching Empresa shooters.
Harris immediately dived back down below the window as the enemy opened up and directed
a fusillade of bullets in his direction.
Seconds later, Layton
heard the oncoming attackers smashing the butt-stocks of their rifles through
the front door, wood splintering and snapping against the heavy blows.
Almost
simultaneously, Tyson shouted out from his position that he also had enemy
contact.
Layton pulled the
pin on the stun grenade and maintained a tight grip around the safety lever. The
barrage against the door continued, and finally the upper half of the flimsy
door split apart above the couch and collapsed inward. But the Empresa shooters
were unable to push past the couch barricading the remaining lower half of the
door.
As the attacker’s
torso and face filled the space of the hole, Layton drilled him three times.
The body dropped, revealing two more gunmen behind him. Layton managed to take
out another one, and the remaining attacker sidestepped left, out of the way of
Layton’s bullets and out of sight.
Layton tossed
the stun grenade outside and waited for its blast before swinging his MP7 to
bear through the mangled hole in the door. He drew his sights over a target and
dropped the startled Empresa attacker, striking him in the back and ass as he
attempted to run away.
Before ducking
out of the way of incoming fire, Layton caught a glimpse of another pair of
attackers running left, after realizing that coming through the door was no
longer a viable option.
Layton sprung up
onto his feet and ran around the couch to Harris’ position. “They’re going to
try for the window!”
On cue, a
perfectly-pitched grenade was hurled through the window. It bounced off a wall,
hit the floor, and rolled. Layton’s and Harris’s eyes followed the lethal
egg-shaped bomb, now six feet away in the middle of the open space.
So did Foster,
in whose direction the grenade rolled. Time froze, and suddenly Foster was no
longer cognizant of anything else. Fueled by adrenaline and the primordial urge
to save the lives of his teammates at all costs, or at least prolong their
lives for another couple minutes, Foster threw his weight on top of the
grenade, grabbing it and curling himself around it.
The explosion
lifted his body a couple inches off the floor as he absorbed the brunt of the
shrapnel. His blood suddenly materialized against the nearest wall and the low
ceiling. More blood seeped out through numerous holes and lacerations across
his body, and a gray smoke cloud expanded in the air over him. His eyes were
open and stared vacantly at nothing.
For a second,
Layton was left in a state of shock, his mind catching up with what he just
saw. But he heard the supersonic crack in the air of bullets whizzing past his
head, and he put his mind back in the game.
Believing they’d
incapacitated the besieged DEA agents inside the apartment building’s foyer,
the Empresa soldiers converged on the window. One, a West African in his early
twenties with a glazed-over look to his bloodshot eyes, stuck the barrel of his
AK into the foyer through the window frame and fired a wild spray on full
automatic from left to right. Harris took two hits against his vest and was
knocked back. Layton stepped up from the side and fired back through the window
into the attacker’s unprotected chest and neck. The gangbanger dropped straight
down and never moved again.
Four feet back
from where the first one died, another gunman fired his AK-47 into the foyer. Layton
and Harris, who regained his bearings, fired back simultaneously and eliminated
the threat.