Torching the Crimson Flag Read online

  His phone chirped. He’d gotten a text message from KK. Apparently, the harbormaster of Honolulu Harbor was just as surprised to receive money in his own account. Landow heard a vibrating sound coming from his laptop briefcase that he’d traveled with. Opening it, he found the Motorola flip-phone Seiko had given him. There was a text message. The first shipment was coming into the harbor tonight.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Jasmine Stone was up, showered, and ready. She went down to the medical clinic just as Fox and Ashley were coming out.

  “Fox!” she exclaimed. “You’re looking great.”

  He smiled and gave her a big hug. “I had the best care in the world.”

  Ashley linked her arm into his. “I’m just glad things are going well.”

  The trio slowly made their way to the office area in the center of the warehouse. Justin, Saara, and Leonard all got up to greet him.

  “Perfect timing,” Dr. Stone said. “We could use your eye on what’s happening.” He took a few minutes to bring the giant agent up to speed.

  “Who flew the chopper?” Fox asked when Leo had finished.

  “David found him. His name is Gary.”

  “Military?”

  “At one time, I’m sure.”

  “I doubt Trey took his kit with him into the airport terminal. Probably traveled light. Do you know where it is?”

  Justin shook his head, “Either back at the chopper or stashed somewhere on the way.”

  Leonard understood Fox’s question, now. “Of course!”

  “LP to Vegas,” Justin said.

  “Vegas.”

  “You’re going to need all the help you can get. We recommend asking the pilot for help.”

  “Copy that. I’m just pulling into the parking lot.”

  Bruce hopped out of the lifeguard vehicle and grabbed his kit. He pulled out his Glock 17 and holstered it on his hip. Then he back-strapped his personally customized and fully automatic AA-12 Atchisson Assault Shotgun – a 12-gauge that unloaded 300 rounds per minute – with a custom two-point sling that a Delta Force friend had given him. Locke pulled out his Mark XIX Desert Eagle and tucked it into a holster on his lower back. The gun he’d run with was his M4 – the newer, shorter, and lighter variant of the American-made M16. Jogging over to the chopper, he found Gary.

  The pilot was dead. Lying a pool of blood on the helicopter floor, wedged between the seats.

  “Vegas to LP. Pilot is KIA.”

  Everyone in LaunchPad was appalled, then outraged.

  “Proceed with extreme caution,” Leo answered.

  Bruce crouch ran down the path to the beach. It was empty. He moved towards the lifeguard stand, weapon raised and checking his directions as he ran. It looked closed up for the night, but as he got close, the door into the area behind the counter opened, and Cory stood waved him down.

  “Thank God you’re here. I heard gunfire in the parking lot, and then an armed group of guys ran through here. I had just closed up, so I stayed inside, but I could see through the gaps in the boards. They ran right past me up the beach.”

  “Towards the airport?”

  Cory nodded.

  “I might still need your Scout. Is there someone you can call to pick you up?”

  “Yeah, I can call my brother.”

  “Okay,” Bruce said, tossing him the keys. “Go back and wait in your car until he shows up. Then leave the keys under the mat, and the doors unlocked. If trouble shows up before your brother gets to you, drive like a bat out of hell.”

  Police sirens could be heard, about a mile away.

  “Did you call the cops?” Bruce asked.

  The lifeguard nodded.

  Touching his comms, Bruce explained the problem to Leonard. “We can’t have them show up on the scene, Leo. They’ll all get themselves killed.”

  Dr. Stone agreed and immediately disconnected so he could make a call to the Hyde County Sheriff’s Department that oversaw Ocracoke Island.

  “Hey, man,” Locke said to Cory. “These guys are the real deal. They killed our chopper pilot.”

  “Oh, no. Seriously? That was the gunfire in the parking lot?”

  Bruce nodded.

  Cory locked the door and jumped down. “What was your name again?”

  “Bruce.” Agent Locke touched his comms so LaunchPad could hear. “What’s your phone number?”

  The lifeguard said it.

  “Got it,” Justin confirmed.

  “Okay, Cory. When this is all over, we’ll call you and let you know where you can pick up your Scout.”

  “Got it. Good luck.”

  “Thanks. You’ll be safe. All the action’s at the airport.” He was about to go, but then remembered something. “Hey. Call your cousin and tell her not to go anywhere near the rental house until we give the green light, okay? My partner is set up in there waiting for the Russians to get back.”

  The lifeguard was taken aback. “Geez. Okay. I will.”

  Bruce knelt and unzipped his kit. Inside, Justin had put a RagnarokSD holster that was custom-designed to fit a Glock 17 with an attached suppressor. The genius in how it was made, allowed for a short draw stroke even with the lengthened weapon. He swapped it out with the holster he’d been wearing, attached the Safariland QLS receiver plate to his Orion belt, screwed on the suppressor, and then re-indexed his gun.

  Locke jogged up to the tree line and snuck forward. Just as he was about to get onto the trail that led from the beach to the airport, he saw exactly what he’d thought he’d see. Two men were guarding the path. He deftly ducked behind a tree and knelt down. They hadn’t seen him. One was looking up the beach to his right, and the other guy was staring into the ocean. Bruce drew his silenced Glock, unclicked the safety, and dropped them both with four shots.

  He didn’t know whether or not someone further up the path had a visual on the guards, so he moved as quickly as he could, swapping mags as he ran.

  Leonard looked down at his phone. “David’s taking fire from the Trawler!” He barked.

  The drone feed was tricky. Because the radius of the action was so wide, they had to either have a distant view of everything that didn’t let them see details or zoom in on the action in different areas as it unfolded. Saara had prepped for this. She’d created keystroke short cuts for each scene—the airport, Tank at the Russian house, the trawler, the Doral, and David’s boat, the Sunseeker Superhawk 50. Justin entered the code for the boat that Harris was on, and the camera zoomed in. There were two people on the aft deck trying to steady themselves. One was kneeling, weapon up and firing. It looked like he had a light machine gun of some sort. The other guy had a handgun and was trying to hold onto the railing with his left hand and fire with his right.

  Leonard texted David to back off and bank away as if aborting the mission or as if following them wasn’t what the Superhawk 50 had actually been doing.

  The LaunchPad team watched David’s boat slow down and make a steep turn to the east while the trawler continued on, straight ahead. They were about ten minutes from Tank’s location.

  Leo knew that David’s decoy had to be real, so he assigned him to resume chasing the Doral. By this time, the boat that Harris had been on was racing towards Ocracoke Island. Hirsch figured there was about an eleven-minute gap between them.

  Trey had zip tied the two brothers in the control tower, and hurriedly stripped all the hostiles of their weapons and extra mags. He had two 9mm GSh-18s, the kind of semi-automatic pistols often used by Russian Spetznaz; the PP Bizon machine gun from the first guy he’d killed; and the MP-443 Grach from the brother that had crawled into the room on his hands and knees. He’d also collected three flash-bang grenades and an excellent tactical knife, which he’d dumped into his backpack. The first guy he’d killed with a headshot had been wearing a vest, so Trey slipped it on over his t-shirt, and has he did, he heard the front door of the airport open. He pocketed the two grenades that he’d had in his pack, and the checked the zip ties on the
hostiles to make sure they were very tight.

  “You’re going to die,” Ivan hissed at him.

  “We’ll see, big boy,” Stone answered coldly. “I’ll be back for you and trust me, you’ll wish I’d have shot you. In the meantime, make any noise, and I will shoot you right now.”

  “Go to hell,” the hostile answered, spitting.

  “LP to Hemlock. Hostiles on the move,” Justin assessed, having just put in the keystroke codes to focus on the airport. Unlike the satellite footage and the thermal imaging, the drone footage had no delays. “Three entering the front door. Two at the back. Vegas, you have two moving towards your location. Seven are fanning out in the parking lot. Two are moving towards the runway.”

  Both Trey and Bruce acknowledged with double taps on their comms. They didn’t want their voices to interfere with each other.

  Agent Locke noticed that the police sirens had stopped. Leo must’ve gotten through. He slipped into the underbrush, long grass, and trees that paralleled the path on the way to the airport. Bruce wasn’t sure who he’d be facing, but he had a nagging thought that the people who had killed Gary were well-trained. In a perfect world, he’d sit in wait for the two coming down the path and then take them out. But knowing Trey was facing imminent danger, he decided he’d move quickly and trust his instincts. He bent low and darted behind the tree to his right, checked down the path, then took the next one, keeping his profile lower than the brush and grass. It was evening, but the sun was still a good hour from setting. Bruce knew that this had to be wrapped up before dark. Following lightless boats on dark water would be a nightmare.

  Trey was just debating on whether or not to go down a floor or stay where he was. He figured getting out of the building would be necessary so he was about to descend a flight of stairs when he heard the sound of crashing glass and saw a flash-bang grenade skip across the control room floor. Ivan and his brother rolled onto their sides, putting their backs to the explosion while Trey dashed out of the room and down the stairs in one giant leap. The detonation blew out the windows and rattled the stairway, but just in the nick of time, he was able to duck into a hallway and escape the impact of the concussion or the flying debris. Thinking he was stunned, two hostiles hurried past up the stairs to the third floor.

  Stone darted after them. His HK MP7 fired two bursts, and he shot them both in the back of their heads. The hostiles below recognized that Trey’s gun wasn’t one of theirs. He heard shouting and jumped back down the stairs and into his hallway, just in time to see a grenade sail past him and land on the third-floor landing. Hustling into an office, he braced himself for the explosion. It rocked the Victorian structure, viciously shattering most of the rest of the windows and blowing through the outer wall, destroying the upper third of the building on that side. The staircase to the third floor was unusable now, and the hallway directly opposite of Trey had a gaping hole in the ceiling. He crept back out of the office and waited. There was complete silence, and then he heard Ivan yelling in Russian.

  My naverkhu, chert voz'mi! Prikhodite pomoch' nam! “We’re upstairs! Come get us!”

  Trey waited. He heard a stair creak and knew another hostile was coming up the first flight of steps. Stone was a professional. But the thing that had kept him alive throughout his career was expecting the same from his enemies. He always presumed they thought as he did. Not seeing a hostile come up the stairs when he knew he was standing just around the corner, registered something in his mind. Stone was on full alert for any movement. If he hadn’t been so experienced, he might have missed the tiny little camera probe making its way around the corner of the wall by the steps. It stared straight at him. Before his enemy could pull the camera back or act on the intel he was seeing on his screen, Trey charged forward. He jumped through the second-floor landing of the staircase and turned his torso to his right, firing bullets that were designed to pierce armor from over two hundred yards away. The guy who had been operating the camera caught a flurry of bullets in his chest. They ripped through his body with such velocity that they knocked the hostile behind him down the stairs too. Trey adjusted mid-air and brought his weapon’s cold-hammer-forged barrel in line with the falling man, and bullets ripped through his gut up to his neck. Neatly landing on the other side, and knowing that the hallway might be destabilized from the grenade, he raced back across the landing in the direction from which he’d just come, tossing a flash bang grenade down the steps as he passed them. As it flew through the air, Trey changed mags and then ducked back into the office he’d been in.

  The only remaining hostile was in the airport lobby. He saw the grenade but had nowhere to go. He dove in front of the reception counter that backed up to the wall at the bottom of the stairs and covered his ears. The blast broke the remaining windows in the building that hadn’t already been smashed by the explosions. But the 12 million lumens of light completely blinded him, rendering him helpless.

  In two long steps, Trey was at the bottom of the stairs. He dispatched the hostile with a burst to the back, the bullets shredding his spinal cord, killing him in an instant. Trey’s eyes were already up and scanning the parking lot. He picked another grenade out of his pocket, pulled the pin, and threw it like a baseball, through an open window. It bounced along the and rolled towards the cars. He could hear voices yelling and saw people scattering away from the blast radius. Five seconds after the throw, when the thing detonated, it caught just enough of the front end of a Ford Taurus to lift the vehicle six feet into the air where it erupted into a fiery explosion of metal, glass, rubber, and plastic. The tires fired off in different directions and slammed into vehicles around them. The radial blast lifted most of the vehicles off the ground and knocked hostiles off their feet.

  When Bruce heard the gunfire, he moved as quickly and as quietly as he could. All of a sudden, he heard a noise to his left. The two who were coming in his direction weren’t coming down the main path at all. They’d taken a short cut and were almost directly across from him. In a move that only comes from years of practice, Agent Lock holstered his gun with his right hand and pulled his fully automatic AA-12 Atchisson Assault Shotgun over from his back and into his waiting palm. He fired two blasts that were loud enough to be heard half a mile away. The men fell to the ground, just as the grenade ripped a hole in the third floor of the airport terminal. Bruce stayed focused. He kept moving up the path as more gunfire erupted in the rustic coastal terminal.

  As he got closer to the little airport, he saw a hostile straight ahead of him and was about to take him out when the grenade went off. Cars levitated a foot off the ground, paused and then crashed onto the cracking concrete. A fireball with a cloud of ballooning smoke disgorged into the air. And the earth under Bruce shook with impact. The guy in front of him stumbled backward, and Locke took him out with another burst from the AA. Now in a full crouching run, he fully rounded the corner from the path into the airport parking lot, keeping the cars to his left and the terminal to his right. He seamlessly switched from his shotgun to his M4. Gliding forward, he took out three men to his ten o’clock before they even knew where the shots came from. To his two ’o’clock, as if right on cue, Trey exited the terminal, his HK MP7 in full use. The two men coordinated systematically with the kind of almost subconscious teamwork that comes from over a decade of strategizing, drills, and real-world experience.

  “Clear!” Stone announced when the gunfire ceased.

  The torched Taurus was still billowing smoke, and two vehicles on either side of it had caught fire too. Heat from the explosion and the fires hung in the still air like a hot Texas day. Bruce knew the smell of war so well he barely noticed it anymore. What he did see, was a small glint that flashed a reflection from the sun. Straight ahead of him, down the runway.

  “Trey, down!”

  Both men hit the dirt, and dive rolled to their right as the distinct cracking sound of automatic sniper rounds breaking the speed of sound reached their ears followed by the familiar thunks as bul
lets hit something other than flesh. Bruce was behind a bush, and Trey was on the porch.

  “Twelve o’clock!” Bruce barked, tossing a flash-bang grenade to his left, towards the vehicles. He knew the pop and flash wouldn’t have much effect but might serve as a momentary distraction. He stripped off his M4, locked the safety, and slid the weapon to Trey. “It’s the two guys on the runway.” Stone caught the weapon, carefully got to his knees, slowly opened the entryway door, and slipped back inside the terminal.

  As he raced up the stairs, Locke tossed a second flash-bang in the same spot he’d thrown the first one. Then he got prone, rolled to his left, fired off a few shots down the runway, and then rolled back to his right. Another sniper round kicked up the dirt where’d just been lying. Staying low, he moved his weapon onto his back, got a few inches off the ground in a low push-up position and scrambled backward, keeping the bush in front of him until he reached the edge of the staircase that led up to the airport’s front porch. When he reached it, he rolled to his right and popped up onto one knee, now hidden by the five steps that were against his right shoulder.

  Trey raced up the first flight of stairs and turned left, passed the office where he’d taken shelter during the shootout, and went down the hallway to the end. There was a room to his right and one to his left. He opened the door on his left, so it was wide open. Then he slipped into the room on his right. The window, surprisingly, was cracked, but the glass hadn’t fallen out. He moved very slowly, now, not wanting to draw any attention to himself. Getting snug with the right side of the window frame he moved his head to the left so that one eye was peeping out. Just as he thought, he had a clear view of the men on the runway. They were about twenty feet apart from each other. Trey backed out of their view, checked the M4, and unclicked the safety. This gun had almost three times the range of the sub-compact machine gun he’d been using, but he wouldn’t have been able to carry it in the little backpack he was still wearing.