One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [64]
I ditched just about everything the man had, throwing away a ton of bullshit accessories that might be useful on Batman’s utility belt but would do me no good. The one thing I wanted that the guy didn’t have was a radio, but that in itself gave me some relief about Machete’s security posture. Body armor and no radio? He’s wearing the kit as a costume. I kept only the three magazine pouches, each holding two magazines loaded with thirty rounds of Hornady match grade 5.56mm boat-tail hollow points.
For weapons I took the H&K 416 and a Cold Steel push knife, a nasty instrument with a three-and-three-quarter-inch double-sided cutting edge and a “T” handle perpendicular to the blade.
Satisfied that I had all I wanted from the dead guard, I began to move toward the front gate, using the wall as cover, all the while scanning for cameras or other early warning devices. So far, no alarm had been raised, but it was only a matter of time before the guard I had killed was missed.
I held no illusions of what I was about to attempt. The standard operating procedure of my last unit prohibited entering a room as an individual. Two people could enter for extreme situations, otherwise three was the minimum, with four or five preferred. I was now going to assault the entire fortress on my own, using a weapon I had never fired, that might not even be zeroed, and certainly wasn’t zeroed for me. I would be lucky if the wannabe I had killed had bothered to sight-in the weapon at all. I had no idea if the weapon had been properly maintained. Should it fail at any time, I would be a dead man.
As bad as that was, it was the least of my problems. Depending on how many men had left to go chasing shadows at the Plaza Mayor, I was outnumbered upward of twenty to one. In order to succeed I would have to maintain what we called relative superiority, attacking each man individually, or at most two at a time. Should an alarm go up, forcing me to fight a concentrated mass, I would lose.
Continuing down the wall toward the front gate, I heard a commotion on the other side. A man with a UK accent was shouting instructions in English against the background of multiple vehicles being loaded. I grinned. Fuck, yeah. Get ’em all out of here.
I waited until all the vehicles had left and was about to scale the wall when I heard movement to my right. I pressed against the brick, trying to squeeze into the shadows. Another guard came sauntering down the wall, moving without a purpose, his weapon slung and his hands in his pockets. I started breathing in a shallow pant, hoping he couldn’t hear it, even though it sounded like an industrial fan to me. He came within five feet, then stopped and turned around, as if he was going back to the gate. What the hell’s he doing?
Before he could make up his mind about where he was going, I closed on him, trapped his head, and stuck the push blade into the left side of his neck, slicing to the right and ripping out his windpipe and both carotid arteries. I held him upright, aiming the jet of blood away from me, then lowered him to the ground.
I quickly scaled the wall and raced to the first door I could see, a side entrance away from the massive, ornate entryway in the front of the mansion. I tried the knob and saw that it was unlocked. I paused, mentally preparing for what was to come, my conscious mind screaming for me to flee. Taking a couple of deep breaths, I knew that my next step, like a parachutist jumping out of an airplane, would be irreversible. I can walk away now and live. Not long ago I was one of the most highly skilled