Court Gentry sat alone near the closed ramp of the aircraft, listened to the engines whine, and tried to catch his breath, to get control of his emotions. His ass was on a mesh bench in the back of an L-100-30, but his mind was back down below, in the dark, in the sand.
In the shit.
The operator closest on his right got up and moved around the pallet, sat down on the bench facing him. Idly Gentry glanced to his right, noticed the extraction team’s leader adjusting his gear. He began to look to the other guys, but his head returned to the man at the bulkhead.
Something wasn’t right.
The team leader’s back was ramrod straight, and he had an intense expression on his face, though he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. His MP5 was across his chest; he adjusted the glove on his right hand.
And his mouth was moving. He was transmitting into his close quarters radio, giving orders to his men.
Gentry looked down at his own Harris Falcon radio set. He had been on the same channel as the rest of the team, but now he could not hear the transmission.
Strange.
Court turned to the three men next to him on the bench. From their posture, from their facial expressions, Gentry determined that, just like their leader, they weren’t decompressing after the tension of the extraction from the hot zone. No, they moved and looked like they were about to gointoaction. Gentry had spent sixteen years in covert operations, studied faces and evaluated threats for a living. He knew what an operator looked like when the fight was over, and he knew what an operator looked like when the fight was about to begin.
Surreptitiously he unhooked the strap securing him to the bench and swiveled in his seat to face the men around him.
Dulin was up at the bulkhead; he was no longer transmitting. He just stared at Gentry.
“What’s up?” shouted Gentry above the engine’s roar.
Dulin stood slowly.
Court shouted again across the noisy cabin, “Whatever you’re thinking about doing, you need to just—”
Markham turned quickly on the bench, spun towards the Gray Man, his pistol already rising in front of him. Gentry pushed off the wall under the bench with his sandy boots and launched himself across the cabin, tried to put his body behind the pallet of gear lashed to the floor.
The fight was on. The fact that Court didn’t know why the fuck his rescuers had turned on him was a nonissue. He did not waste a single brain cell pondering the turn of events.
Court Gentry was a killer of men.
These were men.
And that’s all there was to it.
Markham got a shot off with his Sig Sauer handgun but missed high. Before Gentry disappeared behind the cargo, he saw Markham and Barnes quickly unhooking their bench harnesses.
McVee was the only man on Gentry’s left as the Gray Man crouched behind the pallet and faced the cockpit doors, thirty feet away. Dulin was up by the bulkhead wall near the doors, and the other three operators were ahead and to his right. Court knew that if he put down the man to his left, he would eliminate one of their fields of fire, so he rolled onto his left shoulder, emerged from behind the pallet with his M4 raised, and fired a long burst at the operator. The man’s goggled face slammed back against the wall, and his HK dropped away from his fingertips.
McVee fell back on the bench, dead.
Gentry had killed him, and he had no idea why.
—
Immediately every man in the back of the L-100 began firing his weapon; four guns poured metal-jacketed lead at Gentry’s position.
Court tucked tight down behind the equipment cache as the fuselage wall behind him began to scream, whistling as the holes made by a dozen rifle rounds allowed pressurized air to race out of the aircraft. The flight crew in the front of the cargo plane could not hear the shriek from the compromised skin, but they obviously heard the gunfire behind them, because they put their L-100 into a nosedive to drop to thicker air in order to lower the pressure differential and, hopefully, keep their aircraft from tearing to pieces.
The nosedive created a seemingly weightless environmentfor Gentry and his four remaining would-be assassins. Court’s body rose away from the relative safety of the pallet and rolled in a pair of reverse somersaults, finally landing on the ceiling of the cabin and scooting along its back to the rear ramp, which was now the highest point of the cargo compartment.
Two of the gunmen lifted into the air as well, firing above them at their target.
Gentry felt a pair of nine-millimeter slugs from an MP5 stitch across the armor plate in his tactical vest. The force of the impact knocked him off balance for an instant, but from his position completely upside down, he saw one of the operators had not unhooked his bench harness, and he kicked frantically in the air, strapped to the wall to Gentry’s right.
The man was a sitting duck.
