“Give me the address, now!”
She did so, Carmichael hung up, and immediately he called Murquin al-Kazaz.
If ERT attacked, Court might die, but if he lived and escaped, the Saudis needed to put themselves in position in time to cut him down.
The worst-case scenario, for Carmichael anyway, was for Gentry to be taken alive by Washington, D.C., law enforcement. The thought of Court Gentry secure in a jail cell talking to a public defender made his stomach boil with acid.
—
D.C. Metro Police Department! Search warrant!”
Court opened the small hatch just as the shout came from outside his front door.
He knew the cops weren’t going to wait for him to answer, and he was right. One second after the call came he heard a shotgun blast; a slug was fired into one of the hinges of the storm door. A second shot came one second later, and the door fell from the frame.
A battering ram would crash through the wooden door any second.
But Court wasn’t waiting around for that. He had the hidden escape hatch door out of the way and he pushed his backpack through the hole, then he backed into it and reached for the hatch door to pull it back into place.
The battering ram slammed into the wooden door of his apartment as he did so.
The chair propped under the knob held for the first strike of the ram, and even the second, but as Court reseated the hatch and backed into the basement proper he heard the chair break fully and the door crash in, and then he heard another noise, followed by just exactly what he expected would come next.
He heard the screams of men.
—
The ERT team leader was fourth in the stack of eight men. He kept his M4 rifle high and his gloved left hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him. As the breach man smashed through the door with the battering ram and moved to the side, the first two shooters began pushing into the basement apartment. They had not made it fully inside the building before a loud rushing sound filled the patio, and then a massive orange ball of fire erupted out of the apartment, engulfing everyone in front of the door.
The three men exposed to the fire stumbled back, falling onto one another, finally getting themselves below the flame, which continued spraying straight out the door all the way up the cement steps to the driveway. As other team members grabbed the men and pulled them out of the fire, the team leader tried to understand what was happening.
All he knew for sure was that a massive cone of flammable propellant was spraying from the apartment through the doorway, and there was no way to make entry here. He had no idea if some sort of booby trap had been tripped or if the suspect was standing there with a fucking flamethrower, but he knew he had to get his team away from danger so they could regroup.
He called into his headset microphone. “Fall back! Fall back!”
—
Court crawled along next to the hot furnace on his elbows and knees, doing his best to ignore the agonizing pain from the old bullet wound on the right side of his rib cage. After several feet he was able to climb up to a low crouch. When he was up full and running for the steps out of the basement, he passed the home’s main circuit breaker and he pulled down the lever, enveloping the entire home in darkness. He then ripped out all the fuses, dropped them on the concrete floor, and stomped them till they shattered. He imagined SWAT men would have NODs, night observation devices, but he also imagined they wouldn’t have the newest models. Instead the cops would be looking through narrow tubes that would give them limited peripheral vision, and he hoped to use their weakness to his advantage. He then raced up the stairs, out of the basement, and into the kitchen, his pistol out in front of him.
—
Evacuating the sunken patio outside the basement apartment devolved into utter chaos for the ERT unit. The three men who’d been hit by flame were not seriously injured, but they did not know this yet. More than anything they were disoriented by the incredible light and heat that had encircled them moments before. The fact that the stairs to the driveway were right in front of the apartment door and therefore still involved in the fire meant everyone had to climb up and over the wall around the patio and onto the driveway, and this was hampered by the three injured men who needed to be helped out, as well as the difficulty in keeping rifles high and at the ready in case the fire stopped and Jeff Duncan charged out of the little room with a weapon in his hand.
After nearly forty-five seconds, though, all eight ERT officers were up on the driveway and to the side of the unrelenting exhaust of flame, and four of them covered the extraction of the wounded men.
More police ran up the driveway to help with the evacuation.