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The scenery changed from scrub and scarce patches of grass to the structures that indicated they were entering the outskirts of the town.
When they hit the wall, Blitz didn’t hesitate, jumped, caught the edge, and rolled his body at the top up and over to the ground below. He moved out to give Bree and Webb space to land, his gun trained on the courtyard and the house in front of them. Nothing moved.
“LT,” Buck said through the comms. “Guards down.” That meant the eastern part of the town had been neutralized of AAL security.
“Copy,” Joker said. “Same here, over and out.” Then there was silence.
Bree came over the wall as elegantly as she always moved. Her curves looked just as good through his NVGs. Then Webb landed. Without words, they marched to the house in the courtyard and stacked at the door.
Blitz tried the handle and it opened. Without waiting, Bree went past him and breached. Her stance was pure locked and loaded. She swept the room, then moved to her right and entered another room. Webb passed him as well and went left. Inside, the hot, stale air hit him, the smell of old body odor and cooked food lingering. He took a hit off his camelback and blocked out the heated misery.
“Clear,” came her voice over the comm on the heels of Webb’s.
They walked toward the front door and after a quick look out with their guns trained toward the street, they exited the house. A belligerent wave of desert heat hit him. With methodical precision, they cleared the houses, neutralizing AAL’s members as they went. Bree kept security, while he and Webb used their knives on the sleeping terrorists, leaving glow sticks in their wake to show the house had been cleared.
After the last house in their designated area was finished, Blitz looked right and left up the street as those lasers from his teammates’ guns got closer. Straight across from him, Zorro stepped out onto the street and nodded to him. The target house was a larger one with a striped awning that looked to be some type of food store, an endless patchwork of residences, narrow streets, and dark alleyways.
“Fuck, it’s hot,” Webb growled.
“Dry heat my ass,” Bree murmured, and the corner of Blitz’s mouth curved. Yeah, the people who had never been subjected to this country’s climate would say that desert heat was dry. Those people were full of crap.
They merged into a nine-person-and-one-dog team and headed toward the striped awning as Buck and Webb peeled away, heading to the back of the house to catch anyone trying to escape.
Joker, D-Day, and Huxley were moving in from the west. They were all converging on the house with the awning. But Team 1 was still working on clearing. A SEAL’s biggest advantage was surprise. They were all about kicking down doors and rolling up bad guys in the middle of the night, swift and deadly.
The front door opened, and a man walked out into the street. He looked a bit disoriented and stumbled after each couple of steps. They all froze. Blitz swore softly. They all knew the edict. The rules of engagement were clear. Hostile action or hostile intent were the only behaviors acceptable to kill a combatant.
But this guy had no weapon Blitz could see. Didn’t mean he wasn’t strapped, though. But it was clear he was sleepwalking. No one could make this shit up…sleepwalking. Fuck.
That’s when the door opened again and a woman walked into the street, going after him. She touched his shoulder and said something in French. The guy turned with her as she guided him back toward the building. Then she looked to where Blitz and the eight people with him were standing exposed in the street. Her eyes widened as she looked directly at him. They stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity, then she shouted at the top of her lungs, waking the man who came out of his sleep trance.
From his belt, the sleepwalker grabbed a hidden handgun, and Blitz pulled off a shot, hitting him, spinning him around. The woman screeched bloody hell and threw herself at the body.
He heard Joker yell, “Contact!” Then all hell broke loose.
Blitz felt the heat of the first rounds come screaming down the street with the sound of a cracking whip. An AAL nosed out of concealment and delivered more lead as everyone moved to the side of the buildings for cover. He risked a glance at Bree, but she was on point, her face composed and focused as she moved with them.
“We’re pinned down,” Joker said over the comms. “Gator?”
“On it, LT.” That’s when bodies started to drop.
The enemy continued to fire down the street toward them. Zorro and Zimmerman crossed to get a better bead on the shooters. He sprinted down the other side of the street, Zimmerman picking up his field of fire with a steady fifty-round burst toward the building. The volume of automatic gunfire diminished as Blitz heard Buck and Webb breaching from the back door, the charge loud and unmistakable. Professor reached them. “Can’t see shit from that rooftop.”
They moved closer, leapfrogging toward the building while hugging the walls. Zorro and Zimmerman covering from another doorway enemy fire was chipping away at.
The target house had been at an intersection full of houses Team 1 hadn’t yet cleared.
Out of the corner of Blitz’s eye, kitty-corner to the target house, a door banged open, and a man and woman bolted into the shadows.
“Squirters!” Zorro called.
Bree blew by him, racing after the running figures.Bree no!
“Bear,” Blitz said, and he sprinted after them, rounds cracking all around him, Bear, and Flint.
As the gunfire receded into the background, he ran hard after Bree’s back. The couple ducked into a house, and Bree unerringly headed in that direction. Flint had almost caught up to her.
“Huxley’s hit! Zorro!” Joker’s calm voice echoed in his earpiece.
