Chapter 14 Rocco
Chapter Fourteen
ROCCO
I rip the transmitter off the shelf and crush it under my boot.
The plastic casing snaps with a dry crack that sounds too loud in the quiet shack. The red LED dies. I grind my heel into the circuit board until I feel the components turn to powder against the rough plywood floor.
It’s a useless gesture. The damage is done. The signal went out the moment we opened the door. Minutes ago. An hour ago. Long enough for every Russian asset within fifty miles to triangulate the frequency and converge on our position.
I leave the plastic debris on the floor. I pick up the Makarov. I check the magazine. Four rounds.
Garrett has the shotgun. Twelve shells left.
I sweep the shelf again. Behind the crushed transmitter, under the Cyrillic cans of stew, I find a flare gun. Heavy, orange plastic. Two cartridges. It’s not a weapon; it’s a distress signal. Or a fire starter.
I look at the propane tank attached to the potbelly stove. It’s a standard twenty-pounder, the kind you see on backyard grills in the suburbs. I tap the side with my knuckle. The sound is dull, solid. It’s full.
I file that information away. It’s not heat. It’s ordinance.
"Garrett," I say. "Perimeter."
He moves to the door. He eases the firewood barricade aside, cracks the heavy door two inches, and puts his eye to the narrow gap. His body goes rigid. The tension radiates off him in a palpable wave.
"How many?"
"Six. Maybe eight," Garrett says, his voice low and tight. "Two approaching from the east along the ravine edge. At least four holding a line in the trees to the north. I can't see the south side, which means they’re probably already at the wall."
Six to eight. An assault team. They’ll have suppressed rifles, body armor, and encrypted comms. They are professional operators who have done this before—cleared a structure, eliminated all targets, and sanitized the scene so that nothing remains but ash and bone.
Against them: Me, with a pistol and a hand that feels like it’s been dipped in boiling oil. Garrett, with a shotgun. Adrian, with a medical bag. And Killian, unconscious on a bench, incapable of contributing anything except a body that needs protecting.
The math is simple. The math is always simple when the numbers are this bad. We are dead. The only variable left is how expensive we make it for them to finish the job.
I turn. Adrian is crouched beside Killian, his fingers pressed firmly to Killian’s carotid artery. His face is composed—the clinical wall is back in place, the surgeon’s mask hiding whatever raw panic is clawing at his throat.
But his eyes are different.
Something fundamental has changed behind those lenses since the plywood wall of this shack, since his body was pressed against mine, since the word yes fell out of his mouth.
He isn't afraid. Not in the way he was in the truck. The vibrating, rabbit-like terror is gone. It’s been burned out of him.
I pull the Makarov from my waistband. I hold it out to him, grip first.
"Four rounds," I say. "Don't waste them on suppressive fire. You wait until you see a body in the doorway. You aim for center mass. You pull the trigger. Can you do that?"
He looks at the gun. Then he looks at me. He takes it. His long fingers close around the grip with the same quiet precision he uses on a scalpel—index finger extended along the frame, thumb checking the safety, the weight balanced perfectly in his palm. He racks the slide.
"I can do that."
"If they breach the door," I say, stepping closer, lowering my voice so Garrett doesn't hear, "you put yourself between them and Killian. You shoot until the magazine is empty."
I pause. I look at him. At the blood on his shirt—my blood. At the stubborn, determined set of his jaw.
"If the magazine is empty and they’re still coming..." I stop. The sentence has nowhere to go that doesn't sound like a eulogy. "Don't let the magazine be empty."
I recite the number. Ten digits. The only lifeline I can give him that weighs nothing and costs everything.
"If anything goes sideways," I say, my voice a low rumble. "That number. Alessandro will answer."
He repeats it back to me once. His voice is flat, clinical. The surgeon memorizing a critical dosage.
We barricade the shack.
The heavy pine bench from the opposite wall goes against the door. I drag it over one-handed, gritting my teeth against the spike of white-hot pain in my left arm. We wedge it securely under the handle.
The window gets covered with plywood scraps from the shelf, nailed in place with a heavy roofing hammer I find in the corner. It won't stop a bullet. But it will stop a sight line. In close-quarters combat, sight lines are half the fight.
I position Garrett at the window. He knocks a fist-sized hole in the plywood—an observation port and a firing position. The shotgun barrel fits through it perfectly. He has a ninety-degree field of fire covering the north approach.
I take the door. The pine bench is solid, but the door frame is just plywood over two-by-fours.
A sustained burst from a rifle will turn it into splinters.
My job is to fire through the gaps. To force them to take cover.
To buy us seconds that I can convert into more seconds until the seconds finally run out.
Adrian is in the back corner with Killian. He has the Makarov in his right hand and his medical bag at his feet. He is the last line of defense. If they get through me and Garrett, they get him.
The silence stretches out.
It is heavy, suffocating. The wind pushes against the thin walls, making the wood groan. Snow slides off the corrugated metal roof with a soft, dry hiss. My heart thuds against my ribs, a slow, heavy drumbeat.
Then the first round hits.
The shot comes from the east. It’s a suppressed crack—flat, clinical, almost polite.
The bullet punches through the plywood six inches above Garrett’s head. Splinters spray across the small room. A second round follows immediately, lower. It punches through the wall at waist height and buries itself in the opposite side of the shack with a dull thwack.
"Contact!" Garrett yells.
He fires. The shotgun blast is enormous in the small space—a percussive wave that rattles the cans on the shelf and sends a pressure spike through my eardrums. The shot pattern shreds the plywood around his port and tears into the tree line.
I hear a sound from outside—a wet, surprised grunt, then a heavy body hitting the snow. First blood.
The north line opens up.
The wall disintegrates. Rifle rounds come in a staggered, rhythmic pattern—two shooters, maybe three, walking their fire across the face of the shack in a pattern designed to suppress and penetrate.
The plywood isn't a wall anymore—it’s a screen, and the screen is coming apart.
Holes appear in tight clusters. Daylight punches through in jagged, dusty beams. Wood fragments fill the air like sawdust. A round passes so close to my head that I feel the pressure wave against my ear, a physical slap of displaced air that leaves a high-pitched whine in its wake.
I fire through the door gap. Once. The Makarov barks. Through the gap, I see movement—a figure in white winter camouflage darting between trees, closing the distance. I don't know if I hit him. I can't afford to care.
Garrett fires again. Racks the slide. Chk-chack. Fires again. The shotgun is devastating at this range. Each blast is a concussive announcement that this shack has teeth.
A round comes through the window.
It hits Garrett in the shoulder.
The impact spins him like a top. The shotgun drops from his hands.
He hits the wall and slides down it, his left hand clamping over the wound.
Blood runs between his fingers, dark and fast. The round punched through the plywood barricade and through the meat of his deltoid muscle.
The entry wound is a dark hole in his flannel shirt that’s already soaking through.
"Garrett—"
"I’m up."
He grunts, his face a sickly grey. He reaches for the shotgun with his right hand. His left arm hangs uselessly at his side. The blood is steady, arterial. The bright red of a compromised vessel.
He picks up the shotgun, braces it against his hip, and fires one-handed through the port. The heavy recoil nearly takes him off his feet, slamming him back hard against the wall.
Adrian is moving.
He’s across the room before I can say anything. His medical bag is open. His hands are already pulling out gauze and hemostatic packing. He drops to his knees beside Garrett, staying below the window line. He presses the packing deep into the wound.
Garrett hisses through his clenched teeth. Adrian doesn't flinch.
"Apply pressure," Adrian orders. "Hold this."
"I need to shoot."
"You need to not bleed to death. Hold the gauze."
Garrett holds the gauze. His hand is shaking.
Adrian picks up the shotgun.
He looks at it. It’s heavy, alien in his hands. He looks at me.
"How does this work?"
"Pump action," I shout over the noise of incoming fire. "Rack the slide to chamber. Point. Pull. Do not put the stock against your shoulder or the recoil will break your collarbone."
He nods. He racks the slide. The sound is mechanical, definitive.
He moves to the window port. He presses his back against the wall beside it and holds the shotgun across his chest.
Another burst of fire. The south wall takes three rounds in a tight grouping.
They’ve moved. Flanking us. Tightening the perimeter. The shack is being dismantled around us one round at a time. The air is thick with dust and the sharp smell of cordite.
I look at the propane tank. Twenty pounds. Connected to the stove by a rubber hose with a brass fitting. The tank is full.
A full twenty-pound propane tank, when ruptured and ignited, produces a massive fireball with a blast radius of approximately fifteen feet and enough concussive force to stun anyone within thirty.
I look at the back wall of the shack. The thin plywood behind Killian’s bench.