Court fired, dropping the man onto his back with two rounds to the chest.
Up and running again, he had not made it far at all before he heard more gunfire, close and on his left. The wall next to him began to pock with bullet holes, fired from the other side by an automatic weapon. Plaster and paint sprayed across the glow of his red headlamp’s light.
This forced Court down into a crouch as he ran. He returned fire blindly into the wall, then felt a powerful tug, nearly toppling him. He was certain he’d been hit at first, but quickly realized his backpack had taken a bullet instead of his body.
More bursts of fire chased him back across a hall in the east wing, and then, when he made the turn to head towards the stairs to the basement, he found himself facing down another pair of men with flashlights and guns, just a dozen feet away.
As gunfire pounded his ears, Court dove to the dusty floor of the abandoned building, sliding on his hip towards the gunmen. He took one down like a bowling pin as they collided, then shot the second man three times as he spun and took aim on Court’s prone body.
The sentry on the ground with him had lost control of his gun and it fell away, but he quickly pulled a short, hooked, fixed-blade knife out of a sheath on his belt and drove it down at Court’s face while Court still had his weapon pointed in the direction of the other enemy. Court parried the first strike with his left hand, and the man knocked Court’s gun arm back and lurched to stab again.
Court rolled quickly onto his stomach. The knife cut through air above him, and then the blade slammed into the backpack, burying itself into a plastic bottle of water.
Now Court rolled onto his backpack, bringing his left arm out as he whirled back around, and he executed a spinning backfist that connected with the jaw of the man above him. With the thunk of bone on flesh, the man’s head snapped to the side, a tooth flew out of his mouth ahead of a spray of blood, and he slumped to his side, on top of his dead colleague.
Court rose to his feet as more men approached from behind. He fired back behind him as he ran the opposite way, quickly getting himself out of the line of fire by racing into the stairwell down to the basement.
As he entered the tunnel to the mortuary seconds later, he could hear the footsteps and shouts of what sounded like at least a half dozen men running through the basement behind him. He ran in a crouch through the tunnel, using his red light freely now, a necessity to avoid tripping through the trash-filled water or banging his head on pipes hanging from the ceiling that ran the length of the passageway.
He knew that in moments there would be bullets racing through the narrow shaft and he’d be a fish in a barrel, so he pulled off his pack, yanked out the grenade launcher, and spun back around. He dropped to his knees in the murky sludge just as the first flashlight beam shone on him, and he raised the weapon.
A crack of unsuppressed gunfire, the ping of a bullet hitting a pipe feet from Court’s head, and then Court pulled the trigger, arcing a 40-millimeter grenade back up the small tunnel to the entrance to the basement. With a jarring boom and a ball of fire it detonated, and Court was back up and running again, reloading the single-shot break-open-barrel weapon, this time with a tear gas round.
He made it all the way to the mortuary end of the tunnel before the gunfire behind him resumed, and here he dropped again into the ankle-deep water, spun back, and fired the launcher once more.
The tear gas round didn’t generate the sound or the flash of the high-explosive shell, but he knew it would make the poorly ventilated, claustrophobic tunnel impassable for the next hour or so. When it detonated halfway down the passage he raced up the stairs into the postmortem room of the mortuary, then ran through the building, throwing his M320 back into his wet pack and retrieving his pistol from his waistband.
He exited through a window of the mortuary, then sprinted for the woods with his gun, shifting left to right with his eyes as he