Parkowski smiled and accepted them.
Her boyfriend smiled back, his teeth glistening in the dim light, and went back to the kitchen.
She poked her head out again and this time she was met with a new round of bullets. There were fewer, but they came from a different direction, near where the hills that surrounded the complex started their rise. They were also now visible to her; white lines tracing across the black sky.
The bastards had repositioned.
Parkowski swore to herself and carefully crawled underneath the window to a new position in the corner. If they were to move slightly more up the rise, they could reach her through the window on the next wall.
Something big — probably a large caliber bullet — hit the back of the house.
“They moved!” DePresti yelled, barely audible.
“I know!” Parkowski screamed back.
Her repositioning saved her. Another bullet hit the spot she had been crouched in a moment ago.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” she said to herself.
There was a silver lining, though. Her assailants were now using tracer rounds. She knew exactly where they were.
Parkowski switched her rifle to her bad shoulder — the adrenaline pumping through her dulled the pain — and leaned out in the opposite direction she had previously.
She fired a dozen rounds.
The AR-15 jammed.
“Shit.” She opened the bolt and tried to get the stuck casing out of it.
A new noise — a dull thud — came from just inside the window.
Parkowski looked up in horror to see a cylindrical grenade, the same as the one that had been used to incapacitate Chang, lying on the floor.
Even in the fog of the NVGs, she could make out a small stream of smoke escaping from it.
Parkowski threw her rifle onto the ground and dove to the grenade. A familiar pain spread from her shoulder to her back as she crashed down next to it. She groaned as the rest of her body followed onto the wooden floor.
Grabbing the grenade with her good hand, she rolled slightly. It was hot, not hot enough to burn her hand, but definitely increasing in temperature. Like she had thrown the scuba tank out of DePresti’s Subaru, she aimed an arc out of the house’s window and threw the grenade out of it.
Parkowski felt slightly sleepy, just like she had earlier in the bedroom, but that quickly passed. It was another incapacitating grenade. That answered her earlier question to DePresti. They were trying to capture them, like they had Chang.
The problem was that they hadn’t gotten the drop on them like they had their friend.
“Mike!” she screamed as she crawled on her hands and knees back to her still-jammed rifle. “Mike!”
“What?”
“They’re trying to grab us too!”
“What?”
A torrent of bullets, tightly grouped, slammed into the window on the side of the house, littering her new cover spot with fresh glass shards.
“A grenade, like the other one we found,” she finally got out.
“Did you give it back to them?”
Parkowski didn’t respond at first. She almost had the stuck brass out of the ejection port. “Yes!” she yelled as the enemy outside began a new tactic. They fired a shot every few seconds, coordinated between at least two or three shooters. She wouldn’t be able to poke her head out to fire like she had been doing.
The Aering engineer finally worked the stuck shell out of her rifle.
She took a breath and removed the spent magazine, then inserted one that DePresti had given her.
Did they get close enough to throw the grenade? Or was it propelled from some kind of grenade launcher?
“Mike!” she yelled again.
“What?”
“Cover me.”
Parkowski heard rustling from the other side of the wall that the living room shared with the kitchen.
DePresti had repositioned.
She heard the long bolt rifle boom, again, and again, and again, in a rhythmic beat.
“I hit one! I hit one!” DePresti screamed in celebration.
“What?”
“I hit one on the arm,” he said, soft enough that Parkowski could barely hear him.
“Good job,” she said, not loud enough for him to hear, as she pulled the charging handle back to chamber a round.
The coordinated fire had stopped.
Parkowski poked her head out of the newly shattered window.
They were close now, maybe a hundred feet away. She could make out three, no, four different shooters; likely a separate team than the one on the ridge.
She had a fleeting thought. This was supposed to be a highly trained team, government or otherwise, coming to extract her and DePresti and take them wherever the hell they had taken Chang. But, their tactics were weak and easily countered by the inexperienced pair in Chang’s house. Granted, they had a proverbial arsenal available to them and had a strategic advantage in position, but they had already held out for a ten-minute firefight.
That shouldn’t be possible.
Parkowski shouldered her rifle again and fired a pair of rounds at the indistinct figures at the nearby boulders.
She was met by a return of coordinated fire.
