The Gray Man by Mark Greaney Read Free Book Online Page B

his leg back like a hammer’s blow. He ignored the injury, and his feet found purchase again on the rear ramp. He looked up, which was now straight down, and found Dulin in his sights. The extraction team’s leader had one arm wrapped in the bulkhead webbing, and he held his submachine gun over his head with the other, pointed up towards the Gray Man. Court fired six quick rounds and saw the operator’s body react as the bullets slammed into Dulin’s groin and lower torso.
    Gentry next turned to get a bead on Barnes and Markham, his final two targets, but McVee’s dead body sailed across his field of fire. Just then the pilot apparently decided he’d seen enough sand in his windscreen, and he pulled quickly out of his dive. All passengers in the back, the dead and the living alike, now dropped through the air, slammed hard into the steel flooring of the transport, and rolled like bowling balls towards the front bulkhead of the aircraft. Court’s pistol flew free of his hand on impact, and he bounced forward, the sting from the gunshot wound in his thigh burning with each jolt.
    Court rolled towards the netting on the front bulkhead as the plane leveled, almost got a handhold, but the pilot put the L-100 back into a climb. Gentry’s momentum pushed him forward for a while, but as the cargo floor became a steep incline, passing forty-five degrees now, he lost the last of his inertia, and his fingertips just barely managed to tickle the nylon webbing next to Dulin’s motionless form.
    Then the Gray Man went backwards. He rocked back on his heels first and fell down, then slid, then rolled, and finally Court went airborne halfway down the length of the cabin. The pain in his thigh was compounded when he landed on his hip at the rear of the plane, but this pain paled in comparison to the excruciating crush of Markham’s body as he slammed into Court’s chest. Markham faced the other direction and was even more stunned than Gentry by the violent impact, so the Gray Man easily got his arms around the operator’s head. With a merciless twist, Markham’s neck snapped, wrecking his spinal cord and killing him instantly.
    The dead operator wore his rifle around his neck on a one-point sling, essentially a necklace with an automatic assault weapon dangling as its charm. Court tried to remove it, but the sling was caught on the operator’s load-bearing vest. Court pulled the gun up to the dead man’s shoulder, tried to quickly sight on the last remaining extraction team member, who was using the legs of the long bench as a ladder to climb up the cabin to the forward bulkhead loadmaster’s galley.
    Court pulled the trigger, but the weapon clicked empty. He fumbled around Markham’s chest rig for another magazine and slammed it into the MP5’s magazine well. He readied to fire at his target just as the man disappeared into the galley. The plane leveled off again, and Court’s gravity returned to normal. He stayed low behind the pallet towards the rear hatch, waiting for Barnes to peek back around the door.
    Without warning, Gentry heard a loud noise and felt the rear cargo ramp behind him move. The wind roared.
    Barnes had activated the ramp from the front of the cabin. A second later, the aircraft began another steep climb.
    As Court scrambled to grab on to the netting over the pallet on the floor in front of him, Barnes appeared near the bulkhead. The dark-clad operator had slung a parachute rig onto his back. Apparently he figured this plane had taken all the damage it could, or perhaps he worried the pilots were dead from stray gunfire. Barnes held the bulkhead webbing with all his might and fired burst after burst in Gentry’s direction, one-handed, with his M4 as the ramp opened fully behind the Gray Man.
    Court reached behind him with his free hand and stripped the gun off Markham’s neck just before the dead man rolled out of the plane and into the darkness. The pilot continued his climb, and soon McVee’s body