As the bullet penetrated dermis and subcutaneous matter, it slowed somewhat but not radically; it plowed through gelid tissue below the laryngopharynx, it ruptured the vestibular fold, the vocal fold, atomized all thyroid and cricoid cartilage in its path, and deformed slightly at the resistance of the flesh that defiled the integrity of its swim, causing it to yaw. It lacerated a length of both carotid and subclavian arteries, exactly where the sternoclavicular articulation passes upward to the medial margin of the scalenus anterior. Yawing fully now, it more or less staggered drunkenly—it had become a random event by this time—along a line that included the left lung, heart, aorta, right lung, diaphragm, liver, and colon, opening a massive swath. It came to rest, spent, bent, part of its copper gilding lost somewhere in its odyssey through the body, in the man’s colon, having brutalized the liver into pâté. Liver wounds are inevitably fatal, but by the time that organ was pulverized, so many other causes of death had been inflicted, it hardly mattered.
The senior group leader did not fall instantly. Instead, as his hydrostatic pressure decreased in the order of several magnitudes and his knees became the final destination of all 412-foot pounds of energy, he stepped laterally on his right foot. Some internal gyro, unaware that the body around it was already dead, performed its stabilization duty, and as he lurched, it corrected by pulling the remaining leg forward to reacquire balance. This had the effect of causing him to twist even more, so that he came to face Salid as he commenced to topple. He hit the rail of the bridge, which broke his fall, and slid sideways to the slats of the construction, and it shuddered slightly on its rope moorings.
His body was dead, his brain not quite. As he fell, his eyes communicated thought: perhaps disbelief, perhaps disappointment, perhaps even curiosity (how had she made that shot?) before, at the half-topple mark, they went all eight ball and lost the spark of life. He hit the slats hard, as no inhibitors were left electrical enough to issue corrections during the fall. There was a weird after-death reflex by which his legs and arms curled up.
Captain Salid was horrified to discover that an atomization of blood and skin and other cellular material adhered to his own clothes and face.
He looked at the dead man in shock, just as, finally, the far-off sound of a rifle shot reached his ears.
CHAPTER 49
The Carpathians
Scree Field
THE PRESENT
It should work. He had set her up with the gun, shown her how to use it, more or less, warned her about the safety notch, how to shift mags. Bullets facing OUT. Really, that’s it. Bullets facing out, into the housing till it snaps, pull the bolt back, and start shooting again. OUT. OUT. She didn’t have to learn the difference between “bullet” and “cartridge,” which was beyond the scope of all journalists, especially the ones who’d been to Harvard. Fortunately she had good education for this kind of work: she hadn’t been to Harvard.
Her job: when she heard him scream, “Go!,” she was to lean around a rock with the weapon locked under her arm at hip height, point the gun at the men as best as possible, and squeeze the trigger. It would fire thirty times in about four seconds. She should try and hold it low, fighting its need to rise, but not worry about targets. The point was to send a fusillade down the pathway so their trackers would leap off it into the brush, seeking cover, and consider their next move.
At that point, from behind them, Bob would pull five pins on five No. 36 Mills bombs and toss them exactly where the bad guys had gone to rest. Those whom five blasts and one thousand pieces of supersonic steel filling the air didn’t kill would be quite dazed. Moreover, a turmoil of dust and smoke would blur everything. Bob would step into it with his Sten and shoot anything that still moved.
“Get the dog,” she said.
“I can’t make no guarantees about the dog. But he will probably die.”
He thought the dog would probably be turned to Alpo by the blasts, but who knew? You can’t never outthink a dog.
So now he sat with his Sten and his No. 36s behind a rock a few yards farther down and a few yards off the path. It was just waiting.
“A lot of war is waiting,” he’d told her. “You go crazy waiting. Don’t go crazy. Think of something else.”
Swagger himself thought of weapons, those he wished he had and the lesser quality of those he did have. Each grenade was a classic olive-drab egg, cross-checked by grooves meant to facilitate fragmentation. It had a mechanism at one end that sustained a pin, and the pin locked down what some called a spoon and others a lever, just a junk prang of metal that would pop off under spring tension when the pin was removed and the thing thrown, as the hammer pivoted under spring power to smack a detonator that lit a fuse that, 4.5 seconds later, turned the thing to noise and death. Grenades were tricky. You did not take grenades for granted. Drop it at the wrong time and it killed you, not them. Another grenade problem: you tossed it, it hit an overhanging branch or limb and bounced back. Not pretty. Thus he had checked and made sure his throws would have free passage. He also made sure all pins were loose in their holes, easy to yank. Too many guys had died from grenade mistakes in Vietnam. Grenades were heavier than they looked, and although some men got quite good with them, it took practice, and Bob had not thrown one since 1966, first tour in ’Nam. He got through two more tours without any grenade work and counted himself lucky.
But these were seventy years old. Boom or no boom, that was the question. That was why he would throw five, because if only two went boom, he still ought to win the war. Or at least get to the Sten part.
No uglier gun existed. You could not love it unless it saved your life countless times, and even then it would take some willpower. It was just a variety of steel tubes welded together at 4:57 P.M. Friday, British summer war time, three minutes before the end of the shift. Blobs and smears of liquid weld, now hardened into little disfigurements, littered its ostensibly smooth surface. They looked like lumps of butter hardened and spray-painted. It was beyond nuance, as if designed at the kitchen table, and in fact, that was where it had been designed. It rattled, nothing in it fit well, all angles were sharp and punishing to the hand or body. It was just a tube with stuff sticking off it at weird angles. The magazine inserted horizontally so that it was infernally out of balance; its trigger guard appeared to have been engineered before anyone thought up the curve. It lacked elegance, streamline, grace, ergonomic concession, or solidity. It lacked a front sight; its rear sight was a small nubby projection with a hole in it, which was why nobody ever used them. It even had a stupid nomenclature; machine carbine. The only thing it did well was kill people.
If he had to fight for his life, this was not quite what he would have come up with. However, the British won their part of World War II with this stuff, so in for a penny, in for a pound. Mili Petrova was worth it. He would have fought with a can opener for her.
Now he heard them. At last. It was almost a relief. By canting a little and staying low, he was able to get an eyeball on them.
There were six, seven if you counted the dog, who came first, sniffing bravely for pheromones that weren’t there. It pulled Thug One on a leash and was followed by Thugs Two through Five, in sweatsuits or jeans, really heavy, strong, tough-looking guys. Gangster meat, each carrying a short-barreled AK-74 with the long forty-round plum-colored magazine. Jerry Renn hadn’t flown in an A-Team from Dubai or anything like that. He’d hired off the Moscow street, probably Mob soldiers, cheap and expendable, complete with heavy brows, jawlines stark with testosterone, necks like diesel tires, huge hands, an aura of instant, thoughtless brutality so necessary to instill terror in potential resistants and keep others in the outfit in line, as well as to guarantee the boss’s comfort. Drug couriers or security, rule enforcement, lords of snitch discipline, collection experts, takedown crew, gunfighters, whatever was called for, these men provided it without a lot of thought before or guilt afterward. They were the universal soldiers of the Mob, any Mob. They did it for the blow, the chicks
and the gold necklaces. On a good day they got all three, on a bad, nothing but lead at twelve hundred feet per second.
Then came Jerry, last in line, but with a shorty AK as well. That made him one of the boys, that made him killable. Bob tried not to personalize this stuff, but he thought it would be kind of cool to kill Jerry. You could tell he was convinced he was pretty hot stuff, and that Swagger was years beyond effectiveness, an old goat with a bad case of crankiness and a steel ball for a hip. Be nice to blow the smug off his face with eighteen or twenty Sten-gun rounds.
Jerry had added a baseball hat, khaki, and one of those shoot-me-first tactical vests the contractors all wore. All his shit was sand-colored, so he’d spent a lot of time in the sand. He also wore Oakley killer shades, what looked to be a SiG 226 strapped to his thigh in a Tommy Tactical rig, and a nice pair of too-expensive tactical boots. He looked like a model for the iTactical.com site.
At least the six weren’t talking, bullshitting, smoking, joshing, or laughing. They weren’t quite that cocksure, though their postures were far from the kind of Condition Four readiness that kept you alive on combat patrols. It was clear they thought they had this one whipped. An old man with a bad hip, a not quite so old woman, an actual grandma, no weapons, no water, in wilderness about which they knew nothing, mostly moving uphill as fast as possible, but grinding down every step of the way. What was there to worry about?
* * *
Reilly couldn’t think of Paris. She couldn’t even think of Ocean City. It wasn’t fear, not as some experience it: weight, dread, air painful to skin, breath raw and raspy and somehow not satisfying. It was more like: Do I really have to do this? And: I can think of a lot of reasons why this is not a good idea. What would Marty say? “You what? You killed gangsters? Don’t tell Legal.”
So she tried to think of something else, something that she really loved, something that had sustained her over the years. She didn’t want to think of Will or her two daughters or her grandchild, because she feared that would make her shaky and full of remorse.
So she thought of newsrooms.
She knew she had been so lucky to live her life in newsrooms, among funny, ironic, not terribly serious people, some geniuses, some hacks, some fools, some crazy. You got the weirdest memories from a newsroom. There was a reporter who went out on a story and managed to lose a company car. That took some doing, although alcohol was involved. There was a strange old lady, who every day wore a pilot’s leather cap and a dress made from the Maryland flag. There was a failed priest who spent his lunchtime feeding quarters into peep machines in a nearby porn strip. There was a man who slipped off to massage parlors. There were several toupees wearing men beneath them, several princesses of WASP, Jewish, and Asian persuasion, a managing editor whose pants were too high, followed by one whose pants were too low. She’d weathered a storm when one new regime brought in anyone they could hire from Philadelphia, including, she supposed, the delivery drivers. There was a guy who went on to become a TV producer, another who wrote some novels, but most just drifted out of the business into something with regular hours when their wives or husbands wore them down. Then there were the pros who were really good at it and just loved the hell out it, working sixty-hour weeks whether it was necessary or not. They did about 70 percent of the work but never held it against the others who disappeared at the crack of five.
Of course it changed. The corporation took over, the model mutated from pay-the-most-for-the-best to pay-the-least-for-the-worst, and she’d watched it change from loon show to midsize insurance company, with mediocrities typing at monitors all day, so that the dull clackity-clunk of finger on plastic took over for the staccato spatters of fingers on typewriters, with the occasional slam-bang of a bell dinging when Johnny Ace hit the end of a line. She even remembered the hot-metal days, being just old enough to have caught a few years of that particular ancient tech and to work with the surly roustabout printers who actually knew what they were doing, even if most of the actual makeup people who supervised them had no idea, had been its own special kind of initiation. She remembered her first makeup editor, who’d saved her career a dozen times in the composing room, and could play the printers like a violin, knew them all and their kids by first name. Man, he was a newspaperman! She remembered rewrite desks, copy paper pasted together, rolled up, and fired to composing in a pneumatic tube that made a plumph sound that you never forgot if you ever heard it. She remembered a new copyreader saying, “Oh, I see. You put a headline on every story!” She remembered editors with the imagination of hamsters, hamsters who should have been editors, and the odd drunk and the odd suicide (it seemed the coming of computers had wiped out a whole generation of old men with gin-gray skin and shaky fingers who could turn any screamer’s phone call into prose in a minute’s time but were lost in cyberspace). She remembered the affairs, the hatreds, the vendettas, and the passion, the loyalty of people who loved and respected each other helping each other up rung by rung. She’d helped; she’d been helped.
It’s been a wonderful life, she thought. If I have to leave it, at least I had the golden age. The only thing is, none of us had any idea it was a golden age.
“Go!” came the call from Swagger.
She stepped out, assumed the position, and was amazed by how close they were. She pulled the trigger, and the metal machine in her hands became some kind of twitching, energetic pneumatic hammer as it turned the physical world to a storm of disturbed grit, while the noise was terrific. There seemed to be lots of cracking and shattering as the bullets struck whatever they struck and did whatever they did next. The gun’s stock beat sharply into the arms and ribs that locked it into place. A blur of brass refuse spurted from a slot in its side, and at its muzzle, blurring her vision, a rippling pulse of incandescent flash danced crazily. She closed her eyes as the gun rattled itself empty and opened them to get a glimpse of the mayhem she had loosed on the world at the last shot. She saw two men down and crawling and the others rolling or having already disappeared. Best of all, she didn’t see the dog. She hoped it was dead.
* * *
Swagger had placed a grenade at each three-yard mark and the Sten at the end of them, thirty yards down. He threw the first as he yelled, “Go!,” then ran down the line to lift, pull pin, and toss over the screen of boulders that separated himself from his hunters. One short toss, one long toss.
The God of Grenade was good that day. He let each of his children achieve its destiny. Five for five. Each lever popped off, each grenade began to hiss and spit, and it was away. Four-point-five seconds later, it became a chaos event, releasing energy and pressure totally out of scale with its size and weight, turning its shielding into bullets and its doughy center into pure killing force. To be near it was to be unlucky. It was very unkind to living things. Only the dog escaped unhurt, turning at the machine-gun burst to flee like its own kind of hell on wheels and sprint at warp speed out of the kill zone, those good dog reflexes giving it advantages at survival that the men around it never had. It darted off and clear to become feral, to acquire a new master, who knew?
Swagger snatched up the Sten and found its one advantage was its easy pointability, its hunger to find and destroy targets. A shape staggered by him and he put a burst into it and it went down. He got around a rock and faced the alleyway of carnage. Visibility nonexistent, just a seething sea of dust and gas, silent because all ears had shut down among killer and killed alike. Another figure appeared before Swagger, severely injured by the look of the walk. But mercy was not on the menu, and he shot it till it went down—this guy took a lot of killing—and as he finished him, still another figure flashed by him, running like hell. Bob pivoted to fire and saw that it was Jerry Renn, absent I-am-cool baseball hat, running like a halfback. Too bad for Jerry. Swagger fired only two shots, both liberating geysers of raw debris at the target’s feet, and the gun had run dry. He raced through a mag change, but by the time he was hot to go, Jerry had vanished. He hunkered down, waited a wh
ile as the dust settled, and beheld what he had wrought.
Four dead, opened up badly by the blasts or the Swagger stitches, one barely moving. Swagger put a burst into him before Reilly got into the picture, he didn’t want to argue the moral complexity of the coup de grâce, he just wanted the guy out of the situation.
“Clear, all down,” he yelled, then retraced his way to his entrance point into the alley, where he’d set the Enfield No. 4 (T). He snatched it up and ran to a spot he’d reconnoitered earlier, a kind of promontory where an arm of rock stood out right at the margin of the scree field and gave him best vantage on what lay below.
Arm snaked through sling, rifle to shoulder. Position built from bones outward. Both eyes open but the dominant one, at the precise point of maximum accessibility to the scope, in charge. He nestled for support, feeling his bones line up, feeling his joints lock. He was against the rock, leaning over a shelf, looking down the descending line of trees, and he caught a flash of movement, vectored to it, identified Jerry by his loping stride and because he was the only living human male in the immediate world, and tracked.
Tracked.
Tracked.
Range about six hundred, so gauging that she had zeroed at a thousand, he held low, at foot level, pivoted to stay with Jerry until he led him by a good six feet, and then his finger, on direct-command line from his deep brain, P-R-E-S-S-E-D the trigger. He came back on target to see the bullet hit Jerry somewhere low and toss him, as it had a thousand or so pounds of energy left. He went down hard and lay still.