Hard as Nails jk-3

by Dan Simmons

  Maybe I could fallow their car and…

  Arlene shook her head. After getting even a glimpse of the police, the already paranoid smugglers would probably be more paranoid. The streets were empty in this wet, botched caricature of a city, and there was little to no chance that Arlene would be able to tail the smugglers without them seeing her. And if she spooked them enough, they might even kill the girl and just dump her out somewhere. Arlene just didn't know the stakes here—for Aysha, for the people smuggling her in, for the Burned Man in that bug truck straight ahead, or even for Joe.

  I could just go home. That was certainly the option that made the most sense. In the morning, Joe would probably say, "Oh, that's all right—I just wanted to chat with the girl if possible. No biggee."

  Uh-huh, thought Arlene.

  "All right, I'm back with the phone," came Gail's voice in her ear. "What next?"

  "Ahh…just hold onto it for a second," said Arlene, knowing how foolish she sounded. It was like those old practical jokes in high school where some boy would call up pretending to be a telephone repairman and get you to take the cover off the phone—back when phones looked alike and had covers—and then made you do one thing after the other to help «fix» it, until you were swinging a bag of parts over your head and clucking like a chicken.

  Joe had talked Arlene into purchasing a cell phone for Rachel a few months earlier. He was always worried that the girl might be in danger, that someone might go after her the way her late stepfather had, and he liked the idea of Rachel carrying around a phone with Arlene's numbers set to speed dial.

  Gail had been a little nonplussed at the gift—"If Rachel wanted a phone, I'd buy one for her," she'd said logically enough—but Arlene had convinced her that this was Joe's awkward way of establishing some contact with the girl, of watching over her from afar. "He can establish contact just by coming to dinner and seeing her more frequently," Gail had said sternly. Arlene couldn't argue with that.

  She'd thought of the phone right now because although its bills were paid by WeddingBells-dot-com, if someone tried to use reverse-911 on it, the records would show just the WeddingBells PO box number.

  Fourteen minutes before midnight. It was quite possible the smugglers could get here a few minutes early with Aysha—any second—and Arlene didn't have a clue what to do. If the Burned Man nabbed Aysha, she could try following the bug truck so at least she could tell Joe where the girl was taken, but the same empty, wet streets in the same empty, wet town here made that no more feasible than following the smugglers themselves.

  Arlene didn't like to use obscenities, but she had to admit that her goose was well and truly cooked here.

  "Arlene? Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine. Is the phone charged?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. Dial nine-one-one."

  "What? Is there an emergency?"

  "Not yet. But dial nine-one-one. But don't hit the 'call' button yet."

  "All right. What do I tell them the emergency is?"

  "Tell them that there's a man having a heart attack—in cardiac arrest—just outside the Rainbow Centre Mall."

  "Rainbow Centre? That place up in Niagara Falls?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you there? Is there someone in cardiac arrest? I can talk you through the CPR until the paramedics get there."

  "This is just private-eye stuff, Gail. Just tell them that a man's having a heart attack outside the Rainbow Centre Mall… And tell them he's in a van near the south main mall doors and the van has Total Pest Control written on the side."

  "Wait… wait… let me write that down. What was the…"

  "Total Pest Control. Like in the cereal."

  "There's a cereal called Pest Control?"

  "Just write it down." Arlene usually enjoyed Gail's odd sense of humor, but there wasn't time tonight.

  "Won't they arrest me for false reporting?"

  "They won't find you. Trust me. After you make the call… if you make the call… just take a hammer and smash that cell phone and throw the pieces away. I'll provide a new one."

  "It looks like a pretty expensive phone. I'm not sure…"

  "Gail."

  "All right. A man undergoing cardiac arrest at the south entrance to the Rainbow Centre Mall—that one near the convention center in Niagara Falls… and he's having this heart attack in a van with Total Pest Control written on the side of it."

  "Yes." Arlene looked at her watch. Eleven minutes before midnight. It was almost too late to…

  The van had started up. Arlene could see the oil-rich exhaust in the humid air. She could hear the engine even with her window up.

  Oh, thank God. I don't have to…

  The van made a fast left turn and headed in Arlene's direction. For a second the headlights pinned her like a deer.

  She immediately dropped sideways onto the passenger seat and fumbled in her purse for the.44 Magnum. The cell phone fell off her lap and bounced and for a second Arlene was sure that she'd disconnected with Gail.

  "Hello? Hello?" Gail and Arlene were both shouting.

  The van stopped fifty or sixty feet in front of Arlene's Buick, the headlights turning her windshield a thick milky white.

  "Call nine-one-one," Arlene whispered urgently. "Call nine-one-one. On the cell phone. Keep this line open."

  "Oh, my God. Arlene, are you all right? What's…"

  "Call nine-one-one!" shouted Arlene. 'Tell them what I said."

  Arlene lowered herself to the floor, her back against the passenger-side door. She set the cell phone on the seat, pulled her legs over the console and set her feet on the carpeted floor. She set the heavy Magnum on her knee and cocked it, keeping the muzzle pointing at the ceiling. If the Burned Man came to the passenger side, she might not be visible in the shadow of the footwell here, especially with the headlights making everything else so bright She aimed the gun at the driver's door.

  The van's headlights went off and the van's engine fell silent.

  "Arlene!" It was a screech, but not a panicked one. Gail had been a nurse for a long time. The more tense things got, the more calm Gail became, Arlene knew. On the job.

  "Husssshhhh," whispered Arlene, leaning left to hiss into the phone. "Don't talk. Don't talk."

  There was no further noise. No footsteps. But the van's engine stayed off and the van's headlights stayed dark. Arlene looked across at the driver's door window, aiming the muzzle of her weapon. What seemed like hours passed in the silence, but she knew it must have been just a minute or two.

  Oh, dear Lord. Did I lock the doors?

  It was too late to lunge across for the locking controls on the far door now. She considered reaching above her head and locking the door on her side—If he swings it open, I'll fall out backwards like a bag of laundry—but knew that the power lock driving home would sound like a gunshot. She left it alone.

  The van door slammed. Arlene set her finger in the trigger guard. She'd practice-fired this weapon enough to know that it required quite a bit of pressure on the trigger to fire. And the recoil was serious. She propped her head more firmly on the door behind her so that the recoil wouldn't catch her on the chin, cradled the big gun on her knee with her left hand under her right hand to steady it and thumbed the hammer back until it clicked.

  She could bear the footsteps on the concrete now. He was walking toward the driver's side.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  As the big helicopter plummeted, Kurtz banished the blue-pill haze from his mind and body.

  He willed away the false good-feeling and tinge of good humor that overlay everything. He willed away the cloud of painlessness and let both his headache and his resolve flow back in like black ink. He willed away the soft pharmaceutical fog and summoned the hard-edged core of Joe Kurtz back to duty.

  The big Bell Long Ranger hit hard, jarring Kurtz's spine and sending the old familiar spikes through his skull, slid a few yards across slick grass, and came to a stop. Immediately Gonzaga and his man
Bobby were out the side door and running. Angelina and her bodyguard, Campbell, followed a minute later, carrying Mp5s, the ditty bags filled with ammunition rattling at their hips.

  Kurtz struggled with the four point straps for a few seconds, slapped them away, grabbed up his bag, set the folded aluminum and web litter over his shoulder on a sling, and went out through the side door just as Baby Doc stepped out his pilot-side door and pulled two long tubes from behind his seat. The pilot hung one of the tubes over his shoulder with a sling and carried the other. They looked like RPGs, the old Russian and Eastern European rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

  "What're those?" whispered Kurtz. The two were jogging toward the house now in the dark, passing the dark shape of the Major's Huey.

  "RPGs," said Baby Doc and turned in the direction of the driveway.

  "Wait!" called Kurtz.

  Baby Doc turned but did not stop jogging.

  "I thought you were staying with the chopper," whispered Kurtz.

  Baby Doc grinned. "I never said I would."

  "What if you get killed?"

  The grin stayed in place. "You guys will either have to take flying lessons or start walking." He turned his back and ran toward the head of the driveway.

  There was a dead man lying in the guardhouse gazebo. Nothing stirred except the six of them jogging toward the house. The external security lights were on in the back, but the house remained dark.

  Angelina Farino Ferrara set the C-4 charge on the door, triggered the tuned detonator, and stepped back with the other three just as Kurtz came jogging up. The blast wasn't as loud as Kurtz expected, but it was pretty sure to wake everyone in the house. The door flew inward, showing steel reinforcements blown off at the hinges.

  Gonzaga went in first. His bodyguard followed a second later. Angelina and her man lunged in a second after that.

  This is nuts, thought Kurtz, not for the first time that night. One did not assault a house without knowing the houseplans intimately. He raised the Browning and threw himself through the door.

  The foyer and hall lights had come on, which was not good. The layout was as he remembered—the foyer opening on the center hall straight ahead, staircase to the right—Angelina and her man were already pounding up it—a dark, formal living room was visible to his left, closed doors along the hallway to the left and right.

  Gonzaga kicked open the first door to the right of the foyer and tossed in a flash-bang. The explosion was very loud. Bobby, the bodyguard, kicked in the second door to the right and dodged back as a hail of automatic weapons fire slashed across the foyer, shattering the chandelier and tearing apart vases and furniture in the living room across the way. Bobby fired his shotgun into the room, pumped it, fired again, pumped it, fired again. The machine gun fire stopped abruptly.

  Upstairs, two explosions poured smoke down the stairway.

  Kurtz ran across the foyer, scattering crystal as he ran. Plaster was falling from the high ceiling. He could see the glass library doors fifty feet or so straight ahead and anyone in that dark room could see him. There were too many lights in this broad hallway, and they were too recessed to shoot out, so he felt like the target he was as he dodged from one side to the other and paused where the hallway began.

  Gonzaga came out of the room behind him and fired up the staircase to Kurtz's right. A black-garbed figure tumbled down the steps and an M-16 fell onto the foyer tiles. Not one of ours, thought Kurtz.

  "You take the left, Bobby and I'll take the right," shouted Toma Gonzaga.

  Kurtz nodded and dodged left just as the library doors exploded shards of glass outward. Toma, Bobby, and Kurtz jumped against doorways. Two shotguns and Kurtz's Browning fired at the same time, smashing the last shards of the glass doors. Kurtz wanted to get to the Major's room, which opened off the left side of the library at the end of the hall, but right now he wasn't going anywhere as someone fired an M-16 again from the darkness of the library.

  The second door on the left along that hallway opened and one of the Vietnamese bodyguards peered out, ducked back behind the door, held out an M-16, and sprayed the hallway. Gonzaga and Bobby were out of sight behind Kurtz, in the rooms along the opposite side of the hallway. Shotgun blasts roared and filled the air with cordite stink.

  Kurtz pressed into the first doorway on the left—the door was locked—and waited until the spray of plaster and ricochets from the M-16 blast let up. Then he aimed the Browning at the center of the open wooden doorway and fired five slugs into it, about chest high. There was a cry and the sound of a body tumbling down the stairs.

  Basement. Kurtz wanted to go down there—it was his job to—but he had to secure the library first. He ran, firing, to the basement doorway. There was no return fire from beyond the shattered glass of the library.

  There was a light on downstairs and Kurtz could see the bodyguard's body crumpled at the base of the steps. Kurtz pulled a flash-bang grenade from his bag, flipped the primer, and tossed it down the stairs, stepping back behind the door while it exploded. When he peered around, the basement was full of smoke and the bodyguard's clothing was burning. He hadn't moved.

  More explosions from the second floor. The gunfire up there was horrendous. Kurtz wondered if Angelina had survived the Battle of the North Bedroom or whatever the hell it was.

  As Kurtz lunged around and crouched on the top step of the basement stairs, still focused on the library doors, Gonzaga and Bobby poked their heads out of their doorways.

  "These rooms are clear," shouted Gonzaga. "At least two down here. What about the library?"

  Automatic weapons fire exploded from the dark library again, stitching the walls along the wide hallway and making all three men duck back. Kurtz had caught a glimpse of two splaying muzzle flashes.

  "It's not clear," he called from the top step. "Two machine guns at least."

  "Throw a flash-bang," called Bobby.

  I can do better than that, thought Kurtz. He took a wad of C-4 from his ditty bag, wadded it into a rough sphere, stuck in a primer detonator, and set it for four seconds. He lunged into the hall and threw it like a fastball through the shattered doors, jumping back onto the top step just as both M-16s opened up.

  The blast blew the wide doors off their hinges and rolled a cloud of acrid smoke down the hallway.

  Kurtz, Gonzaga and Bobby ran into the smoke, firing as they ran.

  The last door on the right opened. An Asian woman looked out and screamed. Her hands were empty.

  "No!" shouted Kurtz over his shoulder, but too late. Gonzaga fired at her with his shotgun at a range of twenty feet and the woman's upper body flew back into the room as if jerked away on a cable.

  Kurtz kicked the hanging library doors open and rolled in among broken glass and splintered doorframe. The carpet was on fire. Smoke rose to the cathedral ceiling and a smoke alarm was screaming, hitting almost the same note the Asian woman had.

  Trinh and another Vietnamese had been firing from behind a long, heavy library table they'd turned on its side. The C-4 blast had shattered the table into several chunks and a thousand splinters and thrown it all back over them. The bodyguard had been blown out through the glass terrace doors—a burglar alarm raised its whoop in chorus to the smoke alarm—and that man was obviously dead. Colonel Trinh was lying unconscious on the smoking carpet. His face was bloody and his left arm was visibly broken, but he was breathing. His red slippers had been blown off and one of them sat in a bookshelf ten feet up the high wall of shelves. The colonel's shattered M-16 lay nearby.

  Kurtz rolled the colonel on his belly, pulled flexcuffs from his bag, and cuffed the man's wrists behind him. Tightly.

  "Take him out to the chopper," he told Bobby, who was swinging his shotgun in short arcs, covering every opening, including the broken doors onto the lighted terrace.

  "I don't take orders from you."

  "Do it," said Gonzaga, stepping through the broken doors from the hallway.

  Bobby grabbed the old Vietnamese
man by his hair, pulled him halfway up, tucked a shoulder under him, hoisted him onto his shoulder without releasing his shotgun, and jogged down the hallway with him.

  "Strong fucker," said Kurtz.

  "Yeah."

  The two men had each taken a knee and were covering different doorways. Upstairs, the rock 'n' roll gunfire had resolved itself into the occasional short bursts of full auto.

  "That's the Major's bedroom," said Kurtz, jabbing a finger at the closed door on the south wall of the library. "You get him. I'm going to check the basement."

  Gonzaga nodded and ran to the right of the bedroom doorway, jamming more shells into his 12-gauge as he did so.

  Good idea, thought Kurtz as he went back out into the hallway. He pulled another clip from his pocket. He'd kept count of his shots out of old habit—nine fired so far. There should be two bullets left in the Browning, one in the chamber and one in the clip.

  The bodyguard's body at the bottom of the steps was still on fire, but the smoke in the basement had dissipated some. Besides the burning carpet and books in the library on the first floor, something on the second floor was also burning—smoke poured down into the foyer. The shooting up there had stopped.

  Suddenly there was a double explosion from outside, north of the house, where the driveway came up from the valley.

  Well, Baby Doc got to use at least one of his RPGs.

  Kurtz went down the steps, pistol extended. A glance at the heaped body at the bottom showed him that he'd managed to put three slugs into the Asian man's chest through the door. Kurtz moved into the basement.

  Surprisingly for such a fancy house, the basement wasn't finished. The central part was open and carpeted, there was a big screen TV and some cheap couches near the far wall a small kitchen and bar area showed a refrigerator and booze, but part of the floor was bare concrete and the place smelted of sweat and cigarettes. It looked to Kurtz like a place where the bodyguards might hang out. More smoke was roiling down the stairway.