by Gordon Kent
The central stall was sturdier. It looked like a shed built of corrugated iron, and its roof ran back to the tower. At least one survivor was under it, firing steadily in short, disciplined bursts. Alan could see the light of the muzzle flash but not the shooter. He began to move out from behind the truck, his gun hand fully extended toward the target. Harry was silent, either hit or reloading. Alan moved to his left, toward the corner of the tower, keeping the corrugated iron stall between him and the shooter. When he reached the line of stalls, mangled by repeated hits, he began to move along them toward the entrance to the iron stall. Then, to his relief, Harry fired again, this time at something on the other side of the market. Alan saw his flash as the shotgun roared. He waved his pistol and pointed at the central stall.
“I see you.” Harry’s voice sounded clear across the market. The shooter in the stall fired at the voice. Harry fired again.
“There’s another one at the other end,” he shouted. Alan froze, pointing his pistol into the moonshadows fifty feet away. He heard movement inside the main stall, which went all the way back to the tower. The shooter there was moving.
Alan moved too, first to his left again to get cover from the south end of the market, then straight to the wall of the warehouse. He heard scrabbling sounds, a wooden thud, and a single roaring shot, followed by silence. He moved as quietly as he could back down the warehouse toward its dark mouth. Then he looked around the corner with his right eye, toward the south end of the market. He lowered himself to his haunches and crouched, perfectly still, watching the darkness to his front. The shotgun roared again, and the thin fabric at the front of one of the south-side stalls shredded.
“Harry!” That was Dukas’s voice in the warehouse.
“Mike! There’s a guy in there!”
“Not any more.”
Alan flung a bolt of cotton out from his hiding place and it spun, unrolling a little, across the market. No fire greeted it.
Harry fired twice, aimed shots at the base of stalls.
Dukas stayed where he was.
“I think we’re shooting at shadows,” called Harry.
Alan watched the dark.
“I’m crossing the square. Cover me.”
Alan pointed his pistol at the other side of the square, and Dukas materialized at the corner of the warehouse.
“Where’s Harry?”
Alan’s speech was slurred, and he spoke slowly.
“He’s crossing the square. Maybe—shooter over here—”
Dukas held the big revolver in both hands and pointed it where Alan had indicated. Harry moved very quickly from cover to cover. Nobody fired.
The explosion had deafened Chen and half-buried him in debris. It took him time to extricate himself from the new wreckage piled on the old, and more time to clear his head. The sniper, however, was already up and moving. Shreed, lying behind the stone of the prayer screen, seemed untouched. He’d stopped screaming. Now he was talking to himself.
Chen raised his head, half expecting to be shot.
At first glance in the moonlight, the tower appeared untouched. Chen had to focus to see that the whole facade sagged in the middle. A deep gouge like a thumbmark in clay disappeared into shadows at the base. If the charge had blown a hole, however, it was too small for entry.
There was a burst of flickering light from the far side of the tower, like hidden fireworks. The noise of the firing took a moment to register.
“Sergeant! Report!”
“I’m at the door to the tower. They’re all over the square.”
“Get inside!”
“—door.”
The sound of the shot and the noise from his headset told him the story.
“Sergeant!”
Chen looked back at the sniper, who was prone in a rubble pile, covering Chen’s back.
“Report!” he demanded on the command channel.
Only silence responded.
Shreed was talking again. He said Chen’s name several times. He started to talk about money, and Chen thought for a moment about how typical Shreed was of his kind. Dying, he didn’t talk about God or revolution; he talked about money.
Then Chen began to understand what Shreed was saying.
The three men picked their way along the edge of the tower. Harry stopped to check the body at the corner, the one Dukas had shot from the tower. Dead. Harry took the dead man’s machine pistol, searched him for ammunition, and handed it to Dukas, who looked over the gun, fitted a clip, and hung the sling over his shoulder. Alan stayed silent, leaning against the wall of the tower. He had refused to stay behind, and they had rebound his wrist and bandaged the wreck of his hand more carefully. While Harry took his time over the hand, Dukas kept looking to the east beyond the tower.
“Don’t worry, Mike. They won’t get away.” He had sounded very sure. Dukas hadn’t asked any questions. He looked shellshocked.
Harry came to the southeast corner and stopped, looking south. Then he got down on hands and knees and looked carefully around the corner. He watched what little he could see of the square down the wall. Dukas thought that he was going to wait forever. Alan merely leaned against the wall, stolid as an animal heading for slaughter.
Harry turned the corner quickly and then moved close to the wall, still covered from the mosque by the tower’s jutting corner. Dukas followed him closely, one hand on his back, Alan a little farther behind.
When they stopped at the last corner, Harry could hear Shreed talking, and a voice, higher in pitch, shouting in English. Harry froze and then sank into a crouch.
“Where! Where is the money?”
“All—gone. All gone.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I think—you’ll be…happier—US of A.” Shreed’s voice was weak, fading into murmurs, but it sounded happy.
“Bastard!”
Harry crept the last few feet and looked around the corner. He could see nothing but rubble. He kept moving. He could feel Dukas’s hand on his back. He could hear Alan, another step behind. He was afraid that Alan was too far gone to bend over, that he would walk into a bullet like a zombie. He turned to look, and Dukas stepped right past him, half crouched, his whole attention focused on the voice.
“They’ll kill—go…home.”
“I’ll kill you right now! Traitor!”
“Fuck you, Chen.” Shreed’s words were slow and distinct, as if they had been practiced many times. Harry had scrambled to keep up with Dukas, who stepped straight out of the shadow of the wall.
The sniper had heard the movement. His commander was oblivious, prattling in English, and he twisted as quietly as possible to change his front. He rolled to a crouch and moved in a long glide away from the northwest corner, where he had waited so long. In one motion he raised his rifle to his eye and raised his body so that the muzzle appeared a few feet from Dukas.
When a shot from the darkness severed the sniper’s spine, Dukas was sprayed with his blood. The sound of the shot lingered and echoed. Dukas crouched, stunned, and Chen spun and fired from a few meters away, knocking Dukas back into Harry. The shot hit his collarbone and turned in, plowing through the soft tissue and exiting at the back.
Alan raised his right arm like a duelist and brought the sight down one-handed. He leaned forward a little as Dukas fell. He shot once and Chen stumbled back, stepping on Shreed, and caught himself against the prayer screen. Chen raised his gun again and then flew forward as if kicked between the shoulders, to fall just in front of Shreed’s head. There was a gaping hole in the back of his jacket and the body armor beneath.
Alan hugged one side of the doorway and looked over at Harry, flat against the opposite wall.
“Where did that come from?”
“Anna, bud. I met…”
Dukas staggered up and forward even as Harry tried to restrain him. He fell to his knees beside Shreed, who was still watching Chen, his eyes open and unglazed.
“George Shreed, I arrest you for
the crime of high treason—”
“Who—shot—Chen—?”
“—against the people and nation of the United States—”
“Who the—fuck are—you—!”
“—crimes of murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit treason—”
“Partlow—fucking parade—”
“You have the right to remain silent—”
Alan watched it with his vision tunneling, and it seemed as if Mike Dukas was a priest saying last rites over a dying man. Harry had moved next to Dukas, trying to tend his wound, but Dukas knelt there, his badge out, blood running down over his belt in back. Alan tottered forward, unsure, confused, losing blood.
Then Dukas had completed his rites. He let Harry reach a hand down his back, winced when Harry came to the exit wound, and slumped.
“Hey, buddy, you up to slapping a compress on Mike while I apply pressure?”
Alan tried to cross the distance back to Harry. Harry was right there and needed help. He focused himself. Compress. In the little pack on his hip. His good hand went there, moved around, found something wrapped in paper, emerged. Harry had the wound bare, the whole track of the bullet’s course around the neck clear under the skin. Blood flowed at both ends of the wound where the collarbone had split the bullet. Alan slapped the compress on, and his smart hand, the right, went back for tape. Harry cut pieces off the roll and they managed to stuff the ends of the wound with gauze. The focus helped. Alan emerged a little from the tunnel of his own wound.
“How’s Shreed?”
“Who cares?” Harry looked over at the man by the prayer screen. “If I thought he might live, I’d shoot him myself.”
“We have to get out of here.”
Harry paused, cut lengths of tape all down his arm, and looked at his watch.
“Plane comes by in twenty minutes.”
“Need to get a car down—to the road.”
“Give me a minute here.” He was putting tape over the other tape ends, running tape all the way over the compress and around Mike’s neck and down his back.
“Mick?” Shreed asked with perfect clarity. “That you, buddy?”
Mick? Alan’s father’s name. Alan thought of the George Shreed who had been shot down in 1972 in Nam, and of Alan’s father, Mick Craik, flying top cover for him beyond the point of no return, until the choppers came and his dad had had to land an A-6 on a dirt road. George Shreed, who had been part of his life since he was a child. Who had tried to help him, in a twisted way, when his father had died, and who had betrayed them all. Harry, Rose, Alan himself.
There were things he had to know.
He fell on his knees beside Shreed, as close as Dukas had been.
“It’s Alan, not Mick.”
“Alan Craik.” Shreed smiled, the old smile, malevolent, bitter. “Here?”
“Why? I want to know why. Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” Still the smile.
Betray your country, Alan wanted to shout. He wasn’t sure what to say. The man was probably dying, and all Alan felt was rage, rage that pushed him out of the tunnel and on to the cold plane of reality.
“This.”
“This op? Because I could. None of those other dickheads had—intestinal—” Shreed rolled a little as if to rise on his elbow and gasped, falling back so hard his head hit the rock.
“You weren’t running an op. You betrayed people. People died!”
“China—won’t trouble—us—”
“What the hell—China—!”
“Dickheads. Idiots.” His lips moved, and he pushed his head up. “Like Partlow! Bureaucrats!”
“My wife. You framed Rose.”
“What?” Shreed was weak. Whatever lift he had got from talking to Chen, seeing Chen die, was going. Still, he had the strength to laugh. “Your wife!” It was real laughter. Then the laughter ended, and he muttered, “She bought me some—time.”
“What did you bring the Chinese?”
Shreed looked at him, struggling to concentrate.
“Chinese?”
“You ran to the Chinese. What did you take them?”
Shreed gurgled, turned his head, and spat against the wall. The saliva had red in it. His eyes lost their focus; behind Alan, Harry and Mike were as concentrated on Shreed as he was. Dukas began to rifle through Shreed’s pockets. Harry searched Chen.
“Poison.”
“What about poison?”
“Brought Chen—poison—”
“Isn’t he your control? He’s running you?”
“Bastard—never—”
Dukas leaned over. “Never what? Never controlled you? Tell me another one.”
Then Shreed almost shouted, with sudden clarity, “How’d you get here, boy?”
“We followed you.”
Shreed closed his eyes. His chest moved up and down rapidly, and it came to Alan that he was laughing again. He wheezed and coughed. His eyes sprang open, focused, a clear blue untouched by frost, staring right into Alan.
“You taking me home?”
“If we make it.”
Shreed said something too quietly for Alan to hear. He bent over and noticed that blood was again spurting from the wreckage of his hand. It seemed to be happening a long way away. Shreed tried to push him away and spoke clearly.
“You think you’re heroes, but you don’t—understand—”
Harry leaned in, his dark head between Alan and Shreed.
“You’ll hang.”
“I’ll have—monument like—Casey. You’ll see—who the hero—is—”
Shreed’s mouth worked a little, but no more sound came out. It was as if Harry’s voice had broken a spell. Alan stood slowly, the almost forgotten rip across his knee springing to new pain.
“I’m going to get a car down to the road to signal the plane,” he said. “Harry—take care of—”
“I’ll watch Mike. And I want to find…the other shooter.”
Dukas looked up at him, his lips white.
“He doesn’t have anything.” He looked dazed. “Maybe—maybe in the car…”
Alan nodded.
Alan drove Shreed’s white sedan down the dark track, feeling the first hit of a morphine injection and its false security as it crept through his system. He looked at his watch and drove the car out on the road, shifted hard and pushed the pedal down until he was flying past the ridge, past the turn where their own abandoned vehicle sat off the road, on and on for more than a mile until a bright red-and-yellow sign flashed past. The wind was from the south, right in his face. It would make a landing easier. He slowed the car with the gears and the brake and backed it in a K turn until he had it pointed north, his left hand smearing the wheel with blood. Then he turned it off, rolled the window down, and waited. He could see headlights shining at the top of the hill. Harry would be getting Dukas and Shreed into one of the Chinese trucks up there.
Alan pulled Harry’s cellphone out of his pack and wedged it between his knees while he turned it on, waited for a signal, and pressed the auto-dial for Harry’s computer office in DC. It was answered on the third ring.
“Ethos Security.”
“Valdez?”
“Who’s this?”
He had to brace himself. “Alan Craik.”
“Jeez, Mister Craik, you don’t sound too good.”
“Valdez, I need you to pass a message—”
“You guys okay? Where are you?”
“Tell the Navy, Valdez. Get to the highest level you—can and tell them—we got him.”
“The guy you were after.”
“And I don’t think he had time to pass anything. That part is—very important—” He had trouble keeping his voice loud enough.
“You got the guy, he didn’t pass anything.”
“I can’t swear to that, Valdez. But we got him meeting the Chinese…” His voice faded a moment, and he rallied himself. “And no one left that meeting alive. You got that? Do it now. Now. Very important—”
“Mister Craik, you sound like shit, pardon my French.”
“Just—do it—”
Alan pressed the cutoff switch.
He heard the vacuum cleaner noise first. It sounded intermittent and far away, and he was surprised by the flash of the landing lights in front of him, only a mile distant. He flicked the car-lights three times, a long pulse each time. The engine noise dwindled away to a whine, and then he saw the plane clearly, lined up and only a few meters above the road. It passed over his head in a rush and was gone, and then he heard the engines go to full power and it turned west, out over the valley, and came around. He lost the engine noise then and watched Harry stop where the village road met the highway. Harry’s lights did a good job of marking the start of a runway, and Harry probably didn’t want to risk running down the road when the plane was on approach.
The landing lights came on again to the north, and Alan thought that Stevens looked too low, too early, but the plane came on and on, past Harry’s lights, and it was down, and the engines roared as it braked itself, taxiing, and rolled out. The S-3 stopped well north of him. He cut his lights, cranked the engine, and turned them back on, and then, his vision coming and going as if a light was being turned on and off, drove to the edge of the jetwash, rolled the car to the shoulder, and parked it.
Harry was already strapping Dukas into the SENSO seat. The front of the cockpit was illuminated red and green by the gauges, the back end darker with both tactical screens down. Soleck unstrapped and bounded past him, pausing to try to shake his hand, then seeing him stagger.
“Jesus—Commander—”
“Shreed’s in the truck,” Harry said. “He’s still alive.”
Alan put his good hand on Harry. “You’ll have to ride in the tunnel.”
“I’m not coming with you.”
“I’m not leaving you here!” Leaning back against the aircraft, not able to bear his own weight, Harry fading—
