by Mark Greaney
Court started to run forward again, glad to feel the tension leave his shoulder as Russ did the same on the far side of the rooftop.
This roof ended just feet from where they ran; they could barely see through the darkness and heavy snowfall, otherwise they would have had time to decide what to do. Instead the four-story drop just appeared and there was no time to stop on the icy surface; there was only time to rush forward, pick up speed, and then launch off the roof into the air.
Both men, lashed together at the wrists, kicked out over open ground; fifty feet below them was a cobblestone alley bathed in gaslights. Across the alley was a three-story wooden building; the pitched roof above it was as steep as the one they’d just leapt from.
They crashed onto the sheer three-story roof as one, Gentry on the right of the peak, Whitlock on the left. Both men splayed out flat, landing on the steeply angled surface, but again, the fact they were connected saved them and they did not slide off to the ground below.
The men were up again and moving in seconds.
Trestle Actual ran along narrow Kooli Street, trying to get line of sight on the roof high above. Just behind him was Trestle Seven.
Five had headed back to the parking lot in front of the hotel to bring the van to pick up the team up the street. They all stayed in contact with Trestles Two and Four, who were now racing through the park on the opposite side of the buildings that ran along the old town wall. It was difficult for the Townsend operators to see anything high on the rooftop in the whipping blizzard, and the tactical lights hanging from the rails of their HK rifles were less than useless, as they only illuminated the whiteout conditions between themselves and any potential target.
As they neared the end of the block Trestle Seven shouted, “Got him!” and Nick looked back over his shoulder to see what his colleague was focusing on. Seven’s eyes and the barrel of his MP7 pointed across the alleyway that separated the row of buildings next to them with another block of lower structures. Nick could not believe Gentry had managed to move that quickly along a sixty-degree roofline that must have been as slick as glass, but he, too, saw a figure ahead.
He and Seven both fired at the same time.
Court and Russ had just dropped down off the peaked town wall and onto a roof that was not as steeply angled as the others; it had more packed snowfall frozen to it, several inches high and hanging over the street below, terminating in long icicles. When another burst of fire from the street blew out a window just below where he ran along the roof, Court looked down again and saw that two men had gained on him, and they were running in the narrow cobblestoned alleyway just below his position.
Court looked ahead through the blizzard at the next connected roof. It was less steeply angled than the others, and the snowfall here was a foot deep. He shouted over the storm, “Give me ten feet of slack!” Within a second he felt the wiring wrapped around his left hand lose tension, and he shouted, “Belay!”
Court leapt high in the air and came crashing down on the next roof on his back, and a massive block of white broke off and cascaded down the side like an avalanche. Court was held up by the cables connecting him to Russ on the other side of the apex, so he did not slide off the roof with the snow.
Trestles Actual and Seven had been running below their target, and both men had just reloaded their MP7s and trained them back up above them when they heard Gentry yell something. They looked for their target in the heavy snowstorm, but instead they saw a huge foot-thick sheet of white falling from the roof, some twenty-five feet above their heads. The avalanche of packed precipitation was the size of an automobile, weighing several hundred pounds, and it dropped through the air, picking up velocity and power. Trestle Seven took the brunt of the avalanche, and Nick only caught a glimpse of the man before he was buried alive. Trestle Actual himself dove out of the way of the brunt of the mass of frozen precipitation, but his legs were momentarily buried under the pile.
Russ Whitlock didn’t have a clue what was going on on the other side of the building, but he had heard gunfire and Court’s call for slack. He’d run up toward the crown of the roof, giving Court the freedom he’d asked for, and then he’d dropped to his knees to support him when Court called for the belay. Now Russ was back down where he’d started, racing along again as fast as possible on the slick roof. He and Gentry had to climb up to the next building, but within moments they were hustling again, still heading east, getting closer and closer to the end of the block.
While he struggled along the pitched rooftop Russ tapped his earpiece and placed a call to a number he had programmed into it.
“Yes?”
He spoke loud enough to sound agitated, but softly enough so that Gentry would not hear him through the storm. “This is Dead Eye. It’s turning to shit over here!”
“Say iden, Dead Eye.”
“Metronome, it’s me. Trestle is getting slaughtered! You’ve got to pull them out of—”
“Say iden key.”
“They are outside! There is a running gun battle in the streets! Pull them back!”
“If you can’t establish your identity—”
“Fuck you, Parks! I’m going in!” Whitlock shouted this, and then disconnected the call.
“What?” yelled Gentry.
Russ shouted over the roof. He’d expected Gentry to hear something and was ready. “I said, the roof ends up ahead. We can jump it again!”
“Roger that!”
Another narrow small street marked the end of the block. On the far side was a lower brick storage building behind an art studio. It had a lean-to roof, a single slope that started high on Dead Eye’s side of the building and ran to only ten feet above ground on Gentry’s side.
Both men launched out over the cobblestones, as they had done at the last alleyway.
Russ kicked through the air, his eyes locked to a landing zone near the top of the lean-to roof, barely visible in the storm. But when he was only halfway over the alley he heard gunfire behind him. He knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He crashed onto the snow-covered roof next to Gentry, hitting awkwardly on his left side, and he grunted with the impact. Both he and Gentry skidded and rolled off the roof, creating an avalanche that cascaded to the ground with them.
Both men and hundreds of pounds of fresh snow crashed in a heap in the forecourt of the art studio building along the little street. They fought to uncoil themselves from all the cabling, dig out of the mini avalanche, and get themselves back in the fight.
“Two targets! Repeat, two targets!” Trestle Actual heard the call from Trestle Two, but he had no idea what the man on the other side of the row of buildings was talking about. Nick was behind the action, still moving up Kooli Street by himself, having left Seven under the avalanche of snow from the roof.
He stopped in the street and struggled with the boom arm of his mic, which had gotten turned around when he fell in the snow. He twisted it back around to his mouth so he could transmit. “Repeat last? Who is the second target?”
“Two men . . . uh, two people jumped to the roof on the other side of the alley. I think I hit one of them.”
Actual started to move again, but headlights washed over his body from behind. He stopped, looked back over his shoulder, and saw a small police car racing up Aida Street. Its siren squawked out an angry wail and it slid to a stop just thirty feet from him.
“Fuck!” Nick dropped his HK into the snow and stood there in the middle of the street, clutching his bloody shoulder wound with his hand.
As soon as Russ and Court crawled out of the snow pile, Russ shouted, “Contact rear!” Both men scrambled to their knees and trained their pistols on the alleyway. Two men in black tactical gear appeared from around the corner. Both of their weapons were trained on the roof above; they clearly did not realize their targets had fallen off the building into the forecourt.
Gentry and Whitlock opened fire together, dumping over a dozen rounds into their targets at a range of twenty f
eet.
The two Townsend operators fell into the snow.
“This way,” Russ said, and he turned away from the dead men in the street and began moving toward a low stone passageway between the art studio and the city wall.
As Court climbed out of the snowdrift he noticed blood in the snow around him; he’d smeared it with his hand as he stood up, so the streak moved in an arc in the impression left by his glove. Quickly he turned behind him and saw more blood, drips and smears all over the snow pile.
Russ saw it, too. “You’re hit,” he said.
Court entered the passageway, feeling himself for holes as he went. He felt the smeared blood on his left hand, but as he ran his hands over his body he could find no other injuries.
He turned to Russ as they arrived under a streetlamp on the southern exit of the passageway. “I’m good. It must be you.”
Russ slowed and performed the same blood sweep; he ran his hands over his torso, then down the front of his midsection and his upper legs, and finally back up his hips. He winced in pain. He pulled his hand off his left hip and saw his fingers red with blood, watery from the dampness in his clothing. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “I’m shot.” He held his hand to his hip to stanch the blood flow and called out to Gentry. “Head south. Away from the port. Find a place to go to ground and watch for me. I’ll catch up in ten mikes. Stay to the east. Their police HQ is on Kolde, to the west; they will—”
Court said, “I know where the police HQ is. Where are you going?”
“Have to take care of something first.” He handed Gentry a fresh magazine for his Glock, and then reloaded his own weapon.
Court reloaded his own pistol, and then said, “More important than that gunshot wound and getting away from the cops?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Wait for me.”
“Sure.”
Whitlock turned and started running in the other direction, one hand holding his pistol and the other holding his hip. He had no idea if Gentry was going to do as he said, but he had no alternative.
There were still Trestle men out there, and he had to kill them all.
Trestle Actual stood in the middle of the cobblestoned alley with his hands in the air. The two cops stared at him through their windshield; one spoke into the radio, and the other just pointed his pistol at him through the glass.
The cops had started to exit their car as soon as they arrived, but a long salvo of gunfire a block to the east sent them back into their vehicle, content to wait on the dozens of police cars that were on the way from the station.
While Actual stood there, listening to gunfire and an increasing chorus of approaching sirens, waiting to be arrested and already imagining the uncomfortable international incident that would begin just as soon as these two bozos grew a pair of balls and climbed out of their cruiser to handcuff him, he spoke into his mic. “Two and Four, this is Actual. Tell me you got him.”
No response.
“Two and Four, are you receiving?”
Nothing.
“Dammit! Kip? Dave? Talk to me, guys.”
The gunfire he’d heard seconds before sounded like multiple handguns firing simultaneously. What the hell? Two Targets? His men were down?
“Fuck this shit,” he said aloud, and then his arms shot down to his sides in a blur; he drew the SIG Sauer P226 pistol from the retention holster on his right hip and dropped to one knee as he raised the gun at the cops.
The two young Tallinn municipal police saw the movement, but neither the officer with the gun in his hand nor the officer talking into the radio had any reaction that was fast enough to defend themselves.
Trestle Actual opened fire on them, spraying the two young men and their patrol car with round after round of nine-millimeter hollow points. The windshield exploded, glass turned to white dust, and blood sprayed throughout the car’s interior.
The echoes of gunfire died in the alleyway, and sirens neared from the west and south.
Nick reloaded his weapon quickly and turned back in the street to catch up with Trestles Two and Four, but as he did so, he saw a man coming toward him in the darkness. He raised his pistol, but Dead Eye moved into the glow of a streetlight.
Actual lowered his pistol and shouted angrily. “I thought I told you to stay inside your damned—”
Dead Eye raised his weapon.
“The fuck is wrong with—”
Whitlock shot Nick, Trestle One, through the jaw. He fell back onto the icy street, his arms wide, his pistol tumbling from his hand.
Russ stood over him, and their eyes met through the snowfall. He shot the man again in the forehead, then knelt and retrieved the gun.
A minute later Trestle Five climbed behind the wheel of the van in front of the hotel. He’d found Six, dead out here in the parking lot, and dragged his body into the vehicle. All around him lights were on in the buildings; a few people looked out from windows, but the majority of those in the neighborhood had the good sense to keep their heads down.
With the door still open he started the van, and then he saw a shadow to his left. He turned quickly, raising his MP7 at the threat, but almost immediately he lowered it and breathed a sigh of relief.
It was the singleton, Dead Eye. He was holding his left hip with one hand, and he held a pistol in his right.
Trestle Five said, “Get in! I can’t raise anybody. The whole fucking team is down, man! We’ve got to—”
He stopped speaking when Dead Eye drew his pistol up to eye level. He tried to get his own weapon up to meet the threat, but Whitlock shot him once between the eyes. Five flipped away from the side window, out of the seat, and over the center console of the van, and his foot slid from the brake. The van began rolling forward across the little parking lot through the heavy snow, and it crashed into the entrance of the hotel.
Dead Eye turned away and disappeared into the shadows.
SIXTEEN
Gentry had moved southeast away from the Old Town and into a newer district full of restaurants and office buildings that were empty at this time of morning. From all directions he heard sirens as first responders raced to the scene of the gun battle, and flashing lights beat off glass and metal surfaces. Court ducked into doorways and behind bus stops when emergency vehicles came into view, but this was slowing him down, and he searched for a faster route out of the area.
He had lied to Russ; Court had no intention of hanging out here at the edge of the kill zone where eight guys had come out of nowhere to punch his ticket, especially now that every cop in town was racing through the blizzard and into the area.
Court leaned into the blowing snow and pushed on. He wore his black coat now and stayed in the shadows, and he concentrated on remaining low profile while putting some distance between himself and the scene.
Court thought back to everything that had happened, or at least everything that happened after his head had cleared from the effect of the nine-banger. He was pretty sure he’d dropped three or four of the opposition. The guy he’d fired at in the hallway of the hotel before running up the staircase, the dude who’d been shooting at him from the hotel parking lot, and the two guys he and Russ had shot in the alley after falling off the roof into the snowdrift. He’d also tried to bury a couple of shooters in an avalanche as he ran along the roof, but he had no idea if he’d been successful with that low-probability plan.
And he also had no clue if Russ had managed to take out any of the enemy, which meant there could easily still be four or five able-bodied assholes in the neighborhood with a mandate to kill him.
No thanks, Gentry thought to himself as he walked through the storm. I’m not going to sit around and wait for that.
Whoever the hell Russ was, Court knew he could take care of himself.
Except for the fact he’d gotten himself shot while saving Gentry’s life.
Dammit.
Court kept walking, perhaps a little slower now, but he kept walking.
Kaubamaja Street was dark and
quiet, so he turned onto it, moving through the heavy snowfall and out of the streetlamps’ glow. Sirens squealed on a parallel parkway, but Gentry felt safe enough to keep walking here for the next few blocks.
He had not asked for Russ’s help. He had no idea who he was or what his intentions were. For all Court knew, the man was a bounty hunter ordered to bring Court back alive, back to Madrigal or LaurentGroup or whoever the fuck was now running Sid’s operation. Just because the bastard spoke English like he was American did not mean he wasn’t a bad guy.
Meant nothing at all. Some of the biggest pricks Gentry knew were American.
But the guy had taken a bullet, a bullet that was meant for Court.
Court slowed down a little more.
“Dammit, Gentry,” he mumbled aloud.
He had to do something for him. Something to help him out or, more precisely, something that would allow Court to walk away from this shit with a clear conscience. He could find a place to get out of the weather for a minute to warm up and, at the same time, to watch for Russ, just to make sure he was good to go.
Court found a dark alley that gave him a good line of sight of the intersection, and he stood in a doorway there, out of the wind. He shook off the snow that covered his coat and eyed the streets leading back to the Old Town. Every thirty seconds another whining flashing emergency vehicle passed, and up the hill in the district where it had all gone down it looked like a damned fireworks display. Flashing, glowing red and amber lights bounced off every reflective surface for a square mile. The lights were visible even through the blizzard, and they indicated to Court that the area was crawling with cops now, and the streets would be full of onlookers.
Court figured Russ didn’t stand a chance of getting out of there unseen, especially hobbled with a gunshot wound.
He had his eyes focused on streetlights in the mid-distance, not expecting to see anyone passing, and he did not, but suddenly he saw a brief movement on the sidewalk much closer. Just fifty feet away he saw a figure in a dark coat, wearing a backpack and limping slightly. Though obviously injured, the man seemed to float easily through the urban landscape, avoiding the lights of the passing cars, just as Gentry himself had done.
