Cody and Murphy raced from the office, the two corpses behind them forgotten.
Caine and Hawkins met them with questioning glances outside the doorway, then fell in, the team stretching their legs fast across the garage toward the door to the alley.
The beeping of the VW’s hom from the street ceased abruptly.
The men kept on the move, reaching the door to the alley.
Cody motioned them to pause behind him. He edged the door open with his hand, the other holding the Uzi. He glanced out.
The steam-hazed gloom of the stretch of street he could see at the end of the alley was pierced by powerful headlights from one end of that street, well beyond his line of vision. Heavy engine sounds could be heard bouncing around the canyon of the street that cut between the blocks of warehouses.
Narda’s van was nowhere in sight.
“And that does sound like trouble,” Rufe said, snarling.
“Just as if the blighters were sitting around somewhere waiting for us,” Caine commented. “What did you find in the office?”
“A lead, maybe,” Cody growled. His mind raced, forming a strategy. “Richard, Hawkeye, go back. Locate us another way out of this building.”
“Right-o,” Caine nodded.
He and Hawkins disappeared into the interior of the warehouse, leaving Cody and Murphy in the alley doorway.
“Come on, Rufe, let’s take a look at what we’re up against and see if there’s any sign of Narda.”
They left the doorway, hustling along between the warehouses toward the mouth of the alley.
“Sure hope that little lady didn’t set us up,” Rufe growled. “Back there it looked like Kamal and Vronski beat us here but didn’t finish the job.”
They reached the mouth of the alley and pressed themselves against one corner.
The motor sounds came no closer. Up the street, having stopped, idling, maybe a half block away, Cody estimated.
“Kamal’s had a busy day,” he whispered to Rufe. “Vronski would leave killing Charova to Kamal. Kamal blew it. Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.”
Cody eased a glance around the corner, looking up the narrow street. He could not make out much of the vehicle from behind its headlights, but from the placement of the lights he estimated its size, and the noise of its engine told him something, too.
“Looks and sounds from here like a BTR-60.”
“Make that trouble with a capital T, Murphy said with a sigh.
A racing engine roared around the corner of the intersection at the opposite end of the block from where the first armored car sat, a second Soviet-built BTR-60 tearing ass in a two-wheeled turn around that corner, caught for a moment in the headlights of the first BTR-60.
Cody clearly saw the SGMB light machine gun poking from this armored vehicle’s turret, swiveling around, searching for targets as the driver straightened the BTR-60 out from the turn.
The armored car sped in toward the alley at full speed. The first BTR-60 remained at the intersection.
Cody and Murphy broke from the corner of the aJley, retracing their steps at dead heat back down the alley between the warehouses to the door into Charova’s building, the street behind them and the alley filled with throttling engine sounds, then squealing tires and grinding brakes from the street.
The first BTR-60 held its position while the second one closed in. The first armored car would remain out there to pick off anyone who managed to elude the net.
“Could be another of those babies waiting on the other side of this building,” Murphy said.
He hustled on through the doorway, back into the warehouse.
Cody heard the clanking sound of the turreted machine gun swiveling around on them. A floodlight mounted on the truck clicked on, throwing a blinding white glare down the alley after them.
“Let’s worry about this sucker for the time being!” he snarled.
He threw himself from his feet into a dive that took him the rest of the way through the doorway at the exact moment that the machine gun commenced yammering, storming the alley with cracking projectiles that spanged off the metal door and the brick wall. He heard men shouting to each other, scrambling from the armored car to give chase on foot, and he thought he heard the rumble of the first BTR-60 lumbering down the street to pull in behind the armored car blocking the alley.
Inside the building, he jumped to his feet, throwing shut the steel door, slamming home the crossbar; they would have to break it down from outside before gaining entrance into the warehouse this way.
He turned to Rufe and was just about to wonder aloud what the hell had happened to Caine and Hawkins when a Texas twang beckoned them from the far side of the garage.
“If y’all’re done fooling around, I think the tea bag’s found us a way out of this pickle!”
“And not one damn minute too soon,” Murphy growled.
He and Cody dashed across the garage to where Hawkeye stood, waving them over.
Rifle butts started pounding on the metal alley door, then someone out there triggered off a couple of rounds at the lock mechanism. But when the shooting stopped and the militiamen outside again threw their weight and rifle butts against the door, the bar across the inside held tight against their onslaught.
Murphy and Cody reached the far side of the cavernous garage. Hawkeye waited for them at a narrow hallway leading off from the garage area.
Hawkins glanced across at the steel door across the way where the hammering and banging from outside suddenly stopped.
“Looks like Charova was ready for unwanted company.”
“I don’t think those cats will give up trying to get in,” said Murphy. “They’ll be ramming that damn thing off its hinges with one of those armored cars in another couple of seconds.”
“So we use those seconds,” Cody growled.
“This way!”
Hawkins motioned for them to follow at a run down the narrow hall, their footfalls magnified by the confines of the corridor as they hurried along rapidly.
“Think that little Bulgarian cutie set us up? Murphy queried.
They pushed through the musty, damp chill in the bowels of the old building.
Hawkins muttered back from up front, “Sure looks thatway, don’t it, Sarge?”
“Let’s take first things first,” Cody said. “She was beeping real hard on that horn to get us out of here in time.”
“Or was she doing it to let those gunner boys know that us targets were in place?” Hawkins wondered aloud.
They reached the spot where Caine waited for them at the end of the narrow corridor that, Cody noticed, had doors that probably led to a rest room and a small break room.
Caine waited for them, his left hand holding open a metal door that matched the one on the other side of the warehouse, this door parted a crack to keep a watch out with the Uzi poking out that way too. He glanced around with a wry grin.
“Sounded like you were starting a party back there without me.”
Cody stood alongside the Englishman at the door.
“What’ve we got?”
He took a look out the narrow space himself.
“All clear, but I don’t know for how long,” the Brit reported.
This street, when intersected by the one where theBTR-60s closed in from, offered even less illumination than the other street and rebounded the engine racket of the armored vehicles from around the corner on the other side of the warehouse where men’s voices could be heard shouting to each other.
“So let’s hoof it, Sarge,” Hawkeye urged. “What’re we waiting for?”
Murphy read Cody’s mind.
“There’s got to be at least one more of those armored cars out there somewhere. At least one to plug the other end of that alley on the other side.”
“We can’t stay where we are,” Cody said. “There’s only one way this plays. Charova was double-dealing Kamal and the KGB, got caught at it, and Vronski staked the place out in case there were others. He’d want to make a clean sweep.”
“And the lads left behind in those BTR-60s were expecting druggies who wouldn’t put up much of a fight when they saw the militia closing in.” Caine nodded. “That’s what’s bought us our edge.”
Cody kicked the door open the rest of the way and stormed on through.
“Enough talk,” he growled. The others tracked out with him, filing along the side of the building. “Priority one is cutting out of here, and for that we need transportation.”
“Maybe one of those BTR-60s would do the job,” Murphy chuckled sarcastically.
“Maybe it would.” Cody nodded.
They jogged along the wall, away from the street where the two armored cars had closed in.
He was not joking. He was thinking of that third BTR-60, which would be in the vicinity, and as they hustled along he also considered where it could be and what they could do about it.
“Too bad we don’t have ourselves something a little heavier than these Uzis,” Hawkeye muttered. “Don’t know how good these thundersticks’ll be against armored plating.”
“The grenades and all the rest of it are with Miss Rykov”—Caine nodded—“wherever the bloody hell she might be at the moment!”
Cody held up a hand.
The men of his team pulled up and gathered around him, one hundred feet or so from the intersection of the side street at the far end of the block from the street where the militia vehicles had closed in.
By this time the militiamen would have battered down the alley door and be pouring into the warehouse, spreading out through the building whereupon they would find the two dead bodies in the office, then the exit by which Cody and his men had escaped.
Cody figured they had made it out this side doorway only because Vronski had placed this stakeout to nab people going into the warehouse. And since those inside were dead, he must have known enough of Charova’s business to know that the drug dealer always received customers through the alley door.
This close to the intersection, Cody could hear the idling of a third armored vehicle, unseen, but he now knew that it would be parked at the end of the alley between the warehouses at this side of the building, mid-block down the street and around the corner from this intersection.
“Let’s pull away from her and hot-wire the first vehicle we see after those BTR-60s,” he decided. “They’ll be calling in more backup after they find those dead men. The guys around this comer will be watching the alley where they think the action is. We’ll cut across the intersection and—”
The sudden acceleration of an engine, much smaller than the militia vehicle, cut him off.
He had spent enough time behind the wheel on the drive from the border to recognize Narda Rykov’s VW van from the far side of the intersection, farther up the street.
The van tore away from the gloom over there, racing without lights toward the intersection.
“Well, all bloody right,” Caine grunted.
“You got that right.” Murphy grinned his widest grin.
“That heifer’s one of the good “uns, after all.” Hawkeye nodded.
“Watch it,” Cody hissed.
The others swung around to see what had elicited the warning.
Three uniformed militiamen charged out of the door through which Cody and his men had exited. They eyeballed Cody’s team up the dark street almost immediately.
At that same instant the VW van hurtled across the intersection.
Cody could see that it was Narda’s van, as he had known it would be, and there was no way the men in the BTR-60 down the cross street could miss the van sailing past.
Then his attention and that of his men concentrated on whipping their Uzis around in a millisecond, falling away from each other, opening fire, before the three Nersko-Tsopska had time to bring their rifles around.
The side street chattered from Uzi submachine guns ramming hundreds of 9-mm projectiles into three unfortunates caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, the impacting slugs sending the dead men colliding into each other in backslides to the pavement.
The van swung around in a tight U-turn, screeching to a stop.
Cody and his men dashed over to the van. Caine, Murphy, and Hawkeye tumbled into the back. Cody circled around the front and jumped in behind the wheel. Narda clambered over into the passenger seat.
“Almost thought you’d given up on us, ma’am.” Hawkeye chuckled.
“Almost?” she returned with an amused grin.
Cody floored the gas pedal to the metal, accelerating the old vehicle the hell away from there for all she was worth, which was nowhere near what they’d need to outrun the BTR-60 armored cars.
“Thanks for waiting around. Narda.”
He piloted the van back across the intersection, and one look down the cross street told him that the men in that third militia vehicle had not missed the van whizzing across the intersection.
The BTR-60 on the street had been positioned at the end of the alley that ran between the warehouses. The armored vehicle was idling there, and the driver had shut off the headlights—but they snapped on during the split seconds in which Cody saw that vehicle while the van flew through that intersection. Cody saw that the armored car gun was forward in the pursuit.
“Looks like the chase is on,” Caine noted.
The van rocketed down the side street, away from Charova’s warehouse.
“What happened back there?” Cody asked Narda as he steered. “You were lucky to get away.”
They charged through another intersection, heading away from the train yards, out of the warehouse district.
“Lucky, perhaps, in that I was endowed with a good set of ears,” Narda said. “I sat waiting for you while you went into Charova’s. I had the side window rolled down. I heard one of those armored vehicles coming from the street behind me. It could have been a truck, but it seemed too early for deliveries. I kept sounding the horn as they came closer. They must have been waiting around the corner. As soon as the first of the vehicles turned behind me onto the street, I got away to wait for you on this street, to see what I could do.”
“You did plenty, miss,” Murphy assured her.
“At the very least, you saved our hides.” Hawkeye nodded.
Cody glanced in his rearview mirror and saw the BTR-60’s headlights wheeling around into the intersection one and a half blocks behind, the BTR-60’s headlights zooming closer behind the van, eating up the distance behind them.
Caine, watching out the van’s back window, observed those chase lights.
“Our hides, as you call them, dear Hawkeye, have not been saved just yet. There’s no way we’re going to outrun what we’ve got on our tail.”
“Maybe we won’t have to,” Cody said.” Maybe our first idea was the right one.” He looked sideways at Narda. “You did know the risks you were taking, didn’t you, when you came back to help us?”
“I could not leave you behind,” she said.
His eyes panned the canyons of warehouses stretched out in the next block, beyond which the architecture shifted dramatically to one-level businesses surrounded by vacant lots.
An alley between two warehouses in the last block came racing toward them from the right-hand side of the street.
Behind, the BTR-60 split the night with it upshifting engine racket, gulping up the distance between it and the van, the armored car’s headlights growing into luminous saucers in Cody’s rearview mirror.
Another minute or two and those other armored vehicles would be joining the parade.
“Hold on,” Cody said, warning his passengers. “Here’s where we roll the dice.”