Cody left the orderly room and heard the gunfire from outside—Uzis and AK-47s—telling him that Murphy and Hawkeye had run into trouble.
He hoped they could handle it. They’d have to.
He sped down the ground-floor hallway of this mansion, which had become a KGB headshed. He reached a wide circular staircase. He charged up it four steps at a time.
After taking care of the patrol he encountered coming in through the back door of this house, he had crept to an open doorway around which he had peered to discover that what had once been a sitting room of some son had been renovated to function as an Orderly Room.
One soldier sat behind a desk, a young orderly wearing corporal stripes of the Soviet Army. The kid had his feet up on the desk, intently studying the glossy centerfold of a skin magazine, his superior off somewhere, probably supervising security along the wall.
Cody came in behind the young man, and one arrn went around the kid’s throat, the forearm cutting off his breath. Cody pressed the stubby muzzle of the Uzi against the man’s right temple, much as Abdul Kamal held Laura Parker under the gun not twelve hours earlier.
The kid gasped but recognized the feel of what pressed against his skull. He did not struggle once he grasped what was happening.
“Colonel Vronski,” Cody snarled in the kid’s ear.
“N-not here! He just left!” the young soldier babbled.
Why are they always young? Cody wondered.
“Where is his office?’
“T-top of the stairs,” the kid stuttered. “Second door down, to the right.”
“Thanks.”
He popped the kid with the grip of the Uzi.
The soldier sighed and slipped from the chair, snoring into a very deep sort of sleep.
Cody left him there, storming out and up the winding main staircase in what looked to have been one hell of a sumptuous digs before the State had stolen the place from its rightful owner.
It occurred to him that he had spared two lives already on this night’s mission. Cody did not enjoy killing. Not usually. In Kamal’s case, and Vronski’s, he would make an exception. And he would never hesitate to kill to defend himself, or if there was no other way. But the two he had spared tonight were not much different than young American men sent to do their government’s bidding.
The real enemy was not the kid sent to the front lines with a rifle in his hands, even if he had to kill his fair share of those, the world being what it was. the real enemy was the power that ran things for the other side; the ones who had a choice and chose to commit atrocities and cruel acts upon innocents and innocence, in a world that seemed too often unable to stop them through conventional means.
Like Kamal and Vronski.
Cody believed now that they weren’t here, but there could be some clue, some indication, in Vronski’s office as to where the two had fled. To be this close and lose them was too bitter a turn for him to consider.
The gunfire from the direction of the motor pool ceased. The hooting of a Klaxon horn and shouting across the open expanses outside the house filled the air.
Time had run out.
But he was too damn close to fold up the game!
He hit a combat crouch at the top landing of the stairs and eyed to the left down the hallway there, finding no one in the direction opposite Vronski’s office. He circled around with the Uzi in one continuous motion to center eyes and weapon down the other end of the hall, which extended to either end of this wing of the house.
The second doorway to his right, Vronski’s office door, opened. Two men with AK-47s rushed out, obviously in response to the gunfire and siren from outside.
Vronski did think we might make it this far! thought Cody in the flash it took the two burly Russians to eyeball the man on the landing looking their way with a Uzi.
They were not apple-cheeked lads like the kid down in the Orderly Room but hard-faced, mean-eyed dudes who had been stashed in that office to surprise Cody if he got here, but that had been blown when they heard the racket outside and thought that the expected assault team had already been encountered.
Cody triggered a burst that stitched across the chest of the guy to his left, then swept the Uzi fire on the other but not before that one dodged sideways, returning fire.
A round from the AK-47 fired too fast.
Cody felt the snick of the projectile snipe close to his head, then he tracked the Uzi on the man and hammered a burst of silenced fire down the hallway that tripped the second rifleman over the first, the back of his head puking blood and brains across the ceiling and wall as he fell.
Cody rushed forward, hearing yells and pounding footfalls echoing from various parts of the big house, but the sounds played tricks up and down the long corridors and connecting wings and staircases, and he figured he had a few seconds, a minute at most, before he would have to try to pull out to link up with the others.
He booted open the door to Vronski’s office, then followed in and through with a somersaulting roll that took him in well below the three-round blast of fire that flared in the black interior of the office.
He came out of the somersault, tracking his Uzi on the source of fire from the third rifleman left behind. He heard a frantic shuffle in one corner of the office, the gunman trying to put himself away from where he had fired from, then Cody put the bastard away for keeps with a wide figure eight of silenced fire that elicited a choked-off death grunt, and the clatter of a human body slammed backward off its feet under the force of dozens of 9-mm flesh-eaters.
Cody paused just long enough to palm a fresh magazine into the Uzi. He could not feel the presence of anyone but the dead. His eyes, growing accustomed to the absence of light in the office except what crept in through the open doorway from the hall, began to discern the shapes of furniture and nothing else.
If another gunman waited for him in here, he had the patience of Job and the silence of a butterfly.
Cody saw the outline of the light switch on the light-toned wall alongside the door. He edged over to it, making certain not to put himself in the light from the doorway. He stood as far as he could from the switch, reached over, and clicked it on, filling the office with illumination from overheads that nearly blinded him after the dark.
He poised, ready to pitch himself to the floor if anything came his way, but nothing did.
The office, spartanly furnished in stern grays: metal desk, chairs, filing cabinet, a world map, and a few military citations on the walls completed the decor, except, of course, for the dead man sitting in one corner where he had fallen, his legs sticking out in front of him, his chin resting forward on his chest, AK-47 next to his body, looking as if he were asleep except for his blood over everything.
Cody returned to the hallway. He grabbed each of the dead men there and dragged their bodies and weapons back into the office, closing the door after them.
Anyone coming to check on them would see the blood-splattered walls and ceiling in the hall, but he reasoned that anyone taking a hurried look down this hallway, either from the landing at the top of the stairs or from the ends of the hallway connecting the other wings of the mansion, would perceive only an empty hallway and would, he hoped, assume that all was okay in the house.
He had only time to make a quick search of the office before he would have to git—the coming dawn and the rendezvous with the others left him no choice—and he did not want to spend that miute fighting oft’ more KGB troops or, worse, getting himself killed.
He locked the office door and went behind Vronski’s desk, stepping over the dead men.
He cast a fast look across the desktop, but it was cleared off except for a telephone, an ashtray, a pen set, a blank notepad next to the telephone, and an in-out box. He rifled through the official forms in that box.
CIA training had long ago taught him spoken Russian in several dialects, and although he could not read the language with anywhere near the capacity with which he spoke or could understand it, and could read even less Bulgarian, he understood enough to realize that the few forms he found in the box were not what he wanted, mostly requisitions, a couple of morning reports, nothing to suggest travel or, more importantly, a destination.
From beyond the closed, draped window, the Klaxon continued its wailing. Activity rattled and bustled from out there, but there was no more gunfire, meaning that Hawkeye and Murphy had either made it or they had been stopped and would be going no farther.
Cody stopped himself from thinking about that.
He had less than a minute to discover where Kamal and Vronski had tied to after here.
Talk about a needle in a haystack. And no damn time to look.
Caine worked his way back along the outside base of the perimeter wall toward where the BTR-60 waited beneath the cluster of trees, appearing undisturbed where Cody had parked it.
He approached the vehicle very cautiously.
There was the chance that a security foot patrol walking the outside wall could have come across the hidden armored car and be lying in wait.
He advanced on it from behind, inching forward, weapon up.
No one around.
He was returning from having prowled along one side of the property where he had planted one explosive charge, then had really taken a risk and crept along the front wall of this “estate” to where he had wedged a second puttylike glob of C-4 halfway between the main gate and one corner of the wallcd-in property.
He had been halfway back to the BTR-60, picking his way not as quickly as he would have liked through the foliage growing down to where it had been cleared away thirty feet from the wall as a security measure, when he heard the exchange of fire from inside the grounds and—a short half minute after that, no more—the fainter still exchange of fire sounding as if it came from inside the main house.
He had paused, worry punching him in the solar plexus like a balled fist.
Everything in him wanted to climb that wall onto the grounds in aid of the men of his team. That weapon fire could only mean that Cody. Hawkins, and Murphy had encountered trouble. But he held himself in check.
He had continued on to the BTR-60 somewhat mollified when the shooting ceased and faded away. His orders were to wait here for the rest of them or to start thumbing the explosive charges out here if things looked like they were going real wrong and a diversion was needed. Or if the guys inside started setting on” their charges.
He climbed in behind the turreted machine gun. He waited.
The Klaxon siren had started cawing inside the walls.
The seconds dragged by like crippled snails.
Caine had never allowed feelings to get in the way of his work. Between his stint in the British military, his time spent in combat in Southeast Asia with the Americans, his subsequent work for British Intelligence in danger spots around the world that had needed cleaning up with no questions asked, and in the Special Air Services, with a topnotch British antiterrorist commando unit, he had been called on to witness, and to perpetrate, sonie mighty inhumane and—Caine considered himself no hypocrite—downright disgusting jobs. The way such a man lives with himself is to motivate himself with the knowledge that he is on the right side, working for an ultimate good, even though he may be committing acts that could be indistinguishable from those perpetrated by his enemies.
He had long ago recognized that he was different from most people because of the things a man in his line of work had seen and done, things most people would never comprehend no matter how much they thought they did or wanted to. And so he had cut himself off from the feelings most people took for granted. He had no one he gave much of a damn about.
Except for the men of this team.
Women—or nearly all human contact, for that matter— was a sporadic, temporary thing in his life. Combat was the only constant for him, and it forged strong bonds of friendship between men who took Ore together. A brotherhood of fire.
He cared about Cody, Murphy, and Hawkins. He gave more than a damn about the men who were right now very possibly trapped inside this walled killing ground in the mountains of Bulgaria.
The world around the armored car was turning lighter by the second or, more correctly, less dark; that strange period of day when the world is still, the day beginning. The eyes play tricks. Anything can happen.
Movement caught his eye from atop the wall at the point where the others should be coming over.
He looked through the view space of the machine gun turret and saw Rufe Murphy and Hawkeye Hawkins gain the top of the wall and start over.
They would have been invisible at this distance scant minutes ago, but dawn was coming on too fast. He could make out the black-clad commandos as they pulled themselves onto the top of the wall, retrieving their climbing ropes behind them, turning toward his direction to jump off the top of the wall to the ground.
Ritle fire popped from below and behind them.
Hawkeye Hawkins jolted from what only could have been the sudden impact of a bullet, punching him forward off the wall.
Caine bolted from behind the machine gun to leg himself out from the armored personnel carrier to assist.
He saw Murphy pause atop the wall long enough to twist and return fire, then Rufe jumped of his own volition down after Hawkeye.
Caine leapt from the BTR-60, his thumb flicking aside the safety on the triggering device, depressing buttons to detonate the C-4 he had planted.
Cody had unlocked Vronski’s file cabinet with some quick jimmying, but a rapid search of the tabs on file folders divulged nothing related to travel, and only one of the drawers was used to store files; the others were empty. Vronski’s line of work was not one in which extensive records were kept.
Cody turned from the file cabinet, considering whether or not he should go through the desk again. His search had already taken him through the one drawer Vronski used, and he had found nothing but office supplies.
There had been nothing in the wastebasket, either.
Vronski was either a man who allowed no shred of his personality to intrude on his workplace or, more likely, Cody figured that the colonel’s personality was as drab as this ugly gray office.
He was halfway back to the desk, disappointment biting at his gut.
The chase, the hunt, for Abdul Kamal could not end here. He refused to accept that. But it appeared that he had no choice. He had already overplayed his hand. He would be thirty seconds late for his rendezvous with the others, and that was no good, but he could not let it go. He couldn’t.
He stood at the desk, knowing he had to leave, when he heard the rifle fire from the rear wall where Murphy and Hawkeye would be going over to hook up with Richard.
Then that exchange got gobbed up by explosions that rocked the night from other points.
Caine had triggered his planted explosives, and that meant something had gone wrong.
And that tumult, that jolting to his eardrums and senses and his subconscious, those explosions somehow caused his eyes to fall again on the blank notepad beside the telephone on the colonel’s’s desk, and he knew that this was the last straw, that he’d have to leave to join the others.
He snatched up a pencil, and mentally kicking himself for not having thought of it sooner, he scribbled a solid black shading across the length and width of the pad using broad, rapid strokes.
And there it was.
Vronski had done what most people do when they’re talking on the telephone with a pencil and paper in front of them. He had idly jotted down pertinent information and thought he’d covered himself when he ripped off the sheet he’d written on and burned it, forgetting in his haste that an impression on the next notepad page could often be detected by this kind of simple procedure.
One word in Cyrillic script jumped out at his eyes from the blackened piece of paper: Edri.
He ripped the piece of paper from the pad and bolted back to the door which he unlocked. He looked out. He saw activity at one end of the hallway, at the opposite end far beyond the landing where this wing of the house connected with another.
He sprinted from Vronski’s office for the stairs, reached the landing—and the two conferring with each other down at the other end of the hall spotted him, shouted for him to stop.
He kept on, not pausing to fire. They would be out of effective range of the Uzi. He sped down the staircase.
The walls and his eardrums reverberated to the blamming of gunfire, the men at the end of the hallway triggering rounds that zinged chunks out of the wall at the top of the stairs, well behind him.
He took the stairs four at a time going down, as he had coming up. He reached the bottom stair and swung around toward the corridor to the back entrance and came face-to-face with a man in a uniform, wearing the insignia of a captain in the KGB.
The Russian came to a stop when he saw Cody. He wore a sidearm at his hip, had probably just come in to call for reinforcements in the wake of the shooting and explosions blowing the base apart; maybe he had come here just to get away from the fighting. He made no attempt to grab for the pistol. The officer started to whip around to run back in the direction from which he had come.
Cody cut the guy to pieces with a sustained burst from the Uzi that whapped the KGB crud through an archway, across a polished dining room floor, leaving a stringy blood slick behind his back-skidding corpse.
Cody paused at the dining room door, and just inside of it, out of sight from anyone passing in the hall, he planted a wad of the C-4 explosive and set it with a detonator like the one at the barracks building.
He exited the main house, hoofing well around the barracks buildings, paying no heed to the pivoting cameras mounted on the poles.
Steely gray light washed the grounds of the estate.
It looked all clear, Caine’s explosions having done their job, placed as they had been along the wall on the opposite side of the estate. After those explosions, the attention of most personnel on the base would be centered there.
The barracks showed no more signs of occupancy than they had earlier, confirming his suspicions that they had been for Kamal’s now decimated force.
Gunfire cut loose on him from his left, clods of earth geysering up ahead of him, tearing at him, a gunner over near the motor pool cutting loose with what sounded like an AK-47 on full auto.
He dived to his right, the line of near miss projectiles whizzing the earth near him. He reached for the detonator on his belt, flicked the safety, and depressed a button.
One of the barracks buildings disintegrated with a ferocious Ka-bloooooom! that hurled debris and brick and flame and fury, shaking the earth, yanking everyone’s attention, including the gunner’s.
Cody used the opportunity to propel himself into resuming his dash for the wall while debris still fell.
He triggered the second charge, and the same thunder roared as flame blew every window out of the main wing of the house. Some of those windows started to billow flame and roiling black smoke.
He heard engines coming to life from the direction of the motor pool on the far side of the house, then a whole string of big booms from that direction shook the ground beneath his running feet, sounding like an overly magnified Fourth of July string of firecrackers, devastating vehicles, drawing more attention from a security force that, no matter how well trained, would by this time be reeling from one hard punch after another.
He slapped a fresh clip into the Uzi, slung it over his shoulder, and reached to unloop his climbing rope with another fifty feet to the wall when another machine gun opened up behind him, sounding this time like an M-60, combined with the engine sounds of a fast-approaching Chor-7 he had not heard coming up from behind because of the din of high explosives detonating.
They had spotted him in the light of the new day and were closing in for the kill, and Cody quite literally had his back to the wall with nowhere to run.