“They’re using infrared for accuracy like that,” Caine growled in those first moments during which rifle fire stung the clearing.
The mounted Bulgars were between them and Narda Rykov and where the incoming fire came from the shadows of a wall of gnarled trees.
The mounted Bulgars returned the fire, the flaring firefight orchestrated to the enveloping hell sounds of the Mi-24 chopper, still hovering slightly out of sight beyond the ceiling of connecting treetops.
“We must get to the van!” Narda urged, her tone taut but remaining under control.
Rufe Murphy looked ready to leap into the fray from the sidelines, as did Caine and Hawkins.
“Hate to run out on these guys.”
At that moment Yydasgrei saw them. The mountain-man leader reared his steed onto its hind hooves, motioning them to get away.
“Go, my friends! Go! We will hold them!”
Yydasgrei looked to Cody like he was having the time of his life.
“They’ve got their job, we’ve got ours,” Cody growled. He looked at Narda. “Lead the way.”
He moved aside as the young woman broke into inky shrubbery to what looked like a trail leading away, parallel to the river, along a rise in the terrain. Cody stood with his Uzi, covering their tracks.
Caine, Hawkins, and Murphy jogged past after the lady, and as each man passed, he shot Cody a sideways, questioning glance that Cody did not acknowledge, but he knew these guys well enough to know that the Englishman, the Texan, and the big guy from Mississippi were as surprised as he was to find that their connection into Bulgaria was a young woman barely old enough to be off a college campus, much less providing essential support on a mission of this urgency and risk. But this was no time to worry about that, because right at this instant the success of the mission was in the hands of the lady, and Cody still had his hunch that they were in good hands.
The last he saw of Yydasgrei and the other Bulgars, the mounted mountain men were spurring their horses around, galloping for cover, creating enough of a diversion for Cody to feel that even with infrared night-sighting equipment, the border patrol that had tried to creep up on them had missed the pulling away of his small group on foot. He saw one of the Bulgars reaching to yank loose an object from where it rode strapped upon his horse, then he reined his horse up, putting two objects together, hoisting them to his shoulder.
The Soviet chopper sailed in with turret-mounted miniguns stuttering, and Cody knew that the gunners up in that high-tech death machine would be sighting with infrared too.
No fighting man likes to turn his back on comrades under fire, but he forced himself to rejoin the branches he had been holding back for the others, somewhat camouflaging the break through to the game trail. He hurried after the others, away from the ground-shuddering pounding and booming of battle behind them.
They cut along the river until the trail led to a small clearing where a battered old rust-bucket VW van of indeterminate age sat waiting, its side door yawning to receive.
The four of them heaved their gear inside. Narda started toward the driver’s side, but Cody reached the door first.
“Sorry. I’m a nervous passenger.”
She started an angry retort but was interrupted when the night exploded.
An airborne fireball blossomed from the direction of the fighting, the purple mantle of night searing apart with a blast that dyed the night sky a violent myriad of polychomatic colors.
“Looks like Yydasgrei’s boys didn’t need our help, after all,” Hawkeye said, chuckling.
“I saw a rocket launcher being assembled on horseback,” Cody said with a nod.
“Sounds like the CIA is taking bloody good care of its interests in Bulgaria,” Caine noted.
“I sure hope that applies to the little lady,” Rufe Murphy said, rumbling.
Some of Narda Rykov’s professional reserve heated up around the edges at that.
“I will have you know that I am fully qualified in all of the duties I have been asked to provide,” she said, bristling, “and those duties do not include suffering insults from the likes of you.”
In the near distance the fireball that had been the chopper plummeted groundward and out of sight like a sun setting too fast, and with the sounds of the crash beyond the layer of trees came what sounded like one rousing, throaty cry of victory that only could have come from the Bulgars.
Cody nodded to the passenger seat beside him.
“Please, Narda. I’ll need you to guide us.”
She accepted. She climbed aboard as Murphy, Hawkins, and Caine leapt into the back of the van, slamming the side door shut.
Cody took the keys Narda handed him, gunned the truck to life, flicked on the parking; lights, released the emergency brake, and slipped into gear.
Caine and Hawkeye knelt at the back of the van, watching the night behind them with Uzis in their fists. Murphy knelt between Cody and the woman in the passenger seat, his eyes carefully probing beyond the windshield as they rolled along.
“It’s a cinch that this neck of the woods ain’t about to cool off any in the near future, Sarge.”
“I hear that, Murph, but any air cover that patrol calls in will be after those mountain men, and I’ve got a feeling that they’ve already faded.”
“Them Bulgars fight like Texans,” Hawkeye grunted.
“Hmm, and I was about to point out that they fight just like Englishmen,” Caine grumbled.
“To each his own, tea bag, to each his own,” Hawkins acquiesced in this combative wind-down that had nothing to do with any of them relaxing their vigilance as the van rattled downhill.
Cody took the chance to cast a quick sideways glance at the young lady who hugged the opposite door, her purse clutched in her lap, her mouth back to being a tight line, dark eyes piercing straight ahead, as if he weren’t there.
He could live with that.
There would be plenty of time for Narda Rykov to come across with the business of getting them what they needed to know, and where they needed to go, once they reached the city.
He hoped they were trusting the right person. His gut reading of people wasn’t often wrong, but a man could never be sure about a woman—and in this deadly game that applied even more. But he was willing to play the game because the only thing that mattered, that had mattered since a little girl had gotten the life blown out of her on the tarmac of the Rome airport only a handful of hours ago, was the bringing of justice to the man responsible for that atrocity.
There would be no long, drawn-out court proceedings with Abdul Kamal for the world to snore over, the accused making a mockery of a system of international law that might hand him a few years, and everybody knowing he’d be out long before that.
Cody’s justice for Abdul Kamal and the slime who controlled him would be a justice their kind would understand, though they were on the receiving end all too seldom.
John Cody intended to see to that personally.
Kamal was in Sofia. And so would Cody’s Army.
Let the death games begin.
The unrecognizable remains of the gunship smoldered in the clearing along the river’s edge, the night wind pungent with the unpleasant bite of burned machinery and the stench of roasting human flesh.
Nocheki lowered his infrared binoculars. He had been surveying the line of trees farther along the river where the horsemen had disappeared after what one of them carried had brought down the helicopter with a shoulder-held rocket launcher.
Sergeant Kalojan came over to crouch next to him, having checked for casualties among the men.
“Three dead, sir. No wounded.”
“And the poor devils in that helicopter,” Nocheki added. “My God, Sergeant, I wonder what we did stumble onto here.”
“I’ve radioed in for more air support.”
Nocheki raised the binoculars, scanning the line of trees some more, knowing that he would find nothing.
“Good, Sergeant, but if I know the Bulgars, we will not find them, and maybe that’s just as well.”
“They fight like devils.” Kalojan nodded, a tremor in his voice. “Like a pack of devils!”
“I know all of this country,” Nocheki agreed, “yet I have no idea where they will go, and even infrared will not help the helicopter pilots you’ve called in, once those horsemen separate, which they probably already have done.”
“Amazing.” Kalojan- shook his head, surveying the remains of the Mi-24. “Men on horseback and they did not even flinch when that gunship came at them. They just held their ground and took their losses and returned fire. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“They were Bulgars,” Nocheki said simply, and he heard the quaver in his own voice.
“Do you think we’ll ever find out what they were doing down here?”
“I’m not sure I want to know. Sergeant. They were here to meet somebody; to smuggle something into the country. The sort of thing we are assigned to stop.”
“And do you think we stopped it?”
“Now that is something I would like to know,” Nocheki confessed. “The way they were positioned, they were looking down from the ridge upon which they stood, but I couldn’t see what it was they were watching, if anything. Too bad they had those lookouts posted, and too bad one of our men panicked and opened fire.”
Kalojan looked back at one of the dead militiamen.
“He paid for that mistake with his life, sir. I’m just glad that you know as much as you do about these mountain devils. If you hadn’t heard those birdcalls and known that they weren’t real, they would have waited down there for us.”
Off in the distance Nocheki heard the first sounds of two helicopter gunships flying in, the air force responding, and he felt glad that this was out of his hands.
There would be much he would have to answer for when he returned to the base, he knew, and he did not have any excuses.
And something inside told him that whatever reasons those Bulgars had for being at this riverbank spot at this ungodly hour, it had been realized.
Someone, probably more than one person, had infiltrated the country.
All Captain Verdo Nocheki knew with complete certainty was that he and his men had faced death here tonight, and he was damn glad that whatever it had been about, it was very much out of his hands.
The walking sudden death that appeared here that night was now someone else’s problem.
Kamal could not relax, but he made certain that Colonel Vronski was not aware of this. With effort he controlled his restlessness.
He felt long overdue for sleep. He had not slept on the flight from Rome to Sofia. He was still running high on adrenaline from the long, strenuous day before and this night, one nonstop, high-speed blur in his mind since yesterday morning when he had left the safe house in Rome’s Cassarina section and met Baquir and Mahmud outside that sidewalk snack counter on the Via Vittorio Veneto. From that moment to this, he realized, he had not closed his eyes for one minute’s rest.
The assault on the American embassy; the sluggish hours spent intimidating the hostages; negotiating with the swine who had been plotting his undoing all along; keeping an eye out for any sort of attack. And then, of course, the counterassault led by that fighting demon who had called himself Cody.
Kamal’s greatest sorrow was that he had had Cody under his gun twice, at the embassy and at the airport, and had not managed to kill the American.
The flight from Rome had been spent staring at his own reflection in the jet cabin’s portal, but he had been looking at nothing.
Not that he disliked this nerved-up feeling. There was about it a wide-awake hypersensation intensified by the knowledge that those others with whom he had spent the preceding days were dead, while he lived and breathed, and he wondered if immortality felt like this.
The colonel’s driver steered the ZIL to a stop on a cobbled side street of the city’s warehouse section, not far from the Sofia rail yards.
Train sounds carried faintly on the quiet evening chill. Steam wheezed from a manhole cover farther down the street. The only illumination came from streetlights at distant intersections.
The driver shut off the car’s ignition and headlights.
Vronski turned to Kamal. The two of them had not spoken since their meeting at the airport.
“Well, then, shall we pay dear Mr. Charova a call?”
Kamal sensed something pointed in the KGB man’s tone.
“You understand, of course, Colonel, that I have had no personal dealings with this man.”
“You say this even though you were the one who brought us together?”
“I did so only to facilitate our mutual interests—at your suggestion if you recall. Do you suggest that there is something going on between Charova and myself, against you?”
Vronski smiled blandly.
“Is there?”
“Certainly not.”
Vronski purred with satisfaction. “Then, in the event we should determine that Mr. Charova has been attempting to defraud us, I shall rely on your, uh, singular skills to persuade him to see the error of his ways.”
Kamal and the Russian left the car and crossed the street toward an alley that cut between the loading dock of one warehouse, closed up and silent, and the opposite wall of another warehouse. Both buildings loomed overhead like the walls of some dank canyon.
Kamal felt himself shiver. He would never get used to these cities, he told himself. But they would be gone from Sofia soon, or so Vronski had assured him, and he saw no reason for the Russian to lie about that. This time tomorrow, he and Vronski would be in Libya, back where an Arab belongs. This would be behind him, and he would be in the desert where there would be time for rest while he recruited new men to his ranks before plotting the next action of the jihad against the American and Zionist filth.
They went, in practically pitch blackness, along the wall of the building opposite the loading dock to a metal door set at the midpoint of the wall.
Kamal unholstered his 9-mm automatic from its concealed shoulder holster. Vronski produced a penlight in one hand and a set of passkeys in the other. While Kamal kept watch, Vronski tried first one key, then another, until the third key unlocked the door.
Vronski stepped inside, Kamal following after him, pausing to close and lock the door behind them. He followed Vronski across a garage area that smelled of petrol fumes and motor oil.
They hurried quietly along a wall toward a vertical rectangle of light and the murmur of voices coming from beyond a half-open door on the far side of this ground-floor level.
Vronski pocketed his keys and penlight and unholstered a Tokarev pistol.
“My suspicions are correct,” he hissed. “This is a most unusual time for Charova to be conducting business without us.”
A sharp gun blast punched the stillness from the direction of the lit doorway.
Kamal and Vronski froze, Kamal’s pulse racing. What is this? he wondered.
Vronski motioned for him to close in on the doorway from the opposite side.
The report—it had sounded to Kamal like a small-caliber handgun, bouncing around from wall to ceiling to wall of the darkened garage area—gave way to the sounds of furniture splintering and a body collapsing beyond the door.
Kamal had heard the sound often enough to recognize it anywhere, even here in a warehouse in Sofia. He and Vronski reached the half-open doorway from both sides moments after the gun report echoes evaporated. Kamal and Vronski raised their pistols in both hands. Kamal watched Vronski’s face.
This is the Russian’ pig’s business, he told himself. Let them take the risks.
Vronski nodded the go-ahead and rushed through the doorway, kicking the door open.
Kamal went in behind him, both men drawing two-handed target acquisitions on the same startied, hairy ball of greasy blubber, who stared back at them with piglet eyes, fist-full of lev notes he’d been counting, a fresh corpse pumping red rivulets from a heart wound across the floor, and the kindling all that remained of the chair that had splintered when the dead man caught the bullet and fell.
On the table, a revolver that had been between the two men was within reach, but the fat man had been too sure that he and his victim had been alone. With both chubby Firsts filled with money, Charova did not have a chance of reaching his gun.
The acrid tang of burned cordite and the sick-sweet scent of death made this a claustrophic place.
Charova lowered the money to the table and gulped audibly, the semblance of a smile slick across trembling lips.
“Colonel… Abdul… this is, uh, rather an unexpected surprise… we were to meet tomorrow—’’
Vronski lowered his pistol. Kamal kept Charova covered from across the room. Vronski strolled over and scooped up Charova’s pistol from the table, pocketing it in his overcoat. He looked down at the body and made a tsk-tsk sound.
“You really must learn to be more tidy in your business dealings, my dear Charova.” He looked back up to meet the sweaty, fat man’s frightened eyes with a stabbing, steely glare. “If, that is, you survive this night to conduct any further business.”
Charova’s oily, mottled brown skin and bald pate glistened beneath bright fluorescent overhead lights.
“Colonel, I’m sure I do not understand…. What has this to do with us? This”—he motioned almost absently to the body—“has nothing to do with us.”
“It has nothing to do with the delay you mentioned to me earlier regarding our transaction?”
“Nothing, nothing, I assure you!”
“I think it has everything to do with it,” Vronski snapped, his pretense of civility giving in to frigid rage. “I have what you want, you son of a diseased whore: a fresh shipment of new Kalashnikov rifles and all the ammunition your customers could want. You are supposed to have what I want, and you know what it is.”
“But there has been a delay, I tell you! My connection with Turkey—”
“I’m afraid you’ve been so busy with your own double dealing, you’ve neglected to give the KGB its due,” Vronski snapped. “I learned only an hour ago, before meeting my friend Abdul here, that you have made arrangements to flee the country.”
“No!” Charova screamed as if an electric current had shot through him. “It’s a lie—”
“You told this unfortunate that you would sell my shipment to him, is that it?” Vronski accused in a sharp clip that brooked no denial. “That is why you tried to stall Abdul and myself, but once I learned of your intentions to leave the country, I decided to come straight here and not wait until tomorrow, as you suggested. It seems well that I did.”
“Colonel, please—””
“You must have thought your Swiss bank account had grown fat enough for you to retire, is that it? My guess is you intended to tell us that the latest shipment had yet to arrive and then you would ask for more money. Or weren’t you clever enough to think of that?”
“Colonel, please, these things you’re saying, none of them are true! This man, I had to kill him. This is my money. He tried to swindle me. As for your shipment, I, uh, well, that is to say, I do regret to inform you that indeed it has been detained. However—”
“You shall indeed regret it, dear Charova.” Vronski nodded. “Perhaps far more than you think. Abdul,” he barked sharply, “begin on him. Make him tell us where it is he has hidden what is ours. Use your knife.”
Kamal holstered his pistol and withdrew a wide-bladed knife. He started toward Charova.
The small, fat man backpedaled away from the table until stopped by the wall behind. He took one look at Kamal, stalking toward him slowly with the knife held up, the blade gleaming in the overhead lights, then he twisted his head back around to Vronski.
“C-colonel, p-please tell me you are… joking—”
“I am not joking, my underhanded friend. Make him scream, Abdul. It would do me good to hear this rat squeal.”
Kamal ignored the commanding tone Vronski used. The Russian was in charge here, after all, he told himself. He felt nothing but energy pulsating through him.
He reached up with blinding speed and braced Charova to the wall with a stiff arm, his iron fingers positioning the fat man upright.
He felt nothing personal toward Charova. So many have died this day, something in his mind told him, why not one more?
Charova decided that Kamal was worth pleading to.
“Abdul, please, noooo—’”
Kamal held Charova in place and began doing things with the knife.
Vronski watched.
Charova began screaming. His shrill shrieks echoed eerily across the walls of the warehouse until finally—and it did not take long—he had enough, and in between the screams he told Vronski and Kamal what they wanted to know.