Eighteen

Asher lifted a pack on to a sawhorse and unzipped it partway. It was as tightly packed as a parachute. It held two folded, white canvas sheaths: more body bags. Like the first two, there were places for names, infection dates, and death dates. Like the other two, the material had been picked because it would burn well once the interior of the pressurized infection tent was set ablaze.

Will Halliday had just checked the factory perimeter and sauntered back to the group. He saw Asher study the white bundle inside the pack. “What’s that?”

Asher studied the name tags, barely visible where the holdall was unzipped. They read GEORGES RABADEAU and WILL HALLIDAY. He carefully stuffed the white material back into the holdall and zipped it up. He looked up through his lenses at the big American and smiled.

“Stowing our gear. We’re moving out soon.”

Halliday nodded.

Eli Schullman casually worked his way around behind the blond American and slid a titanium hunting knife from its leather scabbard. He made eye contact with Asher, who nodded slightly.

Somewhere inside the factory, broken glass tinkled.

Schullman, sidling up behind the American, paused.

Asher pretended to brush dust off his palms as he turned 360 degrees.

Halliday had heard the noise. “You got rats, buddy?”

“We do. But they don’t generally break glass.”

Eli Schullman stepped back and slid his knife into its sheath. He reached for the ArmaLite with banana clip and vanadium barrel.

Halliday palmed a stubby, matte-black .9 mm Ruger and held it taut against his left thigh.

The Ivorian picked up the vibe next and positioned himself slightly ahead of the pathologist, whom he had been tasked to protect.

Dr. Rabadeau had missed the tensing up of the others. He refolded his pocket kerchief. “Remarkable bit of recombinant science, this. If I may?” He offered a clever smile and gestured toward the containment tent. “The Russian? Tuychiev?”

The rest of the solders were on guard now, picking up cues from their cohorts. Asher said, “You know Tuychiev?”

“Yes, yes. We have exchanged compliments from time to time. His recombinant RNA has a certain flair. I recognize his, ah, signature.”

“Ah. Fellow artists.” Asher listened for more sounds of trouble. “He’s an ethnic Tajik, you know. Tuychiev. Not Russian at all. These distinctions are important. To some of us.”

The doctor brushed lint off his shoulder. “Of course. And fellow artists may be overstating it. I am not in János Tuychiev’s league. He’s brilliant. But in my own humble way—”

A groan reached them from the street. It was a heavy vehicle on tractor treads. All of the soldiers came to a stop. They all knew the distinctive rumble. It was an armored war wagon. With the windows boarded over, pitch added between boards, and inside the white cube room, most street sounds were muffled. The fact that they heard this truck approach, then heard it rapidly decelerate, was telling.

Asher turned to Schullman and adjusted his glasses. “Exit, please.”

Dr. Rabadeau said, “Is there a prob—”

Just then, one of the boarded-over windows on the ground floor exploded.

*   *   *

Colonel Trinh believed in the strong opening gambit, especially against an adversary as infamous as the Syrian Mukhabarat. If the Americans were correct and this Major Belhadj had allied himself with the Israeli trafiquant d’armes, then it was best to assume he was well armed and well protected.

If the Gibron woman was in the factory, Belhadj likely was as well. Plus, one of Trinh’s advance teams had reported hearing sound-suppressed rifle fire from the general vicinity of the factory roof. No telling what that meant.

Given an armed and entrenched opponent, the urban assault vehicle was Trinh’s gambit of choice. Being smaller than a conventional tank meant it could accelerate and decelerate quickly, and could negotiate narrow urban streets. On her command, the small tank roared up the four blocks from its hiding point, the driver gunning the engine, then slamming on the brakes directly outside the factory with the dozen-or-so heat signatures clustered around the first floor.

Le Tigre flew closer, giving Colonel Trinh in her command vehicle a live feed as a rocket-propelled grenade spat from the turret of the assault tank and smashed through a ground-floor window of the factory.

*   *   *

The building under Daria’s feet shuddered under an impact and curtains of dust rained down from the second-story rafters.

Damn it! she thought. The “good guys” have arrived!

She abandoned the strategy of tiptoeing on the aged floorboards and sprinted toward the stairs. A saner person might have tried to distance herself from Asher Sahar, the likely target of the assault from outside, but Daria had a tendency not to choose the safe options. The safe options rarely led to clear-cut victories.

A two-meter high, L-shaped wall, which secured the handrail, circled the stairs to the ground floor. The building shuddered under another impact as Daria vaulted over the little wall, both boots landing hard halfway down the stairs, and she was moving, Glock in hand, hitting the first floor and rolling, keeping low, landing on her shoulder then her ass then her boots and she sprang forward, hitting a thick, creosote-soaked timber that supported the ceiling.

The building shuddered again as explosions began chewing through the brick on the north side.

*   *   *

Colonel Céline Trinh spoke into her voice wand. “Gas.”

She watched the scene on her monitor. The other ground forces were arriving now, some in civilian vehicles, others in battle-hardened Humvees and some on foot.

The gunner in the urban assault tank stopped firing RPGs and another wider barrel appeared from the turret. Trinh saw the distinctive puff of expanding gases from the barrel as canisters were spewed into the ruined side of the factory.

Her communications technician turned to her. “Colonel? The CIA has contacted the ministry. Asking us to confirm weapons-hold status until their people arrive.”

“Please inform the ministry that you are relaying their request to me with all due haste,” the petite colonel replied, then turned to the driver of the command vehicle. “Move us up.”

The command vehicle—looking more like a UPS truck than the command-and-control nerve center of a military assault unit—began vectoring closer to the battle.

*   *   *

Inside the plastic cube of the white room, Eli Schullman knelt, drew his serrated combat knife and deftly dug two long, straight slices through the white plastic floor covering, coming together at a right angle. He peeled back the plastic to reveal a reinforced trapdoor built into the floorboards.

Asher thought to himself: The Tunnel Rat of Rafah was not so easily caught off guard.

Schullman dropped down, feet first, into the hole.

Tear gas canisters flew through the ruined windows of the factory. Almost everyone flinched as the canisters hit the reinforced plastic sheets of the cube room, secured to a matrix of aluminum scaffolding.

But the cube room walls worked like a vertical trampoline. Five gas canisters were hurled into the room; three bounced back out into the street.

One of the mercenaries said, “What the hell was that?”

Asher said, “The law of unintended consequences.” He hadn’t ordered the construction of the cube room in order to repel a gas attack. But it was a nice side effect.

Two more gas canisters burst through the windows, hit the white wall, but stayed within the factory. Gas began hissing from them. But they were outside the pressurized cube room and of no concern to Asher.

*   *   *

From behind the load-bearing support timber, Daria watched as gas began billowing from behind the weird, alien-looking plastic cube, sixty meters wide and sixty meters high. She had no idea what the hell it was, except that it was modern, sturdy, and the gas seemed to be buffeting around its perimeter.

Daria filled her lungs with air, expelled it in a rush, then filled her lungs again to oxygenate her blood. She rose, shut her eyes tight and, arms churning, sprinted blind into the heart of the mushrooming gas cloud.

As she hit the billowy, pale yellow plumes of gas, Daria slid like a baseball runner, boots first, down on her hip, gliding up against the plastic walls of the cube, her free hand snatching the spade-shaped knife from her boot.

She thumbed out the toughened plastic blade, held it horizontally, and sliced cleanly through the plastic, an inch off the ground, as far as the arc of her arm would reach. She spun on her hip, slipped through the breach headfirst, emerged inside the cube room, opened her eyes a slit, and tucked herself behind a pyramid of heavy iron canisters.

She knew that tear gas is relatively heavy and stays low to the ground in hot climates. But in the cold, it tends to hover a half-meter or so off the ground, trapping a layer of air beneath it. The slit in the white plastic should be too low to allow the gas to enter the cube room.

She heard shouting. Some of it in Hebrew.

Getting this far had not been what one could call a plan, per se. But she nonetheless seemed to be where she needed to be: nearer and nearer to Asher.

Daria grinned, revealing her canines.

*   *   *

Out on the street, three of the gas canisters had bounced back outside and gushed sickly yellow fumes. The heavy gas billowed but staying tightly packed due to the nearness of the buildings, the lack of wind, and the crisp, cold air.

In the doorway, Asher’s Croatian soldier panicked. He fired his pistol up at the fast approaching gunship, then eyed the assault vehicle and the quickly spreading gas, and began running away.

By sheer luck, the single bullet from his unaimed handgun hit the bulletproof windshield of Le Tigre. It bounced away, harmless.

“We are taking gunfire!” the pilot shouted into his helmet mic.

*   *   *

Colonel Trinh grasped a looped, leather handhold from the ceiling of the command vehicle. She pivoted to the left as the tall, boxy truck rounded a corner, her upraised arm taking the strain.

“Tigre. Show them the error of their ways.”

*   *   *

The helicopter’s machine cannon began pouring heavy shells into the century-old factory at a rate of five hundred per minute.

The thick plastic walls and aluminum scaffolding had repelled some of the gas canisters. But under the helicopter’s Gatling-style machine cannon, it turned to Kleenex.

Everyone awaited the all clear from Eli Schullman. The soldiers drew weapons. Not Asher. He stood with his hands folded behind his olive field jacket, wireless bifocals in place, listening and watching as the first hail of heavy shells penetrated brick as if it were cheese, zinging into the factory and burying themselves in the wooden floor, long raggedy sticks of wood erupting under the impact.

Sixty-degree angle, he thought to himself. Fired from a helicopter … military.

Good. For a moment there, he had feared it was Daria Gibron.

*   *   *

Daria stood and moved toward the Hebrew voices, then dove back behind the horizontal pyramid of massive iron air tanks as heavy shells began turning the brick exterior of the factory into Saint Audrey Lace.

A shell panged off one of the six-foot-long tanks and compressed air began hissing free. The impact was enough to rattle the other tanks in the pyramid, which were supported by nailed-together wooden supports and two military-issue, olive-colored web belts. The entire affair probably weighed four tons, and all of it wobbled like gelatin over Daria’s body.

Fucking hell! she thought. Thanks for the help, lads!

*   *   *

“What is going on!” the French pathologist screamed in Asher’s ear. “My God! What is—”

A shell flashed through the brick wall, through the tattered plastic, through the Frenchman’s knee, through the floor, into the escape tunnel between the ground floor and the sewer lines, then into the body of one of the first mercenaries to hit the tunnel, through him, and into the sewers below.

The mercenary died instantly.

The pathologist did not, although the shell didn’t just break his knee; it blew the lower part of his leg seven meters away.

Asher watched the Frenchman fall.

*   *   *

The helicopter gunner swung his cannon slowly, left to right, then slowly back the way he’d started.

All in all, he fired for fewer than thirty seconds.

The fusillade demolished the northern wall of the factory.

*   *   *

Asher Sahar heard a distinctive crack! It came, not from without, but from within his factory. It was organic, not metallic. The floorboards under his feet vibrated.

Support columns were buckling as the northern wall disintegrated. The top two floors and the roof were in danger of collapsing on them.

Asher hadn’t assumed the tunnel exit had gone undetected, and he didn’t want his team caught in the tunnel where they would have been easily picked off. Eli Schullman had ducked into the tunnel first. Now he reappeared. “Clear! All the way! Come on!”

Asher said, “Yes. Shall we?”

Schullman made room as men began diving for the bolt-hole cut in the floor.

*   *   *

The DCRI command vehicle screeched around a corner and now the combat zone was within view. The driver activated a dashboard camera and one of the monitors in front of Colonel Trinh popped to life, showing a real-time, real-light diorama ahead of them.

Directly above them, the gunship pilot popped on his ultra-powerful searchlight. That, plus the full moon, turned night into day.

Trinh saw billows of dust erupting from the top two floors of the factory. This surprised her, in that all of her crew’s firepower had been aimed at the ground floor.

She didn’t realize then, but the dust came from upper floors that were beginning to buckle.

*   *   *

The demonic onslaught ended and Daria rose from behind the unstable tower of air tanks. She took four steps to her right, caught sight of the others in the room, raised the Glock and let loose with three shots.

Three of Asher’s mercenaries spun and fell.

Daria readjusted her sights. Asher himself was halfway down into the tunnel.

They made eye contact. Held the eye contact. Both froze.

Daria Gibron and Asher Sahar. Siblings, by most measures of the term.

A very thin, very dark black man knelt on the floor, bleeding from his gut. He fired in Daria’s direction. His bullet pinged off one of the air tanks and Daria dodged back. She had hit the black man; she was sure of it. She just hadn’t killed him.

She dared to glance around again. Asher looked right at her, lights flickering across the flat frames of his glasses. She saw what he saw: his childhood friend, his oldest extant acquaintance in all of the world, standing with a sleeveless hooded sweatshirt and cartoony boots shoulder-length apart, wearing a ridiculous skirt, hair gray with dust and asbestos, firing two-handed and paring his team by a third.

Asher ducked into the crawlway.

*   *   *

Where are you, Sahar! Belhadj chanted silently to himself from his catwalk halfway up the grain silo. His ears still rang from the proximity of the flying gunship’s machine cannon. No way you are cowering under this assault. You have an “out,” you mongrel!

He lifted his binoculars, thumbed off the night-scope status, and began scanning the now-bright streets in every direction.

*   *   *

Because of the tear gas billowing in the streets, the other two dozen soldiers under the baton of Colonel Céline Trinh held back. That left the tank-tread assault vehicle and Trinh’s own, boxy command vehicle on point, Le Tigre hovering over them by four stories.

Trinh activated her headset. “Tigre! Bring it down! Disperse the gas! Ground forces: get ready to move in!”

*   *   *

The helicopter dropped straight down until it was even with the roof of the factory. Its propeller wash hit the tear gas, which began to billow and roil, rising and dispersing, clearing the way for Trinh’s ground forces.

*   *   *

With Asher’s team gone, Daria was the only one still being fired upon.

It was just possible, she realized, that she had not thought this thing through as well as she might have.

Shots were still flying into the ruined factory but from street level, not from the air. They also were coming in twos and threes, not the blinding clip of an airship’s rotating cannon.

Still, blind though the shots may be, they were sufficient to keep Daria from making a dash for the trapdoor.

She glanced around the pyramid of oxygen tanks. She had killed two of Asher’s men and wounded a third. That man was alive, blood glistening in a spreading stain above his belt. He was struggling to ratchet a new magazine into an automatic weapon.

The French have a damn tank! Daria realized. She could hear its treads grinding up the street, turning it to loose gravel. The assault vehicle was the source of the random firing into the factory, which kept her pinned down. All I need is for one of their bullets to rupture another air tank, and there goes my cover.

More heavy shells smashed into the room. A loud, low, resonant groan escaped from the very soul of the factory and three wooden support beams cracked and fell from the ceiling, smashing through the walls of the white plastic cube room and then through the rotting floorboards.

Daria glanced around. A few weapons had been scattered about and abandoned, but nothing to match an urban assault vehicle.

Near the trapdoor, the wounded Ivorian soldier pushed a magazine into his Sten gun and struggled to ratchet the slide. “You … will die!” he coughed, blood spewing from his lips. “You bitch! Fuck—”

God, but the man had become annoying! She reached around the tanks and shot him in the head.

First things first. Deal with the tank. Then chase Asher.

She saw tool kits, acetylene torches, sawhorses, a makeshift toilet, tables with canned food, and Sterno heaters. Her eyes lit on a massive iron wrench as long as her leg. It looked more like a cartoon notion of a caveman’s club than an actual tool.

Perfect.

She tucked away the Glock and drew the spade-blade from her boot. She sawed through the two web belts that tied down the pyramid of oxygen tanks. The tanks themselves were lined up perpendicular to the ruined north wall. A camouflaged camp tent stood between the tanks and the wall. She had no idea what lay within the tent but didn’t much care.

Daria dared to sprint out of the cover of the pyramid. She grabbed the massive wrench and dragged it back. The beast weighed at least a quarter as much as Daria herself. Blowing sooty strands of hair away from her eyes, Daria gripped the wrench with both hands. She huffed, gritted her teeth, and lifted the massive spanner over her head.

Howling, she slammed it down on the release valve of the highest tank in the pyramid.

The valve shattered.

The high-pressure air blasted out of the broken valve exactly the same way that rocket propellant works.

The tank flew. Not straight up, like a rocket. But straight out.

*   *   *

Colonel Céline Trinh activated the all-call button on her communications unit. “Everyone, move in. LeTourneau, take point. Duvaliere, bring your people—”

A metal missile, six feet long, screamed out of the factory, missing the assault vehicle by inches.

“What was that! What was that!” someone shouted over the comms.

The gunship pilot’s voice sounded. “Taking fire! Taking fire! They have missiles!”

Colonel Trinh tried to regain order. “Report! What’s happening What’s—”

A second metal cylinder erupted from the factory’s ruined wall. This one connected to the left front-quarter panel of the assault vehicle. It did no serious damage. But the vehicle pivoted five degrees on its central axis, its treads grinding up the street. Inside, its crew was jarred and shocked, one man falling out of his seat, his head slamming into a console.

Voices rose over each other across the communication arrays. “Artillery! They have missiles! Fire! Fire!”

*   *   *

From his vantage point, Belhadj saw a sewer grate pop open in a culvert. Men began racing away. One wore round glasses and had thinning brown hair. Belhadj tried to bring his long gun around by shifting his position on the tight, narrow platform. Not fast enough. Asher Sahar and his crew raced away from the culvert, around the edge of the silo, and were lost from Belhadj’s line of sight.

Cursing God, his attention was drawn back to the street scene. Something exploded from the factory. Belhadj peered through his night scope.

They were oxygen tanks! Oxygen tanks were being fired like missiles! Someone was—

No, he corrected himself. Not someone.

Belhadj grinned beneath the binocular grips. He recognized the insanity of it all. She lived. She was giving the French hell. And she remained Belhadj’s best hope of reacquiring Asher Sahar.

Belhadj swung the silenced Sako rifle back around and lined up his crosshairs in Le Tigre’s rear stabilizer propeller.

*   *   *

The pilot pointed at the factory, his gunner bringing the rotating cannons back online. “Base, lining up for—”

The gunship’s stabilizer blade shattered.

Klaxons sounded in the cockpit. The yoke jerked in the pilot’s hands, a mind of its own, as the warbird began rotating on its central vertical axis.

“Base! We are hit! We are hit!”

The helicopter’s long, heavy tail section—shaped more or less like the striking surface of a hockey stick—had served to stabilize the flying weapons platform. Devoid of its propeller, the tail section’s mass threw off the gunship’s balance. She began spinning in place.

Until the torque offset the uplift of the main, overhead propellers.

When that happened, Le Tigre began dropping.

*   *   *

The firing from outside stopped after Daria had blasted her fifth oxygen tank. Good thing, too. Her arms felt like linguini and she doubted she could lift the monstrous spanner over her head a sixth time.

More rafters cracked and plummeted from the ceiling, tearing down sections of the white plastic walls. Tear gas began billowing in. The huge support column, behind which she initially had ducked, splintered along its entire vertical length, the roof above it groaning and dropping a meter.

From the corner of her eye, she noted the now-ruined, camouflaged tent fluttering away. Where it had stood she saw overturned medical equipment and two field hospital gurneys, both on their sides. Thick pools of clotted brown liquid spread from them both. She recognized old blood when she saw it. She had caused enough such stains in her years.

Daria had no time to ponder. She had bought herself a few precious seconds. She sprinted toward the bolt-hole.

“W-wait…”

A voice reached her. She noticed a man, down on his back, his right leg missing below the knee, a small pool of blood encircling his lower torso. The man wore expensive, well-tailored civilian clothes, even a lavender pocket square, and Daria caught a whiff of expensive cologne.

“Please … God … please … don’t leave … me,” the man begged in French, his eyes bulging in panic.

The well-dressed gentleman was completely out of place, like a crystal chandelier hanging in a latrine.

This man had been of value to Asher.

Daria checked the man’s leg. The heavy-caliber shell had gone straight through his leg, hot enough to partially cauterize the wound. It was the only reason he hadn’t bled out. Yet.

She grabbed the man’s lapel with her left fist and jumped down into the ripe drainage pipe below, dragging the dapper civilian behind her, leaving a wide blood trail. He landed like a sack of onions.

The ceiling above them continued to collapse, meaning the tunnel was no safer than the floor they had abandoned. Daria began backpedaling as quickly as she could, dragging his ass and one and a half legs behind her across the boards that had been laid down for traction.

Somewhere beneath the soot and dust and grime and sweat-slick hair, Daria Gibron’s eyes sparkled.