Nineteen

The gunship didn’t plummet; it retained enough lift to retard its descent. It still landed hard on the urban assault vehicle, ruining both.

Nearby, the roof of the factory collapsed into the third floor, and the third floor began its now-inevitable collapse into the second floor.

The destruction was too close to the piled-up ruins of the two attack vehicles for Colonel Céline Trinh’s comfort. But she wasn’t willing to ask a soldier or airman to do something she, herself, wouldn’t do. She strapped on her own sidearm, buckling the belt over her narrow hips. “Captain LeTourneau! Meet me at Le Tigre! Bring Renault and Gilbert!”

She ripped off her headset and threw open the rear door to the UPS-style truck. She leaped down into one of the grooves that the assault tank had left in its wake, concrete turned into rough coffee grounds.

Her two communication techies joined her. Where their colonel went, so did they.

Trinh didn’t look three months past fifty-five as she raced toward the devastation, her lace-up boots tearing up the distance, her senior officers arriving from the opposite direction.

The factory shuddered and upper-story windows exploded, creating glittery rainbows of moonlight over their heads. Trinh ducked, arm up over her short-cropped hair, as glass shards rained into the street.

The acrid stink of tear gas permeated the scene and reminded Trinh of spoiled eggs. The rotor wash from Le Tigre had dispersed enough of it, but some of her men donned bandannas across their mouths and noses.

Trinh turned to one of her communications people, who followed her everywhere. “Headlamps!” she bellowed over the roar of everyone and everything else on the street. “Tell everyone: Cars, trucks, get this scene illuminated!”

The strong strobe of Le Tigre lay smashed against the top of the assault vehicle. A bar of five high-power LED lights atop of the command vehicle provided an anemic alternative, and, coming from street level, threw elongated shadows everywhere.

The colonel turned to the ruined factory. Her eyes were watering now.

For a brief time they had had thermal images of the interior, but the insertion of tear gas had degraded that capability—the dense gas tended to mute temperature variations. And besides, like the strobe, the infrared camera lay in a smoldering heap on the street.

She’d come looking for Belhadj and Gibron. Her airship had revealed an estimated ten to twelve hostiles on the ground floor of the building at one point. And she knew Gibron had been in the building. Belhadj? No one had seen him at all.

She had no doubt that the attack had neutralized whatever terrorist war party Belhadj and Gibron had formed inside the factory. But the building looked far too unstable for a follow-up raid. The job now would be to get a mobile camera and transmitter in there, and to start identifying the bodies.

At least the building hadn’t caught fire. Trinh counted that as a minor blessing.

She reached the downed gunship just as the pilot kicked open the port-side door. It took three kicks; the door was stuck in the bent airframe. He held his broken left arm pinioned against his flank.

One of her senior officers dashed around the wreckage. He was bleeding from his leg.

“Paul! Get the gunner!” Trinh shouted, hauling the pilot’s good arm over her shoulder and half-carrying him away from the disintegrating factory.

Men emerged from the ruined urban assault vehicle, shaken up, banged up, but alive.

Céline Trinh stepped over a six-foot-long metal tube lying in the street. It was one of the “missiles” that had attacked the assault vehicle. She realized now that it was an oxygen tank with a smashed valve. As weapons go, it had been all but useless. But as diversions go …

With the big man’s arm over her shoulder and his weight against her hip, Colonel Trinh took another look back at the factory.

*   *   *

Grunting, her muscles screaming, Daria backed out of the drainpipe, moving from pitch-black to night gloom, into the culvert by the railroad tracks. She sucked cold, clean air into her lungs and fell on her butt. The well-dressed man’s head and shoulders thumped down on to the winter-hardened ground between her spread legs.

She sat, huffing, and wiped gritty hair away from her face. Her hand came away chalky with sweat, dust, and asbestos. She hawked up a gob of particulate and spat on the ground. Her arm muscles twitched with fatigue.

The civilian—Asher’s well-dressed civilian—hadn’t bled out yet. He moaned, unconscious.

Daria struggled to her knees and whipped off her stolen black hoodie, leaving on the white undershirt, now a grimy gray. She twisted the sweatshirt into a tourniquet for the man’s severed leg. She realized she should have done that inside, but with the building under assault, she’d risked waiting.

A sweep of headlights raked the culvert, dazzling her. Brakes squealed. Her night vision obliterated, Daria twisted on her knees, drawing the Glock, aiming for the headlights. Now what? She squinted into the light.

A voice boomed in Arabic. “Get in, idiot!”

She lowered the auto. By all the sinners in hell.… She groaned. Surrounded by enemies, outmanned, outgunned, and who shows up for the rescue but Khalid Fucking Belhadj!

*   *   *

Belhadj helped her carry the deadweight civilian into the back of the tall, boxy truck. They set him down on a gridded metal floor, none too gingerly. Belhadj raced forward to the cramped driver’s seat.

“Asher…” Daria gasped, on her knees. “I saw him.”

“Escaped. Same route as you.” Belhadj jammed the truck into gear and the tires squealed. “Who is this?”

Daria hacked a wet cough and pushed the Frenchman over enough to retrieve his kid leather wallet. She thumbed through it.

“Georges Rabadeau. Doctor.”

“What is Sahar doing with a doctor?”

The truck veered around a corner and Daria braced herself. “Don’t know. They had a field hospital set up inside an airtight room.”

Daria idly pocketed the doctor’s eight hundred euros—waste not, want not—and added it to the wad she’d stolen from enforcer girl. She fingered a laminated rectangle from the doctor’s wallet. “La Société Européenne de la Pathologie.”

“My French is not—”

“Pathologist.”

Belhadj’s face clouded over. “Foreboding.”

“A bit.” She rocked as the truck took another corner, and a thought hit her. “Did you bring down that attack helicopter?”

Belhadj shrugged, eyes on the road. “Yes.”

“Cobra?”

“No, a Tiger.”

“Tiger? They’re good.”

Belhadj grunted. “Did you hurl oxygen bottles at a fully armored assault vehicle?”

Daria wrinkled her nose. “Well, it seemed like a good idea before you said it out loud.”

Catching her breath, she took in her surroundings, the banks of computers, the monitors, the bolted-down chairs, subway-style support straps hanging from the ceiling, the weapons cabinet. Slowly, she smiled.

“Cheeky bastard! You stole a command vehicle!”

Belhadj didn’t turn around, but she could see from his shoulders that he was preening a bit.

“Not bad,” she conceded.

“Thank you.”

“Fast. Armored. A weapons cache. Computers…”

The Syrian allowed himself a smile over his right shoulder. “Well, I—”

“Not as impressive as the one I stole. But, you know…”

The big man gave her a surly glower and drove.