Countdown_ The Liberators Part 47

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT.

Cruelty has a Human HeartAnd Jealousy a Human FaceTerror, the Human Form DivineAnd Secrecy, the Human DressThe Human Dress, is forged IronThe Human Form, a fiery Forge.The Human Face, a Furnace seal'dThe Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.-William Blake, "A Divine Image"

D-Day, five and a half miles north-northeast of Nugaal, Ophir

Plaster from the bullet-shattered ceiling was still raining down as men, some armed, others not, began stumbling into the hallway. Some rubbed sleep from their eyes. Most were, at best, half dressed. The two Americans with Terry on the second floor fired at all armed men as they appeared. Sure, maybe the accountant who was the prime target had come out with a rifle but if Stauer didn't like it, he could do the thing himself.

Once those flurries of fire were done with, Terry thundered through his interpreter: "THE ACCOUNTANT WILL SURRENDER HIMSELF NOW OR EVERYONE IN THIS COMPLEX DOWN TO THE LAST BABY SUCKING THE LAST t.i.t WILL BE PUT TO DEATH!"

"Say it again," Terry ordered the translator. "Only this time put a little insane hysteria into it."

"THE ACCOUNTANT WILL SURRENDER HIMSELF NOW . . . ".

Even as those words thundered an altogether different kind of thunder, this one accompanied by a sort of lightning, began in the grounds outside and on the lower floor.

Graft, the machine gunner on the gate, snugged his Pecheneg's stock a little closer to his shoulder as soon as he heard firing commence inside the palace. His scope was trained on the sole door from the barracks into the gra.s.sy compound.

The Pecheneg was yet another among the remarkable series of innovations and improvements attributable to the Russian, formerly Soviet, arms industry. The thing was, at core, a PKM machine gun, modified with a heavier, radially ribbed barrel, with a sleeve around the barrel through which cooling air was drawn. The barrel, itself, was nonchangeable in the field. This didn't matter so very much as the cooling arrangements allowed the gun to fire up to six hundred rounds in one continuous burst without overheating. No other single barreled, air-cooled machine-gun, meant to be fired from the ground, could boast this, though the First World War's Lewis Gun might have come close.

Graft proceeded to put that nearly to the test. As the ready squad from the barracks piled out of the door in a confusion of arms and legs and rifles, he trained on the foremost, depressed the trigger, and walked his six hundred and fifty rounds a minute across the squad, then back again. Some of his targets fell immediately. Others did a version of the ballistic ballet, there on the gra.s.s. A few screamed and someone began to cry.

Some of those felled tried to crawl away, but Graft was having none of that. Lifting his shoulder slightly to depress the muzzle, he fired three more bursts at the crawling men, stopping each in his own blood trail. In his scope Graft saw sprays of blood and chunks of flesh fly up from the shattered bodies.

'G.o.d, I missed this," Graft said, just as grenades began going off in the first floor rooms of the small palace, driving gla.s.s shards out onto the courtyard. "Good hunting and no limit."

Semmerlin snickered as he heard Graft's machine gun chattering behind him. Be my turn soon.

He didn't have long to wait. Whoever was inside the barracks had probably seen the gunner's handiwork and decided that the courtyard was no place for Mrs. Dheere's little boy, Achmed.

Achmed, or whatever his name really was, slipped out the back with a few friends. Semmerlin let them run perhaps one hundred, one hundred and twenty meters, and opened fire, engaging the rearmost man first and working his way forward. Achmed, if that's who was in the lead, heard and felt nothing until the three-ounce bronze bullet pa.s.sed through his chest, wrecking heart and lungs and pitching him, already dead, to the ground.

"Graft," Issaq Abay asked, "you want me use RPG now?"

"No, Issaq," the gunner answered, without taking his eyes from the scope. "They're pinned in there. No sense in giving them a reason to want to come out yet."

"Okay, I do what you say. Still . . . want to use RPG now."

"Just wait. You'll get your chance."

"Give me a chance," came the shout in English from one of the rooms farther down the hall. A set of underwear on the end of a curtain rod was shoved out the door. "I am the accountant. Please don't shoot anymore."

"Cease fire except in defense," Terry told the subteam with him on the second floor. Immediately, all but the translator, Abdidi, dropped to one knee, keeping their weapons aimed toward the back of the building. Explosions and bursts of fire continued on the floor below.

"Come out," Terry ordered.

The rod with its makeshift white flag dropped incrementally, then sagged to the floor as a man in a clean robe, wearing gla.s.ses, emerged. He took one look at the a.s.sault team and dropped the rod, frightened even more than he had been during the shooting.

Welch beckoned for the man who claimed to be the accountant to come forward. Hesitantly, he did.

From his breast pocket Terry withdrew a plastic bag. From the bag he took a single accounts sheet. He handed it to the man who claimed to be the accountant and asked, "What's wrong with this?"

The accountant, if accountant he was, shook his head in disbelief. "You came here in the middle of the night? Killed so many people? Just to have me check your books?"

Terry placed the still warm muzzle of his submachine gun to the man's chin and asked again, "What's wrong with it?"

After a gulp, the man looked over the sheet, saw that the number at the bottom was exactly nine off, and said, "Transpositional error. It'll take me a minute to . . . "

"Never mind; you're the accountant." Terry lowered the muzzle.

"Yes," the accountant agreed. Nodding his head vigorously, he said, "Yes, yes, I am."

"You know all of Gutaale's accounts? His codes?"

"Yessss."

"Very good. Pigf.u.c.ker, take charge of Mr . . . "

"Dayid. Jama Dayid," the accountant supplied.

"Take charge of Mr. Dayid and get him downstairs to Blackguard. Then to the parking lot. Hotwire a couple of suitable vehicles and flatten the tires on the rest."

Another first floor explosion, followed by a burst of fire, punctuated Welch's command.

"Clear down here, Terry," Ryan called up. "But we've got a dozen civilians."

"Abdidi, tell the rest of the people up here to come out with their hands up and empty! Tell 'em we're going to burn the house but if they cooperate we'll let them out before the fire."

Once downstairs, Welch saw two armed men lying on the floor at the back of the house. That would be the roving guard, I suspect. He went to the front door and called out, "Grau, you engage anyone?"

"Not since we took down the gate guards," the sniper answered.

"All right. I'm pretty sure the roving guard's here and very dead. Roust the people in the servants' quarters out and bring them inside here."

"Roger."

"The rest of you, except for Blackguard, who will watch the prisoners, take up firing positions on the barracks side window. Abdidi, call out to the barracks that they are to surrender, same routine as the other."

"Yes, sir."

The first response of the guards remaining in the barracks was to fire on all the palace windows. Abdidi, unfortunately, was a little too exposed. One bullet-and even random bullets can hit, sometimes-took the top of his head off. A substantial piece of his skull was still flying through the air, from there to bounce off the far wall, as his body hit the floor.

"Kill 'em all," Welch ordered.

"RPG now?" Issaq asked.

"RPG now," Graft agreed.

The translator set the launcher on his shoulder and stood up enough to raise it just above the top of the wall. He shouted something in his own language that Graft took to mean, "Backblast area clear!" Then he let fly at the barracks, blowing a hole in the wall and sending a stream of hot ga.s.ses inside.

After two more shots with the RPG, the remnants of the guard force attempted to stream out both doors. Both Semmerlin and Graft had a field day-way overlimit. Some tried to surrender but Welch had ordered no prisoners and neither the sniper nor the gunner were much inclined to disagree.

Issaq fired a fourth shot, and then a fifth and final. Somewhere between the two, the building caught fire.

A woman, tall and slender, walked up to Terry. She was veiled, but removed the veil when she reached him. Her cheekbones were high, her complexion quite smooth, and her eyes were absolutely huge. He thought she looked a bit like a model whose name he couldn't quite recall. Married to some ambiguously s.e.xual singer . . . what was that woman's name? Anyway, this one looks pretty good by the light of a burning barracks.

"You . . . American?" she asked, in very badly accented and hesitant English.

"Yes, we're Americans," Terry answered.

The woman gestured with a sweeping hand and said, still hesitatingly, "I . . . Ayanna. We . . . slaves. Christians. Some . . . Moslem . . . too. You take . . . with. Please . . . take with."

"'As he died to make men holy,'" Blackguard Blackburn quoted.

Terry looked intently at the woman whose eyes were so eloquently pleading. Am I the good guy or the bad guy, he wondered. Maybe I'm a bad guy, but once, just once, maybe I'd like to do good.

Slowly, maybe even reluctantly, he nodded his head. Let us try to make men . . . or women . . . free.

"All right," he told Ayanna. "We'll try."

"Let me make sure I understand what you want," the accountant said. Firelight from the barracks next door flickered off his face. "You want me to transfer all the money my chief has to you?"

"That's about right," Terry Welch answered. "For the privilege, I am authorized to let you have one percent of everything . . . recovered."

"Recovered" seemed like a better, more morally uplifting, word.

"One percent? Twenty million U.S. Dollars? That's a lot of money . . . but . . . I can't."

"The alternative . . . "

The accountant sighed. "Sir, no matter what you may do to me, I would rather that than take Gutaale's money and leave my family in his . . . care."

"Where is your family?" Terry asked.

"A few miles from here, in Nugaal."

"How many?"

"Forty-two."

'Forty-two?"

"I have three wives and one concubine. Plus my parents. And three brothers and their families. Forty-two."

f.u.c.k. "Do you need any books?" Terry asked. "Any ledgers? Discs? Your laptop?"

The accountant shook his head and then tapped one finger to it. "It's all here."

Should I mention the couple of tons of gold in the bas.e.m.e.nt? Dayid wondered. Mmmm . . . maybe not. They came in, probably, by air; they will leave by air. Given the weight of some members of my family, telling them about the gold might get them left behind. And no matter what I may say, I do not want to be rigorously questioned. No, let Gutaale keep the gold. Maybe it will incline him to be more forgiving of the more distant members of my sept.