Without Warning Part 24

It was a large, excessive a.r.s.enal for just one young lady to haul around, but Caitlin very much adhered to her daddy's rule that when it came to guns it was always better to have 'em and not need 'em than the other way around.

She picked up the shotty, jacked a cartridge into the chamber, and poked the muzzle out through the shattered window. The Benelli was loaded with a buck'n'ball combo that gave her a nice spread for quick and dirty area clearance, but still packed a nasty surprise in the form of one larger, molyb-denum-disulfide-coated bra.s.s slug at the center of the load. Unlike softer malleable rounds, it was armor-piercing and would slice through a car door or ballistic vest without bothering to slow down much.

She methodically pumped half a dozen rounds of buck'n'ball downrange, angling to do some damage to the men behind the vehicles, but occasionally raking a shot along the front of the building to shut down their partner in the recessed doorway. She briefly heard a few distressed cries and more shouting upstairs and the hammering of feet on bare wooden boards, but then the uproar of her sustained gunfire drowned out everything else.

I need to get a handle on this f.u.c.king mess, she thought. She was still firing blind, however, attempting to disrupt the flow of her opponent's advance and hoping for a lucky hit.

The briefest of lulls drew her attention upward again, to the sounds of renewed panic. She let loose with another four sh.e.l.ls from the shotgun and then ran, reloading, clearing the ruined sitting room and bouncing off the slimy, plastered wall of the apartment's main corridor. She leapt over Monique, who was writhing and crying pitiably-"Hold on, baby! These f.u.c.kers are gonna regret getting out of bed today"-then sped for the internal staircase, slipping the shotgun over her shoulder and bringing the Heckler & Koch into play.

After bounding up the steps, she swung around at the first level and raced for the front of the building. An open door led onto a small bedroom just ahead, and she rushed in, grateful to find that there was no baby in the cot pushed up against one wall. She thumbed the selector on the machine gun to full auto. One of the reasons she liked the H&K was its relatively low rate of fire, a modest six hundred rounds per minute, which in the hands of an expert operator made the burst mode all but superfluous.

Caitlin looked out the window with a black widow's smile.

Two of the three were crossing the street, giving her a clear line of fire.

"Thank you, gentlemen," she said. "Much obliged."

The operatives both squeezed off covering fire as they crossed the road. The dense rapid crack of their FAMAS rifles was painfully loud. They edged forward, right into her sights.

Her movements were quick and machinelike.

One sharp pull on the trigger shattered the window, and as the men instinctively looked up, she nailed the pair of them with short auto bursts, aiming for the center ma.s.s and letting the muzzle drift upward to punch a couple of rounds into their skulls. The first man simply looked surprised, his eyebrows raised comically and mouth a perfect O before five rounds st.i.tched him up from the sternum to the forehead. His head all but disintegrated. The second attacker was fast, well trained, but doomed. He managed to get his muzzle up a few inches and even squeezed off one misdirected round before Caitlin nailed him in the same way. A fan of blood and brain matter painted the side of the car next to which he died.

More. There have to be more of them, she screamed silently at herself.

She didn't pause, leaning back from the exposed position and holding the gun forward, angled down, to let rip at the guy who had been sheltering in the doorway. There was no direct line of sight, but Caitlin fired from memory, confident she could at least keep him pinned down. A woman was screaming nearby, and downstairs she could hear Monique's own guttural cries of pain becoming more ragged and intense, more animalistic in their abandonment.

"s.h.i.tfire!" spat Caitlin.

She took half a second to scan her immediate surroundings and plug them into a larger mental map of the world outside. A triangular block, typical of the streets of Paris, was her battlefield.

Time to slip backa.s.swards.

Setting off at a sprint, she charged down the first-floor internal corridor, a dank, evil-smelling s.p.a.ce. She headed away from Monique, from the cries of the tenement's occupants, moving as fast as possible for the rear of the building. A closed wooden door loomed ahead of her, and she went straight through it, shoulder-charging the old wooden frame, which disintegrated in a storm of splinters and dust. A faraway part of her mind thought "termites."

She'd been expecting either a small storeroom or water closet. It was the latter, as filthy and unkempt as the rest of the place, but she didn't care. A sash window, gray and completely opaque from grime, opened onto a rear courtyard. The pulley ropes were broken and hung uselessly, one of them trailing its frayed end through a petrified blob of toothpaste. Caitlin ignored it, safed and shouldered her weapons, and hauled herself awkwardly through the window.

It was a straight drop into the muddy courtyard. No shed or ledge to step on. She levered herself out, hung down as far as possible. Then she pushed out and dropped. Her knees folded up under her just as she had been trained by the good folks at the U.S. Army Airborne School at Fort Benning.

There was nothing elegant about the move, which ended with her rolling in the wet earth. The submachine gun squelched underneath her, digging painfully into her ribs, but she mostly kept the Benelli out of the muck, and with no time to check and clean the guns, she chose that as her primary. Pulling more sh.e.l.ls from the sidesaddle, she finished reloading on the run toward the small wooden fence separating the courtyard from the next property.

The muted rattling cough of the FAMAS reached her, adding urgency to her flight. As she stood, however, a wave of disorientation swept over her and threatened to steal her balance. Caitlin took one precious second to stand perfectly still, draw in a fresh breath, and attempt to center herself, to gain some measure of control over her traitorous body. Then there was nothing for it but to forge on, leaning forward into the vertigo that seized her and biting down a rising tide of bile trying to erupt upward out of her stomach.

She leapt over the wooden fence, catching her jeans and almost crashing down in a heap on the other side as she lost her footing on a dead pigeon. Her momentum was enough to carry her forward, however, and she brought the shotgun around, flicked off the safety, and jacked a round into the chamber.

In front of her stood the rear door of a building facing onto the rue du Bac d'Asnieres, one side of the elongated triangular block. From her point of view the quiet, uncontested side. The van was at the apex of the triangle, flat tires and all.

An empty bakery stood in front of her, if she recalled correctly. This just might work.

The small frosted window embedded in the door was covered with a wire grille, but there were no other obvious security measures. No wires, no cams, no back-to-base relays that she could spot. Her head was still spinning and her balance was off, but the door was a stationary target. She drove a powerful side kick into it just inches below the rusted lock. It gave way with a report like a gunshot, and she hurried in as the sound of more automatic fire drifted over the roofline from the street she had just fled. She entered a storeroom, mostly empty, with just two large paper bags of flour lying on the concrete floor. Rats had chewed both of them open. A doorway led through to the baking room, where big commercial ovens stood cold and unattended, presumably for want of supplies. Or perhaps the baker, more closely attuned to the city's increasingly serious hunger, had already taken his family and left.

Caitlin didn't give a s.h.i.t. She found the door she was looking for, punched through it, and emerged into a flat dismal light that leached through the thick blanket of toxic clouds lowering overhead. Rain started to spatter down again, burning her eyes and exposed skin. A black crow, seemingly unaffected by the pollution, picked at the carca.s.s of a squirrel in the gutter just in front of her. She swore at her lack of goggles, a pair of which lay in the bag she'd left with Monique.

The a.s.sa.s.sin was caught unawares by the strength of her feeling for the girl. They were not comrades, more allies of convenience, thrown together only because of the extreme circ.u.mstances of the last week. And she had never allowed herself to grow attached to a target or an a.s.set, but neither had she ever been diagnosed with a brain tumor or woken up to discover that her whole world had vanished like a dream. As she ignored the increasingly difficult symptoms of her illness and pushed herself to the limits of endurance, Caitlin tried to convince herself that she was simply worried, quite reasonably, at losing the vital support of a key a.s.set.

A rising, ungovernable anger threatened to overwhelm her as she remembered her last sighting of Monique, jackknifed in pain, bleeding out onto the filthy floor of the old tenement. She was a ditz, but she had stuck by Caitlin when, really, she would have been better lighting out on her own. If nothing else, the American owed her a settlement with whoever had shot her.

There were a dozen or more people milling about nervously on this street, flinching at the gunfire. A young man called out a warning in French- "She's got a gun!"-and they scattered like birds startled from a tree. Caitlin ran five doors down the street back toward the hairpin corner around which she'd walked with Monique a lifetime ago. When she judged herself far enough along she diverted in through an open garage door of an auto-repair business, yelling that she was the police and warning everyone to get down. She heard more cries of alarm and noted two figures in coveralls cowering out of her way, but ignored them.

This building sat on the point formed by the meeting of the rue and the rue d'Asnieres and so it had no back courtyard. The only open ground it boasted was a triangular concrete ap.r.o.n at the apex of the two streets, which appeared to be used as a parking bay for the business. It was possible to cut right through the workshop and emerge, hopefully, behind the white van and the last shooter. She quickly weaved her way through, dodging around a couple of pits over which a new Honda Accord and an ancient Trabant were being gutted by mechanics. A pair of double doors, identical to the ones through which she'd entered, stood ajar, opening onto the wider thoroughfare of the rue d'Asnieres. She could just make out the rear of the white van, splattered with blood, and an outstretched hand, lifeless on the sidewalk.

The FAMAS roared again, a long guttural snarl of fully automatic fire, none of it directed at her. Nonetheless her heart lurched forward. She saw smoke and a muzzle flash light up the darkened cave of the apartment entryway where the last shooter had holed up. The doorway of the building in which Monique lay disintegrated as the bullets struck.

Clearing burst, she thought. Right where she's lying.

Caitlin took a second to check the shotgun and finish racking sh.e.l.ls into the magazine. It was good to go, as near as she could tell. After she reloaded her Glock with a full mag, she stopped to think for a moment.

What if there are more of them? There have to be more of them. Her eyes scanned the windows and rooftops, into stopped cars, taking in the few people still crazy enough to be on the street.

Nothing for it, she told herself. Surprise is everything.

The shooters lying on the sidewalk and roadway in front of her were dead. She hurried past the van, covering the man whose legs protruded from the rear cabin, but he, too, was gone. Bled out. The last-known gunman was inside the building, just out of her sight.

She sped up, crouching to drop below the line of the windowsill as she reached the front door. Shotgun up, trigger on a half pull, she took in the sight of Monique lying as still as a fallen log in the dark pool of her own fluids. Her head was a shattered mess of blood, gristle, and gray matter. She was identifiable only because of the stupid little protest badges she still wore on her old jacket. Fury boiled over inside Caitlin's head.

Oh, you filthy c.o.c.ksucker, Caitlin swore to herself. You and I will most certainly have a reckoning here directly.

b.l.o.o.d.y footprints led away up the stairs, and she heard the creak of a footfall overhead.

Oh yes, Caitlin thought, pointing her shotgun at the ceiling. We'll have that reckoning right now.

She pulled the trigger two, three, four times without giving a second thought to any collateral damage. Not a thought about the families who lived in the building or the cot she had fired over. Each blast gouged giant plumes of plaster dust and atomized floorboard, which erupted and dropped, coating the two women like a snowfall. She was rewarded with a strangled cry and a brief, uncontrolled snarl of gunfire, before a dead weight dropped to the floor above.

She looked over her shoulder, out the door behind her, still wary that someone else might show up. But there was no one in sight.

Taking off at speed again she rushed the steps for the second time that morning. A round in the chamber, the Benelli's muzzle described tight little arcs as she aimed where she expected to find the body.

He was still moving, but barely so. The last shooter, she hoped. Struck three times, once in the femoral artery to judge by the rivers of rich, almost purple lifeblood flowing out of him on the tacky brown carpet. He'd dropped the a.s.sault rifle in his dying spasm and Caitlin used her boot to kick it away, never once taking her aim off the back of his head. She heard a door open somewhere and yelled out in French again, "Police. Get back!"

The door slammed shut quickly. A child screamed endlessly somewhere in the building.

Cautiously approaching the downed man, she kept her eyes on his hands and feet, aware that even now he might lash out at her. In his position, if at all possible, she would have. But a thick, glutinous, gargling sound told her he was on the way out. She shouldered the Benelli again, where it clanked against the barrel of the Heckler & Koch. Her pistol replaced the long guns, and she dropped a knee right into the small of the man's back, jamming the Glock up against the base of his ear. A pellet had torn off a bite-sized chunk, and she ground the iron gun sight into the bleeding wound for emphasis. He groaned pitiably, but there was very little fight left in him.

"You don't have long, Pepe Le Pew. We both know that," she snarled in French. "But I could make the last few minutes of your miserable f.u.c.king life feel like an eternity."

To drive the point home she shifted her balance to focus her weight onto a rib that was protruding from an ugly chest wound. A weak, liquid groan escaped from the man beneath her as she felt a nub of bone dig into her knee.

"Okay. Two questions. First one. Did you shoot my friend downstairs?"

"I don't..."

The Glock gouged out a chunk of meat from his ruined ear, and he found the strength for a full-bodied scream.

"Yes. Yes. I did," he babbled. In heavily accented English.

"Question two. Who sent you?"

Lighter pressure was all she required this time.

The answer told her half of what she needed to know.

"Noisy-le-Sec."

An iceberg in her stomach.

Just as she'd thought. They were from the action division of the DGSE.

She didn't bother asking why.

This loser wouldn't have a clue, only a target. Her and Monique.

"Okay I lied. More questions. How many in your team? How many shooters? How many on overwatch?"

"f.u.c.k you," he groaned.

Caitlin drove a short, sharp punch into his injured rib cage and he screamed.

"How many?"

But his howling did not abate. If anything it grew worse.

Her skin crawled, and every nerve ending under it seemed to tingle.

Time to go.

She stood up carefully, making sure to give him no chance of entangling her legs or feet, and then she fired once into the back of his head, silencing the caterwauling cries, before turning and hurrying back downstairs to Monique.

Not that she needed to hurry.

She already knew that her friend-and yes, "friend" was appropriate- was dead.

The body lay still and heavy in that telltale way, as though slowly melting into the floor under the pressure of its own dead weight. Black petals of light bloomed in her vision, and her head began to spin again, this time around the axis of a bright, sharp pain. Caitlin staggered against the wall, which seemed to fall away from her. She had to get out. She had to abandon her friend. More killers would be on their way. As the floor rushed up to slam into her face she thought she heard the dull metallic thudding of a helicopter. But it could have been her own heartbeat.

U.S. Army Combat Support Hospital, Camp New Jersey, Kuwait

He was getting used to the chaotic, tumbling, white-water rush of events, to waking up in different cots, or beds, or a plastic picnic chair at some random transit point. Of course, Melton had experienced plenty of hurry-up-and-wait during his time as a ranger, and although he enjoyed a much greater degree of autonomy in his later career as a civilian correspondent, he was, in the end, still hanging around the army, which had raised "hanging around" to an Olympic standard event, interspersed with short bouts of furious a.s.s haulage and seemingly pointless tail chasing. The thirty-six hours after he awoke in the field hospital featured plenty of each.

He'd been upset on returning from the mess tent to discover that Corporal Shetty was gone, evacuated on a medical flight to Ramstein. He was alone again, without friends or colleagues or even a pa.s.sing acquaintance, before Corpsman Deftereos returned, this time with a set of three-pattern desert BDUs and a standard-issue brown undershirt and underwear. He was accompanied by an exhausted-looking female doctor, who gave the reporter a perfunctory once-over, checked his st.i.tches, wrote him a prescription for some antibiotics, and signed off a travel order, ripped from a clipboard, and pushed into Melton's pocket.

"Congratulations," she said in a voice devoid of any spark. "You win a no-expenses-paid trip out of my ward and on into the next exciting phase of your own personal mystery tour."

He hadn't even drawn breath to ask what the f.u.c.k she was talking about before she was gone, administering more scrips and travel doc.u.ments like some sort of malfunctioning vending machine. Deftereos, at least, had been a little more helpful, gesturing for him to stay exactly where he was for the next couple of minutes at least. Melton felt abandoned and more alone than he had in a long time as the two of them swept out of the ward, and he was on the verge of simply climbing back into his cot when the corpsman rushed back in, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him upright.

"No, really, you gotta get the h.e.l.l outta here right now, sir," said Deftereos.

"Why? What's up?"

"What? You think they tell me anything? I don't f.u.c.king know, excuse my language, sir."

Deftereos was babbling, and noticeably distracted.

"Look, we just got word that we're shifting at least a third of our cases. Corporal Shetty scored a golden ticket with the Eighty-sixth Airlift while you were out. And you just lucked out with a civilian charter, to London. If I was you, I wouldn't even be here anymore. I'd be a dust ball, on my way to the f.u.c.king helipad. Now go!"

He pushed a small bottle of pills into Melton's hand. Vicodin.

"It'll help. With the shoulder and your finger," he said. "Don't worry about your kit. All your stuff has gone ahead. Now you gotta get going, too."

And with that he'd changed out of his scrubs and been given the b.u.m's rush out of the tent and into the dust and harsh sunlight, to join a small throng of the walking wounded, all recently displaced and as thoroughly nonplussed as himself. They had just enough time to work up some really wild theories about battles gone wrong, bioweapon exchanges, hundreds of thousands of American dead and wounded, when a white bus with dark blue Hilton Hotel livery pulled around the corner formed by a pod of air-conditioned shipping containers a hundred yards away, and a navy chief stuck his head out of the rear door, roaring at them to get their worthless carca.s.ses into the vehicle or they'd get left behind for good.

Melton remembered a short ride out to a vast helipad where civilian choppers of all manner and description vied with U.S. military helicopters for landing and takeoff slots. He remembered shuffling onto a Vietnam-era Chinook with an Australian aircrew, but missed a lot of that flight, after downing two of the Vicodin with a swig of warm bottled water. He vaguely recalled half an hour spent in some lavish civilian airport where he was at last able to fill the prescription for his antibiotics, at a markup of about a thousand percent.

Melton slept through a C-130 flight to Qatar, and ended up for a long spell in a giant hangar where hundreds of wounded marines and soldiers were laid out on stretchers if they were lucky, or if they weren't, on a makeshift line of bright orange molded plastic chairs. Groggy from the Vicodin and creeping exhaustion, he made his way toward a small mound of duffel bags that had been colonized by half a dozen Polish commandos. They all seemed in fine fettle, with their equipment stowed neatly in a pile to one side, guarded by one of their own, a huge blond stone monolith of a man.

"Witatn!" He smiled in greeting, before holding up his hands to forestall a Polish-language landslide. "Sorry. That's all the Polish I know. Besides piwo and piekna dzie...dzi..."

"Dziewczyna?" grinned a small, wiry, heavily mustachioed man, the men's sergeant to judge by his chevrons. "Not much beer or beautiful ladies around here, my friend. Just stinky American boxheads, yes. Apologies if you are boxhead, too. I say it with love in my heart. And sorrow, too, great sorrow. Please sit, you are wounded, yes?"

Two of the Poles crabbed around and Melton eased himself down onto a couple of kit bags. They seemed wonderfully soft.

"Boxhead? No," he grunted with relief at getting off his feet. "Not for a long time, anyway. Wounded, yes. Not too bad though. Just missing a few bits and pieces."

"Nothing to stop you enjoying piwo or dziewczyna though?"

"No." He smiled. "Nothing that bad. My name is Melton, by the way. Bret Melton. I'm a reporter, or was ..."

He shrugged awkwardly and trailed off. It was simply too much effort to go into his CV, to explain his shift from Army Times staffer to itinerant freelancer for a slew of British arms trade mags.

"You guys been waiting for transport long?"

"Eight hours. Not long. Some here have been waiting many days. Some have died here. Not joking now. I am Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz. I do not joke. Pleased to meet you, Melton by-the-way. Okay. That was joke. Polish joke, yes? The best kind. By Pole."