Dead Man's Rule (38 page)

The gloom deepened by the minute as the last vestiges of twilight faded outside. As night fell around them, the likelihood of a renewed attack increased—as did their opponents’ advantage. The growing darkness hid their enemies—but not them. The Chechens knew exactly where they were.

Ben sniffed, and a new fear formed in his mind. “Do you smell gasoline?” he asked in a low, hurried whisper.

“Yes,” replied Elena.

“Me too,” said Noelle. “I just noticed it.”

Something moved outside the building windows, a barely perceptible shadow against the lightless sky. “Sergei?” Ben called.

No answer.

He saw another movement and fired, shattering the windows. A sharp breeze blew in, carrying a strong smell of gas.

They’re going to burn us out!
Ben realized. Before he could say anything, a wall of flame roared up. Fed by the breeze, tongues of fire licked in through the broken windows, igniting curtains, splintered furniture, and piles of paper.

Elbek and Yunus climbed into the front seat of the lead van. Yunus drove and Elbek sat beside him. Four more men rode with them—two crouching by the open side doors with AK-47s and RPG launchers, and two other heavily armed gunmen in the back, guarding against any attack from the rear. A plain cardboard box sat on the floor in the middle of the van, carefully packed to prevent it from sliding or tipping. The second van was similarly equipped and manned.

They turned onto the access road, and Elbek got his first clear view of the remnant of the police roadblock. It lay a quarter of a mile ahead, where the street ended in a T-intersection with a four-lane road. A burning police cruiser lay on its roof on the shoulder, and two more had been rammed into a deep ditch on the far side of the intersection. A white Dodge Caravan and two white Ford Expeditions were in a parking lot on the far side of the four-lane road, surrounded by a half dozen police. Two ambulances had pulled up to the south of the intersection, and paramedics were carefully removing dead and wounded officers from the wreckage.

Shattered glass and bits of plastic sparkled on the asphalt in the glare of the emergency lights, but the intersection was clear. Ten minutes ago, Elbek had feared that they would all die in a heroic last stand in the brewery, but now he had hope—no, more than hope: a realistic belief—that they would complete their mission.

Once they were past the roadblock, it would be a small matter to abandon the vans, board buses or trains, and vanish. They would need to redivide the Variant D dispensers and revise their target list, but that would not be difficult. It also probably would not matter, because a virulent plague in even one city would likely spread throughout the nation in a matter of weeks as people fled from the disease by car or plane, unwittingly taking the terror with them.

But there still remained the task of getting past the roadblock—which should be simple, but could not be taken for granted. “Yunus, watch the road when you make the turn,” said Elbek. “We cannot afford a flat tire.” He turned to the men by the doors. “Put two RPGs in the parking lot, then follow with gunfire. We want them to be dead or distracted when we drive past.”

“He’ll probably die if we try to move him!” Elena shouted over the blaring fire alarm.

The flames raced up the wall and flowed in broad sheets across the ceiling, blackening and consuming the sound-absorbing tiles. The alarms had gone off almost the instant the fire started, but no water came from the sprinkler heads that dotted the ceiling. The collapse of the roof when the Mustang crashed in must have cut off the water supply.

The flickering flames gave an artificial glow of health to Will’s unconscious face, but his slack features and increasingly uneven breathing showed that he was failing rapidly. Despite Noelle’s and Elena’s best efforts with the tourniquets, a steady flow of blood oozed from his legs.

“We’ll all die if we stay here!” replied Ben. “I’m going to at least try to get this seat off his legs!” So far, they had left the seat in place for fear of injuring Will further if they moved it. And they couldn’t get in a position to lift it without leaving the cover of the wrecked vehicle. But as Will’s condition deteriorated and the fire moved closer, doing nothing became a worse and worse option.

Elena sat in undecided silence, but Noelle said, “Okay, we’ll cover you.”

Ben said a quick prayer, got out of his seat, and scrambled over the car. Elena and Noelle fired short bursts into spots where Chechen snipers might be hiding. He pushed aside a file cabinet and pulled on the driver’s-side door. It didn’t budge, but the handle snapped off in his hand.

Ben looked around on the floor and spotted a length of pipe that appeared to have fallen from the ceiling. Jamming one end of it into a gap between the edge of the door and the bent car frame, he braced himself against a row of cubicles and pushed the pipe with all his might, painfully aware that his entire body was now exposed to the dark windows beyond the fire. His muscles strained and shook with the effort, and his back prickled with the fear that at any moment bullets could tear through him. But none came—and after several minutes of exhausting labor, the door suddenly popped open, sending Ben sprawling to the floor.

Panting, he got to his knees and crawled to where he could poke his head in between the doorframe and the seat. The thick stench of blood nearly gagged him as he leaned in to examine the situation. The floor of the car had buckled under the force of the crash, ramming the seat back and down over Will’s legs. The crash also had partly torn the seat free from the floorboard. Only two bolts now held it down, and one of them was partially sheared through.

He struggled to unscrew the undamaged bolt, but the combination of his sweat and Will’s blood made it too slick. He pulled his shirtsleeve over his hand for a better grip, but still the bolt would not move.

He turned back and fished around on the ground for the pipe he had used to pry open the door. It was now bent, but he was still able to wedge it under the frame of the seat nearest to the damaged bolt and work it back and forth to weaken the torn metal. He could feel the heat on his back increasing, but he resisted the temptation to turn around and look at the progress of the fire.

Snap!

The top of the bolt broke off. Ben tipped the seat off of Will’s legs, forcing and bending the seat over the remaining bolt so that the seatback leaned against the steering wheel. Will moaned, and the flow of blood from his crushed legs increased. As Elena watched for snipers outside, Noelle and Ben quickly repositioned and tightened the tourniquets. They could reach more effective locations now that the seat was gone, and the bleeding stopped almost completely.

“Whew!” Ben wiped the sweat from his eyes and sat back on his heels. “All right, now I say we—”

He had been going to say “get out of here,” but as he looked around, he saw that that was no longer possible. The fire had spread along the walls of the room, which were lined with paper-filled wooden file cabinets that burned like torches. Roaring flames now barred all exits, trapping the little group in a breathlessly hot and shrinking patch of floor.

“Two more coming,” Sergei warned the police captain as he watched the two vans depart from the brewery.

“My men aren’t there yet,” replied the captain. “If you think you can stop them, do it.”

“I’ll try.” Sergei ended the call and put the phone back in his pocket. He took out his Beretta and readied himself. If he could take out the drivers of the vans, they would probably crash. At the very least, they’d be disabled long enough for the police to reestablish the roadblock.

As the first van approached, Sergei jumped up from his hiding place and aimed through the windshield. But before he could fire, a burst of rifle fire erupted from the trailing van. Bullets struck Sergei in the stomach, chest, and left arm, hurling him to the ground.

He lay writhing in pain by the roadside as the vans barreled past. His Kevlar vest had stopped the bullets that hit his torso, though they still had the impact of body blows delivered by a heavyweight boxer. The third shot had snapped the radius of his left arm.

Hauling himself to his knees with every ounce of grit and determination he could muster, Sergei watched helplessly as the vans raced toward the devastated roadblock.

“Those things are armed like tanks,” he muttered to himself as he noticed what looked like grenade launchers and automatic rifles in the hands of the men crouched in the side and back doorways of the vehicles.

Tanks!
He suddenly remembered one of his great-uncle Peter’s stories from World War II. In the depths of winter, the ground had frozen so hard that Russian infantrymen had been able to take out Nazi Panzer and Tiger tanks by firing their rifles into the ground in front of the tanks. The bullets would bounce off the frozen earth and strike the vulnerable gas tanks from below, creating a spectacular and lethal fireball.

Sergei fired rapidly, aiming a few yards behind the rear van. One ricocheting bullet brought sparks from the bumper, so he moved his aim and put the bullets almost directly underneath the van. But he was just guessing where to shoot; he was firing too quickly to aim well, and the angle the bullets took depended largely on pebbles and small imperfections in the surface of the road.

His tenth shot struck the pavement under the rear axle of the second van. If the asphalt had been perfectly flat, the bullet would have bounced up into the engine, probably causing an oil fire. But the asphalt was not flat. It had a small pothole caused by years of heavy truck traffic. The bullet ricocheted off the lip of the pothole at a much shallower angle than it would have off a flat surface and missed the rear van entirely. It struck the lead van instead, passing through the gas tank before lodging in the frame.

Sergei watched in amazed joy as the lead van burst into flame and swerved. The rear van smashed into it and caught fire as well.

He staggered to his feet, hardly feeling the wound in his arm or the deep bruises in his chest and stomach.

“Yes!” he shouted as the fire reached explosives in the vans and a string of large and small explosions rocked the night. “Yes!” He pointed to the burning wrecks. “
Never
start a fight with a Russian, ’cause he’s the one who’ll finish it!”

WHUMP!

A tremendous blast behind Sergei knocked him from his feet again. Debris rained on him, and he turned to see the brewery vanish in a cloud of fire and dust. The old brick warehouse next door swayed in the shock wave, then collapsed, crushing the western side of the electronics factory—very near where the wreck of his Mustang sat.