Extreme Faction (33 page)

The man moved closer.

Come on, Jake thought. A few feet more.

As the guard came within range, a leg flew out of nowhere sending the Kurd to the stone path. Then the two men struggled on the ground. Jake hurried forward and moved the guard's gun out of reach. Jake was about to help Nelsen when there was a single silenced shot and the Kurd had a shocked look on his face, along with a bullet hole in his forehead. The Kurd hit the ground as if Nelsen had thrown a sack of grain.

Helena stood a few yards away and slowly lowered her silenced 9mm. “You were making too much noise,” she explained.

Nelsen dragged the man into the bushes.

Jake checked the M-16 over to make sure there was a round chambered. They could use the extra firepower.

They went into the open corridor, down the long exposed hallway, with arched brick facing a garden, and stopped outside a large wooden door.

Nelsen pulled Jake back. He checked his watch. “Just a minute.” He glanced back toward the edge of the village, where the laboratory barn was.

“When did you set it for?” Jake asked.

“About...” Nelsen checked his watch again.

There was a huge explosion across town, with an instant fireball rising up through the night air. The orange plume rolled upward as if God were pulling a yo-yo from a tremendous campfire.

“Now!”

Jake could feel the percussion as the ground shook with the force of a great earthquake.

The three of them climbed over the wall, through an arched window, into a garden on the other side. They crouched in bushes.

“Carzani will send some of his best men to check on the explosion,” Helena said. “We'll shoot them once they clear the door.”

In a few seconds four men came flying out the wooden door and hesitated for a second, looking at the fire ball across town.

Without thinking, Jake leveled the M-16 and sprayed the men on full auto. All four crashed to the stone floor.

“Hurry,” Helena said, jumping the wall.

Jake and Nelsen were right on her tail, locking the door behind them.

Inside was another corridor with another door at the far end. That one was closed. They slipped forward in the darkness, checking in front and behind them with each step. As they neared the door, voices echoed from behind it. Jake couldn't make out what was being said.

Instinctively, the three of them knew what they had to do. But then Jake stopped them with a halting hand. “If we take them alive,” he whispered, “we have a much greater chance of finding the formula, and knowing if it's the only copy.”

Nelsen and Helena gazed at each other. They nodded.

Jake reached for the handle. With one swift pull, he flung the door open, and Nelsen and Helena rushed in.

Jake followed with the M-16.

A young man startled and leveled his rifle at the trio. Helena shot him three times in the chest. He crashed backward against a console.

An older man screamed to stop, his hands in the air. They were the only two in the room.

Jake stood at the door, slightly ajar, watching their back.

“Move away from the radio,” Nelsen yelled in Turkish, his gun pointed at the man's head.

The older man's eyes pierced through Nelsen, not even blinking.

“Move away,” Nelsen repeated.

Slowly the man shuffled to one side. “What do you want?” the man asked in English.

“Mesut Carzani?”

The man smiled. “So you know my name? What are you doing in Kurdistan? You are in free and autonomous Kurdistan, and you will be tried and shot as spies.”

“He's got balls,” Nelsen whispered over his shoulder to Jake. “I want Tvchenko's formula.”

Carzani laughed out loud. Then his face turned grave. “You will get the business end. You just blew up our lab. The nerve agent is everywhere in the air.”

Nelsen looked back at Jake, raising his brows.

“You have a twenty-mile-an-hour wind out of the south,” Jake said. “The explosion would have quickly disbursed the compound high into the air, and the wind will push it up the canyon, combining with the downward thermals from the mountains. You might have to replace some sheep and goats. I hope your men have enough sense to stay away for a few hours.”

Carzani thought about that for a moment. “Can you at least close the door?”

Jake thought about what he himself had just said. But what if the wind shifted? He slowly closed the door.

“The formula?” Nelsen said.

The Kurd's eyes shifted toward a fire safe along one wall.

“So, it's in there?” Nelsen asked. “Open it.”

Carzani hesitated.

Jake leveled the M-16 on the box.

“Wait,” Carzani yelled. “It's wired. I must disarm it or we will all die.” Carzani went to the safe, pulled a key from around his neck, slowly opened the box part way, and then disconnected a trip wire inside and brought the top all the way open.

Helena rushed toward the box. As she did, there was a flash from the side and she swiveled toward the floor, returning fire twice.

Before Jake or Nelsen knew what had happened, Carzani was on his stomach, a bullet in his right lung and another in his liver. Near the fire safe, Helena lay on her back holding her left shoulder.

Jake ran to her and set the rifle on the floor. “Let me see it?”

She reluctantly removed her hand.

The bullet had entered her shoulder, but he couldn't find an exit wound.

Her chest was heaving from the pain.

“Can you breathe normally?” Jake asked. “Slow down and try to breathe normally.”

She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Does it hurt to breathe?” Jake asked.

She shook her head.

“Can you talk?”

“Yes,” she forced out. “What do you want me to say? It hurts like hell.”

She was a tough one, Jake thought.

“What about Carzani?” she asked.

Jake gazed over at Nelsen, who had checked on the Kurdish leader. Nelsen shook his head.

“He's seen better days,” Jake said. Then Jake rolled Helena over to her side. There was a growing spot of blood on her shoulder. Jake quickly unbuttoned her top and pulled it down over her shoulder. There was an exit wound on the far side of her scapula. Two more inches and the bullet would have severed her spine. But that was the good news. The bullet had probably missed bone completely. If it had hit anything hard, it could have turned inward toward vital organs. But the bullet had even missed her lungs, since the blood was dark red. Jake ripped a piece of cloth from Helena's shirt and stuffed it over the exit wound. Then he found some wide, heavy duct tape on the console and he patched the wound. He did the same to her shoulder where the bullet had entered.

In a few minutes Helena was sitting up. “What about the formula?” she asked.

Nelsen was busy looking through the safe. Most of the documents were written in Turkish, and probably Kurdish. Finally, he pulled out a package of papers with Slavic writing and chemical diagrams. “Got it.”

“I don't think so,” came a voice from the inner door, which was wide open now. Jake and Nelsen had been so preoccupied, they hadn't noticed the man enter.

Jake glared at the man, who was holding an automatic pistol on them. It was Chavva's boss, Omri Sherut. “So, Omar. I see you didn't get on that flight to Tel Aviv.”

“Nor did you look up some old friend,” Sherut said with a gap-toothed smile.

This was the first time Jake had seen the man without his huge bodyguard, or whatever he was. He had to be somewhere close.

“You can give those papers to me,” Sherut said, his hand outstretched toward Nelsen.

“Who the hell is this?” Nelsen asked Jake. “You know this Bozo?”

“We've met. My guess is Mossad.”

“Well I'm Agency,” Nelsen reminded the room. “Last time I looked, we were on the same side.”

Omri Sherut laughed. “When the moon is full on a leap year.”

“A fucking comedian,” Nelsen said. He had returned his gun to its holster while searching through the papers, and he thought of pulling it now.

Jake was five feet from the M-16. His own 9mm was also in its holster inside his leather jacket. “Put the gun away, Omar. I'm sure our governments will work out some sort of deal. They always do.”

“Not this time,” Sherut said, his gun still trained on Nelsen. “This one's for me.”

Jake considered that. Had Sherut been working for himself all along? Jake didn't get a chance to find out.

There were three shots from the open door that Sherut had entered. The Israeli's gun dropped to the floor. And Omri Sherut, as if in slow motion, sunk to his knees.

Jake pulled his gun.

Nelsen drew his.

Out of the darkness came Chavva. She walked up to Sherut, who was still on his knees in obvious pain. “You fucking pig,” she screamed in Hebrew. Then she switched languages and spouted off in a long recitation, as if she were a teacher lecturing an errant student.

Jake watched her in awe. She was dressed in all black, and it clung to her perfect body. A body he had seen and felt and made love to. He had known she was dangerous, and that had been part of the attraction. Yet, here she was now, having just shot a man. A man Jake had thought she worked for. Something didn't quite add up.

When she was done yelling, she finally regarded Jake with a smile. “I had a feeling you would come,” she said.

“You know her too?” Nelsen asked.

“Afraid so. Odessa was a crazy town.”

“Who are they, Jake?” Chavva asked, nodding toward Nelsen and Helena.

Jake explained who they were. Nelsen still had his gun out, but Jake had relaxed slightly. Looking at Chavva he finally realized what was going on. He had watched Chavva lecture Sherut, and the little girl in her seemed to leap forward, out and away from that tough exterior. He had suspected all along that there was something special about Chavva, but it took that very moment to confirm his suspicions. She had become the 15-year-old girl in Halabja, tears in her eyes, wondering how anyone could be so inhuman. He returned his gun to his holster and walked toward Chavva.

“You were Halabja,” Jake said to her. “Tvchenko was talking about you. You killed him.”

“I had to Jake. Nobody should make weapons like that.”

Chavva still had her gun out, but it was poised on Sherut. “Jake. How could he do this?”

Omri Sherut let out one last gasp and then dropped to his side, looking up to Chavva with wonder in his eyes.

Jake put his hand on Chavva's shoulder. She turned and settled into his arms. “It's okay, Chavva. It's over.”

Finding out where the Kurds were keeping Sinclair Tucker wasn't a difficult task. Chavva had come across the primitive cells in the depths of the catacombs while making her way toward Carzani's control center.

She and Jake were now sneaking through the near darkness of the damp passageways, with the only light coming from low-watt bulbs strung like Christmas lights down the center of the arched ceiling.

After a short distance they came upon a crumpled body. Jake shone the flashlight on the huge form. It was Omri Sherut's bodyguard.

“Some of your work, I suppose,” Jake whispered to Chavva.

She shrugged. “He got in my way.”

They continued on, both with their guns drawn.

When they reached the cell area, they became more cautious. There were six cells in all. Three on each side. Chavva was on one side and Jake on the other. The first two doors were open, so they each slammed inward simultaneously, their guns leading the way.

Nothing.

They were empty.

The middle doors were closed, but the far end doors were open. They slipped past the center ones and smashed through the last two.

Nothing.

There was a passageway on the far wall with a closed door. Jake pointed toward it. She motioned that she had come from that way. She had told Jake earlier in the control room that there was a back entrance from the mountain side.

“Tuck. Are you in here?” Jake asked, breaking the silence.

After a moment. “Jake, is that you?”

“Damn straight.”

Jake and Chavva moved to the outside of Tucker's cell.

“How'd you get here? You crazy bastard.” Tucker laughed softly to himself.

“Same as you. Helicopter. Only mine blew up after I got out.”

“Great. I heard an explosion a while back. Was that you?”

While they were talking, Jake and Chavva were both looking for some way to get in. The wooden door was by no means impenetrable, but there was nothing to even pry at it with. It appeared like an old skeleton lock.

“Stand to the side, Tuck. I'm going to shoot the lock.”

Jake shot once and missed the metal throw. The second shot hit metal, but the lock held. After the third and fourth shots, Jake decided to try the strength. He kicked the door and it went inward partially, leaving a one inch gap. The second kick did the trick, the door flung open.

Inside, Sinclair Tucker was crouched low against the side wall, next to a body covered with a blanket.

Chavva waited at the door, her gun still drawn.

Jake helped Tucker to his feet. “You look like shit, Tuck. You smell too.”

“I've been here a while, you bloke. Besides, you don't smell great yourself.”

Jake had forgotten about crawling through sheep shit to get into the lab earlier.

“I was meaning to ask you about that,” Chavva said.

Jake shrugged and then pointing to the covered man at their feet. “The co-pilot?”

“He died a while back,” Tucker said. “They wouldn't remove him. The bastards. I don't know how much longer I could have lasted. Thanks Jake.” Then Tucker nodded toward Chavva. “Who's this lovely woman.”

“I'll explain later. Right now we've got to get the hell out of here.”

Jake propped the Brit's arm over his shoulder and started to work his way toward the door.