Top Hook (47 page)

Harry rolled to his right to put a screen of low shacks between himself and the movement, his lungs gasping for more air, his heart shaking his ribs. He raced for the next corner and threw himself on his chest like a runner sliding for first. Up the alley now revealed he saw a man
firing around the next corner, using a house for cover. He was firing at the roof of the building where Harry had just seen movement. Another man in a Chinese uniform lay kicking in agony behind the first.
They were both in Chinese uniforms.

Harry took a long moment to aim and blew the top of his head off.

Anna heard the roar of the big shotgun from
behind
her assailants. It didn't matter; they would be all around her in a moment. She rolled up into the corner of a new crenellation and aimed.

Nothing but two bodies.

She rolled back out of their line of sight and waited, her whole body shaking. No one had fired. Someone had killed the second man. The reaction was as great as if they had been alive and fired at her. But her brain was still in charge and she rode it out, waiting until her limbs were under control. It took thirty seconds.

Then she looked again.

Harry's first thought was that the man on the roof was Dukas; it
almost
fit his description. But it was wrong, and a second's observation proved it; Dukas was over there, six streets away, by the minaret. It wasn't Alan. It
was
someone who had killed a Chinese soldier. Harry smiled unconsciously, like a man with a really good and unexpected birthday gift.

“Don't shoot, Anna,” he called, and rolled out of his cover.

Alan stopped in the shadow of the first building he reached to press the Send button on his cellphone. Then he moved, racing up the opening between two
houses. The stench told him it was a midden, not an alley, and he could now see that the opening ended in a wall. He leaped for the top and tumbled over, landing without grace on the other side. He had screwed up, was exposed in the open, off-balance, but no shots came. A two-story house with a high wall at the back loomed ahead of him, and again he jumped, his arms finding just enough purchase on the top to get one leg up. Broken glass bit into his gloves and raked his right knee, but he kept going, right over the wall and down the roof of the little outbuilding beyond, feeling an ooze of blood down his leg.

The layout of the town reminded him of the houses in Mombasa's Old Town—walled gardens behind continuous street-facing houses. If he kept to the walled yards he'd be safe from anybody covering the alleys.

A rooster crowed behind him, startling him with its raucous call. The glass cuts burned through the haze of adrenaline. He was twenty-five yards into the town and the minaret was dead ahead, its middle height silhouetted against the square tower beyond. He scrambled up the trash heap at the corner of a courtyard and leaped over the next wall, landing softly on more trash beyond it, trying not to think of what was getting into the deep cuts on his knee. The minaret looked close enough to touch now. Its far wall ought to give on the square.

He flinched as a burst of fire blew holes in a gate to his right, showering him with splinters. Somewhere, a man screamed, but Alan's attention was riveted on the muzzle-flash that he had seen above the gate. He took two steps to the gated wall and got up on a crate without raising his head, then rolled his gun out over the wall in one motion. There was a helmeted man inches below him, another one six feet away and facing the gate,
and Alan pulled the little machine pistol up and shot wildly, on instinct, actually missing the first man for a split second and then hitting him and walking the shots to the other.

He dropped back below the wall and heard more shooting to the west. The scream of a wounded man rang out again, hoarser from repetition. Alan wiped his arm across his face to clear the grit and the crap from the trash heaps he'd jumped through and noticed that his sleeve was in shreds, probably from the glass.

Then there was the clear, long crack of a large-caliber rifle from the tower, and Alan knew that Mike had got the message of the open Send button on his cellphone.

Dukas felt the phone vibrate and pressed the button, but for some seconds the noises he heard were a mystery.

“Hey!” he whispered.

Then he realized he was listening to footsteps running: Alan and Harry were in the town. He set the phone next to his flashlight on the low bench beside him and raised his rifle. Shreed had fired two more times, both at targets that Dukas couldn't see, so he knew his quarry was still down there and alive.

Dukas had never been a killer, and for a moment he hesitated as the iron sights crossed the hazy shape of a second sniper, prone in the moonlight at the back of the mosque where a corner of old stone supported a triangle of roof. But the man was focused on the dark to the north of the square, and for all Dukas knew he had Alan in his sights, or Harry.

Then fire broke out just across the square, out of Dukas's field of view, and the muzzle-flashes lit the tops of the alleys in pulses of yellow and white as if a fire was burning. A man screamed. Dukas wrenched
his attention back to the sniper, held the sight picture, and fired.

He missed.

The man rolled on his back and over the lip of the roof as Dukas shot again. He hadn't aimed. Really aimed.
Buck fever.
Dukas knew that if he put his head down he'd never get it up again to look, and he forced himself to scan the rubble of the mosque. He kept the rifle pointed down and moved it as he changed lines of vision, just as they had taught him long ago at Quantico.

The cellphone was making human sounds on the bench behind him now. He ducked down without thinking and pulled it to his ear.

“Yeah?”

“Mike. What the hell's happening?”

“Shreed's down at the base of the mosque. He's hit. I missed a goddam sniper.”

“I can see the tower. I'm at the—fuck. I'm about fifty yards away, almost due north of you. I just shot two guys.” Alan sounded a little high. Dukas remembered Alan eight years before, in Sudan—an adrenaline junky.

“Shreed's control and a radioman are in the mosque,” Dukas growled. “The sniper's off north of the mosque in another ruined building.”

A shotgun roared behind Dukas and his tower—
west,
he reminded himself.

“That's Harry,” he heard Alan say.

“Grenade launcher?”

“Shotgun. Watch the north of the square. I'm going to move. If anyone tries to get me, they have to cross your line of sight, right?”

“Not everywhere.”

“Try, Mike.”

Dukas moved along the parapet several meters and raised his head.

Chen never lost his nerve—not when the shooting started, not when his men began to fall, and not when the sergeant tried to seize control. His mind became beautifully clear, his doubts erased by the need to act. He focused on his sketch map of the village as he struggled to organize a counterattack against what he thought were Shreed's forces—US Marines? Rangers? It was clear to him that he had walked into a trap, and, if he survived, he knew that he would reexamine his failure to secure the village over and over. And he would not be alone in the reexamination: his superiors—

Perhaps Shreed's men had been waiting in the houses. Perhaps—

At least four of his men were down or not responding. Shreed was on the other side of the mosque wall, wounded and perhaps dying, and his forces had a sniper in the tower above him. Chen ordered his men on the south side of the square to cover the tower while the two men immediately under his hand secured Shreed. Shooters at the base of the tower would be able to hit the sniper or at least keep his head down. When he had Shreed, he would take the tower. He sent the sergeant to get around into the market and find the tower's entrance.

He turned to the radioman and the sniper who were clinging to the wall behind them.

“Have you sent the message?” He was trying to reach the command in Szhinjiang.

“Yes, sir.”

“Any reply?”

“They're putting a response together.”

Hours. He had to get into the tower and hope that Pakistan was still friendly to China.

He explained how he wanted them to move to capture Shreed. “I want him
alive
!”

The two soldiers were scared, determined, and young. Chen didn't think he would last as a platoon leader in a war. They were all too
young
. “Ready?”

They both nodded.

He gave the word.

Alan stripped the clip out of the machine pistol. He looked at his watch. Eleven minutes ago, they had started up the slope. While he thought, his right hand, as if it had its own brain, reached back into the pack at his hip, took out another clip, and tilted it into the receiver. His mouth was dry, his knee wet with blood, and his whole frame seemed to shake with the beat of his heart.

He jumped down from the crate and was shocked to feel his knees sag a little, as if the joints were stiff. He flexed them, twice, gritting his teeth at the pain from his right knee.
Probably why SWAT guys wore kneepads.
Then he moved to the bullet-riddled gate and lifted the bar. No one fired, and he pushed the gate open until it shielded him from the square. Then he threw a can from the rubbish heap into the street. Nothing. He glanced around the gate and saw the edge of the square for the first time. Another body lay at the mouth of the alley.

A brief storm of fire struck the gate and ricocheted around the alley. Alan flung himself back and flattened at the gateway, peering through the dark under the gate itself. Another burst buzzed by him. He saw two shapes move out into the open, firing as they came, and he fired without hitting either, the gap between
gate and earth too narrow to let him get a sight picture.

They were going for Shreed.

A blast like a cannon shot echoed through the town, and one of the men sprawled backward, rotating like a broken gymnast.
Harry or Mike?
The other leaped, fell flat. Alan saw a third man firing steadily almost straight up, and he realized the man was shooting for Dukas. Somebody else was spraying the alley with fire from the south. Alan took an instant, working himself up to it, then leaned out with the machine pistol and fired left-handed.

His first thought was that the machine pistol had detonated. It was gone, down the alley. So were two fingers from his left hand.

It was ironic, Shreed thought, that his wounds had robbed him of the use of his legs. Yet he had been used to getting by without them, and now he dragged himself about the rubble as fast as he could, the ache in his back sealed away by morphine. The shots had gone in below his body armor, he knew that, probably kissed his spine.

He was down, but he wasn't out.

He thought he had got one Chinese with his first shots. Then he had wasted ammo, firing at every movement he could see. For the first few seconds he had assumed that all fire was directed at him, and he hadn't allowed himself even a flicker of hope until he saw one of the Chinese cut down by fire from another position. He couldn't understand who might be out there or why they were shooting the Chinese. He didn't really care, and he was unaware that he was screaming sometimes. He simply wanted Chen. He held tight to that thought
whenever he moved and felt the grating, the almost audible crack from his lower back.
Chen. Tell him and then kill him
.

Things were getting gray around the edges when the two Chinese soldiers charged him. He got the big pistol up and shot on reflex, center of mass, but the other man came down on top of him and his gun was gone. Then he stopped trying to make sense of it. He felt himself floating a little, bouncing, and he thought it was over. Then he was slammed back to earth, the blow to his ribs shooting the first real pain in several minutes through every nerve ending, and he screamed.

The radioman was dead and another soldier was down at the base of the tower, but Chen had Top Hook at his feet. He still looked big, and American, even as he screamed. Chen wanted to give the sniper a medal on the spot.

“That was—incredible.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Because of you, we may win this yet.”

The square was silent for the first time in what seemed like hours. There was no more firing from the north side, where he had had men; now Chen counted them as casualties. He should have five left.

He took a shaped charge out of his pack and checked the firing mechanism. He'd planned to use it on Shreed's car, back in the other world where his plan worked and he scooped Shreed up cleanly
. A little distraction to make the forced defection look like a terrorist bomb
. Now he thought that it would probably be powerful enough to punch through the wall of the tower. The sergeant could go after the tower's door. Chen acknowledged to himself that it wasn't much of a plan, but he had become
focused on the tower, because there was somebody up there who was killing them; and because unless the Americans had a big team, he thought his survivors could hold the tower until the Pakistanis or his own service came.

He took the charge and wriggled forward to the base of the tower wall. “Two?”

“In position.”

“When I blow the charge, take the tower. That goes for everybody. Acknowledge!”

Numbers counted off, leaving telltale spaces. Eight men silent.

Chen punched the charge on the wall and set the timer, pushing rubble over the charge to give it the best possible chance, then tumbled back behind the remains of the mosque wall. His mind registered the surprising observation that the wall had been inlaid with plates of Chinese porcelain.

He clapped his hands to his ears and rolled into a ball.

Dukas heard Alan cursing and went back to the cellphone. He was covered in stone chips from the volley that had greeted his attempt to peer out over the edge; several were embedded in his cheek. He had fired two shots. His hands were shaking.

“Alan!”