Paradox Page 11

  But this roadblock was a different thing entirely. Annja hoped this bunch proved as acquisitive as the National Police were.

  Tommy hauled his black camera bag down from the overhead wire-mesh rack and started to zip it open. "Hey, what're you doing?" Josh asked.

  "Gotta get some shots of this, man."

  "Not a good idea." Fairlie's handsome young face was pale.

  The lead car had stopped. Baron and Atabeg climbed out into the road and walked toward the men at the roadblock. A moment later Bostitch emerged, and Larry Taitt from behind the wheel.

  "He's right," Annja said to Tommy.

  "But this is some great shit!" Tommy protested. "It'll make for wicked-awesome TV."

  "Think how much more gripping the viewers back home will find it when you videotape your own massacre at the hands of peevish tribals with medieval attitudes and thoroughly modern weapons," Wilfork said.

  "They have guns," Trish said, as if that were a surprise. "I hate guns."

  "Me, too," Jason said.

  Annja looked at them in surprise. She thought they were a fairly seasoned crew. Apparently they either had only visited the tamer parts of the world on their shoots for Chasing History's Monsters, or Doug sprang for a better quality of local fixers to insulate them from the harsher local realities than Annja would've given him credit for. Whether you liked guns or not was beside the point. In most of America, especially the sanitized if not quite so safe as advertised New York City, somebody sporting fully automatic weapons was cause to alert the media. In much of the third world, it was part of the scenery.

  Annja had no trouble with guns per se. What she had trouble with was people pointing them at her. Which unfortunately seemed a form of trouble that was just about to recur.

  "Those aren't the Turkish National Police," Josh said, getting out of his seat to lean over and look out a window.

  "Not army, either," said Fred Mallory. Like the carrot-topped Eli who sat across the aisle from him the dark-haired bodybuilder seldom said much. Both seemed content to let others do the talking. And probably the thinking.

  The men at the block weren't uniformed, as such. They wore long sheepskin coats over long smocklike wool shirts and baggy trousers, which was the basic dress of South Asia from Iraq to Pakistan. Some had on black wool hats, others knit caps.

  The tall man who seemed to be in charge, whose splendid beard and piercing eyes made him resemble a younger Osama bin Laden, had a flat cap and a 1911-series Colt .45 or reasonable facsimile thereof stuffed down the front of his trousers, which were a gray-white-black camouflage pattern. The hammer was back, Annja could see. It didn't mean the safety was on. In fact the odds were good it wasn't.

  He stood with thumbs tucked on either side of the big angular handgun, listening as Atabeg expostulated at him. Or so Annja guessed from the way the short, dumpy Turk, dapper as ever in his utterly inappropriate suit, waved his arms and hopped around.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Robin Wilfork announced grandly, "I have the pleasure of presenting to you the Kurds."

  "Great," Jason muttered. Annja couldn't tell if that was irony or not. "And we can't even shoot stills?"

  "That verb, to shoot," Annja said. "That's kind of key here. It's the sort of idea we don't want people getting."

  "Are they peshmerga?" Trish asked hesitantly.

  "I'd rather say so, dear, given the Kalashnikovs and beards," Wilfork said.

  Trish was so anxious she neglected to bridle at being called dear.

  "In Kurdish the name peshmerga means 'those who face death,'" the journalist added helpfully.

  "That's encouraging," Jason said.

  Annja's cell rang again. It was Baron.

  "I thought you were tight with these guys," she said.

  "There are peshmerga and there are peshmerga," Baron said. "These aren't my guys."

  Annja looked uneasily out the window at the lean bearded men in their long sheepskin coats and black sheepskin caps. Wolves in sheeps' clothing for a literal fact, she thought.

  "What do you want us to do?" Annja asked.

  "Sit tight and stay frosty," the former SEAL said. "I told you, Atabeg's got us covered."

  Right about then the peshmerga leader pulled the .45 out of his pants and shot Atabeg point-blank. The muzzle was about a handspan from the stickpin of the smaller man's necktie.

  "Shit!" she heard Baron shout. He grabbed Charlie and threw him bodily into the ditch by the roadside. He flung himself on top of his boss.

  Trish screamed.

  Atabeg staggered back. A dark stain spread across the front of his shirt and his necktie was burning with a smoky blue flame. The peshmerga leader shot him again and he fell on his back with arms flung out. The fez came off his head and rolled a few feet away, revealing the bald spot on top of his head.

  As the other peshmerga raised their Kalashnikovs and began to lash the ditch where Baron had thrown Bostitch with bullets the bus door was kicked open inward. From outside came a billow of new falling snow, a knife-edged chill, and a spate of angry Turkish. The bus driver leapt from his seat, dashed out the door, ran off up the side of a hill, and was swallowed from sight as the blizzard outside intensified.

  "Cowardly heathen," one of the Young Wolves spat. Annja sympathized with the driver. He hadn't signed on for this. He sure wasn't getting paid enough.

  An immense-looking broken-nosed AKM assault rifle came in the door, seeming to tow a tall man in a cap behind. He swept the bus with dark eyes and the muzzle brake of his rifle. He favored Annja with a gap-toothed leer and then started toward the back of the bus, evidently intent on securing the men—the only opponents he considered worthy of notice.

  Eyes blazing, Annja watched him. As he came abreast of her she lunged at him in a tigerish leap.

  She caught the gunman totally unaware. Her sudden onslaught sent him staggering several steps backward, slamming his head into the steel pole behind the driver's seat. At the same time she grabbed the forestock of his weapon, controlling it, driving the barrel up.

  He triggered a burst, shatteringly loud in the confines of the bus. Though she felt the sting of flame from the flashes from the cuts in the muzzle brake, Annja scarcely heard the terrific noise. She was totally intent on her target as a burst ripped through the ceiling over Wilfork's head, causing the journalist to vanish to the floor with a yip of dismay.

  It was an old-school Soviet-era rifle and it packed quite a kick. The full-auto recoil jarred the weapon loose in the stunned man's grip. Annja wrenched it away. She butt-stroked him in his bearded face.

  He fell to the floor, holding up an arm to defend himself. It didn't help. Gritting her teeth in rage she smashed the metal butt-plate into his face and the side of his head, battering him into the slushy, gritty rubber runner that covered the steel floorboards.

  She stopped. Slowly, she straightened. The gunman lay unmoving at her feet. Blood totally obscured his face.

  The bus was silent as the tomb. The firefight crashing merrily away outside sounded like fireworks from a distant stadium.

  "That ought to hold him," she said. She was aware that all of them—the CHM crew, Young Wolves, even hardened trouble journalist Wilfork—were staring at her as if she'd just turned into a pterodactyl. "Watch him anyway, in case it doesn't," she said.

  Jason raised an ashen, trembling face to her. "Annja, what are you doing?"

  "What needs to be done. Keep your heads down."

  She was out the open door into the snow. The Kalashnikov was a familiar, comforting weight in her arms. I'm glad I could take care of that one without the sword coming out, she thought. We might actually survive this fiasco, and I don't want questions asked that I definitely don't want to answer.

  She barely felt the bite of the air, the snowflakes hitting her face like tiny wet slaps. She ran straight up the same ridge the driver had disappeared over, headed toward a clump of rocks already thoroughly mounded over in white. If she was going to do any good—if she was going
to do anything other than catch a round and go down—she had to get to cover fast.

  Fortunately the gunman on the bus had been flying solo. Apparently the peshmerga felt one bus full of foreign infidels only required one fighter. The others, maybe a half dozen or so including the leader, still stood blasting happily away at the defenders in the ditch.

  The Americans were shooting back gamely. But it was handguns against assault rifles. It was not as hopeless as it might seem at that close a range. A burst from a Kalashnikov wasn't going to kill you any deader than a good handgun hit to chest or head, Annja thought. And presumably the Americans were bothering to aim. That was more than the Kurds were doing. They were ducking down behind rocks or the vehicles to reload, then standing bolt upright to blaze off their whole magazines in the general direction of the foe.

  But there were only Leif Baron and Larry Taitt, who had joined his boss and bodyguard in the ditch, to return fire. Presumably one or the other was sitting on Charlie Bostitch's head to keep it down. Their worst problem was they could seldom get a shot of their own off for the torrent of bullets streaming their way. It was one of the relatively few circumstances where handheld full-auto fire really did provide an advantage: the superior if unaimed Kurd firepower kept the American pair all but suppressed.

  We're about to change that, Annja thought grimly. Using the big metal lever on the side of the stamped-steel receiver she switched her weapon from full-auto to single-shot with the famous loud "Kalashnikov clack." She winced at the sound.

  No one noticed. The noise levels were too high, and anyway, as she knew too well, when somebody was shooting at you directly, your whole world tended to narrow to pinpoint focus on that person. And his gun. Even a highly trained and seasoned special warrior like Baron would be able to spare little perception for anything but the enemies firing him up.

  She snugged the rifle's steel butt-plate against her shoulder. Having been trained in classic rifle marksmanship by one of the many military mentors, serving and ex, whom she had sought out, the first time she'd tried to shoot an AK, she'd gamely thrust her face down to try to get a proper cheek weld on the wooden stock. It was uncomfortable and felt unnatural with the rifle's upright design. She'd persevered.

  Her reward was a savage whack like a home-run swing from a baseball bat that left her cheekbone first numb and then aching for two days. She missed a target she could have dead-centered with a handgun at that range by a good five feet. Not just the silhouette, either: the whole piece of paper, and the three-by-four-foot piece of plywood it was stapled to.

  With that sharp lesson she'd meekly accepted instruction in proper AK technique. With an assault rifle like that you didn't press your cheek to the stock, but rather held your head up, as one of her older Special Forces teachers had taught her. It was easier to sight that way, anyway, since the Kalashnikov's profile was much higher than a bolt-action rifle's. It did make for a less stable shooting platform. Then again, assault rifles weren't designed to engage targets three hundred yards away with minute-of-arc accuracy, either.

  But the farthest enemy gunman in sight wasn't fifty yards from her, and at that kind of range even a bunged-up third-world AK was more accurate than a pistol. Fortunately the Kurds fought the way most third-world fighters did: standing right up in the open and blazing away, either from the hip or holding their rifles up and out in front of them with the butts actually clear of their shoulders. Which worked fine if your enemy fought the same way. Or was shooting full-auto from more than a hundred yards away or so, where they'd hit man-sized targets only by accident.

  To the side of her field of vision Annja saw one Kurd fall backward, downed by bullets from one of her companions. Almost directly in front of her, though, was a cagier fighter, better trained or better seasoned. He knelt behind a rock with the buttstock held to his shoulder and pulled off short bursts instead of hosing the landscape a magazine at a time. Clearly he was the most dangerous opponent. Aside from the fact he was more likely to hit one of her friends he was also hard for one of them to hit, since he actually used cover.

  She lined up the black-capped head between the ears of the rear sights and the hooded post of the front sight. Using the best form she could she let out half a deep inhalation, caught it and squeezed the trigger. It was like working a rusty gate latch but she managed to hold true until the trigger broke sear and the gun went off with a ringing bark and kicked her shoulder hard.

  She let the weapon ride up in recoil then brought it down with proper follow-through. Then she moved toward another target. Even before the rising barrel had obscured her vision she'd seen the shooter's head jerk and a cloud puff out beyond it, dark in the dull afternoon light.

  He didn't concern her anymore.

  None of the other half-dozen standing enemies had noticed the fall of the marksman behind the rock. She put down two more with solid hits to the torso before the survivors broke and ran, realizing with a sudden adrenal fear-jolt that someone was firing at them from the flank. Abandoning their own vehicle they rabbited off over the nearby hills. Baron and Larry Taitt swarmed out of the ditch, grabbed up fallen Kalashnikovs, and fired after them with quick shoulder-aimed bursts. One threw up his arms, his rifle soaring up over his head theatrically, before collapsing over the top of a ridge out of sight.

  And silence descended like a steel curtain.

  Chapter 14

  Annja sighed and slumped to the cold ground. She let herself just lay there and quiver with reaction for three whole breaths. Then she stood and walked back toward the bus, brushing snow off the front of her jacket and pants with one hand.

  She held the Kalashnikov ready in the other. She doubted the Kurds would stop running for some time as they'd taken terrible casualties in terms of their small numbers. But she wasn't going to bet her life on that.

  "Nice job, Creed," Baron said as she came back to the road.

  With obvious effort Charlie Bostitch hauled himself out of the ditch where he had taken cover. "Annja!" he cried. Brushing snow-damp bits of dead vegetation from his trench coat he lumbered quickly toward her.

  "Thank the Lord you're all right!" Before she could elude or try to dissuade him he'd caught her in an enfolding embrace. Fortunately it was no more than a sort of clumsy dancing-bear hug. If he harbored any impure ideas beyond that they didn't come through. Of course that might have been tricky, given that he'd trapped the heavy Russian rifle crosswise between their bodies.

  Releasing her, he held her out to arm's length for a moment. Out of politeness she didn't try to squirm away. Still wired from the fight she was determined that if he got out of line she'd give him a fast knee where it'd do the most good, boss or no boss.

  Instead he said, "You've done a remarkable thing. But why didn't you let the men handle it?"

  In light of whom she had agreed to work with she'd already performed the necessary attitudinal self-adjustments not to give in to reflex resentment at a question like that. Besides, she had to admit it wouldn't take a dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist to ask it; in her place most women would've said the same thing. And most women would probably have been right to.

  "He had the drop on the men, sir," she said, quite truthfully. "The man on the bus did, I mean. He was also pretty focused on them. I saw my opening and acted. And then because I knew what to do next, I went ahead and did it."

  "That's a pretty concise after-action report," Baron said.

  They took stock of the situation. Mr. Atabeg was dead. So were six of the roadblock party. If any of the Kurds had gotten injured their companions had carried them off with them.

  Although Bostitch, Baron and Taitt were soggy and dirty and chilled through from diving into a ditch partially filled with snow none of them was hurt. Neither was anybody on the bus.

  There was no sign of the bus driver. The CHM crew and several of Bostitch's pack wandered around the ridges calling his name, which was Ali. They got no response.

  The worse news was that neither the lead car nor
the school bus was going anywhere anytime soon. The shine had definitely come off the Mercedes SUV, with bullet holes speckling what looked like every square inch of its bodywork and the starred and sagging windows. Meanwhile the engine compartment of the battered white school bus had gotten shot up; the radiator was gone, the engine block probably cracked. Or so Baron, Tommy and a couple of the Young Wolves who knew a lot more about cars than Annja did said after prying up the damaged hood.

  However, all the full-auto/high-power rounds had gone one way. Aside from a hole in the windshield the truck blocking the road was intact. It started immediately when Baron tried it.