Peter swore bitterly.
The cold patch on Kelly’s forehead was probably blood cooling, but it felt as if the blow had lifted off a patch of skin. Flashes of light moved across his vision like the rotary shutter of a movie camera, but through them he could see Gisela still slumped where she had fallen. Kelly couldn’t be sure, but he thought one of the dancer’s legs flexed minutely when the blond man’s shoe brushed it.
“Straighten him up,” Doug ordered, wiping his forehead with the back of his gloved hand.
“Look, I said get Tomashek,” Peter said. “I’m not – ”
“Listen, you bastard!” the blond American roared. “You want to spend the rest of your life in a cell in Buca, you just give me lip once more. Lift him!”
Peter grunted in a combination of anger and effort as he obeyed. He bent his left arm at the elbow and half knelt, then used his leg muscles to jerk the veteran into place for another punch.
Kelly hurt in more places than the glove had touched him directly, signals scrambled when his brain jounced, but the inexpert beating had not thus far made him nonfunctional. He’d been in worse shape after a night drop into steppe country once – and that hadn’t kept him from blowing up hardware that somebody else shouldn’t have left behind and trekking out again himself.
He wasn’t a boxer, but neither was Doug, and the fist the blond man aimed at Kelly’s face was slow and clumsy. The veteran jerked his head to the side instinctively, even though part of his mind knew that it might be better to accept the punch than to piss off Doug further by dodging it. The fist touched the lobe of Kelly’s left ear before momentum carried it into Peter’s shoulder.
Peter blurted a curse, again in Bulgarian. Doug screamed incoherently and swung the Beretta at Kelly’s head.
The looping sideways blow was beyond Kelly’s ability to dodge, but Peter’s own flinching reaction gave the veteran enough slack to avoid the worst of it.
The submachinegun’s stock glanced off Kelly’s skull, just above his right temple, and the shock jarred the gun’s heavy bolt off the sear. The bolt clanged forward and fired the top round in the magazine.
The muzzle blast of the nine-millimeter round was deafening to all three men; gas and unburned powder bloomed simultaneously from the muzzle in a yellow-orange flash, stinging Peter’s cheek as the bullet itself gouged a long slot through the wall. Sparks flew, and the howl of the unstabilized bullet cut through the echoing crash of the sheet metal.
‘You have pig shit for brains!” Peter shouted as he grabbed Doug’s weapon by the magazine and twisted until the muzzle was safely skyward. Kelly, sprawled on his back, tangled the feet of the two men who had been beating him a moment before. “Either you’re going to get more help here or you’re going to do it alone, I swear to you!”
Kelly reached under himself as his heels and shoulders lifted the small of his back from the ground.
The Beretta’s wire stock had flexed enough on impact to keep the veteran’s skull from cracking, but there was still a four-inch pressure cut in his scalp, and blood had begun to mat the black hair before his body hit the ground. It felt as though he had been struck by an ax, laying his brain open to the chill night air, and a part of him was quite sure that he was dying.
“Watch – ” one of the men above him shouted as Kelly lifted the aluminum snubbie and shot twice, close enough to Peter’s belly that the shirt caught fire.
Kelly’s vision was sharp, though he had no color sense at the moment. Both submachineguns were still pointed up, but Peter had started to lower his to cover the man on the ground when the bullets hit him like punches in the solar plexus. The gunman doubled up, clamping both elbows to his wounds. The muzzle blasts had jerked the front of his shirt out of his pants, to smolder over the oval entrance holes just beneath his rib cage.