Chapter Ten
Rourke worked the CAR-15’s trigger steadily, aiming rather than at single targets at groups of targets, figuring to up his chances of making each shot count. As best he could make out as he sped along the gauntlet of armed men on each side of him, the ones by the bridge—there was a large hole in the middle of it—were Mexican, firing at Texans on the street side and also caught in a crossfire between the Texans and some other group at the far end of the bridge on the Juarez side. A man from the Mexican group started running into the street toward Rourke, what Rourke identified as a vintage Thompson SMG in his hands, spitting fire. Rourke swerved his bike, a burst of the heavy .45 ACP slugs from the tommy gun chewing into the pavement beside him. Fighting to control the bike and still keep shooting, Rourke swerved back right, his bike now less than a dozen feet from the man with the Thompson.
As the man turned to fire another burst, Rourke pumped two rounds from the semiautomatic Colt CAR-15 that he held like a pistol in his fist. Both Rourke’s shots slammed hard into the tommy-gun-armed man’s chest, hammering him back onto the pavement. Rourke’s bike skidded as the subgunner fell uncharacteristically forward, the body vaulting toward the front wheel of Rourke’s bike. The bike slipped and Rourke rolled away. Flat on the street, Rourke hauled himself up to his knees and holding the CAR-15 at waist level, fired rapid, two-round semiautomatic bursts into the closest of the armed men. At the corner of his eye, Rourke could see Rubenstein, hear him shouting, “I’m coming, John!”
Rourke hauled himself to his feet. Firing the CAR-15 one-handed again like a long-barreled pistol, Rourke ran toward his bike. Two men with riot shotguns were opening up on him, running for him, Rourke guessed in order to steal the bike and his weapons. Dropping to one knee, he swapped the CAR-15 into his left hand, firing it empty at the two attackers, and snatching the Python from the leather on his right hip, he fired it as well.
Backstepping, holstering the Python and making a rapid magazine change on the CAR-15, Rourke hauled his bike up, kicked it started and let the CAR-15 hang at his side on its black web sling as he started the bike back into the middle of the street.
Already, more than a half-dozen men from the building side of the street were running toward him, assault rifles and pistols blazing in their hands. Swerving to avoid the fusillade of gunfire, Rourke cut back along the street, catching sight of Rubenstein coming up fast behind him. Rourke gunned his bike and jumped the curb, heading down along the sidewalk, the Mexicans there on the bridge side parting in waves before him as he bent low over his bike, firing the CAR-15. Behind him, Rourke could hear the steady, light three-round bursts of Rubenstein’s German MP-40 9mm, hear Rubenstein’s counterfeit Rebel yell—”Ya-hoo!”
Rourke fired the CAR-15 empty as he reached the end of the sidewalk, jumped the bike down the curb and into the street. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see Rubenstein close behind him, the “Schmeisser” shot empty, the Browning High Power firing from his hand as he jumped the sidewalk and into the street, Rourke heard the rebel yell again as the noise of the gunfire died in the background behind him. Under his breath, bending low over his bike, Rourke muttered, “That kid’s really gettin’ into it.”
Chapter Eleven
Major Vladmir Karamatsov glanced to Captain Natalia Tiemerovna at his side in the gathering darkness. He could just make out the outline of her profile, the skin of her face smudged with black camouflage stick, a black silk bandanna tied over her hair, her hands fitted with tight black leather fingerless gloves, a close-fitting black jumpsuit covering the rest of her lithe body. He noticed her hands again—she held an assault rifle the way most women held a baby, he noted. A smile crossed his thin lips, his black camouflage-painted cheeks creasing at the corners of his mouth into heavy lines.
Karamatsov upped the safety catch on the blued-black Smith & Wesson Model 59 in his right hand. Like all the people in his special KGB liquidation squad, he carried strictly American or Western European-made firearms. In the event that they encountered a substantial American force, regular or irregular, there was nothing to identify himself or any of his handpicked, personally trained team as Soviet—their English was perfect midwestern, all of them trained, as was Karamatsov himself, at the KGB’s top-secret “Chicago” espionage school. They had read American books and newspapers, watched videotapes of American television, worn American-made clothes, trained on American-made firearms. American food, American slang—everything so American that they soon thought, talked and acted like Americans who had lived in America all their lives—with the one exception being their often-tested allegiance to the KGB.
Like most of the top clandestine operatives in the KGB, Karamatsov—like the girl beside him in the darkness—had gone to the Chicago school in his mid-teens. He had grown up playing basketball and betting on the World Series. For years, Karamatsov’s one outside interest besides chess had been American football. He had arranged to attend three Super Bowls and had sat in the crowd happily munching hot dogs; drinking beer and shouting and cheering no less earnestly than everyone around him. He had been Arnold Warshawski of South Bend, Indiana, or Craig Bates of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or someone else. Karamatsov was a past master at dying his hair, creating life-mask wrinkles or built-up noses. Sometimes he would stroke his cheek expecting to find a full beard and remember suddenly that that had been yesterday—instead of forty-three with a red beard and broken nose he was twenty-eight with blond hair, a small mustache and a nose that looked as though it had been the model for a Roman or Greek statue.
And very frequently over the years he had worked with the magnificent Natalia—sometimes they had posed as husband and wife, sometimes as brother and sister, sometimes as father and daughter. He liked her best as she looked now, the black hair just past the shoulders, her own strikingly dark blue eyes rather than contacts which had made them appear brown or green, her own slightly upturned nose—the figure that he had warmed himself beside so many nights. She was technically his second-in-command, his right hand. Her heart was too soft, sometimes, he reflected; but it had never interfered with her work.
He stared into the darkness, trying to make out the shapes of the others of his team who were there— Nicolai, Yuri, Boris, Constantine… he could not see them and Karamatsov smiled because of this.
His head itched under the black watch cap he wore. He scratched the itch, checked the Rolex watch on his wrist and felt again in the darkness the safety catch on the fifteen-shot 9mm pistol he held, checked the position of the tiny blue Chiefs Special .38 in the small of his back, checked the 9mm MAC-10 slung from his shoulder.
He watched the face of the Rolex, and as the hand swept into position, he raised up from his low crouch and started into a dead run, Natalia—as she always was, he thought comfortably—beside him, ready to die for him. The ranch house was just beyond the end of the bracken and as he reached the clearing, he could see the others of the team breaking from the shadows as well.
There was gunfire coming from the house, slow as though from a bolt action rifle. A shotgun went off in the darkness—none of his men carried a shotgun and he cursed. He kept on running, the pistol raised in his hand, 9mm slugs—115-grain jacketed hollow points—spinning from its muzzle toward the plate glass front of the building. He could hear glass shattering. There was a faster-working rifle now firing into his team in the darkness, and he tried to make out the sound. As he turned to bear his pistol down onto the suspected target, he turned to his left and saw Natalia, down on one knee, the H-K assault rifle to her shoulder, firing steady three-shot bursts, the window that had been Karamatsov’s projected target shattering and even in the near total darkness the ill-defined shape of a body falling forward through the glass and into the bed of white flowers just outside.
Karamatsov started running again, first to reach the front door, kicking at the lock, which held, then stepping back and blasting at it with the MAC-11 on full auto. Natalia was beside him, her left foot smashing toward the lock, kicking the shot-through mechanism away, swinging the door inward. Karamatsov rolled through.
The house was in near total darkness. He fired the MAC-11 at a flash of brightness, his gun going empty on him. Rather than swapping magazines, he reached for the Model 59 pistol—he gauged there were at least eight rounds left in it.