After America (19 page)

“Fine,” he said. “Down on my floor.”

Jules took a few seconds to retrieve the small package of documents she’d stashed in her room after studying it the previous night, but she grabbed nothing else. There was virtually no chance she would return to the hotel and that meant leaving a few personal items, but there was no choice. They had to move quickly.

Hastening down the narrow corridor, she was at least a little safer for a moment. Unless the pirates let off some massive bomb directly under the hotel that brought down the entire structure, they were afforded some protection by the internal walls. She ran right past the elevators and wrenched open the door to the fire escape. The Rhino’s room was two floors down, and she took the steps three at a time, holding on to the handrail and swinging around at each landing. The sounds of battle outside reached them as hollow booms and thunder, occasionally transmitted right through the fabric of the building as a rocket or mortar bomb made a direct hit.

“This one,” the Rhino called as they made his floor.

There was nobody there, either. She checked her watch. Everyone would have been waiting in the bus when the attack commenced, and that caused Jules a momentary pang of survivor guilt. Many of their fellow workers undoubtedly had died in the last few minutes. In fact, their buses may well have been the targets. Eight or nine of them were lined up each morning on Duane Street to ferry the crews out to whichever clearance site they’d be working that day. They made a nice, tightly bunched target.

“Here we go,” said the Rhino, stopping not outside his room but in front of the little cupboard where the hotel guests had been able to obtain ice cubes in happier times. The space wasn’t used for anything now, not officially, anyway. The Rhino reached in and stood on his toes to retrieve something from high up over the door lintel. With a jump and a grunt he dislodged two small black backpacks. Jules caught the one he tossed to her. It was heavy. She drew back the zipper and removed a strange-looking firearm.

“What the hell is this?” she asked, holding it up to inspect it. The rear half of the gun was effectively a solid block, and the grip at the front was formed from a series of dark metal curlicues, giving it an overall appearance of something alien and wrong. It was obviously a weapon but unlike any she had ever fired.

A look of irritation crossed her face. “I asked you to get us some guns, not a bag of bloody Dr. Who props.”

The Rhino allowed himself a guilty smile, removing a clone of the weapon from his own backpack.

“These are mil-spec P90s, Miss Julianne. I picked ‘em up cheap, swapped ‘em for those food vouchers we scored back in KC. Look here.” He tucked the buttstock in against his left shoulder and swept the empty hallway with the muzzle. Jules bit down on her frustration as the barely muffled sounds of battle raged on outside.

“It was designed for support troops by the Belgians, you know, the rear echelon fucks. It’s got fully ambidextrous operation,” the Rhino said. “Bullpup configuration. Fifty-round mag. Specialized ammo, of which I have an elegant sufficiency, believe me, with much better lethal range, a flatter trajectory, and greater penetration against body armor than—”

“Okay, okay, I can feel the fucking love.” She shook her bag up and down, pulling out an equipment vest filled with magazines and a set of black body armor. She set the weapon down and shrugged into the vest, nodding toward Rhino’s weapon. “Where’s the selector switch?”

He held up his own weapon and pointed out a dial under the trigger.

“You’re safe in the S position. One is semi. A is full auto,” he explained. “On full rock ‘n’ roll you have a two-stage pull. Semiauto on the half pull. Then you blow your whole wad with a full squeeze.”

“Got it,” she said, Velcroing the equipment vest into place. She hefted the unusual weapon a few times to get the feel of it. Despite its bizarre appearance, it did sit very comfortably in her grip.

“Take this and snap it on,” said the Rhino, handing her a length of black piping.

Jules scrutinized the pipe. “Flash suppressor?”

“Nope. Well, sorta. But mostly for sound suppression,” he corrected her. “P90’s already a good deal quieter than, say, an M4. This makes it even stealthier. I’m guessing we’ll be sneaking out of here today.”

“Yes.” She sighed as a heavy automatic weapon started grinding through hundreds of rounds somewhere below them. “Anything you need from your room?”

“Got everything I need right here,” he said, nodding at his backpack as he snapped on his silencer. Soon his body armor and oversized equipment vest were in place, leaving his massive biceps exposed for a quick kiss.

“Did I ever tell that you that you don’t get these pettin’ kitty cats?” He grinned, before sticking an unlit cigar between his teeth.

Jules rolled her eyes as she slipped her arms through the backpack straps and they trotted back to the fire escape. The angry sounds of combat seemed to have settled into something like a rhythm beyond the walls of the hotel, a steady pounding of heavier weapons overlaying short, spasmodic gusts of small arms fire, single-shot three-round bursts, and the regular snarls of somebody letting off whole clips. That would most likely be the attackers, she thought. The militia and private operators protecting the Green Zone had better fire discipline than that. A pity their professionalism didn’t extend to properly securing the perimeter.

The lights in the stairwell flickered briefly as they entered, but only once. Nonetheless, the two smugglers picked up their pace as they made the long climb down past the ground floor and into the service levels, where they hoped they could make their exit. Jules expected to run into drug-fucked pirates at any moment, and once or twice they did hear doors opening and slamming closed above them, but they enjoyed a clear run all the way down. It was only when she carefully pushed open the door on the lower ground floor that they ran into trouble. Two rounds slammed into the wall next to her, sending hot chips of cement into her face.

“Damn it,” she cried out. “It’s Jules and the Rhino. Who the fuck’s out there?”

A pause followed before a shaky voice called back, “It’s me, Ryan Dubois. Julesy, is that you?”

She shook her head angrily and yelled at the door.

“Of course it’s me, you wanker. I just told you that. Who the hell did you think you were shooting at?”

The door opened a crack as Dubois nervously peered through.

“I thought you were pirates, sorry. I heard they got inside the hotel. Lewis told me to stay down here and keep an eye on the service levels. Gave me this.”

He almost waved the chrome .38 special in her face, but the Rhino reached over with one giant paw and pushed the muzzle down firmly but gently.

“Guns don’t kill people, Ryan,” he said in soft tones, taking the unlit cigar from his mouth to make his point. “Stupidity does. And Rhinos of course. Rhinos are always killing people. Especially stupid ones.”

“You said Lewis sent you down here,” Jules cut in. “So he’s still alive?”

Ryan looked worried, and his shrug was more of a nervous tic than an answer.

“I hope so. He told me to stay here until he came and got me. But I really don’t want to stay here. D’ you think I could come with you? This place is giving me the creeps.”

Jules pushed past him, careful not to get in the way of his pistol, which did not have a safety. The hallway outside the fire escape was poorly lit, with only every third fluorescent tube powered up, and one of them was flickering erratically. Shadows appeared to twitch and shiver organically in the crawl space between stacks of cardboard boxes and laundry carts. The thunder of guns and rockets was muffled to a dull rumble by the concrete foundation. Ryan fell in behind them as the two smugglers cautiously advanced down the subterranean corridor, sweeping the space in front of them, ready to lay fire on any sort of danger.

“So, umm, can I tag along?” he chirped.

“No,” they answered in unison.

Jules could sense him walking behind them, anyway. She was annoyed, but Ryan was the least of her concerns at the moment. They had no idea what they were walking into, how many pirates might be out there, in what numbers, or even what their intentions might be. A punitive raid? An attempt to overrun the Green Zone? And what was the militia doing? Or, more important, the private ops, the mercenaries. Most of them had left the zone after securing it, but she knew at least two dozen or more still remained, and she feared them more than any freebooter. The mercs had a reputation for using way more firepower than was ever really warranted, which was why Lewis Graham had insisted on keeping some of them around well after this part of Manhattan had been cleared.

“So it stays cleared,” he always said.

Or he used to. Jules wondered if he was still running around somewhere upstairs.

“Ryan,” she said, coming to a halt outside a storeroom.

“Uh, yeah?”

“Tell me exactly what happened this morning.”

He made a show of searching his memories. “Well, I got up early to make sure I scored some flapjacks because those bastards from the third-floor crew are always scarfing the lot down and—”

“Christ,” Rhino said under his breath.

Julianne rubbed at her sore and tired eyes, pulling her hand away when she felt the sting of Vaseline again.

“No. Not what happened at the breakfast buffet. Tell us about the attack. What you remember of that.”

The Rhino watched the corridor while Julianne encouraged Ryan to focus.

“Were you out at the bus queue when the raiders hit?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head with apparent regret. “No. ‘Fraid I was on the crapper. Somebody left a copy of the Seattle papers in the dining room, and I was reading the sports pages from the
P-I
.
I had a bet on the Royals-Mariners game, and the radio reception was pretty bad.”

The Rhino piped in. “Tell me you did not bet on the Royals.”

“I did,” Ryan said, almost indignant. “Someone told me they won the World Series once.”

“They did,” the Rhino said. “Back in ‘85.”

“Oh,” Ryan said.

“Fuck me,” Jules said heatedly. “Would anyone like to chat about the fucking cricket, perhaps? Good! Stay with me here, Ryan. The attack. It started while you were in the bathroom?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, looking abashed. “Lucky thing. I’d a been toast otherwise. I saw those buses, man, when I came out. They got opened like fucking tin cans, eh?”

“And the militia. And the private operators, what about them?”

Ryan shrugged. “Well you know the routine, Jules. There was probably some of them out at the bus line, just keeping things running. But I guess they got blown up, too.”

“Did you go out there, to check?”

“No,” Ryan continued. “When I knew what was happening, I started running for my room. But Mister Graham, he caught me and gave me this gun, told me to get down here and stand guard.”

The Rhino, who was stealing energy bars from a nearby stack of cardboard cartons, stopped for a second.

“Was Lewis hurt, Ryan?”

The boy shrugged. “Well, duh. He was out with the buses when the rockets hit. Dude was covered in blood. One arm kind of limp and all.”

Julianne exchanged a look with the Rhino.

“Sounds like we got caught bent over and pants down.”

The Rhino grunted in disgust.

“You would have thought after yesterday they’d have had extra security on. Worked the perimeter harder. Always said that Graham asshole was as worthless as tits on a bull.”

Jules began moving again, headed toward a heavy steel door shrouded in darkness at the end of the hallway.

“Well, to be fair, Rhino, they could have dropped mortars on us from well outside the zone.”

He conceded the point with a barely perceptible lift of the shoulders.

“Suppose so. They did control this part of town for a long time. Could have prefigured the mortars before they had to give it up. Doesn’t sound like any fucking pirates I ever met, though. Their idea of forward planning generally doesn’t even extend to checking they got enough paper to wipe their asses before takin’ a shit.”

Jules nodded as they reached the door. Pressing her ear to the cool steel, she could hear the fighting only distantly.

“Ryan.” She put her hand on his chest. “Do not follow us. It will end badly for you.”

The Rhino took up a firing position to cover her as she heaved on the horizontal steel bar that opened the door.

New York

“Jesus wept, this just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

Kipper peered through the cracked and heavily grimed window on the second floor of the U.S. Custom House. He could feel his Secret Service detail fidgeting with barely suppressed anxiety behind him. He supposed he shouldn’t rile them by exposing himself to danger or even the chance of danger, but from what he could tell, all the action was uptown from their current hiding place. And that’s what it was, a hiding place. Agent Shinoda had tucked him away in the massive stone pile of the old customs building that overlooked Battery Park and Bowling Green at the very bottom of Broadway. It was a beautiful building to Kip’s eye. Even though it had stood empty and neglected for nearly four years, the lines of the hundred-year-old architecture spoke to that rare and perfect balance of form and function that engineers thought of as elegant. To Kipper, there was no higher praise one could afford a human-made structure.

His appreciation of the old girl was soured, however, by the evidence he could see of the conflagration unfolding up near the Tribeca area, where many of the clearance crews he’d visited just yesterday were housed. The sun had risen a few hours ago, and with the day came the roar of an explosion that signaled what looked like the start of a small war. And it was a war, he supposed, even if they weren’t fighting another country. At least not openly. He’d seen plenty of classified intelligence that clearly incriminated a host of foreign states in supporting the pirates, whether to profit from their raids or simply to kick back against an old enemy. What was that old Arab saying? A falling horse attracts many knives. Or was it a camel?