Conflagration (51 page)

“If we’re seen, we risk the whole attack.”

Penhaligon looked surprised that the warning even needed to be given. “The bastards will never know what hit them.”

The eleven men on the Paris Gun detail started off into the darkness. Argo cleared his mind, concentrating completely on one moment at a time. He was not thinking what might happen in the future, and he was especially not thinking about the pyramid. Even at a distance, the thing was emitting waves of black anxiety, and he did not want to open up to it, unless absolutely forced. He focused solely on the simple stuff, like where he was putting his feet, and keeping in sight of the man in front of him; in Argo’s case, a shifty-eyed Falconetti thief called Lapin. Penhaligon led them from one piece of natural cover to another, stopping, ducking down, and then moving in bursts of fast and silent motion, along a dry ditch, around the perimeter wire and the floodlights of the labor camp, in and out of the shadows of what seemed to be unused outbuildings, and piles of construction materials. The whole Mosul site proved relatively unguarded, as though those in command believed no one would have the crazy audacity to stage any kind of attack.

The group finally found themselves sheltering in the shadows between stacks of timber that looked like railroad ties, with the pyramid looming over them, and the Paris Gun a scant hundred and fifty paces away. Like the pyramid itself, the Paris Gun was so big that it confounded all ideas of relative size. Argo’s first impression was that it seemed shorter and more squat than he remembered from pictures, with much of the lower part of the barrel concealed by the thick cylindrical levers that absorbed the recoil, and it was not until Penhaligon made what he had called his “brisk sprint,” and a human being was in the picture, that Argo finally realized just how huge the thing really was.

Before Penhaligon made his run, he carefully laid the groundwork for himself, and those who would follow. He gathered the other men around him, and pointed. “You see the guard tower on the near corner of the slave camp?”

They all nodded, and Penhaligon continued. “The guard on it seems to be the only one interested in this area. He now and again shines a light over here to take a look, but it’s several minutes between inspections. Plenty of time to make it over, and, once we’re beside the gun, he can’t see us. I’m going over on my own first to check for bad news we don’t know about, then the rest of you should come across in threes. Just keep one firm eye on that tower monkey, and, if he looks like he’s swinging his light your way, hit the deck and freeze.”

Penhaligon waited until the light was just gone from the area he had to cross, and took off running, low and cautious. Halfway across something must have spooked him, because he dropped like a flat shadow, and waited, but then he was up again, and, in a matter of seconds, beside the gun and beckoning for the others to follow. The first group, Argo among them, waited long minutes until the light came again, but, when it was gone, they managed to cross the open space in one uninterrupted, desperate dash. The second group also made it across without incident, but the third, that was four in number, dropped and froze halfway across, as the light unexpectedly turned in their direction. They would never know whether the guard had half-noticed something, or if he was just looking on a whim, but he failed to spot their prone figures, and they, too, reached the gun unscathed. When Old Temps had all his chickens safely home, he turned his attention to the gun itself, running his hands over one of the great steel wheels, and talking to himself in a voice that verged on awe. “This fucker is unique. Maybe the only work of art to ever come out of the Ruhr.”

Penhaligon had looked at him with a puzzled expression. “You sound like you don’t want to blow it up.”

“Oh, I want to blow it up, my boy. Make no mistake about that.” He looked sharply at Argo. “Weaver.”

“Yes.”

“Can you do the whammy, and let your ladies know we’re in place.”

“I can try.”

“Then try.”

Argo knew this would be required of him, but he was also dreading it. He opened his mind, and, as he had feared, the pyramid forced its way in like an invisible wind, filling his head with a clashing plague of venom-filled wordless chatter. All he could do was soundlessly shout above it. “Cordelia! Jesamine!”

The voices that came back were faint and distorted, but they were there.
“Argo, we hear you.”

“Inform everyone that the team on the gun is in place.”

“We’ll do that.”

He must have shown sign of the strain, because Perdu was looking at him with concern. “Trouble?”

Argo shook his head, and stared at the pyramid. “No trouble. But that fucking thing is alive.”

RAPHAEL

To call it a hill was an exaggeration, the slight rise was nothing more than a mild roll in the otherwise flat countryside, but it gave them a slightly elevated view of most of the Mosul slave labor camp, and also afforded them a hidden vantage point. Steuben had made it clear to all around him that one of the most prized Ranger skills was making the terrain work for you, rather than against you. Steuben, Falconetti, Slide, and Windermere lay flat on their stomachs on the damp grass, watching and waiting, looking for the weaknesses in and around the camp and construction site while the main body of their force waited some yards back, crouched and ready for the order to go. Raphael’s first surprise was at how quiet it all was. The Amiens Pyramid project did not work a night-shift, which seemed odd. When he had been an unwilling recruit in the Mosul Provincial Levies, there had been much barrack-room talk about the labor camps, and, for most of the young conscripts, it had been a choice of forced labor or the army, and they told stories of slaves being worked to death in twelve-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day. On the other hand, to be assigned to guard a labor camp was the desired miracle that would save them from near-certain death in combat in the Americas.

Falconetti seemed quite as amazed as Raphael, although for slightly different reasons. He gestured to the two rows of workers’ huts enclosed in the electrically lit rectangle of barbed wired, with a watchtower on each corner, and the guards’ barracks and other buildings beyond. “It all looks so easy. The damned place is hardly guarded.”

Slide nodded. “A prison is always easy to take. The concentration is always on the business of keeping in, not keeping out.”

Falconetti shook his head. “I don’t get it. They have the big secret, but without enough guns to protect it.”

Slide smiled. “That’s because they believe their secret is still a secret, and that no one would attack what looks, from the outside, to be nothing more than the needless renovation of an unpleasant monument.”

A voice called in Raphael’s head, distorted and somewhat dizzying from the interference of the pyramid.
“Raphael. It’s Cordelia.”

“I hear you, although not well.”

“Argo has made contact. Perdu’s team is in place, and ready for the explosives truck to come to them.”

“And what about the White Twins?”

“Lime has heard nothing yet.”

“You believe her?”

“I think so. She knows she’ll be killed if she fucks with us.”
She paused as though distracted.
“What?”

Raphael was confused. “Cordelia?”

“Raphael, wait…”

“What?”

Only the noise of the pyramid remained in his head, and Raphael glanced in the approximate direction of where Cordelia, Jesamine, and the others in that team were waiting for the supposed arrival of the White Twins. To his dismay, he saw headlights on the road. He nudged Slide, who looked in the same direction. “That can’t be one of our cars or trucks, driving so close to the camp with full headlights.”

“If it is, the driver’s a damned fool.”

Falconetti snarled angrily. “I didn’t recruit any damned fools.”

“So what the fuck is it?”

Slide shook his head. “Beats me.”

“Could it be the Twins arriving unannounced?”

“I sure hope not.”

JESAMINE

“What the fuck is that?”

“It’s a fucking car. And coming this way.”

“Is it the Twins?”

“It had better not be.”

Jesamine, Cordelia, and Sera all rounded on Harriet Lime. “If you’ve fucked us, you die.”

Lime knew they weren’t bluffing and her response was pure desperation. “I swear, I heard nothing.”

Sera looked urgently up the road. “Maybe it’s just a normal piece of late-night camp traffic.”

They now had their own roadblock in place. The Benz was parked across the road, ready to halt all incoming vehicles, and it was too late to clear it before the strange car was upon them. Madden and Jacques readied their weapons, but Cordelia was shaking her head. “This can’t turn into a firefight. If we start shooting now, the whole damn camp will be alerted. The element of surprise will be lost for the other groups.”

Madden did not seem concerned. He slung his shotgun over his shoulder, drew his side arm, and began screwing on the silencer again. “So we stop them and hold them, whoever they are. We just have to be quiet about it.”

Jesamine drew her own pistol, and also replaced the silencer. Meanwhile Sera beckoned to the men who had joined them to reinforce the roadblock that was designed to stop the Twins. “You guys in the uniforms. Get in position.”

A number of the newcomers were dressed in Zhaithan and Mosul army uniforms. The idea was to deal with any occurrence like the one they now apparently faced. The roadblock would look, at first glance, like a genuine Mosul emergency, and that should be enough to bring any official vehicle to an unsuspecting stop. They moved quickly into place, taking up positions beside the Benz, doing their best to look like enemy soldiers in the middle of a long and tedious nighttime guard duty, while the others melted away to crouch, weapons drawn, in the shadows at the side of the road.

The still unidentified car slowed and came to a halt, and finally Jesamine could see more than just the headlights. She lay prone beside Cordelia and Lime. Cordelia had her pistol to Lime’s head, and she whispered tensely, “Not a sound.”

The car proved to be a small two-seater, a Teuton copy of the Armstrong roadster that Windermere drove in London. The car stood for a moment, with the men in the Mosul uniforms watching it carefully with their carbines leveled, then both doors opened and two men climbed angrily out. One was overweight, with a shaved head, and wearing the uniform of a colonel in the Teuton Engineers. The other was thin and angular and affected a monocle in his right eye. He had a seriously receding chin and seemed to be a major in the same regiment. The colonel was the more incensed of the two, and instantly demanded to know why he and his companion had been stopped. “What the fuck is this all about?”

One of Falconetti’s men, wearing a fake Zhaithan uniform, took a step forward. “State your names, ranks, and what business you have here.”

The demand only increased the colonel’s indignation. “I’m Colonel Helmut Phaall of the 4
^th
Engineers, you idiot. Don’t you know me? And this is Major Vogel. We’re stationed here, damn it. Working on the damned pyramid for you people. And after the recent fuck-ups, you have a lot of gall bothering us like this.”

Jesamine let out a gasp. “Phaall?”

The phony Zhaithan continued with his questions. “And where are you coming from?”

“From Rotk’s whorehouse in Boulogne, as if it’s any of your business.”

Cordelia, realizing what was happening, quickly put a hand on Jesamine’s arm, but Jesamine ignored her, and, throwing all caution to the winds, stood up and stepped into the aura of the headlights. “I though you’d died at the Potomac, but I guess that was just wishful thinking.”

Phaall looked at her in amazement. “What the … Jesamine?”

“Yes, Jesamine.”

“How did you escape the retreat? And what are you doing in that ridiculous uniform?”

“Right now I’m remembering how you fucked me, how you beat me for no reason except your own amusement, and how you made me suck your drunken flaccid cock, and dance for you, and touch myself, and take it up my ass, and how you loaned me to your friends, you motherpenis. You used to think you owned me, but guess what? It’s fucking payback time.”

Phaall seemed incapable of grasping what was taking place. He began to bluster furiously. “Put that gun away, you stupid girl. Do you have any idea what will happen to you if you shoot me? They really should have caned you harder in that Cadiz whorehouse where I found you.”

Jesamine pulled the trigger on her silenced pistol. The
pifft
seemed a less-than-fitting end for Phaall, who still appeared unable to believe what was happening, even when the bullet hit him in the chest. She shot him a second time just to make sure, and, even before Phaall fell, she pivoted gracefully and put a third shot into Vogel’s head, as he watched the drama open-mouthed. “You picked the wrong bloody night to go whoring with the colonel, boy.”

Sera came out of the darkness and looked down at the two bodies. “I guess that was one way to solve the problem.” She looked round at her men, who also seemed unsure of what they had just witnessed. “Okay, stop your gawking. You’ve all seen revenge before. Get the two stiffs and their car off the road and out of sight.”

But no sooner had her orders been carried out than a new crisis fell on them. Cordelia and Harriet Lime had just emerged from cover when Lime suddenly doubled over, choking and gasping. She fell to her knees, clutching her stomach with her cuffed hands. Cordelia’s first response was to raise her pistol. “If you’re faking this, I swear I really will kill you.”

Lime, however, continued to gurgle and gasp. Her entire body started twitching, but she forced out a few words. “The Twins … The Twins, I can’t … control it.”

At the same time, a red signal flare arced into the air.

RAPHAEL

Falconetti fired the signal flare, and, at the same time, standing or kneeling, Graham and the other sharpshooters that Falconetti had called forward, took aim with their long rifles and began picking off the sentries on the watchtowers at the four corners of the slave compound, and the foot soldiers patrolling the perimeter. Down on the road, truck engines were grinding to life, and, in a matter of minutes, the first vehicle had smashed through the main gates of the camp. Two Mosul ran out from the guard shack beside the gate, but were brought down. More trucks and cars were coming up behind. The lead vehicle made a wide, reckless turn, swaying and rolling on its suspension, and then deliberately smashed into what looked like a Mosul barracks hut. Armed men poured from the back, shooting as soon as they hit the ground.