The Gamma Option (41 page)

Blaine looked away from the blur, hand going for the pistol. The ease of reaching it surprised him, for he didn’t realize that Lace’s intended target was his other hand, the one holding the detonator. He felt the gnarled edges of the link dig into his wrist, powerless to maintain his grasp of the detonator against the pain. It flew outward, and Blaine felt his wrist explode in fiery agony as he was yanked away. He had the pistol briefly, but the vicious thrust of Lace’s motion stripped it from him.

Stunned, McCracken awaited certain death as he watched Rasin bring the machine gun up to fire. Suddenly a second huge shape charged through the open double doors. Johnny Wareagle’s staff preceded him and smacked hard into Rasin’s ribs, which caused his first burst of fire to stitch a jagged design in the far wall.

Instantly Lace released her grip on the chain digging into McCracken and sped inside the second strike, which Wareagle had aimed for her. The miss carried Johnny sufficiently off balance for the huge woman to pound a shoulder into him with force sufficient to propel both of them through the door into the corridor.

Blaine saw Rasin staggering, machine gun dangling from the shoulder strap supporting it. He knew the madman was struggling to right it on him again and just as fast made the decision to go for the detonator and not the pistol. He couldn’t take a chance that the Arab delegates carrying the Gamma vials would make it out of the tunnel while he and Rasin were fighting. He dove headlong and slid off the carpet onto an exposed portion of the hardwood floor to where the detonator had come to a rest. His outstretched hand just managed to find the red button when Rasin’s desperate burst coughed fragments of wood everywhere around him. He was rolling to avoid the next burst when the floor in the hall began to shake, the tunnel underlying the royal palace caving in on itself under the force of the blasts. The explosion blew out a number of windows in the library, turning the glass into flying shards that fell over a prostrate McCracken and then slid harmlessly to the floor.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Rasin’s scream barely preceded the
rat-tat-tat
of his machine gun fire aimed at the downed figure of McCracken. But Blaine was already in motion away from it, rolling over the shattered glass that had coated him toward the cover promised by the long shelves of books.

Wareagle still felt the battle was his to win. In close, the advantage of his staff was negated, but there was strength to consider at this proximity, and the woman’s was no match for his. Strangely, the thought that he was battling a woman never crossed his mind. His feelings revealed to him a spirit as black on the inside as her leather garb was on the outside.

Johnny felt his back smash up against the wall and drove his knee hard into the rippling muscles of the woman’s abdomen. The move drove her from him and started to double her over; the Indian’s next intention was to dip behind and loop the staff round her throat to crush it.

He saw the scimitar sweep up at him only after he had committed himself to the move. A heavy sword with a sharply angled edge, it could be wielded accurately only by the strongest of warriors. He managed to backpedal at the last moment, sliding enough to the side to allow him to block the sword with his staff. The heavy blade dug into the wood but couldn’t cut all the way through.

Lace was quick to pull it free and send the scimitar at him a second time in roundhouse fashion. But Wareagle anticipated the move perfectly and countered by darting to the innermost point of the strike. This allowed him to accept the blow at its weakest with the lower end of the staff while he crashed its upper end downward against the woman’s face.

Lace wailed in agony, her cheekbone shattered. Wareagle went for the finish, a thrust to the throat while she was dazed. But Lace managed to duck under the move and used a sweep kick to take out Johnny’s left knee. He went down, maintaining the presence of mind to keep his grip on the staff, so when she charged at him, snarling, wielding the scimitar in a downward blow, he was ready.

He jammed the staff up to meet the blow and felt his elbows lock tight an instant before the clash came. This time the wood split on impact, leaving Johnny with a segment in either hand. Lace wasted no time and swung the scimitar round again.

If he had tried to regain his feet, death would have been the inevitable result. But Johnny did the last thing expected of him by remaining on his knees and actually closing
into
the blow while he jammed the more jagged piece of the staff hard against the woman’s blade-wielding wrist.

Lace screamed again, the sound still piercing Johnny’s ears when he slid behind her and lashed the hard wood into her kidney through the padding of her leather jacket. Impact separated him from the more brittle portions of the staff, and he succeeded in smashing the woman’s already-damaged face straight into the wall. She spun around with the left side of her mouth curling up from the bulging swell of her broken cheek. Her leather pants were tight enough to let Johnny see the rippling tension in her leg muscles as she came forward, stalking him, clip-clopping on her boots and waving the scimitar through the air.

It was instantly clear to Wareagle that those high-heeled boots were anything but ideal for rapid motions, and he seized this for his next strategy. She came at him when he expected her to—as he was climbing back to his feet. She came at him with the left side of her face swollen twice the size of her right.

Johnny stopped rising, went down all the way to the floor, and swept the staff half he still held back at her as she passed. The blow broke the heel off her right boot. But Lace didn’t realize it until she planted to steady her next swing. With her heel gone, her leg buckled. She went down and Wareagle spun over her, brandishing the jagged staff half aloft, making ready to plunge it into her.

The second shape lunged atop him from behind just as he started his motion. A scream punctured his ears and he felt himself going down, the weight of another, smaller woman enough to strip his precarious balance away. He struggled to pry her off while before him Lace had risen to her knees, almost to her feet, scimitar in hand, readying to come for him.

“I’ll kill you, McCracken! I’ll kill you!” Rasin raged, and Blaine felt the machine gun fire skid close to him as he sped between the first and second book-lined aisles.

The bullets followed him as far as the end of the row when he rounded the shelves and pressed himself against the books in the next aisle. Instantly, more rapid fire spit books from their places around him, pages torn from bindings and set to flutter free. McCracken went down but kept moving, propelling himself on his elbows. Another burst fired just over him showered Blaine with more book fragments. Rasin spun round one end of the book-lined aisle just when Blaine climbed back to his feet at the other. Again he was moving amidst the books, varying his path and target while Rasin’s bullets splintered the shelf into fragments and scattered classics everywhere.

McCracken heard Rasin jam a fresh clip home an instant before another burst covered him with books jetting out under the bullets’ force. He pinned down Rasin’s position and steadied himself. He had to put some distance between the fanatic and himself and he had to do it fast, if he hoped to emerge from this alive.

Blaine crept to the end of the aisle and pinned his shoulders up against the wood. Total camouflage this way. Rasin wouldn’t see a thing when he swung into the last aisle before the wall, and by then it would be too late.

Now!

McCracken swung hard to the right and bolted for the third aisle down. With Rasin’s gunfire struggling to right itself, he gathered momentum and slammed his right shoulder into the shelf of books directly before him. That shelf toppled into the next under the force of the collision, creating a domino effect that sent books and wood crashing backward. McCracken thought he heard a scream as Rasin was buried by the debris, and then there was nothing.

With the smaller woman still yanking on his throat while holding on to his shoulders, and the big one fighting to regain her feet, Johnny Wareagle seized the only move left to him. He jammed the jagged edge of the staff piece he still held back toward where he judged the smaller one’s throat to be. He closed his eyes for an instant and pictured it perfectly. The sharp wood parted the soft flesh and cartilage beneath the small woman’s Adam’s apple and sprayed him with blood. Her hands flailed from their grasp to stem the flow of the life pouring from her. It still took all his strength to toss her writhing body from him.

By then, though, the huge woman had regained her feet with a scream of incredible rage born of watching her lover die. In the flash of an instant, he found the scimitar rising in her hand and then dipping into a straight downward motion as she lunged for him. Johnny started his arm upward into the strike, no choice but to sacrifice a limb and hope he could fight down the shock long enough to win.

He felt the calm resignation flow through him a blink before a trio of deafening roars split his already-seared eardrums. Directly over him, Lace spasmed in her tracks, eyes bulging. She was still trying to force the scimitar down at him weakly when a fourth shot rocked her head forward. Blood exploded from her mouth as fragments of skull and brains coated the ceiling and walls.

She fell straight over, legs thrashing in death, at Johnny’s feet to reveal Blaine McCracken kneeling in a combat crouch a dozen feet away with smoking pistol still clutched in his hand.

“Nice for me to be able to save your life for a change, Indian,” he said, rising.

McCracken lowered an arm to help Wareagle up, but his eyes stayed on Lace and the three scarlet holes stitched down her back.

“That was for Hiroshi, you bitch.”

After digging Rasin’s unconscious body out from the rubble of the broken shelves and fallen books, they climbed to the palace’s top floor and reached the roof through a skylight. Wareagle held Rasin while Blaine waved frantically for the hovering Apache to sweep down and pick them up. Around the outer wall of the royal palace, the Iranian masses had taken the battle to the last stronghold of Guardsmen. Blaine heard the gunshots, the screams, the wails of both fervor and pain, and found himself looking away. This portion of the palace roof was flat, and with no wind to impede him the Apache pilot was able to bring his ship to a point where his landing pods were only a yard from touchdown.

“Lower!” Blaine ordered upward, as he started to push Rasin’s unconscious frame ahead of him into the attack ship.

He never heard the gunshot, felt only the thud of impact as Rasin’s body smacked against him, the back of the fanatic’s head blown totally away. The kill shot was much too precise to be random, the mark of a top grade sharpshooter.

“You bastards,” Blaine muttered, turning away from the Apache. “
You fucking bastards!
”

Wareagle grasped Blaine at the shoulders and shoved him upward.

“Now, Blainey! We must go now!”

The corpse of Yosef Rasin slid from his grasp and McCracken finished the climb into the Apache on his own.

“Hell of a shot for an Iranian,” the pilot noted somberly, lifting the Apache upward.

“It wasn’t an Iranian.”

“Huh?”

“Just take us up, son, and blow the shit out of this place.”

“The … palace?”

“Unless my eyes deceive me.”

His gaze turned toward the first of the masses who were starting to clear the outer wall. “But the people …”

“Keep wasting time and you just may have to kill them. Fire your missiles now and they’ll get the idea.”

The pilot shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

“Then we agree on something anyway,” Blaine said, and leaned back against the Apache’s bulkhead, indifferent to the rest of what transpired.

It took all eight of the Hellfires fired in the space of twenty seconds to reduce the royal palace to flame-soaked rubble and leave whatever remained of Gamma to smolder within the debris.

“This is Shooter,” the report came from the marksman on the roof of the building two-hundred-fifty yards from the royal palace.

“What is your report, Shooter?” asked the voice that would relay the message back to Israel.

“Rasin won’t be coming home. Dispatch complete.”

“What about McCracken?”

“Sorry. No could do.”

“I didn’t copy that,” the voice of the contact came back.

“No could do,” Colonel Yuri Ben-Neser repeated into the microphone held in his single hand. His punishment had been exile to Tehran as part of Operation Firestorm, a sniper once more. “McCracken saved my life in Jaffa Square ten days ago. I owed him one.”

Epilogue

“IT’S ALL YOU NEED
. Believe me.”

McCracken inspected the piece of paper Evira had handed him from her hospital bed. “Just an address in Paris. This is where I’m supposed to find my son?”

“You’ll find the answers.”

Blaine eyed her quizzically. “There’s something you’re not telling me. I’ll accept that, but God help you if it’s something I won’t like when I get there.”

Evira smiled in spite of herself. “After all this you still sound like my enemy.”

“Friends and enemies are transitory for the most part. I’ve learned to accept that, too, over the years. I saved your life in Tehran, but you can be damn well sure the life of my son was the only reason.”

Her gaze was distant. “I couldn’t understand what you were feeling, the strength of the obsession.”

“Spoken in the past tense because something’s changed you. That Iranian urchin we brought with us from the barricade no doubt.”

“You took care of him once we reached Israel?”

“He’s in a state-supported children’s home … waiting for you to get well enough to pick him up.”

Evira’s face almost brightened. “It’s strange, but at first I thought it was gratitude. After all, he did save my life. Then I saw it was something much more. He needed me, and realizing that made me need him.”

“Ah, so now we come to the crux of the issue. You and I live in a world where we can’t get close, can’t reach out, can’t touch. So when those moments come when we’re forced to, when we’re
allowed
to, we prove ourselves to be as inept in the normal world as normal people would be in ours. It makes us vulnerable, not to others so much as ourselves.”