A Knife Edge (45 page)

I
stood panting and sweating, the Koreans and Rossi all tangled at my feet. Rossi was beginning to stir. She rolled slowly onto her back with a groan. Her left eye was bruised and swollen and there were two rivulets of blood flowing from both nostrils. The asswipes had busted her nose. She spat blood. Said asswipes also began to move, and that was a surprise. After the clout I'd given them, I fully expected them to be counting stars for another half hour at least. I figured they were either a couple of tough hombres, or stupid. I tossed a mental coin on the question and, based on the theory of no-pain-no-brain, came up with stupid.

Situation awareness dawned on Rossi slowly at first, and then with a rush when she saw the Korean's naked, spotty, twig-plastered butt and her pants sliced up. She stood uneasily, trying to find her balance, her fists clenched into tight balls, the skin on her knuckles white with the pressure.

“Rossi,” I said, hoping for some acknowledgment. I got none. My instinct was to ask her whether she was OK, but I knew she was OK so that would have been trite. I'd come to the conclusion that Rossi only
looked
like a woman, a handy disguise in her line of work. A millimeter below that feminine exterior I believed she had all the warmth of a razor strop. “The keys. Where are they?” I asked her instead, holding my cuffed wrists toward her.

I didn't need to be a clairvoyant to see Rossi wanted to kill
someone, maybe even me. Her eyes were flat, and it wasn't with shock. I didn't even think she'd heard my question. Her small pack was at my feet, so I picked it up, undid the zip, and shook out the contents: underpants, toiletries, a little makeup, and a couple of keys attached to a familiar Michelin Man key ring. My keys for the S&Ws. I unlocked the cuffs and transferred them to the Koreans' wrists. One of the men was attempting to sit up. He was groggy and spitting bits of tooth, gum, clotted blood, and mucus onto the ground between his legs. He was still a long way from giving trouble. I patted him and his buddy down. Both had binoculars, walkie-talkies, Colt. 45s—my personal favorite—and a couple of spare magazines to go with them. I examined the pistols quickly. Their front sights were ground off and the magazines for both were full. I stuffed one of the weapons in the back of my pants and the other in a pocket with the spare magazines. Stupid they may have been, but I had no doubt these guys were professional enough to have radioed their observations back to base before approaching Rossi's hide too closely. I stomped on the walkie-talkies. The sets were no more than kids' toys and they shattered into chunks of plastic and printed circuit board.

“Borrow these? Thanks,” I said, taking a pair of binoculars and not waiting for permission to be granted. I brought the lenses into focus on the villa. The image of Sean Boyle danced and shook with my adrenaline-charged breathing. I caught the last moments of my target being stuffed into the back of a black Lexus 4−4 by a clone of the two boys by my feet who, I noted absently, were now easily distinguished from him by the orthodontic work I'd just performed with what turned out to be a hundred-and-twenty-pound tuning fork. “They've made us,” I told Rossi. “Boyle is on the move.” I wasn't too concerned. There was only one road out. Colonel Ratipakorn would head them off at the pass, access blocked by a couple of Humvees topped with Mr. Browning's gift to the world—big, black fifty-caliber machine guns. Through the binoculars, I followed the vehicle as it bounced and rocked over the rough dirt road hacked through the bush on the valley floor. But where the ribbon of gray dirt cut
through the green scrub and turned left, the 4−4 went straight ahead, cutting its own path. No. More likely, it was following a private road that wasn't on any map. “Shit,” I said.

Behind me, I heard Rossi shout something I didn't recognize as being English. I turned in time to see her point the rifle at one of the Koreans' feet. I saw the barrel recoil and heard the
bang
and a couple of the guy's toes disappeared in a spray of atomized red mist that drifted across his buddy. The big man screamed. Rossi slid back the bolt like she had all the time in the world and then moved it forward, chambering another round. The injured guy rocked back, screaming in an animal kind of way, holding his shattered foot in the air. His tracksuit pants slid down his leg, revealing skin that had gone white with shock, the black hairs raised. His foot didn't start bleeding right away. The muscle fibers in the exposed flesh quivered.

Rossi altered her aim, burying the suppressor on the end of the long barrel in the pubic hair of the man's crotch, at the base of his now shrunken turnip. She asked whatever she'd asked before, only politely this time, confident of getting the right answer.

The man blubbered something, his formerly narrow almond eyes now as wide as any I'd ever seen.

“The airport,” said Rossi, translating. “That's where they're going.”

“You see how far a little politeness will get you?” I replied.

Rossi shrugged. I doubt her pulse cracked sixty. She could've been buttering bread for all the emotion she exhibited. “Now, before I blow off this guy's dick, did he touch me with it?” She nudged his penis with the steel finger of the suppressor. He whimpered.

I shook my head. “No.”

I saw the slightest movement in her trigger finger. The guy saw it too and cried out. Rossi hesitated. She could pull the trigger. She could turn the weapon on me. She could start singing “Rhinestone Cowboy.” She could also remove the suppressor from the Korean's crotch, which was in fact what she chose to do.
The movement was reluctant, like it took considerable willpower. If I hadn't have been a witness, she might well have taken another option, and it wouldn't have been the karaoke one.

“We can leave these guys here—they're not going anywhere.” I recuffed them after feeding one end of the S&Ws through the bars of the headboard. Between its bulk and the fact that they only had eighteen and a half toes between them, I was reasonably sure on that point.

I turned my back on Rossi and the Koreans and jogged back into the bush, heading to the stakeout hut. I wondered where Boyle and Butler were really going. The airport was crawling with Royal Thai Airborne troops. Their most likely destination had to be toward the soft mud banks of the Moei River, which weren't more than a thousand feet from the villa they'd been occupying. It'd be easy for them to have planned for a back-door exit, take a boat across to Burma, and vanish into the teak forests. Smugglers had supposedly beaten that very same path to bare earth.

The going on the way down was much easier than climbing up. Through my own footfalls and a cloud of mosquitoes humming furiously around my head, I could hear Rossi close behind. The sun was up, which meant there was plenty of light to see. I stopped to get bearings. And then I heard something else, something familiar, but I had no idea where it was coming from. Suddenly, a Humvee burst from the bush not fifty feet away. The driver swerved to avoid me. Another followed close behind. It was a posse of Colonel Ratipakorn's people joining the chase. So much for keeping station behind the ridge. Despite what they told us, the Thais must have had their own forward observers keeping an eye on developments.

Rossi overtook me on the trail, trotting effortlessly along, holding her rifle by its handle. She disappeared around a bend. Our hut was maybe two hundred feet away. I stood and listened to the Humvees as they smashed their way through the foliage, until the sound faded into the background. I was pretty stiff and sore. I'd walk the rest of the way. And then I heard the gunshots up ahead.

I
broke into a run. I slowed only when our stakeout hut came into view. The gunshots came from inside. I stopped at the edge of the cleared area, dropped to the ground, listened and watched. Nothing. The hut was dark and quiet. I considered how to approach it. If the people inside had the angle right, they'd be able to see me coming while I wouldn't be able to see squat.

My hand went automatically for the butt of the pistol in my pocket. It felt good, reassuring, a friend. I massaged my palm against the roughness of the checkering on the handgrip while I figured out a plan. I didn't have much to work with. I had no radio, no backup. I removed the Colt and gave it the once-over. All the blueing seemed intact. My thumb found the safety and satisfied itself that the weapon wasn't going to go off unexpectedly. I popped the clip. Seven rounds plus one in the chamber—.357 semi wad cutters. Make a hell of mess of someone. WCs reduced the weapon's effective range. And they didn't so much as put holes in you as turn you inside out. The choice of ammunition said something about the guy who packed this weapon—the word “fuckhead” came to mind. Perhaps the Korean assholes now sharing a headboard back up the valley weren't soldiers. I pulled back the slide. It was a well-oiled, well-maintained piece. The ground-away front sight… now, that
was the sort of modification someone who regularly pulled a gun from a holster would make. I wondered how many tickets this piece had punched. Perhaps the owners of these weapons were bad asses from North Korea's Research Department for External Intelligence. NK's CIA equivalent. Who or what was inside our hut? More RDEI hitmen?

I'd heard two shots and they hadn't come from the same weapon. One, I was reasonably sure, had come from Rossi's. It had made a sound like a phone book smacked with a broom handle. The kind of sound a suppressed weapon might make. The other shot made a straight-out
bang
—a handgun sound, not unlike the one warming up my right hand would make when it went off.

There was no way to approach the hut except through the front door, which wasn't even a door. The windows were too high, and there was no way to get under the floor on account of it was a concrete slab poured onto the earth. I doubted the roof would take my weight. Even if it could, there was no way up there other than by pole-vaulting and, typically, I'd gone and left my vaulting pole in my other pair of pants.

The front entrance was it. No other option than to walk straight up and press the doorbell. I approached from an angle, running crouched over. It was quiet, too damn quiet. I figured whoever was inside wanted me inside with them. I sat down against the side of the hut, adjacent to the opening, and counted to three before rushing it. I thumbed off the safety, cocked the hammer.
Click.

One … two … three …

I went in low. I managed to get three paces into the main room—the bedroom—before what I saw made me stop dead.

“You just won't fuckin' die, Cooper, will you?” It was Butler. He was sitting on one of the beds. There was a smile on his face. I could almost have believed he was happy to see me, except for the Glock 17 in his hand pointed straight at me. Curled up on the bed beside him was Sean Boyle, groaning. From the position the professor was lying in and the sounds he was making, I was reasonably sure it wasn't food poisoning. The blood oozing
from a stomach wound was also a dead giveaway. His face was squeezed into a grimace. On the floor, beside the entrance to the bathroom, lay Rossi. She wasn't moving. There was a lot of blood on the floor beneath her face and neck. It was seeping out of her chest, which told me her heart was still pumping. She was alive. Only, for how much longer?

“How the fuck did you survive the fuckin' fall? Sprout fuckin' wings or something?” Butler asked, shaking his head.

“I think you should put the gun down,” I said. I had the .45 in a two-handed assault grip, Butler's nose bobbing in the space where the front sight would have been. I thought about the last time we'd been face-to-face, dropping through the troposphere at one hundred and twenty miles per hour and him sawing through my chute harness. Oh yeah, I wanted to squeeze a couple of pounds of pressure into that trigger finger.

“And why should I do that?” he asked.

“Because otherwise I'm gonna have to give you a really bad nose job.”

The professor moved a little and cried out in pain.

“He looks bad,” I said. “Doesn't sound too good, either.”

“Thank your friend for that,” Butler said, with a nod at Rossi. “She walked in on us. Shot him, just like that. So I shot her. The prof will live, even if it's with only one kidney. As for the bird, you shagging her?” Butler changed target. He swung his arm and lowered his hand so that the gun pointed at the back of Rossi's head. “You should. She's got a wicked arse
and
she can handle a gun. Makes me horny just thinking about it. She's alive, but one more bullet—not even a well-aimed one—would probably finish her off. Lost a lot of blood, as you can see. I think it'd be a shame myself, but the call's yours.”

“Where's Dortmund?” I asked.

“He let us off down the road. At the moment he's taking a tour group to the airport. With any luck, he'll be along later.” I pictured Dortmund behind the wheel of the Lexus, Ratipakorn's machine-gun-toting Humvees in hot pursuit smashing through the jungle.

“How did you know which hut we were in?” I asked. I was playing for time, hoping some interesting plan might pop into my head. Also, I was genuinely interested to know, just in case I ever had to do something like this again.

“I don't get it with you, Cooper. You're here, which says you're good at some things, though only God knows what, exactly. Maybe it's just being able to stay alive. Anyway, it's like this: There are nine huts scattered up the hillside. All except three were lit up at night. So either these unlit huts were unoccupied, or occupied by people who didn't use lights. We'd re-connoitered two of the darkened huts. They were empty. That left yours. According to my new Korean pals, there seemed to be movement coming from inside. Now, when people move around in the dark without turning on any lights, there's usually a good reason, isn't there?”

Yeah, I thought. Good point, even if it was made by a patronizing Limey shithead.

“Our patrol came across your friend here, and called it in. We just put it all together and dropped in to say hello … Hello.”

“You're pretty relaxed about things,” I said, annoyed at my own tactical stupidity. Goddamn it, it's not easy sneaking up on the SAS—that's why they're the SAS. “I get the feeling you think you're just going to walk on out of here.”