After America (65 page)

No. She would not be moving anywhere soon.

She didn’t even dare turn her head to see where the Rhino had gone. She had a brief impression that he’d dived to the right, somehow arcing over the crumpled hood of a flame-scorched yellow cab, but how he’d managed to get such an enormous mass of Rhino flesh airborne at speed, she had no idea. The firing stopped for a few seconds, but not the music or laughter. Reloading presumably, although she wasn’t quite ready to test the theory by hopping up and exposing herself to another fusillade. Perhaps if she’d been close enough to hear the hollow clunk of a mag swap …

The frantic drumming of the Kalashnikov started up again, disintegrating leaf and branch all around her, caroming off car bodies, and shattering the odd unbroken window. Jules’s shoulder was in agony. Black spots bloomed and spread across her vision. And then the terrible din abruptly ceased, cut off by two short bursts of fire from a P90. The glassy tinkle of falling shell cases terminated with a giant crash, causing her to jump.

“Nothing to worry about, Miss Jules,” the Rhino announced, as he suddenly appeared from behind the body of the trashed yellow cab. “That was just his boom box hitting the curb.”

“Thank Christ for that,” she said, finding her feet somewhat shakily and brushing off the worst of the mud and foliage with her good arm. “What do you think his story was?” she asked.

The Rhino slitted his eyes and peered at the building from which they had been sniped after a fashion.

“Dunno. Mighta slept in and missed all the fun downtown,” he suggested. “Doesn’t seem likely from what those rangers told us, though. They reckon the pirate clans have been working almost professionally together. Fighting in big units.”

“The enemy of my enemy …” Jules said.

“Something like that,” he answered, scanning the block ahead of them. “Whatever the case, we’ll want to be on the stick from now on. This part of the city was never going to be completely deserted one way or another. Let’s get under cover and check the map again.”

The Rhino helped her up and over the hood of the nearest car wreck, and they hurried into the foyer of an office block on the corner, jumping straight through the hole where a plate glass window had been smashed. Given the lack of water and rubbish in the foyer and the neatly presevered remains of the Disappeared, perhaps a dozen of them in all, it appeared the window had been intact until very recently. There was a chance the shooter with the boom box had taken it out, for there seemed to be no evidence that the foul weather of the previous twenty-four hours had encroached in there. The smugglers retreated from the street front, where they might be seen and targeted, and laid out the map of midtown that the soldiers had helpfully updated for them.

Central Park was still listed as no-man’s-land, but the Serbs and Chechens were present in much greater concentrations on the far side of that wilderness than the Rhino’s last update had indicated. They faced off against each other across West 64th, and the Chechens were thought to have pushed into the park, taking over the Tavern on the Green as they attempted to flank their Serbian rivals. That was as far into the park as any raider clan was known to have pushed. According to the female soldier they’d met, the air force had armed drones constantly over the area and standing orders to fire on any movement within the confines of the park.

“Wouldn’t surprise me to see ‘em drop an air assault force in there real soon,” said the Rhino, circling a couple of open greenswards with one huge, filthy finger.

“In helicopters, you mean?” asked Jules.

He shrugged.

“I suppose they could paradrop the Eighty-second, but I’d lay money on the cav or the One hundred first going in. They’re faster. They hit harder. And they can keep their shit together a lot easier. If you are in a parachute and strike a bad wind, you and your buddies end up all over midtown getting picked off in detail. We learned that lesson on D-day.”

“Did we indeed.” Jules smirked. “How about we stick with our current little war, General Patton.”

“Ah, recovering our wits, are we, after the excitement of being rescued by a rampaging American Rhino?”

“Lets just get on with it,” Jules countered. “If you’re right and the army does try to take the park, this whole part of town is going to become a free fire zone. I’d prefer to be well away from here by then. How much farther to Rubin’s apartment?”

“Two blocks north and one west,” the Rhino said without bothering to consult the map.

“So do we try our luck on Park Avenue again?” she asked. “Or do we—”

Jules didn’t finish her question. Instead she cried out in surprise as a bomb of some sort exploded outside, shattering the foyer windows. The angle of the blast and the mass of the concierge’s desk on which they were examining the map protected them from the worst of the blast, but even so, as she dropped and rolled, awkwardly trying to bring up her machine gun, she noticed that the Rhino’s Viking helmet was gone and a sizable flap of skin was hanging down over one eye, pouring blood in bright red torrents over his face and chest.

That wasn’t the most disturbing aspect of this unpleasant development, however.

Much more upsetting was the heavily accented voice crying to them from the street.

To her.

“Helloooooo … Miss Choolia. And Meester Rhino. Welcome to New York. Meester Cesky sends his regards.”

Mister who?
thought Jules as the foyer erupted under the impact of hundreds of rounds of automatic weapons fire.

New York

She came at her target from the north, looking for an older office building at the corner of 59th Street and Park. Her last update from G2 had the Plaza as the northern outpost of Baumer’s forces, almost all of which now appeared to have been drawn south toward Rockefeller Center. After leaving the hotel and Donna Gambaro, she had faded back into the cover of Central Park, trusting in her
IFF
transponder to protect her from air strikes by any orbiting drones. With the clock running down, she hurried through the park, exiting just opposite the remains of the Temple Emanu-El on 65th and diving into the network of streets on the other side. They were not entirely deserted, and once or twice she was forced to take shelter from small numbers of men who appeared to be roaming around aimlessly. Avoiding such encounters slowed her considerably, delaying her arrival at the address she’d tortured from Jukic. The gunfire started up when she was two blocks away.

It wasn’t a large-scale engagement like some of the battalion-size encounters shaking themselves out downtown, and it seemed to come in two waves: a brief, shattering eruption of fire that lasted a few minutes but involved only a few shooters, followed by a larger engagement that sounded willing enough to make extra caution on approach advisable. She could make out a few of the weapons types from their reports: at least one AK-47, the street fighter standby; a curious, almost paramilitary mix of M16s and M4s like her own; a shotgun of some sort; and a couple of chunky, large-caliber pistols. All of them were punctuated by two noticeably different discharges of high-capacity automatic fire from something nasty and brutish. She wondered whether she was too late and some freelancing Lord Jim spec-ops type had beaten her to Baumer.

Sheltering in the lobby of a brownstone, Caitlin listened intently as the small gunfight played out. At one point, early on, she was certain she could hear amplified music, tinny but distinct: that dumbass song with a bunch of barking dogs that had been huge about a year or two before the Wave. The snarling bark of an automatic weapon—a P90, she was certain—seemed to cut off both the music and the hammering of a lone AK at about the same time. She scanned the street outside in case anybody else was being drawn into the confrontation, and occasionally she checked the darkened lobby of the building in which she was standing. It had suffered some desultory looting but did not seem to have attracted the attention of any systematic scavenging efforts. The foyer had flooded recently, however, and the place reeked of decay and contamination.

When she heard nothing for a few minutes after the music died, Caitlin resolved to push on. She needed to give herself time to examine the building she had to infiltrate. It was unlikely that Baumer would have an obvious security presence out on the street; that would do nothing but attract the attention of the air force drones constantly buzzing over the city, looking for signs of enemy concentrations. And she had no idea what part of the building his people were using. Jukic had merely given her the street address and said it was a large building. There could be forty or fifty floors on which they had set up camp, if they were even still there. To do the job properly would take days of careful observation, but she had only hours left before extraction. Her mission brief had been adamant about that. This afternoon midtown Manhattan was going to become a “nonsurvivable environment.”

The Echelon agent performed another equipment check by rote before easing herself out onto Park Avenue to continue her quiet approach to the enemy camp. She was just turning her mind to how she might handle the last couple of hundred yards when another gun battle erupted not far from the location of the last one. Caitlin quickly took cover behind the body of a rusted Town Car that had had a prime parking spot in front of the apartment block on the morning of the Disappearance. Focusing on the intersection a few blocks down with a pair of compact binoculars, she caught a small band of men, maybe seven or eight of them, hurriedly picking their way through the snarl of auto wreckage that was always so much thicker wherever the traffic streams had met back in 2003.

“Motherfucker,” she said quietly.

There could be no doubt about it. They were attacking the very same building she was headed for. Cursing quietly, she returned to the lobby of the brownstone. She wasn’t sure why, but the feeling of an unnatural presence was particularly strong here. Perhaps it was the remains of the Disappeared that lay in great profusion in the mud and muck that had flooded in with the recent bad weather. She hurried through the lobby regardless of the flesh-crawling sense of being watched and judged from beyond the grave.

Caitlin shuddered.

She was someone who dealt with death as a matter of routine. It was odd that she should suddenly find herself unsettled and affected by it now. She put it down to exhaustion and hurried on, her jump boots splashing through the filthy brown watery ooze. The fire escape was over near the elevator shafts, and she racked a round into the chamber of her shotgun before entering.

The stairwell was empty and pitch-black. So little ambient light made it in there that her night vision goggles struggled to illuminate the space. She hurried up three flights of stairs and exited after carefully sweeping the hallway for potential adversaries. There were none, just that same creepy feeling that recalled to her mind a line from her Shakespeare studies at the academy in Colorado Springs.

Now entertain conjecture of a time, when creeping murmur and the pouring dark fill the wide vessel of the universe.

“Or I could just shut the fuck up,” she muttered to herself in the dank, musty confines of the unlit third-floor hallway. Caitlin tried the door of the nearest apartment that she judged likely to have a view down Park Avenue. It was locked. She flipped up her night vision goggles and drove one powerful side kick into the wooden door just up and back from the handle. The latch and part of the frame shattered inward as the door flew open, flooding the hallway with a weak gray light.

A few strides carried her over to a pair of double-hung sash windows looking out across the overgrown median strip of Park Avenue. From there she could see the small band of men she’d observed two minutes earlier down on the street. Using the binoculars, she was able to count eight of them. They had two down already, one dead with half his head missing. The other was thrashing about screeching and clutching at the stump of one arm. A burst of fire had severed it just below the elbow, and he was bleeding out in great extravagant fountains. None of his comrades had moved to help him. They were all too focused on putting fire into the lobby of the building she was supposed to infiltrate. From the volume of return fire, which was accurate but by no means overwhelming, Caitlin judged there to be only two or three targets inside. Their bursts were much more discriminating, indicating a greater level of professionalism but also a more modest supply of ammunition. She scanned the face of the building with the binoculars, looking for the telltale signs of shooters preparing to drop plunging fire down on the attackers.

There was no sign of any such activity, meaning that either Jukic had lied under the duress of torture or his information was wrong or out of date. Caitlin favored the latter as the most likely explanation. The air force had been pounding any command and control cells it located, necessitating frequent movement by the jihadi leadership cadre.

“Well, that’s just great,” she said aloud. “Another excellent plan down the crapper.”

Her plan, such as it was, was predicated entirely on a swift but stealthy assault up the chain of command to put her within striking distance of her man. It was always going to be subject to the risk of critical failure at any number of points, but it was way galling to have it fail before she’d even really begun.

Caitlin dropped her attention back to street level. Another of the attackers was down, leaving five. She took her time to scope them out. None looked like the African or Caribbean pirates allied with Baumer’s fedayeen warriors. These guys looked more like they might even have belonged here once upon a time. They appeared to be Latino, possibly Mexican, or maybe a crew from farther south. It was impossible to say, of course. But none of them were sporting keffiyehs or dreadlocks or any of the other giveaway headgear that might mark them as being linked to Baumer. Looking at these guys, Caitlin had the impression she was watching a small gang of dope smugglers on a day trip away from one of the struggling
narcotraficante
settlements down in the vast graveyard of Mexico City.