Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (5 page)

So long as no gunman peered down from the edge of the rooftop Harry and Owens could consider themselves safe. But their luck stretched only so far. As they came near to their objective the sidewalk exploded just behind Harry and immediately in front of Owens, sending up a cloud of dust and cement fragments that began raining down on them.

Because there was no sense in returning the fire—they could barely expect to hit their antagonists from their earth-bound position—they ran, zigzagging, no longer worried about the protection of the shadows since they’d already been seen.

Their tactics did not go unrewarded. The bullets that carved out great swaths of the sidewalk failed to hit them. Moreover, the terrorists could not concentrate entirely on the two men directly below them if they were to keep the men across the street from escaping.

Breathing hard, their lungs straining from the exertion, Harry and Owens found themselves at the dull green door that led into the building they wanted. Over the door a sign read “Animal Shelter League,” but by the looks of this sign, and the drab façade itself, the Animal Shelter League people and their adopted pets had moved out long ago, leaving behind empty rooms and lots of dust.

The door was locked but the lock was not strong enough to resist the strength of a .44 round which easily mangled the shabby armor.

In the event that one of the gunmen was waiting in ambush, Harry kicked open the door and stood back. Owens faced him, flush against the opposite jamb.

Harry then dived into a hallway that hadn’t seen light, natural or artificial, for several years. Owens duplicated his maneuver, his .356 Magnum extended in his hands.

No opposition presented itself, only a faint smell of must and decay reached their nostrils as they crouched warily, trying to make out what awaited them in the profound darkness.

Silently, the two men started to move, using their hands like the blind to guide themselves down the hallway. Within half a minute they had fully explored the entirety of the groundfloor in this clumsy manner, and yet had failed to locate any means of ascending higher in the building. Harry risked employing his lighter, sending a small flame into the air that was sufficient to reveal a door to a freight elevator and by its side the button that apparently could control it.

Owens pushed. They waited, at first hearing nothing but the muffled rattle of gunfire in the street and the more distant shriek of sirens.

Then, from high up in the shaft came the groaning, tortured sound of cables, and obsolescent machinery. The antiquated elevator began its grudging descent but there was, of course, no way of telling whether anyone was descending with it.

The elevator’s groaning became louder and then ceased altogether as it came to a rest. Nobody got out. The elevator was unoccupied, and the two of them entered.

The buttons on the elevator’s interior wall indicated that twelve was as high as they were going to go; presumably, from that floor one could gain access to the roof.

Before they commenced their treacherous climb, Harry surveyed their confined circumstances, determining with his eye that the roof of the elevator could be made to open. It would be a mistake—and very likely a fatal one—to remain imprisoned by the elevator, especially as it attained the twelfth floor. It was obvious that the snipers would be awaiting their arrival.

To avoid this unhappy prospect, Harry decided it best if they rode on top of the elevator. Owens, being the lighter of the two, supported himself on Harry’s shoulders and by exerting all the strength in his arms forced the door open. Then he grasped hold of the sharp rusted surface of the roof and pulled himself up.

Harry now depressed the button designated 12, and while the elevator responded, beginning to move slowly, Owens helped him up and out onto the roof. It was a tricky maneuver, one that a mastery of Alpine mountaineering would have helped. But the possibility of a quick violent end is powerful incentive; mothers have been known to lift cars weighing tons when their children have been trapped beneath them. Harry could conquer the canvas-lined wall of a freight elevator.

Both men now safely on the roof of the elevator, they stretched out, hugging the surface. No telling how much space would be available between the cable supports and the top of the elevator. It wouldn’t be of much use to survive a terrorist’s attack, only to be mashed by indifferent machinery.

Certainly when viewed from their angle, the thicket of cables looked intimidating. It was possible to believe that the elevator wouldn’t stop, that it would keep right on going, allowing Harry and his partner to be sucked into the fearsome motor that kept the whole thing in motion.

The all-too-familiar staccato of gunfire reached their ears as they came closer to their destination. Gradually, the churning wheels about which the cables continued to revolve slowed and creaked to a halt. The twelfth floor.

Somebody was opening the door but only enough to permit him to spray the elevator’s interior with a succession of rounds that tore apart the canvas, echoed off the metal walls underneath, and sent up a poisonous smell of cordite into the air.

The gunman who wielded a Belgian FN MAG machine gun, the kind mercenaries fighting in Rhodesia used, stepped into the elevator, clearly astonished that he hadn’t hit anyone and that there was no one to hit in the first place.

Before he could glance upward and see that the door to the roof of the cabin was open, Harry fired his .44, striking the man in the chest. The gunman was flung way back, slamming against the wall he had just ripped up with his FN. His eyes were wide with shock and surprise that his strategy had so obviously and catastrophically come to an end. He slumped down on the floor and loosened a short burst from his FN, a futile gesture but one that he probably found as consoling as a priest’s last rites.

Harry quickly leaped down through the opening, expecting to have to contend with the deceased’s equally murderous comrades, but they were either too busy wreaking havoc on the steps of the Cavanaugh-Sterling headquarters or else operating on the premise that the problem coming up on the elevator had been eliminated.

Owens followed Harry down. Before they abandoned the elevator they confiscated the FN, seeing as how the dead man was not going to be using it where he was headed. It was difficult to determine the nationality of the terrorist; he was swarthy, though that could have been merely because he liked the great outdoors, and he sported a bushy beard that pretty much dominated his face. They had no time to search him or note any other distinguishing attributes.

Opening the door that entered onto a hallway that looked no different in the darkness than the one on the ground floor, they instinctively turned in the direction of the firing. A small speck of light to their left aided their search.

As they proceeded toward this light, they realized that it was leaking in from a door that presumably yielded onto the roof.

“From here on in we continue firing,” Harry said. “Take out as many as you can with this thing.” He handed Owens the FN.

Owens was not expecting this. “Don’t you want it?”

“You don’t know how to use it? Is that what you mean?”

Owens shook his head; he’d had experience with machine guns before, when he served in Vietnam for a year’s tour, but he had just naturally assumed Harry would prefer the benefit of its rapid firing.

Not so. Harry held out his .44, “You believe something gives you luck, you go with it.”

“You’re the boss.”

Owens had never been on a parachute jump, all his training and battling had kept him to the ground, but he imagined that this was what it felt like when for the first time you were standing at the door about to leap from a plane twenty thousand feet in the air, stomach lurching, heart beating crazily, wondering whether your chute would open.

It was a different sort of door now and a different sort of jump. Only the danger was far greater.

Harry stood, his hand gripping the handle, waiting as if for some signal. It would have to come from his own mind, from his instincts, because with no window to see what was happening outside, they would never have any means of knowing which moment to launch their assault was the most propitious.

As soon as the door flew open, Harry flung himself on the asphalt surface of the roof. Owens followed his example, and when they had flattened themselves out, they opened fire.

Across from them, crouched behind a low-lying protective wall that extended about the entire perimeter of the roof, were two snipers, both of whom were maintaining their barrage on the street. All that could be seen of them were their backs, their shoulders hunched high enough to blot out almost all view of their heads. Their bodies shuddered repeatedly with the recoil from their guns, but clearly they were accustomed to it.

Because of the time element involved and the necessity of protecting themselves, neither of the guns discharged by Owens and Callahan did as much damage as they should have were they properly sighted. But they did enough.

One of the snipers sustained a blast of the FN in his upper shoulder, which forced his weapon from his hand. Another gouged out a huge chunk of the brick wall, propelling it upward so that it hit this same gunman in his gut, further debilitating him.

The second narrowly escaped Harry’s fire, but that was only because he had unexpectedly shifted position. Turning to see where this attack was coming from, he fared much worse, for the round that Harry now fired made a mess of his stomach and sent him toppling over to the street. His scream persisted for as long as it took him to plummet to the ground: not long.

The surviving sniper had no opportunity in which to consolidate himself, for Owens had him correctly targeted by this point and, without a moment’s hesitation, loosened another burst from the Belgian machine gun. Though this gunman did not make his exit from the world so dramatically as his companion had, his death was every bit as thorough. He crashed to the asphalt and immediately began to pour blood onto its dull, sunbaked topography.

It was only then that Owens allowed himself the luxury of standing erect in order to better survey the scene. Twelve floors below there was shouting as people gradually understood that the danger had passed, that they could move out into the street again without sustaining a gunshot wound.

But it was not the shouting that Harry heard but something else, a softer, almost inaudible sound from their left. He reached out, grabbing hold of Owens’ ankle and virtually threw him down.

Owens reacted with annoyance. “What did you do that for?”

Harry signalled him to be silent. “Over there,” he whispered, “there’s another one still alive.”

Owens looked to where Harry was pointing but all he could see was the protrusion of an immense gray cooling unit that rested on pontoons and beyond that what looked like it might be a water tank of some kind. He noticed nothing unusual nor did he hear what it was that had Harry so alarmed.

But Owens was certainly not about to lose faith in Harry now. If Harry said there was someone there, why then he believed him.

Once Harry’d advised Owens to stay put, he began to crawl slowly in the direction of the cooling unit. He surmised that the fourth assailant, aware that his companions had been killed, had decided to break off the engagement and was now hiding, hoping to avoid discovery, at least long enough for him to make good his escape. And the route of that escape was evident enough to Harry. Denied the use of the elevator, the gunman would have to resort to the adjacent rooftops that were about as high off the ground as this one, meaning he wouldn’t have to chance limb-breaking jumps as he ran. No doubt considerable reconnaissance had gone into this operation before it was undertaken.

Whether Harry’s antagonist panicked or whether he actually thought he had a decent chance of hitting him, Harry didn’t know, but all at once the asphalt in front of Harry spewed into the air as a succession of rounds tore into it.

Instantly, Harry rolled away. And before he could return the fire, Owens was doing so for him, spraying the cooling system, puncturing a trail of holes into the weather-beaten metal. Water bubbled out of the ruptured ducts, splashing down onto the roof with a roar that made it sound like a small Niagara.

Though he hadn’t hit Harry’s assailant, Owens had succeeded in driving him from his shelter. He could now be seen bolting in the direction of the next rooftop. Owens could barely make out his form and was in no position to hit him, not with the water tank and cooling unit in his way.

Harry, spitting out the asphalt dust that had gotten in his mouth and rubbing his eyes free of the same, started after him, oblivious of the water that cascaded down on him.

The escaping gunman was agile, that much was obvious, leapfrogging over the retaining wall, momentarily disappearing from sight until he picked himself up and began his scramble across the contiguous roof.

But in mid-motion he wheeled about, firing his Yugoslav FAZ automatic, a cousin of the famous—some would say notorious—Soviet AK machine gun. Lacking optimal balance, he failed to cause Harry injury, but he did force Harry down, which in turn allowed him the opportunity to put more distance between them.

The threatening afternoon skies, which had held off since morning, now unleashed a fierce downpour that did not even bother announcing itself with the formality of a drizzle. The rooftops were converted into instant pools, and the deluge of water made their surfaces more and more slippery until both Harry and the man he was chasing found the going increasingly difficult. And there was no question that either of them could proceed as fast, as nimbly, as they had before the skies broke.

They got onto their third rooftop, but only by a risky jump down one entire story. The impact was painful. Harry, coming down on his knees, had momentarily stumbled and fallen into a gathering, mud-clotted lake. After lifting himself to his feet with difficulty, he could no longer see the man.

He continued to the rooftop’s edge and peered down. This was as far as one could go. Either the terrorist had leaped eleven floors, which was unlikely given his determination to extend his lifetime beyond this afternoon, or he had somehow found another way off the roof.