The scout drew nearer.
He held his fire. Something about the moving figure’s shape intrigued him. Then he realized what it was. The American scout was a woman! Nedel bared his teeth in the darkness, anticipating even more pleasure once he had eliminated her companions.
Suddenly another Uzi stuttered harshly, spitting bullets down the road.
Pieces of asphalt and shredded grass and dirt exploded all around the black-clad woman. She fell forward and lay still.
Nedel swore silently. Bazhenov had panicked.
Suddenly he saw the Russian poke his head out above the bushes, trying to get a clearer shot. The demolitions expert brought his submachine gun up, aiming intently at the motionless figure curled up beside the road.
And then another weapon fired, this one from farther down the hill.
Hit in the face, Bazhenov screamed shrilly once and then fell sideways, sprawling out from the bushes to lie in a heap. A second burst tore him apart.
Instantly, the black-clad gunman who had killed him leaped to his feet and raced toward the fallen woman. He dropped to her side, apparently fumbling for a medical kit in one of the many pouches on his assault vest.
Nedel nodded slightly to himself. That was a worthwhile target. Slowly, with great care, he rose up from behind his little pile of rocks. He stared down the short barrel of his Uzi, breathing shallowly, waiting until the sights settled on the kneeling man and hung there. His finger tightened on the trigger …
Lying prone about one hundred meters away, Smith fired. The MP5 chattered loudly, punching back against his shoulder. Three spent cartridges flew away into the grass. Hit twice, once in the neck and once in the shoulder, Brandt’s gunman slumped forward. Black in the pale light, blood pulsed across the rocks briefly and then stopped flowing.
Grim-faced, Jon sprang up and sprinted forward to where Kirov knelt beside Fiona Devin.
She was already sitting up when he got there. “I’m okay,” she insisted, pale and plainly a bit shaken, but smiling with relief nonetheless. “They missed me.”
“You say they missed?” Kirov growled. He reached out and touched a long tear through the dark cloth covering her upper left arm. A thin trickle of blood welled up from a bullet graze there. “So what is this?”
“That?” Fiona said, grinning back at him. “That’s nothing but a scratch.”
“You were lucky,” Smith told her bluntly. His heart was still pounding.
Like Kirov, he had been sure that she was dead or badly wounded.
She nodded calmly. “Indeed I was, Colonel.” She looked down ruefully at the radio clipped to her equipment vest. It had been smashed, either by a bullet or by a rock when she dove for cover. She stripped off the now-useless headset. “But it looks as though I’ll have to rely on you two to make any calls for me.”
Abruptly, bright white light flared through the night behind them, throwing their shadows ahead up the slope. They whirled around, in time to see a huge fireball rising in the west. Shards of twisted steel and shattered concrete spun away from the center of the explosion, soaring hundreds of meters into the night sky before tumbling back to earth. The sound of the blast reached them in that same moment, a rumbling, thunderous freight-train roar that died slowly, leaving only a stunned silence in its wake.
“There went Renke’s lab,” Smith said bitterly, staring at the pillar of flame still rising from the ECPR compound. “Along with most of the evidence we needed.”
Kirov nodded somberly. “All the more reason to capture Malkovic and Brandt, then.” He shrugged. “But at least we no longer have to worry so much about being stopped by the police.”
“No kidding,”Jon agreed absently, still looking at the fires consuming the shattered ruins of Renke’s weapons lab. “Every municipal police and Carabinieri squad in Orvieto will be swarming over that compound in ten minutes or less.” He leaned down and helped Fiona back to her feet. “We’d better not waste the opportunity.”
Together, the three Covert-One agents turned and sprinted east along the road, running flat-out now toward the top of the plateau.
Pushing carefully through a tangle of vines, Randi Russell saw the sudden glare light up the slope around her, casting its stark illumination across a landscape of tall grass, leafless fruit trees, waist-high rail fences, and eroded terraces covered in brush. She dropped flat, waiting until the flash faded and the hillside returned to darkness.
In the sudden silence following the explosion, she heard a quick murmur of startled voices from ahead and off to her left. Cautiously, she rose and moved forward again, heading in that direction. The voices fell silent abruptly.
Randi came to a rail fence and crouched lower. In the faint moonlight, the terrain ahead looked far more open. It was difficult, however, to make out details. There was a succession of what appeared to be grassy mounds with gray stones set in the top, but the areas between these mounds were bathed in impenetrable shadow. It was time to get a better look at what lay ahead of her, she decided. She raised her image-intensifier binoculars. Set to amplify even the smallest amount of ambient light, whether from the stars or the moon, they turned night into effective day.
Immediately, the landscape leaped into clearer focus.
She was looking at what appeared to be a rectangular grid of streets.
Small houses built of large blocks of quarried tufa, a form of pitted gray limestone, lined these narrow, stepped roads cut into the hillside. Some of their roofs were conical, others were flat, but almost all of them were covered in grass and hard-packed earth. Low, dark, trapezoidal openings gaped in the center of each building. Letters in some archaic script were carved on the large stones set above the empty doorways. Beyond the buildings she could see a path with railings leading up shallow steps to an empty parking lot.
This was the old Etruscan city of the dead, Randi realized, remembering the quick research she had done on her flight down from Germany the day before. Some of the tombs here were nearly three thousand years old. Excavated beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the vases, drinking cups, weapons, and armor found inside were now on display in a museum next to Orvieto’s cathedral.
She frowned. Renke and his bodyguard must be hiding somewhere in the necropolis, probably with the intention of slipping away back down the hill when all the shooting died down. Not a bad plan, Randi thought coldly.
Anyone trying to hunt for them up and down those narrow streets would be exposed, a sitting duck for anyone shooting from cover inside one of the tombs.
She stuffed the binoculars back into one of her equipment pouches and slid under the bottom rail of the fence, moving slowly to make sure she did not snag any of her gear. Then she wriggled toward the tombs through the long grass, gliding quietly from one patch of shadow to another.
Periodically, Randi stopped moving to listen, trying to ferret out the slightest sound that could tell her where her enemies were lurking. But she heard nothing, only the sound of police and fire and ambulance sirens speeding toward the explosion-ravaged ECPR compound.
At last she made it to the position she had been aiming for, a small stand of scrub trees growing out of the slope above the necropolis. From here, she could look down into most of the streets, especially the lanes that ran back toward the Orvieto road.
Again, Randi dug out her binoculars. Methodically, she swept them across the ancient cemetery, focusing first on the entrances of tombs that she thought offered the best vantage points. Unless she missed her guess, Renke and his bodyguard would have picked a hiding place that would let them spot anyone entering the tomb complex from the road or the parking lot.
Her binoculars slid slowly past a tomb opening about halfway up the central street, paused, and then came back. Was that paler shape inside the darkness just a chunk of fallen stone or a trick of the moonlight?
Randi held her breath, waiting patiently. The shape moved slightly, taking on form and definition. She was looking at the head and shoulders of a man, a clean-shaven man who was crouched just inside the low opening, peering down the street toward the entrance to the necropolis. He shifted position again and now she saw the weapon in his hands.
She held still. Was Renke inside the tomb with this man? Or had the weapons scientist chosen another
