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.
48
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
