They were cut off as the final charge began with an unholy war cry. He had enough time to wonder where it had originated, what benighted jungle swamp or howling desert these particular nig nog asswits hailed from that they should travel so fucking far and die in such numbers just to have at him.
He had four bullets left for his own Beretta and resolved to put each of them into a different man, standing up from where he'd crouched below the scarred ruins of the bank's high-vaulted windows and assuming a comfortable shooter's stance, taking careful aim with a two-handed grip. His pistol boomed once, and a charging asswit spun and dropped. He fired again, and the throat of another exploded in red ruin. A third shot smacked into the chest of a massively fat man whose momentum carried him forward so far that Milosz wondered if he had been hit at all. He lifted his aim slightly and shot him in the face, which came apart like a rotten melon, spewing its corruption everywhere.
Bullets struck and whizzed all around as he calmly unsheathed his fighting knife and waited to receive the enemy.
At last they drew close enough for him to marvel at the whiteness of teeth bared like canine fangs, as though they might leap the last ten feet and tear him apart like jackals. And then… a murderous wind blew over them, scything them down, carving through them, raking huge chunks of meat and chips of bone from their dancing bodies. So shocked was he that it took another second before he recognized the dense, ripping sound of a high- capacity machine gun coming from somewhere to the north. And then his knee collapsed under him as Gardener kicked it out from behind and dragged him down below the line of the window.
'What the fuck! Is that the cavalry? The real cavalry?'
The ferocious industrial hammering continued without faltering, and Milosz risked a pop up to see what had become of the assault wave.
It was broken.
A few asswits were fleeing back through the flames and the shattered landscape through which they came, some of them tumbling as short staccato roars from the automatic weapons cut them down.
Milosz looked around, desperate to see who had saved them, incredulous that they had survived. There had to be an explanation.
But all he heard was one loud, mocking American voice.
'No, siree. You do not get these from pettin' kitty cats. Hooaahh!'
29
London 'The armorer will see you now, ma'am.'
The young gray-suited man pronounced it 'marm.'
'Thanks,' she said. The occasional vestiges of Ye Olde England still amused her greatly. Caitlin swallowed the last of her thin, lukewarm instant coffee with a grimace. That didn't amuse her at all. It was nothing like the potent brew Bret made back on the farm, but it would have been churlish to refuse it. Such offers were not made lightly, even within the confines of the London Cage, where many of the privations suffered by the wider city were ameliorated by black budgets and secondary funding sources.
'I have a few of the usual suspects to see. I'll join you in the briefing room,' said Dalby, excusing himself from the scarred Formica table and the trifling remains of a plate of fries-hereabouts known as chips-lying in a puddle of dark brown gravy. Dalby ate his chips with a knife and fork, which Caitlin also filed under Q, for quirk.
They shook hands, the Englishman being a stickler for the formalities. Indeed, the word 'stickler' could have been invented just for him. Caitlin picked up her backpack and followed the younger officer out of the staff canteen and into a long corridor lined with closed doors and blacked-out windows. Somewhere nearby a man, or possibly a woman, was crying. Walking behind her escort, she noted that his hair was slightly longer than normal and his chin more heavily stubbled. She wondered if he had just come in from the field-unlikely, given the lowly nature of his duties today-or whether, like everyone else, he was feeling the hardships of the ration system. She was certainly missing the small luxuries of home life at the farm: the fresh eggs and milk, a loaf of bread baked in the wood-fired oven. And Bret and Monique, of course. She couldn't stop wondering how they were faring and how long it might be before she would see them again. Would the baby even recognize her? On cue, her leaky breasts began aching dully.
'Knock it off, asshole,' she muttered to herself before mommy guilt could run away with her.
'Excuse me, marm?' asked the suit, turning his head as he continued to stride down the hallway.
'Don't sweat it.' She smiled. 'Talking to myself. First sign of madness.'
'Very good, marm.'
They reached a set of stairs at the end of the hall and descended three flights, which would have put them well below the river. The cinder block walls leaked moisture and in places had sprouted cancerous-looking growths between the bricks. Some of the lightbulbs had burned out, making the staircase something of a darkened well. At the very bottom they pushed through a pair of heavy rubber doors into a workshop, an area much better lit by fluorescent tubes and long-life bulbs. Dehumidifiers labored to suck the dampness out of the space with limited effect. The cement floor still had a moist color to it.
Workers in coveralls bent before workbenches laden with the tools of war. Racks of M16s lined the far wall where a couple of men were working with a larger rifle barrel. Probably something that would increase the punch of the pathetically underpowered round. On other workbenches, innocent-looking civilian devices were being stripped down to their component parts and remodeled with secret compartments, special packages, and, in some cases, explosives. Surrounded by the whine of power tools and the scent of machine grease, Caitlin thought it was the sort of place her father would have loved even though he wasn't a gun nut.
The suit handed her off to a middle-aged woman, a short, squat specimen with an enormous mole on one of her nostrils.
'Hiya, Gerty.' Caitlin smiled. 'Long time.'
''Ello, pet.' The woman grinned back, displaying an alarming mouthful of decaying teeth. 'Sending you out again, are they? A woman in your condition; it's a disgrace is what it is, pet. An absolute disgrace. You should be at 'ome with your young one and that lovely man of yours. Sorry to 'ear about 'im, I was, luv, I hope he's resting well. Typical of the Wallies running this place, I tell you. Still, beggars and choosers, eh? Mister Dalby said you'd be needing all your kit 'n' caboodle, then. A lovely chap that Dalby, a gent of the old school, too. So, whereabouts are we off to this time, you poor girl you?'
Gerty's delivery was uninterrupted by the need to draw breath or apparently to pause while injesting the sodden biscuit she dunked into a cup of tea before pushing it into that mouth full of broken tombstones.
'I'm off to Germany, Gert,' said Caitlin. 'Probably fly out later today.'
'Oh, dear,' cooed the armorer. 'Nothing good ever comes of intrigues with those sausage-eating bastards. They did for my old granddad, you know, Miss Cait. A Stuka got him at Dunkirk. A terrible shock it was to old nan Dorothy, too. And she with her dicky heart an' all. It's a wonder the family line didn't die out there and then.'
The woman put one warm, meaty hand through the crook of Caitlin's arm and drew her deeper into the workshop. A few men and women, mostly men, huddled around machine tools, fiddling and adjusting levers and dials. One manned a lathe from which poured a shower of bright, white sparks and a high screeching sound.
'So will you be giving the bally Hun a stand-up floggin', then, Miss Cait? Or doing him quietly with a bit of shiv work and piano wire?'
Caitlin grinned.
'I'll be going into the shariatowns, Gerty…'
'Oh, Gawd…'
'So discretion will be my friend, but…'
They finished the old routine together, 'A sodding great shooter couldn't hurt, neither.'
'All right, then,' Gerty said as they came to her personal office, an isolated workbench in the center of the shop. 'I understand that discretion may well be the better part of valor, but there's nothing quite so discreet as forty grains of hollow-point silenced by one of these spankin' new Reflex Suppressors we've just 'ad in. It's the very thing to give one of those mad Turks over there pause to think that perhaps he might have misinterpreted the Prophet's teachings about the relative relations between the sexes, not that they're not always thinking about the
