one in a few moments. He cannot hold too long against such odds.”
Rourke nodded agreement. “I know, I don’t think we’ll encounter that much resistance at the lab itself—they wouldn’t want to risk a Shootout that would destroy their equipment. If we get inside, we should be able to get loaded and get out again before we bump into more trouble.” He loaded the last of the two revolvers—the Python — and hol-stered it.
“Let’s go,” and Rourke gunned the Ninja. He looked back once.
Vladov and his men were holding the chamber. The sound of gunfire was loud. Soon it would reach a peak, then stop—and Vladov and his men—they would be dead. Cap-ture for them was something Rourke didn’t even consider.
“Let’s get out of here,” and Rourke started into the corri-dor.
Chapter Fifty-nine
Five of his men lived, Daszrozinski though wounded, among them. Both of the GRU men had perished in the fighting.
“I have not seen, Comrade Captain—I have not seen Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy.”
“He is here somewhere. Perhaps ahead, waiting for Doctor Rourke and Comrade Major Tiemerovna near the laboratory. But he is here.”
The fighting had slowed for a moment, the Elite Corps personnel massing by the long corridor through which Vladov and his men had come, Elite Corps bodies litter-ing the floor, dangling dead or dying from the construc-tion towers.
“I believe that we should counterattack, my friend,” Vladov smiled. His own wounded side hurt him badly and he had lost considerable blood and his head ached from it.
“Yes, Comrade Captain, I believe this, too, when they come for us, we can go to them. We can show them what it really means to be Russian.”
“Order the men to check their weapons and fix bayo-nets.”
Vladov blotted out Daszrozinski’s response, staring across the overturned golf cart toward the KGB Elite Corps position by the end of the corridor. He checked his Smith & Wesson automatics — all three of them, one at a time.
He checked his rifle. He affixed the inverted Bowie bladed bayonet to it.
“Comrade Captain, we are ready,” Daszrozinski said, interrupting Vladov’s thoughts—of death and what, if anything, lay beyond it. It was easier to die, he consid-ered, as someone other than a Russian. One might be al- lowed to grow up with a faith in some afterlife. But nothing about being Russian was easy or ever had been. And he was proud somehow of that.
He looked at his men.
“When they come for us, we shall cheat them, we shall counterattack. I estimate there are one hundred of them massing there by the end of the corridor. There are six of us. We should easily be able to kill one quarter of their number, perhaps greater than that. For we are whom we are, we are the best our nation has to offer. We are the finest soldiers who have ever lived. We have trained, we have fought, some of us have already died. And the rest shall join our comrades soon. If any of you hold a reli-gious belief, now is the time to make your peace with your God. This will be the last battle for us all. I have never known finer comrades—there could be no finer comrades for any officer, for any man.”
Vladov extended his right hand to each of his men in turn, all of them huddled there behind the overturned golf carts. At last he came to Daszrozinski. “My finest friend,” he told the younger officer. The two men em- braced.
Vladov had cried once before in his adult life, when the woman he had been about to marry had died in an agri-cultural accident.
He cried now as he raised his right hand to salute his men. Each returned the salute.
From the end of the corridor across the space of the vaulted hall from them there was a shout. Then the sound of an automatic weapon.
He lowered the salute as did his men.
He looked across the golf carts—the KGB Elite Corps was walking forward, their weapons firing sporadically.
“See to your uniforms,” Vladov ordered, the men straightening their tunics. “Gloves.” Each man in turn took his parade dress white gloves from inside his uni-form, pulling them on. Vladov straightened his beret.
“A wedge formation—we run to them—we kill them. My comrades.”
Vladov raised himself up—his side hurt him terribly, but he kept his head up.
“Attack—fight!” He started to run forward, Daszrozinski beside him, his men around him. He fired out the AKS-74, seeing it all as if in slow motion when the Elite Corps bodies fell to his fire. He let the assault rifle fall to his side. His 659 pistols—both 9mms in his hands, he ran ahead, emptying the double column magazines at his ene- mies. Daszrozinski fell beside him and did not move, dead.
He kept going, both pistols emptied—he let them fall from his hands—he would not need them in an anony- mous mass grave with his comrades. He drew the Smith Mini Gun in the shoulder holster under his tunic, firing, killing, another of his men down, a scream issuing from his throat,
“Long live the—” But he died before the word came out.
Vladov moved ahead, walking now, his pistol empty— he let it fall. He raised his empty rifle—
no time to load it, closing with the KGB, his bayonet doing its mighty work, hacking, slashing, killing. The rifle fell from his right hand as the fingers there were severed.
His men were dead.
He grabbed his knife with his left hand, unsheathing it, burying it in the chest of an Elite Corps Major—killing him.
He felt the coldness suddenly, not knowing for an in-stant if it were the blood loss, the shock, or the moment before death.
It was the moment before death he realized then, a bay-onet being ripped from his already wounded side as he fell.
But in Vladov’s left hand was the knife. The bayonet stabbed at him again, missing him, Vladov thrusting the knife upward, into the abdomen of his attacker. There was a scream.
The blades of perhaps a dozen bayonets hacked toward him and Vladov shouted the name given his men and him-self. “Fight!” One of the blades was coming at his throat and he didn’t turn his face away from it and ...
Chapter Sixty
Reed fired the last round from his .45 into the face of the KGB Elite Corpsman, shoving the body aside, pushing against the doorway—it didn’t give. But Dressier was beside him, rasping,
“Stay back, sir,” and Dressler’s M-16 emptied into the locking mechanism.
Reed threw his body against the doors, his left shoulder aching him badly, his left arm already drenched with his blood.
The doors gave and Reed half fell through, Dressier be-side him. They threw their bodies against the doors, closing them, the fighting still going on in the corridor outside, less than a half dozen of Reed’s men surviving it.
“Sir, you goin’ up to the particle beam weapons?”
“I’m gonna sabotage the controls. President Chambers told me what to do if I got this far—make the power build up in the system and blow the weapons up — “
“You gonna be needin’ me, Colonel. I’d sorta—well—the men outside there.”
“Gimme your plastique, Sergeant Dressier.”
Dressier reached under his fatigue blouse. “Here, sir—nice and warm. Malleable.”
Reed nodded, noticing for the first time that in the battle to get out of the smaller access corridor, Dressier too had been wounded — his left leg was drenched with blood and there was a wound from the right side of his neck, blood clotting there.
