an American-made 22-caliber pistol, an assassin's favorite, very effective at close range but virtually useless beyond twenty yards. Veil gripped the gun, straightened up.
Perry was already out of the room and running down the corridor leading to the main entrance. Veil caught up with him at the swinging doors, grabbed his shoulder, and roughly spun him around.
'You stay here, Perry! There's nothing you can do down there! You're the last line of defense for the people in the hospital! Tell everyone you can find to get out and run like hell for the woods!'
'What about Sharon? Should I carry her out?'
For a few moments Veil was paralyzed by agonizing indecision. Finally he spat out the word, 'No. If she's disconnected from the machines supplying her with drugs and anesthesia, I'm afraid she'll die—or worse. I'll just have to stop them before they get up here. Don't argue, Perry! Stay here!'
Then Veil was out the doors and sprinting down the narrow, winding path leading to Sharon's offices and a cluster of chalets. To his surprise and chagrin, Perry suddenly appeared beside him.
'The best defense is a good offense,' Perry managed to gasp as he pumped his arms and raced alongside Veil. 'Dries and the orderlies will take care of the other business, and you certainly made it clear to Dries that he shouldn't touch Dr. Solow. Also, there's no way I could stop anybody who made it up there. You were just trying to protect me.'
'Damn it, Tomp—!'
They rounded a sharp bend and saw a green-uniformed man running up the trail toward them. Two large and ominous, rectangle-shaped bundles slapped against his sides as he ran. He carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
On the run, there was no way he was going to go up against an automatic rifle with a .22 pistol, Veil thought as the man glanced up and saw them. Virtually without breaking stride, the commando snapped his rifle up to waist-high firing position.
'Veil?!'
Perry dove to the other side as the assault rifle chattered and sprayed bullets through the space where they had separated only an instant before.
Veil fell through the brush and landed on his side, his fall cushioned by the soft loam of the forest floor. He rolled, then twisted into position behind a tree trunk as more bullets shredded the underbrush. He waited until the firing stopped, then reached around the trunk and squeezed off a round. He was immediately answered by another burst of automatic rifle fire that shredded the bark of the trees on either side of him.
It was like pitting a peashooter against a cannon, Veil thought. And he only had four peas left.
When the shooting stopped again, Veil counted to five, then burst out from behind the tree and started to race up the mountain, darting between trees, running parallel to the trail, searching desperately for some spot where he could get a clear shot at the sapper. But he was slowed by the soft ground and underbrush, and he saw a flash of Kelly green on the trail. Outdistancing him.
Four bullets—four chances to stop the man. Veil stopped running, braced, and fired through the trees toward the trail. One bullet glanced off a tree, and the other three simply missed their unseen target.
The man was gone, Veil thought as, for the first time in his life, he understood the full depths of meaning in the word
But Perry Tompkins could.
The burly figure of the painter, sprinting at full speed, flashed by on the trail.
Veil tore through the clinging underbrush and out onto the path, then put his head down and raced after the two men. When he looked up, he found that he had not closed the distance between himself and Perry. However, Perry was now perhaps fifteen yards behind the weighted-down sapper, and gaining. Gasping for breath, Veil reached down to the deepest part of himself for more strength and speed—and he slowly began to gain on the artist.
Then the commando heard, or sensed, Perry behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw Perry barely ten yards away.
Veil started to shout a warning, but it was too late. The commando had stopped and was already pressing the trigger on his Kalashnikov as he swung it around. The bullets caught Perry in midair, ripping through his midsection and killing him instantly as he fell onto the commando. The man collapsed under the weight of Perry's body. He struggled to free himself, but by then Veil, his long hair swirling about his head in the morning breeze, was standing over him, staring down into his eyes like a blond-haired, blue-eyed angel of death.
Veil crushed the man's skull with a single, tremendously powerful kick to the temple. Then he picked up the rifle, slipped in a fresh magazine, and sprinted back down the trail.
Tears glistened in Veil's eyes for a moment, then were gone—chased by the force of his passage and his will. He hoped there would be time later for proper homage, meditation, and free-flowing tears, to the men who had sacrificed their lives to save his and Sharon's; for now, the only proper meditation was to wreak destruction upon those men who would destroy the hospice and the people in it.
There was another explosion that shook the ground. A burst of gunfire somewhere across the compound.
Explosions were for buildings, Veil thought as his lungs and the muscles in his legs began to burn. Bullets were for people.
When he was twenty yards from the end of the trail that emptied into a clearing ringed by chalets, Veil cut into the woods to his right in order to reach the rear of the nearest chalet. He threw his rifle up on the roof, then followed it by scrambling up a tree and swinging over on an overhanging limb. He picked up the rifle, then crawled up the sloping roof and peered over the top.
From his vantage point he could see the entire clearing and all of the chalets that ringed it. There were two sappers at the opposite end of the clearing, standing perhaps thirty yards apart, spraying gunfire into the surrounding woods. Veil aimed and squeezed off a shot that caught the man on the left between the shoulder blades. The second man reacted and started to run to his right, but Veil calmly tracked the man with his rifle and sprayed the area in front of him with bullets.
The man ran into them, danced for a moment like a drunken puppet as the bullets ripped through him, then collapsed to the ground when Veil released the trigger.
Silence. The eye-watering smell of cordite.
Veil waited, watching and listening. There was no sound except for the sibilant whisper of the waterfall in the distance; no sign of any people.
There were only the chimes sounding in his head, behind his eyes, and they were growing increasingly louder.
Veil quickly looked behind him, but he could see no movement in the forest behind the chalet. When he looked back, the satchel charge—thrown from somewhere beneath the chalet's front eave—had already reached its apogee and was falling toward him.
The satchel would be dialed for short-fuse detonation, Veil thought as he rolled down the roof—perhaps as little as four or five seconds, just enough time to allow the commando who had thrown it to duck behind a neighboring chalet or into the woods.
He made it over the edge, but the concussion of the blast caught him in midair. It struck him like an iron fist, spinning him in the air and hurling him to the ground, breaking him. He did not lose consciousness, but his left arm was bent back under his body at an impossible angle, and he just had time to bring his right arm over his eyes to protect them from the debris, shards of glass and wood, that rained down on him.
When it was over, Veil was buried in the afterbirth of destruction. He was not in pain, but his entire body felt numb. He also felt remarkably detached and clearheaded as he waited. And waited.
Finally there came a kicking sound, accompanied by beats of pressure on the left side of his head. The kicking became scraping, and in a few moments he felt a rifle butt bump against his arm as dirt and scraps of wood were scraped away from his face and chest.
Chimes tolled behind his eyes.
