evening,' he said as he passed. He moved around the women and bumped into the bodyguard. 'Excuse me, Comrade-' The man found that there was a pistol aimed at his face. 'Turn left and go into the alley. Hands out where I can see them, Comrade.'
The shock on the poor bastard's face was amusing as hell, Clark thought, reminding himself that this was a skilled man with a gun in his pocket. He grabbed the back of the man's I collar and kept him out at arm's length, with his gun held in tight.
'Mother?' Katryn said in quiet alarm.
'Hush and do as I say. Do as this man says.'
'But-'
'Against the wall,' Clark told the man. He kept the gun aimed at the center of the bodyguard's head while he switched hands, then he chopped hard on the side of his neck with his right hand. The man fell stunned, and Clark put handcuffs on his wrists. Next he gagged him, tied up his ankles, and dragged him to the darkest spot he could find. 'Ladies, if you will come with me, please?'
'What is this?' Katryn asked.
'I don't know,' her mother admitted. 'Your father told I me to-'
'Miss, your father has decided that he wants to visit America, and he wants you and your mother to join him,' Clark said in flawless Russian.
Katryn did not reply. The lighting in the alley was very poor, but he could see her face lose all of the color it had. Her mother looked little better.
'But,' the young girl said finally. 'But that's treason? I don't believe it.'
'He told me? he told me to do whatever this man says,' Maria said. 'Katryn-we must.'
'But-'
'Katryn,' her mother said. 'What will happen to your life if your father defects and you remain behind? What will happen to your friends? What will happen to you? They will use you to get him back, anything they have to do, Katusha?'
'Time to leave, folks.' Clark took both women by the arm.
'But-' Katryn gestured at the bodyguard.
'He'll be fine. We don't kill people. It's bad for business.' Clark led them back to the street, turning left toward the harbor.
The Major had divided his men into two groups. The smaller one was setting explosive charges on everything they could find. A light pole or a laser, it didn't matter to them. The large group had cut down most of the KGB troops who'd tried to come here, and was arrayed around the control bunker. It wasn't actually a bunker, but whoever had made the construction plans for the place had evidently thought that the control room should have the same sort of protection as those at the Leninsk Cosmodrome, or maybe he'd thought that the mountain might someday be subjected to a nuclear airburst attack. Most likely was that someone had decided the manual prescribed this sort of structure for this sort of place. What had resulted was a building with reinforced-concrete walls fully a meter thick. His men had killed the KGB commander and taken his vehicle, with the heavy machine gun, and were pouring fire into the vision slits cut in the structure. In fact, no one used them for looking, and their rounds had long since pounded through the thick glass and were chewing into the room's computers and control gear. Inside, General Pokryshkin had taken command by default. He had thirty or so KGB troops, armed only with light weapons and what little ammunition they'd been carrying when the attack had begun. A lieutenant was handling the defense as best he could, while the General was trying to get help by radio.
'It will take an hour,' a regimental commander was saying. 'My men are moving out right now!'
'Fast as you can!' Pokryshkin said. 'People are dying here.' He'd already thought of helicopters, but in this weather they'd accomplish nothing at all. A helicopter assault would not even have been a gamble, just suicide. He set down the radio and picked up his service automatic. He could hear the noise from the outside. All the site's equipment was being blown up. He could live with that now. As great a catastrophe as that was, the people mattered more. Nearly a third of his engineers were in the bunker. They'd been finishing up a lengthy conference when the attack began. Had that not been the case, fewer would be here, but those would have been out working on the equipment. At least here they had a chance.
On the other side of the bunker's concrete walls, the Major was still trying to figure this one out. He'd hardly expected to find this sort of structure. His RPG antitank rounds merely chipped the wall, and aiming them at the narrow slits was difficult in the darkness. His machine-gun rounds could be guided to them with tracers, but that wasn't good enough.
Find the weak points, he told himself. Take your time and think it out. He ordered his men to maintain a steady rate of fire and started moving around the building. Whoever was inside had his weapons equally dispersed, but buildings like this one always had at least one blind spot? The Major merely had to find it.
'What is happening?' his radio squawked.
'We have killed perhaps fifty. The rest are in a bunker and we're trying to get them, too. What of your target?'
'The apartment building,' the Archer replied. 'They're all in there, and-' The radio transmitted the sound of gunfire. 'We will have them soon.'
'Thirty minutes and we must leave, my friend,' the Major said.
'Yes!' The radio went silent.
The Archer was a good man, and a brave one, the Major thought as he examined the bunker's north face, but wirh just a week's formal training he'd be so much more effective? just a week to codify the things that he was learning on his own? and to pass on the lessons that others had shed blood for? There was the place. There was a blind spot.
The last mortar rounds were targeted on the roof of the apartment block. Bondarenko smiled as he watched. Finally the other side had done something really foolish. The 82-millimeter shells didn't have a chance of breaking through the concrete roof slabs, but if they'd spread them around the building's periphery he'd have lost many of his men. He was down to ten, two of them wounded. The rifles of the fallen were inside the building now, being fired from the second floor. He counted twenty bodies outside his perimeter, and the attackers-they were Afghans, he was sure of that now-were milling about beyond his vision, trying to decide what to do. For the first time Bondarenko felt that they just might survive after all. The General had radioed to say that a motorized regiment was on the way down the road from Nurek, and though he shuddered to think what it would be like driving BTR infantry carriers over snow-covered mountain roads, the loss of a few infantry squads was as nothing compared to the corporate expertise that he was trying to protect now.
The incoming rifle fire was sporadic now, just harassment fire while they decided what to do next. With more people he'd try a counterattack, just to throw them off balance, but the Colonel was tied to his post. He couldn't risk it, not with a mere squad left to cover two sides of the building.
Do I pull back now? The longer I can keep them away from the building, the better, but should I do my withdrawal now? His thoughts wavered at that decision. Inside the building his troops would have far better protection, but he'd lose the ability to control them when each man was separated from the next by the interior wails. If they pulled inside and withdrew to the upper floors, they'd allow the Afghan sappers to drop the building with explosive charges-no, that was the counsel of despair. Bondarenko listened to the scattered rifle shots that punctuated the sounds of wounded and dying men and couldn't make up his mind.
Two hundred meters away, the Archer was about to do that for him. Mistaking the casualties he'd taken here to mean that this part of the building was the most heavily defended, he was leading what was left of his men to the other side. It required five minutes to do so, while those he left behind kept up a steady drumbeat of fire into the Russian perimeter. Out of mortar rounds, out of RPG projectiles, the only thing left to him besides rifles were a few grenades and six satchel charges. All around him fires blazed into the night, separate orange-red flames reaching upward to melt the falling snow. He heard the cries of his own wounded as he formed up the fifty men he had left. They'd attack as one mass, behind the leader who'd brought them here. The Archer flipped the safety off his AK-47, and remembered the first three men he'd killed with it.
Bondarenko's head snapped around when he heard the screams from the other side of the building. He turned back and saw that nothing was happening. It was time to do something, and he hoped that it was the right thing:
'Everyone back to the building. Move!' Two of his remaining ten were wounded, and each had to be helped. It
