Blackburn’s ATV and he veered off sharply in a zigzagging evasive maneuver.
The air quivered with incoming, and though surprise had given the Sword team an edge, their opposition was determined and murderous. A rippling onslaught of 7.62mm bullets scored a direct hit on one of the ATVs and its driver went sailing over the handlebars like a rag doll, blood showering from his chest. The vehicle flipped over twice in midair, spilling the man in the gunseat. He rose, disoriented, blood ribboning down from under his helmet, and was shot dead before he could regain his bearings.
A second ATV was tagged off to Blackburn’s right, its tire rupturing with an explosive outrush of air, peeling away from its rim like a shed snakeskin. It overbalanced and went skidding onto its side in a spray of sand, dislodging its stealthsuited riders. Blackburn saw one of them dash over to his partner, saw him help the man to his feet, saw a member of the hit team take aim at both of them, and knew he had to act fast.
They were pinned.
He wrenched his vehicle in their direction, zooming in close, taking a hand off the handlebars long enough to motion to Perry. Perry nodded, leveled his gun, clouted the diver with a tight, controlled volley before he could pick off the unseated pair.
Angling away, Blackburn suddenly heard gunfire from up on the embankment and swore under his breath.
Starinov, he thought, and urged his ATV toward the slope.
The assassins were up there.
Gilea and Adil sprinted across the crest of the bluff, toward the cottage, now less than ten feet up ahead. Behind them a dead guard lay spilling his blood into the sand, his uniform tunic spotted with bullet holes. They reached the door and halted, Gilea stepping back out of Adil’s way, giving him room to move in front of her and kick it open.
She pivoted away from him, watching his rear, her eyes flicking warily left and right. A guard came racing around the side of the house and she cut him down before he even spotted them, stitching bullets across his middle. Two more Russian soldiers appeared from around back just as she heard the door crash inward amid spears of broken wood, one of them falling instantly to a burst from her weapon, the other managing to squirt off a volley before she took him out. He staggered in a wide circle, made a moist coughing sound, and keeled over sideways, the gun slipping from his grasp.
She turned back to the cottage. Adil was sprawled in front of the open door, half his head blown away. The second man had gotten him with his salvo, she thought, registering his death without emotion.
Her mind was on her job, and her job was making sure Starinov joined Adil in his fate.
Blackburn crested the rise in just enough time to see the Nastik woman leap through the door over her companion’s body.
He braked the ATV to a sand-spitting halt, leaped off the vehicle, and tore after her, drawing his Smith & Wesson from beneath his shock vest as he ran. Perry was at his heels.
Blackburn plunged through the entryway, snapped a bullet into the gun’s chamber, glanced left and right. He wanted Nastik alive, but if it came down to a choice between her and Starinov, he would do whatever he had to.
The foyer was empty. Which direction should he look in? Where the hell
He heard Perry behind him, motioned crisply for him to search the left side of the house, and was turning toward the right, toward what looked like the bedroom, when he heard the dog growling, heard the gunshot, and then heard the loud crash of someone falling back against the wall.
Starinov had been in the kitchen when the shooting started and, realizing what was happening, realizing that his home was under attack, he had plunged into his bedroom to get his personal firearm from his dresser drawer. It was just a small.22 caliber handgun, and he knew it would do little good against the kind of automatic weapons he heard out there in the night, but it was all he had.
He pulled open the drawer and was fumbling under his clothes for the pistol when the woman burst into the room and raised her AK at him, holding it at point-blank range. The grin stretching across her face seemed barely human.
That was when Ome came springing from under the bed, his teeth bared, growling and snarling as he lunged at the woman, clamping his jaws around her ankle.
Caught off guard, she stumbled backward, triggering a wild burst as she smashed against the wall. She tried to recover her balance, kicking at the dog, but only managing to get it off her after its teeth had sunk deep into her flesh.
“Don’t
She looked at him across the room, clinging to the gun, the dog barking in front of her. The leg of her dive suit was soaked with blood. Behind Blackburn, the men he had radioed on his com-link were pouring into the room, led by Scull, shuffling the minister out of harm’s way in a protective phalanx.
“Don’t be suicidal,” Blackburn said. “It’s over.”
She looked at him. Shook her head. Grinned. Still holding the machine gun, her hands clenched tightly around it, trembling.
And then, before Blackburn could react, she swung the AK upward so that its bore was fixed directly upon his heart.
“Over for me,” she said. “Over for both of us.”
His mouth dry of spit, the blood thundering in his ears, Blackburn kept his gun trained on the woman even as she kept her weapon on him, watching her hand for the slightest twitch, hoping to God he’d be fast enough to anticipate her next move. His concentration shrank to a narrow tunnel that encompassed his hand, Gilea, and nothing else.
A moment of slow time passed. Another. Neither of them budged. Neither weapon was lowered. The air around Blackburn felt like gelatin infused with current.
He was unaware of the sudden movement behind him until it was too late. It all seemed to happen with lightning rapidity — the oiled click of a firing mechanism near his ear, the loud crack of the gun discharging behind him, the surprised, almost quizzical expression on Gilea’s face just before the bullet struck her forehead, producing a perfectly round dot of red above the ridge of her nose. Blackburn saw the machine gun jerk in her hand, and for a heartstopping instant was sure her finger would spasmodically lock around the trigger, sure he would be blown off his feet.
But the weapon slipped from her grasp without firing a round, and then her eyes rolled up in their sockets and her legs gave out and she slid loosely to the floor, trailing blood, brains, and skull fragments down the wall as she crumpled.
Blackburn lowered his pistol, turned his head on muscles that felt much too tight.
Starinov was standing directly behind him, having shoved through the Sword operatives that had converged around him. Smoke curled from the barrel of his outthrust.22.
His eyes met Blackburn’s. Held them.
“It is better like this,” he said.
Blackburn swallowed dryly but said nothing. The smell of cordite stung his nostrils.
“Your people saved my life, I saved yours.” Starinov brought down his gun. “Now perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me where you have come from.”
Blackburn was silent another moment. He looked past Starinov at the members of his team, men who had assembled from every corner of the globe to do a job that was both thankless and immeasurably dangerous. Thought about Ibrahim and his desert riders in Turkey, and Nimec’s operatives in New York, and the diverse, ordinary people who had done what they could to help along the way.
How was he to answer?
He considered it another few seconds, and finally just shrugged.
