Net Force

Day thought he caught a flash of movement at the rear of the limo, but when he looked, he didn't see anything.

'Go!' Boyle yelled. 'Go, go!'

The driver tried. The engine roared, the wheels screeched, but the car didn't move. The stench of burning rubber filled the car.

Day thumbed the emergency scramble button on the virgil, and was already reaching for his own pistol when the man in black reached the limo and slapped something on the door. Whatever it was thunked metallically. The man turned and sprinted away, back into the darkness—

'Out!' Boyle screamed. 'He's stuck a limpet on the door! Out!'

Day grabbed the door handle on the driver's side, jerked it up, dove out and hit the ground in a sloppy shoulder roll.

There came the repetitive bark of a submachine gun, followed by the spang! spang! spang! of jacketed teeth chewing at the wounded limo.

Day rolled again, looking for cover. Nothing. Nowhere to hide!

He glanced back at the car. Saw and felt time become mired in heaviness. Boyle exited the car, gun working, tongues of orange fire stabbing into the dark, but it was like a slow-motion scene in a movie.

Boyle jerked as the small-arms fire beat at him, slammed into his torso.

In a small corner of his mind, Day knew that most submachine guns used pistol ammunition and that the vests he and Boyle both wore would stop any handgun round. As long as they didn't—

— blood and brain matter sprayed from the side of Boyle's temple as a bullet exited there—

— as long as they didn't think to shoot for the head!

Damn, damn! What was going on? Who were these people?

In the limo, the driver kept trying to pull away, the roar of the engine continuing. Day could smell the exhaust, the burned tires — he could smell his own fear, too, sharp, sour, overwhelming.

The mine attached to the rear door of the limo went off—blam!

All the glass in the limo blew out. It sleeted in all directions — some of it hit Day, but he was only dimly aware of it touching him.

The car's roof peeled up a little in the back, leaving a fist-sized gap. Smoke, bitter and acrid, washed over him in a hot wave.

The driver hung partway out of his window, boneless.

Dead. The driver and Boyle were both dead. Help would be coming, but he couldn't wait for it — if he did, he would be dead, too.

Day came up, took two or three quick steps, jinked right for two more steps, then cut left. Broken-field, came back to him from football in high school thirty-five years ago.

Gunfire tried to catch him, but failed to connect solidly. A bullet tugged at his jacket, punched through under his left arm. He felt a sense of outrage. The goddamned jacket was Hong Kong silk, it had cost him six hundred dollars!

Another round smashed into his chest, right over the heart. He'd never worn the titanium trauma plate, had just used a trifold of Kevlar stuffed down in the trauma pocket over the heart like a lot of agents did, and the impact hurt like a bastard! Like he'd been hit with a hammer, right on the sternum! Damn!

But it didn't matter. He was up, he was moving—

A black figure appeared in front of him, waving a flashing Uzi. Even in the night and murk of his fear, Day saw the man wore bulky combat armor under his black jacket. Day had been taught to shoot to the center of mass first, but that wouldn't do now, no, no, the SIG.40 wouldn't hurt the attacker that way any more than the Uzi's 9mm's were hurting him!

Still running, Day lifted the SIG, lined the glowing tritium dot of the front sight on the man's nose. Day's vision tunneled — all he could see was the face. The green night-sight dot bounced around, but he squeezed off three shots as fast as he could pull the trigger.

The armored attacker dropped as if his legs had vanished.

All right! All right! He had taken one of them out, he had created a hole, it was just like in football when he'd been the quarterback so long ago.

Now, go through the hole, fast, head for the goal line!

He caught motion peripherally, glanced to his left, and saw another man, also in black. The man held a pistol in two hands. He was as still as a painting. He looked as if he were at the range, ready to practice.

Day felt his bowels clench. He wanted to run, shoot, defecate, all at the same instant. Whoever these guys were, they were professionals. This wasn't any street gang looking for somebody's wallet. This was a hit, an assassination, and they were good—

It was his final thought.

The bullet hit him between the eyes and took away everything else he might ever think.

* * *

In the backseat of the Volvo station wagon, Mikhayl Ruzhyo looked into the cargo compartment behind him at the body of Nicholas Papirosa. The body lay on its side, covered with a blanket, and the smell of death seeped into the air despite the covering. Ruzhyo sighed, shook his head. Poor Nicholas. It had been hoped there would be no casualties — it was always hoped to be so — but the fat American had not been as old and slow as expected. They had underestimated him — an error. Of course, it had been Nicholas who had been responsible for the intelligence about the FBI Commander, so perhaps it was fitting that he was the only casualty. Still, Ruzhyo would miss him. They went back a long way, to the days in the Foreign Intelligence Service, the SRV. Fifteen years. A lifetime in this business.

Tomorrow would have been Nicholas's birthday; he would have been forty-two.

In the front seat, Winters, the American, drove, and Grigory Zmeya rode in the passenger seat, mumbling to himself in Russian.

Their last names — even Winters — were not those bestowed upon them by their fathers. They were jokes. Ruzhyo meant 'rifle.' Nicholas had named himself 'cigarette.' Grigory called himself after the Russian word for 'snake.'

Ruzhyo sighed again. Done was done. Nicholas was dead, but so was the target. The loss was therefore acceptable.

'You doin' okay back there, hoss?' the American said.

'I am fine.'

'Just checkin'.'

The American had said he was from Texas, and either he was or his accent was a passable fake.

Ruzhyo looked down at the pistol on the seat next to him, the one with which he had killed the man who had killed Nicholas. It was a Beretta 9mm, an Italian weapon. It was a fine piece of machinery, well made, but it was also big, heavy, with too much recoil, too much noise, too much bullet for Ruzhyo's taste. When he had been Spetznaz and involved in mokrie dela—wet affairs — he had carried a little PSM, a 5.45mm pistol. The round it fired had been perhaps half as large as those in the Italian gun, and the weapon itself was much smaller than this piece. True, he'd had the armorer tune it for him; but still, it had always been sufficient to do the job. It had never let him down. He would have preferred that weapon to this one, but of course, that would not do. This had to look as if the killing was by someone inside this country, and a Russian assassin's-weapon would ring enough alarms to raise the dead man. The Americans were not altogether stupid in these matters.

He frowned at the Beretta. The Americans had this obsession with size; to them, bigger was always better. Their policemen would sometimes empty handguns containing eighteen or twenty high-powered and large-caliber rounds at their criminals, missing each time, what they called 'spray-and-pray.' They did not seem to understand that a single shot from a small-caliber weapon in the hands of an expert was much more effective than a magazine full of elephant-killing bullets in the hands of an untrained idiot — as many of the American policemen seemed to be. The Jews knew this. The Israeli Mossad still routinely carried.22's, weapons that fired the smallest commercially available rounds. And everybody knew Mossad was not to be taken lightly.