Woody rolled onto his knees and made his way to the curtain wall. Black figures were crossing the boulevard toward the building directly across from him. He sent a stream of fire at them. He thought he clipped one but wasn’t sure. They were out of sight now either in or against that corner building.

  More rounds chipped the top of the curtain wall. Woody dropped behind it and recharged his rifle.

  “Woody on overwatch! Bad guys inside the perimeter. Flanking you from the Walgreen’s.” They’d re-named the corner building for the ubiquitous drug store chain.

  No response reached him. Woody realized that the air rush from the grenade blast had torn off his earbud. No use looking for it now. Even without it he could hear someone calling his name.

  It was Chili calling for him over and over from the building below.

  “Get out of there, Chili! The fight’s moving on us!”

  “Woody! Woody!”

  “I’m on the roof, asshole! We have to move!”

  Chili just kept calling him.

  Woody crawled away from the curtain wall. Tracers buzzed overhead searching for targets. He’d have to drag Chili out of there before his SEAL brother called more fire down on them.

  ****

  Blair Freeman and Pancho were exposed on the garage roof. But they couldn’t abandon their position and leave the front of the bank building uncovered. They moved to the cover of the only cars still parked here; an ancient Mercedes sedan with flat tires and a Toyota pickup with a rusted out bed. The two men took up positions with the engine blocks between them and the source of the attack. As protective cover it sucked but it was all they had.

  “Priest! Come in Priest!” Blair spoke low and watched the roof and facing windows of the building they were calling Walgreen’s. The upper floor of that building overlooked the garage’s roof level.

  “Go for Priest.”

  “You hearing this?” Blair said.

  “Roger that.”

  “Stay put for now,” Blair said.

  “I’m set to blow this thing.”

  “Not until we cool down this situation,” Blair said.

  “Negative. This firefight will draw more heat. We need to do this now.” Priest’s voice was even and cool.

  “Give us ten minutes, damn it,” Blair said.

  “We’re coming out now.”

  Blair could not respond. Men in black were dropping from windows on the corner building onto the garage roof. Pancho opened up on them dropping one.

  “Shit,” Blair hissed under his breath and let loose with his Kalashnikov. The Merc trembled on its bare rims under the hail of lead striking it. Blair made himself small behind the front tire and reloaded. Gravel chips hit him from where rounds struck the roof surface inches from him. The car’s hood rang with shots caroming off the surface. He looked over to see Pancho standing now and firing controlled bursts downrange.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit!” The last was a war cry. Blair rolled out from behind the sedan to burn down two men rushing toward him. He lay prone and kept up suppression while the Israeli reloaded. Blair went dry and, elbows and knees, returned to the cover of the Mercedes. The rifle was scorching hot in his hands. He was reloading as he crawled. A shadow crossed his peripheral. He looked up to see a black-clad figure coming around the rear of the car and raising a rifle. The front sight ring lined up with him. Blair looked at it like he imagined a rabbit might stare at a serpent’s tongue.

  The man in black stumbled to strike the sedan’s rear quarter panel hard. He dropped to the gravel lifeless.

  “Get off that roof!” Pig’s voice in his earbud. Pig was covering them from the roof of the building behind them.

  “I got your ass covered! Move out now, Freeman!”

  Blair didn’t question it. He was up and sprinting for the corrugated shack that covered the top of the stairwell that led down to street level. Behind him men shouted and AKs rumbled with their peculiar freight train cadence.

  He heard and felt a muted explosion. It was the shell inside the bank building. Priest had gone ahead and detonated it.

  A second blast followed closer. It lifted Blair off the roof and threw him hard into the steel wall of the stairwell access.

  ****

  These guys were good.

  From Pig’s vantage point across the street he could see black-clad dudes leaping the five-foot gap between Walgreen’s and the garage roof. They moved under a screen of their own suppression fire supporting one another with close fire while their comrades re-loaded. Manny used to call it “combat Darwinism”; if these jihad jerk-offs survived long enough they picked up the skills needed to win.

  Pig wished he had his SAW or an M240 with some real punch and cyclic rate and mag capacity. A belt-fed weapon in his expert hands would turn the tide here in a hot minute. He’d have to make do with the modified AK. He dropped two; including one that came within a hair of kakking Freeman. But the loud-ass AK he was using was drawing fire now. Lead was wanging off the metal frame of the window he was firing from. It followed him as he shifted to another position. These fuckers had spread themselves out to engage the two men on the garage roof in a pure textbook enfilade. They fired one RPG and it was damned sure they had more. It was only a matter of time.

  “Fuck it,” Pig growled and stood exposing himself to fire from a corner window. He ripped out three round bursts and nailed another man moving toward the POS Toyota that the Mossad guy was using for cover.

  Pig felt the floorboards shiver under him. A second blast went off in the bank. The building shuddered around him. A section of plaster the size of a grand piano dropped from the ceiling behind him.

  He called to Freeman to haul ass. He didn’t hear the reply under the sound of the AK chugging in his fists. Freeman heard him. The man was up and running flat out for the shack atop the stairwell.

  Pig stood giving out as much suppression as he could deliver. He took more fire from the roof and windows of the Walgreen’s. The concrete frame of his window was a storm of flying chips and dust. A spent round tapped him in the shoulder like a left hook. Another tugged at the cloth of his sleeve.

  “Thank you, Jesus,” he said and dropped to cover to change magazines.

  A thunderclap sounded outside the window. Pig rose up to see that a grenade struck the Toyota just behind the cab. White-hot kinks of wire shrapnel ripped through the body to hurl the Israeli agent back. The man landed on the gravel like a sack of wet laundry. Pig swung the AK to send rounds through the lowering haze of smoke from the grenade propellant.

  ****

  Heath reached the street as Chili’s first heads-up came through their sat network. He stayed in the shelter of the office block’s arched entryway and crouched low to scan the street toward the foot of the “T” intersection. Tracers were crisscrossing from sources out of his sight. Someone was firing blind at Chili’s hide. The Dragunov boomed steadily. Someone was on the receiving end of the Alabaman’s ice-cold killer eye.

  He saw the RPG snake high into Chili’s building. The Dragunov went silent.

  A rapid exchange between Priest and Freeman rattled in Heath’s ear. The situation was fluid and the two men were at odds over how to react. Priest was laying the bomb in place come hell or high water. Heath would stick with him and, if they were bugging out if this place, they’d do it together. If they were going to stick then they’d do that together too. Their primary mission was to get their hands on that bug. Their secondary mission was making sure no one else got their hands on it.

  Heath looked across the street to the garage building. The boy was there taking turkey peeks from one side of the drive-through opening. The fire was increasing from above. The street was filled with the sounds of a hot firefight somewhere above them.

  “Stay the hell down!” Heath called in English.

  Gharib looked confused and exposed himself further.

  “Stay back!” Heath called again, this time in Arabic.

  The boy ducked back out of sight.

  Priest joined Heath in the arched opening.

  “We’re rigged and ready,” Priest said. “What’s our situation?”

  “A clusterfuck heading for a gangbang,” Heath said.

  “We need to detonate that charge now,” Priest said. “But we can’t expose our location. No matter what happens we hold this bank.”

  “Roger that. Alamo time.”

  “Is the kid still in place?”

  “Yeah. Why do you—?” Heath began.

  “Gharib!” Priest called and the boy poked his head from the cover of the garage opening.

  “Touch the wires to the battery,” Priest called in flawless Arabic. He mimed holding a wire in each hand and touching them to the battery contacts.

  Gharib nodded vigorously and disappeared from sight.

  Heath was about to express how much he thought using the kid as a sapper sucked as an option when the entry foyer shuddered side to side. Tiles rained down on them both. Gharib did as he was told and round numero dos made thunder boom from close behind them. Way too fucking close. Heath tried to shake the clanging from inside his head.

  Seconds later, an answering blast reached them from directly across the street. An RPG. The attackers, whoever the hell they were, were taking the garage and would soon have the high ground.

  If they took the roof of the garage that meant they were moving through the lower level too.

  “Gharib!”

  Heath was up and running to cross the street before Priest could reach out a hand to stop him.

  From down the far end of the street an armored truck trundled around the corner at the Walgreen’s. It was painted an incongruous white. Large block letters in black identified it as a UN vehicle.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  MEANWHILE IN BELGIUM

  A second alarm went off in the Brussels office of Sarchannes-Osito Securitech, EU.

  The security operator had escaped the Veil of Woe with the Golden Arrow of Truth in his possession. He was now wading through Misery Swamp on the way to Castle Dread and had not yet run into the sexy witch again. A new window popped up center screen just as an angry marsh orc was approaching him.

  “Merde,” he said to himself and clicked on the window to expand it.

  Yet another seismic alarm in that flyspeck town in Syria.

  He turned to the operator next to him.

  “I have this alert again,” the security operator said.

  His neighbor shrugged then returned to an instant message conversation with his mistress.

  “Huh,” the security operator said to himself.

  He wrote a second Post-It note and pressed it in place next to the first.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  DRIVING SIDEWAYS

  Roman Timur Tyomkin was not amused.

  The ride through the city was unpleasant and noisy. The driver found them a little used service road that merged onto a street that led into the city from the west and north. The route had had the advantage of being away from the area where the air strikes were concentrated.

  Still they had to tolerate random shots taken at them and, as everywhere in the region, gangs of kids throwing rocks. The interior of the increasingly suffocating van rang with the sounds. The cacophony rose in decibels whenever they came to a halt at a street barricaded either by war damage or design. They’d pull to a stop and the driver would fight the monster vehicle around in a three-point, sometimes four and five point, turn to get them away. The whole while, rocks and bricks and bullets rained on them from all around. The inside of the truck was a drum. Every strike was magnified to ring louder.

  The truck’s interior temperature was as unbearable as the noise. They needed to dog down the protective hatches as they moved through the hostile urban maze. The only relief came from a pair of sluggish fans drawing in slightly less scalding air from outside. Roman had stripped off his sodden shirt and pants. He was dressed only in boxer shorts and boots. Still the sweat rolled off him in a shower whenever he moved. The driver was somewhat startled by Roman’s prosthetic leg but asked no questions. The man was dim but realized that the Russian passenger was on his very last frayed nerve.

  So, it was a very dangerous man made even more dangerous by hours of bottled anxiety and rage that arrived at his destination to find a troop ofzalupasshooting up the street in front of his bank.

  “We are here? This is place?” the driver said.

  “Da! We are fucking here!” Roman roared at him.

  “What we do? Men shooting!” The driver leaned over the wheel to squint through the narrow slots in the protective vents before his windscreen.

  “We kill them,” Roman said. He sprang from his seat and stepped up on the ledge beneath the roof hatch. He swung the hatch open to man the 20mm chain gun.

  ****

  Chili wasn’t sure if it was the symptom of a concussion but he swore he could see a naked white guy firing a cannon from the top of a Russian armored truck painted in winter white. The dude swept both sides of the street, raking the bank and garage fronts with HE and frag rounds. The street filled with a fresh tempest of shrapnel and brick dust.

  He exposed himself out the window to sight on the guy. His skull was still banging from the close encounter with the grenade. The target’s close-cropped blonde head swam in the scope, the reticule swirling on and off target like a pesky insect buzzing the dude’s head.

  Chili turned as he sensed movement next to him. It was Woody.

  ****

  Woody found a wobbly Chili silhouetting himself in an open window. Chili was moving his rifle more like a golfer lining up for a tee than like the master sniper he was. Make that a drunk-off-his-ass golfer. He shouldered Chili aside to see what the hell the racket was coming from down on the street. Chili treated him to a stupid grin and screamed, “Woody! You’re okay!” The man was stone deaf and concussed. The redneck SEAL’s eyes jiggled crazily in his head.

  No time for that right now, Woody thought and trained his rifle out the window to see a dude shouting in what sounded a hell of a lot like Russian. Woody didn’t know a lot of Russian but he knew the bad words. This guy was using all of them. The Russian was raising hell with a big-ass automatic gun and didn’t seem to care who was downrange.

  Woody laid his front sight on the man and let go a three round burst. But the vehicle lurched forward just then. Woody’s rounds struck sparks off the armor plate behind the gun turret. They had no effect but to let the Russian know he was taking fire. The guy swung the gun around the turret and was looking over the open sights at Woody and Chili.

  Chili was startled by Woody’s arm around his throat. He was pulled from his feet. Together they crashed to the floorboards with Woody’s weight atop him. He lay back under his buddy and watched a mad constellation of ragged holes appear in the ceiling above. The floor beneath his back quaked against his spine.

  ****

  Blair Freeman came around to the sound of pounding surf. He knew that was impossible.

  He opened his eyes to see the surface of the garage roof leaping with fragments and gravel. Black-clad figures were being flung around as by a wind. It was a gale so savage that it tore off heads and limbs and ripped entrails in streams from their bodies. The pounding surf morphed to a staccato booming coming from somewhere down on the street below.

  Blair rolled to the stairwell opening. He threw himself tumble free down the concrete steps. The sheet steel shed above him rocked back and forth as it was peppered through by thousands of flying barbs. He reached the bottom of the steps with limbs entangled. The gun outside went silent. Blair was still in one piece but a pain in his shoulders and hips was making itself known. He managed to rise to his feet after three tries.

  *****

  Gharib heard the heavy motor revving over the sounds of gunfire all around. He shimmied forward on his belly and moved his head to the corner of the garage entry. With one eye exposed he watched a truck with the biggest tires he’d ever seen stop in the middle of the intersection.

  He saw no more because he was plucked off the floor and dragged deeper into the garage. It was Heath. The big man ran with Gharib over his shoulder. The boy looked back to see a kaleidoscope of debris hurled into the air in an instant. A thrumming noise like an enormous angry insect filled the air.

  Heath dropped him behind a stout support column. A wave of dust swept toward them. The explosions from outside stopped and then started again. The shells no longer impacted the garage. Whatever gun was working out on the street had turned its sights on another target.

  Gharib turned to see Heath with a hand clapped over one ear. He was speaking to someone unseen. The words were loud but Gharib understood nothing.

  ****

  Pig followed Heath’s call and joined him and the kid inside the garage.

  “What the fuck, Heath?” Pig gasped after the fastest broken field sprint of his life. He had a few precious seconds while the black jammies were stunned and the nut in the armored truck was busy shooting up the intersection.

  “Priest is inside the bank but I can’t reach him,” Heath said. “Chili’s comm is out of action but Woody tells me they’re both shook up but ambulatory.”

  “You okay? The kid okay?” Pig gave Gharib a forced smile that the boy returned fiercely. This little dude was game, hoss.

  “Yeah. We’re maintaining. We got to bring down that heavy, Pig.”

  The roaring of the turret gun had ceased. They could hear the engine gunning. The wheels crunching over rubble were growing louder as it closed on their position.

  “Maybe it’ll move on,” Pig said.

  “No. It’s here because this is where it wants to be. We get jacked by black jammies then fucking armor shows up? They’re here for the same thing we’re here for.”

  “The bug?” Pig said. “So why they fucking each other up?”

  “I didn’t say they shared sympathies, just goals,” Heath said and gave Pig a V-8 tap on the head.