With no more time to waste, less than an hour to Solomon’s deadline, and the bright sun beginning to dip toward the west and now no longer visible above the treetops, Alicia and Russo found the best hand- and footholds at the base of the concrete block wall. As her fingers gripped the crumbly rock, Alicia got a feel for the sharp edges and unreliable cavities and voids. She scraped rubble out of a crack before testing it with her weight.
“Ready?”
“Just go, Catwoman. I’ll be right behind you.”
Alicia took her time. Falling now would have the same effect as being captured — it would scupper their plan. The handholds were regular but most didn’t offer enough of a grip or crumbled away to dust. Russo followed her every move, figuring that if she could do it he could do it. A warm breeze turned Alicia’s sweat cool. At one point her left foot slipped, unhinging the right and she hung by her fingertips. Russo guided her boots back to safety.
“What I want to know,” he said. “Is who saves me?”
“Maybe a fucking baboon will recognize you as part of the family and lend a hand.”
Alicia inched up the wall, her vision consisting of nothing but concrete, forty feet high now and still several feet from the top. The forest made noises all around her, hoots and growls and catcalls. Light slipped from the skies. She would let Crouch play for time his own way. This mission was now do or die. At last she reached the top and paused, allowing her forehead and eyes to rise over the apex of the wall.
A rough square flat roof met her eyes, the larger part of which was occupied by a helipad and chopper, with a high, triangular-roofed, guard tower at the far side. Alicia saw movement there. The guard was smoking hard, his gaze lost far out across the tops of the forest trees. With a quick heave she slipped over the top and fell to the tarmacked floor, rolling and scuttling underneath the chopper. When she looked back Russo was in her place, watching the guard.
Two minutes later he lay at her side.
“Phase one complete,” Alicia radioed in.
Crouch came back immediately. “Christ, is that all? Get a bloody move on. I’ve arranged to meet with Solomon in forty five minutes.”
So much for playing for time.
“Where?” Russo clicked his mic. “Here?”
“Yes. He knows that we know where he is. There’s simply no point pretending.”
“I’m just thinking that might make the job of extracting Healey harder.”
“Like I said, get a bloody move on.”
Alicia rolled out from under the chopper, moved to the guard’s blind side and made some noise. When his head popped out into the open she was more than ready, aiming and squeezing her silenced trigger in less than a heartbeat. After that all that remained was his cigarette, floating down through the air.
Russo ran past her. “Cameras?”
“Not up here. Clearly privacy is maintained for the type of person that might visit.”
Russo shrugged. “Who cares? It’s time to fight.”
Alicia vehemently agreed. Together they half-slid, half-climbed down the guard’s ladder, all the way to the floor of the compound. Two men saw them and drifted over, unsure. Alicia taught them to be more careful with bullets to the head. Now inside, the pair could afford to plant one or two distractions. Alicia unpacked blocks of C4 and jammed them into various niches before arming a simple transmit and receive device. Russo disabled two Jeeps and readied another before she beckoned him.
Together, they made it to the side of the guards’ quarters, crouching low in the shade but now in full view of the southward facing towers. It was only a matter of time…
“There!” The cry went up. “Stop!”
Alicia instantly blew the C4 which was set on a delayed timer, starting the mayhem. Russo ran forward, spraying the tops of the towers with bullets. From out of the HQ emerged a score of men, hardened faces beset with fury. Another blast of C4 went off, sending soil and wreckage among them, blasting most off their feet. Guns flew high into the air. The HQ shuddered as its windows blasted in, the catalyst to even more shrieks of pain.
Closer by, Alicia set off a third blast, this one placed against the wall of the guards’ quarters and as far removed from Healey’s last known position as was possible. She waited for the debris blast to pass then ran instantly into the hole she’d created, even as more rubble rained down.
The interior was high, hot and disorderly. Cots sat all around the edges of the room, most unmade and with boots and jackets slung atop the covers. Pitted tables ran up the center, covered with unwashed plates and decks of cards, newspapers and magazines. A sink sat in the far corner and a tall refrigerator next to it. Ten years ago they might have been white. At the far end of the building Alicia spied a row of cells, simply bars that had been hammered into the concrete floor to segregate prisoners from the guards. Maybe the guards themselves were sometimes disciplined there.
In any case a face she recognized pressed through one of the bars. “Hey!”
Healey!
Alicia and Russo took off at a sprint, but the view was suddenly obscured as men came in from all sides of the building; those who had been snoozing, off-shift or malingering.
Most were unarmed. Alicia dodged blows and spun as she ran, grabbing the arm of an assailant and flinging him full circle without breaking pace, using his body as a battering ram to fling at the crowd ahead. Bodies flew left and right. She leaped onto another’s back, springing off and high into the air, kicking two in the face as she came down to land and digging her elbow into the skull of a third. Russo was the deadly weapon at her side, shooting without let-up, a gun in each hand. Alicia saw two men converging from two directions in front of her, dropped and slid on her knees beneath their combined lunges. Still in her slide, she spun around and fired her own guns, blasting at their bodies.
She holstered her weapons as the knee-spin reached full-circle, rising to her feet and racing hard at Healey’s cell. Another man came in fast from behind and this time she leaped above his attack, saw him slide by below and came down hard on his exposed neck. The movement unbalanced her and she fell, rolling hard into the metal bars.
Russo smashed hard into the cell door, a crag attacking a mountain, but the bars held. Russo shuddered in pain.
“Fuck!”
“What the hell did you expect?” Alicia coughed in disbelief.
“That they would break!”
“Christ, and I thought Healey was the immature one.”
Alicia fired from the hip, downing another two runners so that they impeded those that came after. Healey stepped away and Russo shot out the lock. The young man accepted the gift of a shiny Heckler and Koch, unable to keep the grin from his face.
“Knew you guys would do something stupid like this.”
“You can count on us!” Russo ducked and fired as bullets slammed into the wall behind his head. The added firepower was from some new arrivals entering through the hole Alicia had blown into the far end of the building.
“Down!”
Alicia exposed the next part of their plan as she threw and detonated a brick of C4 just as it hit the wall to their left. Another blast destroyed part of the wall. Russo grabbed Healey and the pair hightailed it back out into the open, Alicia crabwalking and using her semi-auto for the first time.
Ducking out through the newly opened hole she threw the empty weapon back inside. “Ain’t worth getting yourselves killed for, boys,” she said and set off the explosive she’d attached to it.
“Boom.”
Outside, she wished they’d had time to neutralize the guard towers. Men hid in the shadows up there, taking pot shots, their only disadvantage having to duck as Russo and Healey emptied their clips at them.