A door just off the landing opened and someone tossed an object into the hallway. Mercer threw himself back, dropping and rolling behind the golden statue an instant before the grenade detonated. The concussion was a hammer slap to his ears. Part of the statue’s gold veneer melted, and drops were blown across the foyer to splattered against the wall like gilded Rorschach blotches. The statue itself, made from the aromatic wood of myrrh trees, had been shredded by the blast. One of Buddha’s jewel eyes was missing; the other had been turned to powder.
The door opened again and a figure ducked his head out before retreating an instant later. Mercer searched for his rifle and saw it lying three yards beyond his reach. A young monk stepped through the door to check his work, a pistol in one hand, a second grenade in the other. He searched the area with his eyes, seemingly unconcerned with the destruction of the priceless statue. He spotted Mercer cowering behind the figure’s pedestal. His gun came up and he fired a snap shot that blew off the remainder of Buddha’s head.
Before he could take better aim, Sykes dropped the monk with a shot from up the stairs. He joined Mercer on the third floor. “Are you okay?”
Mercer barely heard Sykes’s voice over the ringing in his ears. He nodded anyway. With Tisa only two floors below, nothing else mattered. He gathered up his fallen rifle as two more robed men fired at them from down the hall. They were well protected behind a massive cabinet covered in ornate scrollwork. Mercer unclipped one of the concussion grenades he’d been issued. He pulled the pin and held it for a moment before lobbing it down the hall. He and Sykes covered their ears and screwed their eyes closed. In the confined space, the flash/bang had nearly the same effect as a fragmentation grenade.
One of the men staggered from around the tall bureau and collapsed. Mercer charged forward, firing three-round bursts to keep the other pinned. He stopped just short of the cabinet, held his gun around the corner and fired blind. When he looked, the second monk lay in a pool of blood, his woolen robe holed a dozen times.
“Clear,” he shouted back at Sykes and continued on, looking for a stairwell to get him to the ground floor.
Two stories above them, the fire had weakened a secondary support column for the building’s pagoda roof. The massive timber failed under the load of the baked tiles. The result was as if that part of the monastery had been dynamited. Tons of wood and barrel tiles fell inward in an implosion that pulled more material into the crater. The sloping roof lost the counterweight of its own construction and the entire eastern side of the temple sagged. A flood of loosened barrel tiles went crashing into the courtyard in an avalanche that quickly formed twenty-foot mounds of rubble.
The other three sides of the roof swayed, shedding tiles like a fish being scaled as wind tore through the burning structure. Lances of flame climbed seventy feet into the air, fueled by the ancient wood and bellowslike gusts funneling down the valley. As the building shifted, windows exploded from their frames in staccato pulses, first north, then south, until the glass from two thousand panes littered the ground.
Inside, Mercer was thrown against a wall as the floors above began to pancake. One wing of the monastery collapsed entirely, dragging more sections with it. Dust billowed from the heap of wreckage in waves of ash and debris that engulfed the length of the valley. It was so heavy that even the ferocious Alpine winds couldn’t clear it. Mercer ran blindly, feeling the building tearing itself apart.
“Sit rep,” he heard Sykes shouting over the radio.
“Doc, it’s Grumpy. The target’s past me. I couldn’t risk a shot. They went through a door about fifty feet off the main foyer. It’s not an exterior door so I think they went underground.”
“Shit,” Mercer cursed as the others reported their position and progress. Tracking her in the enormous monastery was hard enough. Trying to find her in the warren of tunnels he was sure was under the building would be next to impossible.
As more of the building came down, he expected the defenders to give up the fight and try to save themselves, but as he came to a staircase, someone down on the second floor fired up at him.
Mercer pulled the pins from a pair of flash/bangs and let them roll down the steps. The explosion blew apart the bottom of the stairs and the whole structure nearly collapsed. He loosed a short burst from the M-4, tentatively stepped on the top stair and leapt back as the staircase caved in.
He and Sykes abandoned the ruined stairs in search of another.
“This is Bash, me and Happy are on the first floor. Grump, give me your position.”
Mercer tuned out the radio chatter. The third floor was burning freely now. The air was full of smoke and sparks that singed his skin and burned away tufts of hair. After what seemed like an endless search, the confining hallways opened up to a long balcony overlooking a mezzanine. This wasn’t the main foyer where the team was assembling, but a secondary space that was still larger than the lobby of most hotels. A set of stairs spiraled down along three walls, descending past the second floor and ending at the first. Standing at the railing, Mercer and Sykes swept the area through their rifle sights. It appeared deserted. They were about to descend when the wall behind them disintegrated and a torrent of flame exploded across the landing. They were both lifted from their feet and launched down the stairs.
Mercer tucked himself into a ball as the scalding pressure wave blew him over the steps. Rolling as he fell, he was hit repeatedly by Sykes tumbling right behind him. He caught a boot to the mouth that split his lip and another to the lower back that felt like it had gouged out a kidney. He smashed into a wall hard enough to arrest his headlong plunge and managed to get a hand on Sykes to stop him too. They climbed to their feet.
Mercer cleared his mouth of blood. “You all right?”
Sykes grabbed his trigger finger and winced as he straightened the misshapen digit. It had broken when it got caught in the trigger guard of his assault rifle. “Fine.”
A startled shout from below gave them a second’s warning to fall flat before auto-fire raked the staircase. Tufts of carpet and wood splinters filled the air as rounds tore through the steps. They were pinned. Above them the balcony was an inferno; the newel posts burned like roman candles, and banks of smoke poured over the landing. Below, the unseen gunmen were getting more accurate. Bullet holes appeared in the wall a foot from where Mercer lay.
“Bash — Snow and I are pinned,” Sykes radioed. “I don’t know where the hell we are, but we need help.” He fired over the railing, drawing redoubled counterfire.
“I hear you,” Happy replied. “Hold one.”
“We don’t have one, Hap.”
Down below, one of the fanatical Order members cocked an RPG-7 under his arm and fired the rocket-propelled grenade at the stairs. The explosive-tipped shell impacted well above Mercer and Sykes, but the charge blew the cantilevered stairs from the wall. The entire structure began to tilt, wood pulling from the wall with a sound like an agonized moan. The staircase had been pegged to the wall with two-inch-thick dowels that remained in place as the steps collapsed. Mercer reached across the widening gap between the stairs and the wall and took hold of one of these pegs just as the section he was lying on fell free.
Sykes just managed to grab his own dowel.
The staircase crashed to the first floor, leaving both men hanging on the wall twenty feet above the ground, exposed and unable to defend themselves. The killing shots were a moment away.