Celia began to scream.
20
The door banged open, and Kingston's prayers dissolved in sick horror. The man was in uniform, but not of any U.S. military service. There was a lot of gold braid on the unbuttoned jacket, and he held a vicious-looking little pistol with a curved magazine in front of the trigger. Two more soldiers crowded in behind him, brandishing assault weapons.
"Up ladies," the man said, his accent thick and Slavic-sounding. "Everybody up!"
"What do you want with us?" Beth Leary cried from behind the bed.
"He's going to rape us!" Celia screamed.
"I will kill you if you don't do precisely what I tell you!" the man snapped. He added something in a rasping, Slavic tongue, and the two men with him came in and shut the door, taking up positions on either side of it.
The officer shoved his way through the women until he was face to face with Kingston. "You," he said, "will come with me." Moving around behind her, he reached around her with his left arm, not circling her throat as she'd thought he was going to do, but slipping it under her left arm and across her breasts. She caught the sharp tang of his cologne mingled with his sweat. He jerked back suddenly, lifting her off her feet, swinging her about to hold her between his body and the door, backing farther away from the door until his back was up against the wall. Bunny screamed.
"Shut up!" the officer shouted. Still holding Kingston inches above the floor with one arm, he reached out with the deadly-looking little gun, until the muzzle was only a couple of inches from Bunny's right eye. "Shut up, bitch, or you die this instant!"
The woman fell quiet. "That is better," the man said, but he did not relax at all. "Now, we wait."
Stepano had point going up the stairs; Kosciuszko was at his back, moving up the steps backward with his M-16 trained up the stairwell, insurance against someone pulling a hop-and-pop surprise from further up the steps. Frazier followed, then Holt, packing his big M-60 like a child's toy. DeWitt and Fernandez brought up the rear.
"Looks clear," Stepano was saying as he went, a kind of mantra, a chant. "Looks clear… looks clear…"
It was one of those tightly wound spiral stairs, all of stone, winding up the middle of the castle keep. If there was a good place for an ambush…
Movement… a face, a weapon at the landing just above. Stepano fired instinctively, the silenced weapon thuttering briefly as he sent a burst snapping into the target. Stepano took the next few steps three at a time, bounding onto the landing, stepping across the body. The man was still alive, his eyes starting from his head, his hands scrabbling weakly at his chest and shoulder, which were already slick with blood.
He was wearing an officer's uniform… a captain in the JNA.
Stepano grabbed the man's collar beneath his chin. "Kade e Gospogya Kingston?" he demanded. "Where is Ms. Kingston?" Then he repeated it in Serbian, the words almost identical. "Gde ye Gospogya Kingston?"
"Top floor," the wounded man answered, speaking Serbian. He seemed anxious to talk, and Stepano wondered whether that was because he thought he was dying, or because he was terrified of the black-clad apparition looming over him. "Room twelve."
"Are the hostages all together? Or did you spread them out?"
"Women… in room twelve. Men are… are room three. Please. I didn't-" And then he was dead. "Room twelve and three," Stepano told DeWitt.
"Room twelve and room three, people," DeWitt echoed. "Let's go!"
"You wanna split up and take 'em down together?" Holt asked.
"Sounds good," DeWitt said. "Three and three. Kos, you take Bearcat and Scotty. Steponit and Rattler, you two with me. Watch out for a trap."
Stepano didn't think the dying man had lied, but it was certainly a possibility. At the top of the stairs the SEAL squad turned right and pounded down a corridor. Room eight… room ten… there! Room twelve.
Silently, DeWitt deployed his men, Stepano to the left of the door, himself to the right, both crouched below the level of the doorknob in case the opposition tried firing through the door. Rattler took up a crouched position slightly on the right of the door, his shotgun switched to single-shot.
DeWitt held up three fingers… two… one…
Blam! Blam! And the door splintered inward, flying off shattered hinges. Kingston screamed; she couldn't help herself… and then her ears rang with a deafening quickfire chain of explosions and a blinding light like a news reporter's camera strobe set off inches from her face.
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, seeing that blinding light even through her closed eyelids, feeling something like a hot blast of air slap her face and clothing and set her skin tingling. When she opened her tear-streaming eyes again, she had a glimpse — just a glimpse — of monsters crashing through the shattered door. They were dressed head to foot in black, with vests heavily laden with arcane and technical-looking gadgets, with visored helmets and with the visible parts of their faces thickly smeared with green and black paint. Their weapons were submachine guns of some kind, but with muzzles as long and as thick as her forearm.
The first man through rolled to the right, so low he might have been sitting down, his weapon held high and stiff-armed; he nearly collided with the soldier crouched in the corner, who had fallen to the floor and had his hand over his eyes. The submachine gun spoke — a fluttering whisper — and the stunned soldier's face came apart.
A second black-clad figure had rolled through the door to the left close behind the first. The other Serb soldier had had his head turned away from that dazzling light and was still on his feet. As the black apparitions burst into the room, he tried to raise his assault rifle, but before he could fire he was slammed back against the wall by the attacker's shot and the gun went clattering into the floor.
"Stop!" the officer holding Kingston screamed, his mouth an inch from her right ear, the muzzle of his machine pistol pressed against her head. She knew he was shouting, could feel his chest moving and feel the breath on her face, but her ears were still ringing from the explosions and his voice seemed very far away. "Stop now or I kill them!"
"American Special Forces," one of the men shouted back. "Hurt her and you're dead, y'hear me? You can't get out of here. Best thing for you to do is drop your gun and give it up!"
Everything seemed suspended in time and space. Both invaders had their weapons turned now, aimed — she was certain — directly at her, and there was a third invader still in the hallway, covering them all with something that didn't even look wholly like a gun. Kingston found herself looking straight down the black openings at the fronts of those heavy barrels. The women were flat on their faces or on their hands and knees, knocked down by the explosions; only Ellen Kingston was still upright, and that was only because her captor was still holding her up off the floor. She swung her legs, kicking at him, but he only tightened his grip painfully across her chest.
"No! You will drop weapons!" her captor shouted. "Now! Then back out of the way!"
It happened so fast she could scarcely tell what had happened. The black figure on the right took two steps further to the right, the muzzle of his gun still aiming at a point directly behind Kingston's head. He said something… and it wasn't English. What was he saying? The words were liquid and Slavic-sounding, spilling out so quickly she felt completely bewildered. She'd assumed her rescuers would be Americans, not… God, was that Russian he was speaking?
Her captor stiffened; the muzzle of his gun left her head, sweeping across an arc to aim at the Russian-sounding man. Her captor screamed something…