“I’ve never done it!”
“You’ll never get a better chance!” Grofield shouted, and the squad-room door slammed shut. An unexpected blessing. Grofield gestured wildly at Vivian to come to him, and held his finger to his lips. She nodded, and hurried silently down the hall, and Grofield told her, “Stand beside the door, and shoot when you see something to shoot at.”
“All right.” She was on the edge of hysteria, but was keeping it fiercely under control.
Grofield stood to the other side of the door and fired a burst at the lock. He could hear commotion downstairs now, knew they’d be coming up soon. Keeping clear of the doorway, he kicked the door open.
Gunfire chattered inside, and plaster flew from the opposite wall. The same voice that had shouted the warning before now yelled, “They’re behind the sofa!”
Grofield said, “Vivian. Fire into the room. Don’t show yourself, just stick the barrel around the door and start shooting.”
She nodded shakily and did so. Grofield counted to three, and dove through the doorway under the line of her fire. He hit the floor rolling, kept rolling until he hit a piece of furniture, found it to be an overstuffed chair, and clambered quickly behind it, feeling it shiver as bullets thudded into it.
Vivian screamed, and yelled, “They’re coming up!”
“Hold them!” Grofield yelled, and stuck his gun around the other side of the sofa and pulled the trigger. He followed the gun around, saw the overturned sofa in the middle of the room, broadside to the door, saw that the angle he’d gotten to made the sofa poor protection for the two white men behind it, saw the four black men lying self-protectively on the floor against the far wall, and kept firing. One of the white men screamed and fell back, and the other one ran for a safer piece of furniture. Grofield cut him down in mid-stride and yelled, “Vivian, come in!”
She backed in, looking terrified and hysterical. “They’re all over out there!”
Grofield shouted, “Is this them?” and pointed at the four black men getting to their feet.
She looked in panicky distraction at them and said, “Yes, yes.”
“All four?”
“Yes! That’s them, Grofield, for God’s sake that’s them!”
One of the four said to Grofield, “I don’t know where you came from, man, but you’re beautiful.” All four of them were grinning in relief.
Grofield said, “Did you tell anybody where the canisters are?”
“Are you crazy? That’s what’s kept us alive.”
“Nobody at all?” Grofield insisted.
“Not even the chaplain,” the spokesman said.
“That’s good,” Grofield said, and pointed the machine gun at them, and pulled the trigger.
Twenty-Six
Vivian screamed and jumped forward to knock the gun barrel down, but she was too late. She stared in disbelief from the falling bodies to Grofield, shrieking, “Why? What did you do it for?”
“Now nobody knows where the canisters are,” Grofield told her. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” He hurried to the window, unlocked it, pushed it open.
“You murdered them.”
“Do you know how to do a cannonball dive?”
“You murdered them!”
Grofield angrily grabbed her arm and shook her. “Bitch at me later! I’m not going to get killed to give you a chance to nag. Do you know how to do a cannonball dive? You wrap your arms around your legs, bend your knees up—”
“I know how,” she said. She looked and sounded dazed.
“Then do one out the window,” he told her. “Don’t worry, the snow’s soft. Then head for the building we were in before.”
“I can’t believe... ” She was looking at the bodies again.
“God damn it!” Grofield yelled, and picked her up, and threw her out the window. She’d dropped her machine gun when he grabbed her, and he threw that out after her, then threw his own machine gun and jumped.
The snow wasn’t as soft as he’d remembered. It was a tooth-rattling landing, and he got up dazed, barely remembering the fact of urgency, losing for a second or two the circumstances. He knew he was supposed to run, though, and started off through the snow, but then got enough of his brains together to remember the guns. He stopped and looked back, and they were nowhere in sight, they’d sunk into the snow without a trace. He took a step back, and somebody started shooting at him from the window he’d just left, so he turned around and ran the other way again, seeing a vague splash of green bobbing ahead of him. Vivian’s ski pants.
After floundering toward the other building for a while, he stumbled across the path between it and the lodge, and then he could go faster. He caught up with Vivian just as she reached the building, and took her arm. “We’ll go through it,” he said. “It’ll be faster.”
She pulled away from him. “I’ll take my chances on my own,” she said.
“We don’t have time for stupidity, Vivian,” he said, and opened the door and shoved her inside. There was still the odd chatter of gunfire from behind them, but it had to be people shooting at shadows, and when Grofield looked back he couldn’t see anyone yet actually outside the building and pursuing them. It would happen, but that crowd over there would need a couple of minutes to get itself organized.
Grofield went into the building, and she was standing just inside, glaring at him. He said, “I killed them because it was the only way to handle it.”
“You killed them,” she said, “because they were black.”
He stared at her. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Americans have a reputation,” she said. “I see it’s well-earned.”
“Vivian,” he said, “I couldn’t carry those four with me. I couldn’t guard them. I had to shut their mouths before anybody injected them with truth serum.”
“You wouldn’t have killed them if they were white,” she said.
“The hell I wouldn’t. Don’t you realize they would have had to kill me?”
She frowned at him. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “You were saving their lives, why should they kill you?”
“Because I’m an American, working at the moment for the government, and I know too damn much about those four. I could blow the whistle on them when we all got back to the States, and nothing would convince them I’d keep my mouth shut. I could have done it the other way, I could have had all six of us jump out the window, and then we’d all run over to here, and at some point one of the four would manage to get behind me, and that would be the end of it. Given the fact that they were up here to peddle instant death for the whole world to anybody with the price, I really doubt they were Boy Scouts.”
“Neither are you,” she said. “It isn’t as though you’re a policeman.”
“You know the background on me,” Grofield reminded her. “They didn’t. All they’d know is I’m the American spy that was brought up here to be put on ice for the weekend. I’d smell like cop to them, I’d smell like all kinds of trouble to them. I did the only thing I could do, I saw to it that nobody would get those canisters, and I protected myself.” He looked through the glass in the door and said, “We’d better argue this out later. Here come the people from eagle country.”
She went willingly with him now, and he led the way down the long hall and out the door at the far end. She got out the flashlight and they followed their own footsteps back toward the skimobile. The trail was faint already, the breeze smoothing it out. Also, the first snowflakes of a new fall were already starting down.
The pursuit was quite a ways behind them, but well-equipped with lights. Looking back, Grofield could see the glare of large lanterns back there and knew the pursuers would be having no trouble following their trail through the snow. As long as they were all on foot, though, it didn’t much matter.