Instinctively, I opened my mouth to shout the standard police warning not to move, when Anatoly’s muzzle flash exploded right next to me. In that split second of lightning clarity, I saw the man below spin like a top and vanish from sight. He never knew what hit him.
Willy looked disgusted. “So much for waiting till we see the whites of their eyes.”
But my own disgust ran deeper, and Gail picked up on it instantly, placing her hand gently against my back. “They are here to kill us.”
I glanced across at Padzhev’s pinched features. His arm was obviously causing him growing discomfort. “They’re here to kill those bastards,” I barely whispered.
But she was right. I was no longer a cop-I hadn’t been for a long time now. Worse, I was now operating out of desperation. Niceties like verbal warnings and taking prisoners were as appropriate here as in a feeding frenzy.
But I still couldn’t come to terms with shooting a man in cold blood.
There were more sounds from below, furtive, tentative, unaccompanied by anything visible. Sammie jogged over to the door leading to the small exterior platform to see what was going on outside the building. All she got for her pains were two shots which ricocheted inside the large room like lethal marbles in a tin can.
“Nice, Sam,” Willy said to her. “Maybe you can call in some artillery next.”
She gave him a baleful stare and came back, saying nothing.
A voice speaking Russian echoed loudly up the stairwell. Padzhev and his men listened quietly, and then Padzhev responded with an abrupt one-liner.
Willy smiled grimly, seemingly in his element. “What d’ya bet that meant, ‘Fuck you’?”
“You should know,” Sammie muttered.
There was a sudden blast of gunfire from below and a stuttering of blinding flashes. Bullets came screaming through the gridwork before us, bouncing off the walls and ceiling, careening among the obstacles we’d laid out, like crazed hummingbirds hungry for blood.
We hit the floor and covered our heads, feeling the thud of spent missiles falling around us. In the background, we could hear the dull thunder of footsteps pounding up the stairs.
Willy, his cheek bleeding, cradled his one good arm on the barricade, oblivious to the fusillade. “Come on, come on, come on,” he kept shouting, and then began to fire. The rest of us joined him a moment later, and in the bursts of acrid light, we saw two men fall, entangled in our barrier, and three more behind them turn tail.
The silence that followed emphasized the ringing in our ears.
I motioned to my cheek and asked Willy, “You okay?”
He touched the wound gingerly. “Yeah. Didn’t even go through.”
“Went through this guy,” Rarig said, his voice trembling with adrenaline.
We looked at one of Padzhev’s men, seemingly resting with his back against the barricade. His shirtfront was stained bright red. Without hesitation, Gail scrambled over on her hands and knees and checked his pulse. She shook her head at me. Two of the other Russians dragged him to one side and distributed his gun and ammunition among them.
I glanced at Lew Corbin-Teich, who was sitting around the corner from the door, his back to the wall, his eyes sightlessly on the opposite wall. His gun was resting on the floor between his legs.
I scuttled over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Lew?”
I wasn’t sure what to expect-from nothing to a frightened scream. Instead, he turned his head and looked at me calmly. “I am fine, thank you.” He then handed me the gun. “I do not believe I will be using this, however. I might have been of service in a situation like this very long ago. But I realize now, despite even this, that I am not who I once was.”
I took the gun and returned to the others, doubting he was alone in his sentiments.
There was a longer wait before the next assault, and when it arrived, the reasons for the pause became instantly clear. Another barrage from the stairwell’s nether depths was accompanied by a second, long distance offensive from outside, with a shower of automatic gunfire through the exterior door Sammie had peered from earlier.
Now, instead of bullets bouncing in front and over us, they came from behind as well, commingling in a hail that sent us scrambling uselessly for cover. The very steel walls we’d depended upon for protection became the allies of our attackers, redirecting their shots in patterns we couldn’t anticipate.
As before, Willy stood his ground, this time with Sammie and two of the Russians beside him, but they were paying the price, flinching and falling under the deafening onslaught.
And then Rarig yelled, “Grenade.”
Rolling across the floor toward us was the cylindrical missile from a grenade launcher. Anatoly was in mid sprint almost as soon as Rarig let out his warning. He fielded the grenade like a ballplayer, tossed it underhand back toward the door, and dove to his right for protection.
The explosion occurred just outside the building, riddling its corrugated wall, and turning it into a ragged, day-lit doily, each hole of which threw a shaft of light across the bitter, smoke-filled air. Anatoly lay still where he’d landed, caught by a piece of shrapnel.
I staggered to my feet, my head thrumming from the effects of the blast, and gestured to the ladder leading up to the roof hatch. “Get out, get out. Willy. Sam. Get the hell out.”
I grabbed Gail by the arm and thrust her toward the small room with the ladder, hauling Corbin-Teich to his feet to follow her. Little by little, the others fell into line, some barely able to walk-Padzhev supported by a bleeding Corbin-Teich-until only Sam, Willy, and one of the Russians were left at the barricade.
Sam crouched long enough to slam another magazine into her gun and shouted to me, “Get them out. We’ll be right there.”
I did as she said, pushing, prodding, yelling at the others to hurry, until at last only Padzhev was left on the ladder, struggling up with one hand and being pulled along by the scruff of his neck. Mercifully, inside the small room, we were shielded from most of the lethal ricocheting.
I wedged myself alongside the room’s small doorway and called out to the three of them, “Now. Go. I’ll cover you.”
Only Sam and Willy made it. The Russian turned to follow and caught a slug to the side of his head, falling to the floor as if dropped from thirty feet.
The other two ran by me, Willy first, because of his arm, then Sammie, who positioned herself across from me as Willy began to climb. He was almost to the top when the first head appeared around the corner of the stairwell door. I fired at it and ordered Sammie to go.
She hesitated and then obviously realized now was not the time. Halfway up the ladder, however, she stopped, hooked one arm around a rung, drew a bead through our door to the one at the barricade, and said, “Okay, your turn.”
I retreated as she fired several shots to cover me, until my head was even with the backs of her legs.
“Go,” I shouted, and we both scrambled as fast as we could, up and through the roof hatch above. There, Willy was lying on his stomach, waiting for anyone to come into view.
The contrast between the roof and the room below was an assault on the senses. Instead of being catapulted from chaos to calm, we found ourselves surrounded by the equivalent of a minor hurricane. Freezing wind tore at our clothing, cut off our breath, and worked in pulsating gusts to drive us off the roof’s flat surface. Bleeding and dazed, most of us either staggered to retain our footing, or simply gave up and fell to the cold steel plating.
Leaving Sammie with Willy at the hatch to watch our backs, I crawled around to check on the others. Padzhev, his head cradled in Corbin-Teich’s lap, looked almost beyond help, his eyes glazed and his face expressionless. Rarig, holding a stomach wound, lay on his side, turned so he could catch his breath in the gale. Gail was sitting cross-legged, her back to the wind, several guns in her lap, trying to force her numb fingers to redistribute our remaining bullets among a small cluster of magazines. She was grim but determined, looking up as I appeared and saying, “Jesus Christ, Joe. Is this what it’s like?”