The second shape lunged atop him from behind just as he started his motion. A scream punctured his ears and he felt himself going down, the weight of another, smaller woman enough to strip his precarious balance away. He struggled to pry her off while before him Lace had risen to her knees, almost to her feet, scimitar in hand, readying to come for him.
“I’ll kill you, McCracken! I’ll kill you!” Rasin raged, and Blaine felt the machine gun fire skid close to him as he sped between the first and second book-lined aisles.
The bullets followed him as far as the end of the row when he rounded the shelves and pressed himself against the books in the next aisle. Instantly, more rapid fire spit books from their places around him, pages torn from bindings and set to flutter free. McCracken went down but kept moving, propelling himself on his elbows. Another burst fired just over him showered Blaine with more book fragments. Rasin spun round one end of the book-lined aisle just when Blaine climbed back to his feet at the other. Again he was moving amidst the books, varying his path and target while Rasin’s bullets splintered the shelf into fragments and scattered classics everywhere.
McCracken heard Rasin jam a fresh clip home an instant before another burst covered him with books jetting out under the bullets’ force. He pinned down Rasin’s position and steadied himself. He had to put some distance between the fanatic and himself and he had to do it fast, if he hoped to emerge from this alive.
Blaine crept to the end of the aisle and pinned his shoulders up against the wood. Total camouflage this way. Rasin wouldn’t see a thing when he swung into the last aisle before the wall, and by then it would be too late.
Now!
McCracken swung hard to the right and bolted for the third aisle down. With Rasin’s gunfire struggling to right itself, he gathered momentum and slammed his right shoulder into the shelf of books directly before him. That shelf toppled into the next under the force of the collision, creating a domino effect that sent books and wood crashing backward. McCracken thought he heard a scream as Rasin was buried by the debris, and then there was nothing.
With the smaller woman still yanking on his throat while holding on to his shoulders, and the big one fighting to regain her feet, Johnny Wareagle seized the only move left to him. He jammed the jagged edge of the staff piece he still held back toward where he judged the smaller one’s throat to be. He closed his eyes for an instant and pictured it perfectly. The sharp wood parted the soft flesh and cartilage beneath the small woman’s Adam’s apple and sprayed him with blood. Her hands flailed from their grasp to stem the flow of the life pouring from her. It still took all his strength to toss her writhing body from him.
By then, though, the huge woman had regained her feet with a scream of incredible rage born of watching her lover die. In the flash of an instant, he found the scimitar rising in her hand and then dipping into a straight downward motion as she lunged for him. Johnny started his arm upward into the strike, no choice but to sacrifice a limb and hope he could fight down the shock long enough to win.
He felt the calm resignation flow through him a blink before a trio of deafening roars split his already-seared eardrums. Directly over him, Lace spasmed in her tracks, eyes bulging. She was still trying to force the scimitar down at him weakly when a fourth shot rocked her head forward. Blood exploded from her mouth as fragments of skull and brains coated the ceiling and walls.
She fell straight over, legs thrashing in death, at Johnny’s feet to reveal Blaine McCracken kneeling in a combat crouch a dozen feet away with smoking pistol still clutched in his hand.
“Nice for me to be able to save your life for a change, Indian,” he said, rising.
McCracken lowered an arm to help Wareagle up, but his eyes stayed on Lace and the three scarlet holes stitched down her back.
“That was for Hiroshi, you bitch.”
After digging Rasin’s unconscious body out from the rubble of the broken shelves and fallen books, they climbed to the palace’s top floor and reached the roof through a skylight. Wareagle held Rasin while Blaine waved frantically for the hovering Apache to sweep down and pick them up. Around the outer wall of the royal palace, the Iranian masses had taken the battle to the last stronghold of Guardsmen. Blaine heard the gunshots, the screams, the wails of both fervor and pain, and found himself looking away. This portion of the palace roof was flat, and with no wind to impede him the Apache pilot was able to bring his ship to a point where his landing pods were only a yard from touchdown.
“Lower!” Blaine ordered upward, as he started to push Rasin’s unconscious frame ahead of him into the attack ship.
He never heard the gunshot, felt only the thud of impact as Rasin’s body smacked against him, the back of the fanatic’s head blown totally away. The kill shot was much too precise to be random, the mark of a top grade sharpshooter.
“You bastards,” Blaine muttered, turning away from the Apache. “You fucking bastards!”
Wareagle grasped Blaine at the shoulders and shoved him upward.
“Now, Blainey! We must go now!”
The corpse of Yosef Rasin slid from his grasp and McCracken finished the climb into the Apache on his own.
“Hell of a shot for an Iranian,” the pilot noted somberly, lifting the Apache upward.
“It wasn’t an Iranian.”
“Huh?”
“Just take us up, son, and blow the shit out of this place.”
“The … palace?”
“Unless my eyes deceive me.”
His gaze turned toward the first of the masses who were starting to clear the outer wall. “But the people …”
“Keep wasting time and you just may have to kill them. Fire your missiles now and they’ll get the idea.”
The pilot shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
“Then we agree on something anyway,” Blaine said, and leaned back against the Apache’s bulkhead, indifferent to the rest of what transpired.
It took all eight of the Hellfires fired in the space of twenty seconds to reduce the royal palace to flame-soaked rubble and leave whatever remained of Gamma to smolder within the debris.
“This is Shooter,” the report came from the marksman on the roof of the building two-hundred-fifty yards from the royal palace.
“What is your report, Shooter?” asked the voice that would relay the message back to Israel.
“Rasin won’t be coming home. Dispatch complete.”
“What about McCracken?”
“Sorry. No could do.”
“I didn’t copy that,” the voice of the contact came back.
“No could do,” Colonel Yuri Ben-Neser repeated into the microphone held in his single hand. His punishment had been exile to Tehran as part of Operation Firestorm, a sniper once more. “McCracken saved my life in Jaffa Square ten days ago. I owed him one.”
Epilogue
“It’s all you need. Believe me.”
McCracken inspected the piece of paper Evira had handed him from her hospital bed. “Just an address in Paris. This is where I’m supposed to find my son?”
“You’ll find the answers.”
Blaine eyed her quizzically. “There’s something you’re not telling me. I’ll accept that, but God help you if it’s something I won’t like when I get there.”
Evira smiled in spite of herself. “After all this you still sound like my enemy.”
“Friends and enemies are transitory for the most part. I’ve learned to accept that, too, over the years. I saved your life in Tehran, but you can be damn well sure the life of my son was the only reason.”