She broke away from him and ran toward the front of the building. He headed back toward the stairs.
Even before he could reach the roof, the helicopter came for him, strafing the broken windows on the upper floor of the building. Concrete dust puffed from each of the windows in turn, and the windowsills crumbled away, rotten after years of exposure to the desert sun. Debris crunched under his feet as he ran for cover between two windows, then ducked down to keep out of sight.
The Gatling gun spun down and he took his chance, leaning out the window to fire off a quick burst at the gunner in the side hatch. He didn’t hit anything important, but the helicopter bobbed away a little — clearly the pilot didn’t want to risk a stray shot hitting a fuel line or an ammo box.
The likelihood of that was minimal, though. Chapel needed to kill the pilot if he was to have any chance of bringing the helicopter down. That was going to take a miracle. He wished he had his tablet with him, that he could talk to Angel — not just because she could give him an idea of what the battle looked like at ground level. He wanted to tell her good-bye as well.
He wasn’t going to get his miracle by hiding in cover. He ducked low under a windowsill and dashed over to another window, several yards down. If he could keep the gunner guessing where he was going to shoot from next, that might buy him a little time.
He heard shots from below, carbine rounds. That could be Nadia or it could be one of the assassins. Clearly they planned on storming this building, finishing him off if the helicopter couldn’t. He could only hope Nadia was ready for that kind of assault.
He poked his rifle barrel out of the window, then risked a quick look. The nose of the helicopter was ten yards away from him. He could see right through the viewport, could see the pilot hunched over his controls.
He was never going to get a better chance than this. He lifted his weapon, lined up the sights—
And saw the pilot glance up and see him, the Russian’s face instantly going white with fear. Chapel took his shot, firing a tight burst right into the viewport.
Glass splintered and flew, but the pilot was already moving. The third shot of Chapel’s burst didn’t even hit the viewport, instead digging into the fuselage between the canopy and the side hatch. Worthless.
Except — Chapel wasn’t sure it was even possible, but yes, he could definitely see a tinge of red on the broken glass of the viewport. The helicopter didn’t just fall out of the sky, but he knew he had struck the pilot, wounded him at least.
Not that it mattered. The helicopter was already pulling away, drawing back to a range where Chapel would be unlikely to hit the aircraft at all. He howled in frustration — then cut himself off in midgrowl as he saw the Gatling gun’s barrels moving, tracking around. In an instant it would fire again; he needed to move—
— Except the Gatling gun wasn’t turning toward him. The gunner had lowered his elevation, tilting the barrels down so they could fire into the street.
No. No, no, no, Chapel thought, the words hammering in his brain like fists on steel. Nadia was down there, moving already, dashing for safety as the Gatling gun homed in on her position. It didn’t need to be accurate. It didn’t need to conserve ammunition. It could just hose her down with bullets, chop her to pieces.
Roaring with anguish, Chapel leaned far out of the window and pointed his rifle at the gunner, barely visible behind the mass of his weapon. Chapel held down his trigger and sprayed bullets as best he could into the man, so far away, so far out of reach. His rifle clicked dry and he wanted to throw the damned thing at the gunner, as useless a gesture as it might be.
Down in the street Nadia zigged and zagged, trying to keep the gunner from drawing a bead on her. She was fast, so very fast, but in a second it wouldn’t matter, the gunner would just start painting the ground with lead—
And that was when Chapel got his miracle.
Or was it even a miracle? Maybe Nadia had planned for it to happen. Maybe she’d been that smart. Maybe Chapel had hit the helicopter pilot harder than he thought, maybe the pilot was losing blood and getting dizzy, not paying attention like he should.
Chapel would never know why it happened. But it did happen, so fast Chapel couldn’t even process the details.
The helicopter had to move back to give the gunner a good angle of fire on Nadia. It had to move back to get away from Chapel and his AK-47. It had already been flying very low, only a few dozen feet off the ground, below the level of the surrounding buildings. The pilot must have assumed he had plenty of clearance, though, because he was in the middle of the wide intersection.
He didn’t have enough clearance. The very tip of one of his rotor blades brushed, ever so gently, the bronze face of Vladimir Lenin.
The blade was made of a tough composite material, but it was thin and the statue was thick, hard bronze. The blade twisted and bent faster than any human eye could follow and knocked backward into another blade in the space of an eyeblink. Suddenly there was nothing holding the helicopter up in the air and it fell, its rotor like the crooked wings of a squashed bug. It hit the ground hard, its nose smashing into the base of the statue, its tail twisting around and around until it snapped off and flew across the intersection to collide with a building on the far side.
It brought up an incredible cloud of dust and debris, a vast wave of murk that hid everything from Chapel’s view. He saw flashes of light inside the cloud — gunfire — and knew that Nadia was making her move, running for the truck.
Something buried deep in Chapel’s brain, some survival instinct, started shouting at him then. If he could reach the truck himself, if he could run over there in the dust, when the assassins couldn’t see him, if he could get away with Nadia and Bogdan—
He didn’t let it turn into a full-fledged thought, much less a concrete plan. He just started running and hoped for the best. Down the stairs, two at a time. He missed one riser when his wounded leg went out from under him, but he was so full of adrenaline at that point he caught himself on the handrail and just kept running. Down to the ground floor, the door just in front of him. A shape appeared in the doorway, a human form in silhouette. Chapel didn’t waste time trying to make out any details. He brought his shoulder down and smashed into the shape like a linebacker, bowling over one of the assassins. He didn’t even slow down as he plunged into the debris cloud, even as things whizzed and rocketed past his head. Maybe they were bullets, maybe they were parts of the helicopter that flew off in the crash. He didn’t care. If one of them struck him, he would go down, he knew that much, but there was nothing he could do about that, no way to prevent it.
The truck was ahead of him, a big square shape slightly darker than the dust and sand blowing up around him. It was still so far away, and he heard shouting, and knew he was being chased, but if he kept running, if he kept moving — his leg hurt, bad, but — but—
He came out of the cloud gasping for breath, moving as fast as his wounded leg would carry him. The truck was no more than sixty yards away. Its taillights were lit, and he knew Nadia was in the driver seat, waiting for him, Bogdan sitting next to her; if he could just make it over there, they could be gone, laughing as they rocketed through the desert, just like before, before they’d found Perimeter—
“Ostanovis!” someone shouted. “Ya pristelu tebya!”
Another shape appeared in front of Chapel, a human shape again. He tried to swat it away, but the shape just took a step backward. Then it lifted a tactical shotgun and pointed the barrel right at Chapel’s chest.