by David Drake
Kelly pulled the pin with his right thumb and stumbled through the back door. He tossed the grenade into the shop as he closed the door behind him. It was a piss-poor thing to do to a supporter’s property, but there were other people out there catching bullets. It had to be done. The Casbah was a maze. Closing the entrance to the track the fugitives were taking would, with luck, delay pursuit until there was no longer a trail to follow.
With luck.
XXXI
The back room was furnished as living quarters. Vlasov waited uncertainly at the door in the far end. Ramdan was doubled up on the rug, moaning and clutching again at his wounded thigh. “Come on, Professor,” Kelly said in Russian, opening the second door for the defector.
Beyond was an alley less than a meter wide—Alexandria Street, if you wanted to believe a French map-maker to whom there was no such thing as terra incognita, even if the cognition were in the map-maker’s office alone. A Kabyle with a Kalashnikov half-hidden in the folds of his robe beckoned them urgently from the top of a pole-supported staircase a few meters away. Kelly gestured Vlasov toward the stairs, then called over his shoulder in French, “If you don’t roust, you’ll be there when they come looking—that’ll hurt worse’n now, believe me.”
No one ran toward them down the alley from the killing ground on the Boulevard de la Victoire. Vlasov mounted the steep, unrailed stairs with as much agility as could be expected of a scientist in his mid-60s.
Kelly risked a glance down at the Ingram. His left palm was throbbing and beginning to swell. Long bursts had heated the suppressor tube enough to make the air above it dance. It had seared the abraded flesh of the hand that gripped it. Like the gas-filled epicerie, that came with the turf. Kelly tried to extend the sub-machine gun’s stock, but he found that he could not figure how to lock the folding butt-plate into position in the instants he was willing to spare. It was more important to spot the people coming down the alley whom he might have to kill.
Vlasov squeezed by the guard at the narrow landing. The American pounded up the stairs himself. The guard ducked inside behind Kelly and slammed the blue-painted door panel.
An entire family waited inside the room. There was a grandfather, parents, and four wide-eyed children spaced from six to the infant in the woman’s arms. The rugs that provided bedding were rolled up against the wall. A table holding a plastic bucket of water completed the furnishings. The family might be related to someone taking an active part in the operation . . . or it might not. No matter. In all likelihood, the father had been a babe in arms when similar scenes were played out in the struggle against the French; and his father had not talked, either.
At the end of the room, where a hanging blanket filled the place of a door, stood Hoang Tanh. “You did not tell us about him,” said the rifleman accusingly to Kelly.
The agent nodded curtly. “Let’s go,” he said. No point in trying to explain. The Kabyle, after all, did not have the real problem of trying to get the stupid son of a bitch out of the country.
It would have been faster to run to the Rue Amar Ali down the Rue Porte Neuve. The latter was one of the few pedestrian ways in the Casbah that deserved the name of street. It would be faster for the security forces too, if they blew their way past the gunmen who were supposed to lie in ambush at its head. To the Kabyles, a room to room, central courtyard to stairs route had the advantage of involving large numbers of people who therefore had excellent reason to fear the police and army. In for a penny, in for a pound. . . . Kelly himself had spent enough time in another kind of jungle to have learned that you did not follow established trails if you wanted to go back to the World under your own power. It did not occur to him to question the technique as the Kabyles applied it.
They reached the Amar Ali through a hammam, a Turkish bath, which they had entered by a trap door from the cellar where the oven was. In the cellar, dampness was a thing you could touch. Kelly had shrugged his jacket off. He carried it slung over the Ingram as he had the trench coat when the morning began. With his dark complexion and his cheap, styleless clothing, the American agent was not worth a second glance from the bath attendants and their early customers.
The two defectors were another matter. Hoang had generalized Oriental features. There must have been Chinese or even Korean in the physicist’s ancestry. Conceivably, he might have gone unremarked in the dim light. Professor Vlasov, on the other hand, stood out like a pregnant bride. He was six-foot-three, and his forebears had certainly included many a blond “Rus,” as the natives called the Viking “rowers” who had founded Novgorod and the Grand Duchy of Kiev before the Mongols swept across the Siberian plains. But no one looked at Vlasov, either, proof that the would-be rebels had done their homework—even if their aggressiveness had put Kelly and the operation in jeopardy.
At the entrance of the hammam, the plain, cream tile of the hallway gave way to a mosaic of intricate knots on a golden background. Kelly blinked at the sunlight of the open street beyond. Their original guide had been replaced by an older man whose right hand never left the side pocket of his coat. “Quickly, get out,” he hissed to Kelly. The agent still hesitated. ‘This was all our arrangement.”
The Volare wagon waited across the street. Commander Posner was drumming on the steering wheel, his eyes trying to look in all directions. The Attaché’s nerves were screwed as tight as the breech of a cannon. Ordinary traffic noises had given way to sirens from all directions. In the open air again, the thump of gunfire could be heard.
The car parked three spaces behind the Volare was a Volkswagen Beetle. Presumably the Defense Attaché had not noticed it pulling in. The driver was Mayer, one of the CIA personnel Kelly had met in the snack bar.
“I’ll go first,” Kelly said in French. His right arm crawled with a sweaty desire to put a burst through the Beetle’s door. If those bastards thought they were going to get in his way, they’d better be ready to die. . . .
He started across the street with the quick, nervous stride of a man dodging traffic on any busy artery. Kelly’s eyes darted around him at street level and above, trying to anticipate the shot that would pay him back for the many mistakes of others on which he had capitalized. There was no shot, though a van missed him by less than the small part of his mind devoted to traffic had calculated. The Company man saw Kelly before Commander Posner did. His eyes widened and he raised a walkie-talkie enough for Kelly to see it.
“Start the goddam engine!” Kelly shouted to Posner through the open window. His anger was flashing out at the closest victim, not the cause. Face black as thunder, the agent waved curtly across to the hammam entrance.
It said something about the sparseness of CIA assets in Algiers that Warner had to use Amcit officers for a surveillance operation. It said something about how badly Langley wanted to know what the DIA was up to that they had gone ahead with the surveillance regardless.
Vlasov, his white hair flashing like a marker pennant, stepped into the street. He was more cautious than even Kelly had been. The American agent still stood on the traffic side. His thigh was trembling as the door transmitted the vibration of the engine’s initial fast idle. Posner was saying something, but the words made no impression on the mirror surface of Kelly’s mind. Something was about—
Hoang ran past the tall Russian scientist. His body, ten feet or less from Kelly, disintegrated in a white flash like the one that had vaporized most of the truck cab.
The vehicle from which the rocket-propelled grenade must have come was a black sedan a hundred yards away. It was just turning left out of the Boulevard Ourida-Meddad, the shortest way from the Institute by car. That was goddam good shooting, even with the scope sights fitted to the RPG-7, Kelly thought as he blew out the sedan’s side windows with the last four rounds in the Ingram.
“Get over!” the agent screamed to Posner. He tossed the empty gun through the window with little concern for where the Attaché’s head might be at the moment. With his freed right hand, Kelly jerked open t
he driver’s door. A weary Simca screeched to a stop in the traffic lane. Its driver looked as horrified as Mayer. The CIA officer was gaping through his windshield at a scene right out of The Battle of Algiers.
The Russian had been thrown sideways by the blast. He lurched upright under the tug of Kelly’s left hand. On the pavement beneath Vlasov lay a shoe, sock, and probably a foot from the ankle down. The American had seen its like before, when a dink had been almost on top of a Claymore mine as it went off. Hoang had made his own choice, and it appeared to have been a very goddam bad one for him. The chance of his location, however, had saved Professor Vlasov from taking the grenade himself.
The Defense Attaché had not yet grasped that Kelly was taking over the driving. When the operation had been planned, they had decided that Posner, who knew the city, would drive. Too much had hit the fan in the past few minutes for Kelly now to trust the naval man’s reflexes to get them out of what might be coming next. The agent threw the Attaché aside with as little ceremony as he bundled the Russian in after him. That put the defector between the two Americans with no chance of changing his mind and leaping out of the car again.
The driver of the Simca had gotten out of the car. She was staring at the disembodied foot on the pavement. The knuckles of both her hands were pressed against her mouth. Welcome to the world of international diplomacy, Kelly thought as he jerked the wheel left. He took the Volare into the street with as much verve as its slant-six engine could muster.
“We’ll go straight up along the coast road,” Kelly said, remembering to speak in French so that both his companions could understand. He cut right at the first intersection, feeling his guts tense as he waited for a trio of white-robed widows to cross in front of him. Things were not quite bad enough that Kelly was going to kill old ladies to save a few seconds. Not quite.
“They have decided to kill me,” said Professor Vlasov in a voice that belied the apparent calm of his face. “I thought they would, if I tried to reach the West.”
“Why did you turn, then?” Commander Posner demanded in peevish English. He had just stuffed the sub-machine gun gingerly under the seat. “We could have gone straight and turned at the Abdel Kader Lyceum.”
The agent heard brakes and felt metal jolt as he pulled left across traffic onto the Rue Bougrina. A Peugeot’s driver had not been alert enough when the relatively huge American car took his place in what was already a solid line of traffic. The Peugeotbumper dragged off with a clang on the Volare’s right rear fender. The Defense Attaché stared open-mouthed at Kelly. His cigarette, still unlighted, stuttered like a telegraph key between his fingers.
Kelly ignored the sounds. He said, “Because traffic on the Abderrazak’d be blocked by that procession even without that goddam bomb cratering the road four blocks south. God willing, we can get through by the Lycee if we’re on the north side of the square.”
“My hope was,” the Russian said in the same taut voice as before, “that they would be taken off guard. Before, they spared me because I was harmless with no one to build my devices. Killing me would prove that I was right.”
He raised his head. “Now that I have started,” he said, “I must succeed. If they catch us, we have no hope and the world has no hope.”
XXXII
The nearby shooting had stopped. Most of the smoke particles had settled to paint the street like the wing of a giant butterfly. The screaming still continued.
Someone was plucking at Korchenko with maddening persistence. The colonel rushed back to awareness with a flush that made his whole skin prickle inside. Babroi had an arm under Korchenko’s shoulders and was trying to feed him a swig of vodka. The colonel did not need either the help or the liquor. He needed full consciousness—that was returning—and better luck than seemed probable.
“Get away, dammit,” Korchenko muttered to his aide. He rolled to all fours and stood. Babroi hovered beside his chief. He had dropped his flask uncapped into his pocket to free both hands in case the colonel fell. Only Schwartz’ own door was still closed on the limousine. The driver was hunched over the wheel, as rigid as a gargoyle. Schwartz was the best driver Korchenko had ever met, skillful and utterly fearless while performing his functions. When he was faced with any other sort of danger, however, he froze—until someone ordered him to drive.
The back compartment of the Citröen was empty. Through its open doors Korchenko could see bodies sprawled on the pavement. The Professor’s body was not among them.
The other shoe dropped. “The bastard is defecting!” Korchenko shouted. He slammed his hand down on the limousine’s roof.
The Vietnamese security man raised himself by his grip on the car’s bumper. His face was as blank as a pelt stretched to dry. The pain within illuminated the skin. “If you please, sir,” he said in a calm voice, “where is Doctor Hoang?”
“Shut the hell up, I’m busy!” Korchenko snapped. He forgot to use English, but the tone translated well enough. The KGB colonel ducked to use the microphone. The motion made him dizzy for a moment. Angrily, Korchenko blipped the mike button three times for attention. The nervous babble on the control channel ceased.
Car One was the Citröen, Car Two the Volga which had dropped off the KGB team in front of them. Three and Four were the Volgas further back in the procession. “This is Korchenko,” the colonel snarled into his microphone. “Everybody shut their fucking mouth. Car Two, report your location.”
Nothing. “Car Two, come in or I’ll—” Korchenko shouted.
Beside him, Babroi clucked in the back of his throat and said, “Colonel, their radio wasn’t working in the compound when we tested it.”
Korchenko licked the edges of his front teeth. The sole survivor of the team from Car Two was wandering dazedly down the street with his pistol in his hand. The man’s eyes appeared fixed on the bodies of the men who had accompanied him moments before. “Right,” said the colonel. Then he keyed the mike and went on, “Car Three, report your location.”
“We’re not up to the National Police barracks yet and everything’s stopped,” the radio responded. The speaker’s calm was surprising until Korchenko remembered the situation. No one more than a block from the explosion and firefight knew more than that something had happened. “What’s going on?” Car Three continued. “The police are all running out and it sounded like there were shots?”
“Shut up,” the colonel said. The Vietnamese officer had groped his way around the hood of the car. He stood, listening intently as if he understood the Russian being spoken. “Can you turn—” Korchenko began to the microphone.
Babroi’s scanner blurted unexpectedly in English, “Harry! Good God! He’s got a machine gun! They’re killing people here!”
Korchenko stopped speaking with his mouth open. The two-way set asked, “Say again?” in Russian. “I didn’t copy that.”
“Shut up,” the colonel screamed into his microphone.
The scanner picked up a different voice saying, “Don, cool down. Who’s shooting? Are you safe?”
“It’s Kelly,” responded the first voice in a less shrill tone. “He’s got somebody with him in the station wagon besides Posner. I’m all right, I’m . . . they’re driving off east on the Rue Amar Ali and I’m staying here. He’s shooting a machine gun. Harry, there was a bomb and somebody. . . .”
“Tell the other cars to turn around. One of them goes up the Arbadji Abderrahman, the other Rue Bab el Oued,” said Nguyen. Because he spoke in English like the voices on the scanner, Korchenko listened instead of shouting him to silence reflexively. “Look for an American car, there can’t be any other here.”
The scanner was moaning in the first voice, “They blew somebody apart, Harry. There’s a foot here in the street.”
Korchenko relayed Nguyen’s suggestions—orders, from the tone!—in quick Russian. The KGB officer had not memorized the street layout of Algiers, and for all he knew there was no map of the city in the car—even if he had time to check it out. But if th
is fish-eating nigger was wrong, the colonel would personally see to it that he never saw home again.
The trunk lid closed solidly. Babroi strode around to the door again. He was holding out to his superior one of the automatic rifles he had gotten from the trunk. At the head of the street, an armored personnel carrier nosed around the truck still burning in the intersection. There had been no shooting for several minutes. Now some unseen marksman down the Rue Porte Neuve spanged a round off the APC’s glacis plate. The vehicle halted with its front wheels up on the curb. The heavy machine gun in the turret blasted a response to the rifle fire. The whole steel-clad mass of the APC rocked with the recoil of the automatic weapon.
Korchenko cursed. “We’ve got to get past them,” he said. He waved forward as he slid into the seat beside the driver. His rifle was impossibly awkward in the space cramped by the floor shift and the tube-driven radio. The colonel dropped the weapon over the seat as Babroi got into the back.
The rear doors slammed, one and then the other. Korchenko drew the pistol from his shoulder holster. “Sir, we’ll try,” Schwartz said. He put the Citröen in gear.
A second APC from the Mobile Guard barracks south on the Avenue Mohamed pulled up beside the first. Both began ripping long bursts down the pedestrian way. White smoke from their guns drifted to mix with black curls from the burning truck.
Instead of trying to force his way through the firefight, Schwartz cramped the wheel hard and took the limousine up the narrow alley between , the Institute and the Church of the Holy Cross. A squad of Algerian troops was coming the other way. The KGB driver went through them. He slowed just enough that the car’s glass leading edge did not shatter as it brushed a pair of soldiers out of the way.
“Call your base,” directed an unexpected voice. “Have them alert all other available cars.”
Colonel Korchenko jerked his head around. His throat was caught between a curse and inarticulate rage. The Vietnamese officer was poised behind him in the back seat, holding the rifle Korchenko had tossed there.