Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  The layout of the town reminded him of the houses in Mombasa’s Old Town—walled gardens behind continuous street-facing houses. If he kept to the walled yards he’d be safe from anybody covering the alleys.

  A rooster crowed behind him, startling him with its raucous call. The glass cuts burned through the haze of adrenaline. He was twenty-five yards into the town and the minaret was dead ahead, its middle height silhouetted against the square tower beyond. He scrambled up the trash heap at the corner of a courtyard and leaped over the next wall, landing softly on more trash beyond it, trying not to think of what was getting into the deep cuts on his knee. The minaret looked close enough to touch now. Its far wall ought to give on the square.

  He flinched as a burst of fire blew holes in a gate to his right, showering him with splinters. Somewhere, a man screamed, but Alan’s attention was riveted on the muzzle-flash that he had seen above the gate. He took two steps to the gated wall and got up on a crate without raising his head, then rolled his gun out over the wall in one motion. There was a helmeted man inches below him, another one six feet away and facing the gate, and Alan pulled the little machine pistol up and shot wildly, on instinct, actually missing the first man for a split second and then hitting him and walking the shots to the other.

  He dropped back below the wall and heard more shooting to the west. The scream of a wounded man rang out again, hoarser from repetition. Alan wiped his arm across his face to clear the grit and the crap from the trash heaps he’d jumped through and noticed that his sleeve was in shreds, probably from the glass.

  Then there was the clear, long crack of a large-caliber rifle from the tower, and Alan knew that Mike had got the message of the open Send button on his cellphone.

  Dukas felt the phone vibrate and pressed the button, but for some seconds the noises he heard were a mystery.

  “Hey!” he whispered.

  Then he realized he was listening to footsteps running: Alan and Harry were in the town. He set the phone next to his flashlight on the low bench beside him and raised his rifle. Shreed had fired two more times, both at targets that Dukas couldn’t see, so he knew his quarry was still down there and alive.

  Dukas had never been a killer, and for a moment he hesitated as the iron sights crossed the hazy shape of a second sniper, prone in the moonlight at the back of the mosque where a corner of old stone supported a triangle of roof. But the man was focused on the dark to the north of the square, and for all Dukas knew he had Alan in his sights, or Harry.

  Then fire broke out just across the square, out of Dukas’s field of view, and the muzzle-flashes lit the tops of the alleys in pulses of yellow and white as if a fire was burning. A man screamed. Dukas wrenched his attention back to the sniper, held the sight picture, and fired.

  He missed.

  The man rolled on his back and over the lip of the roof as Dukas shot again. He hadn’t aimed. Really aimed. Buck fever. Dukas knew that if he put his head down he’d never get it up again to look, and he forced himself to scan the rubble of the mosque. He kept the rifle pointed down and moved it as he changed lines of vision, just as they had taught him long ago at Quantico.

  The cellphone was making human sounds on the bench behind him now. He ducked down without thinking and pulled it to his ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mike. What the hell’s happening?”

  “Shreed’s down at the base of the mosque. He’s hit. I missed a goddam sniper.”

  “I can see the tower. I’m at the—fuck. I’m about fifty yards away, almost due north of you. I just shot two guys.” Alan sounded a little high. Dukas remembered Alan eight years before, in Sudan—an adrenaline junky.

  “Shreed’s control and a radioman are in the mosque,” Dukas growled. “The sniper’s off north of the mosque in another ruined building.”

  A shotgun roared behind Dukas and his tower—west, he reminded himself.

  “That’s Harry,” he heard Alan say.

  “Grenade launcher?”

  “Shotgun. Watch the north of the square. I’m going to move. If anyone tries to get me, they have to cross your line of sight, right?”

  “Not everywhere.”

  “Try, Mike.”

  Dukas moved along the parapet several meters and raised his head.

  Chen never lost his nerve—not when the shooting started, not when his men began to fall, and not when the sergeant tried to seize control. His mind became beautifully clear, his doubts erased by the need to act. He focused on his sketch map of the village as he struggled to organize a counterattack against what he thought were Shreed’s forces—US Marines? Rangers? It was clear to him that he had walked into a trap, and, if he survived, he knew that he would reexamine his failure to secure the village over and over. And he would not be alone in the reexamination: his superiors—

  Perhaps Shreed’s men had been waiting in the houses. Perhaps—

  At least four of his men were down or not responding. Shreed was on the other side of the mosque wall, wounded and perhaps dying, and his forces had a sniper in the tower above him. Chen ordered his men on the south side of the square to cover the tower while the two men immediately under his hand secured Shreed. Shooters at the base of the tower would be able to hit the sniper or at least keep his head down. When he had Shreed, he would take the tower. He sent the sergeant to get around into the market and find the tower’s entrance.

  He turned to the radioman and the sniper who were clinging to the wall behind them.

  “Have you sent the message?” He was trying to reach the command in Szhinjiang.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any reply?”

  “They’re putting a response together.”

  Hours. He had to get into the tower and hope that Pakistan was still friendly to China.

  He explained how he wanted them to move to capture Shreed. “I want him alive!”

  The two soldiers were scared, determined, and young. Chen didn’t think he would last as a platoon leader in a war. They were all too young. “Ready?”

  They both nodded.

  He gave the word.

  Alan stripped the clip out of the machine pistol. He looked at his watch. Eleven minutes ago, they had started up the slope. While he thought, his right hand, as if it had its own brain, reached back into the pack at his hip, took out another clip, and tilted it into the receiver. His mouth was dry, his knee wet with blood, and his whole frame seemed to shake with the beat of his heart.

  He jumped down from the crate and was shocked to feel his knees sag a little, as if the joints were stiff. He flexed them, twice, gritting his teeth at the pain from his right knee. Probably why SWAT guys wore kneepads. Then he moved to the bullet-riddled gate and lifted the bar. No one fired, and he pushed the gate open until it shielded him from the square. Then he threw a can from the rubbish heap into the street. Nothing. He glanced around the gate and saw the edge of the square for the first time. Another body lay at the mouth of the alley.

  A brief storm of fire struck the gate and ricocheted around the alley. Alan flung himself back and flattened at the gateway, peering through the dark under the gate itself. Another burst buzzed by him. He saw two shapes move out into the open, firing as they came, and he fired without hitting either, the gap between gate and earth too narrow to let him get a sight picture.

  They were going for Shreed.

  A blast like a cannon shot echoed through the town, and one of the men sprawled backward, rotating like a broken gymnast. Harry or Mike? The other leaped, fell flat. Alan saw a third man firing steadily almost straight up, and he realized the man was shooting for Dukas. Somebody else was spraying the alley with fire from the south. Alan took an instant, working himself up to it, then leaned out with the machine pistol and fired left-handed.

  His first thought was that the machine pistol had detonated. It was gone, down the alley. So were two fingers from his left hand.

  It was ironic, Shreed thought, that his wounds had robbed him of the
use of his legs. Yet he had been used to getting by without them, and now he dragged himself about the rubble as fast as he could, the ache in his back sealed away by morphine. The shots had gone in below his body armor, he knew that, probably kissed his spine.

  He was down, but he wasn’t out.

  He thought he had got one Chinese with his first shots. Then he had wasted ammo, firing at every movement he could see. For the first few seconds he had assumed that all fire was directed at him, and he hadn’t allowed himself even a flicker of hope until he saw one of the Chinese cut down by fire from another position. He couldn’t understand who might be out there or why they were shooting the Chinese. He didn’t really care, and he was unaware that he was screaming sometimes. He simply wanted Chen. He held tight to that thought whenever he moved and felt the grating, the almost audible crack from his lower back. Chen. Tell him and then kill him.

  Things were getting gray around the edges when the two Chinese soldiers charged him. He got the big pistol up and shot on reflex, center of mass, but the other man came down on top of him and his gun was gone. Then he stopped trying to make sense of it. He felt himself floating a little, bouncing, and he thought it was over. Then he was slammed back to earth, the blow to his ribs shooting the first real pain in several minutes through every nerve ending, and he screamed.

  The radioman was dead and another soldier was down at the base of the tower, but Chen had Top Hook at his feet. He still looked big, and American, even as he screamed. Chen wanted to give the sniper a medal on the spot.

  “That was—incredible.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Because of you, we may win this yet.”

  The square was silent for the first time in what seemed like hours. There was no more firing from the north side, where he had had men; now Chen counted them as casualties. He should have five left.

  He took a shaped charge out of his pack and checked the firing mechanism. He’d planned to use it on Shreed’s car, back in the other world where his plan worked and he scooped Shreed up cleanly. A little distraction to make the forced defection look like a terrorist bomb. Now he thought that it would probably be powerful enough to punch through the wall of the tower. The sergeant could go after the tower’s door. Chen acknowledged to himself that it wasn’t much of a plan, but he had become focused on the tower, because there was somebody up there who was killing them; and because unless the Americans had a big team, he thought his survivors could hold the tower until the Pakistanis or his own service came.

  He took the charge and wriggled forward to the base of the tower wall. “Two?”

  “In position.”

  “When I blow the charge, take the tower. That goes for everybody. Acknowledge!”

  Numbers counted off, leaving telltale spaces. Eight men silent.

  Chen punched the charge on the wall and set the timer, pushing rubble over the charge to give it the best possible chance, then tumbled back behind the remains of the mosque wall. His mind registered the surprising observation that the wall had been inlaid with plates of Chinese porcelain.

  He clapped his hands to his ears and rolled into a ball.

  Dukas heard Alan cursing and went back to the cellphone. He was covered in stone chips from the volley that had greeted his attempt to peer out over the edge; several were embedded in his cheek. He had fired two shots. His hands were shaking.

  “Alan!”

  “Fuck fuck fuck FUCK!”

  “Alan!”

  “Hurts like a son of a bitch. Mike, they’re trying to get around the tower. I caught some movement to your, uh, east and west.”

  “You okay?”

  “Just go! Look!”

  Dukas steeled himself before looking out the low arches on the south. Three men were moving along the edge of the rubble. The first disappeared to the west into the market even as Dukas raised his rifle.

  Bang.

  The last one dropped. The second one whirled and fired, a blaze of light and angry hornets all around him. Dukas stood his ground and the other man fired again and so did Dukas, simultaneous roars, and then the man was gone and the rifle was empty, its bolt back. Short magazine. He didn’t have reloads. He put the rifle down on the stone roof carefully, as though it was something very valuable, and then he reached into his jacket for the revolver, and the tower moved.

  Alan had his hand wrapped in lint and roughly taped. There was blood everywhere and he couldn’t seem to get enough pressure on the hand to stop the spurts until he put a tourniquet on the brachial artery on the inside of the upper arm just above the elbow. That seemed to take forever. He heard Dukas fire from the building.

  He had retreated into the shelter of the yard. When the blast came, it struck the open gate full on and crashed it back against its stops, the sound lost in the explosion. The slamming gate stopped within inches of his face, and the wave of smoke and noise dazed him. He shook his head, his ears ringing, and reached in the holster at his waist for his pistol. Then he worked the slide against his thigh. Alan had never been hit before, and he felt leaden with shock and fear. And worry: he hadn’t heard Harry’s gun for long minutes.

  The Chinese had Shreed. The Chinese were trying to storm Dukas’s tower.

  He had reached a state where his muscles seemed to be making decisions for him. While his mind was still thinking that he didn’t have the energy or the will to find Harry, his legs had levered him to his feet and pushed him to the gate, which still hung straight. He shouldered it open to keep it between him and the square and ran the other way down the street. At the first crossway, he turned left without pausing to look up the alley. He could hear his feet distinctly, slapping on the packed earth in rhythm, even though his ears were still ringing. He wasn’t even looking around and he thought, very clearly, “I’m dead.”

  He passed an opening to the left, back toward the square, and kept going west, trying to keep parallel to the men moving behind the tower. At the second turning, he stopped, straining for air, and looked to the south. This lane turned slightly to the west. It appeared to be empty in the moonlight. He moved off, jogging slowly along the left margin of the street, his mouth half-open in an attempt to quiet his breathing. His left hand hurt at every heartbeat and every step, and blood continued to pulse out of the bandage, drops falling to the ground as he went.

  He thought this route would take him to the area behind the tower. If it didn’t, he wasn’t sure he’d make it back.

  Ahead of him, the street suddenly opened into a wider space, and a small truck blocked his way. He crouched by the wheel and gasped for only a moment; then he leaned out around the hood. The tower was clear in the moonlight, rising from a row of market stalls at its base. Silent shapes were climbing through the stalls.

  The blast extinguished sound, and the pillar of powdered rock and smoke that leaped up the north face of the tower was answered by a second column of smoke that followed the trap door into the air. Dukas was thrown flat, and when he gained his knees he saw that the whole north wall of the top of the tower was gone. The big pistol was still in his hand. He swayed and thought of Shreed, still down in the dark at the base of the tower if the explosion hadn’t killed him. He crabwalked across the roof to the empty hole that had been a trap door. Dust still rose through it, and with the dust, a sort of mewling like a young cat wanting food. It was dark down there.

  Dukas gritted his teeth and lowered himself into the empty space by his hands, his feet kicking out for a ladder that was no longer there. It seemed easier to take his chances on the drop than to pull himself back on the exposed roof; he lowered himself to the full reach of his arms, tried not to think of how tall the tower was, and dropped into the dark.

  It was farther and more disorienting than he had expected, and he landed clumsily, his right foot on something yielding, and he sprawled. Nothing broken. The little sound came to him again. The stairs in the wall were over to the left. He felt for the wall, didn’t find it where he expected, and stumbled agai
n. He had a flashlight in his pocket. The thought came to him from a distance, as if he had just remembered where his keys were in the midst of a frantic search. He pulled it out and turned the head until the beam illuminated the dark.

  He wished he hadn’t.

  It didn’t take a forensic expert to understand that the charge had blown a large piece off the inside of the tower, scattering shrapnel from the ancient stones in a concentrated cone. One body had its head severed just at the neck. The sound was coming from a boy, who was lying at the head of the stairs with both of his feet gone, his blood flowing down a set of stone cataracts to pool at the bottom.

  The child might live. Dukas whispered to him while he grabbed at stray bits of wreckage and came up with curtain cords that he used to bind his legs. His attempts seemed feeble and useless, his tourniquets like Band-Aids compared to the damage. The boy made inhuman sounds from his chest.

  I brought this here.

  He avoided the blood at the foot of the steps and turned the light on the door just as the shooting started again.

  The shotgun roared to Alan’s right, throwing one of the shapes back into a stall. A burst of return fire from the base of the tower gave him a target and he shot at the flashes, aiming low. The shotgun went off again, a sound like ripping canvas, and Alan’s target crossed a beam of moonlight right in front of his sights and he fired, his right hand propped on the hood of the vehicle. Harry was methodically firing low into the lightly built stalls, forcing them to move.