by Gar Wilson
"Yeah," James said cynically. "Everything is coming up roses."
"Jam the brakes. Give me a little left turn and then a right so the guys ahead won't see me doing my graceful swan dive."
James nodded acknowledgment.
"Go, Encizo, go."
"I'm gone, man."
Ahead of them a police car fully blocked the road.
Encizo unlatched the passenger door and waited for the momentum of the sudden braking action to fling it open. Then he leaped for the side of the road. He rolled, bounced and skidded before plunging into a foot of drainage water.
He held his breath and kept his face down in the muck as if he were dead or unconscious.
Still in the taxi, James saw two police officers waiting at the roadblock. They carried automatic rifles, ready for the kill, but their number was manageable.
No problem, the young black reassured himself. Once he managed to get out of the taxi alive, he would be able to neutralize two country cops with his bare hands.
He gave himself two seconds to refresh his memory on the trick McCarter had taught him.
"Now," he shouted aloud.
He snugged his seat belt, unlatched the door on his side, turned sharply and stomped on the brakes.
The car went into a skid, the tires screaming.
He released the steering wheel and prepared to unfasten his seat belt as the car assumed control. It did as it damn pleased, sliding crosswise on the road. The left wheels left the pavement. The taxi persisted on its chosen direction and the only way was to roll.
Momentum obliged.
The car slid on its right side for a few yards, then the next thing James knew he was upside down. Dirt from the floor and papers from the glove compartment rained on him. The roof was collapsing, squeezing down against his head, forcing his face into the steering wheel.
There was pain. All over. Not in vital organs, he hoped.
When the battered chassis stopped, he unlatched his belt but found that he couldn't move.
Outside one of the police cars from Yalta made a panic stop. The second smashed into the rear of the lead vehicle, setting off a deafening chain reaction.
From ahead, the two local police officers instinctively leaped to the shoulder of the road. One landed safely and rolled until he regained his upright stance. He made straight toward the driver's side of the overturned taxi.
The door was open, but a stunned Calvin James was having difficulty extricating himself from the compressed interior.
Holding his weapon in one hand, the officer helped the black foreigner. The taxi reeked of gasoline, and both of them were anxious to be a safe distance away when the inevitable explosion of the fuel tank occurred.
"Thanks," James said once he was in the open air. Then he kicked the cop in the groin, yanked the AK-47 from him and cracked him on the head with the butt. "Sorry," James added.
In the other gutter the second officer was searching for the body he thought he had seen thrown from the cab.
Encizo, dripping with muck, his face turned to one side to breathe, stabbed out his left hand to catch the man by the ankle.
In one swift movement Encizo pulled the officer off balance and into the drainage ditch. He stunned him with a kick to the face and then forced the Russian's head into the water, struggling to hold it there. Then he picked up the attack rifle and took several spare clips from the nearly drowned man.
He swung around in time to see the other policeman trying to recover from his pain to tackle James. No more than five square inches of the Russian officer's head was exposed. James was unwillingly providing body armor for the rest and trying to break a choke hold that threatened to gag him into unconsciousness.
The Cuban took one quick look at their pursuers. One of their cars was stuck nose-down in the ditch, and a second car rested on its top, its wheels spinning.
A would-be hero raced an official car up the shoulder, two wheels on the edge of the pavement and the other two spurting a rooster tail of water from the flooded ditch. He provided a fine target and offered Encizo a good starting point for his offensive.
The Cuban-born warrior rattled off a steady string of bullets. They eliminated the windshield, found the driver and added more wreckage to the growing roadblock.
A half dozen of the Russian officers on foot had unintentionally formed a straight line across the road. They stormed the overturned taxi, the lights from their own stalled vehicles silhouetting them, making them perfect targets.
Encizo squeezed off six steady shots.
The pursuers went down in a neat row, either as casualties or as the result of quick thinking. The Phoenix Force expert put bullets in the last three men just to be certain they were out of the blood sport before he turned toward his friend.
What he saw made him very fast in feeding in a new clip of ammo.
James was choking to death. To aim carefully Encizo had the time it takes a clock to tick. Russian reinforcements were on the way.
"Sorry, Calvin," he called. "If I miss, you're better off dead anyway."
He fired.
The bullet tore a path in the side of the man's skull, and blood squirted freely and with great force.
The cop lost the choke hold and flew backward, freeing James. "Nice shooting," he said with a weak grin.
"We aren't out of this yet. Get to the car ahead and be ready for a fast break. I'll provide cover."
The last part of his sentence was lost in a burst of gunfire as he opened up on the enemy reinforcements.
He hit one in the knee. That one did a somersault. He grazed another, and a third one, hit in the shoulder, was wrenched backward. The others fled for cover.
While Encizo kept the enemy down as he backed away, James slid into the driver's seat of the police car.
"Let's get out of here," he called.
The police car that had served as the original roadblock was pointed away from the vehicular carnage. It was moving before the Cuban fired the rest of his bullets and jumped into the passenger seat.
Seconds later the speedometer hit its peak.
It was a mile before Calvin James breathed easily enough to pose a question. "Now what?"
"Wasn't that enough?"
"We need a plan."
"We go rescue the other guys like we intended to do all along."
"You think they need rescuing more than us?"
"How's that?"
"We're in a stolen police car. We left a dozen security men and cops dead or moaning. There isn't a cold enough place in all Siberia for them to send us."
"Relax, amigo. Those guys still breathing are stuck behind a junkyard."
"They have mobile radios. They'll call ahead. We'll be recognized immediately in this thing."
Encizo leaned his head back. "Turn on the siren and the flashing lights."
"We'll be even more visible."
Encizo tapped his friend. "Think. The first car we catch up with is going to pull off the road. We swap vehicles. Comprende?"
James closed his eyes for a moment. He appeared calm, but he would not have sold himself an insurance policy for longer than the next five minutes.
8
The «Reverend» Arnold Vulcan was in a towering rage. He was poised on the steps of his church, his face flushed, his eyes burning in their sockets. Clenching and unclenching his fists, he fought for control. Had he a saber or scimitar, he might have come down from his perch to slash and cut anything or anyone who dared cross his path.
One of his frequent fantasies flashed into his mind, and he saw himself on horseback, riding hard and cutting a killing path through his enemies without remorse.
In his late teens he had served as a guard in Siberian labor camps. There he learned the enormous power of cruelty. Kindly guards were rewarded with friendship by their charges. Cruelty made him superior to the gaunt, broken individuals who worked under him. They hated him, but they worked. Mistreatment made them surpass his production quota, an achievement that cau
ght his superior's attention.
The other wardens feared him, too, feared he might rise above them and treat them as he treated the prisoners. They praised him and assumed he was a protégé of the higher-ups. Because they feared him, they helped him grow in stature.
Ever since his education in the camps, he had blended cruelty with fear and, more recently, had learned how to handle his superiors.
More than life itself, the rulers feared losing their sometimes slowly acquired amenities. Losing their special status that made them different from the classless Communist society was their greatest fear.
Vulcan was a bestial man. He would allow no one to unseat those above him even if it required killing interlopers or torturing those who threatened the stature of those currently in control.
The implied promise remained unspoken and when he was ready, his superiors moved him another notch higher. And each of the aging rulers thought Vulcan was his own special protege and protector. Meanwhile he shared one success after another with the aspirants in the Politburo.
His brainchild — Cheyenne, Wyoming — blended those factors. The inhabitants were as good as prisoners who would unwittingly support his rise to power.
The project would propel him to share in the authority invested in those sheltered by the Kremlin walls. It already kept him in the eyes of the Party hierarchy.
The new Cheyenne project would take him farther yet. But some maniac was trying to destroy it. He let his eyes take in the scene again, and he could not believe what he saw.
Bodies littered the main street of his fiefdom. The dead lay in positions of defeat where they fell. Several were face down on the pavement, soaking in their own blood. A man sat against the door of ComputerLand. His arms were limp at his sides, as though he had suffered from the summer heat and slumped with exhaustion. His tongue lolled like a panting dog's. Vulcan knew the man well. He had been crucial in planning the upcoming mission.
"Who did this?" Vulcan roared. "Who dared do this to me?"
He came down one step.
He imagined any number of enemies who might attempt to destroy his creation. They were all inside the government. Small, incompetent challengers knew they had to destroy Vulcan if they were to achieve.heir own fantasies.
"Are these traitors from our own ranks?" It was easy to believe that some of his subjects were in the employ of his enemies. Traitors were all around him.
He would see them executed after he tortured them in the KGB ways. No perpetrator of such a crime against him deserved to die easily.
The next minute his eyes recorded a ghastly sight that fed the raging fire inside of him.
Four corpses formed a semicircle in front of the gun shop. One man had reached as far as the sidewalk.
No one had ventured out to police the dead. Several broken and bloodied forms showed signs of life. The hands of one man clawed the pavement, reaching for the gun he had been firing. Another dying man sat in the gutter, holding an H&K MP-5 in both of his shaking hands. The German chatter gun pumped slugs into the gaping window of the gun shop.
When his weapon's hammer clicked on empty, a short familiar burst of an AK-47 from inside made his body dance.
Others appeared to be breathing.
"You out there," Katz called from inside. "Do you want a truce long enough to gather your wounded?"
Vulcan came down another step.
"Who is that? Is it one of ours?" He shoved his hand inside his black suitcoat and withdrew a Beretta 92-F. He treasured the 9 mm semiauto because it was the U.S. Military replacement for the aged Colt.45! government model.
It was tough like him. Rugged like him. "Truce, hell." He laughed loud enough to be heard in the shop.
He fingered the trigger in a single-hand hold. The first shot was double-action, but each of the others took only a light touch of the forefinger. He fired all sixteen shells randomly through the empty window frame. From his position nearly parallel to the storefront, he knew his shots were useless unless a lucky ricochet caught one of the devils who had gone mad in his favorite store.
Vulcan did not care.
He released the empty clip and replaced it with a full one from the breast pocket on the other side of his jacket. His finger felt good on the trigger. Mentally he was lost in a muddle of troubling questions. He was infected, too, by the fierce temper that had plagued him since childhood.
He took the last step and started toward the store, and he might have walked straight into combat if his chief aide had not stopped him.
"Reverend Vulcan, don't," Colin Edge said. He was American by birth and had lived in New York City where his parents served the Russian ambassador to the United Nations. He hated the land of his birth with a special passion that he never let anyone else understand. Secretly, his hate was caused by the fact that he damned every American for letting his parents drag him bodily to an Aeroflot jetliner when he had been fourteen and force him into the poverty of mind and goods that he found the USSR to be. "Stop or you'll be killed."
Vulcan laughed. "Killed? By whom?"
He could not conceive that anyone was capable of hurting him as long as he held a functioning gun in his hands. With the Beretta at intermediate ranges, he had outscored men with hunting rifles.
"Colin is right," the woman who called herself Ann Cardwell said. "You would kill one, probably two, maybe wound a third, but there may be more inside. Besides, nothing is worth risking your life for at this point in our mission."
Colin Edge moved his hands slightly, motioning with his fingers to warn her not to tell Vulcan that there was something he couldn't do.
Although Edge was taller than his superior, he appeared to be a small man. His shoulders were hunched defensively as a lasting result of the beatings and mind-altering drugs administered in the mental hospital where he had spent years for his outspoken defiance of authority. He held his arms pressed close to his side as though he were a man in a crowded elevator. His milky gray eyes had a slightly vacant look at times, and he unconsciously made scrubbing motions with his hands whenever he was disturbed.
Gray hair and a gaunt face made him look older than his forty years. He appeared to be totally devoted to Vulcan, although actually his only concern was the security he felt he gained by his unswerving loyalty.
To him, Vulcan reigned as a high priest with protective powers when he cared to dispense them. So, Edge obeyed and followed except now when the danger was real. Then he protected his lifeline.
Vulcan took another step, as though he wouldn't be detained.
"Go ahead. Be a fool," Ann Cardwell told him. "I will take your place."
The words were exactly right. He stopped. No one would lead the mission except him. "Who are they?" he demanded, breathing like the bull tormented by a matador. "Who allowed that to happen? And that?" He pointed at the heap of smoking ruins that the tavern had become, then at the gun shop.
Neither Ann Cardwell nor Edge answered.
Ann felt no guilt although she knew Vulcan would eventually give his superiors a sacrificial lamb. She had been the first to come running to him with news that there were strangers in the McDonald's store, but he had not taken the matter very seriously.
Although entrance and exit from his Cheyenne were officially restricted, they were never bothered by strangers. The security men who were supposed to patrol the perimeter were not professional. They were cadre who wanted only to be shipped to the United States as quickly as possible, and they had never met any threat.
As Vulcan looked around yet again, the enormity of the slaughter nearly overpowered him. His knees became water. He had no idea what could have interfered with his project in such a drastic manner, and his voice threatened to betray his fear and his clouded mind.
He became terrified although he did all he could to hide his fear. Standing on the church steps, somewhat exposed, helped conceal that fear.
"Shall I call in the police from Yalta?" Ann Cardwell asked.
"Police?" he tried to
sound incredulous.
Colin Edge suggested, "The army, then?"
Vulcan imagined the complications if he admitted he could not protect his own creation.
"What army?" He laughed.
"Why, the Russian army, sir."
"To stop three men?"
"Three men in a gun shop with a wide selection of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Grenades. Smoke bombs," Ann said in support of Colin's suggestion.
Vulcan pretended that he considered the idea ridiculous. "They might be our own people."
"They are not," she said.
"You do not know everyone here."
"I know these are not our people. One had an artificial hand. No one with such a flaw would be allowed here."
"That does not mean we need outsiders. We have an entire town composed of young- to middle-aged men and women. All are trained in weapons. All of them have one or more guns in their house that they target-practice with five days a week."
"But the intruders have all the guns and ammunition they need inside the gun shop. The army would have flame throwers, tear gas, things like that. We would lose no more of our own people."
Forget our own people, he wanted to tell her. He could cover the loss with paperwork. Those in the Kremlin accepted human losses unless they became common knowledge.
"No army. No police. We have a twenty-man security force."
"Five of them were found dead in the forest," Colin Edge said softly. "More are still searching the woods."
"Searching the woods when the obvious assassins are here in the center of our city? Call them back immediately."
"Yes, Reverend Vulcan."
"At least half a dozen of our people have been killed in the street already," Ann Cardwell reminded the leader. "More are seriously wounded."
"Are any of those assigned to our next mission wounded or dead?" he asked coldly.
"No," Colin Edge responded. "I sheltered them immediately."
"Good."
"It would be better not to lose any of our own people. We should call for outside help." Ann Cardwell was the one person who did not cower before Vulcan.