————
They thought she was sick. They thought she was weak. Of all of the people to go after Eddie Mazaryk, Kayla was sure nobody thought it would be her, least of all the man himself. This was her advantage. She’d seen him. She’d seen him move past them to get behind their position. He was up and out of the car even before they were. He was so fast that she hadn’t the time to pull her gun around before he’d disappeared into the rain. Now they were boxed in: Ales and Brander in front, and Eddie Mazaryk somewhere behind.
It was time: enough of this sneaking about like flushed out rats. She would hit hard and fast, the exact opposite of what everyone expected from her. The com was dead, but it made no difference. She would act alone. She didn’t hesitate; she didn’t even steady herself. She just popped up and sprinted through the sheets of water towards a reckoning with the dread captain of Black. Pyper didn’t even see her go.
————
Ian almost shot her. He whipped around the back of the car he was using for cover and glimpsed Kayla tearing off through the rain to his right, back the way he’d come. Only a flash of her spikey hair glimpsed through the rain stayed his hand. He was sure Brander had seen her, probably Ales too, but they held their fire. They were letting her run towards what he could only assume was Mazaryk himself. They were toying with her. For another half of a minute Ian waited, dripping, for the looming hulk of Goran Brander to materialize out of the rain like some huge swamp monster, gunning for him. But Brander never came. Ian’s mind raced. Ales Radomir had disappeared somewhere up to his right, near where Pyper was, and now Brander had disappeared to his left, probably moving back towards Pyper.
They were both going for Pyper Hurley.
Ian popped up from hiding, aiming wildly at nothing. He had to draw them off.
“Brander!” he screamed. No answer. The sound of his voice died feet from his mouth, battered like a bug to the ground.
“Brander, I’m over here!”
Still no answer. He screamed again but this time for Pyper, his voice cracked. Nothing. He ran towards the center of the highway where he’d last seen her.
————
Pyper saw Goran Brander coming for her, his long arms sweeping the rain in front of him. He was surprisingly fast for such a large man, shifting in and out of view like a ghoul with the passing sheets of rain. Just when she had a bead on him, he would disappear. Patiently, she waited. Ales Radomir was somewhere nearby, up where Kayla MacQuillan had been before she’d disappeared. If she fired, Ales would know and pinpoint her. She had but one shot at the hulking Brander and then she would have to run to try and escape Radomir. She followed him with her sight then jumped to where she thought he’d be, but never was. She took a deep breath and wiped the rain off her lips. It was as if he knew the limits of her sight exactly, as if he was staying just outside her range, distracting her.
And then she knew.
She spun around one second too late: Ales Radomir was already on top of her. He stopped her arm with one hand as she fired and her shot went wide. She’d startled him; she could see it in his eyes behind their round, gold rimmed spectacles. She took advantage and shoved him back as she sprang up. He made no sound as he fell, but he did shoot. The diode slammed into Pyper’s knee just as she put pressure on it. She toppled to the side and her head bounced off of the grimy bumper of a nearby car. She lost focus.
Ales Radomir was not used to being on the ground. His eyes flashed and his mouth formed a white line on his face. He brought his gun up. Pyper fired into his gut just as he fired into her face.
Ian saw two flashes in the center lane, ten meters away from him. His heart was in his throat and his eyes went everywhere at once. For fear of hitting his own captain, he didn’t dare risk firing into the tangle that grew visible before him. He screamed her name again and again but then heard a muffled crack, and then another, and he knew she was gone. He wheeled up just short of them, but was forced to take cover behind a nearby lorry as gunfire raked down its side. In the distance he heard the booming laugh of Goran Brander.
On the ground, Ales Radomir shifted and blinked several times as he watched the still body of Pyper Hurley. His wound was severe and he hadn’t much time left, but if it pained him at all, he didn’t let it show. Instead, he fumed. His nostrils flared and his mouth opened in a silent snarl. He pounded his fist into the water on the street. He spat on her. Then he shook his head and lay back so that his body cut the runoff around either side of him. He tucked his glasses into his pocket, and he closed his eyes.
“Two on two!” Brander boomed through the rain. His voice was a full octave lower than the average man’s and the rain played a ventriloquist’s tricks with it, making it seem to come from everywhere. “It looks like you and me, Mr. Finn! And I wouldn’t hold out much hope for that little sweeper of yours,” Brander added sadly. That he sounded genuinely sorry chilled Ian more than the pouring rain.
Ian threw himself onto the car immediately in front of him, up and over, praying that the lorry would still provide him with cover. The hood popped under his weight and he heard a muted scream from within, but no shots came after him. Safely in a new position, he ducked low and took stock. Whoever was in the car tried to open the passenger door, but Ian slammed it shut and heard a startled yelp. They didn’t try to open it again.
His captain was gone. He felt her absence like a gash in the fabric of his team, deflating him. He shook his dripping head and brushed back his soaking hair. For all he knew, he was all that remained. He was angry at Kayla for running to face Mazaryk alone, yet he also admired her. It seemed to Ian like he’d spent the entire firefight scampering for his life, fighting from a defensive position, ducking and dodging like a terrified child. At least Kayla had taken matters into her own hands. He had to find her. He had to help her if she was still standing. But first he would have to take out Brander.
————
Donovan Debenham was a long haul trucker for Refrigerated Transport of Greater Britain and he was on the tail end of a drive from Cardiff when the storm hit just outside of Dublin. He’d been through heavy rain before, but rarely this severe, and he knew when the sluggish traffic halted that the rain must have washed away a barrier or formed a pool too deep to risk crossing— he would be there for a while. He threw his rig into park and his cab shuddered into place and began to idle with a soft rattle. He took out his cigarettes and swore under his breath as he lit one up. He was so close. He couldn’t be more than twenty kilometers from his drop point. And a pub. A pub most importantly.
He inhaled deeply, cracked his window to let out the smoke, and then quickly rolled it back up as water poured in.
“Jesus,” he muttered. If that was how it was, he’d just smoke out the cab.
His shortwave radio chirped with occasional bursts of chatter, people reporting the dead stop to their dispatchers and warning others away from the storm. He learned that barriers had been set up several kilometers back and that all traffic was being rerouted from this area. That was peculiar, blocking off the whole expressway like that. He reached over and flicked off the radio. He was tired, and it was beginning to give him a headache. He preferred to listen to the steady thrum of the rain and gaze out of the windshield at the motion of the washers: clear, blurry, clear, blurry. Hypnotic. He let his seat back a tad and watched the fury of the storm rage around him from on high.
So it was that he saw the man approach from rather far back, materializing out of the distance as he made his way down the expressway. He walked quickly, but didn’t seem rushed. He was well dressed, in a black suit and a thin black tie. He wore a knee length, dark gray raincoat. He kept his head down against the wind and the rain, and he had long, dark hair, pulled back and held together with a small band. His hands were in the pockets of his coat as he walked. He was surely soaked to the bone, but didn’t act as though the rain bothered him.
About ten feet from the truck, the man stopped and looked directly at Donovan. Donova
n froze mid-drag. The look wasn’t threatening, not exactly, but it was deeply probing, as if he were taking in the entirety of Donovan: his job, his life, his truck, his whole being all at once. Then the man smiled and approached the passenger’s side. With a strange thrill Donovan realized that he wanted to talk to him. He slid over and rolled the window down about halfway, letting rain pool on the floor of the cab. The man stood a respectable distance back, his hands still in his pockets.
“Hello,” he said in flat English. His accent was almost American. Almost, but not quite. He was clearly not Irish. His face was delicate, almost feminine. He had a button nose and small pink lips and his skin was very pale.
“Are you all right?” Donovan asked.
“My car is stalled in a pool of water just up ahead. Could I perhaps wait out the storm in your cab?”
Donovan thought for a moment. The guy didn’t look dangerous. He was slight, almost thin, like a bird. Donovan probably had three stone on him. He was most likely just some foreign businessman, stuck here on his way home.
Donovan shrugged and popped open the door. “Sure. Come on in. My name is Donovan.”
The man smiled that strange smile again as he stepped up and into the cab. “Hello Donovan. My name is Eddie.”
————
Kayla continued down the highway, running in bursts as her body would allow, until she saw the flares. At first they were nothing more than an odd brightening in the distance, a strange red coloring of the pouring rain. She paused, suddenly cautious. This was the type of place where that bastard Mazaryk would wait, she thought. He would exploit something like this, a disconcerting scene, an odd coloring, anything to disturb the system. Then he would pounce.
She ducked between the cars, skating the dotted lines as she edged closer to the phosphorescence. When she could smell the acrid tang of sulfur, burning so hot it was immune to the downpour, she stopped. He was somewhere close. A man popped out of the passenger’s side door of a nearby car and she leveled her gun at him without a second thought. But he was fat; she could tell even in the rain, and when he saw her he immediately got back in the car. She swore under her breath. Things like that could give away her position.
The rain was dripping into her eyes. She wiped it away, cleared her nose, and spat. Her eyeglasses were basically useless. It was like standing under a shower. She was very conscious of at least two pairs of eyes watching her from either side as she edged her way forward, but neither of these strangers would meddle with her. It was a touchy science, determining who would act and who would not. She had been burned badly in the last round and the humiliation still stung her. And in front of Ian, too. She would not let that happen again. She wondered how they were faring behind her... not that she could do anything about it now. This was her battle. She had chosen it. She would make them proud by gunning down the legend.
She could see that the flares were ringing what looked to be a giant puddle. Perhaps you could even call it a small pond. At the far end, directly across from Kayla, an abandoned car sat swamped, half in and half out of the bubbling water like the carcass of a dead animal stuck in tar. The water level was up above the bottom of the doors. She needed to avoid that at all costs. The wrong shot at the wrong time and she could slip under that mess and drown. No adrenal shot on earth would help her then. She turned away, panning the rain. He was out there somewhere, and his time was up.
————
“Look at this one,” Donovan remarked, exhaling a jet of smoke through his nostrils and nodding out toward the rain. “You think she’s okay?”
While Donovan had just noticed her, Eddie Mazaryk had been watching her since she had appeared in the distance—watching for her, in fact. He watched as she ran up the middle of two lanes. He watched her pull up ten or so feet back from where some poor municipal worker had set out a series of flares marking a large pool of runoff. He watched her push her hair out of her eyes and he smiled when she spat rainwater out of her mouth.
Donovan looked at him as he watched Kayla.
“Do you know her or something? There’s room here. She can wait it out here too,” he said, moving to roll his window down.
Eddie Mazaryk held his hand up and Donovan stopped mid-motion. “No,” Mazaryk said softly. “I’ll get her.”
————
Crouched by the pool, Kayla was looking in all of the wrong places. She snapped her gaze from aisle to aisle in between the cars. She peered into the swampy distance. She even got low and looked for shoes. All the while, Mazaryk eased down his window and popped his shoulder out. Donovan watched with horror as Mazaryk withdrew a gun from his overcoat pocket. He brought it outside, sighted briefly, and fired three times in quick succession. Donovan couldn’t scream; he couldn’t say anything. The words caught with the smoke in his throat. He could only cough and scrape wildly for the handle of his door and shove himself as far away from Mazaryk as possible. Once the firing was done, Eddie Mazaryk turned slowly to look at Donovan.
“Goodbye,” he said, as he opened the door and stepped carefully down and out of view. He closed the door softly behind him.
Once outside, he saw that she had fallen with her face half inside the ever growing pool. With his gun leveled at her, he pulled her back until she was clear of the water. He saw that there were two red welts on her face, one just below her right cheekbone, the other on her chin. A third spidery welt wrapped around the right side of her neck; he’d hit with all three shots. Still holding the scruff of her shirt, he bent down so that his cheek was beside her slackened mouth. He felt the barest cold brush of air. She was still breathing. She hadn’t sucked in water. He gently propped her against the nearby concrete barrier. He even brushed her hair back from her forehead. Then he turned his attention back down the highway.
————
Goran Brander came around the far side of the lorry with his .50 caliber blazing. He fired at anything and everything near Ian. When Ian ducked behind a car, Brander shot through it. He pelted it like hail, exploding every window. The screams of the passengers didn’t slow Brander in the slightest, but they rang like foghorns in Ian’s ears. To spare them Ian would run, but no sooner did he stop to get his bearings when Brander would tear through his cover and new screams erupted. Ian got a shot off in his direction only when Brander paused to reload, and when he did this he was quick. When Ian was finally able to sight him through a windshield or passenger’s window, his outline vague and watery behind wide eyed stares and screams, he couldn’t bring himself to fire through them as Brander did. Ian screamed in fury at Brander, but also at himself.
He realized Brander was herding him like a stray sheep. He cut a startling figure, tall and thin, his arms flipped about him in the rain like a flag in the wind. His gun was everywhere at once. He seemed to part the rain around him, whereas it fell fully upon Ian as he scrambled about. And what was worse, Brander was smiling. Enjoying himself.
When Brander fired a cluster of shots to Ian’s left, Ian ran right, and then he saw Eddie Mazaryk walking towards him. The captain of Black walked behind his gun, his head bowed, his left eye just visible over the hammer. He reached out to Ian like a pale wraith. Everything seemed to slow, and Ian could see fat drops of rain explode off of the epaulets on the shoulders of his raincoat. He knew it was over.
Mazaryk fired three shots and Ian saw them jump up his front, exploding in pops of blue like electric coat buttons. He jerked back and collapsed onto the hood of a car behind him, his slack face open to the rain. Mazaryk lowered his gun and paused, waiting for any movement at all from Ian. He cast a sideward glance at Brander, who was already holstering his gun.
Mazaryk walked over to Ian and gently closed his gaping mouth. He turned Ian to his side as one might a sleeping child, to the screams of the family in the car under him. Then he turned and walked towards Brander. Now that the action was over, the helicopters that had been at bay moved directly over the bodies and dropped lines down which medics scampered with harnes
ses. Men and women in dark jumpsuits emblazoned with the white letter T ran from behind the barriers where they had been waiting and down the alleys of the gridlocked lanes into the combat zones. Brander watched all of this with mild interest as Mazaryk approached.
“Take care of Ales and meet me in St. Petersburg. I have an errand to run,” he said in soft Russian, barely audible over the storm. Brander nodded.
The two men parted ways: Brander off to St. Vincent’s Hospital and the secluded Tournament wing where Ales would awaken, and Eddie Mazaryk to the airport, where he would catch a plane.
They left Team Green to soak on the swamped streets of the N3.
Chapter Forty-Nine
JOHNNIE NORTHERN WAS STILL asleep in Sarah Walcott’s bed, one arm resting lightly over her curled body, when Greer Nichols called. The phone rattled lightly against the butt of his semi-automatic on her nightstand.
“Green is out,” Greer said. “Three to one.”
“Who did they get?” Northern asked quietly, looking over at the gentle slope of Sarah’s back.
“Pyper Hurley got Ales Radomir. Brander and Mazaryk were unscathed.”
“Pyper’s a dangerous one. She’s quiet, but she’s dangerous.”
“Not dangerous enough, apparently.”
“No.”
Sarah stirred and arched her back, stretching like a cat.
“I think we should assume that the English are in the air, coming for you,” Greer said.
Northern sat up.
“Our people picked up increased activity surrounding a flight that departed from Heathrow a half of an hour ago. Last minute reservations and all that. The typical indicators. Probably them.”
The Tournament Trilogy Page 35