Despite The Babe’s machinations, the plan was still perfectly workable, perhaps even more so now that he had lost at least twenty-five per cent of his troops in the battle on the eighteenth floor. As we spoke, via the comm sets and my translation to Sarah, who had given up hers to one of James’ men, we arrived at the consensus that The Babe would move soon, try to entice me out into the open while he had strength.
If the Messenger who James had killed on fifteen was telling the truth about their numbers, they had at least sixty men left alive, most on them concentrated on sixteen and seventeen. In accordance, we had brought all but two of the Disciples from eighteen down to seventeen and sixteen to beef up the defense of the stairwell doors. There were now over thirty of us divided among the four stairwells on sixteen and seventeen.
We might not be able to get in through the doors.
But the Messengers would find it impossible to get out.
“One more thing,” I asked Weasel, “what was with those floating red lights on the eighteenth floor?”
“It’s a nice little story,” he replied. “But we got no time for stories here. Tell you when we get back home. Just remember, we got nearly thirty men here without night glasses. You tell them that if the lights go out and they see a red light, shoot it. It will save their lives.”
• • • •
I pulled the walkie from my pocket. It was set to receive at low volume. We were very close.
“Here goes,” I told everyone.
Thumbing the send button, I said, “I’ve thought about your proposal.”
“Tell me,” he replied.
“Know why I came here, fat man?” I asked.
“To meet your little friend,” he laughed. “He’s not feeling so good, McCall. Little bit sore. We been without slits for five, six days now. Your little man-boy’s got a nice ass. We been taking turns on it.”
My stomach dropped. Beside me, one ear close to the walkie, Sarah squeezed my arm and whispered in my ear. “Don’t lose it, hon. That’s what he’s shooting for. You’ll make a mistake if you lose your cool. At least we know Merlin’s still alive.”
Behind her, James was silent. He heard the words. Just sat on his haunches and petted Duke. I couldn’t see his eyes with the goggles on, but his motions were stiff, mechanical. He wanted to kill someone.
I digested Sarah’s words, accepted her wisdom, took a few seconds to breathe deeply, refocus, slow my heartbeat. I found her hand and gently covered it with mine, then went back to business.
Thumbing the button on the walkie-talkie, I said, “I came here because I knew you’d be here.” I paused, letting it sink in that the prey was after the hunter. “I’m going to kill you, you fat bucket of puke.”
He laughed, a deep, harsh bark. “If you knew I was here, you’d be miles away. I’m the monster that visits when you sleep, McCall. If I can’t get you, if you keep running and hiding from me, I’ll devour anybody you know. I’ll snuff every person you ever talked to just to make you hurt.”
“Keep pushing him, Mac.” It was Weasel’s voice over the comm set. “He’s getting pissed.”
“Are your soldiers beginning to lose faith in you?” I asked. “Seeing as how you been looking for me for a year without any fucking results.”
“You’re here now,” he replied, anger beginning to affect the timbre of his voice. “You don’t set up a meet with me and I’m gonna start carving on this little whore up here.”
“You know what happens if you do?”
“You gonna hurt me?” he replied, mocking, taunting.
“No. I’ll leave. I’ll pack everyone up and slip away. Leave you sitting here holding your pecker. Twenty of your men on eighteen drowning in their cowards’ blood. Leave you to explain to the People clans how one man and a dog elude the great Messengers. How they should all join you even though you live in fear of a single man and a mangy dog. That you are a great warrior, slayer of women, defiler of children, who lives in fear of one simple man and his stupid dog.”
His reply came in stutters, as though a giant had him by the throat, choking off his breath. “I’ve…got…you…here…now.”
“I think its the other way around. Is the blood of your men seeping through the ceiling? Watch your head. Cowards’ blood will eat your skin off.”
“What…do…you…want,” he croaked.
“I want to kill you. But I’ll settle for taking Merlin home. I’m coming down to seventeen. If Merlin isn’t in the hallway by the stairs in ten minutes, I leave this place. You can hunt me for another year. You want to deal, I give you the dog for Merlin. Otherwise I’m going home. You don’t cooperate here, then I’m willing to pay for your humiliation with my friend’s life. I’ll find another snitch.”
It was a few seconds before he came back. Was I telling the truth? Could I give up on Merlin? It meshed with his system of values. He could appreciate the logic.
“Be there,” the fat man said.
“You coming too? I’ll let you pet the dog.”
“I’ll tear its head off.”
“I’ll let you know when I’m coming in.”
• • • •
I pocketed the walkie and peeked into the hallway, still dimly lit by the lanterns, marking in my mind the spot where Merlin was supposed to show up. On the other side of the door, in the Messenger’s lair, I heard the sounds of our enemies preparing for combat, weapons shouldered, clips driven home, bodies in motion. The flickering lamps began to show dancing shadows approaching our position. I ducked back behind the door.
They would bring Merlin. The Babe couldn’t risk my leaving. His reputation would be in tatters. Without new recruits attracted by his power, his dreams of domination would dissolve.
“Weasel?” I asked via the comm set, “Is he going to bring Merlin himself?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “Man’s pretty smart. He’s not afraid to mix it, but you got him a little wary. He’ll send someone else.”
“How we going to play it?” Sarah asked.
“Fast,” Weasel said. “They probably got some kind of plan. Let’s not let ‘em get it started. First instant you think I got an angle, let me know. Tell me where, how many. I’ll pop these doors open, sneak into the hallway and go for whoever’s got Merlin. Make sure their backs are turned to me.”
• • • •
The three of us, Sarah, Stevie and I, had nine minutes left to run down to fifteen and work our way back up to seventeen through Merlin’s escape hatch. Weasel found it in the women’s bathroom on fifteen. In the corner, over the last toilet stall, hidden by the original ceiling tile. Dust on the floor had given it away to his eyes. We didn’t know how far up it went. Figured at least through eighteen. All we needed was to get to the seventeenth floor.
I went first. Up onto the toilet, remove the ceiling panel, pull myself up to the next level and push up on the floor tile to enter sixteen. The bathroom was empty. I reached down for Stevie, pulled him up and then did the same for Sarah. We then repeated the process, finishing up in the women’s bathroom on seventeen.
I visualized the terrain outside the bathroom door. Immediately on our left was a doorway to the bullpen. Across the hall was the men’s bathroom. Also across the hall a meter to the right was the hallway to the freight elevators. Then the two stairway doors on the same side. Behind those doors our reinforcements awaited our signal. There was a double glass door between the two stairwell doors. Further down on the same side was the cul de sac that housed the eight main elevators. That was the spot from which Weasel would enter the battle.
On the same side that Sarah, Stevie and I would enter the hall, to the right of the bathroom, was another hallway, the one that led to the east side of the bullpen. Fifteen meters down was the vending machine room. It was across from the banks of elevators where Weasel was hiding. Right in the middle of all of these openings where the Messengers would surely be setting up defenses was the spot where Merlin was to be presented to me.
We h
ad four advantages. They didn’t know our strength; Weasel was going to get behind them; they expected me to enter through the stairway door. The fourth and biggest advantage was that The Babe wanted me alive. That would buy Sarah, Stevie and me a few seconds when we stepped into the hallway from the bathroom.
Normally, the grenades would have been ideal to clear the hallway of defenders, allowing our men to enter from the stairwells. But with Merlin in the hall, they were useless. He would be shredded along with the Messengers.
• • • •
It had been ten minutes. I got on my hands and knees and pushed the bathroom door open a crack. About ten meters down the hall, illuminated by the lights of the lamps, Merlin was standing, under his own power, flanked by two Messenger soldiers, pistols in their hands, M 16s on their backs. He was on the other side of the glass double doors. His face was swollen and discolored. But in the dim lamp light, I couldn’t make out details of the injuries.
No one else was visible. I told Weasel the situation, ordered everyone to remove their night vision goggles and then told the two men left above us on the eighteen to enter their floor and begin firing. Weasel would use the noise as cover to exit the elevators, letting us know when he was in position.
Five seconds after the firing on eighteen commenced, Weasel came on the line. “Door’s open. Got five soldiers in here, waiting in ambush for you. Can’t get out.”
Stevie translated for Sarah.
“Toss a grenade in,” I said. “The shrapnel’s not going around the corner where Merlin is. When it goes off, we’ll make our move.”
From our position by the closed bathroom door, I mapped the situation for Stevie and Sarah. Two men, ten meters down on our right, Merlin in between them. Head shots only.
Ten seconds later, the concussion of the grenade reverberated throughout the seventeenth floor and the three of us stepped out of the bathroom into the hallway. Except for Merlin and the two Messenger soldiers, it was still empty. They were still planning to take me when I entered from the stairwell.
Stevie and I dropped to a shooter’s crouch. Sarah covered our backs with the Franchi combat shotgun and the Australian Leader assault rifle. The men guarding Merlin had swung around to the other end of the hallway in response to grenade’s resounding explosion, placing their backs toward Stevie and me. We each fired two shots from the silenced pistols, the 9mm slugs shattered the glass in the double doors and flew true to their intended destination in the men’s skulls.
The guards crumbled, leaving a bewildered Merlin standing alone in the hallway.
“On the floor, Merlin!” I screamed. “Crawl toward the explosion. Move your ass.”
In the fifteen seconds following my command to Merlin, there was more action than all of us had experienced in our combined lifetimes. It was if my voice had shattered an invisible barrier that was holding everyone in check.
• • • •
Sarah and I had once walked in the woods with Duke on a spring morning, stumbling across a meadow filled with thousands of Canadian geese, browsing the grasses for morsels, chattering at one another under the warm sun. Duke went on point and Sarah and I stopped dead in our tracks. We had never witnessed a goose gathering of such magnitude.
Duke went down on all fours and managed a strange creeping, stalking crawl until he achieved the edge of the meadow, hidden from his quarry by the high grasses. I saw the muscles in his haunches bunch, preparatory to his big leap, anticipatory of the best fun a dog could have.
He shot forward in a golden arc, barking furiously, and achieved a position twenty meters into the meadow before the thousands of huge birds arose, en masse, as if on a signal from God, darkening the sun and filling the sky with downy feathers and dust motes, deafening our ears with their honking and the flaps of their muscular wings.
The three of us—man, wife and dog companion—stood in silent amazement, heads pointed to the sky, gazing at the mayhem Duke had wrought.
What occurred in the fifteen seconds following my command to Merlin to hit the ground on the seventeenth floor of the AON Building made the pandemonium of thousands of geese seem like an orderly procession of monks to chapel.
• • • •
Merlin heard my voice, but didn’t heed my command. In the lamplight that illuminated the seventeenth floor, I saw Merlin drop to the floor, squeezing between the bulks of his two dead guards, moments before rifle fire came at him from across the hall, where more Messengers were lying in wait for my expected appearance in the stairway door. Their bullets smacked into the flesh of the dead men. Merlin’s former potential executioners now served as his bunker.
I heard the fire from Weasel’s Uzi before I saw him. He was sweeping the other Messenger soldiers who were hiding in the vending machine alcove. He came around the corner and changed to his Galil SAR assault rifle, peppering 7.62mm rounds from his 36 round clip into the men who were firing upon Merlin from the connecting hallway, driving them back toward the west wall of the bullpen area.
Merlin was in a paroxysm of rage, twisting one of the guards’ bodies to extract his M16. When he retrieved the weapon, he began spraying rounds at the same men Weasel was firing upon, screaming maniacally, having crossed over the line of sanity, possessing no regard for his safety.
During the same five seconds that I observed Weasel and Merlin defending their end, I heard three blasts from Sarah’s shotgun. I snapped a glance back at her. The double doors to our left, the entry to the north area of the bullpen, had been blasted away. Some of the Messengers were trying to flank us. They were gone now, two of their dead on the floor, victims of the blasts from Sarah’s shoulder slung Franchi 12 gage.
With Sarah covering our left flank and Weasel and Merlin on our right and a wall to our backs, Stevie and I focused our attention across the hall. Men’s bathroom in front of us. Entry to the freight elevator hallway a meter or two to the right, then a few meters down the two entrances to the stairwells, where reinforcements awaited us.
We needed to make it possible for James and his Disciple soldiers to gain entry from the stairwells.
From the darkened interior of the hallway that led to the freight elevators flashes of rifle fire became visible, quickly followed by the impact of bullets on the wall to our right. Telling Stevie to cover the bathroom, I dropped to the floor and inched forward a meter so I could train my assault rifle on the recesses of the hallway. I sprayed the hall with 30 rounds from the HK assault rifle, flipping the double taped clip to reload when finished. Their firing stopped.
Stevie did the same on the bathroom door, reducing it to splinters. He then kicked it in and underhanded a grenade into the dark interior. Its muffled thump followed two seconds later, ejecting dust, smoke and shrapnel into our hallway.
Only ten seconds had passed. We seemed momentarily clear, and I looked right, where the firing was still furious. Merlin was doing the dance of a maniac, firing the M16 into the hallway and screaming at the top of his lungs. None of the words were intelligible. They may not have even been words as we know them. But they were a clear expression of his mental state. He cared not whether he lived or died. He just wanted to punish.
Weasel’s voice entered my ear, loud against the competition of the rounds being expended in his end of the battle zone. “Mac, give me a hand with Merlin, ‘fore the little fucker gets himself killed.”
Weasel approached him from behind and I moved forward to help, crossing the hallway that led to the freight elevators. I didn’t move quickly enough. Several shots rang out from my left as I crossed the corridor, Messengers laying in wait, looking for something to shoot. I was punched fiercely on my left side twice, debilitating blows that pushed me to the wall on my right, knocked me to the floor, took my breath from me. The Kevlar III kept the rounds from penetrating, but my torso felt like I had just taken several body shots from a heavyweight fighter.
With my right hand, I swung the HK to spray the corridor once more, then tried to crawl beyond it opening, past t
he angle where they could get more shots into me.
I looked right. Through the smoke and haze and the dust raised by the grenades, I saw Weasel approaching Merlin, who was oblivious to any of our efforts. Using his left hand, Weasel was firing his assault rifle into the same corridor Merlin was focusing on. With his right, he grabbed Merlin by the collar, jerked him off his feet and dragged him back to the elevator area. Merlin kept on firing at the hallway and screaming at the Messengers who had retreated.
That was the first fifteen seconds. The next fifteen were worse.
• • • •
Across the ten meters separating us, Weasel’s eyes met mine. “Are you all right?” he asked his voice clear in my comm set.
I nodded my head. I couldn’t speak.
“Hang on,” he said. “Stevie and Sarah are comin’ up behind you. Let’s get those men out of the stairways and onto the floor. James,” he spoke to the Disciple leader who was waiting for a chance to enter the main hallway, “you got an opening. Bring ‘em out now!”
Then he and Merlin disappeared into the cul de sac that housed the elevators. Last I saw of them on seventeen was Merlin’s boots being dragged around the corner.
“I’m gettin’ him out of here, Mac,” Weasel said. “Down the shaft. Clear everyone out quick as possible.”
Both sets of stairway doors slammed open. Black Gangster Disciples poured out right and left, rifles and pistols ready, searching for targets. I prayed none of us would be snuffed by friendly fire. Among the fifteen men was a golden form, close to the ground, moving fast. Duke came unerringly straight for me and straddled me as a lay upon the ground. If they came at us, his body would take the first of the bullets meant for me.
I looked behind and saw Stevie and Sarah heading toward us. Then I heard a squawk on the walkie talkie, silent in my pocket these few long seconds. I couldn’t make out the words, but I recognized the voice.
Then, behind Sarah and Stevie, filling the doorway they had just vacated to come help me, pushing two of his men before him, screaming into the walkie talkie, The Babe entered the game. He surveyed the scene, saw several of his men down, unmoving, the Disciples moving down the hall in both directions, Sarah and Stevie moving away.
Blood of the Dogs_Book I_Annihilation Page 35