Crossfire

by David Hagberg

  He closed his eyes against the grisly sight on top of him. The rescuers would have to come very soon, he thought, or he would not make it. Either the building would collapse on top of him —it had shifted a couple of times in the last few minutes—or he would die of exposure.

  Either way he would not get his revenge. And more than anything on this earth at this moment, he wanted his turn with the monster who had done this to them.

  The second-floor corridor was impossibly blocked. Each time McGarvey pulled debris out of the jumbled wreckage, the floor shifted ominously beneath his feet. There was no telling how deep the debris was piled.

  The firefighters were pouring water into the east side of the building, where the flames were the most intense. But the water was adding a tremendous amount of weight to the already weakened structure, and it was coming closer to collapse every second.

  In the darkness and dense smoke it was difficult to maintain his bearings. The woman said she’d seen Reid and another man coming out of one of the offices somewhere farther down this corridor. It was certain he would not be able to dig his way back, but it might be possible to get up onto the third floor, cross beyond the collapsed section, and somehow make his way back down onto the second floor, behind the rubble pile.

  Moving with extreme caution he picked his way over a steeply slanting section of wall, then up onto what remained of the third floor, over a thick wooden beam, and across a jumble of lead pipe and electrical wires into the corridor. For just an instant the thought that he might be electrocuted crossed his mind, but he figured that by now the authorities would have made certain that the electric and gas mains supplying the building were shut off.

  Sixty or seventy feet ahead, the building abruptly came to an end. Tom Lord’s office had been back there, but it was gone, as was everything above and beneath it. The explosion had most likely been centered there, or possibly just below Lord’s office.

  Whoever had been back there hadn’t had a chance. He shivered.

  The water being sprayed by the firefighters fell in huge sheets, backlit in pinks and reds and blues from the fire and the spotlights below and the city lights on the Place de la Concorde and beyond.

  McGarvey hesitated only a moment before carefully working his way straight back to where the corridor opened into what remained of the communications center. The walls and most of the floor had fallen down into the courtyard. There was no way down.

  He was turning away when he thought he heard a movement in the debris below. He held his breath and cocked his head to listen, but the sound was not repeated.

  Water poured along this floor, cascading over the far edge like a waterfall. From outside he could hear sirens still converging from all over the city, mingled with the sounds of the portable generators supplying electricity to the searchlights, and the more significant noises of the continually shifting building.

  He eased a little nearer to the unstable edge and yelled, “Is there somebody down there?”

  Something scraped below, but there was no answer.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” a weak voice filtered up from below.

  “Is it Reid?”

  “No, Reid is dead. I’m Bob Graves.”

  “Can you move, Bob? Can you come to the edge? I’m on the third floor just above you.”

  “I can’t move. My legs are pinned in what’s left of the doorway.”

  “All right, I’m coming down to you.”

  “No—wait!” Graves called urgently. “I think the ceiling is about ready to come down.”

  “The whole building is ready to fall,” McGarvey said. “Is there any water down there?”

  “A lot of it,” Graves said.

  McGarvey had figured as much. It would be running down that corridor as well, and probably pooling up behind piles of rubble, dramatically increasing the weight on that floor.

  “There’s no one else up here, and there’s no time to get anyone. If you’re willing to chance it, so am I.”

  “Who are you?” Graves called.

  “McGarvey.”

  There was a moment of silence below.

  “Bob?” McGarvey called.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Graves answered. Former CIA agents, especially those dismissed from the Company for supposed cause, made everyone nervous.

  “Looking for a job,” McGarvey said. “Now hang on, Bob, I’m going to try to get down to you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Graves said.

  The first problem would be getting down to the assistant chief of station. The second would be dislodging Graves from the rubble. But even more difficult would be getting him back up to this floor and across to where they could drop back down to the second-floor corridor near where Maria had been trapped. The stairs, if they were still open, would lead them to safety. At this point he figured it was their only way out of the building, and he was going to have to make it happen right now.

  But the floor was too unstable, and the water cascading over the edge would make it difficult if not impossible to come back the same way.

  He went back toward the corridor to where a section of ceiling had collapsed. In the flickering light from the fire behind him, he could see his path back down onto the second floor, but just to his right there was a dark opening beneath a thick wooden beam. A way down?

  For a breathless second or two he remained motionless, trying to penetrate the total darkness in that black opening. When he was a kid in Kansas he and a few friends had gone down into a cave where they had gotten lost. They’d spent hours in the utter blackness until they had finally stumbled into the main chamber and found their way out.

  He had vowed never again to be so foolish. This was worse than that cave. Much worse.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. This was Arkady Kurshin’s work. It had the same feel as before. The man was alive. But there was no reason for this. Although the Russians weren’t exactly friends and allies, at least they were no longer enemies. This attack made no sense.

  It was a safe bet, however, that this strike on the embassy, if Kurshin had been responsible for it, was nothing more than the tip of some iceberg. A diversion. A sleight of hand to hide whatever the real goal was.

  Girding himself, he opened his eyes and lowered himself into the hole. “Graves?” he shouted, his voice muffled in the close confines.

  “Here,” Graves’s answering cry came faintly from below, and McGarvey crawled deeper into the hole that immediately slanted sharply downward for about twenty feet until he could see light from outside, and hear running water below and to the right.

  “Graves?” he yelled again.

  “Here,” Graves called again, his voice still muffled but very near.

  Five feet farther, the passageway twisted sharply to the right, and McGarvey came face-to-face with a young man whose right hand appeared to be badly damaged, and he recoiled instinctively.

  10

  “CHRIST,” MCGARVEY SWORE. He was in the remains of an office, the outside wall of which was gone. The emergency spotlights playing on the building from outside cast a pink glow, exaggerating the crazy angles of the jumbled walls and what remained of the ceiling. Across the room was another body, its legs jutting out from beneath an overturned desk.

  He pulled himself a little closer. The young man’s mouth was half open as if he were trying to say something. But his eyes were closed, as if he had fallen asleep in the middle of a speech.

  McGarvey felt for a pulse at the side of the neck, but the moment he touched the skin he knew that the young man was dead.

  “He’s dead,” Graves said from the shadows at the back of the room.

  McGarvey pulled himself the rest of the way out of the tunnel through the debris into the shattered office, the icy water at least two inches deep flowing across the floor and over the edge.

  “Who was he?”

  “Berringer. Vaughan’s dead too.”

  “Under the desk?” />
  “Right.”

  McGarvey crawled over to where Graves lay pinned. For just a moment it seemed to him as if the man had too many arms and at least one extra shoulder. There was blood everywhere. Suddenly he realized that he was looking at Carleton Reid’s crushed body.

  Graves grabbed his wrist. “Get me the hell out of here, McGarvey.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. Any feeling in your legs or feet?”

  The beam that had crushed Reid to death had missed Graves’s torso by an inch or two. As far as McGarvey could determine, he was held in place by a pile of debris, most of it plaster and lath from the ceiling.

  “I don’t know,” Graves said weakly, laying his head back in the water. “They didn’t have a chance. He was here. The bastard penetrated us.”

  McGarvey pulled a big slab of plaster off Graves’s legs as more of it tumbled down from above. Before long the pile of debris blocking the corridor would cave in on them. “Did anyone see him?”

  “Vaughan did,” Graves replied bitterly. “And he got shot for it. In the face, at point-blank range.”

  “What?” McGarvey asked sharply. Someone had just walked over his grave.

  “Vaughan didn’t have a chance. The bastard was in here setting his explosives when Vaughan walked in on him.”

  “Was it a big-caliber weapon? Could you tell? Did you see the wound?”

  Graves’s eyes narrowed. “What is it, McGarvey? Do you know something?”

  “What about the wound?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. But he was shot in the face.”

  Old-school KGB, it went almost as far back as the Cheka days. McGarvey didn’t have to close his eyes to see. It was called mokrie dela, the spilling of blood, a wet affair. The victim was shot in the face at very close range as a sign of discouragement to others. But hardly anyone had thought it necessary to use those methods in years. Ever since the cold war ended. And especially not in the past year or two.

  It had been Kurshin’s style to the end.

  But the man was dead. There could be little doubt of it. What was happening here and now was the work of a madman, no doubt. Someone influenced, perhaps, by men of Kurshin’s ilk. But such monsters were an anachronism in this day and age. They would not last. They could not last.

  A little voice inside McGarvey’s head was insisting that he not become involved.

  “Do you know who did this?” Graves was asking him.

  McGarvey shook his head as he continued digging Graves out.

  “Goddamnit, McGarvey, if you know something, or even suspect something, you have to tell me. A lot of good people have died here.”

  “I don’t know a thing,” McGarvey said sharply. He had cleared the door lintel, which was a heavy wooden beam four or five feet long. It was pressing down on Graves’s legs.

  “Then what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Saving your life. I’m going to try to lift this beam. As soon as the pressure is off, pull your legs out. Are you ready?”

  Graves nodded, and McGarvey put his shoulder to the heavy beam. It wouldn’t budge, and he had to dig more rubble away from it. Graves’s legs were oozing blood, and it was obvious that they were badly broken. He had to be in considerable pain, but he didn’t cry out.

  “Try again,” he said through clenched teeth.

  McGarvey had to straddle Reid’s horribly mangled body so that he could push back and up using his legs for leverage. At first nothing happened, but then something crashed behind the wall of rubble, and the beam began to shift.

  “Now!” he shouted, putting every last ounce of his strength into it, and Graves heaved himself backward, pulling his legs out. Suddenly he was free.

  “I’m out! I’m out!”

  McGarvey let go, at the same time rolling left, out of the way, and the lintel came crashing down, the entire building shuddering under the impact, plaster dust, wood, bricks, and sections of ceiling tumbling down all around them.

  “Can you crawl?” McGarvey shouted.

  “I’ll try,” Graves yelled back over the din. This entire section of the building was collapsing.

  “I’ll pull you out,” McGarvey said. He dragged Graves across the office and over Berringer’s body, then plunged headfirst into the narrow passageway.

  He could feel Graves’s grip on his ankles and he waited until the man had pulled himself up behind him, and then he crawled another couple of feet and stopped. Again Graves pulled himself up.

  Smoke and plaster dust were very thick in the narrow tunnel, and as he negotiated the sharp turn to the left, he had visions of being buried alive. He shuddered and stopped.

  “What is it?” Graves shouted weakly. “What’s wrong, man?”

  “Nothing. We’ve got another twenty feet to go. Are you ready?”

  “Yes! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  Twice more he stopped in an effort to catch his breath, but he was becoming light-headed from the smoke and lack of oxygen. He wouldn’t be able to go on like this much longer. Yet he could not simply stop and wait to die. He wasn’t built that way.

  Minutes or hours later—time had become a blur for him—he was back in the third-floor corridor, the cold wind and snow mixed with spray from the fire hoses clearing his head.

  Disengaging himself from the nearly unconscious assistant chief of station, he turned around and pulled the man the rest of the way into the corridor.

  “Where are we?” Graves groaned a second or two later.

  “Third-floor corridor,” McGarvey said. “There’s a way down to the second floor from here, and then the stairs are open the rest of the way. Or at least they were.”

  Something crashed below them and the passageway they’d just emerged from suddenly collapsed in a huge cloud of smoke and dust, the floor beneath their feet starting to slide away from the center of the building.

  McGarvey grabbed Graves under the arms and rolled him up onto his left shoulder. Struggling away from the edge, he scrambled back the way he’d first come up, working his way across the pipes and electrical wires, and then past the beam and down the steeply sloping wall into the second-floor corridor, more and more of the building collapsing behind them.

  Graves was drifting. The tremendous pain that had throbbed in his legs as he’d pulled himself through the tunnel after McGarvey was mostly gone, and he was having difficulty taking a deep breath. He felt confused and frightened. He’d come this far; he did not want to die like Berringer or Vaughan or Tom Lord.

  Someone was shouting something. It sounded as if it were coming from below.

  He opened his eyes suddenly and tried to rear back. Somehow they’d been trapped by the fire and were about to be burned to death, though he could feel no heat yet.

  “Christ, don’t drop him,” someone said nearby.

  Graves raised his head in time to see a Marine sergeant, one of the security people, reaching up for him. He knew the kid. “Kunze?” he croaked.

  “That’s right, Mr. Graves,” the Marine said. “You just take it easy now, hear? You’re going to be okay.”

  “Get me out of here. The building is on fire.”

  “We’re almost there. Take it easy, now.”

  There were other hands on him, and he was lowered onto a stretcher. For an instant it felt as if he were falling, and he flinched.

  “Watch his legs,” McGarvey said overhead.

  “You McGarvey?” Sergeant Kunze asked.

  “That’s right,” McGarvey replied. His voice swam in and out of focus above Graves.

  “You’re going to have to come with me, sir. There are some questions we need to ask you.”

  Graves suddenly panicked. He grabbed Kunze’s sleeve. He had to make them understand. “You have to watch out,” he cried.

  “Yes, sir …”

  “Kunze, watch out. He knows about Berringer and Vaughan. He was up there.”

  “I understand, sir,” Kunze said, a new harsh edge to his voice. The two medics who’d
brought the stretcher into the building lifted it and hurried across the lobby.

  Carley Webb stood just across the street trying to make some sense out of what had happened. She’d been paged on her beeper and had arrived a couple of minutes earlier. Marine Lieutenant Donald Horvak, chief of the embassy’s physical security detail, had filled her in with what he knew.

  So far there had been little or no word about anyone on the second or third floor, though eight bodies had already been pulled out, and apparently McGarvey had shown up and rescued a woman who had been carrying an Argentinian passport.

  No one had been able to tell her yet what the woman had been doing in the embassy, but someone thought he might have seen her entering the building with Carleton Reid a few minutes after the explosion.

  Nor did anyone seem to know how or why McGarvey had shown up, but it was making a lot of people nervous, among them Lieutenant Horvak.

  “The son of a bitch signed in a couple of minutes before six and never left,” he said. “Begging your pardon, Ms. Webb, but it was his passport number on the ledger.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Carley said. “I stopped by his apartment tonight. He was there.”

  “Then it was a goddamned imposter, and five will get you ten that McGarvey knows something about it.”

  The ambulance attendants emerged from the embassy with Graves. Sergeant Kunze and McGarvey came out behind them. Kunze didn’t seem happy.

  “There they are,” Horvak said, and he and Carley hurried across the street.

  Graves was barely conscious, and McGarvey looked terrible. His clothing was torn and dirty, his left cheek was cut, and his hands were bloody.

  “Berringer and Vaughan,” Graves said weakly.

  “What happened, Bob?” Carley asked. “Where’s Tom Lord?”

  “Dead,” Graves mumbled. “They’re all dead.”

  Carley could hardly believe it. “What about Carleton? Did you see him?”

  “He’s dead too. They’re all dead, the entire crew.” Graves grabbed Carley’s coat sleeve. “He knows, Carley,” he whispered, looking wildly toward McGarvey. “He knows about Vaughan … even the caliber of the weapon. They’re dead … all … dead …” Graves slumped back, unconscious.