Jon heard footsteps pounding up the road behind him and whirled around, raising his MP5.
Randi Russell came loping out of the darkness, pistol in hand. “That was Renke!” she growled, pointing to where the two men had disappeared among the shadowed trees. “You and Kirov and Devin take the rest of them. I’ll go after Renke!”
Smith nodded quickly. “Good luck.”
Randi clapped his shoulder as she ran past him. “You, too!” Then she turned and began climbing the slope.
Jon stripped the spent magazine out of his submachine gun and slapped in a fresh clip. He turned to Kirov and Fiona. “You ready?”
They nodded, eyes alightgripped, like him, by the strange exultation, verging on madness, of combat.
“Right, then,” Smith snapped, already starting to move up the road. “Let’s finish this!”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Smith ran up the left side of the road while Kirov and Fiona moved up on the right. Far ahead of them now, still illuminated by the moonlight, he could see Malkovic and Brandt and their two bodyguards hurrying away, straining to reach the top of the plateau before their pursuers came within range. Renke and one of the other gunmen had vanished up the slope to the right, disappearing among what looked like small orchards of peach and apple trees and rows of grapevines that were planted right up to the base of the cliffs. Small yellow signs by the side of the road pointed in that direction, identifying the area as Tombe del Crocifisso del Tufo, the site of an ancient Etruscan necropolis, a city of the dead.
It was the men lurking up ahead who most concerned Jon now. Two of Brandt’s gunmen had stayed behind while the others fled, probably under orders to kill or at least delay the Americans chasing after them. One had dropped into cover among the bushes and trees on the downhill slope.
The other was hiding somewhere to the right, in the rocks and brush higher up.
Smith frowned. Charging straight up the open road toward those guys was a really good way to get killed. Courage under fire was one thing. Suicidal madness was quite another.
He slowed down and then dropped to one knee, carefully scanning the tangled vegetation along both sides of the road over the barrel of his submachine gun. Kirov and Fiona went prone off to his right, peering ahead with their own weapons ready.
“See anything?” Jon hissed.
Kirov shook his head. “No.” He glanced over at the American. “But we have to keep moving, my friend, despite the risks. All this shooting will soon draw the police.”
Smith grinned back at him. “You don’t think the Carabinieri will buy our storv about being tourists out for a midnight stroll?”
Kirov snorted. He hefted his MP5 and ran a quick finger over the dark camouflage paint smeared across his cheeks and forehead. “For some reason, Jon, I doubt it,” he said drily.
“Then we’d best cut the chitchat and get going,” Fiona said, sounding both amused and irritated at the same time. She scrambled to her feet and started up the road again, staying close to the verge. “I’ll draw their fire. Then you two shoot them.”
Startled, Kirov turned, putting out a hand to stop her. “No, Fiona. Let Jon and me handle this. We were trained as soldiers. You were not. The risk is too great.”
“Oleg is right,” Smith agreed.
She shook her head impatiently. “No, he’s not, Colonel. And neither are you.” Fiona showed them the pistol in her hand. “I can’t count on hitting anything with this at more than twenty or thirty meters. Those submachine guns you’re both earning give you an edge at longer range. So let’s make use of that.”
Jon grimaced. Reluctantly, he shrugged at Kirov. “She’s right.”
The Russian, scowling himself, nodded heavily. “Yes. As she is so often.”
He dropped his hand, though not without a gruff plea. “But please do not get yourself killed, Fiona. If you do, I “
His voice thickened and then fell silent.
Smiling now, Fiona patted Kirov gently on the head. “Yes, I know. I’ll be as careful as I can.” Then she walked on ahead, crouching slightly.
The two men waited a few seconds and then followed her, staying low, moving cautiously through the grass on the edge of the road and keeping to the shadows wherever possible.
One of Brandt’s gunmen, Sepp Nedel, lay hidden behind a little pile of weathered, brush-covered rocks. He peered down toward the road, watching for any signs of movement over the sights of his Micro-Uzi. He settled the weapon’s folding stock firmly against his shoulder, waiting calmly. Shooting Renke’s unarmed scientists had been a pleasant enough diversion, but this duel against armed opponents was more to his taste.
There was a faint stir among the bushes across the road. Nedel sneered.
That was typical of Fyodor Bazhenov, nervous and twitchy as alwavs when holding a gun. ‘Hie onetime KGB man was competent enough with explosives. But he was a menace to himself and others in the field.
Something flickered at the edge of his vision. Someone was coming up the road. The German tightened his grip on the Uzi and shifted his aim. Now he could see a black-clad figure drifting closer, crouching brief!}’ from time to time to watch and listen. A scout, Nedel thought. The correct move was obvious. Let this one pass unharmed and then kill the others who would come later.
The scout drew nearer.
He held his fire. Something about the moving figure’s shape intrigued him. Then he realized what it was. The American scout was a woman! Nedel bared his teeth in the darkness, anticipating even more pleasure once he had eliminated her companions.
Suddenly another Uzi stuttered harshly, spitting bullets down the road.
Pieces of asphalt and shredded grass and dirt exploded all around the black-clad woman. She fell forward and lay still.
Nedel swore silently. Bazhenov had panicked.
Suddenly he saw the Russian poke his head out above the bushes, trying to get a clearer shot. The demolitions expert brought his submachine gun up, aiming intently at the motionless figure curled up beside the road.
And then another weapon fired, this one from farther down the hill.
Hit in the face, Bazhenov screamed shrilly once and then fell sideways, sprawling out from the bushes to lie in a heap. A second burst tore him apart.
Instantly, the black-clad gunman who had killed him leaped to his feet and raced toward the fallen woman. He dropped to her side, apparently fumbling for a medical kit in one of the many pouches on his assault vest.
Nedel nodded slightly to himself. That was a worthwhile target. Slowly, with great care, he rose up from behind his little pile of rocks. He stared down the short barrel of his Uzi, breathing shallowly, waiting until the sights settled on the kneeling man and hung there. His finger tightened on the trigger …
* * *
Lying prone about one hundred meters away, Smith fired. The MP5 chattered loudly, punching back against his shoulder. Three spent cartridges flew away into the grass. Hit twice, once in the neck and once in the shoulder, Brandt’s gunman slumped forward. Black in the pale light, blood pulsed across the rocks briefly and then stopped flowing.
Grim-faced, Jon sprang up and sprinted forward to where Kirov knelt beside Fiona Devin.
She was already sitting up when he got there. “I’m okay,” she insisted, pale and plainly a bit shaken, but smiling with relief nonetheless. “They missed me.”
“You say they missed?” Kirov growled. He reached out and touched a long tear through the dark cloth covering her upper left arm. A thin trickle of blood welled up from a bullet graze there. “So what is this?”
“That?” Fiona said, grinning back at him. “That’s nothing but a scratch.”
“You were lucky,” Smith told her bluntly. His heart was still pounding.
Like Kirov, he had been sure that she was dead or badly wounded.
She nodded calmly. “Indeed I was, Colonel.” She looked down ruefully at the radio clipped to her equipment vest. It had been smashed, either by a bullet or b
y a rock when she dove for cover. She stripped off the now-useless headset. “But it looks as though I’ll have to rely on you two to make any calls for me.”
Abruptly, bright white light flared through the night behind them, throwing their shadows ahead up the slope. They whirled around, in time to see a huge fireball rising in the west. Shards of twisted steel and shattered concrete spun away from the center of the explosion, soaring hundreds of meters into the night sky before tumbling back to earth. The sound of the blast reached them in that same moment, a rumbling, thunderous freight-train roar that died slowly, leaving only a stunned silence in its wake.
“There went Renke’s lab,” Smith said bitterly, staring at the pillar of flame still rising from the ECPR compound. “Along with most of the evidence we needed.”
Kirov nodded somberly. “All the more reason to capture Malkovic and Brandt, then.” He shrugged. “But at least we no longer have to worry so much about being stopped by the police.”
“No kidding,”Jon agreed absently, still looking at the fires consuming the shattered ruins of Renke’s weapons lab. “Every municipal police and Carabinieri squad in Orvieto will be swarming over that compound in ten minutes or less.” He leaned down and helped Fiona back to her feet. “We’d better not waste the opportunity.”
Together, the three Covert-One agents turned and sprinted east along the road, running flat-out now toward the top of the plateau.
* * *
Pushing carefully through a tangle of vines, Randi Russell saw the sudden glare light up the slope around her, casting its stark illumination across a landscape of tall grass, leafless fruit trees, waist-high rail fences, and eroded terraces covered in brush. She dropped flat, waiting until the flash faded and the hillside returned to darkness.
In the sudden silence following the explosion, she heard a quick murmur of startled voices from ahead and off to her left. Cautiously, she rose and moved forward again, heading in that direction. The voices fell silent abruptly.
Randi came to a rail fence and crouched lower. In the faint moonlight, the terrain ahead looked far more open. It was difficult, however, to make out details. There was a succession of what appeared to be grassy mounds with gray stones set in the top, but the areas between these mounds were bathed in impenetrable shadow. It was time to get a better look at what lay ahead of her, she decided. She raised her image-intensifier binoculars. Set to amplify even the smallest amount of ambient light, whether from the stars or the moon, they turned night into effective day.
Immediately, the landscape leaped into clearer focus.
She was looking at what appeared to be a rectangular grid of streets.
Small houses built of large blocks of quarried tufa, a form of pitted gray limestone, lined these narrow, stepped roads cut into the hillside. Some of their roofs were conical, others were flat, but almost all of them were covered in grass and hard-packed earth. Low, dark, trapezoidal openings gaped in the center of each building. Letters in some archaic script were carved on the large stones set above the empty doorways. Beyond the buildings she could see a path with railings leading up shallow steps to an empty parking lot.
This was the old Etruscan city of the dead, Randi realized, remembering the quick research she had done on her flight down from Germany the day before. Some of the tombs here were nearly three thousand years old. Excavated beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the vases, drinking cups, weapons, and armor found inside were now on display in a museum next to Orvieto’s cathedral.
She frowned. Renke and his bodyguard must be hiding somewhere in the necropolis, probably with the intention of slipping away back down the hill when all the shooting died down. Not a bad plan, Randi thought coldly.
Anyone trying to hunt for them up and down those narrow streets would be exposed, a sitting duck for anyone shooting from cover inside one of the tombs.
She stuffed the binoculars back into one of her equipment pouches and slid under the bottom rail of the fence, moving slowly to make sure she did not snag any of her gear. Then she wriggled toward the tombs through the long grass, gliding quietly from one patch of shadow to another.
Periodically, Randi stopped moving to listen, trying to ferret out the slightest sound that could tell her where her enemies were lurking. But she heard nothing, only the sound of police and fire and ambulance sirens speeding toward the explosion-ravaged ECPR compound.
At last she made it to the position she had been aiming for, a small stand of scrub trees growing out of the slope above the necropolis. From here, she could look down into most of the streets, especially the lanes that ran back toward the Orvieto road.
Again, Randi dug out her binoculars. Methodically, she swept them across the ancient cemetery, focusing first on the entrances of tombs that she thought offered the best vantage points. Unless she missed her guess, Renke and his bodyguard would have picked a hiding place that would let them spot anyone entering the tomb complex from the road or the parking lot.
Her binoculars slid slowly past a tomb opening about halfway up the central street, paused, and then came back. Was that paler shape inside the darkness just a chunk of fallen stone or a trick of the moonlight?
Randi held her breath, waiting patiently. The shape moved slightly, taking on form and definition. She was looking at the head and shoulders of a man, a clean-shaven man who was crouched just inside the low opening, peering down the street toward the entrance to the necropolis. He shifted position again and now she saw the weapon in his hands.
She held still. Was Renke inside the tomb with this man? Or had the weapons scientist chosen another lair?
The bodyguard looked back behind him for a moment, apparently listening to something being whispered to him, nodded, and then turned back to his post.
Randi smiled thinly. Wulf Renke was there, crouching patiently in the darkness, waiting for his chance to slip away and disappear again, as he had so many times before. That was the answer she had been hoping for. She put her binoculars away and crawled down the slope, staying low and angling away from the street where Renke and the other man were concealed.
She dropped quietly into the little lane that marked the northern boundary of the necropolis and crossed it quickly, slipping into the shelter of one of the small square mounded tombs. Then she slid her Beretta back into the holster on her hip, snapped the flap shut, and used both hands to haul herself up onto the grass-covered roof of the burial chamber.
From there, Randi made her way from rooftop to rooftop, jumping lightly across the narrow gaps between buildings until she reached the flat-roofed tomb just north of Renke’s hiding place. She drew the 9mm pistol, crawled to the corner, and looked down over the edge.
There, just a few meters away, lay the low open door where she had seen the scientist’s lookout. She took aim with the Beretta, waiting while her eyes adjusted. Gradually, the blackness took on different shapes and shades, again revealing the head and shoulders of the sentry crouching there with his submachine gun. Her finger tightened on the trigger and then eased off slightly.
She decided to give this guy the chance to be smart.
“Drop the weapon!” Randi called softly.
Taken completely by surprise, the guard reacted instinctively. His head jerked up and he spun desperately, bringing his Uzi up to fire.
She shot him in the head.
Before the Beretta’s sharp, ringing report stopped echoing back from the stone walls around her, she was in motion. She rolled off the roof, landed in a crouch on the street, and brought her pistol back up, aiming straight at the opening to the crypt.
There was no noise. No sign of movement from inside.
“Wulf Renke!” Randi said quietly in perfect German, pitching her voice just loud enough to be heard inside the tomb. “It’s over. You’ve got nowhere left to run. Come out now, with your hands up, and you’ll live. Otherwise, I will kill you.”
For a moment, she thought he would stay silent, refusing to talk. But then the scientist
replied. “So those are my two choices?” he said calmly. “I either meekly surrender to you and face prison? Or else I die at your hands?”
“Correct.”
Renke snorted. “You are wrong,” he said bleakly. “You forget, there is always a third option. And that is the path I choose.”
Suddenly Randi heard a faint crunch from inside the tomb, followed by a startled gasp and then a long, drawn-out sigh that ended in absolute silence.
“Oh, hell,” she murmured, already moving toward the entrance.
She was too late.
Wulf Renke sat slumped over on one of the stone benches used by the Etruscans for their dead. His eyes stared back at her, rigid and unblinking. Foam had dripped out of his slack mouth and into his neat, white beard. The fragments of a broken glass ampule lay on the ground at his feet, next to an insulated carrying case. The air inside the burial chamber smelled faintly of almonds.
The fugitive biological weapons scientist had committed suicide, probably with cyanide, Randi thought grimly. She bent down and entered the tomb.
When a quick search of Renke’s pockets produced nothing of value, she took the case and backed out again, into the narrow moonlit street.
Inside the container, she found a row of glass vials packed in dry ice. And when she read the labels on each vial, her eyes widened in absolute astonishment and horror. At a guess, Randi decided that she was looking at lethal disease variants keyed to the precise genetic makeup of Viktor Dudarev, his senior ministers, and many of Russia’s highest-ranking military commanders.
Quickly, she slammed the lid back down, grabbed the case, and then raced away through the cramped streets of the city of the dead.
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