Millen had a solution. He walked over to them. I thought he was going to shoot them, but he merely once again used his rifle stock. I nodded toward the upstairs, and we ran to the wide wooden stairs. I led the way and was three steps up when a man called out from the second floor.
“Hey, Franko. You hear something down there? Something like a muffled fart?”
We both froze when we first heard the voice. Now we raced up the stairs. I was four steps from the top when a man holding another of the Kalashnikov knock-offs rounded a corner at the top of the stairs.
Phut! Phut!
“Somebody just shot Elmort!”
The yell was followed by at least three more voices. Our stealth assault was over. Millen passed me on the stairs and lobbed a hand grenade around the corner to the right. Anyone who wasn’t alerted by the shouts certainly was by the blast.
I keyed my comm already pre-set to Ashraf. “Go, Ashraf! Get their attention!”
As planned, Ashraf would pass the word for everyone surrounding the ranch to begin a steady fire, even if they had no target. The object was to draw as much attention as possible, so that Millen and I weren’t the center of attention for all of Cherkoff’s men.
We jumped onto the second floor. Two bodies lay shredded in the right-hand hallway. A door opened in the left hallway and a head poked out, then quickly disappeared before my three-shot burst hit him.
“Up!” yelled Millen.
We raced to the next stairs. Gunfire erupted from both hallways. The Dynaflex suits once again did their jobs. Millen was two steps ahead of me, and I saw him stumble from a bullet hit to his leg. It must have been from a pistol because he didn’t go down. A similar hit twisted my torso as I took the first stairs three at a time, the bullet glancing off my back.
Once on the stairs, we were out of sight from the men in the hallways, but that situation was temporary. We ignored our gasping breath and protesting leg muscles to get to the top floor as quickly as possible.
Movement above us caught my eye just in time to see a man with a rifle appear startled at seeing us. I shot him with a three-round burst before he could react.
Millen reached the top landing first. Donal Wilton hadn’t been on this floor, so he couldn’t give us the layout. There was only one hallway—to the left—down which were several doors. To the right were double doors pushed against the body of the man I’d shot. Since the dead man would have flung the doors open as he fell, someone must have pushed the doors, trying the close them.
Millen didn’t hesitate. He tossed his last grenade into the room and we ducked. A second after the explosion, Millen charged into the room, flinging the doors wide and crouching. I followed on his heels, going in the opposite direction. A glance at the body confirmed it wasn’t Cherkoff.
I assumed, as Millen must have, that we were in a master suite—the most likely place to find Cherkoff. The flaw in our entire plan, and one we never discussed because there was nothing to be done about it, was what if we got to the third floor and Cherkoff wasn’t there? For whatever reason, he might not have preferred the best room, might be up early and working in another area of the main house, or might be elsewhere within the complex, and we might well be truly screwed.
Movement out of the corner of my eye made me spin to the right. I reflexively triggered a three-round burst at the armed man facing me before I realized I’d just killed a full-length mirror.
No one else was in the room. It appeared to be a sitting area with multiple cushion seats, two sofas, several tables of different sizes, and what a glance suggested was a sophisticated holovid setup—all in various states of damage from Millen’s grenade. Three closed doors led elsewhere, one of which presumably was the bedroom.
“Cover the stairs,” said Millen.
The men below would be on our heels. One of us could hold the stairs for a short while, but experience told me we should have at least three men to search the master suite. Unfortunately, “should be” wasn’t along on this raid. There were only the two of us, and I had to provide Millen with time.
From the suite’s double door, I could peer down the stairs. Shouts echoed up the stairwell. Many voices—so many, I couldn’t make out words. Then shots. Not coming up the stairs, but outside. First, faint rifle shots, then closer rifles—our people continuing to provide a distraction and Cherkoff’s men answering.
Tatatatat! Tatatatat! Tatatatat!
A single machine-gun sent out five-round bursts. Whoever the gunner was had some basic knowledge. Complete amateurs would have held down the trigger and risked a jam from overheating. I was hoping the 30-millimeter chain gun was a rumor or they didn’t have ammunition. That hope didn’t last long.
TATATATAT! TATATATAT!
I hoped our people ducked and moved. The 30-millimeter could saw right through a half-meter diameter tree or cut an unarmored vehicle in two.
The sound of splintering wood came from behind me. I glanced over a shoulder to see Millen go through a door.
It must have been locked.
But I had other interests. The stairs from the second to the third floor were in two sections, with a 90-degree turn halfway up. I could see the intermediate landing but not the second floor. Voices were getting closer, along with thuds, as if bodies and metal objects were impacting wood. They were on their way up.
A shadow danced across the landing’s far wall. Another and another. Faint silhouettes of men. Many men.
With a shout, four men jumped onto the landing, weapons pointed upward and firing. As soon as I saw the first body part come into view, I ducked back inside the door. Several rounds came through the door and punched holes in the suite’s wooden ceiling.
The men below had fired, not knowing how they would be exposed and wanting to at least suppress fire from Millen and me. The downside to their action was that they inevitably stopped firing once there was no return fire and we weren’t in view. They had set themselves up as stationary targets.
From a kneeling position, I poked my rifle and my head out slightly. I fired eight to ten rounds in the general direction of the middle landing, then ducked back into the suite. No return fire came. To further discourage the men below, I activated one of my two hand grenades. I lobbed it down the stairs and got a quick look at the landing. One body lay motionless. A bloody man moved, but my split-second glance didn’t identify whether he was trying to get out of a fire lane or if his motions were the reflexes of someone terminally wounded.
The glance also gave me the opportunity to make a last-second adjustment of the grenade lob. My intent was to hit the corner wall facing downstairs and have the grenade ricochet into men out of my line of sight. I didn’t linger to evaluate my aim—I knew what curiosity got the cat. However, sounds supported my success.
“Grenade!”
“Outta the way!”
“Oh, God!”
Other utterances were unintelligible, including what might have been Spanish, Russian, and something not quite Russian.
BOOM!
Screams and curses joined the cacophony coming from the lower levels. Outside, gunfire continued from small arms and the 30-millimeter chain gun. I noticed that the machine-gun on the south side was silent. Maybe some of our people had taken out the gunners.
The pause in men trying to get up the stairs let me check how things were going for Millen—although if they’d gone poorly, Cherkoff might have already shot me in the back of the head.
The three doors leading from the sitting room were all open. The one on the far side of the room had clues to action I’d missed—a jagged hole in a half-open door. The size of the hole worried me. It bespoke of a caliber firearm more appropriate for hunting Millen’s Ecorium pandas than humans.
“Millen!” I called out. We were well past stealth. I think everyone within two kilometers already knew exactly where we were.
I couldn’t hear anything that might have come from the room with the ventilated door. I focused my attention back on the stairwell.
Plenty of noises rose from below, but nothing suggesting an imminent new attempt to reach the third floor. That left me with a conundrum. I needed to check on Millen, but I also had to defend the stairwell. So I did both with the aid of my second, and last, hand grenade.
I tried to repeat the rebound off the wall and down the stairway. After two grenades, anyone rational would have had to wonder just how many grenades I had and how badly they wanted to get to us. I didn’t think these were fanatical supporters of Cherkoff, so it could be many minutes before any of them got up enough courage to test the stairwell again.
I didn’t wait for the explosion and moved quickly to the suspect door.
“Millen!” I called again. What might have been a groan came from the room, but I couldn’t be sure. I pushed open the door fully with the barrel of my rifle and threw a cushion into the room to distract anyone with deadly intentions. Then I jumped into the room in the opposite direction of the cushion, going to one knee as I surveyed the room with my rifle. It was a large bedroom.
I didn’t know what had happened from the time Millen entered the room until I did, but it involved turning over most of the furniture, thirty or so 6-millimeter holes from Millen’s rifle in walls, pictures, and furniture, and three more of those big holes like the one in the bedroom door.
A strangled scream erupted from a recessed alcove to my left. Out stepped Cherkoff holding a young woman in front of him so I couldn’t get a killing shot. One of his arms was around her waist, the other held a knife to her throat. Both were naked. She had smears of blood, but Cherkoff’s left side and leg had blood running down. His face was drawn and his teeth were clenched.
“Drop your rifle or I’ll cut her throat!”
Like . . . that was going to happen. I didn’t hesitate and shot him at the wrist holding the knife. His arm jerked, and the girl twisted enough to expose half his face. My second shot hit his right eye and he dropped back, pulling the girl with him.
I scanned the room for more movement. There was none, but I checked the bathroom, closet, under the oversized bed, and any nook big enough to conceal a person. Nothing. I returned to Cherkoff.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
The girl had rolled off the body and now lay whimpering, clutching her throat.
“Let me see,” I said as gently as my adrenaline-saturated blood system allowed. She bled from a ten-centimeter gash in her throat, but nothing major had been cut: windpipe, veins, arteries.
“You’re okay. It’s bleeding, but you’ll be fine.” I didn’t think she’d noticed the bullet I’d fired at Cherkoff’s wrist had continued and passed through the upper edge of her trapezius muscle connecting her neck to her shoulder. It bled, but not as badly as her throat.
I grabbed a towel from the bathroom and pressed it to the knife wound. “Hold this tight. Help will be coming.”
As I rose, I looked at Cherkoff’s body. Besides my two holes, he had bled profusely from a wound to his right side. Millen had hit him.
But where was Millen?
Then, I heard a faint groan. It led me to a foot sticking out from behind a heavy overturned table.
Kneeling beside Millen, I checked his body but it was clear from my first glance that he was in big trouble. The right side of his chest was protruding less than the left. Given the holes made by whatever weapon Cherkoff used, I could assume one shot had hit Millen, caving in part of his chest. At a minimum, he had multiple broken ribs, and a few broken ends could have punctured internal organs. Still, he was lucky. The Dynaplex suit prevented whatever hit him from tearing a gaping hole through him.
He had taken quite a blow. But he was alive.
“Millen. Can you hear me? Stay with me.”
He didn’t respond, though his chest moved, albeit with a ragged rise and fall.
I keyed my comm to Ashraf. “Cherkoff is dead, but Millen is in bad shape. What’s happening out there?”
“Whatever you and Millen were doing sure stirred the pot. Shooting back at us slacked off, except for the damned hovercraft’s big gun and the machine-gun on the north side. Everything on the east side went so quiet that Ron Chang raced to the railgun emplacement. When no one seemed to notice, he comm’d back, and now there’s a dozen men with Chang in the barn right behind the main house. Chang comm’d he won’t push further until he hears from you or Millen.”
“All of you stop shooting and start yelling that Cherkoff is dead. Say that everyone who lays down their weapons and walks to the front driveway of the main house will be allowed to leave Justice, with no questions asked.”
“That won’t go down well, Cole. That big gun on the hovercraft caught three people standing up and pretty much cut them in half. I also hear of one fatality and two wounded from that northern machine-gun.”
“How many more dead is it worth, Ashraf? The longer the shooting goes on, the more dead there’ll be. Sometimes you’ve just got to bite down and bear what you hate.”
I waited for a response. Time was critical for both Millen and me.
Finally, Ashraf answered. “Okay, I’ll pass the word. I assume you want Chang to start yelling out about Cherkoff, too. He’s not going to be happy about drawing attention.”
“Tell him to hunker down in place and only fire if fired on. I’m going to do my own yelling here and see what I can do for Millen.”
However, help for Millen had to wait. First priority was trying to get Cherkoff’s men to stand down. I went back to the suite’s door to the top landing.
“Hey! Down there! Cherkoff is dead. You ain’t getting paid no more. There’s no sense fighting for something that’s over. You’re surrounded, and we control the third floor.”
They had to assume both Millen and I were unharmed.
“If you keep fighting, you’ll only end up dead. The people of Justice will have less mercy the longer this goes on. We can strike a deal. You all lay down your weapons, and you can walk out of here to get the first available dirigibles to anywhere else on Astrild.”
“Sez who?” called back a gravelly voice.
“This is Marshal Edgar Millen and Deputy Marshal Everett Cole up here. I repeat. Cherkoff is dead. Who am I talking to?”
“Name’s Chikalow. How do we know he’s dead? Maybe he got away. Maybe he’s a prisoner.”
“Hold a second, and I’ll prove it. I’ll come out with his body. If he’s dead, you’ve no reason to fire. If he’s alive, you’d be shooting at him.”
I went back into the bedroom, put Cherkoff’s body into a fireman’s carry, and staggered back to the landing.”
“I’m coming out, don’t fire.”
Naturally, I didn’t trust our unofficial truce, so I held the body in front of me, supporting it upright under the armpits. When I got to the railing of the landing, I leaned Cherkoff against the rail, bent to grab his lower legs, and flipped him over the rail. Curses preceded the sound of the body hitting the bottom floor.
“It’s Cherkoff,” said a faint voice, followed by multiple others talking, shouting, and cursing.
I went to check on Millen. He was no better but no worse. I’d seen enough injuries to have the sense he wasn’t in danger of imminent death, but that could change quickly if he didn’t get medical care. The girl lay holding the towel to her throat, eyes wide, old tears drying on her face. The firing outside had died away to nothing.
Back to the stairwell. “How about it? Walk out of here with your lives or die for nothing.”
“We’ve no reason to trust you’d keep your word once we give up our weapons,” yelled Chikalow.
It was good news. We were negotiating. Millen didn’t have time for lengthy back-and-forths. I wanted to get Dr. Gebran to Millen quickly, but I figured if Chikalow knew one of us was seriously injured, it would harden the negotiations. So, when I jumped right to where I figured it would end up, agreement came quickly. Cherkoff’s men would keep their firearms but give up the heavier weapons and leave Justice on the first dirigible. Bossev, Ashraf, and Aleyna H
amdan were all unhappy with the result, although the mayor was the first to accept it as necessary for the greater good. He placated the others.
Cherkoff’s reign over Justice was finished.
CHAPTER 22
By conditions of the truce, a convoy of trucks would transport the remaining Cherkoff men to the dirigible field: twenty-nine fighters—or thugs, as Ashraf preferred to call them—plus ten noncombatants who figured having worked for Cherkoff precluded a future in Justice, and fifteen family members. They would be escorted by fifty-one members of our “army,” now in possession of two machine-guns, plus a railgun no one from Justice knew how to operate.
The deal struck, Dr. Gebran, another doctor, three nurses, a driver, and the two Lamoa brothers drove to the ranch house in one of the VLK trucks under a truce flag. Ron Chang had kept Schlottner informed of what was happening, and the mine manager had suggested the company truck to imply our coup had VLK support. I was in constant comm with the medical team. When they arrived, the other doctor and two nurses stayed on the first floor to tend the ranch’s wounded. Gebran and the third nurse were puffing when they got to the third floor. Gebran supported my decision not to move Millen until help arrived.
“I saw Cherkoff on the first floor, and one of the men said how he got there. Was he dead when you threw him down?”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference, but yes, he was definitely deceased.”
“First real war zone I’ve ever seen, Cole,” said Gebran. “Is it always as bad as this?”
“Bad? Like this?” I asked, suppressing irritation. “This is nothing. I’ll tell you what a real war zone is like later if you’re interested, but for now, Millen is in the bedroom.”
The doctor took one look at Millen and exclaimed, “Kolara!” or something that I didn’t understand. The two medics did the usual manual checks, clamped a med-band to Millen’s wrist and a neural probe to his forehead, and read out results on a screen Gebran pulled from his med-vest.
A Tangled Road to Justice Page 28