Down: Trilogy Box Set (146 page)

Culpepper grunted once and said, “Sarge, I …” before slumping over.

Caravaggio climbed over John to pull Culpepper as far away from the rear as possible.

Loomis cowered in terror but Emily, cool under fire, told him they’d be okay.

O’Malley fired off another three rounds. They heard a horse’s whinny or maybe it was a human cry.

“Jack!” O’Malley said, looking back. “How bad is it? Jack!”

“What’s going on back there?” Brian called out.

John rolled off Emily enough to have a look at Culpepper’s chest. It was soaking wet with blood. He felt for his neck pulse and detected one or two faint beats then nothing.

“He’s bleeding out,” John said quietly. “There’s nothing we can do for him.”

“What did you say?” O’Malley asked. “How is he?”

“Keep firing,” John replied. “Even if you don’t hit anyone it’ll make them keep their distance.”

It was as if the horse and rider appeared from nowhere. The blackness behind the wagon suddenly belched out a charging and snorting white horse ridden by a Russian soldier who was confidently riding with both hands holding a bow and arrow. He released his arrow the instant O’Malley drilled him with a rifle shot. The arrow was equally deadly. Its sharpened steel tip knocked out O’Malley’s top teeth on its way through his brainstem. He was dead before he pitched back onto Culpepper’s legs.

The rifle was half in and half-out of the wagon and John grabbed it before it fell out.

“Brian, I need you back here!” he shouted. Brian clamored over the living and dead and half-kneeled on O’Malley’s body, peering into the blackness.

“What do you need?” Brian shouted.

“Shoot at any sign of movement.”

Brian nocked an arrow.

“Michelangelo, you’ve got three loaded pistols and a musket. Anything Brian doesn’t hit, you take them out,” John said.

John was squatting beside Brian, looking down at the road, trying to judge the speed of the bouncing wagon. He picked up two of O’Malley’s spare mags, stuffed them in his trouser pockets and swung a leg over the half-door.

Emily was watching him and cried out, “John, what are you doing?”

“Trying to save our lives. Just keep going till you get to the border. I love you.”

“John, no!” she screamed as he vaulted out the rear, disappearing from sight.

Another arrow whistled past the wagon and one lodged in the half-door. Brian picked up a faint outline and let an arrow fly. There was a sharp cry followed by a thud. Before he could ready another arrow a rider pointing a pistol appeared but Caravaggio was already aiming. He pulled the trigger, striking the man in his gut.

John rolled three or four times, swearing at each hard knock but keeping an iron grip on the rifle he had tucked against his middle. When his body came to a stop he picked himself up and scrambled to the side of the road where he assumed a firing position on one knee. He felt for the selector lever and clicked the rifle into full auto mode.

The approaching Russian troops were bunched fairly tightly and came past him fast. John opened up on the first rider and slowly turned at the waist raking them with fire.

As horses screamed and bucked and bodies flew onto the road, John changed out mags and flicked the selector to single-shot. He rose and took two long strides to position himself in the middle of the road, firing isolated shots at any soldier who was moving rapidly.

He didn’t see the pistol rising from behind a felled horse but he heard and felt the blast. It hit the AK-47 squarely in the lower receiver and ripped it from his hands. A head popped up over the horse. Unless the shooter had another loaded gun at hand he was one and done. John charged him and leapt over the horse landing on top of the shooter. He began pummeling the man with his fists and when the man rolled over on his back John saw who it was.

Ostrov.

“You fucker!” John said, smashing his fist into his nose. The cartilage crunched and blood streamed over his mouth.

A fist with a knife in it came toward John’s flank and was about to penetrate the area of his surgical scar, when John countered it with a Krav Maga combination—a lateral blocking move with his left arm and a simultaneous upward thrust with the heel of his right hand into Ostrov’s broken nose. The force of the blow drove his nasal bones deeply into his brain.

Ostrov stared ahead in seeming surprise but then his mouth curled into something resembling a smile.

“I have last laugh on you because …”

His eyes rolled back and the rest was gibberish.

John shook him. “What do you mean? What do you mean?”

But there was nothing but mouth movements and gurgling.

A horse whinnied and John looked up into the barrel of a pistol. He heard the hammer drop with a loud click. The gun didn’t fire. Then he looked up at the rider. The two men recognized each other from their last encounter at Marksburg weeks before.

“John Camp,” Bushenkov said.

“First rule, keep your powder dry,” John said, standing up and looking around for a weapon.

From his perch Bushenkov saw his entire squad was gunned down and that Ostrov was destroyed.

“Want to come down and fight me? I’ll keep one eye closed to make it more even.”

“Not tonight, Mr. Camp, but soon perhaps. I think we shall meet again soon.”

With that he turned his horse and rode off into the wet night.

John went looking for his rifle and found it in the grass beside the road. There was a large through-and-through hole in the lower receiver just above the trigger. The metal around the hole was buckled. He was lucky his hand hadn’t been hit. He threw the rifle deeply into the woods. There’d be plenty more in Paris.

The wagon was a quarter of a mile down the road when Emily shouted at Simon to turn around.

They’d all heard the burst of automatic fire and then a few isolated shots.

Loomis sounded panicky. “But he said to keep going.”

“I agree,” Caravaggio said, “we must go back.”

“Do it, Simon,” Brian shouted.

Simon pulled back on the reins until the horses stopped then climbed down to coax the lead horses to turn tightly on the narrow road. Brian climbed onto the buckboard seat and readied an arrow. It didn’t take long to find John’s handiwork in the road.

When the horses pulled up, Brian and Simon both stood, weapons ready.

“I thought I told you not to stop before the border.”

John emerged from the woods with a grim smile.

Emily heard him and was out the back running toward him.

She threw her arms around him and said, “Don’t you ever do that again.”

He held her tightly. “Believe me, I don’t plan to. Dumbest thing I ever did.”

It was late in the evening. Forneau was out of breath from running through the vast palace. “They have returned.”

Garibaldi looked up from his writing desk. “All of them?”

“The two soldiers are dead.”

Garibaldi tried to stand but his arthritic hips locked up and sent him back to his chair. Uncharacteristically, he accepted Forneau’s help for a second try.

“I don’t think you’ve slept or eaten, have you?” the minister said.

“I don’t recall,” Garibaldi said, tucking in his shirttail. “Did they find the man Emily sought?”

“He is here.”

“That wasn’t the plan.”

“There were some complications.”

“Are you sure no one will mention the news?”

“The court is carefully instructed but it would be best if you could speak with John Camp quickly.”

Garibaldi lashed him with his tongue. “Well that’s what I’m intending, Forneau.”

Forneau dropped his head. “I know, I know. It is hard for me to bear, that is all.”

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Garibaldi said. “We’re all under considerable stress.”

Garibaldi came into the hall where John and the others were wolfing down a spread of food and drinking the best wine from old Robespierre’s cellars.

“I am so glad to see you all,” Garibaldi said, “and so pained to hear of the deaths of the English soldiers.”

“They died heroes,” John said. “I’d like to bring their bodies back to England but I don’t think it’s practical.”

“We will have them buried with great honor and dignity,” Forneau said.

Emily said, “Giuseppe, this is Paul Loomis, my old mentor.”

“A great pleasure,” Garibaldi said.

“I’ve heard many good things about you, sir,” Loomis replied.

Caravaggio and Simon approached the king for embraces.

“I take it from the casualties that there were complications,” Garibaldi said.

John nodded and said, “There were. Big time complications. Ostrov was a traitor all right, but not to Stalin.”

Garibaldi’s face twisted in rage. “Damn him! And damn me for trusting him!” he cried. “That explains everything.”

“Sorry, what does that mean?” John said. He suddenly felt a chill, as if a cold wind had passed through his body. “Where’s Kyle? Is he still at the forge?”

He didn’t like Garibaldi’s answer of, “John, come and sit with me.”

Emily lay beside him. He was drunk and inconsolable and was thrashing around so much she didn’t know if she could contain him.

“I know, baby, I know,” she said over and over.

“My fault, my fault,” he babbled. “Shouldn’t have. Should’ve let him be.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Kyle made his own choices. He knew the risks.”

He rolled onto his stomach and buried his head in his arms. “Glad they’re dead.”

“Who? Glad who’s dead?”

“My parents. Couldn’t face them.”

Her eyes stung as she conjured up an image of two young boys, playing on a carpet at their parents’ feet, a gentle, happy moment long past.

“Go to sleep now,” she whispered, stroking his back. “I’ll be here. I’ll be with you.”

The rotor wash from the Black Hawk blotted out the night sky. A few moments earlier, waiting for the bird to land, John had allowed himself a second, maybe two, to seek out the North Star.

It was hard to fathom how, in such a brief snippet of time, the mind could compress a much longer memory. But as he acquired the sight of the heavenly object John remembered lying in his boyhood bedroom on the top bunk while his mother sat on the bottom bunk with his younger brother, Kyle. He remembered her lilting voice saying, “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight …”

The helicopter touched down hard.

“Get Mike in first,” John said, and his men slid Mike Entwistle’s body bag into the Black Hawk.

“Now him.”

Fazal Toofan was unconscious, his jaw broken and swollen from the blow John had landed. The Taliban commander, trussed with plastic ties, was manhandled and dumped like a sack of garbage on the metal floor beside the body bag.

The remaining members of the Green Beret squad piled in. John did a fast headcount, subtracting out the casualties who’d already been evacuated. He looked over at the smoldering rubble of the farmhouse and then glanced at Toofan, lying in the chopper, this so-called high-value target.

How high could his value be?

High enough to balance out the lives of the men he’d lost?

He spit on the parched ground and climbed in, his men silently making room for him on a low metal bench. One of his boots was touching Mike’s dead body. The other was touching Toofan’s live body.

John called out to the pilot, “Get us the fuck out of here.”

The next morning Emily awoke early and was surprised John was already up, dressed and washing in a basin. He didn’t want to talk about being drunk out of his mind or anything else and she didn’t press him. She knew where he wanted to go.

The arrangements had been made.

Led by Garibaldi and Forneau and protected by a garrison of soldiers, the procession left the palace and made its way along the Seine to the demolished royal forge. John and Emily rode alone in one wagon, Simon, Brian, Alice, Loomis, and Caravaggio in another.

In the flat, gray light of morning, the caved-in and smoking mountain of bricks was a sad sight. A small army of French and Italian workers had already begun the painstaking task of shifting bricks and timbers and stacking them on a flat parcel of land for their eventual re-use. Immediately after learning of the blast, Garibaldi had declared his intention to rebuild and expand the forge as a blast furnace and foundry to produce the Bessemer steel he would need to make his brave, new world.

“From this disaster, we will grow stronger,” he had said. “From this sorrow, we will triumph.”

John jumped off the wagon and helped Emily down. He stood, watching the men clear debris, and suppressed a sob.

Emily said something to him but he said he’d be all right. Then the two of them went to Garibaldi.

“John, it might be days before we find Kyle’s remains,” Garibaldi said.

“I should stay,” John said, “but I can’t.”

“I will treat him like my own brother,” Garibaldi said. “We will give him a hero’s burial. Was he a religious man? Perhaps we can find a man or woman who remembers what to say?”

“I don’t think he was religious,” John said. “You might want to bury him with a jug of beer though.”

“He deserves a full barrel,” Garibaldi said. “I should mention we found his killer, the Russian, Antonov. Well, the French found him hiding in an inn in the city last night, awaiting his chance to escape. They revenged the forge workers who were destroyed by chopping him into small pieces and throwing them into the river. I would have preferred to have him interrogated but I believe we already know his motives and whom he worked for.”

“You’ve got to deal with the elephant in the room, Giuseppe.”

“Ah, the elephant,” Garibaldi said with a pained smile.

John shook his head. “All the AK-47s lost. The molds lost. The primers lost. And we gave a rifle to Stalin. Our plan backfired.”

“Hardly,” Garibaldi said, gesturing toward Loomis. “You found your man.”

“I left a broken up AK rifle somewhere in the woods on the German side of the border. I’m not sure I could even find it.”

“Never mind, John.”

“It’ll take Stalin a while to mass produce the guns and figure out the primers but when he does he’ll have an enormous advantage over you.”