Текст книги "Corsair"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

First, he moussed his hair to give it Goldman’s curls and then sprinkled it with talcum powder so it matched his salt-and-pepper. He filled in the space between his eyebrows with a cosmetic pencil, and used a wad of toilet paper and the contents of a mascara bottle to give his face Goldman’s heavy five o’clock shadow.

Goldman saw what Eddie was doing and had his harbor pilot shirt off and ready to swap. Eddie tossed Goldman his shirt and slipped on Goldman’s.

The Israeli agent led them out of the bathroom and into the woman’s closet. He pushed aside a section of the hanging clothes, ignoring the increasing whine of her pleading questions. He moved a rather odorous shoe rack to reveal a piece of wood pressed up against the stucco wall. When he pulled it away, there was an open void about two feet across that ran the depth of the building. Opposite, they could see the backside of the laths for the next apartment. Budging plaster filled the gaps between the boards. Above, light filtered into the void from a pair of dusty skylights.

“This was left over from when the building was converted from offices,” Lev explained. “I found it on the old blueprints. At the bottom, I cut another hole that leads to the garage.”

“Okay, you two go down. Hali, get our car and pick up Lev in the garage. The cordon shouldn’t be too tight yet, and with any luck the police will be focusing on me.”

“If it is the police,” Goldman said. “Remember, Al-Jama is running a shadow government inside Qaddafi’s.”

“Does it really matter?” Hali pointed out, thrusting a leg into the opening.

He braced a foot on each wall and slowly started making his way down. His motion kicked up a thick cloud of fine white dust, and his weight caused the old laths to bow. Chunks of plaster broke away and fell into the darkness below.

Goldman had to disentangle himself from his distraught mistress. Her eye makeup ran in dark smudges down her apple cheeks, and her heavy bosom heaved with each sob.

“Women,” he remarked when he was finally free and crawling after Hali.

Eddie followed him, but rather than descend he moved laterally for a few feet, so any plaster he dislodged wouldn’t hit the men below, and started climbing. It was only a single story, so it took just a few minutes before he was pressed up under one of the skylights. The heat in the shaft was stifling, a weight that pulled at him as surely as gravity.

He could hear the rotor beat of the police helicopter and judged he had a few more seconds. The glazing holding the panes of glass to the metal frame had dried rock hard and came away with just a little pressure.

A shadow passed over the skylight. The chopper.

Eddie swallowed hard and popped one of the large panes free. The sound of the helicopter doubled, and even though he was exposed to the noonday sun it felt like he was moving into air-conditioning.

He rolled onto the flat, tarry roof and got to his feet. The chopper was a couple blocks away, hovering a few hundred feet above the rooftops. Eddie had to wait almost a minute before he was spotted. The big machine twisted in the air and thundered toward him. Its side door was open, and a police sniper stood braced with a scoped rifle cradled against his shoulder.

Eddie ran for the wall separating this building from the next, his feet sinking slightly into the warm tar. The wall was built to chest height and topped with jagged bits of embedded glass to prevent people from doing what Seng was attempting. But unlike barbed wire, which never loses its keen edge, the glass had been scoured by wind for decades and was almost smooth. Pieces snapped flat when he vaulted over the wall. He landed on the other side.

This building’s roof was virtually identical to the first, a wide area of a tar-gravel mix punctured by the elevator housing and dozens of satellite dishes and defunct antennae.

The chopper swooped low over the roof, and Eddie made certain the sniper saw his face and hoped it was a close enough match to Tariq Assad’s. He got his answer a second later when a three-round burst from an automatic weapon pounded the roof at his feet.

Now that the police believed their suspect was on the roof, Hali and Goldman should be able to slip away undetected.

Eddie raced for the back of the building, cutting a serpentine path to throw off the sharpshooter, and almost threw himself from the edge before realizing that, unlike the mistress’s apartment house, this one didn’t have a proper fire escape. There was just a simple metal ladder bolted to the side of the structure, a death trap if he committed himself to it with the sniper hovering so close overhead.

He glanced back the way he came. He’d be running right for the circling chopper if he retreated, so instead he ran for the next building, vaulting the wall and opening a gash in his palm for the effort. Not all the glass had weathered the same.

More bullets pounded into the roof, kicking up hot clots of tar that burned against his cheek. He pulled his pistol and returned fire. The wide misses were still enough to force the pilot to retreat for a moment.

Sprinting flat out, he raced for the next building, throwing himself over the wall and almost dropping down. The next building was a story lower than the previous ones, and beyond that was the open expanse of the construction site. Dangling from his fingertips, he looked quickly to see if there was any evidence of a fire escape and saw none, not even a cable house for an elevator.

He made the decision to pull himself back over the wall and find some other route when the sniper zeroed in on his hands. Bullets tore into the brick and mortar, forcing Eddie to drop free. He rolled when he landed to absorb the impact, but surviving the ten-foot drop didn’t mean he was any less trapped.

TWENTY-NINE

BY THE TIME HALI KASIM REACHED THE BOTTTOM OF THE air shaft, he was covered in dust, and his shoulders and knees ached mercilessly. He promised himself that when he returned to the Oregon, he’d spend more time in the ship’s fitness center. He’d seen how effortlessly Eddie had climbed, and the former CIA agent was nearly a decade older.

The floor here was littered with fragments of plaster and dried layers of pigeon guano. Lev Goldman lowered himself the last few feet. Sweat had cut channels through the dirt caked on his face, and the dust coating his beard aged him twenty years.

“You okay?” Hali panted, resting his hands on his knees.

“Perhaps I should have thought up a better escape route,” the Israeli admitted, fighting not to cough in the mote-filled air. “Come. This way.”

He led Kasim toward the rear of the building and an area where the lath had been cut way low to the ground. Together they kicked at the two-foot-square spot. At first, the blows merely cracked the plaster. But then bits of it broke away. Goldman used his hands to tear out inch-thick chunks until the hole was big enough to crawl through.

They emerged into an underground garage. The lot was mostly vacant, with only a few cars, usually driven by the stay-at-home wives, sitting in their assigned spots. Had any of them been older models, Hali would have considered hot-wiring one of them, but they were all fairly new and would be equipped with alarms.

“Meet me at the exit and stay out of sight,” he said. “Our car is right around the corner.”

Hali dusted himself off as best he could as he jogged up the ramp and into the blazing sunshine. The street was a scene of pandemonium. The shots fired from the helicopter had forced everyone to find cover. Oranges from the grocer’s littered the sidewalk where someone had run into the display. The chairs where the old men had played backgammon were overturned. Police vans were just now arriving.

It didn’t take much acting for Hali to pretend to be just another frightened Libyan. He reached their rental car and opened the door. Sirens filled the air, drowning out even the heavy throb of the chopper’s blades.

The Fiat’s engine fired on the first try. Hali’s hands were so slick that the wheel got away from him, and he clipped the rear bumper of the car parked in front of him, its alarm adding to the keening police sirens.

The first of the officers, outfitted in black tactical gear, began to emerge from a van. They would have the block surrounded in seconds. Yet none of them seemed interested in anything except the building’s front door. Eddie’s distraction was working. They thought they had their man cornered and ignored proper procedure.

Hali drove around the corner, slowed, but didn’t stop for Lev Goldman, who threw himself into the passenger’s seat, and eased into traffic on the next side street.

Every block they drove exponentially increased the area the police had to cover in order to find them. After eight stoplights, Goldman felt safe enough to pop his head up above the dashboard.

“Pull over into that gas station,” he ordered.

“Can’t you hold it?”

“Not for that. We need to switch seats. It is obvious you don’t know the roads or how to drive like a local. No one here obeys the traffic rules.”

Hali cranked the wheel into the gas station’s lot and threw the car into park. Lev sat still for a moment, expecting Hali to jump out so he could slide over. Instead, he was forced out of the car, and Kasim took the passenger’s seat.

He chuckled humorlessly when he engaged the transmission. “In a situation like that, Mossad training says driver should exit the vehicle.”

Kasim looked at him skeptically. “Really? Doing it your way means there is no one at the wheel for several seconds longer. You should talk to your instructors.”

“No matter.” Lev grinned, this time with genuine amusement. “We made it.”

He asked as they made random turns away from his mistress’s neighborhood, “I am sorry, what is your name again?”

“Kasim. Hali Kasim.”

“That is an Arab name. Where are you from?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“No. I mean your family. Where were they from?”

They took what Hali assumed was a shortcut in an alley between two large, featureless buildings. “My grandfather emigrated from Lebanon when he was a boy.”

“So are you Muslim or Christian?”

“What difference does that make?”

“If you are Christian, I wouldn’t feel so bad about this.”

The report was just a sharp spit in the confines of the Fiat’s cramped interior. A fine mist of blood splattered the passenger’s window when the bullet burst from Hali’s rib cage. Goldman fired his silenced pistol again at the same instant the car hit a pothole. His aim was off, so the round missed entirely, blowing out the side window in a cascade of minuscule chips.

Hali had been so stunned in the first instant of the attack, he had done nothing to stop the second shot. His chest felt like a molten poker had been rammed through it from side to side, and he could feel hot wetness trickling past his belt line.

He grabbed for the gun as it recoiled up, forcing Goldman to let go of the wheel and throw an awkward body shot that still hit directly on the entrance wound. Hali screamed at the unimaginable agony of it, and he lost his grip on the handgun’s warm barrel.

Rather than fight a battle he had no chance of winning, he used his elbow to push open the door release and let himself fall from the car. They were doing perhaps twenty-five miles per hour, and he landed right on his butt, so he didn’t tumble but rather slid along the pavement, until skin smeared from his body.

The Fiat’s brake lights lit up immediately, but by the time the car had come to a stop Hali had pulled his pistol from his ankle holster. He fired as soon as he saw Goldman’s head emerge from the car. Hali missed, so he fired again, this time aiming through the car. Glass splintering sound like tiny bells. The pistol’s recoil made him feel like he was being kicked, but he kept at it. Three more rounds hit the car, other rounds shot masonry off the building beyond. The man Hali thought was an Israeli agent decided killing him wasn’t worth it.

“If you’d only gotten out at that gas station, I would have simply driven away,” he said. The Fiat’s door slammed, and the car sped off with a chirp of its tires.

Hali collapsed onto his back, his chest heaving as his blood pumped from both entrance and exit wounds. He yanked up his shirt to see the damage. There were tiny bubbles foaming from the right-side bullet hole. He didn’t need Doc Huxley to tell him he had been shot in the lung, or that if he didn’t get to a hospital soon he was a dead man.

The alley where he’d been both duped and dumped was long, and he couldn’t see traffic crossing either entrance. This had been a perfect setup, he thought fleetingly, gritting his teeth against a fresh wave of pain when he levered himself to his feet. Whoever Goldman was, he had played them like a maestro.

Hali made it no more than a couple of paces before he collapsed against the building and dropped to the ground amid the broken bottles, thorny weeds, and trash.

His last thought before succumbing to oblivion was relief that Eddie would most likely make it out. Nothing could stop the wiry ex-agent.

EDDIE SENG COULD ONLY HOPE that Hali and Goldman were safe, because he was in serious trouble. The police helicopter roared into view overhead, and he put two bullets into its underside before it swept out of pistol range. The sniper wasn’t so limited by his weapon and blazed away. Bullets pounded the wall behind Eddie, forcing him to run again. The marksman adjusted, leading Eddie ever so slightly, and put a round through the roof less than an inch from his right toe.

Eddie felt as exposed as an actor on an empty stage. Without any cover, it was only a matter of time before the bullets found their mark. Ahead of him, the roof ended in a low decorative cornice, and beyond was the skeletal framework of the new high-rise under construction. An Olympic long jumper would still miss the building by fifty feet from here. The boom of the crane that he and Hali had seen was closer, but there would be nothing to grab onto if he made it.

It was swinging across the sky and Eddie could see its cable reeling upward, but he had no idea what was being maneuvered to one of the building’s upper floors.

At this point, it didn’t matter.

Putting on a burst of speed, he raced for the horizon, running flat out without any deviation. The sniper high above zeroed in, laying down a rain of fire that chased Eddie’s heels. Just before reaching the cornice, he saw down below that the crane was lifting a pallet of Sheetrock. He altered his speed slightly, put one foot on the cornice, and launched himself into space, leaping through a stinging cloud of exploding masonry.

He flew out and down, a forty-foot drop sucking at his body, his stomach lurching at the rapid earthward acceleration. The pallet of Sheetrock was twelve feet below him and rising when he leapt, so when he crashed into it the impact turned his ankle and he almost slid off the far side.

Before he could grab one of the cables, his weight unbalanced the load. It tipped, and he had to scramble on his bad leg. Sheets of gypsum board began to slide against one another as the angle increased. He lunged for the cable as the entire two tons slipped free. The sheets separated as they fell, spreading out as though a giant had tossed a deck of playing cards into the air.

Eddie’s fingers clutched at the cable, his body jerking spasmodically because the cable was bouncing to adjust to losing the load. He managed to change his grip and loop a leg around the cable.

To his credit, the crane’s operator was quick-thinking. He had been watching the lift from the cab, had seen the figure leap from the adjacent building, and understood why the heavy sheets had fallen. Rather than take the time to slowly lower the dangling figure to the ground, he locked the cable spool and continued to swing the boom toward the unfinished building.

The heavy hook at the end of the cable had enough weight to pendulum Eddie through the building’s open side, and he let go, tumbling onto a concrete floor. The workers who’d seen his stunt were several floors above him. It would take them a few moments to come down the ladders leaning inside what would become a stairwell.

Favoring his sprained ankle, Eddie loped to the edge of the building, where a debris chute had been attached. He peered over the edge. The chute was a metal tube about twenty-four inches in diameter that ended just above a large green Dumpster sitting atop a flatbed truck. He stepped in, wedged his good foot against the wall, and braced his hands behind him. His descent was measured and controlled. His only real concern was that someone higher up might toss something in the Dumpster after him.

He landed lightly on chunks of concrete and rebar torn out from a cement pour gone wrong. Seconds later, he was over the side of the Dumpster and striding across the construction site. Everyone still assumed he was up on the third floor, so no one paid him the slightest attention. Most important, the hovering sniper was watching the building and not the lone figure crossing the construction yard.

Parked near a pump truck designed to force concrete up armored hoses to the upper stories was a cement mixer, its rear chute extended with cement flowing into the pump’s hopper. Eddie leapt onto its front bumper, stepped onto its driver’s-side fender, and grabbed the big wing-mirror support before the driver was aware of Eddie’s presence. Eddie swung himself through the open window, caught the man on the jaw with his good foot, and dropped into the seat as the man collapsed sideways.

The whole truck vibrated with the power of the huge cement drum turning just behind the cab. Eddie kicked the unconscious man down into the passenger’s footwell, yanked the gearshift into first, and started forward. He couldn’t hear the shouts of the surprised workers, but he could see them running after the cement mixer in his wing mirrors.

He drove the truck across the site on the dedicated dirt road. In his wake, wet cement continued to fall from the chute like the mixer was some diarrheal mechanical monster. The chopper had to have alerted the ground forces that their man had leapt for the construction site, because a half dozen cops were rushing for the chain-link gate when Eddie smashed through, scattering men like bowling pins.

When he cranked the wheel over, the steel chute pivoted outward like a baseball bat at full swing, knocking over two more men and smashing out the windshield of a parked sedan. A police car charged after him, its siren wailing. When it pulled alongside, Eddie braked hard and turned the wheel. The cement mixer rode up onto the cruiser’s hood. The massive weight of the truck and its load of concrete blew out the front tires and burst the radiator. The truck’s rear wheels skidded into the patrol car so it blocked both the road’s narrow lanes.

The move sent the chute flinging the other way and it tore through the glass of another car. It ricocheted back and forth like a metal tail, smashing into automobiles and keeping the pursuing police well back.

Eddie could see them pause to fire at the truck, but their shots were deflected by the enormous revolving drum, and he was increasing the range with every second. The problem wasn’t them. It was the helicopter circling overhead. Eddie couldn’t make his escape with them watching his every move and radioing his position

The street straightened and widened as he left the neighborhood. In the distance, approaching at nearly seventy miles per hour, were three more police cars, their lights winking rhythmically. Charging along with them was some sort of wheeled armored vehicle. Eddie assumed it would have a mounted heavy machine gun.

He pressed the accelerator to the floor, short shifting the transmission to build up his speed as quickly as possible. With a hundred feet separating him and the cruisers, Eddie slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel over hard. The front fender caught the rear corner of a big delivery truck, and it was enough to unbalance the cement mixer. It went up onto its outside wheels, even as it continued to careen sideways, and then it smashed over onto its side.

Eddie held on to the wheel to stop himself from tumbling onto the passenger’s door, covering his face with his elbow to protect it from the flying glass of the shattered windshield. The truck’s regular operator was sufficiently jammed into place that he was okay as glass rained down on him.

The collision with the ground was hard enough to snap the pins holding the cement drum in place and break the links of its chain drive. Momentum did the rest.

Eleven tons of steel and concrete began rolling down the street, wobbling slightly as the cement sloshed in the huge barrel. Two of the police cars had the good sense to peel out of the way and jump onto the curb, one smashing into a utility pole, the other coming to rest with its front end embedded in a wall. The armored car and the other cruiser were closer and didn’t stand a chance. The barrel rolled up the armored car’s front glacis and tore its small turret from its mount. The gunner would have been sliced in half had he not ducked at the last second.

The drum smashed back onto the road, cracking the asphalt before hitting the police cruiser in a glancing blow that was still enough to flatten it from the rear seat back. The barrel came to rest against the side of a building, with cement as stiff as toothpaste oozing from its open mouth.

Eddie grabbed a spare work shirt that had been hanging from a peg at the back of the cab and stepped through the shattered windshield. He was hidden from the view of the chopper by the truck, so he took a few seconds to wipe the cosmetics from his face and don the denim shirt. The pain radiating from his ankle was something he could contain and compartmentalize, so when he moved away from the truck he walked without a limp. He went no more than a few feet and stopped to stare with the people who’d poured out of shops and homes to see the accident. As simply as that, he was just another rubbernecker.

When the police arrived and began questioning witnesses, he was virtually ignored. They were looking for a Libyan, not an Asian man who spoke no Arabic. He slowly drifted away from the scene, and no one stopped him. Five minutes after calling their hired gang members, he was in the van headed away from the neighborhood entirely.

FIVE MILES AWAY IN the rented Fiat, Tariq Assad was on his cell phone.

“It’s me. There was a raid today. The police almost got me. First, find out why I wasn’t warned. This should have never happened. As it was, I had a little help in escaping from those people off that damned ship. I was pumping them for information when the police arrived.”

He listened for a moment, and replied. “Watch your tone! You arranged the ambush on the coast road, and those were your hand-picked men. We’ve both seen a copy of the investigation report, thanks to our mole in the police. Rather than let vehicles pass unmolested, your supposedly well-trained men were shaking down motorists for bribe money. I don’t know how these American mercenaries managed to kill them all, but they did. Then they proceeded to blow up our Hind, free most of our prisoners, and generally disrupt what had been a perfectly executed plan . . . What? Yes, I said free. Their cargo ship must have been berthed at the coaling station dock. Our men saw an empty train car sinking . . . How should I know? Maybe the vessel is faster than it looks or the men in the chopper were bigger fools than the ones you sent to stop their truck in the first place.

“I have to get out of the city now,” he went on. “Actually, out of the country. I know a pilot who is sympathetic to our cause. I will ask him to fly me in his helicopter to where the men are searching for Suleiman Al-Jama’s tomb, and I will take control personally. Despite the setbacks, it appears you have everything controlled from this end. Fiona Katamora should be in her execution chamber by now, and Colonel Hassad phoned to tell me our martyr force is en route.

“I won’t speak to you again until it’s over. So let me say that Allah’s blessings be upon us all.”

He killed the connection and tossed the encrypted phone on the seat next to him. He was a man who had always been able to keep a grip on his emotions. He wouldn’t have lasted as long as he had if he couldn’t. Today’s close call enraged him. He hadn’t been lying when he said they had spies and sympathizers in every level of the Libyan government. He’d had ample warning that the police were staking out his office and apartment, so he should have been told about the raid.

It seemed the supreme leader, Muammar Qaddafi, needed reminding that his autonomy remained limited.