Dark Zone

84

Tommy Karr saw colors and then brown, felt nothing and then fierce pain. His head snapped forward and he twisted, broken in half.

The moment pushed outward and then collapsed, time bending and twisting in three different directions at once.

He wasn’t falling anymore.

He was across a beam, and the world was on a slant.

He’d fallen onto the grid work. The fall had knocked the wind out of him and battered his body, but considering the alternative, he was in great shape.

Gradually, Karr recovered his breath. He’d fallen only a few feet, slipping down to one of the cross members, landing like a noodle across it. His head had jammed against a metal screen. His left leg hung free, but his right rested on one of the tower lights, twisted in thick cable that connected the light to the others nearby.

“OK,” he said aloud, “let’s get this show on the road.” But he couldn’t move.

He couldn’t find his hands. They seemed to be severed from his body. Finally he managed to turn his head and see his fingers gripping the meshwork near his face. Karr moved them slowly, then pushed his head back against the stabs and jolts at his neck.

“Go, let’s go,” he told himself. “Go, go, go. Come on, Tommy!”

He forced himself to start climbing.

The screen ran up the side of one of the girders near the elevator. While the rectangular holes were too narrow for footholds he found he could push his toes against the metal for traction.

The terrorists were clustered above, no longer paying attention to him. He pushed himself to move faster, but his head spun and he had to stop for a moment, rest.

The elevator began moving downward. Two of the terrorists swung down from above the girder where the others were working — they’d been on the top floor, which probably explained why the police hadn’t tried to get down from above.

Karr watched impotently as the two men began firing at the elevator. The machine continued downward as the bullets sprayed through it. He saw the face of a woman screaming and blood splattered against the glass doorway as the gondola disappeared below.

Kill them. Throw them off the tower. Now!

He started moving again.

The air around him exploded as the helicopters swooped in, one raking the side of the tower with its 7.62mm machine gun. Karr gripped the wire, the structure reverberating with the torrent of bullets the wash from the rotor.

A voice told Karr to leave, to get out of there now. It took a moment for him to realize it was the Art Room.

“There’s a helicopter firing on them!” he shouted.

“Get down!” yelled Rockman. “Get out of there. Go!”

Yeah, right, Karr thought. Move and I’m dead. I don’t even know why I’m not dead now

The terrorists began firing back. Between the forest of iron grids and the buffeting winds, the helicopters had a hard time getting their bullets close to the terrorists. Finally one of the terrorists above slumped against the beam.

Two figures came down from farther up, down on the stairs. They were policemen.

“Tell the cops they’re almost directly above the terrorists,” said Karr.

“What cops?” said Rockman. “There are no policemen on the third level.”

“Are you talking to the French or what? There are two cops or gendarmes or whatever…”

One of the men had a case in his hand. White smoke flared from the stairs and there was a huge explosion — the man had fired an antiair missile point-blank into the fuselage of one of the helicopters. The craft pitched hard to the right, then disappeared.