The Oracle Code

38

“Put these on too.” Fitrat handed Lourds a Kevlar helmet and flack jacket similar to the ones he and his men wore.

Lourds slipped them on, hating the way the helmet strap pulled at his goatee. It also made his head feel heavy. He wore ANA fatigues like the rest of the group.

“And give me your backpack.” Fitrat grabbed it from Lourds’s hand and handed it off to another soldier.

“Be careful with that,” Lourds said. “The scrolls are in there. All my work.”

“I’ll keep it safe, sir,” the soldier said.

Lourds felt the rumble of the approaching vehicles outside in the alley before he heard them. Two of them flashed by the window, barely seen through the sliver of light under the curtain, before the third one rocked to a stop directly outside.

“All right.” Fitrat’s voice held the sharp crack of command. “Move out.”

Four men dashed through the door with their rifles close to their chests. Two went left and two went right.

“Now you.” Fisting Lourds’s shirt, Fitrat pulled him through the door with him. Still maintaining his hold, almost tripping Lourds on occasion, Fitrat propelled him toward the SUV waiting just outside the door.

Before Lourds could reach for the door, Fitrat spun him around and flattened him against the SUV hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs.

“Look out for the rooftops!” Fitrat brought his assault rifle up, and the alley was suddenly filled with the thunder of exploding rounds.

Atop the building at the end of the alley sixty meters from the doorway where the ANA had burst out of the building, Linko watched the line of black SUVs fill the alley and cursed the ill luck that seemed to plague him. He was certain his team had tripped no alarm. They were moving too fast for the ANA to have called for the vehicles to be ready on time.

Then he realized it wasn’t ill luck he was having, it was good. He’d gotten to the safe house just before the ANA had abandoned it. If they’d arrived a few minutes later, they would have found nothing but the empty warehouse. And maybe a few nasty surprises waiting for them that would have blown up in their faces. That was how he would have handled the situation.

He studied the men as they ran from the warehouse in two-by-two blocks. Standard movement and they executed it well. The soldiers set up at either end of the alley just as two more ran outside.

Linko swept his gaze over the men, searching for the American professor’s telltale hat, but it wasn’t visible. He waited.

Then one of the men shouted a warning to the others, and Linko knew one of his team on the rooftops had been seen. The ANA soldiers started firing, and bullets ripped through the eaves. He didn’t have to tell the mercenary forces he’d hired to return fire. The men did so automatically. Living constantly in the battlefield did that to men: when they were fired upon, or even when they knew they were about to be fired upon, they started firing. It was a survival skill.

Linko held his own fire as bullets danced around him. He wanted Lourds.

More men rushed out into the alley, and the rifle fire became a barrage and a wave of noise that deafened him and drowned out the city sounds around them.

Desperate as the men started to load into the vehicles, Linko searched for Lourds. Something was wrong. All the men were dressed the same. Whoever was heading up this operation had been clever. But the man would not have allowed himself to get far from the man he was supposed to protect. Linko scanned again, looking for two men moving together, not independently as the other ANA soldiers were doing.

There. He saw one man holding another by the shirtfront, opening the door of the SUV directly in front of the doorway. Then Linko spotted another man wearing the professor’s backpack over one shoulder.

Linko took aim through the scope and squeezed the trigger while aiming at the man’s neck, thinking that if he could drop Lourds and recover whatever the professor had recovered from the tomb, then he could return to Moscow and receive his promotion.

The bullet tore through the man’s throat and stabbed down into his chest. He crumpled without a sound, folding into a pile there in the alley.

Lourds was half inside the SUV when he saw the man with his backpack go down over Fitrat’s shoulder. “No!” Fueled by adrenaline not only from fear for his life, but also fear that he would lose the scrolls, Lourds took Fitrat by surprise and managed to lever the captain off him. He dove for the man and the backpack.

Lourds dashed to the man’s side and tried to lift him from the ground, thinking that if they could get him inside the SUV then they could give him medical attention. The man was dead weight in his arms, much harder to move than Lourds had believed.

Fitrat stepped up beside him, and Lourds realized that some of the heavy fire they’d been taking had slacked off as the ANA soldiers found their targets and provided cover fire.

At the end of the alley, a man in street clothes and carrying an AK-47 thudded to the ground. Bloody from his injuries, the man slowly rose. More bullets struck him, and he stumbled out into the street. He stepped in front of a car that tried to swerve away but only succeeded in striking him a glancing blow before crashing into another car in the opposing lane. The street became blocked as cars put on their brakes, stopping traffic ahead of the ANA convoy almost at once.

Fitrat yanked the dead man from Lourds’s arms. “He’s dead, Professor. There is nothing you can do for him.” The soldier’s body fell to the ground, and the captain rolled him over to get the backpack.

Lourds started to say something about the callous way Fitrat treated the dead soldier, then he noticed the hesitation the captain showed at taking the backpack. Pain showed on Fitrat’s face, and Lourds knew the captain blamed himself for the death.

“Let me.” Lourds stepped in and took the backpack. Holding it to his chest, he and the captain ran for all they were worth, reaching the SUV just as the enemy fire picked up steam again. Bullets flattened against the bulletproof windows and left spiderwebs of cracks running through the glass.

Lourds dove into the vehicle. Fitrat slid into the seat next to him and shouted to the driver, “Go. Tell them to get underway. Now!”

The driver did as he was ordered, and the first two vehicles raced forward.

Lourds turned to Fitrat. “The street is blocked. Didn’t you see?”

“Then it will become unblocked.”

Ahead of them, through the windshield, Lourds watched as the lead SUV ran over the dead man in the street and collided with a car that had stopped in the middle of the road. Still powering forward, the lead SUV shoved the other car into the oncoming lane of traffic. Horns blared and brakes shrilled, but that barely penetrated the hail of gunfire chasing them through the alley.

Just as their own SUV was about to pull onto the street, the side mirror on the passenger side exploded into fragments and blew away.

Lourds held on to the safety strap as they careened through the maze of wrecked and stalled cars. Some of the drivers had gotten out of their vehicles, presumably to see if they could help. When they recognized the sound of gunfire and saw the black SUVs nimbly darting through the traffic jam, they headed back for the relative safety of their vehicles.

Anxious, Lourds looked out the back windshield and saw Fitrat doing the same thing.

“Do you think that’s it?”

Fitrat shook his head. “If it is, then we are up against a less determined force than I’d thought. If I had done this, I would have a backup plan in play, a pursuit team standing by to track anyone who got away.” He paused. “Of course, if I had done this thing, no one would have gotten out of that alley. But bad things happen even to the best of plans. I think, perhaps, we just got incredibly lucky.”

Lourds nodded in agreement.

“One thing I would like to know, Professor. I would very much like to know who is chasing you.”

Lourds shook his head. “I wish I knew. It might give me some insight on these scrolls.”

“Whoever it is wants those scrolls very badly.”

When he saw Lourds get back into the waiting SUV with the backpack in his hand, Linko calmed himself. There were five identical black SUVs in the alley. He had already tried shooting the tires, but they were equipped with run-flats, tires designed with support rings attached to the wheels that allowed them to keep driving even after the loss of air pressure.

If he could not stop the SUVs here, he needed a way to mark the vehicle Lourds was in. He put the rifle scope on the passenger side mirror, led it slightly because the SUV was already in motion, then squeezed the trigger until he saw the mirror blow to pieces.

Satisfied, Linko pushed up and ran to the fire escape at the rear of the building. He went down quickly, mentally reviewing the various ways out of Kandahar. If fortune favored him, he could catch the convoy before they escaped the neighborhood streets or could call for backup.

“Achmed.” Linko spoke over the headset receiver that connected him by cell phone to the chase team.

“Yes.”

“You see the SUVs?”

“Yes.”

Linko reached the ground and raced to the car he had parked across the street in the alley there. “Find the one with the missing passenger side mirror. That is the one that we want.”

“All right.”

“Which way are they headed?”

“South. They had to escape the traffic jam.”

“They will probably turn back toward the highway to Kabul. Stay with them.”

“I will.”

Linko flung himself into his vehicle and started the engine. As he roared out into the street, he ran over two young men passing by on bicycles, leaving them bleeding and broken on the pavement behind him.