They Came to Kill

10

Lyons fell back as Blancanales attempted to close the door against an avalanche of trash and filth. But the debris blocked the door.

On the other side the bursts of automatic-rifle fire continued.

But they heard no slugs hitting the trash or door. They waited, listening.

"They're not shooting at us," Blancanales told Lyons.

Standing on the box again, Lyons looked outside. He saw no one. Another burst shattered the quiet, the autofire echoing in the garage. Lyons heard no ricochets or voices, or the sound of running. He dug through the trash and broken concrete, then crawled into the light.

Scanning the area, he saw debris from years of explosions and fighting littering the garage. Burned-out wrecks blocked the alley exit. Two new Japanese panel trucks sat parked on his left. Then he heard voices coming from a flight of steel-and-concrete stairs.

A dead militiaman sprawled on the stairs, blood draining from wounds. He wore the fatigues of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. A rifle fired, the noise coming from somewhere above the dead man.

"Pol! Get the others! It's clear."

Lyons scrambled out. He pulled out his auto-Colt, checking to see that it was cocked and locked, and ran across the garage to the stairs. He looked up and quickly dodged back as an autorifle fired.

But no slugs came at him. He looked at the dead man. The Iranian had been shot in the back.

Looking across the garage, Lyons saw Blancanales lead the line of men out of the trash pile. Blancanales and Powell ran across the garage to join him. Akbar directed the platoon of Shia militiamen to cover the street and alley exits.

Lyons went up. At the first landing he went flat on the concrete and looked up the next flight of stairs. He saw an open fire exit with the door gone, but the low angle denied him a view of the corridor beyond. He heard voices, then kicks against a door. A rifle fired once.

He went up the next flight of stairs on his hands and knees. Stairs squeaked behind him as weight stressed the steel framework. He looked back, saw Blancanales. Lyons continued to the top.

Peering into the corridor, Lyons saw two Iranian militiamen fire their Kalashnikov rifles at a closed door, punching the door and the walls on each side with lines of 7.62mm ComBloc. Then they ran at the door and kicked it. A rifle inside fired one bullet out, splintered wood and plastic flying from the door. The Iranians scrambled for cover.

Lyons braced his silent Colt on the top stair. Thumbing the fire-selector down one click to semiautomatic, he sighted on the head of the Iranian farthest from him and squeezed the trigger.

The Iranian moved. As he raised his rifle to his shoulder, the .45-caliber hollowpoint slammed into his left cheek at three hundred meters per second, the upward trajectory of the impact-flattened slug tearing away his eyes and half his face. The force spun him back several steps; he was still alive, blood and fluids spraying from his opened skull.

A second slug caught the other Iranian low in the back of the head, killing him instantly as the expanding hollowpoint liberated a devastating shock force of kinetic energy to explode his skull.

Motioning Blancanales and Powell up, Lyons ran through the corridor. He continued past the door to the lobby of the office building. Rusting steel grills covered the long-ago-shattered plate-glass windows. Moldy papers, rifled files and charred furniture littered the lobby. Vandals had spray painted Arabic slogans on the gray marble walls. Everything not burned had been smashed. Only twisted metal and broken glass remained of what had been an abstract sculpture of colored glass rising from the lobby to the mezzanine.

Nothing moved on the mezzanine level. Lyons saw no one on the stairs. He heard nothing in the building.

Lyons turned at the sound of footsteps. Blancanales and Powell stood on each side of the bullet-splintered door. Shia militiamen ran past the door. With the universal hand signals learned by fighting alongside soldiers of many languages, Lyons pointed to where he stood, indicating the interior of the high lobby in a wide sweep of his arm. The Shias nodded. One man squatted against the walls and watched the lobby, his AK rifle ready. The other Shia ran down the stairs to the garage.

Lyons returned to the door. Powell glanced at the two dead Iranians, then at the splintered door.

"Who's in there?" Powell asked in a whisper.

Lyons shrugged.

"Mademoiselle!" Powell shouted in his most nasal Texas accent. "Is that you shooting in there? What is going on?"

"Who is it? Is that you, American? Tell me your name!" a female voice demanded, the voice cracking. "Tell me, identify who you are!"

"This is you-know-who come to rescue you. Mr. Nothing."

"Captain Powell!" the woman shouted. They heard sheet metal squeaking. A weight shifted, then crashed. The door opened and Anne Desmarais looked out. Her face bore the marks and blood of a beating. She held a Kalashnikov. When she saw them, she tried to open the door completely. It banged against metal. She struggled with the door and sobbed. "Oh, finally. Thank you, oh my God I prayed..."

Blancanales spoke slowly, soothingly. "Do you have the door blocked, miss? Do you need us to push the door open? Set that rifle's safety so we don't have an accident. Do you know how to set the safety? That lever on the right side, push it all the way up. That one, good. Step back, we'll push the door open."

The combined force of the three Americans forced a filing cabinet back. Holding the Kalashnikov in one hand, her coat closed with the other, the young French woman sat on a desk top, crying. She wore nothing under the long coat. Her knife-cut sweater and jeans lay in the trash on the office floor. Blancanales went to her immediately, easing the autorifle out of her hands.

"They raped you?" he asked gently.

Desmarais nodded.

As Blancanales soothed the woman, the others checked the dead and wounded. A dead Iranian lay face down on the floor, his fatigue pants around his knees. A moaning man sprawled against a wall clutching a massive wound. Unlike the Revolutionary Guards, he wore the tailored suit and stark white shirt of a diplomat. He sat in a pool of blood, moaning, his eyes watching the Americans.

Powell laughed. "That's First Secretary Baesho, of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, also known as the Land of Khaddafi Duck. How are you doing, first secretary?"

"I am a diplomat!" the man responded tersely. "I expect the respect due a man of my position. You will take me to a medical facility immediately!"

Squatting in front of Baesho, Powell grinned into the suffering man's face. "I won't do nothing to you. Unless you cooperate. Then maybe we'll help you out, you miserable bag of pig shit. You had Clayton killed. You tried to get me. Why?"

"You are violating international law..." Baesho began.

Jerking back the diplomat's head by his greasy hair, Powell pulled him to his feet. The diplomat screamed and struggled, his bloody hands clutching at Powell.

Pink intestines bulged from the gut wound.

"See that man over there, First Secretary Pig Shit?" Powell pointed to Blancanales. "That man's a medic. That man can save your life. Talk or I let you die."

Baesho vomited blood. Powell dropped him and the diplomat fell on his face. Blood spread around his head as he vomited and choked. He stopped breathing. Shudders racked his body.

Powell jerked his head up and screamed into his face. "Don't die! Don't... Ah, shit! He's dead. And I wanted to kill him. Here's one for the road, first secretary."

Drawing back his booted foot, Powell released the shuddering man's head and drop-kicked him in the face with enough force to flop him backward. Against the wall, Baesho took a long last gasping breath, his eyes fluttering and rolling. His eyes fixed on Powell. Powell drew back his boot for another kick.

"Quit it, Powell," Lyons told him. "It's pointless."

Powell ignored Lyons and kicked the diplomat again, snapping the dead man's neck.

"One more thing..." Flipping off the safety on his Galil, Powell fired a burst into the dead man's face, spraying brains and bone. He fired again and again until he destroyed the man's head.

Lyons jerked the Marine captain back. "Quit it!" he shouted.

Powell changed the autorifle's magazine. "Hey, specialist. This is my business. That Libyan was in on the barracks bombing. Until you spend a week or so looking for pieces of friends — men that had wives and kids and babies they never got to see and futures they never got to live — until you do that, you can't tell me to quit. I could kill that creature a thousand times and it wouldn't be payback! You understand?"

"I understand we lost the chance to question him. Now we've got nothing but corpses."

"He wouldn't have lived long enough to question."

Akbar came into the ruined office. "We found the ambush. We killed them all."

The woman spoke quietly. "His briefcase. There, over there. Inside the briefcase..."

Lyons snapped open the gold-trimmed leather attache case. Inside, he found passports, stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills still in bank wrappers, and folders. The folders contained airline tickets and complete sets of identification — worker cards, university-student-union identification, and miscellaneous photos of families and places.

Lyons turned to Akbar. "You killed the Iranians outside? All of them? Not one escaped?"

"A wipeout," the Shia militiaman told him. "Totally."

"The tickets are for flights to Mexico," the young woman explained. "All these..." she paused to think of an obscenity, then spat out the word, "Iranians! That one would have sent them to Mexico. There was a Nicaraguan here. They did not know I spoke Spanish. They talked and laughed at what the Iranians did and then the Nicaraguan left. They were raping me, they thought I was unconscious. I tricked them. That one, the Libyan, he went out with the Nicaraguan, and the Iranians went out. Then that one came in to rape me again and he did not see me take a rifle..."

His voice soothing, slow, Blancanales asked, "Can you tell us what they discussed? What do they intend to do in Mexico?"

"No!" Desmarais looked around at the men. "I know but I will not tell you unless you take me to Mexico with you. This is my story."

"Miss, you're all beat up," Blancanales told her. "You need rest and a doctor's care. I don't think it will be possible..."

"No! I need no doctor. I can go. And only if I accompany you, will you learn the information you need."

In the front room of Akbar's family home, surrounded by stereo and video systems, the Americans enjoyed a traditional meal as they studied the contents of the first secretary's attache case. Akbar urged food on his American guests. Gadgets, who had finally received a radio call to give up the rooftop wait, drank hot tea.

"It was cold up there!"

Blancanales laughed. "I don't think you would have liked where we were, either."

"Far-out system you have." Gadgets pointed at the shelves of entertainment electronics. "But why five color televisions and all the VCR decks. Looks like Cape Kennedy in here."

Akbar only smiled. "My family is in the business," he said noncommittally.

"I eat with my hands?" Lyons interrupted.

"Right hand for eating," Akbar instructed. "Here you can use your left hand for picking up the bottles and dishes. In other countries they're more strict about the left hand. The best idea is to watch what they're doing and do that. That is a chili! Oh, man..."

Too late, a handful of rice and lamb spiced with green chili seared Lyons's mouth. He grabbed a bottle of orange pop from the table with his sticky right hand. The bottle shot from his hand, but he grabbed it in midfall with his left and he gulped pop. "Hot! Hot... hot..." he said breathlessly.

"When I was in L.A.," Akbar said to the Americans, "everyone thought they could burn me out with Mexican food. Not me, man. I ate it all."

Lyons sucked down breath after breath, then drank more orange pop. "Not you. I understand. They grow super-jalapefios in Lebanon?"

"Looks like we'll be going to Mexico," Powell told them.

"Is that the final destination?" Blancanales asked. "Or one more stop in the zigzag?"

"That's where all the tickets go. And this..." Powell pointed to a series of tickets. "There's a sequence of arrivals. There's no sequence in Amsterdam or Paris. The Iranians were to get off in Mexico City and call this contact. One man at a time. If Mexico was only a stop, they'd get off the plane, then go to the bus station, zip on to the next place."

"Makes sense," Lyons admitted. "But so what? Maybe it's a zigzag, maybe it isn't. But that's where their contact is. We take him, he takes us to the next stop."

"There goes the Ironman," Gadgets added. "Cutting through all the machinations and mystery. Don't talk about zigzags to him. All he sees is straight lines."

"You want to spend three weeks analyzing this data?" Lyons demanded. "Maybe wait for a Congressional Resolution? We're leaving for Mexico, immediately."

"And how does our dear Mademoiselle Desmarais figure in your plans?" Powell asked.

"She doesn't. She wants a story. Chances are she didn't hear anything. She just wants to stay in the game."

"Like you say, maybe and maybe not," Powell responded. "I know she's got information. Now that I'm a good guy, maybe she'll tell. I'll have hours and hours on the plane to talk."

"If she can travel," Blancanales cautioned. "She could be hurt in ways she doesn't even realize. I hope she has the intelligence to listen to the doctor if he wants to hospitalize her."

"I know her type," Powell said, laughing. "She won't listen to anyone. Akbar, look at this one. Think you could pass?" Powell flipped a passport to his Shia friend.

Akbar wiped off his hands and studied the passport's photograph. "Am I that ugly?"

"It's that joker's beard. You'll have to say you shaved, but the forehead and eyes match."

"You're sending him to Mexico City?" Blancanales asked. "If the contact's gotten word of the killings..."

Lyons nodded. "Yeah, they'll try to hit him. Either way, you make the connection."

"I don't like that idea!" Akbar protested.

"We'll be there," Lyons told him. "We'll back you up."

Akbar's elderly manservant ushered in Anne Desmarais. She had put on makeup to cover her bruises. Though she walked stiffly, painfully, she carried a suitcase. "When do we leave?"

Powell looked to the others. "Any minute now, if..."

"We'll make our own plans," Lyons interrupted. He looked to his partners.

They nodded their agreement.