The other man, who hadn’t moved from his kneeling position, said, “Lucky shot, Tony. Bet he couldn’t do it again.”
The injured man put his hand under his flak jacket and felt a lump the size of an egg where his breast bones met. “Wow … fucking wow….” He looked at the other man. “Your turn.”
The man pulled off his black stocking cap and pushed it above the balustrade on the tip of his rifle. A faint coughing sound rolled out of the choir loft, followed by a whistle and crack, then another, but the hat didn’t move. The ESD man lowered the hat. “He stinks.” He moved to a position several yards down the triforium and peered over the edge of the balustrade. The huge yellow and white Papal flag was no longer hanging from the staff but was stretched across the pews below, covering the body of the dead woman. The ESD man stared back at the staff and saw the two severed flag-ropes swaying. He ducked quickly and looked at the other man. “You’re not going to believe this …”
Someone in the choir loft laughed.
An ESD man beside Burke picked up Bellini’s bullhorn and began to raise it above the balustrade, then thought better of it. He pointed it upward from his kneeling position and called out, “Hey! You in the loft! Show’s over. Nobody left but you. Come to the choir rail with your hands up. You won’t be harmed.” He shut off the bullhorn and said, “You’ll be blasted into hamburger, motherfucker.”
There was a long silence, then a man’s voice called out from the loft. “You’ll never take us.” There were two sharp pistol shots, followed by silence.
The ESD man turned to Burke. “They blew their brains out.”
Burke said, “Sure.”
The man considered for a moment. “How do we know?” he finally asked. Burke nodded toward Bellini’s body.
The ESD man hesitated, then wiped Bellini’s face and forehead with a handkerchief, and Burke helped him heft Bellini’s body over the parapet.
Immediately there was a sound like a bee buzzing, followed by a loud slap, and Bellini’s body was pulled out of their hands and crashed to the triforium floor behind them. An odd shrillish voice screamed from the loft, “Live ones! I want live ones!”
For the first time since the attack began Burke felt sweat forming on his brow.
The ESD man looked pale. “My God….”
The Second Squad leader led his remaining two men down the dark bell tower until they found the choir practice room. They searched it carefully in the dark and located the door that led out to the loft. The squad leader listened quietly at the door, then stood to the side and put his hand on the knob and turned it, but there was no alarm. The three men hugged the walls for a second before the squad leader pushed the door open, and they rushed the opening in a low crouch.
A shotgun exploded five times in the dark in quick succession, and the three men were knocked back into the room, their faces, arms, and legs ripped with buckshot.
Megan Fitzgerald stepped quickly into the room and shone a light on the three contorted bodies. One of the men looked up at the black-robed figure through the light and stared at her grotesquely made-up face, distorted with a repulsive snarl. Megan raised a pistol, deliberately shot each of the writhing figures in the head, then closed the door, reset the silent light alarm, and walked back into the loft. She called to Leary, who was moving and firing from positions all over the loft. “Don’t let Malone or Baxter get away. Keep them pinned there until the bombs explode!”
Leary shouted as he fired, “Yeah, yeah. Just watch the fucking side doors.”
A long stream of red tracers streaked out of the long northwest triforium and began ripping into the choir pews. Leary got off an answering shot before the last tracer left the muzzle of the ESD man’s rifle, and the firing abruptly stopped.
Leary moved far back to the towering organ pipes and looked out at the black horizon line formed by the loft rail across the candle- and flare-lit Cathedral. It was strictly a matter of probability, he knew. There were thirteen hundred square feet of completely unlit loft and less than twenty police in a position to bring fire into the loft. And because of their overhead angle they couldn’t bring grazing fire across the sloping expanse, but only direct fire at a specific point of impact, and that reduced the killing zone of their striking rounds. In addition, he and Megan had flak jackets under their robes, his rifle was silenced and the flash was suppressed, and they were both moving constantly. The ESD night scopes would be whited out as long as the phosphorus below kept burning, but he was firing into a lit area, and he could see their shapes when they came to the edge of the triforia. Probability. Odds. Skill. Vantage point. All in his favor. Always were. Luck did not exist. God did not exist. He called to Megan, “Time?”
She looked at her watch and saw the luminous minute hand tick another minute. “Fourteen minutes until 6:03.”
He nodded to himself. There were times when he felt immortal and times when immortality only meant staying alive for just long enough to get the next shot off. Fourteen minutes. No problem.
Burke heard the field phone click and picked up the receiver from the floor. “Burke.”
Mayor Kline’s voice came through the earpiece. “Lieutenant, I didn’t want to cut in on your command network—I’ve been monitoring all transmissions, of course, and not being there to see the situation, I felt it was better to let Captain Bellini handle it—but now that he’s—”
“We appreciate that, sir.” Burke noticed Kline’s voice had that cool preciseness that was just a hair away from whining panic. “Actually, I have to get through to the crawl space, Mr. Mayor, so—”
“Yes—just a second—I was wondering if you could fill us in—”
“I just did.”
“What? Oh, yes. Just one second. We need a situation report from you as the ranking man in there—you’re in charge, by the way.”
“Thanks. Let me call you right back—”
“Fine.”
He heard a click and spoke to the police operator. “Don’t put that asshole through again.” He dropped the receiver on the floor.
The Sixth Assault Squad of ESD rappelled from police helicopters into the open attic hatches. They ran across the foam-covered catwalks to the south tower and split up, one team going up toward Devane’s position, the other down toward the triforium and choir loft levels.
The team climbing into the tower fired grenades ahead of them, moving up level by level until they reached the copper-louvered room where Devane had been posted. They looked for the body of the Fenian sniper in the dark, smoke-filled room but found only bloodstains on the floor and a gas mask lying in the corner.
The squad leader touched a bloodstain on the ascending ladder and looked up. “We’ll go with gas from here.”
The men pulled on gas masks and fired CS canisters to the next level. They moved up the ladder, floor by floor, the gas rising with them, into the narrowing spire. Above them they heard the echoing sounds of a man coughing, then the deep, full bellow of vomiting. They followed the blood trail on the rusty ladder, cautiously moving through the dark levels until they reached a narrow, tapering, octagonal room about fifteen stories above the street. The room had clover-shaped openings, without glass, cut into the eight sides of the stonework. The blood trail ended on the ladder, and the floor near one of the openings was smeared with vomit. The squad leader pulled off his gas mask and stuck his head and shoulders out of the opening and looked up.
A series of iron rungs ran up the last hundred feet of the tapering spire toward the copper cross on top. The squad leader saw a man climbing halfway up. The man lost his footing, then recovered and pulled himself up to the next rung. The squad leader dropped back into the small, cold room. He unslung his rifle and chambered a round. “These fucks blew away a lot of our people—understand?”