One of his men was still positioned to the side of the door, waiting to shoot up the stairwell should Sava show himself. Before seeing the antiaircraft fire lighting up the sky, and hearing what sounded like aerial bombs exploding, Titov had planned to order his men to take the roof. But given what was going on at the border, he’d decided on a different course of action.
He slung an AKS assault rifle with a strap on it over his shoulder, stuck two extra thirty-round magazines in the pocket of his armored vest, pulled his combat knife from his ankle holster, and affixed his night-vision goggles to his head, but with the dual tubes flipped up.
“I recommend you step back, sir,” whispered the operative guarding the door. “The stairs are not secure. If you—”
“Dammit.”
Titov was trying, using his knife as a lever, to pry the top hinge pin from the bullet-riddled metal door that led from the restaurant to the stairs. The door was thick heavy steel, designed to stop fires from penetrating the hallway; though it was pockmarked with bullet holes on one side, there were no exit holes on the opposite side.
Titov’s throbbing right thumb was useless because of Sava’s bite. He transferred the knife to his left hand. It took him a couple of minutes, but eventually he managed to work all the pins out. He pulled the door off its hinges.
“I’m going up,” said Titov. The metal fire door had been overengineered; as a result, it was exceptionally heavy. With his useless thumb, he struggled to keep it off the ground. “Cover me.”
“Sir, I wouldn’t recommend that.”
“I said, cover me.”
Titov stepped into the stairwell and eyed the door that led to the roof. Sava appeared to have attempted to shut it, but because the latch had been shot up, it remained cracked open an inch. As Titov slowly climbed the stairs, lugging the door up with him, he considered the layout of the roof.
Sava would be positioned so that he had a clear shot of anyone trying to access the roof from the stairwell. Because of the way the door opened, that meant the American would have to be somewhere to the right. So what was to the right?
A big air-conditioning condenser, that was what.
With that in mind, and using the fire door as a shield, he bounded up the last remaining steps, kicked open the door to the roof, and burst through it — holding the fire door between himself and where he thought Sava would be.
69
Mark had been faking exhaustion when he’d been with Titov in the restaurant, but he wasn’t faking it now. He was seated, leaning up against one of several large rooftop air-conditioning condensers. While the condenser probably wouldn’t stop a bullet, it was at least a decent blind and might also help mask the heat of his body. The rifle he’d taken from Titov was equipped with a thermal sight, making it likely the rest of the Russians had been issued similar equipment. But the heat was also making him sweat; he felt light-headed, and his heart was beating faster than it should have been.
He was trying not to move any more than he already had, so as not to disturb the flexible plastic tube protruding from his chest. Although he could still breathe well enough, his left lung ached, and he worried that he’d further damaged it when fighting Titov. He desperately wanted to rip the tube out — it felt as though he’d been shot in the chest with an arrow — but knew better than to act on his instinct.
An involuntary shudder swept through him. He thought of Daria, and how they’d strolled through the streets of Florence on what had passed for a honeymoon, recalled how they’d started most mornings taking long breakfasts, him downing double espressos, she with her cappuccino… He’d been uncharacteristically calm, and happy, and content to just let time pass; he’d never been to Italy before and maybe because of that, because he had no history there that could have come back to bite him, he hadn’t been constantly looking over his shoulder. As his thoughts turned back to the present, he pictured Daria back in Bishkek with Lila, holed up somewhere safe, he hoped, and he steeled himself to the task of guarding his position and holding onto consciousness. At least the light show he’d seen in the northern sky suggested that the Russians were encountering—
The door to the roof burst open.
Mark fired two quick shots at someone who appeared to be using a metal door as a shield. The man made it to a second air-conditioning condenser and dropped the door in front of it.
“Enough, Sava!” cried a voice in Russian, a voice Mark recognized. “You are surprised I am alive, no? Well, there is this thing they make now, armor that can stop bullets. You wear it like a vest. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
Mark didn’t respond to the sarcasm. Instead, he focused on the sounds around and below him, listening for evidence that Titov was advancing, or was just talking to cover the approach of another assailant.
“Ceramic armor, Russian kind. Very good quality. I recommend it to you.”
Titov spoke flippantly, but in a way that seemed to border on mania.
“You’ve got big problems,” said Mark. “The Azeris are coming. There will be more than your men can handle.”
“You don’t know my men, Sava. And my own reinforcements will also be coming soon. Spetsnaz GRU from our base in Yerevan, the very best. If I were you, I would not be so confident.”
Mark wasn’t feeling the slightest bit confident. And spetsnaz GRU troops, elite special forces culled from the military intelligence branch of the Russian army, were no joke. “There is fighting in the north. Heavy fighting.” He tried not to sound as drained as he felt.
“I have seen it.”
“That does not bode well for you.”
“I do not know what it bodes, nor do you. All I know is that I have been ordered to secure the roof of this hotel, so one of our helicopters can land here. If you are still alive when it arrives, that will mean I have failed. But still, the men inside the helicopter will kill you.”
“The hell they will.”
“There will be too many of them, even for a slippery person like you. So either way, if I kill you first or they kill you later, it is the same for you.” A long silence, then, “And if these men don’t come, well…yes, you are right, that will mean the invasion has failed, in which case things will not be so good for me, you understand? If you don’t kill me, well, the Azeris will.”
Mark didn’t answer.
Titov said, “So, Sava, will you try to kill me now?”
Mark still didn’t answer.
“Katerina was my half sister, by the way. I don’t think you knew that. We shared the same mother, but had different fathers — my father died when I was two, then my mother remarried and had Katerina. She was ten years younger than me.”
The words just hung there in the thick air. The heat from the condenser stuck in the back of Mark’s throat, making it difficult for him to swallow. The fact that Katerina and Titov were related was a shock, but less of a shock than what Titov’s words implied.
“Was your sister?” said Mark. When Titov didn’t answer, Mark asked, “What do you mean was? What happened to her?”
More sirens sounded from down below. Mark heard tires screeching in the front lot of the Tabriz. He glanced north, but couldn’t see any more evidence of fighting.
Titov said, “Some might say I killed her. I resisted that thought for years, but now I’ve come to accept that yes, in a way I did kill her.”
“What did you do?” Mark took a deep breath and decided he didn’t feel as lousy as he’d thought. He certainly still had the energy to kill Titov.