Pyotr carried Yevgeni by the legs and was just looking back to make the turn at the landing that would take him to the ladder. The plan was to lower the injured man on Ruslan’s back, which would probably mean both would fall several feet into the alley.
But it was a hell of a lot better than staying in the burning building.
Just as Pyotr turned back and adjusted his grip on Yevgeni’s ankles, his head snapped to the side and he tumbled the half flight down, crashing onto the wounded man and pulling Ruslan over with him.
An automatic weapon boomed in the alleyway. Arseny took rounds to both legs, then fell off the side of the stairs, down two flights, landing on his shoulder, snapping his neck instantly.
Vasily saw the origin of fire below, down between the garbage cans, and he turned his B&T submachine gun to engage it, but before he could press his trigger he felt a hammer blow to his right hip. A second strike to his right thigh sent him tumbling forward on the staircase, tumbling over the top of Yevgeni and barreling down through Ruslan, who was just trying to get his gun up to fire after falling down where Pyotr had crashed into him.
In seconds the five Russian operatives fell into one massive heap on the first-floor landing. Every last one of them was dead or injured, but those with any life in them at all struggled frantically to get their weapons pointed at the source of the gunfire.
Oleg Utkin heard the shooting from the alley he’d just left. A single weapon firing automatically and unsuppressed indicated to his trained ear that his team had just been ambushed.
“Der’mo,” he mumbled to himself, then he picked up the pace. He’d get to the RP and he’d wait for the men, and if they didn’t show up he’d drive out of here, keep on driving till daylight, and get himself over the border.
This shit wasn’t his doing. He’d been ordered into a fucked-up operation in progress, so he wasn’t going to take the blame when it fell apart around him.
Court Gentry followed the blood trail of Nattapong Chamroon all the way from the changing area on the fourth floor down to the second floor. This would have been tough enough in any conditions, considering he was looking for individual drops of blood sometimes separated by ten or more feet. But compounding the difficulty was the fact that he had to keep a head up for hostiles, and the rooms and halls were roiling with noxious gray smoke.
In a hall on the second floor, which served as offices and storage for the nightclub below, he found the body of a gunman who appeared to Court to be Chinese. Rolling him over quickly, Court saw that the man had a pair of bullet holes center mass in his chest. Court also found the holster for a revolver under his jacket, but there was no sign of the weapon itself. In the man’s pocket Court found a speed-loader with five .38 Special cartridges.
Court assumed the woman who’d just stolen his Glock had also picked herself up a backup gun.
Court searched the body a moment more, passing on the man’s phone and wallet, but when his hands grasped hold of a black Montblanc pen, he pulled it out and looked it over quickly.
Yes, it was the same kind of scopolamine hydrobromide blowgun that the Chinese operatives had tried to use on him back in Hong Kong. He hadn’t taken one before when he had the chance, but now he slipped the device into his pocket, thinking it was possible it could come in handy as he tried to track down Fan Jiang.
Court continued following a blood trail, and it led him to the body of Nattapong Chamroon in a room full of tables and chairs. By turning on the overhead light in the smoky room he could see that the twenty-eight-year-old had been shot right between the eyes.
The American knew instantly the blonde had been after information from the man, and it seemed clear enough that she got what she needed.
And with this, Court knew what he had to do now. He had to find the blonde, because he was certain she’d been looking for Fan, and she now knew more than he did.
Court went back out into the hallway and started for the main stairs, but in seconds he was met by a group of firemen coming in his direction. One of the firemen placed a gas mask on Court’s face, and he sucked in the air greedily. While the other firefighters continued on through the second floor, Court and his rescuer moved down the hallway to a window on the eastern side of the building, where Court saw a red ladder truck. He crawled down the ladder, leaving the firefighter behind in the building.
Once Court was on the ground, a Thai police officer rushed up to him and frisked him perfunctorily. He felt the pen in his pocket but ignored it, and in seconds Court was being patted on the back by a sympathetic cop and directed to an ambulance that had just set up on the corner.
Court thanked the policeman and walked towards the ambulance, but when the cop turned away Court bypassed the vehicle.
Three minutes later he was climbing into his rented Toyota four-door up the street, wiping sweat and soot off his face, and drinking a bottle of water to clear his throat. He gave himself only forty-five seconds to rest, then he fired up the engine and headed back towards the Black Pearl.
Zoya Zakharova had made it all the way down into the nightclub carrying two pistols in her hands, but when she saw a purse left unattended on the floor by someone who’d raced out of the building, she scooped it up to hide her weapons. She then joined up with a group of civilian stragglers. Most had been hiding in a women’s restroom, and a few had taken cover behind one of the bars on the mezzanine. But firefighters and police had arrived, and Zoya blended in with the mixed crowd of both Thai and foreign clubbers, and the police cordoning off the building outside didn’t even glance at the blonde in the skimpy teal dress as she began walking barefoot down the street and away from the action.
She had no intention of leaving the scene, however. She knew from her intuition and experience that Vasily’s team would take the fire escape down to ground level if they felt they could do it covertly, or else they would try to use grappling hooks to cross the alleyway to the nearby roof. As soon as she noticed that the buildings on both sides were higher than the one that held the Black Pearl and therefore their roofs would be harder to reach, she felt sure they’d risk the fire escape.
She turned into the alleyway on the west side and found it dark and empty-looking, and she saw the metal stairs attached to the building some forty meters ahead. Smoke poured out of the windows on several floors, obstructing her view. As she looked on, a window exploded out on the second floor, showering part of the alley with broken glass.
She moved closer, waiting for a break in the smoke, and wondered if perhaps Vasily and his team were still caught inside.
Then she saw it; on the second-floor landing, she noticed a massive form lying there. Even from forty meters away she could tell she was looking at a pile of bodies.
Zoya slipped around a tape line erected by the fire department and sprinted barefoot into the alley.
By the time she made it around the broken glass and to the fire escape, she could see that three of the men from the Zaslon team were lying on the asphalt below the ladder, and three more were piled in a heap above her. Nearby, a Chinese man in a business suit lay against the wall of the building opposite the Black Pearl, between two garbage cans. He appeared dead, and an HK rifle lay by his side.
Zoya looked back over her shoulder quickly, making sure no one on the street behind her had entered the alley. When she saw the coast was clear, she lifted a suppressed Brügger and Thomet subgun from Arseny’s still form and shot the Chinese body twice in the head at a range of fifteen feet.
Dropping the weapon, she knelt over Arseny. The Russian operator was dead with gunshot wounds and a broken neck. She moved quickly to Ruslan and found him alive but unconscious. She saw that he had been shot on the right side of his pelvis, and his left arm was badly broken. Zoya wondered if he had fallen or dropped intentionally from the landing above.