He waited.
Pallid light dipped and danced below.
“Nobody,” a voice whined. “We got ‘em all, every one….”
“That little redheaded babe Johnson found down on five. She was so fuckin’ scared she….” The rest was unintelligible. The accent was Latin American, probably a foreign recruit in the U.S. Army.
“Why’n hell did he have to shoot her?” Another soldier, a Black from the deep South by the timbre of his voice, complained. “We all coulda had a thump-a-dump.”
“Shut up!” somebody else ordered in a higher, reedier tone. The voice was almost certainly Korinek’s! “There may be more survivors up here.” The footsteps halted. “Hey, Thomson, scout upstairs, will you? Make sure nobody’s lying doggo.”
A single pair of boots crunched cautiously on the ashes and debris littering the stairs, and a bright oval of light picked out stark shadows on the walls. Lessing prepared to duck back up another flight.
The acoustics in the stairwell fooled him. Before he could retreat, he found himself looking down at a shiny, faceless, plastic helmet visor tilted up toward him. He strove to get the clumsy M-25 up in time, realized it was too late, made himself as small as possible, and gritted his teeth in anticipation of the lethal barrage to come.
The soldier lifted the muzzle of his weapon.
Then slowly lowered it again.
The man’s right arm sketched the Party’s stiff-armed salute. The other hand lifted the visor. The doggie was young and blonde. He smiled and silently mouthed, “Colonel Lessing?”
Lessing went limp with relief. He didn’t know this boy, but that wasn’t unusual. He hardly remembered any of his newer pupils. Maybe this kid had seen him only on TV.
With his left hand the doggie pantomimed “eight” and pointed downstairs. Then he held up two fingers, pointed down again, and gestured at Lessing and himself: two more friends of the Party. Korinek had unwittingly picked three very unsuitable helpers.
Maybe they could get the drop on the bastard and end this the easy way.
It didn’t happen. The tableau was torn asunder by gunfire from the landing below: a shrieking, snarling, sustained racketing of automatic weapons, punctuated by four blasts from a combat shotgun. Shouts and screams echoed up.
Lessing hit the floor and rolled back behind the banister post. Bullets yammered after him; the young soldier had involuntarily let off a burst from his M-25. Cement chips flew like bees above his head, whining and buzzing and stinging.
A fragmentation grenade went crump downstairs. The noise, the smoke, and the concussion were indescribable. The boy shrieked, eyes and mouth stretched wide; then he rose up and flew forward like a thrown dishrag to smash into the stair steps just below Lessing’s landing. His limbs convulsed, and he lay still.
The firing stopped.
Lessing got to his knees in the ringing silence. He ran shaky hands over his body and found himself unhurt except for cuts from flying cement chips. His hearing would probably never be the same, but at least he was alive. What about the others? Who had thrown the grenade? Probably Goddard, who hadn’t any idea what the thing could do in this confined space.
What now? He clutched the wall. God, he was getting too old for this! You stopped playing Captain Marlow Striker when you hit forty, or else you hired stunt men to do the rugged bits for you. His knee hurt, and he saw it was bleeding. Heplucked an inch-long sliver of metal out of his calf: a souvenir of the banister.
Lessing bent to lay trembling fingers against the young soldier’s throat He could feel no pulse. He turned him over and saw he was dead. Shrapnel from the grenade had ricocheted up the stairs and around the comer. The plastic helmet had protected the boy’s head, but his shoulders and back were a mess. Lessing was lucky; he had been almost completely around the next comer higher up.
He crept on down to the landing below. Several bodies lay there in the reeking gloom. He couldn’t tell how many. Blood was everywhere. One of the electric lanterns still worked, and he took it to search further. The fire door was open, hanging on its hinges; the steel-pipe banister was twisted and shredded; and the fire-emergency cabinet from the opposite wall lay smashed on top of one of the bodies.
Lessing lifted the cabinet and pulled the fire-axe and coils of hose away. The body had no head. The torso didn’t look like Korinek, though, and it certainly wasn’t Wrench or Goddard. He shuddered. Then he saw a trail of red spatters that led away, down into the stairwell. Korinek — or his rear guard — must have escaped.
Lessing had to find Wrench and Goddard and get the hell out of this part of the hotel before Korinek came back with more opfoes. He approached the fire door, afraid of what might be behind it.
He saw a foot, then a blood-drenched leg in camouflage pants. They were not connected to anything else.
“Wrench?” he called warily. “Goddard? Hey!”
A thin, gasping wheeze came back.
He found Goddard ten feet farther on, slumped against a door. His face was pasty-pale, and he clutched his abdomen with both hands. Lessing had seen gut-shots before, out in Angola and Syria. Many such wounded lived, provided they got medical care in time.
“Christ…!” Goddard struggled to speak. Froth bubbled at his lips. Lessing noticed another red-oozing hole next to his breast pocket. A lung-puncture would be the proverbial last straw.
“Okay, okay. Don’t talk. Just nod if Wrench is all right.”
“Sent… find… scout… stair “
“Stay still, damn it.” Without medical stuff he could do nothing. He prowled. This floor was mostly Party offices, he remembered: correspondence, liaison, accounting, procurement, membership, newsletters, and other business functions. He raised his head to listen with his less-damaged ear but heard only the hiss and gurgle of the failing sprinklers. Water puddled at his feet.
Almost at once he discovered a first-aid kit on a shelf in a long room full of copying machines. It held only bandaids and a bottle of iodine though, as much use as a peashooter against a rhinoceros. He had to do the best he could for Goddard and hope that Wrench was miraculously alive and bringing back some friendlies!
Goddard’s eyes were closed when he reached him. Lessing felt for his pulse; the man was alive — barely.
“Hey, Bill,” he said, as brightly as he could. “You with me?” Something ice-blue kept flickering at the edge of his vision, and he tried to brush it away.
Goddard rocked his head from side to side. He looked a trifle better, and he struggled to sit up. Men often recovered like this, just before they died. “I’m here, Lessing. But not for long.”
“Don’t be an asshole. We’ll get you out.”
“Sure. Santa and his reindeer comin’ to rescue me?” Goddard wiped his lips with his sleeve.
Lessing applied iodine and plugged the chest wound with apiece of Goddard’s shirt. It was useless. The damage was too severe.
“Really fungled your uniform, Bill.”
“I’ll get it drycleaned.”
Something pricked at his memory, but he was too preoccupied to catch it. All he said was, “Green light. Wrench’ll be back soon.”
Goddard squinted up at him. Lessing wasn’t a very good liar.
“Listen!” Goddard pleaded. “Mulder… Liese ” His lips and jaw worked, but only droplets of blood spilled out. If Bill Goddard had any brave last words for posterity, he would never get them out now.
“Save your breath. You need it. I understand.”
The strange thing was that he did understand. A day, even a few hours ago, Goddard’s opinions would have struck him as harsh, violent, bigoted, fanatic, and “Draconian,” as Wrench put it. Now they sounded right.