“Almost.”
“I’m not going to let her die like that.”
“You’re crazy,” Ko said. “You’re as crazy as she is.”
“I’m going,” Diringshoffen said. “Will you help?”
Ko sighed. “All right.”
“Two seconds out, three seconds back.”
“Sure,” Ko said.
Diringshoffen went out the farmhouse door fast. He was bent over low and firing as he ran. Everyone ducked down behind the stone wall as Ko Yoshikawa sprayed it with his own rifle. Everyone ducked but Jack Spiceman, who shot Diringshoffen nine times before he reached the screaming woman. There was a silence. Then Spiceman took careful aim and shot Françoise Leget twice through the head.
“She was getting on my nerves,” he said.
Franklin Keeling turned to Reese. “Give him a little more razzmatazz on the bullhorn, Reese.”
The bald-headed man put the bullhorn up to his lips, thought a moment, and said, “You in there. The last one left. You have one chance. Send out the hostages. I repeat, send out the hostages. It’s your only chance.”
Ko Yoshikawa listened as the bass voice rumbled out of the bullhorn. He thought almost indifferently for a moment about the hostages. He had grown to like Bingo McKay. He had liked his quick mind and his wit and his style. The one-eared man had had great style. But despite that, Bingo McKay had been the enemy. Not the real enemy, of course. The real enemy was out there in the dark behind the stone wall. But you could argue with Bingo McKay. And Ko had. Wonderful, wide-ranging arguments about politics and life and art and the future of mankind.
But it was useless to send out the hostages now. Completely useless. He wondered if those out there behind the wall realized that. It didn’t matter. It was almost over. All of it. Ko slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle and used its muzzle to bang open the shutters. He rested the rifle’s barrel on the sill and emptied the magazine at the stone wall. There was a silence.
Last words, Ko thought as he shoved a new magazine up into the rifle. Something memorable. No, not something memorable. Something their mentality can understand.
He cupped his left hand around his mouth and screamed at them, the American enemy. “Come and get me, copper!”
Behind the wall, Keeling turned to look at Dunjee. “What’d he say?”
“He said, ‘Come and get me, copper,’ I believe.”
“Well, now. I guess that’s what you’re going to have to do, hero.”
“Me?” Dunjee said.
“Sure. You.”
“What a splendid idea,” Timble said.
“We’ll give you plenty of covering fire,” Spiceman said. “He’ll never know what hit him.”
“No,” Dunjee said.
Keeling sighed and moved his rifle so that it was aimed at Dunjee’s chest. “You can either be a dead nobody here or a live hero inside the house. Which is it?”
“Well, shit,” Dunjee said and turned to look over the wall. He ducked back down immediately as Ko again raked the wall with a full magazine. Dunjee lay against the wall, trying to think of a way to keep from being killed.
Ko began screaming again. It was the scream of his ancestors. Dunjee turned to listen.
“Banzai, you motherfuckers!” Ko screamed from the open window. “Babe Ruth eats shit!”
“Jesus,” Reese said. “He’s gone crackers.”
Keeling turned to Dunjee. “All right, hero.”
Dunjee checked his rifle carefully. He hadn’t fired it yet. “I want you to keep him down behind that window,” he said. “I don’t want you to stop firing. I’m going in through the door. Just keep firing. Don’t stop.”
“When do we start?” Spiceman asked.
“I’ll move straight toward the left corner of the house. That’s five seconds, maybe four. Then I’ll work my way to the door. When I start for the corner of the house, you start. And don’t stop. If you stop, I get my head blown off.”
“Good luck, Mr. Dunjee,” Timble said.
“Fuck off,” Dunjee said and started crawling toward the left end of the wall. He crouched there for a moment, taking deep breaths. He remembered the mechanics of what he had to do. Fast forward, down and roll. But that was the trouble, of course. He had to remember what once had been almost instinct.
“Well, hell,” Dunjee whispered and started for the left corner of the stone farmhouse. He went fast and low — bent over almost double. He could hear them firing. At least they were doing that. He went into the roll six feet from the farmhouse and finished up lying pressed against the round stones. He found himself wanting to stay there — to hug the stone and not move.
He made himself move. He crawled. The door was a mile away, possibly two. It took him three hours to get there. It should all be coming back to you, he thought. It should be just chock full of déjà vu. But it isn’t. It’s just crawling along a wall in the dirt toward a door. It’s the way you earn your living. It’s your profession.
When he reached the door he didn’t hesitate. He knew if he hesitated, he wouldn’t go through it. Diringshoffen had left the door open almost a foot when he came out to die. Nobody had closed it.
Dunjee slammed the door back. He went through it in a leap, spinning in midair and firing at the space just below the win-dowsill where the dark shape should have been crouched, but wasn’t.
Behind you, Dunjee thought. He’s behind you at the other window. He whirled around. The shutters of the other window were now wide open. Ko had just emptied a magazine through the window at the stone wall. He was in the midst of changing magazines, his eyes wide and staring at Dunjee.
Full automatic, Dunjee thought. You had it on full automatic. Now it’s empty. There was a time when he could have done it in less than a second. Release the taped-together magazines, reverse them, and ram them home.
He didn’t think about how to do it now. He let his hands do it. They seemed to remember. He heard the magazine click into place just as Ko brought the muzzle of his own rifle up. Dunjee was surprised when Ko, kneeling, started to slump forward. There were red gobbets all over Ko’s shirt, made by Dunjee’s tumbling .223-caliber bullets. Ko’s face was gone. He fell forward.
Dunjee looked down at the M-16 rifle. His forefinger was still wrapped tightly around the trigger. He couldn’t remember firing. He couldn’t remember the sound the shots had made. Dunjee started over toward the dead Ko but stopped at the sound of the bullhorn.
“Dunjee!” the bullhorn said. “Hey, Dunjee!”
Dunjee went to the door. “What?” he yelled.
“We’re coming in,” the bullhorn said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Dunjee yelled back.
The first thing they did when they came in was to take Dunjee’s rifle away from him. Spiceman looked almost apologetic when he said, “It’s sort of the end of the line. You understand?”
“Sure,” Dunjee said, not understanding anything.
“Use the Jap’s gun on him, Jack,” Keeling said. “Make it all nice and tidy.”
Spiceman was bending over the dead Ko Yoshikawa to pick up the rifle when the first two came through the far window. They were dressed all in black — black pants, black shirts, black stocking caps, black sneakers, and faces that had been smeared with black. They came through like wraiths, smoothly, silently. Two more came through the other window and one of them kicked Ko’s rifle out of Spiceman’s hands. It seemed to be a hard kick, well practiced, as if he had done it often before.
The final two flowed in through the door. All of them had submachineguns. The submachineguns, of Czech manufacture, were also black. The two who came in through the door seemed to be the leaders. One of them made a motion with his submachinegun. The message was clear. Keeling and Reese put their weapons down slowly on the floor. When they straightened up they raised their hands above their heads. A very frightened Leland Timble did the same thing. Timble’s eyes were wide and staring and his mouth was a small round hole. Through it he kept saying, “Oooh, oooh, oooh,” until Spiceman told him to shut up. Only Dunjee didn’t raise his hands above his head.