Black Site (35 page)

Raynor ran to Bob, grabbed him by the left arm, and spun him around in the opposite direction, and the two men began running through the crowd, away from the honking horn of the pickup approaching from behind and toward the parked truck at the intersection ahead. The one man in the cab, the driver, quickly climbed out with his AK, stepped forward, and propped his rifle on the hood of his truck.

A three-round burst from Raynor’s rifle knocked him backward into a crowd of men running by on the sidewalk.

“Get in the truck!” shouted Kopelman. Raynor saw the vehicle had left-sided steering, so he vaulted the hood, landed by the driver’s-side door, and dove behind the wheel. The truck faced up a steep alleyway. Kopelman opened the passenger-side door and lunged inside, reached back and closed the door behind him.

Kolt looked down and saw that the keys were not in the ignition.

A burst of automatic fire came from the crowd back up the alley where the other pickup was pushing its way through the scrambling pedestrians.

“Fuck!” shouted Raynor. He did not have time to get back out of the truck and rifle through the dead man’s pockets for the key. Instead, he popped the truck’s clutch into neutral, stuck his left foot out the open door, and pushed backward on the ground with all the strength in his leg and back. The small pickup rolled backward down the alleyway, slowly at first, but quickly picking up speed. Some men scrambled out of the way; others, clearly not understanding what was happening and only trying to help, desperately grabbed on to the door and sides of the vehicle to try to arrest its uncontrolled backward decent.

The pickup rolled faster now, and the would-be helpers tumbled away from it. Raynor did not even bother to put his hands on the steering wheel. It would not respond to his commands, and he knew they’d roll back twenty, thirty, fifty yards at most and then crash into a shop or a rickshaw or a truck. They might well hit or run over some pedestrians in the process, but his only objective was to get away from the shoot-out above him and get the hell out of here.

The crash came after thirty-five yards, a jarring rearward slam into the support beam for a plastic tarp awning in the front of an adobe building selling counterfeit versions of Thompson submachine guns. A second support beam was knocked over with the truck’s impact, and then the bed smashed through the facade of the building, coming to rest in a cloud of dust.

“Move! Move!” Kolt screamed at Kopelman as he threw open his own door, moved to the hood of the pickup, and immediately picked out targets up the steep alley. Two turning pickup trucks full of armed men had already sighted their weapons on the crash below them. They were preparing to fire over the dozens who had not yet cleared the street, but a long, fully automatic burst from Raynor’s AK into the windshield of the first vehicle killed the driver and caused the small truck to swerve violently to the side, sending the men in the cab tipping out into the street and tumbling down the hill.

Rather than open his own door in the direction of the enemy, Bob had crawled across the cab of the truck, and now he fell out the driver’s side onto the street. Quickly he clambered to his feet, and he shouted at Raynor to follow him around the side of the adobe building. Kolt did so, tossing his empty and smoking rifle to the street as he made the turn in a sprint.

They were on a larger street now, two lanes wide, but it was still only made of hard dirt and bits of gravel. It headed downhill. Shops and stalls lined both curbs all the way to a turn in the road thirty yards on. They passed a shop selling a homemade version of the HK MP5 9 mm submachine gun. It was far from Kolt’s first choice for a frontline battle rifle, but it was the closest weapon available. One of the small black rifles sat proudly on a stand at the entrance, with two loaded magazines nearby in case a prospective buyer wanted to step into the street to fire some test rounds at the surrounding hills. Raynor scooped up the weapon, grabbed the mags, seated one, and pulled the charging handle back, all just in time, as a half-dozen men on foot appeared around the turn in front of him and Bob. They were armed and clearly part of the force chasing them through the alleyways of the Gun Village. Kolt fired on them immediately, saw his shots hit low into the street and kick up dust. Then he pushed Bob into a wooden kiosk on his right. Raynor followed him into the kiosk but passed him, gained speed with his run, and threw his entire body at the plywood back wall.

With a violent jolt the impact smashed the wood and sent Raynor airborne. He’d expected to land in the dirt of another alley, but instead he found himself spinning through the air, six feet straight down, where he slammed chest-first into the corrugated metal roof of a stall facing the next alleyway over, which was farther down the hill than Kolt had anticipated. His fake MP5 skittered off the side of the roof and fell into the crowd of scrambling men below. The tin roof dented in when Raynor hit it, bending into the general shape of a man impacting from above, but it did not give enough to prevent Kolt from getting the wind knocked out of him. Slowly he rolled to his knees, gasping for any air his lungs could accept, and he looked up at the hole he’d created in the back wall of the tiny shop above.

Bob Kopelman appeared through the opening at high speed. He leaped through the air and came down right next to Kolt feetfirst, and instantly the roof of the stall collapsed, sending both Americans crashing down with it, tumbling through the debris.

Bob was the first to his feet, though he stumbled and staggered out of the dust and wreckage. Raynor was a few steps behind, still gasping for air. He felt pain in his forearm, looked down as he struggled to catch his breath, and saw he’d suffered a foot-long laceration to the inside of his forearm from a sharp corner of the sheet metal roofing.

Blood appeared in a jagged line on his arm.

From out of the foot traffic and the shop workers running in all directions, the owner of the shop the two American spies had just destroyed stepped forward. He was a thin man of fifty. He wore a long neat beard and a long white shirt. In his right hand he held a local copy of a Colt .45 model 1911 with silver etching and faux ivory handgrips. With neither a word nor any visible emotion he leveled the handgun at Bob’s chest and pulled the trigger.

Click.

The weapon did not fire.

Bob punched the man in the face with his beefy right hand, sending the shopkeeper’s head snapping back and his body falling into the crowd behind him. The pistol fell to the ground.

Another man in the crowd fired a weapon, but Bob did not know if the round had been intended for him or not. The men in the road grew in number by the second. Bob looked around for a gun, then back toward Raynor.

Kolt stepped clear of the wreckage of the shop. In his right hand he held a counterfeit Mossberg 590 shotgun. He racked a shell into the chamber and fired high in the air, pumped the weapon again, and lowered it at the crowd, sweeping the barrel in a wide, wild 180-degree arc. He pushed through the mob. No one else fired again and Raynor managed to fight through, though many men shouted at him now. Bob stayed right on Kolt’s heels and they ran up the street, turned a quick left and then a quick left again, finding themselves on a long row of stone stairs bordered on both sides by more shops from the arcade of gun vendors. As they descended the stairs in a run Kolt grabbed a fresh AK-47 from a shop stall and a fully loaded magazine from another, and then tossed the Mossberg pump shotgun to big Bob Kopelman.

“You’re hurt, Racer!” Bob was exhausted. His chest wheezed and he gasped the words as he saw Kolt’s bloody arm.

Kolt ignored the comment. “We need to find a place where we can call Jam—”

A vendor from the last kiosk appeared on the road with a machete in his hand. He started chasing Raynor and Kopelman, ready to kill to retrieve his stolen magazine, and he gave up the chase only when Kolt clicked the mag onto his Kalashnikov and chambered a round. Kolt turned and stitched a three-round burst at the feet of the pursuing man, and the man stopped and ran in the other direction, ending his pursuit.

Raynor turned back around and kept running, now just behind Bob.

Gunfire above and behind them caused them to pick up the pace even more. At first Kolt thought the noise might be just guns fired in anger or some other dustup in the area, but after the third burst he saw the stairs below him and to his right crack and tear up with the impact of rifle rounds. Bob turned around and fired the shotgun up at an armed man at the top of the steps. He looked like a shopkeeper but he was clearly trying to kill both of the fleeing Americans. The blast of 12-gauge pellets from twenty-five yards caught the shopkeeper in the midsection and he disappeared over the hill above the steps.

They made it farther down the stairs. In front of them ran the wide road that passed through the center of town. On this street they’d last seen Jamal and his truck, a few hundred yards back to the east, and Kolt hoped to see the old yellow Hilux when he turned the corner, although at this point Kolt couldn’t blame the kid if he’d gunned the Toyota’s engine and hauled ass halfway to Karachi.

As they ran for the main street they began taking more fire from behind. Bob was only ten yards from the intersection, but Kolt slowed his sprint, stopped, spun, and dropped to his knees. Another pickup truck full of Taliban was fifty yards behind and coming down the hill toward them. Raynor dumped the remainder of the AK’s magazine at the truck and it jacked hard to the right, hit a motorized rickshaw, and went up on two wheels. The truck flipped, landed on its roof, and slid off the road, over the descending steps, and into a storefront factory that fabricated rifle ammunition.

An explosion rocked the arcade. Hot metal shards and red flames shot out in all directions, and black smoke mushroomed into the blue afternoon sky. Raynor flattened himself to the ground to avoid the shrapnel. He had no time to alert Kopelman behind him, only hoped the old guy would make it around the corner of the building at the intersection before shrapnel perforated his heavy frame.

Kolt looked back, did not see the sixty-year-old, hoped like hell he’d not run into trouble on the main street. Kolt clambered back to his knees, saw even more blood all over the right side of his shirt now from where he’d slashed his arm in the fall through the kiosk roof. He ignored it—the arm worked and the bleeding hadn’t slowed him yet. His adrenaline warded off the exhaustion he’d otherwise suffer from the exertion of the past ten minutes, though it would not protect him from uncontrolled blood loss.

He left the empty rifle in the street and ducked into a nearby stall. There he found one young shopkeeper cowering in the shadows. Kolt just pushed by him and grabbed the only rifle he could find, a long and heavy Lee Enfield bolt-action replica. He hefted it off the wall, turned to the boy, and in Pashto he shouted, “Where are bullets?” The kid pointed to a shelf: leather pouches full of cartridges were stacked three deep. Raynor grabbed one and slung the carry strap over his neck, took the time to load the unfamiliar weapon with five rounds, all the while looking out into the street for more enemy. Blood dripped off his arm as if from a leaky faucet. It drained down his hand and between his fingers, even wetting the cartridges and the breech of the big rifle.

Also in the kiosk, hanging from a nail on a support beam, was a Makarov pistol in a leather holster built into a long bandolier. Kolt slung this over his head as well, turned back to the kid to ask where the bullets were for
this
gun, but caught only a quick glimpse of the boy running away.

He did not take the time to hunt for the handgun ammunition; instead, he ran back out onto the stairs, shouldered up to the corner of the building at the intersection, and looked around it.

Bob was there, in the street, lying on his side. His shotgun was ten feet from his outstretched hand. It looked as if he’d slipped in a puddle there in the dust.

But it was not a puddle of water, it was blood. Bob’s blood. He’d been shot through the chest. Kolt had not heard the round, did not know from which direction it had come.

“No!” Raynor shouted, and he ran toward the older man, darted out into the street to grab him and pull him to safety. Immediately the road tore apart in front of him—bullets stitched up the road, and bits of stone and dirt and dust flew into the air between his run and his fallen partner. Raynor spun around and dove back out of the street, back behind the baked-mud building at the corner of the intersection.

On his chest in the alleyway now he crawled back around. Bob was still there, crumpled on his side of the street. He was moving still. His big body twitched and his chest wheezed.

“Bob! Don’t move! I’m coming to get you. Just sit tight and I’ll—”

Kopelman looked up at Raynor. He did not speak, just blew out one more long breath as his life left his body.

Bob stilled, and his eyes locked open in death, his irises rolled back. Fifteen feet from Raynor.

Kolt stood up. He felt weak and tired suddenly. Slowly he turned away, left Bob’s body behind, and began walking back up the hill.

*   *   *

A minute later he’d found a tiny space between two kiosks in the arcade. He pushed through, came out onto another busy alleyway, hid his bloody arm as much as possible from the crowds of agitated locals. He carried his rifle under his arm, business end down. A couple of people looked at him in surprise, noticing the dirt and blood and sweat, but Kolt assumed that the situation had been so chaotic, they could not all know that he had been part of the gunfight. He could just as easily have been an innocent victim of all the shooting or of the explosion to the east. Kolt felt his body tiring quickly. He didn’t think he could run again even if his life depended on it, so he just strolled along with the foot traffic, made his way back down to the main road, started to turn to the left because he knew Bob’s body would be in the street fifty yards to his right, and he did not want to see it
or
the crowd that inevitably would have formed around it.