Echo Platoon (16 page)

Y’see, right then, all of a sudden things came to a complete stop. Like—
whoa.
S-t-o-p. Total freeze frame.

And then, and then, the whole fucking crowd turned on me. And started to scream. And come toward me.

Oh, fuck, oh, shit, oh doom on Dickie. This was not going to be any fun. None at all.

Some fucking bearded Azeri put his hands on my shoulders. I swatted him away. Two more grabbed at my vest. I elbowed them aside. I tried to talk my way out, but no one was listening. This had gone from crowd to mob by now—and all they wanted was a chance to lay their hands on me and do some damage.

I pushed back, hard, straight-arming the chests of a trio of guys who, judging from the clumps of old food in their mustaches, were probably related to my taxi driver. They gave way and I started working my way toward the relative safety at the far side of the intersection, beyond the wreckage of the rice rocket. But it was like trying to run the forty-yard dash inside a crowded New York subway train. There was just no place to go. No wiggle room.

A pair of big, burly guys smelling of garlic tried to double-team me, wrapping me up in a simultaneous headlock and a body lock. I smacked the first one with my elbow, catching him in the nose. He slapped his hands to his face and backed off just far enough so
I could use the heavy steel slide of the pistol on B
2
G.
45
I smacked him pretty hard. He staggered back, releasing his grip, too. But by then there were other hands on me, grabbing, gripping, clutching at my clothes and various extremities. My vest was ripped. My shirt pocket was torn. A hand yanked at my French braid, snapping my head back painfully. Then some cock-breath took hold of my left hand and wouldn’t let go. I tried to disengage, but all I succeeded in doing was getting him to release his grip on my hand, take hold of my pinky, and try to head south with it. I struggled to free the fucking digit, but he wasn’t about to let go. Maybe he wanted a souvenir. Who knew—and who cared. Well,
I
did. It was
my
fucking finger after all. Then an arm in a rough peasant shirt wrapped around my neck, squeezed tight, and pulled me in the opposite direction from the one I’d been more or less going in. Another set of arms grabbed me around the torso and pulled me in a third direction. All of a sudden I heard an ominous pop, and an icy shaft of pain radiated from my hand into my brain. Oh, fuck me—the asshole had dislocated my fucking pinky.

I was getting mad. I began to flail, swat, elbow, and claw my way out of the mob. I didn’t necessarily want to hurt any of these people, but I wasn’t getting a vote here, and they sure as hell wanted to nail my ass.

The only thing to do was get out of the intersection and outrun ’em. Except outrunning is a hard thing to do when you have a couple of dozen people trying to tackle you. I screamed, “Back the fuck off—” It didn’t do a bit of good.

Time for a diversion. I fired the P7. Two, three shots went into the black macadam of the street. And then the slide locked back and I was out of ammo.

Oops. Bad move. Remember all those times I told you about counting rounds, and how hard it is to do under combat conditions? Well, now you see how right I was. Fuck. I squeezed the cocker, slid the slide forward, jammed the pistol back in its holster, and hoped that no one would try to grab it.

And all the while, the crowd was getting nastier and nastier and more and more aggressive. I cold-cocked one motherfucker who came at me with a club. Somewhere in the background, I could hear the electric hee-haw of a police siren. It was getting closer, too. I didn’t want, or need, to deal with the cops.

I screamed, “Back the fuck off!” in what’s known as Command Voice. It worked—kinda. The dozen or so folks closest to me hesitated—a few even stepped backward.

I tried it again. This time with much more menace in my Command Voice. Shit—it worked. They backed away some more. And then, I spied a single narrow venue for escape opening up. To be precise, the big, heavy truck that had destroyed the rice rocket was only eight or nine feet away. If I could make it to the truck and squeeze underneath, I’d have a fighting chance of getting away. I headed for the truckbed.

But just then, the damn dam must have broke, because the fucking mob came collapsing on me, and damn near all of ’em had their War Faces on. The pair of Burly Guys, both of whom had murder in their eyes, led the charge. It was T2A—Time To ACT before they shut me down completely. I flailed, and slapped, and kicked, and finally scrambled under the big, high-bed truck.

Wild-eyed, I emerged on the far side, scrambling on my hands and knees. GNBN. The good news was that it immediately became apparent to me that the folks on
this
side of the intersection hadn’t heard Beemer Man’s exhortation. Or, if they had, they hadn’t understood him, so they didn’t quite know what or who to look for. The down side was that I was the only guy running from the angry, hell-bent mob on the other side of the truck.

Except these folks didn’t know that.
Not really. I whirled and pointed back at the first B
2
G, whose puffing, red, determined, puss poked out from the truck’s undercarriage. “He did it,” I bellowed. “That’s the guy—he’s the one. That’s the motherfucker who did it. Kill the cocksucker!”

Did they understand me? No. But, just as I’d been able to grasp the underlying substance of what Beemer Man had shouted to incite the mob against me, what I’d just shouted was instantly understood—and acted upon.

Angry hands reached for him. B
2
G was pulled out, stood up against the truck, and pummeled, all the while protesting his innocence. Me? I didn’t waste a millisecond. I backed away, slowly, trying to attract zero fucking attention, until I’d managed a total and completely successful exfiltration from the nasty AO.

Total? Completely successful? Well . . . not quite. I wasn’t alone. Mister Murphy, who can obviously pass for Azeri when he wants to, had followed me as I’d snuck away. I picked my way south and west, moving contrapuntally to the sounds of the approaching sirens. But somehow, Beemer Man had managed to thread his way through the gridlock, squirt past the
mob, and head for the exact same thoroughfare I’d chosen to make my escape on.

And Beemer Man wasn’t alone any more than I was. He had a passenger on the back of his big black bike—the goon who’d been riding shotgun in the Mercedes. And said goon didn’t look very happy at all. In fact, he looked pretty much like a POG, which as you can probably figure out, stands for Pissed-Off Goon.

I checked for anywhere to cover and conceal—and came up dry. Off to my left was the yawning entrance of a metro stop. But I knew better than to head toward it. I didn’t have any tokens, or whatever the fuck they use here in Baku, and I wasn’t about to try to figure out how to use the fucking system sans a map, or a diagram. Ahead and to starboard I saw a jam-packed Irish pub theme-bar. I rejected that, too. I’ve learned the hard way that if you go into some bar or restaurant or café in a strange city, you can simply bottle yourself up inside—and moreover, the bad guys can call for reinforcements.

There are times when you are being followed that you want to attract attention to yourself. This was not one of them. So, my pinky now swelled to the size of a half-dill, I left the main drag and headed into what looked like a working-class neighborhood, half-walking, half-jogging against the traffic flow, moving up a narrow, one-way street, heading away from the bad guys. My ploy didn’t bother Beemer Man at all—he simply followed me, taking his time and working the bike along the curb, its engine growling noisily, while the POG peered over his shoulder and scowled a War Face scowl.

But he didn’t take any hostile action. Why? For the same reason I didn’t want to attract attention: there
were just too many potential witnesses on this lower-class side street. Look, Baku may be a big, congested city with a lot of skyscrapers that look as if they’ve been transplanted from Paris, or Tel Aviv, or Tulsa, Oklahoma. But don’t let all those glass and steel towers fool you. Baku’s not a rich city, yet. Even though the oil business has brought a lot of money into the country, there’s still a lot of poverty, much of which takes the form of hundreds of thousands of unemployed Azeris who have nothing to do but park themselves on the sidewalks in front of their dilapidated, grimy Soviet-era slum apartment houses, and sit in the stifling heat on broken-down chairs, with folding tables and
shesh-besh
boards (which is how they refer to backgammon in this part of the world), between ’em. No—neither Beemer Man nor the POG wanted to kill me publicly.

And I could use that to my own tactical advantage. But first, I needed the sort of environment that would help me—and impair the opposition. I moved at a steady pace, scanning left and right. On impulse, I cut through a narrow alley. Beemer Man and the POG crawled up to the entrance, perhaps sixty, seventy feet behind me.

I turned—and saw the smile on Beemer Man’s face as he realized the alley dead-ended, and I was apparently trapped.

Except, from where he was, Beemer Man couldn’t see what I saw: the alley didn’t dead end. It came to a
T.
And off to the right, about thirty yards away, I could make out the back side of a small, shabby, under-inventoried, but nonetheless bustling street market.

So far as I was concerned, that was like Brer Rabbit finding the fucking briar patch, when hungry Brer
Fox was on the wily bunny rabbit’s heels. I tossed the bird toward Beemer Man and the POG, then whirled, and ran like hell for the street market. As I ran, I extracted one of the spare magazines in my back pocket, reloaded the P7, reholstered it, and made sure my ripped vest still covered the weapon.

Thus armed and dangerous, I slipped between a couple of vegetable carts, then paused long enough to get a sense of where I was. And guess what—just as I’d hoped, this block-long cluster of rickety carts and rattletrap stalls and makeshift counters was no different from poor folks’ street markets all over the world, from Philadelphia to Cairo; from Damascus to Shanghai.

They’re all laid out roughly the same. The sidewalks have rows of jerry-built stalls, or chocked-wheel carts. Behind the stalls are small stores, where butchers, bakers, and cheese dealers ply their trade. At one end of the street, you’ll always find dry goods—everything from disposable diapers to the kinds of plastic kitchen goods common to all Second, Third, and Fourth World countries. At the other, are the vegetables, legumes, and spices.

I’d landed between the veggies and the dry goods. I dropped low and made my way past crates of tiny cucumbers and radishes whose green tops lay withered in the heat, slipped behind a kiosk that sold towels and soap, then scampered across a narrow break between stalls to take up a defensive position behind a small, shriveled pyramid of past-their-prime Jaffa oranges. I stuck my big Slovak snout over the top of the orange pile, snuck a look, and liked what I saw. Which was that Beemer Man had stopped before committing himself to running the gauntlet of the market,
and sat astride his bike, idling and gunning his engine, at the head of the street.

The POG climbed off the cycle and scanned the crowd of shoppers, his face reflecting both confusion and aggravation. He turned back and shouted something at the driver, gesticulating angrily, then stalked off in my direction, in obvious exasperation.

The bike pulled away, burning rubber as it did—no doubt heading around the block to cut me off at the far end of the market. It was a move that made sense, assuming I was going to actually go to the far end of the market. Of course, I had other ideas. But Beemer Man didn’t know that.

I eyeballed the opposition. The POG was squat—built like a fireplug. He had a round face, and wore his hair short on top and white-walled around the sides, like a Ranger or Marine recon grunt. He was dressed in double-knit trousers and a scruffy, soiled short-sleeved band-neck shirt, over which he wore a long, sleeveless photographer’s vest very much like my own.

Before the POG did anything else, he unzipped the vest, which I understood only too well gave him quick access to whatever weapon he was no doubt concealing beneath it. Next, he felt at the top left-hand pocket of his vest, his thick fingers working around what appeared to be a small, rectangular item. That told me he was carrying a cellular phone. Then, satisfied that everything was properly stowed, he started down the far side of the street, working his way around the stalls in a classic squared-off search pattern. The way he moved plus the hair style told me he was no Mafiya wannabe, but a military professional, probably Russkie or German.

Oh, but God loves me. Yes, He does. Why do I say that? Because He divides my enemies for me, and thusly divided, I can (and most certainly will) conquer them.

I stood up, put two fingers to my mouth, and whistled. Loud.

The sound brought the POG up short. He looked in my direction. I grinned and tossed him the bird. A nasty look came over his round, ugly face, he snorted like a fucking bull in heat, put his head down, and charged, bowling over a poor babushka in his haste to get to me.

I sprinted away from him, broken-field running around the stalls; slaloming past the carts, until I spotted what I’d been looking for—an open door that led to an interior courtyard.

I turned on the speed, and burst through the doorway, into the courtyard, took my bearings, then fled up a narrow flight of stairs that led to the apartments on the second, third, and fourth levels of the building. I could hear the POG huffing and puffing as he proceeded at flank speed in my wake. Great—we were all on schedule. I charged noisily up the stairs, then at the first landing, I took a hard left and clattered down the hallway, my feet thumping boldly
pa-whap, pa-whap.

Abruptly, I stopped. I listened to the sound of the POG in pursuit. Then I whirled and, silent as a fucking jaguar, I quickly retraced my steps and positioned myself at the corner of the hallway, just out of sight of the stairwell, and coiled to spring