Veil of the Goddess (29 page)

Pretty obviously, these Foundation Agents had received military training. But
training
isn't the same as being in an actual war, facing actual bullets, getting actual friends and fellow soldiers killed around you.

Zack had been in a real war. That
should
give him an advantage.

He'd need all the advantages he could get.

He switched the selector to short burst mode and aimed low, trying for ricochets down below the decks. Two quick three round bursts persuaded the Agents to keep their heads down. He broke from cover, backing toward the same gangway Father Galen had taken off the ship.

He'd lost count of his shots, so he switched back to single mode when he hit the gangplank. Time to make every bullet count.

A flurry of bullets from the bow of the ship told him his time had run out. The Agents had found another hatchway and outflanked him.

He fired a couple of times in the direction of the shots, dropped his rifle, and rolled down the gangway.

Maybe they thought they'd killed him. Maybe they were just surprised by his unorthodox tactics. Either way, they stopped shooting for a moment.

He turned his roll into an awkward cartwheel and ended up on his feet, sprinting for the cover of the rusty containers where Mustafa and Cejno were holed up.

"Let's get out of here,” he shouted.

The deep thrum of helicopter rotors barely penetrated his awareness. They were still a ways away, but helicopters travel quickly. He was about to have even more unfriendly company.

"I shall hold off the men on the ship,” Mustafa volunteered.

"Don't be an idiot. We've got to move."

Mustafa smiled. “Hediye, give Mr. Zack your keys. The rest of you, take young Cejno and make sure he goes back to the east, to his family. I'll take the Mercedes once I've delayed them for long enough."

Zack had little use for heroes. In the Army, heroes end up killing a lot more of their fellow soldiers than any enemy.

"Where's the priest?"

"He got away."

Damn. That meant he and Ivy would have to track him down again. This was getting tiresome.

"He gave this to me first.” Cejno pulled a piece of fabric from his pocket. The veil. “Go with Allah, my brother."

Zack shook his head in amazement. He'd been sure the priest would holdfast to his treasure. He'd abandoned his calling, his career, his life for the sake of the veil, after all. Given what Father Galen had done to Ivy, it was hard for Zack to generate much sympathy for the dope-smoking priest. Still, when Galen had seen the real stakes, the real enemy, he'd done the right thing.

Zack stopped arguing and went.

He'd reached the end of the pier when a storm of pistol fire sounded.

There were more Agents on the ship than Zack had thought. At least twenty of them were firing from the deck of the freighter or pouring down the gangplanks.

Mustafa fired calmly, his body in the classic target shooter stance he'd probably learned during his days as a draftee in the Turkish universal military service.

A couple of the Agents went down and Mustafa shifted his position just in time to avoid the Agents’ counterfire.

Mustafa's bodyguards popped away at the agents exposed on the gangplanks. Another agent fell, although whether he'd been hit by Mustafa, a bodyguard, or had simply slipped, Zack couldn't guess.

Mustafa fired again, then reached into his jacket pocket for a reload.

An agent caught him in the throat with a knife before he finished.

"Damn."

"He wanted to die a mujahedeen,” Cejno said. “Let his death serve a purpose."

Zack looked at the keys in his hand. The Cross was far longer than the little Opal, but it was their best chance.

"Stay alive, Cejno."

"You too, Mr. Zack. Oh, you may need this.” He handed over the fat wallet filled with the reward money the Patriarch and Cejno had come up with.

"But—"

"I can make more. Mustafa is not the only hashish dealer in Istanbul."

"What next?” Ivy looked like a goddess as she stepped from the sea, the Cross sections over her shoulders.

"We're taking the Opal and I've got the Veil. Smash the Cross through the back window. It's the only way we'll make the things fit."

She used her rifle butt rather than the Cross to make a hole in the glass while Zack fired up the engine.

He helped shove in the Cross sections, waited until she was seated, then took off.

"Fasten your seatbelt. The Marines are coming and believe me, that isn't good news."

He peeled away from the harbor heading south, along a narrow gravel road that looked like it was mostly tree-shrouded. The helicopters would pick him up with their infrared scopes, but he could hope they wouldn't just start shooting anything with an engine. There was enough traffic that he could hope to get lost.

"Aren't we heading the wrong way?"

Zack looked back. The helicopter about a hundred meters above the death-ship looked like a hungry locust waiting to feed.

"Anywhere away from those guys is the right way."

"We've got to get to Venice."

"We've got to stay alive."

"If we can,” Ivy said. “But getting to Venice is more important."

"How's your Australian accent?” Zack asked Ivy.

She stopped drying herself. “Goodai, mate."

"That was horrible. But maybe it'll be good enough."

"Good enough for what?"

"Americans have mostly forgotten World War I. It was a long time ago, we entered late, and only got involved in the fighting in France. My great grandfather fought there, with Pershing. I barely remember him, but I remember how much he loved France."

"Your point?"

"It
was
a World War, not just a war in France. An especially horrible part of it was fought near here. Just across those straits."

He pointed the few miles to the hilly peninsula on the other side of the waterway.

"Most of the world has forgotten Gallipoli. But the Australians and New Zealanders remember. They come here in their pilgrimages, the same way some Americans come to the beaches in Normandy."

"Maybe some day they'll come to the deserts in Iraq, too."

"Not if the Foundation has any say about it. I'm not sure what their plans are, but I'm pretty sure they're intent on something that will make Iraq look like a Sunday picnic."

"I take it we're going to Gallipoli?"

Zack shielded his eyes with his strong hand. It was nearly noon and it seemed like they'd been on the move, on the run, forever. Still, his hand was rock-solid, without a bit of the trembling that seemed to come over Ivy and shake her like a child with a rattle.

"I think it's called Gelibolu now. Maybe it was then, too and the Brits just got it wrong. But yeah, that's where we're going. From there, we figure out how to get to Italy."

"Just keep driving."

He smiled. “I guess that'll do it. We've made it through one international border so far. If we can make it across to Greece, getting to Italy should be easy. Lots of shipping across the Ionian Sea."

She heard what he didn't say. “You think getting into Greece will be tough?"

"The Turks and the Greeks have only hated each other for a thousand years or so. I don't think there are going to be any border areas we can just walk across. First, though, we have to figure out how to get across the Dardanelles into Gallipoli.

Figuring out how was easy. A regular ferry ran from Lapeseki on the Asian side to Gelibolu on the European side and Zack and Ivy simply merged into the line of cars and trucks waiting for the next boat.

Given the chickens and goats hanging out of many of the vehicles, the balks of timber sticking out the back of the Opal barely got a second glance from the toll collectors. After a brief negotiation, Zack pulled the car onto the deck of the ferry, turned off the engine, and yanked up the parking break.

"How far do you figure it is across?” Ivy asked after the ferry pulled away from the dock and plowed through the choppy waters of the straits.

Zack squinted at the European shore as the ferry plowed through the water. “Four miles, maybe. At most."

"Good."

"Why?"

She gestured at the sky. “I think we're going to have company."

A navy fighter roared overhead, making a high circle over the ferry.

Zack opened the car door and stepped out.

"Let's be ready to jump if they take out the ferry."

Ivy had to hope, even if the Foundation ordered them to fire into the crowded civilian ferry, that Navy pilot would refuse. She was pretty certain that the Foundation wanted to create a war between Islam and Christianity. In such a war, Turkey would be on the other side. But Turkey had been a part of NATO for half a century and the Navy pilots would know that.

The fighter shrieked overhead, flying upside down and barely above the ferry's radio antenna to get a better view of its target. She caught a quick look at the pilot's face.

Although his eyes were covered by mirrored sunglasses, his jaw was set in fierce determination.

Like a quick strobe, her eyes caught that image, then he was gone. At five or six hundred miles an hour, the fighter would be somewhere over the Mediterranean before it could turn around and head back.

The ferry captain shook a fist at the departing jet and kept on his route. He probably thought this was a routine training flight, a hotshot Navy pilot causing troubles for his fearful cargo. Only Zack and Ivy had any idea how close the captain had come to having his ferryboat blown up underneath him.

Zack muttered a couple of numbers.

"What?"

"Trying to calculate how long before a helicopter can get here."

A chopper full of Foundation Agents wouldn't be so reluctant to shoot, or they might just hold the ferry until the naval taskforce arrived and took control. Either way, a chopper would be a lot more dangerous to Ivy and Zack than was the fighter.

"Well, what do you figure?"

"It's going to be close."

The ferry looked like it might be a survivor of the Gallipoli battles, and its ancient diesel engines cranked enough horsepower to push them through the water barely faster than Zack could have swum it.

No amount of his willpower managed to move it any faster.

But they only had a couple of miles and a helicopter would have well over a hundred, assuming the aircraft carrier had stayed in Istanbul harbor. If it had upped anchor and steamed the moment Zack and Ivy had started west, the Agents could be a lot closer.

The navy fighter flew back overhead, then began making long circles high overhead, marking the ferry for whatever was coming.

"You speak English?"

He had been so intent on the jet that he hadn't noticed the elderly woman who approached.

"Yes. Zack Hererra, from Texas."

"Apologies. With your dark hair and all, I thought you were a local."

He guessed it had been a while since he'd had the blond highlights added. “With your accent, I'm guessing you're from Australia."

"You'd be right about that, young man."

"Here to see the memorial?"

"Me mum was pregnant when da’ got killed here but I always said I'd come some day. Almost waited too long."

If her father had died in World War I, that would make the woman at least ninety. Zack suspected he wouldn't survive until ninety.

"It was a horrible battle."

She poked him in the chest with a twisted finger. “It was a war. All war is hell. Didn't anyone ever tell you that?"

"But some wars—"

He wouldn't have guessed her lined face could get more wrinkled but it did. “People always say that. Some wars are different, they say.
Some
wars have to be fought. Maybe they're right. The only problem is, people can always find reasons to fight
this
war. And both sides are always certain they have the right on their side. The human mind is infinitely capable of justifying evil."

"There's some truth to that.” Zack believed some battles had to be fought: he wouldn't have decided to make a career out of the Army if he hadn't. But he recognized he wasn't going to persuade a ninety-year-old woman of anything. Especially not a woman who had lost her father to war before she was even born.

"My mother never married again,” the elderly woman continued. “Weren't enough men to go ‘round back then. War wiped a clean slate of the whole generation. Just women and children and sheep over most of the country. And cripples. Those lucky enough to come home from the war mostly didn't come home in one piece. Ever see those old newsreels with all the soldiers missing a leg marching together with their crutches? Thousands with no right leg, then thousands more with no left?"

Military medicine had made dramatic improvements since the days of World War I. But with improvements in body armor, injury still often meant loss of a limb or loss of sight. Too many of Zack's friends had been injured in Iraq. “It must have been horrible."

"Now you Americans are running around the world starting wars. Dragging the rest of us into them, too."

Back when he'd fled the streets of Dallas to join up, he would have argued with her, would have told her that America would never launch a war without provocation, without extreme need. But could he really say that any longer?

"As Tolstoy reminds us, ‘all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing,'” he said.

"And you Americans are always so certain you're some of those good people, aren't you?"

She turned on her heel and stumped back to her car.

"That went well.” Ivy was laughing at him.

He got back into the Opal. “Yeah. And Australia was part of the coalition in Iraq. Good thing we didn't run into someone from France. They lost soldiers here too, but they don't have to come this far to see their graveyards. Their whole country is covered with them."

The ancient ferry wheezed into its dock a few minutes later and Zack started the car's engine. “Looks like we made it."

"Maybe."

He didn't like the sound of that. “Trouble?"

"There's a whole flock of helicopters heading this way. Looks like the rest of the Navy sailed too because I think I see a couple of destroyers heading this way at a speed that's illegal in crowded waters.