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maintain his balance.
Another fusillade of shots chewed up the paint job of a building only a few feet in front
of Ryan. Without aiming, he pointed the Walther MPL behind him and fired a strafing
burst.
He felt a shock of impact in the muscle of his right shoulder, and he spun completely off
his feet. His head reversed position with his boots and his back thudded heavily onto the
floor with such force he couldn't see or breathe for agonizingly long seconds.
He choked back the burning bile sliding up his throat, and he bit his tongue against the
pain. Rolling over onto his left side, gulping the cold air, he looked behind him, in the
direction from which the shot had come.
The man who had shot him confidently exposed himself to check the quality of his
marksmanship. The blaster looked like a Ruger rifle. Ryan planted two slugs from the
SIG-Sauer in the man's dingy white shirtfront. He went down with a great yelp of pain
and astonishment. Someone pulled him back behind the corner of a flat-roofed building.
Getting to his knees through sheer force of will, Ryan kept low and crawled behind the
base of the Washington Monument. The whole right side of his shirt was dark with blood.
White-hot pain and nausea washed over him in a wave, but it passed. Gingerly he flexed
his fingers, and though the movement tore a protest from his shoulder, the muscles,
tendons and nerves still worked. He wasn't so much worried about the blood loss, but
about crippling injury, temporary or not.
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He seated the earpiece of the headset more securely and called Mildred. There was no
reply, only the hiss of static. He repeated her name, and received the same
response static.
Refusing to speculate on the reasons why he couldn't contact her, Ryan opened his coat
and checked the severity of the exit wound. The bullet had passed completely through his
shoulder from the back. Under the circumstances, the raw, bleeding crater just beneath
his collarbone was more unsightly than critical; the bullet hadn't taken much meat and
muscle with it, and it had fortunately missed bone.
Still, the wound hurt like bottled hell, and it throbbed in cadence with his heartbeat.
Sensations became rubbery, wavering. His eye remained open, but the miniature city
blurred and receded in his vision. Footfalls and voices forced him to focus. He could hear
men moving quickly toward his position.
"He's over there, behind the monument. Frank nailed him."
"And he nailed Frank. Let's be exceptionally careful, gentlemen."
The mechanical sound of firing bolts being pulled back was audible.
"Fuck this," Ryan mumbled beneath his breath.
He pulled one of the incendiary grens from his combat harness, jammed it firmly against
the base of the obelisk and pinched away the pin. He got to his feet and trotted away in a
fast backpedal, making sure to keep the replica of the monument between him and the
freezies stalking him.
A quartet of blaster-wielding men crept around the monument, two to a side. One pair
sighted Ryan and raised their weapons. The second pair sighted the metal egg at the base
of the tower. They uttered cries of alarm and fear, and tried to scuttle away as fast as they
could.
The base of the monument erupted in a blaze of flame, smoke and debris. Ryan felt the
cold slap of the concussion. The obelisk shivered, swayed, and with a groan and grate of
stone, the entire length toppled majestically down across metropolitan Washington,
crashing into and crushing several buildings. Planes of smoke and dust rose in the air.
Men screamed in pain and outrage, cursed in a homicidal fury.
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Ryan turned and ran as fast as he could down another lane, sprinting low to keep his head
down behind the buildings. Once, he was forced to squeeze into a very narrow alley and
squat there as a column of dark-suited pursuers flashed past along the street. He didn't
shoot at their retreating backs, reasoning that if he hadn't done enough to draw the heat
from Mildred by now, there was no point in engaging in another blaster battle.
He noticed blood dripping from his left hand, slicking the butt of the SIG-Sauer and
splattering on the artificial lawn. Fleur's knife cut on his shoulder blade had reopened,
though Mildred's stitches and bandages seemed to be keeping the bleeding to a minimum.
He tried raising Mildred a third time on the comm unit, and when he couldn't, he removed
the headset and stowed it in an inner coat pocket. Biting his lip to repress a grunt of pain,
Ryan rose and moved through the drifting sheets of dust and smoke, wending his way
between the buildings until he came to a barrier. Two very ornate, very tall double doors,
bound with thick braces of brass, towered over him.
Emblazoned in the very center of the doors were two bordered disk-shaped symbols that
depicted, in gold and black paint, an eagle with outstretched wings. One clawed talon [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]