Brian Freemantle - No Time for Heroes

The shooting stopped abruptly, one minute aching noise, the next echoing silence. Danilov was conscious of a lot of men in various uniforms, their faces masked, pouring into the house, and of other uniforms crowding around him. Patton was eased away from him but only enough for medics immediately to tourniquet the shattered arm and plunge hypodermics and saline drips into the man’s remaining arm. Other soldiers were manhandling Danilov, pushing him to the ground to tear at his saturated shirt. Danilov realised what they were doing – and why – and shouted: ‘I’m all right! It’s his blood.’ And when he became fully aware that it was and how much of it covered him, he vomited, not even able to avert his head when he did so, adding to the foul mess.

Danilov wasn’t entirely uninjured. When they cut his clothes away the Army medics found his left shoulder and arm pitted with six separate pellet wounds, but none of them deep nor serious. They injected local anaesthetic to remove the lead shot and cleaned the wounds, and from somewhere a camouflage jacket and trousers were found for him to wear: they were too big, and the trouser bottoms had to be rolled up before he could walk.

Melega broke into the group around him before all the pellets were taken out, urging him towards the medevac helicopter into which the stretchered body of the deeply unconscious and drip-fed Patton was being lifted, with Cowley and Smith attentively on either side. With his unrestrained right arm Danilov waved the Italian away, insisting he was unhurt and didn’t need further treatment: Melega didn’t argue. When the helicopter lifted off, they were buffeted by the updraught.

Danilov’s arm was being strapped to his side, leaving the left sleeve of his camouflage vest hanging limp, when the matchingly grave-faced Cowley and Smith reached him.

Cowley said: ‘You all right?’

‘Pellet wounds, that’s all.’

Cowley offered his hand and instinctively Danilov responded, unsure until they were shaking hands why they were doing it. Cowley said: ‘That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire fucking life!’

‘Mine too,’ came in Smith, covering their hands with his.

Danilov flushed hot with embarrassment. Withdrawing his hand from the cluster, he nodded towards the farmhouse. ‘How many are alive?’

‘All three Russians,’ reassured Cowley. ‘Palma, too. There were five Sicilians. One’s dead. Another’s shot in the head: probably going to die. The Sicilians are from a known Family, the Liccio. They’re all being flown direct to the mainland, to the maximum security jail in Rome.’

‘I saw a soldier’s head blown away?’ said Danilov. The anaesthetic began to wear off from his shoulder and arm: it was not a gentle ache but sharp, jabbing pains.

‘Two soldiers were killed, and one of the carabinieri. Four wounded,’ said Cowley. ‘It’ll be murder charges, against all of them.’

Danilov nodded towards the medevac helicopter, already a distant speck in the sky. ‘What about Patton?’

‘Bad,’ said Cowley. ‘Very bad.’

Seemingly reminded, Smith turned furiously to Melega, who had at that moment returned from the lift-off area. Tight-lipped but yelling, the FBI resident said: ‘Why the fuck didn’t we have flak jackets?’

‘I didn’t think of them,’ admitted the Italian. ‘ You didn’t think of them…’ He paused, to let the rejection settle. ‘And it was his arm: a flak jacket wouldn’t have saved his arm.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ exclaimed Cowley, coughing against a choke of revulsion.

There was a moment of confusion, no-one immediately able to understand. Gradually they followed the direction in which the face-screwed American was looking. Very close to where Danilov and Patton had been treated – the ground stained brown from Patton’s blood – the man’s hand lay perfectly intact, severed from the wrist. It still clutched the revolver for which Danilov had groped, when the magazine of his Beretta had run out.

‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ said Jones.

‘If you want an apology, you’ve got it!’ offered Hartz. ‘It was a brilliant operation, justifying to the last cent whatever it cost, and I’m sorry I ever doubted it.’

Leonard Ross, a pragmatist never interested in look-back debates, said: ‘There’s the possibility we’ll have a dead DEA agent. I want the bastards to die for that.’

‘What about the Russian?’ demanded the Secretary of State.

‘You’re the protocol experts,’ shrugged Ross. ‘He deserves an award: according to Cowley, it was like something out of a Rambo movie. If Danilov hadn’t sat there, firing every time the bastards raised their heads, Patton would have been shot to pieces.’

‘An award might restore goodwill, after all the squabbles.’

‘I hope the Italian publicity hasn’t screwed things in Moscow.’

Now Hartz shrugged. ‘An international Mafia organisation was smashed. Are you surprised the Italians wanted to shout about it?’

‘It hasn’t gotten us one inch closer to understanding the connection between two murders here in Washington and one in Moscow.’

On the far side of town, in their temporarily allocated FBI office, Rafferty tossed the Washington Post across to his partner and said: ‘So that’s where they’ve been, not in deep shit as we were told. All that bullshit about mistakes and collapses of relationships were just that: bullshit!’

‘Just like the shoot-out at the OK Corral,’ reflected Johannsen, reading that morning’s account. Lifting from his desk the piece of paper that had arrived at the same time as the newspaper, he said: ‘And now there’s this!’

‘This’ was a cable from the Swiss police, hopeful of finding a photograph of Ilya Nishin.

There was concerted and government-encouraged publicity, from the moment the manacled mobsters were photographed being led from helicopters at an army base near the capital: there were more photographs as they were led, still manacled, into the high-security Rebibbia jail. In the media release the Italians called the seizures the most severe blow ever to international organised crime: the exaggerated account of Danilov saving the life of David Patton made it seem as if he had protected some of the Italian assault group, as well. It was heightened by the officially expressed gratitude from Washington, describing what he had done as an act of heroic bravery.

Danilov was unaware of any of this until his helicopter followed the Mafia arrival at the same army base: still wearing the borrowed army fatigues, he climbed out to be greeted by a burst of camera lights and jostled demands for him to take part in a hastily arranged press conference with a government minister and Colonel Melega. Danilov refused, careless of any annoyance, more anxious to assess the damage his identification might cause in Moscow: he’d hoped their part in the operation would remain unknown, so they could still manipulate Kosov to guide them beyond the three they now had in custody, to even more important men in the Chechen Family.

Danilov wanted to begin the interrogations at once, but Melega said there had to be official government conferences first. He did, however, agree the three Russians be held in separate cells and refused any contact with each other. Cowley said the bastards weren’t going anywhere and his prior concern was David Patton, undergoing emergency surgery.

Danilov finally presented himself at the Russian embassy, to a hostile reception from diplomats who obviously felt he should have registered with them earlier. He refused to be intimidated, demanding communication facilities to send a full account of the successful arrests to Moscow. He gave his part in the shoot-out in flat, factual detail: had he not known Moscow would demand it because of what was being officially released by the Italians and the Americans, he probably would not have included it at all.