Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

I instinctively shoved him off and dove for the floor as bullets pelted against the car. That’s when I saw what Mel had lunged for-an M16 rifle strapped to the underside of the passenger seat, two metal clips holding it in place. I quickly undid them and yanked the M16 to my body, straining to pull back the charging handle and unlock the safety, ordinarily simple things to accomplish, except when your body’s all scrunched up and keeps involuntarily flinching from the sounds of bullets striking around you.

Two possibilities struck me-I could stay in the car, pray no bullets hit me, and wait till the shooters walked in our direction to perform the coup de grace. Or I could try to get out of the car and pray nobody shot me. Staying in the car posed one problem. Sometimes, bullets cause a fuel ignition and you get one of those Hollywood moments that just mess up your plans for the evening.

Option two had drawbacks also. If I threw open my passenger door and simply rushed out, the three shooters would nail me. They were maybe forty yards away. They couldn’t miss. I yelled, “Katrina!” and through the sound of loud bangs I heard her say, “Yes.”

“Open your door. And stay inside.”

“Okay!” she yelled.

I gave her a two-second head start before I threw open my door. Her door was on the other side of the car, and the second it opened, it became a bullet magnet as the three shooters tried to hit whoever rolled out. I leaped out my side, and as soon as I hit the ground I scrambled for the front of the car. I could feel chips of concrete striking my legs, but I made it.

I got on my belly and scooted until I could peek around a tire. The shooters still stood casually out in the open, unaware I had a weapon, believing they were invulnerable. One was calmly changing magazines while the other two nonchalantly plunked away at our car.

The obvious choice was to take out the two who were firing. I pushed the semiautomatic selector on the M16, stuck it around the corner, took quick aim, and swept it across the two shooters. The first folded over like he suddenly got a bad bellyache, while the second was flung backward and landed on the concrete.

The guy reloading scurried behind his car-I fired two shots, but missed. At least I think I missed, although I saw no movement and there was no firing. I had expended about ten rounds, and the M16 had a twenty-round magazine, so I had maybe ten bullets left. Harassing fire wasn’t an option.

I aimed my weapon in his direction and yelled, “Katrina, get out of the car!”

I hoped she was still alive to hear me. Five or so seconds passed and there was nothing, no sound from her, no movement.

Then I saw her land on the cement and scramble in my direction. At nearly the same instant, I saw the Russian pop over the top of his car, and I fired a quick burst. I had no idea whether I hit him. I was too fixated on the little round cylinder he’d thrown that was sailing in our direction.

I jumped up, tackled Katrina, and ended up on top of her. Then came the explosion. The thing about being in a narrow street is that sound does not escape. A loud boom sends its first shock wave into your eardrums, followed by an almost instantaneous aftershock from ricocheted waves.

My ears were ringing as I rolled off Katrina. She had her hands over her ears, and her elbows and knees were bloody from the effects of my tackle. Something in my left leg stung as I got up and dragged her to the front of the car.

I sat and tried to appraise our situation. The smell of cordite was heavy in the air, and there was a fair amount of smoke, but all I could hear was a loud ringing. I looked over at Katrina, and her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear a word.

What next? Check to see if the last shooter was dead? Wait right there and hope he didn’t have another hand grenade and better aim?

After all the noise and racket, surely the Moscow police had to be on the way. Katrina was staring down at my leg and pointing at a spot below my knee. When I pulled up my trouser leg, blood was pumping out in tiny spurts, an indication a significant vein had been punctured. She slapped a palm over the wound and tried to stem the flow.

She began tugging on her dress sleeve, trying to rip it, until I finally reached over and gave her a hand. I yanked too hard, because I nearly tore off the whole top of her blouse.

She tied the cloth around my leg. Three or four minutes had passed, and while I was still too deaf to hear any sirens, no police had shown up yet. I worked my way around the side of the car and ducked in long enough to drag out Mel’s body. I tugged his corpse around to the front of the car, flipped him over, and found his cell phone. I didn’t know the number to the embassy, but it was one of those fancy Motorola models where you push a few buttons on the side and pretty soon his favorite numbers pop onto the screen.

I handed it to Katrina. “Call the embassy.”

Or that’s what I think I said. It might’ve been “order a pizza” for all I know, because it’s damned hard to speak when you can’t hear your own voice. She studied the screen and punched in some numbers, and I could see her lips moving, so she was obviously talking to somebody.

We waited some more. I was fuming. I couldn’t believe that in a major metropolitan area like Moscow, the police wouldn’t be alerted to a major firefight right in the middle of the town and wouldn’t respond right away. Russian inefficiency has to have its limits, right?

Perhaps another three minutes passed before the first police car arrived. The dicey part was the moment the first two cops came around the side of the shooter’s car with pistols in their hands. I could see Katrina’s lips moving, and I presumed she was yelling something in Russian, like, “Hey, we’re the good guys, so please don’t shoot.”

They didn’t shoot. That, however, was the limit to their kindness. They kicked the M16 out of my hands. Katrina started to stand up, but one of the cops quickly flung her against the car, and before I could do anything, the other cop grabbed me by my shirtfront, lifted me off my feet, and threw me against the car, too. They roughly patted us down, and then had our arms trapped behind our backs as they slapped handcuffs around our wrists.

More cops arrived-lots more cops-and people streaming out of their apartments, coming to investigate the aftermath of the street battle. I watched them walking around, surveying the damage, and then Katrina was jammed into the back of one police car, as I was roughly shoehorned into another. Some three minutes later, my car screeched to a halt in front of a police station that looked like something out of any ordinary American slum.

I was shoved and dragged inside and led to a dirty room in the back, where I was literally tossed into a chair. I still couldn’t hear a sound and my eardrums ached, which was really inconvenient, as I couldn’t massage them. Funny, the little things that bother you in the worst nightmares.

A few minutes later, two guys wearing civilian suits came in. They stood and studied me like I was an interesting new specimen brought to their laboratory for dissection. If this were America, I’d be doing the big lawyer war dance, threatening them with police brutality charges and just generally making a horse’s ass out of myself.

I bit my tongue. It’s always dangerous to put your mouth in gear when you can’t even hear what you’re saying, not to mention we were in a foreign land where lawyers are perhaps not as warmly loved and admired as they are in America.

One of them tried saying something, and I thought I heard a bit of noise. I shook my head to let them know I didn’t understand-a doubly ambiguous signal, as they were probably speaking Russian, which I couldn’t comprehend anyway, so how the hell did I expect them to realize I was deaf?