Stephen Leigh - Card Sharks

She bit her lip. "After this is over — I mean, if we survive — " She looked away then. "Never mind. I'm sorry I opened my mouth. I don't have much experience at this."

"Practice never hurt anybody." I undid the Velcro cover and checked my watch. "We still have a few minutes before H-Hour."

She shook her head. "It's stupid anyway," she said, and it was her turn to be little girl lost. "I can't touch anybody, you understand? If I do, I kill them. I can't help it. I can have friends, if anybody wants to be friends with a black freak like me. I can't — "

I reached a fingertip and touched her briefly on the cheek. She jumped. My whole finger went numb.

"When you have the luxury to think about anything but the mission," I said, "consider the ramifications of my special gift. One can do wonders with prosthetics."

She frowned, slightly, which made her look almost intolerably cute. I decided I wasn't missing anything in passing Damsel by. "Right now, it's time to go back to playing soldier. Listen up, everybody."

They clustered round, Darius hanging slightly back. "It's almost time to move, people. So bring it on home: tell me what you're going to do."

Ackroyd pointed a finger. "The guy in the watchtower goes bye-bye the second we hit the street."

"We walk up to the walking guards and I greet them as a pious Turkmen comrade," Chung said.

"I make everything quiet," Harvey whispered.

"I black one out," Joann said, "both if I can."

"If not I pop him," Ackroyd said.

"Or I take him," Ray added with a flash of teeth.

"Or I just shoot him," I said. "We'll play it by ear. Same drill with the boys at the gate."

"Right," Chung said. "Then I get light and kite up for a peek over the wall — "

"While I make the gate open. Slick as a whistle, we're inside."

"We go straight," Ray said, "for the Chancellery." It was the biggest structure, and the closest to the main gate. Most of the hostages were held inside. Since many of its doors were hardened, it had been expected to be the toughest target for Delta, since they'd have to use explosive entry. For us it was a breeze.

"Then we proceed clockwise," the Librarian said, "very methodically."

There were only six buildings, out of a total of fourteen, that were feasible to house hostages, not to mention captors. That simplified things.

Ackroyd cast a glance over the wall at the thickly-wooded compound. "I can't get over how big it is."

"That's what twenty-seven acres looks like, city boy," Ray said. "Why the surprise? We been through a full-scale mock-up twenty-five times, back at Smokey.

Ackroyd shrugged. I understood him. No matter how exact a model is, it can never really prepare you for the reality. If only more of our mission planners could grasp that little fact….

From overhead came a welcome noise: the faint baritone hum of a Night Shadow's four engines. Our Archangels had arrived to watch over us.

I raised my eyes to the sky. A few clouds, mostly stars. "'Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night,'" I said.

"Zero hour, people. Time to move as if we have a purpose."

We were so high on adrenaline when we hit the ground floor of the apartment where we'd been lying-up that we were damned near flying. We all had weapons in hand, even though it was questionable whether a week's hurried training made any of our civilians a greater threat to the bad guys than to themselves. But what the hey? With luck we wouldn't need to shoot anybody. We were aces, and even if none of us was exactly Golden Boy or the Great and Powerful Turtle, we were hard core.

We were on . Felt we were ten feet tall and covered with hair. Felt immortal .

You know what always happens when you get to feeling that way. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make cocky.

Damsel stopped at the foot of the echoing cement stairs. She made Chung halt too by grabbing his arm. She went up on tiptoe — she was that tiny, that she had to stretch for Chung — and kissed him on the cheek.

"You're the one," she breathed. "You're my Hero."

Darius sneered. Blocked right behind the clinch, Billy Ray said, "Give me a flicking break ."

But something happened to Paul Chung in that moment. I saw it in his eyes. He seemed to, well, expand . What it actually amounted to I couldn't imagine.

"Let's get a grip here, people," Ackroyd muttered. "'We got guns, they got guns, all God's children got guns.'"

"He's right," I said, tapping Chung on the shoulder. Was it my adrenaline-fueled imagination, or did I feel a kind of electric tingle? "We're in a war zone now. Move out as I taught you, by pairs, rolling overwatch to the front doors, then out into the street and across."

Chung and Mears hunkered down inside the stairwell, covering with their AKs. Thirty feet away across the lobby the night was black and empty beyond the glass doors. Taking Darius with me, I dodged quickly out and to the left. We pressed up against the wall to our side of the long-dormant elevator bank.

I waved the next pair forward. Ray and Jefferson ran across a debris-littered floor to take up position on the far wall.

Ackroyd and the Librarian advanced to the door. They and Mears and Chung were supposed to flank the entrance while Darius and I hit the street. If the Pasdaran guards thought there was anything unusual about a fidayin patrol emerging from a mostly-deserted apartment building — and in Tehran, there really wasn't — they would be too circumspect to say so. They were scared spitless of us too. A reputation for craziness is a wonderful thing.

But it doesn't make you bulletproof.

In spite of everything we'd drilled in, little Harvey walked bolt upright, as though he was heading back to roust some boisterous teens from the stacks. As he reached the front of the foyer a guy in a sweater popped right out on the sidewalk in front of him, screamed something with Allah in it, and cut loose with an Uzi from the hip.

The glass blew in around us like a crystal razor snowstorm. Harvey's right leg snapped out from under him. He pitched onto his face.

Ackroyd pointed a finger. The gunman vanished.

I raised my AKM. The doorway filled up with bodies and bearded screaming faces. I held down the trigger and gave them something to scream about. They fell back from the door.

The echoes of gunfire seemed to keep on rebounding off the foyer wall as the Iranians fell back to regroup. I scuttled to Harvey, bent over him. I rolled him onto his back. His face was pale, his pants leg wet with blood. The blood wasn't just blasting out, though. That meant the femoral hadn't been hit, which meant he was not going to bleed to death in the next thirty seconds or anything. Which meant the best immediate action was -

"Ackroyd!" I yelled. "Pop him out!"

The detective pointed. Harvey vanished, gone to the medevac tent back at Desert One.

"Jesus!" Ackroyd said. "Which way do we go now? Up the stairs?"

"We don't want to get trapped on the roof," I said. "Out the back — into the alley."

Darius hit the back door first and stopped dead. Locked. "Out of my way, diaper head," Billy Ray growled. He walked into the door and right on through without slowing.

The night air was cool and full of the sounds of angry voices. There was a mob out on Roosevelt, between us and the Embassy, howling for infidel blood. It must have assembled in the time it took us to get down the stairs.

Real coincidental, wasn't it?

No time to think about that now. The mob had nerved itself to risk the fate of their writhing, moaning brethren blocking the front entrance and swarmed in, trampling them in their lust to catch us. I gave them another whole magazine through the foyer to reveal to them the error of their ways.