CHAPTER 15
“Agresori!” panicked civilians cried, stampeding toward the tunnels.
Brenna turned the camera on the nearest passageway and zoomed the lens to telephoto so she could see what was happening in a close-up.
A crush of people trying to escape, but slowly getting shoved back in.
Shit. They were being corralled. But—by whom?
She dropped the camera, her mind racing.
Well, hell. Who else? ?avi?’s Nationalist army. Here to finish the massacre.
Old City was falling.
She spun, spotted Grace. She was planted in the middle of the square, a boulder in a raging river.
She raced toward her and grabbed her sleeve. “Alcott. Come with me!”
“What’s going on?”
“Nationalists!” She held fast, dragging her against the human torrent running in the opposite direction. She ran alongside her into the blinding sunlight at the western side of the market.
“Back here!” she shouted, racing behind a shimmering veil of smoke, into the searing heat of a flaming stall.
She reconnoitered the wall looming straight above them, looking for the section with the most severe shrapnel damage.
There was a deep gallery above them—a promenade from which to view the market.
She stopped deep behind the fire and turned to her, the side of her face burning from the reflected heat. “I’m going to boost you. Pull yourself up to the balcony.”
She followed her gaze. A dozen feet, straight up.
A cry rose from the crowd on the other side of the crackling fire. The Nationalists were pushing the civilians back into the square.
Brenna set down her camera and pulled some crates nearer.
She put her hand on Grace’s uninjured shoulder, steadied herself, and clambered onto the wobbly pile.
She turned, footing uncertain, and pressed her back against the wall, squatting slightly so her thighs formed a ledge. “Alright, Alcott. I’m a ladder.”
She squinted at her through the smoke.
“Get on the heap, then step onto my thighs and up to my shoulders,” she said, illustrating the footholds with her hands. “Use the gouges in the walls as hand-holds. The balcony is up to you.”
“What about you?”
“Just do it!” Every moment Grace delayed was one Brenna would not have later to scale the wall unaided. She held her hands out, balancing her as she stepped up. Her added weight shifted the pile and they lost half a foot from their base.
Grace mumbled a curse.
“Up, up, up,” she ordered. “Don’t stop.”
In the passageways, the trapped crowd pushed back at the Nationalists with a roar.
Releasing her hands, Grace took her shoulders.
Reluctantly, she put a shoe on her left thigh and shifted her weight onto her, wincing as it pulled her injured shoulder.
Brenna grunted, holding her position, letting Grace use her own power to straighten herself.
If she could get the footholds, she could straighten.
Her own six-foot height plus Grace’s would close the gap to the railing.
Wrenched shoulder or not, she’d have to haul herself over it.
Grace reached upwards, leaning into her, seeking hand-holds in the pocked wall.
Brenna looked up at her grim face, framed by her outstretched arm and upper body. The extra time it had taken to get to the most bitten-up part of the wall was about to pay off.
Her fingers gripped a mortar hole. It held. She turned left, seeking a similar purchase that wouldn’t overextend her damaged shoulder. Twice her fingers tentatively left Brenna’s shoulder and returned. On the third try she caught the hand-hold and shifted her weight.
Grit floated down. Brenna hid her face in Grace, smelling her denim jeans as she stretched past.
Grace gained the toe-holds she needed on her shoulders, right side first, then left. The weight compressed Brenna’s vertebrae. She could feel them squeezing together. She shoved her back hard against the wall and willed her trembling thighs to stop, already.
The rumble of diesel engines reverberated in the narrow passageways. The Nationalists were too close for comfort. Sweat rolled into her eyes. Above her, Grace grabbed the railing and miraculously pulled herself over it, falling with an audible thud on the inside.
Released, Brenna leapt to the ground for her camera.
Grace bent over the railing. “Jesus, Brenna! Leave the camera.”
“Take it!” she ordered. She stood on the pile, arms quivering as she held the unit high above her head. Toes hooked under the railing for counterbalance, Grace leaned over and took the camera.
Brenna peered up, plotting her hand-holds.
Through the shimmering smoke she saw the civilians, trapped like water sloshing between the hull of a ship and a dock. The roar of truck engines suggested the advancing troops were plowing the civilians confined in the passageways against the mass pressing from the square. The machines would win.
She clambered up, using all her strength to hug the wall, shifting her weight from handhold to handhold.
Her head flush with the floor of the gallery, she grabbed the railing, and started pulling herself up.
The bags criss-crossed over her chest unbalanced her.
Her feet skittered out beneath her. She dropped straight down, feet scrabbling for toe-holds, her hands barely keeping their grip on the railing.
Automatic fire erupted in the passageways.
She was screwed.
A shadow descended over her from above. Fists clutched her jacket and shirt.
Brenna was dead weight, and Grace was injured.
Impossible. But she felt herself rising, belly scraping the wall.
She found footholds and helped push herself upward.
Heaving over the railing with Grace’s help, she dropped onto the rubble-strewn upper gallery.
Grace collapsed beside her, pale, sweating, panting from the effort.
She scrambled out of view. There wasn’t a moment to spare for gratitude or relief. “Get back. Behind the post.”
Grace was retching, clutching her shoulder, unable to obey.
Brenna grabbed a handful of her jeans and yanked, dragging her butt into the cold shadows at the base of the broad archway column.
The Nationalists breached the square.
The crowd roared.
Brenna squeezed against Grace, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, out of sight of the yard.
Ripping the bags off, she kicked them to the base of the far wall, out of sight of anyone on the ground.
Pressing the camera hard against her free hip, she pulled her knees into her chest.
The smoke up here was thinner, less concealing.
They had put some distance between themselves and the Nationalists, but they were still trapped.
If the Nationalists had any tactical know-how, they would take the high ground—the balcony.
Two staircases served it, one nearby, the other diagonally across on the eastern side.
She’d once tried to get up to the balcony to take pictures, and discovered the stairways were gated and padlocked.
She assumed they still were, or the rest of the panicked civilians below her now would also be up here.
Best case, the lazy Nationalist bastards would see the imposing gates and be dissuaded from coming up.
Next best case, they might scale the walls, but not occupy both L’s of the square, as complete encirclement would put their own men in the crossfire. She had chosen the western side of the market knowing the troops would choose the east to keep the morning sun at their backs.
Worst—and most likely—case, her balcony tactic would merely buy time before she and Grace were discovered. Whatever came next, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
She edged the camera nearer, rotated the viewfinder so she could see it from above, and verified the machine had survived the bumpy trip up the wall.
Satisfied, she crept the camera to the inner corner of the balustrade, keeping the unit tipped downward so the rubber hood over the lens would prevent the sun from glinting off the glass.
There were pictures to take. She had a job to concentrate on.
A hush fell over the square.
“What’s going on?” Grace murmured.
She shook her head. She didn’t know.
Rifles at their waists, the troops had formed a tight semi-circle around the civilians, like wary cowboys expecting the livestock to spook and stampede. What was the army waiting for?
The adenoidal horn of a military jeep announced its arrival through the southern gate.
The throng turned as one to watch it enter.
The vehicle broke into the bright daylight.
A collective gasp went up from the crowd.
Two red flags snapped at the corners of the hood, signature emblems that struck terror in the city like a skull and crossbones had once struck terror on the high seas.
“?avi?,” she whispered, and zoomed in on him.
Dressed in fatigues, he stood Patton-like in the front of the open jeep.
Legs and arms spread wide, he gripped the windscreen.
His characteristic pair of field glasses hung at his neck.
He carried them, it was said, so he could see the far edge of his killing fields without having to walk among the dead.
He was a bulky, authoritative sixty-year-old with closely cropped gray hair.
In a business suit, sitting at a negotiating table, he would look like a corporate executive.
Her skin crawled. He wasn’t a CEO. He was Southeastern Europe’s most ruthless mass murderer, Satan’s big brother—perfectly centered in her viewfinder, perfectly focused so his identity would be incontestable.
The General lifted a bullhorn to his mouth. “I am God,” he said. “No one can save you.”
He dropped the bullhorn to the seat and raised his hands, as if calling an orchestra to attention.
On the downbeat, the troops opened fire.