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“That was stupid,” Kaiser snapped.
“Yeah, but I got a gun, and some night-vision goggles for you, if you want them.”
“I’ll take them,” Kaiser said. “Let’s move Jane.”
Kaiser and Able picked up the cot and Kaiser said to Baxter, “See if you can find some furniture to block the doors. Anything that would slow down an entry.”
“Got it,” Baxter said. “I’ll do it now.” He held up the Mini and the magazines. “I think I know how to use this, but... maybe you can give me some tips.”
“Yeah, right,” Kaiser said, and he and Able carried Longstreet down the hall and around the corner.
When Longstreet was in the yoga room, in a corner next to the brick wall, Kaiser called Letty and Cartwright on the handset and told them what had happened. “I stopped the bleeding and we got another one. That’s three down. But Jane needs a hospital as soon as we can get her to one.”
Neither Letty nor Cartwright risked a vocal answer. Both gave the transmit button a single squeeze, in acknowledgment.
Baxter got one of the guests to help him carry a couch to the door at the end of the hallway, and they wedged it between the hall walls and against the door. “Nobody coming through there,” Baxter said. He’d slung the Mini over his shoulder and the mankept looking at it. “Mini Uzi,” Baxter said. “Took it off a dead Russian.”
Volkov was taking reportsfrom his men, and he didn’t like what he was hearing, and not hearing. He could get no response from three of them, and they’d heard three different bursts of gunfire; he suspected that was not a coincidence.
He had two men still in the trees, approaching the motel from the far side, another hiking up the hill to a point where he could cover the main doors of the hotel, and a fourth moving down the highway toward the driveway that led to the hotel.
One of them called in: there was no door on the far side, only at the ends of the wings of the U-shaped structure, and another in the middle of the back side, opposite the front door. “Our best chance is to approach the side and to go through a window. Once we’re inside, we will be among them.”
“Do what you can,” Volkov said. “We are taking casualties.”
“We know,” the man had replied, dryly. “We can hear machine guns.”
Volkov had no answer for that, so he didn’t answer.
Bunker, watching her cameras,saw the two men break from the trees and run to the side of the motel, and she shouted down the hall at Kaiser, “We’ve got two bogies on the side of the guest wing. Right in the middle. Looks like they might try to go through a window.”
Kaiser shouted, “I’m coming.”
A moment later, he ran past her, and past the lobby with its glass door in a fraction of a second; there was no response from the Russians outside, and he continued running to the far wing,where Baxter was sitting behind a couch, the Mini propped atop it. A half-dozen chairs and couches scattered down the hallway in what amounted to an obstacle course that would slow anyone running down it but wouldn’t provide any protection from a gun.
“Good idea. But we’ve got...”
“I heard,” Baxter said. He picked up the Mini and said, “I figured out the gun. Pretty simple. And there’s nobody in those outer rooms, so if somebody comes out... it’s them.”
Kaiser stared at him for just a second or two, then said, “When you pull the trigger, the barrel will try to ride up. Push down at the top of it. Don’t block the ejection gate, that’s...”
“I know where it is,” Baxter said. “Like I said, it’s a simple machine.”
A dozen guests were spread along the hallway, lying on the floor, and Kaiser called, as quietly as he could, and still be heard, “Listen, folks, you all crawl down to the far end. Do it now, crawl. Stay low.”
They started scrambling down the hall and Baxter said, “Ten rooms down the outside. If they’re in the middle, we should probably hear them breaking in.”
“I’ll go,” Kaiser said. “You wait here.”
“Nah,” Baxter said. “I’m coming.”
Kaiser didn’t argue. They went down the hall, to the middle of the hallway, and stopped there, between doors, and listened. From the other end of the motel, Bunker called, “Incoming.”
And they heard the window glass break, and then more breakage: apparently there was no way to do it silently. The noise stopped, and Kaiser whispered, “They’re probably inside.”
“Yes.”
“They’ll open the door to peek out. When they do it, I’m going to unload on them,” Kaiser said. “You don’t shoot unless you see mego down. And for Christ’s sakes, don’t shoot me. Be ready if one of them comes out through the door and I’m down or reloading.”
