"Wouldn't surprise me to see 'em drop an air assault force in there real soon," said the Rhino, circling a couple of open greenswards with one huge, filthy finger.

"In helicopters, you mean?" asked Jules.

He shrugged.

"I suppose they could paradrop the Eighty-second, but I'd lay money on the cav or the One hundred first going in. They're faster. They hit harder. And they can keep their shit together a lot easier. If you are in a parachute and strike a bad wind, you and your buddies end up all over midtown getting picked off in detail. We learned that lesson on D-day."

"Did we indeed." Jules smirked. "How about we stick with our current little war, General Patton."

"Ah, recovering our wits, are we, after the excitement of being rescued by a rampaging American Rhino?"

"Lets just get on with it," Jules countered. "If you're right and the army does try to take the park, this whole part of town is going to become a free fire zone. I'd prefer to be well away from here by then. How much farther to Rubin's apartment?"

"Two blocks north and one west," the Rhino said without bothering to consult the map.

"So do we try our luck on Park Avenue again?" she asked. "Or do we-"

Jules didn't finish her question. Instead she cried out in surprise as a bomb of some sort exploded outside, shattering the foyer windows. The angle of the blast and the mass of the concierge's desk on which they were examining the map protected them from the worst of the blast, but even so, as she dropped and rolled, awkwardly trying to bring up her machine gun, she noticed that the Rhino's Viking helmet was gone and a sizable flap of skin was hanging down over one eye, pouring blood in bright red torrents over his face and chest.

That wasn't the most disturbing aspect of this unpleasant development, however.

Much more upsetting was the heavily accented voice crying to them from the street.

To her.

"Helloooooo… Miss Choolia. And Meester Rhino. Welcome to New York. Meester Cesky sends his regards."

Mister who? thought Jules as the foyer erupted under the impact of hundreds of rounds of automatic weapons fire.

48

New York She came at her target from the north, looking for an older office building at the corner of 59th Street and Park. Her last update from G2 had the Plaza as the northern outpost of Baumer's forces, almost all of which now appeared to have been drawn south toward Rockefeller Center. After leaving the hotel and Donna Gambaro, she had faded back into the cover of Central Park, trusting in her IFF transponder to protect her from air strikes by any orbiting drones. With the clock running down, she hurried through the park, exiting just opposite the remains of the Temple Emanu-El on 65th and diving into the network of streets on the other side. They were not entirely deserted, and once or twice she was forced to take shelter from small numbers of men who appeared to be roaming around aimlessly. Avoiding such encounters slowed her considerably, delaying her arrival at the address she'd tortured from Jukic. The gunfire started up when she was two blocks away.

It wasn't a large-scale engagement like some of the battalion-size encounters shaking themselves out downtown, and it seemed to come in two waves: a brief, shattering eruption of fire that lasted a few minutes but involved only a few shooters, followed by a larger engagement that sounded willing enough to make extra caution on approach advisable. She could make out a few of the weapons types from their reports: at least one AK-47, the street fighter standby; a curious, almost paramilitary mix of M16s and M4s like her own; a shotgun of some sort; and a couple of chunky, large-caliber pistols. All of them were punctuated by two noticeably different discharges of high-capacity automatic fire from something nasty and brutish. She wondered whether she was too late and some freelancing Lord Jim spec-ops type had beaten her to Baumer.

Sheltering in the lobby of a brownstone, Caitlin listened intently as the small gunfight played out. At one point, early on, she was certain she could hear amplified music, tinny but distinct: that dumbass song with a bunch of barking dogs that had been huge about a year or two before the Wave. The snarling bark of an automatic weapon-a P90, she was certain-seemed to cut off both the music and the hammering of a lone AK at about the same time. She scanned the street outside in case anybody else was being drawn into the confrontation, and occasionally she checked the darkened lobby of the building in which she was standing. It had suffered some desultory looting but did not seem to have attracted the attention of any systematic scavenging efforts. The foyer had flooded recently, however, and the place reeked of decay and contamination.

When she heard nothing for a few minutes after the music died, Caitlin resolved to push on. She needed to give herself time to examine the building she had to infiltrate. It was unlikely that Baumer would have an obvious security presence out on the street; that would do nothing but attract the attention of the air force drones constantly buzzing over the city, looking for signs of enemy concentrations. And she had no idea what part of the building his people were using. Jukic had merely given her the street address and said it was a large building. There could be forty or fifty floors on which they had set up camp, if they were even still there. To do the job properly would take days of careful observation, but she had only hours left before extraction. Her mission brief had been adamant about that. This afternoon midtown Manhattan was going to become a "nonsurvivable environment."

The Echelon agent performed another equipment check by rote before easing herself out onto Park Avenue to continue her quiet approach to the enemy camp. She was just turning her mind to how she might handle the last couple of hundred yards when another gun battle erupted not far from the location of the last one. Caitlin quickly took cover behind the body of a rusted Town Car that had had a prime parking spot in front of the apartment block on the morning of the Disappearance. Focusing on the intersection a few blocks down with a pair of compact binoculars, she caught a small band of men, maybe seven or eight of them, hurriedly picking their way through the snarl of auto wreckage that was always so much thicker wherever the traffic streams had met back in 2003.

"Motherfucker," she said quietly.

There could be no doubt about it. They were attacking the very same building she was headed for. Cursing quietly, she returned to the lobby of the brownstone. She wasn't sure why, but the feeling of an unnatural presence was particularly strong here. Perhaps it was the remains of the Disappeared that lay in great profusion in the mud and muck that had flooded in with the recent bad weather. She hurried through the lobby regardless of the flesh-crawling sense of being watched and judged from beyond the grave.

Caitlin shuddered.

She was someone who dealt with death as a matter of routine. It was odd that she should suddenly find herself unsettled and affected by it now. She put it down to exhaustion and hurried on, her jump boots splashing through the filthy brown watery ooze. The fire escape was over near the elevator shafts, and she racked a round into the chamber of her shotgun before entering.

The stairwell was empty and pitch-black. So little ambient light made it in there that her night vision goggles struggled to illuminate the space. She hurried up three flights of stairs and exited after carefully sweeping the hallway for potential adversaries. There were none, just that same creepy feeling that recalled to her mind a line from her Shakespeare studies at the academy in Colorado Springs.