The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,143
off the ground.
The Serb giant seemed torn between two targets, Cooper and Janson.
"Drop the gun, Ratko!" Janson yelled.
"I fuck your mother!" the giant Serb spat, and he squeezed off a shot at Barry Cooper.
"Dammit!" Cooper bellowed. The bullet had penetrated both his arm and his lower chest. His gun fell to the ground and he retreated, in agony, behind a row of steel drums near the side entrance.
"You OK, Barry?" Janson called out, stepping behind another stanchion.
There was a moment of silence. "I dunno, Paul," he replied weakly. "Hurts like a motherfucker. Plus, I feel like I've fallen off the whole Gandhian-pacifist wagon. I'm probably going to have to become a vegan just to get my karma straightened out."
"YMCA summer camp," Cooper said, sheepish. "BB guns."
"Can you drive?"
"Not the Indy 500 or anything, but, yeah, I guess."
"Keep calm and listen to me. Get into the car and drive yourself to a hospital. Now!"
"But what about ... ?"
"Don't worry about me! Just haul ass."
A bullet from the giant's .45 echoed loudly through the steel enclosure, and a piece of concrete landed near Janson's feet.
It was a standoff now, between the two of them.
Two men, with nothing to lose but their lives.
Janson did not dare shoot blindly, for risk of hitting the man's captive. He took a few steps back until he could make out his target clearly. Ratko, steadying his gun hand with his other hand for precision shooting, had his back to her. A glint of steel told him that the woman was not as helpless as he imagined.
With her one free arm, she had reached down, stretching farther than seemed possible, and grabbed the hilt of the knife, which through extraordinary contortions she had managed to raise to mid-thigh level. Now she was raising it high, keeping the blade horizontal, the better to avoid the ribs, and -
Plunged it into the giant's back.
Shock wiped out the menacing expression on his hideously scarred face. As Janson stepped forward, the giant squeezed off another shot, but it went high. Janson had one more bullet left in his magazine: he could not miss.
He assumed the standard Weaver stance and squeezed off his sole remaining shot, aiming for the man's heart.
"I fuck your mother," the Serb rumbled, and then, like falling timber, he pitched forward, dead.
Now Janson strode over to the woman captive. He felt a surge of fury and revulsion as he took in the tattered clothes, the bruised flesh, the red marks left by hands that had groped and grasped her flesh like so much modeling clay.
Wordlessly, Janson withdrew the knife from the Serb's back and sliced through the hawser, freeing her.
She slid to the floor, her back resting against the pillar, seemingly unable to stand. She curled herself up, putting her arms around her knees, drawing them toward her, and resting her head on her forearm.
He disappeared for a moment, returning with the white shirt and khaki trousers that had been worn by the man with the gold-rimmed glasses.
"Take them," he said. "Put 'em on."
Finally, she raised her head, and he saw that her face was wet with tears.
"I don't understand," she said dully.
"There's a U.S. Consulate General at Museumplein nineteen. If you can get there, they'll take care of you."
"You rescued me," she said in a strange, hollow voice. "You came for me. What the hell would you do that for?"
"I didn't come for you," he snapped. "I came for them."
"Don't lie to me," she said. "Please don't lie to me." A quaver entered her voice. She seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and yet she started to talk, drawling through her tears, desperately clinging to the tattered vestiges of her professionalism. "If you wanted to interrogate one of them, you could have taken one alive and left. You didn't. You didn't, because they'd have killed me if you did."
"Get yourself to the consulate," he said. "File an After-Action Report. You know the regs."
"Answer me, goddammit!" She rubbed the tears from her face desperately, frantically, with the palms of both hands. However traumatized and battered, she remained fiercely ashamed of the display of weakness, vulnerability. She tried to stand up, but the muscles in her legs rebelled and she only ended up sinking to the ground again.
"How come you didn't take out Steve Holmes?" She was breathing heavily. "I saw what happened. You could have taken him out. Should have taken him out. Standard combat procedure is, you take the guy out.