More movement as he reached the bottom landing—a third gunner. Nimec raked the gloom with fire, heard an agonized cry, saw a body fall straight from the knees, a fine mist of blood glittering in the throw of his flash. At the same moment one of the Sword ops racing down the stairway behind him—Rice?—he wasn’t sure in the confusion—loosed a sustained barrage and took out another of the waiting shooters.

Silence then. Absolute silence.

Nimec took a quick glance back at his men, all of them down on the lower landing with him now.

“Everybody okay?”

Three nods.

Nimec stood warily, moved his gun from side to side, sweeping the area in front of the stairs with his tac light. Four men lay dead below them, NVGs over their eyes. He wondered if there had been any more waiting, thought of the one who’d opened fire and slipped clear of his initial return burst. Was he among those sprawled on the ground?

He had no sooner asked himself that question than the answer was violently delivered.

Burkhart sprang from where he’d concealed himself to the right of the bottom landing, raised the barrel of his weapon, released a crisp stream of fire. Bullets studded the risers beneath Nimec, throwing up a bright shower of sparks.

Nimec gestured his men back, his finger continuously squeezing the trigger of his VVRS as he leaped down the stairs and attempted to track the source of the volley with its flash attachment.

Darting clear of his shots, Burkhart brought up his gun for another staccato burst, heard a single sharp tak! as one of his own bullets ricocheted off the handrail . . . and then felt a slap on the upper left side of his chest, followed immediately by a hot needle of heat in the same region.

His finger still looped around his rifle’s trigger, Burkhart looked down at himself. Blood seeping through the front of his parka where the rebounded bullet had struck his heart, the strength seeping from his hand as shots continued to spurt from the Sturmgewehr’s barrel in loose, wildly straying patterns, he looked down at himself.

He could have almost smiled at the sublime jest as he fell.

Nimec crouched beside the dying man, heard him struggling to say something to him, couldn’t make out what it was.

He leaned closer, removed the man’s night-sight goggles, pulled the balaclava from his face, and for a moment focused on an odd crescent-moon scar on the man’s right cheek.

“Die Ironie des Lebens,” Burkhart said in German.

Nimec shook his head, unable to understand.

Burkhart realized his mistake. He pushed his head off the stone ground, coughed up blood.

“The irony of life,” he managed to say in English.

Or thought he did in his fading confusion.

In fact, the words never left his mouth.

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE