Page 94 of Gryphon

“Uh, Tamar, I don’t know what happened…” If he could hear his own lie, she certainly could as well.

And he was so sick of lies he could scream.

“T’rats’i! No, I know exactly what happened. They were trying to start a war between NATO and Russia. They may have succeeded, I don’t know if we stopped them in time.”

She took another step out onto the rooftop patio.

Her eyes scanned from Kancheli to Kurbanov, then back to Kancheli.

Tamar opened her mouth to speak when the sharp crack of a bullet’s supersonic passage resounded off the glass.

78

“Now that. That was sweet.”

Holly worked the bolt to chamber another round before looking to see if she agreed with Max’s assessment.

She did.

79

Pavle had flinched, but felt no pain. Tamar hadn’t shot him.

Instead, she was cradling her hand and looking down at the MP5K.

In hindsight, he could see what happened.

One moment, the submachine gun centered rock steady on his chest as Tamar scanned the two corpses.

The next, the gun flew aside, skidding along the paving stones until it tumbled against the low parapet and stopped there.

As if by mutual consent, he and Tamar both moved close enough to look at it.

The small gun had been mostly folded in half by the round that had struck it side-on. He glanced back up at the Chronicle and wondered whether he had Max or the Aussie to thank for his reprieve.

The question remained as to how long a reprieve that might be.

Tamar looked at him and whispered the first words she’d ever spoken to him.

“Starting a war?”

Pavle nodded.

She sighed as she looked down at the remains of Chief Kancheli, “My father always was a bastard.”

He almost laughed. His future father-in-law would be a delight compared to Kancheli.

80

Someone on the bridge made a horrid retching sound. Kerstin hoped that they didn’t puke on some critical system.

Slaloming a seventy-meter corvette displacing over six hundred tonnes shared little with the feeling of a weaving ski boat. The ship didn’t twist and dance, it lurched from one tack to the other.

Knowing that a couple hundred kilos of explosives was hunting them, with highly sophisticated electronics specializing in ignoring false signals, didn’t help.

“Positive tracking,” tactical called out. “Half a kilometer at eight-three degrees. Thirty seconds out.”

She glanced at the clock. Three minutes before the torpedoes would be out of fuel.

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