Free Survivalist - 21 - To End All War by Jerry Ahern Page A

crawling out under the back partition. Natalia kicked out of her shoes. “You know, it was really good luck coming in here, Annie.” She had the suppressor fitted stainless steel PPK/S American out of her purse, hanging it by the trigger guard on a hook on the partition nearest her right hand. She unbuttoned the waistband of her skirt, thumbed it down over her hips, and shrugged the garment to the floor around her ankles. She reached into the neckline of her blouse and tucked the solitary spare magazine she had for the PPK/S into the cleavage between her breasts. “I wish we’d known about this banquet tonight. I don’t even have any good shoes. We’re going to have to find some, Annie. What?” She paused for an instant, as if listening to Annie. “That’s a good idea!” She had one of the two evening gowns in her left hand (the one she wasn’t planning on buying, just in case it took a stray bullet) and her pistol in her right hand, the litde .380’s slide mounted thumb safety up and off. “Ohh, all right, you can use it, but I thought you didn’t like that scent.” She hoped, if the men were already in the store and listening, her conversation sounded vacuous enough. She peered through the crack between the door and the side wall, and she thought she saw men’s shoes near a rack of hostess skirts.
    And then Annie, from about twenty feet away, to the right and nearer the front of the store, shouted so loudly she could have awakened the dead, “Now, Natalia!”
    Natalia kicked the stall door open and threw herself left and down, going into a roll as the first shots came. Annie’s .45 boomed earsplitting in the confines of the shop, the chatter of an M16 starting as Natalia came up on her knees. Four men were clearly visible, a fifth on the floor already dead. Natalia’s right hand raised instinctively as she pulled the Walther’s trigger through double action and shot the man with the chopped-down Ml6 through the right temple.
    She swung the muzzle of the PPK/S, Annie’s .45 and Natalia’s .380 discharging almost simultanously, killing a third man holding a Beretta 92F in both hands as he was just turning to fire on her. The last two men broke for the doors.
    Annie fired, then fired again, one of the men pitching forward through the window glass and onto the sidewalk. But he picked himself up, stumbling into a run at the heels of the other man.
    Natalia was already running after him, jumping over one of the dead men, careful of her stockinged feet as she ran past the broken glass into the pedestrian walkway. The few private vehicles were already knotting into what would pass for a traffic jam here, and jaws dropped as faces turned toward her … a woman in a blouse with only the bottom part of a silk teddy covering the lower portion of her body, a gun in her hand; Natalia, never considering herself an exhibitionist, laughed at the thought. The wounded man tripped and fell, pushing a pistol toward her as a female pedestrian near him screamed.
    Natalia moved into a crouch and held the Walther in both hands as she fired. The sound of the suppressor-fitted pistol’s report was best compared, she’d always thought, to the sound she’d first heard five centuries ago while posing as an American housewife on an assignment for the KGB. It sounded identical—to her, at least—to the loud plop made when one cracked open a tubular package of oven-ready biscuits against a countertop.
    She fired again, then again, hitting the man in the throat and the left eyeball, all three shots killing ones.
    The last man turned toward her and fired. Natalia dropped to the pavement, running her nylons as at least two shots sang past her. Annie screamed from behind her, “Watch out! He’s got a hostage!”
    Natalia was changing magazines for the PPK/S as she rolled over the curb and into the street, coming up on both knees, the pistol at maximum extension of both arms.
    “Don’t!” Natalia shouted to the fifth man.
    The