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“Richlin. It’s me. It’s me!”

The wild panic in Rio’s eyes fades. She draws a sobbing breath and drops the koummya to the floor.

Geer releases her, bends down to retrieve the knife, and carefully slides it back into its scabbard.

“Jack! Hang on!”

“No, Rio, no!” Jack yells in a voice strained by pain and fear.

She glances across the street and sees Jenou and Molina in a doorway. They look pale and frightened.

“I can get him,” Rio says to Geer. “Give me covering fire, I’ll grab him and—”

“Goddammit, Richlin, no! No! You know better. That sniper is sitting up there waiting for one of us to show our heads. You’d be dead before you got halfway to him!”

Crack!

Jack’s leg jerks from the impact, and he bellows in pain.

“You know the routine,” Geer says intently. “He’s gonna keep Jack screaming until we break and go for him.”

Rio manages a tight nod.

Jenou yells, “What do we do, Rio?”

“Stay put!” Rio cries.

What do we do, Rio?

“I’m going to bazooka this Nazi son of a bitch!” Rio says. Then, “Castain, stay put! Molina, go back, tell them to send up the bazooka team.”

No answer. She looks outside again, and both Jenou and Molina are gone.

“Shit!” Geer says. “They’re going to try and encircle him.”

“We need to put some covering fire on the bastard,” Rio says, and leans out of the window just long enough to fire a burst from her Thompson at what she suspects is the right building.

Crack!

The sniper hits the place where Rio had been half a second earlier.

Rio jerks her thumb upward, and she and Geer go pounding up the stairs to find an elderly couple cowering in their bed, covers pulled up as some kind of symbolic protection.

Rio goes to the bedroom window and carefully cracks the shutter. She peers through the narrow gap and this time she is almost certain that she sees movement in a window on the hotel’s third and top floor.

“Give me your M1,” she says.

“Screw you, Richlin, I have it.” Geer crouches, takes careful aim, and fires once. Th

e sniper is momentarily visible, recoiling. “Yeah, that’s him. Top floor, far left.”

Rio peeks and can just barely see Jack lying on the cobbles. His belly is bloody from side to side. His left leg bleeds too.

And she has nothing. No plan. No sudden rush of courage. Jack is bait in a trap. Anyone trying to help him will be shot. She feels a strange disconnection, as if her brain simply does not want to face the facts. But at the same time another part of her brain is spinning madly, going around and around in circles, trying everything, knowing it’s useless, but powerless to stop herself.

Suddenly she’s on her rear end. Her legs have simply collapsed. She sits with her Thompson on her lap, gazing down at it through a blur.

Geer squats beside her. “It’s okay, Rio. Just stay put. I’ll take care of it.”