Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [141]
They started down the two steps, the Kurd pushing Katzen ahead. Katzen opened the door. As he did, he drew on the survival training which had taught him how to use stairs to his advantage. He crouched. For a moment, the gun was pointing at the empty air above him. Making sure he was low and centered, Katzen reached across his chest with his left arm. He grabbed the arm fabric of the jacket his captor was wearing. Then he tugged the fabric toward his shoulder, dipped his shoulder down, and pulled the Kurd over.
The man tumbled head-first over Katzen. He landed on the ground, on his back, and Katzen leapt toward him. The Kurd was already getting up when Katzen landed on him. Katzen's head was facing the Kurd's feet, the gun hand to his right. He turned, raised his fist, and pounded the side hard on the man's wrist. The fingers opened reflexively. Katzen grabbed the.38.
The American took a moment to turn and look for the two men and their prisoner. They had stopped down the road, about twenty yards behind the van. One of the men had turned to look at him.
"Yu af!" he cried. "Stop!"
Katzen heard the other Kurd in the van running toward the doorway. Katzen regarded the Kurd on the ground. He'd come out here to save a life, not to take one. But if he didn't do something his own life would be lost. Still facing the Kurd's feet, Katzen raised the.38 and put a slug through the man's right foot.
As the Kurd shrieked, Katzen glanced toward the two executioners. The one who'd looked back at the van turned his pistol toward Katzen. The moment he did so the prisoner twisted like a top to his right, literally rolling his neck off the barrel of the other man's gun. Simultaneously, he cocked his right arm like a chicken wing and raised the elbow head-high. As he turned he rolled the elbow behind him, using it to push the gun aside. For a moment, neither weapon was trained on the captive. The prisoner kept turning until he was at the side of his would-be executioners, facing him. As the gunman turned to retarget the prisoner, the captive lifted his hands so they were on either side of the gunman's wrist--palms turned to one another as though he were about to clap. Then the palms flashed toward the gunman's forearm, one slightly closer to his elbow than the other. When they came together they kept moving, snapping the man's wrist between them. Katzen could hear it break. The gun fell. The captive bent to retrieve it.
All of that happened in an instant, and it was all Katzen saw. Behind him he could hear the Kurd in his heavy desert boots clomping down the steps of the ROC. There were shouts coming from the cave to his left. In a moment they'd have him pinned in a three-way cross fire. There was only one avenue open to him: straight ahead, toward the edge of the dirt road. There was a drop on the other side, he didn't know how far, but a fall could be more forgiving than a rain of bullets. He opted to take it. Hopping off the writhing Kurd, Katzen dropped to his side, rolled several yards, and went over the ledge.
He never seemed to hit the steep slope so much as roll alongside it. Branches cracked as he went down and rocks punched him as he rolled over them. He held tight to the gun and covered his face with that arm as he tried to stop his fall with the other. He heard several gunshots, muted by distance and by the sound of sliding dirt and splitting twigs. But he didn't think that anyone was firing at him. The shots were too far away to be coming from the ledge.
Katzen stopped with a jolt. He'd landed on his back in the crook of a tree growing sideways from the slope. It not only punched the air from him, it felt like it broke a rib. He lay there for just a moment as he drew a slow, painful breath. There were more shots, and Katzen squinted up at the solid blue sky. As he did, someone looked down at him. It was the man who had stayed behind in the van. After a moment,