by Matt Hilton
Things escalated rapidly.
Assault rifles began to join the fray, and the shotgun laid down a steady backbeat. A pistol fired from further off and Mercer was glad that Rink had survived the first encounter…funny, he thought, how once over he’d wished for the direst end for Jared Rington, and yet now he was cheering him on. Misery, he’d heard, acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.
From inside the house the shotgun continued booming. Hunter’s pistol replied. Another boom was accompanied by shattering glass. Mercer felt things sifting down on him, and heard the echo of a door being barged open. It sounded as if Hunter was determined to come to close quarters with the shotgun man. The SIG made a drumroll of three shots and then silence followed. Actually, it was anything but silent, because the rain fell harder and formed an angry buzz of white noise. Drips off the porch found their way between the boards and struck Mercer’s face. He shook his head to clear his vision, and understood again that his eyes were juddering uncontrollably. Of all the times for his eyesight to fail him—
From only a few feet behind him the shotgun boomed several times. At first he feared Hunter had failed to kill the gunner, but who then was shooting out through the living room window now? A pained curse drifted from near the newly arrived car, and Mercer gave a silent cheer: Hunter had liberated the big gun. His cheer was short-lived. Assault rifles let loose on the house, and even deep under the porch Mercer wasn’t safe. He cringed as ricochets plowed through the planks on each side of him. He squirmed onto his back, holding his gun tight to his sternum, trying to pinpoint a target, but the rain coming off the deck was like a waterfall.
The barrage of gunfire on the house was too much for Hunter to contend with. His shotgun fell silent, and after a few more bursts from the assault rifles so did they. Mercer eyes were open again, and he could see clearly. He watched somebody race forward and hop up onto the deck. It had happened too fast for him to target, let alone shoot the feet out from under the attacker. A voice begged a question, and the tumult of rain made it too difficult to hear the words, but Mercer thought the gunman was on a radio, coordinating with another. The first man crept along the porch, and Mercer noted a change in shadow play as the man tread slowly along the porch. The guy came to a halt directly overhead. Mercer held his breath for fear he’d give away his hiding spot. There was more indistinguishable whispering, but it was obvious a trap was about to be sprung.
Boom!
The shotgun blasted somebody to hell, and then the house rumbled as — Mercer assumed — Hunter scrambled to a new position. Again a door was kicked in, and Hunter blasted away at the home invader, and directly above Mercer, the first gunman swung around the window frame to cut Hunter apart. Mercer couldn’t hit an elephant twenty feet away but there was no missing the man standing directly over him. With his gun butt jammed against his chest, he fired repeatedly, and heard the drumming of boots as the man’s legs and groin were torn to pieces. Hunter served the coup de grace and knocked the gunman flying off the porch. Mercer peered between his feet at where the gunman lay. The corpse steamed in the bucketing downfall. Mercer grinned rictus-like at his handiwork feeling not altogether useless for a change. Again his reason to be happy was short-lived: a grenade detonated and the concussion almost burst his eardrums and he barely heard the collapsing of the wall behind him. Boards tumbled on him, pounding him.
42
That lucky son of a gun has more lives than a goddamn cat, thought Vince as Joe Hunter took down Jason Mercer in a flying tackle that saved them both from the blast of 12 gauge buckshot. Vince, more bemused than disappointed at Hunter’s seeming invulnerability, watched as Hunter avoided several more attempts on his life until he tumbled off the porch and came under fire from David Paulson. It looked as if Paulson winged him, getting Hunter in a leg, but unsurprisingly to Vince it also galvanised Hunter into seek-and-destroy mode. As Hunter disappeared around the far side of the house, Vince adjusted his binoculars, scanning for what had become of Hunter’s pals. Rink had darted along the porch and hurdled the railing, and must have gone to ground out in the taller, coarse grass at the edge of the grounds, where it met the untamed wilderness next to the Apalachicola River. Mercer had also disappeared in the time that he’d concentrated his binocs on Hunter, but couldn’t have gotten far.
Vince licked his lips in thought, then keyed his throat mike. ‘Bravo team. Move in. Pin those bastards down.’
‘Copy that,’ came the reply.
The sound of a revving engine heralded the approach of the second three-man team. Vince didn’t hang about until the reserves were in place. He rose up from concealment where he’d set up between the V formed of some tree trunks a hundred yards away from the house. As Bravo team roared into battle, he used the distraction to jog from his hiding place to the longer grass to the right of the house. Rink was out there somewhere, and a danger to Vince, but he was confident the man was currently trying to find an advantageous position and wouldn’t have spotted him approaching through the pummeling rain. Besides, Vince had another of his Alpha team set up out there, and Rink would be kept too busy to contend with Vince too. Vince lowered to one knee, so that the tall grass mostly concealed him. Bravo team had arrived and was getting in position.
Inside the house, the shotgunner was trying to make up for the failed ambush by blasting out windows and walls. These were the best hired guns that Paulson could rustle up? Up until now Vince was unimpressed. When all was said and done, it didn’t really matter to him how the battle was fought, only that he was the ultimate victor. Slightly irksome was the fact the gunner had waited a second too long before shooting, and the fool must have given some kind of warning to his prey as they stood in a bunch outside the door: had things gone to plan, that first shot should have at least taken out one of them, and perhaps disabled the others. It would’ve been a simple task to then move in and mop up the others, but now Vince had a full-on siege to contend with. He wasn’t put off by the thought of a prolonged battle, and now that a lightning storm had blown over them, he was happy that their gunshots would be confused with thunder and go unreported.
‘Paulson,’ he said into his mike, ‘what’s going on back there?’
Paulson came back: ‘Hunter’s inside, I think he’s taken Durrell out. I’m getting no reply.’
Harry Durrell was the shotgun man. Yeah, Vince thought, because he’d heard the volleys of competing shots ringing out, and the last to be heard had been from a pistol. Durrell was down and out of the game.
‘Have you got eyes on Hunter?’
‘Negative.’
‘So what are you waiting for?’
‘He needs softening up first,’ said Paulson.
From somewhere nearby came pistol fire, answered immediately by an assault rifle, causing Vince to duck lower. Rink had engaged the gunman out in the tall grass. He would prefer to be the one to end Rink’s life, but he’d be a bonus prize at most, while Hunter was the trophy he really wanted. He might yet get to kill Rink. If he were a betting man he’d still place Rink with a pistol at higher odds than a punk with a carbine. No, he shouldn’t think like that. In the past he’d paid Hunter and Rink far too much respect, and doing so had been to their advantage. There’d be no more looking up to those old timers, and no pity shown either. He’d come here to kill them, and must focus on that alone.
A shotgun boomed repeatedly from within the house. Durrell wasn’t the one to pull the trigger. The target was the SUV that a couple of Bravo team sheltered behind. He heard one of them curse in pain, obviously hit, but still in the game.
‘Light him up boys,’ Vince commanded.
Two carbine’s let loose on the house, the bullets shredding the walls and what remained of the windows, and probably everything else within. From their earlier recce of the house, after Durrell’s forced entry of the front door lock, they’d discovered the home largely devoid of furniture, only a sunken old couch, a few bedrolls in the bedrooms, clothing and sundry belongings in various oth
ers. There was nowhere Hunter could hide from the flying bullets, to which the wooden walls would prove little impediment. Vince was happy to see that the two gunners had the sense to target the house from one end to the other, ensuring there was no hiding place. The third man, the one wounded by Hunter, joined in, and emptied an entire magazine through the front window in a single sustained pull on his trigger.
There was a lull in the fighting, if not the storm.
In his earpiece, Vince heard Paulson ask for a situation report from Allonby: Allonby was the guy that had engaged Rink. His negative response probably meant that the odds Vince gave him against winning had proven true, or maybe that he’d killed Rink with his dying shots. There was no sign or sounds of life out in the long grass, only the constant susurration of water through the tall blades.
Neither was there any hint of life from inside the house.
Vince ordered Paulson to check, while also instructing the nearest member of Bravo team to move in to cover him.
He could detect the uncertainty in Paulson’s response.
‘What are you waitin’ for, man? I thought you wanted revenge on these motherfuckers?’ said Vince.
‘I do, these fuckers killed my baby sister, and I want to see them all dead. But not at the expense of my own life,’ replied Paulson.
It was the reason why Vince had sought David Paulson out. The ex CIA agent, and now private contractor, might not share a family name with Pamela Patrick, but he shared a birth mother. In the years before Arrowsake had disavowed Vince, he’d worked alongside numerous assets and had built a network of contacts in and outside of the organisation. He had discovered that Pam Patrick, the female operator killed by Hunter’s sniper at the hostage exchange, and also wounded and beaten by the man himself during the assault on the Mexico Beach hotel, had an older brother she also contracted to on mercenary jobs. Vince had played on Paulson’s desire to avenge his murdered sister, encouraging the man to pull in several of his assets to assist in killing their mutual enemies. Through his contacts in Langley, Paulson had learned of plans to deliver, on Walter Hayes Conrad’s instruction, a secret package to a boat in Port St. Joe, scheduled — it was whispered — for a burial at sea. Langley, supposedly a place of secrets was also a place of human beings, most of whom suffered human traits: gossip and speculation was as rife there as anywhere else people gathered around the water cooler. Some further digging, and well-placed bribes, had discovered this ranch as a likely hideout of Joe Hunter and his merry men. It was a handy staging post from where Hunter, Rink and Mercer could leave from to attend the secret burial of Sue Bouchard. Initially Paulson had planned assaulting them at dockside, but Vince had argued that the remote ranch was a far more suitable battleground, where there was little fear of involvement from local law enforcement officers. Paulson’s team had conducted surveillance on the ranch, confirming it was where their enemies were in hiding, and once they left the farm that morning for the funeral, had moved in to launch the ambush on their return. Despite losing Durrell and probably Allonby too, the plan hadn’t been a complete bust. To all intents and purposes Rink was out of the fight, Hunter was down for good, and Mercer was barely an afterthought.
Vince asked Paulson: ‘Who could have survived that shit storm we just laid on him? Take a quick look, confirm he’s down and we’ll go in together and finish him off.’
‘You’ll back me up?’
‘Of course, man. I wanna be there to see the light go out of his eyes.’
Vince ordered the two backmost gunners to cover, and waved the nearest to approach the broken window along the porch.
‘I’m on my way. What do you see, Paulson?’ Vince said as he slipped around the side of the house.
‘Nothing. Wait one, I’ll take another look.’
Boom!
Paulson said no more, and it was obvious why.
Vince had to reappraise his earlier summation of Hunter. The lucky son of a gun had more lives than a clowder of goddamn cats!
Not to worry. Vince was still intent on proving his mettle, and finishing Hunter once and for all: he was armed with something that’d challenge a god’s immortality. He spotted Paulson’s corpse slumped under the furthest window away. There was little left of Paulson’s ferret face. Vince had no intention of ending up blasted at close range too. He sought entrance via the safety of the kitchen door, presuming Hunter was still in the same room he’d shot Paulson from. He told the gunner at the front to get ready to shoot and then he kicked open the door and lunged inside, his gun up and ready. He spotted and instantly ignored Durrell who was splayed on his back at the centre of the kitchen.
He could hear the faint scrape of somebody shuffling in the adjacent room.
Through his mike, he said to the gunman on the porch, ‘I’ll draw his fire, you shoot that fucker.’
‘Copy that,’ said the gunman.
Vince was about to stick his hand out round the door and fire a few random shots into the living room, but Hunter beat him to it. Buckshot tore through the wall into the kitchen, each shot closer to Vince, who was forced to duck, then go to his knees to avoid them. There was a series of gunshots, lighter fire than from a carbine, and Vince assumed his plan to catch Hunter in a pincer movement had failed. Bits of tiles and splinters of wood dusted his back, as he returned to his feet. He shoved his pistol in its holster, and reached instead for his belt. Unclipping a grenade and pulling the pin in one swift movement, he peeked around the doorframe and instantly spotted his foe scrambling away across the floor. Hunter had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
‘Survive this, Golden Boy,’ he crowed as he tossed the grenade into the room, then ran and took a flying leap out of the back door.
43
The device Vince tossed at me was probably an M67 fragmentation grenade, packed with six and a half ounces of explosive. Its effective injury radius was about fifty feet; anyone within fifteen feet would be literally torn to ribbons by the flying shrapnel. I was about ten feet from where it hit the floor and rolled. Its detonation mechanism was most likely fitted with a pyrotechnic delay fuse, meaning my life expectancy was no longer than four or five seconds.
All of this I mention in retrospect, because at the time I wasn’t thinking much beyond saving my arse. As soon as the grenade was in flight I rose up and launched towards the only escape route I could. The front door was still shut, and worse, it opened inwards, but it was my only possible egress. The first shotgun blasts had smashed holes in it, and the withering rain of bullets from the assault team’s carbines had cut more holes through it. I threw aside the shotgun and hit it with a rounded shoulder, my elbows tucked tight around my head. At much the same instant the grenade detonated, and I went through the wooden barrier with a headful of nothing, trailing smoke and blood as I rode the concussive blast over the porch and onto the ground beyond.
I’ve no idea if I rolled once or maybe several times before I came to a halt, huddled in a ball and feeling as if I’d just gone ten rounds with Godzilla. My ears were ringing so hard I could hear nothing, and couldn’t think straight. I had no idea I was partly buried beneath debris blown out from the front wall and roof of the house, or that behind me the porch’s deck had partly collapsed. I was completely unaware that two enemy gunmen armed with assault rifles were very close by, but who had for now taken cover behind the cars. Frag grenades can hurl shrapnel more than eight hundred feet, so it was possible some of the flying shards had come down around them.
Some cognizance came into my mind, and it was in the sense of pain. My left scapula felt as if it was on fire, and my leg, already in flames from the earlier gunshot throbbed with fresh agony. I’d not been fully spared the grenade’s fury, but I welcomed the sensation of pain: it confirmed I was still alive. I unfurled, groaning in anticipation of further misery, but for now my beaten body couldn’t hurt any more than it did. Pushing to my knees, I shed some of the detritus off my back, and then had to crawl forward on my palms through the mud to free my left leg fr
om under something heavier. Shaking my head to clear it, I spat saliva on the ground, and was happy to find it wasn’t bloody, so flying shrapnel hadn’t pierced my lungs. I stood on wobbly legs, stretching out the muscles around my shoulder blade and felt a ripping sensation. The smaller intercostal muscles between my ribs contracted in protest.
Everything around me was blurry. It took a moment after lucidity returned to my vision for me to remember that it was bucketing down. I exhaled a heavy breath, and pulled in another whether my ribcage wanted me to or not. I was about to turn, to survey the wreckage of the ranch, when reality returned with a start. My ears must have popped, reacclimatizing to the air pressure, and the sounds of the storm returned. My attention snapped on different sounds; the two surviving gunmen had risen up, aiming their carbines at me. One of them glared daggers at me, and I took it he was the man whose foot I’d hit earlier. For a reason unknown to me yet, they both held fire, even though I was at their mercy. I caught where they aimed quick glances and tried to turn.
Vince’s guitar string garrote dropped over my head, and instantly cinched tightly around my throat.