by Matt Hilton
She shrugged. 'They paid for their failure. The one who survived? He won't survive the night… I have already arranged that.'
'You have a low opinion of those working for you.'
'Only when they displease me. You didn't find Bryce Lang and ultimately you failed to kill Hunter.'
'Like I said: I haven't finished yet.'
'Oh, but you have.' She lifted a hand from under the sheets and waved it at Cesar Calle and his henchman lying on the floor. 'This severs our contract, Rickard. You have led Alvaro Silva's men to my home, and you have murdered the man who was financing you… it is over.'
'It doesn't work that way. Only I say when it's over.' Rickard put down his assault rifle and pulled his blade from his belt. 'Not an ugly whore like you.'
A bullet had stroked her face, blinding her in one eye, and cutting a furrow up her forehead to her hairline. She was permanently disfigured, but only when viewed from one angle: from her untouched side she was still incredibly beautiful. Not that he saw her that way. Jimena's beauty might hold power over the likes of Cesar Calle, forcing the man to do her bidding like her personal lapdog, but to him she was just a hopeless bitch in need of putting in her place.
Deep in his gut he felt the stirring of the serpent. It was not a supernatural creature that infested him, but the expression of the rage and fury he held for all women. It was the culmination of the seed planted there when as a child his mother had abandoned him and left him in the hands of his brutal and sexually deviant stepfather. He had suffered terribly and for that he hated all females. And he had a desire to show that he was not someone a woman could disregard like he was garbage to be thrown in the gutter.
The serpent coiled and demanded release.
He lifted the blade.
Jimena laughed at him.
Rickard paused. 'I'm going to kill you and you laugh at me?'
'Do it, Rickard. You will be doing me a huge favour.' Jimena allowed her hand to flutter across her body and down to her paralysed legs. Then she reached up and touched the horrendous scar on her face.
Death is not the greatest of evils; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to. Rickard remembered the words that Jimena had once quoted to him. He believed they were the words of the philosopher Sophocles. 'What is this, bitch? Reverse psychology. You think that if you invite death I'll spare you?'
'You will kill me or one of Silva's men will do it. I don't care. I will be with my child again.' She glanced again at the wreckage of her body, then calmly at Rickard. 'I will be whole again.'
'That's debatable,' Rickard said. 'Considering that I'm going to cut you to pieces.'
Jimena peered up at him with her one good eye. In its dark depths there was resolution. 'Just make sure that you do it right this time. I've suffered enough: don't leave me the way you left your wife.'
'My wife's dead.'
A smile tugged at Jimena's lips. Again it was as if she was patronising an obstinate boy.
Rickard's eyes puckered. 'I shot her.'
Jimena coughed out a laugh. 'I was shot, too, and much worse than Alisha was. You failed to kill her the way you failed everything else.'
'You're lying.'
'Why would I?'
'Because you're a deceitful bitch, just like every other woman I ever-' Rickard noted the subtle movement of Jimena's other hand beneath the sheets. 'What have you got there?'
He leaned down, readying the knife.
And that was when he heard the clipped command from behind him.
'Drop the knife, Rickard.'
The metamorphosis that came over Jimena's features was shocking. She went from calm resolution to insane hatred in a heartbeat. Without looking, Rickard knew who had just entered the room. Jimena twisted, surprisingly fast for one who'd appeared so feeble all this time, and the gun that she had concealed under the sheet switched from aiming directly at his gut to the man in the doorway behind him. Jimena shrieked and fired at the same time.
Bullets punched through the sheets, making a series of small black holes in the material. Then they sped at supersonic speed past Rickard. He was already reacting, spinning away, but he wasn't quick enough and felt like he'd been kicked in the ribs. His feet caught under the bent knee of Cesar Calle and he stumbled, falling over the dead man to sprawl on the floor. Rickard immediately rolled over, going for his own gun, as he stared incredulously back at the woman.
Jimena was still screeching like a wildcat. She tore her hand from under the sheet, lifting out a Smith and Wesson Sigma, and reared up to get a cleaner shot at her target. Instinctively Rickard knew that the gun had a capacity for seventeen rounds; enough were left that Jimena was a real threat to his ongoing existence.
But so was Joe Hunter.
Rickard looked for the man, but couldn't immediately see him. Maybe Jimena had killed him and he was on the ground, or he'd fled back out the door. He turned back to Jimena, just as she brought her Sigma round towards him.
It would have been more fulfilling to use the ceramic blade, but he was no sentimental fool. He fired. One-two-three bullets in a close group. Every one of them struck the target: Jimena's chest. She was flung back against the pillows and her mouth opened with a rush of air and blood forced from her lungs. Then her head dipped and she didn't move again. The Sigma fell from her limp fingers, bounced once on the mattress then clattered to the floor on the far side of the bed. In the brief moment that he paid her any notice, Jimena looked at peace. Bitch!
Rickard came to his feet.
He looked to the door. Beyond it he could hear the rattle of a machine gun. The fight now sounded like it was in the house. That, of course, was the least of his concerns. Joe Hunter was much closer by. He just couldn't see…
Hunter came up over the top of the bed, a SIG Sauer in hand. He looked unharmed and wholly intent on killing.
But Rickard wasn't one to stand round and wait for death.
They both fired at the same time.
Chapter 36
Jimena Grajales hated me with every atom of her being.
The instant she saw me in the doorway the switch on her sanity flicked over and hit meltdown.
It kind of blew my chances of saving her life.
Sounds crazy, I guess, but even as I realised the true identity of my enemy I couldn't dredge up the minutest grain of enmity towards her. She'd been terribly wounded, had lost her child, and it was all because I hadn't had it in me to shoot when I had the chance. As misguided as that was, it wasn't so surprising that she hated me so much. She'd ordered the other members of the hit team killed, had extended that order to include their families: I should have hated her equally. But I didn't. All I saw was a horrifically injured woman grieving the loss of her baby boy. In that moment I'd have given up my life to save hers.
Then she began shooting at me.
I saw the tug of the gun barrel on the sheet and I dropped low. Her bullets punched the wall above my head, scattering particles of plaster on my shoulders. She was struggling with the gun and I went to my knees, under her line of fire, dumping the machine gun which had become an encumbrance and pulling out my SIG. I still didn't want to shoot her, but that choice was taken from me in the next instant. I heard three almost simultaneous cracks of a gun and Jimena went silent. Her Sigma clattered on the floor next to me.
Snatching a glance under the bed, I could see movement directly opposite me. Rickard had gone down, tripping over a corpse, but he was already coming back to his feet. I was only a beat behind him. I stood up, my gun extended, and fired.
Rickard fired too.
I felt the tug of his bullet as it struck my SIG. Damn well near tore my hand off as it ripped the gun out of my grip. That was either the best or the luckiest shot I'd ever witnessed. My bet was on the latter.
My bullet hit Rickard high in his left trapezius muscle and he twisted with the impact, so that his second shot went over my head, struck the light fixture in the ceiling and plunged us into half-light.
I
looked for my gun. Couldn't see it. Maybe it was damaged beyond repair. The Sigma was a few feet away. So was my assault rifle where I'd dropped it. There was no time for any of them; I vaulted up on to Jimena's deathbed, then through the air at Rickard.
He was already bringing his gun round to shoot me again, but his angle was wrong. I landed on my feet directly in front of him, even as I swept my forearm against his gun, knocking his next shot astray. Then my momentum took me chest to chest with him and we both crashed into a wall. I punched Rickard in the face. It took everything not to scream; an agonising flame leaped from my hand all the way to my brain. Something felt like it had broken in my hand when my SIG had been wrenched away.
Yet I couldn't let that stop me. If I gave him even the briefest of moments to rally, he would shoot me point-blank and that would be the end of it. So, my damaged hand became a bludgeon as I drove it four times in quick succession into his body.
Yelling directly into his face, I grappled with his gun. He yelled back. Nothing either of us said made any sense; it was just the bestial roaring of two wild animals engaged in a life or death battle.
Rickard was no slouch. He gave me a couple punches of his own. One of them got me in my right ear, the other dangerously close to the eye socket. I head-butted him, and he gave me one right back. He kneed at my groin, but I jammed his leg between mine and forced him against the wall. We were too close for clean strikes now and we both clawed. I got my fingers in his nostrils and forced his head back. Rickard stuck his thumb in my already stinging eye. Finally I managed to bang his gun against the wall and he released it. But that gave him two functioning hands as weapons. He punched me in the ribs. Air left my lungs, but I wasn't about to back away now. If I did that he might draw that blade he'd been holding earlier and then I'd be in real trouble. Instead, I sank my teeth into his shoulder at the exact point where my bullet had nicked him moments before. Rickard howled,and I echoed his scream through my clamped teeth.
We were both in frenzy, unmindful of the form standing in the open door behind us. We were too intent on ripping lumps from each other. But even in that primal state something impinged upon my senses. The blocking shadow in the doorway suddenly fled, allowing light to spill inside from the passageway. On the beam of light I saw the tumbling cylindrical object arch towards us as if it was moving in super-slow motion.
I experienced one of those snapshot moments.
L2A2.
My subconscious mind identified the object. It took another split second for it to push the military term to its hiding place in the back of my head and come up with the layman's name. Hand grenade.
Dear God!
I don't know which of us spoke those words. Maybe we both did. Because in the next instant we spilled apart just as the grenade landed in the gap we'd made.
The L2A2 is an anti-personnel weapon, a tin-plated fragmentation device with a coil of notched wire and packed with one hundred and seventy grams of high-explosive filling. It is designed to kill anyone in a radius of up to eighteen yards. The room we were in was no more than eight or nine yards square. It didn't give either of us very good odds at survival.
There was only seconds until detonation.
I went one way and Rickard the other. To be honest I forgot all about him in that instant, was only vaguely aware that he was nearer the exit door than I was. I threw myself over Jimena's still form and on to the floor, crouched and got my fingers under the edge of her bed and heaved it up so that the bed toppled, spilling its occupant on to the floor. The bed on its side wasn't much of a shield, but it was all I had.
It's hard to describe the explosion. I was so close that I didn't actually hear it, just felt the metal frame of the bed slam me and throw me back against the near wall. For the briefest of moments it seemed the frame was going to cut me to pieces, as though I was being passed through a massive dicing machine. But then the pressure was gone, I went face down on the floor and the bed collapsed on top of me.
That wasn't so bad.
Until I tried to raise my head and found that the commands of my brain were being ignored by my body. Then I heard noise: the slamming beat of blood pounding through my inner ears, someone roaring in deep-throated agony.
Pain assaulted me in every fibre.
My fingertips were twitching and I was oddly aware of the movement as though watching from outside myself. I wondered who was groaning in agony. A black wave passed through my mind and I felt like I was falling into a deep hole. I clawed at a dull spark of lucidity, refusing to succumb to the darkness, except it was a losing battle.
It was as though a black drape dropped over my head. In panic I imagined that I was being zipped into a body bag and I fought against the enfolding material. I'm still alive, I wanted to scream, but nothing came out. I kicked, bucked and came to my knees. Or that's how it seemed. When I opened my eyes again I was still face down. A troop of Nazis marched over my spine stamping down with their jackboots.
And someone was still groaning.
Me.
I shoved over on to my side. It was an Olympic-scale effort just to do that. My hearing was compressed by the pressure of the detonation, so that all I could hear were screeches and clicks and the beating of my own heart. The latter at least was a good thing. Didn't mean I was going to survive but it was a start.
Coming to some semblance of lucidity, I unfolded my arms; only then realising that I'd wrapped them round my skull at the last moment. It meant that my earlier image of watching my twitching fingers couldn't have been true, but everything about the entire situation felt more than surreal. Pressing an elbow to the bed frame, I pushed against it. The bed wouldn't move. Blinking through dust, I saw that one of the legs had been thrust into the wall, skewering deep into the plaster covering. It had missed my body by inches.
It was a Herculean task to get a knee under me and press my shoulder against the bed and move it away. As the bed frame scraped across the floor, I slipped and went down hard on my damaged hand. I cringed, but pushed up again. Part of me wanted to give in, to lie down and succumb to the bliss of unconsciousness. Another part screamed at me to get my arse in gear. The screamer was the most adamant. Even if Rickard was dead, the one who'd thrown the grenade at us wasn't. Any second now, he'd be coming back to make sure the explosion had done its work.
The room was full of smoke and dust, and dripping stuff. I didn't like to think about what was smeared on the ceiling and walls, or what the crimson chunks were that had been scattered to the four corners of the room. No way possible to count if those steaming entrails belonged to three corpses or four.
Staggering, I made it round the edge of the bed. First I looked to the door but I could detect no movement through the acrid smoke so I looked at the bed instead. The mattress had been shredded. Clumps of foam erupted from ragged holes where shrapnel had torn into it. The metal headboard had been ripped loose and was a mangled wreck a few feet away. A dark banner floated on the unnatural breeze as displaced air began forcing its way back into the room. It took a moment or so to realise that it was a lock of Jimena Grajales' hair. I closed my eyes against the sight and turned away.
My ears were pulsating.
Gunfire crackled from somewhere, but my senses were so rattled that I couldn't get a fix on the direction. I placed my palms on my ears, pressing and releasing, attempting to pop my eardrums into a more natural configuration. When I withdrew, the palm of my left hand was spotted with blood. I didn't think that my eardrum was ruptured; the blood was more likely from a superficial wound on my face. Who knew?
I'd more important things to worry about.
I gave myself a once-over. I hurt everywhere but, apart from my throbbing hand, nothing seemed to have been broken or torn loose. So I bent in search of a weapon.
First thing I found was my SIG Sauer. There was an indentation on the slide where Rickard's lucky shot had struck it. I doubted it would function properly, but still jammed it into my waistband. Call me sentimental but the g
un had been with me through too many trials to leave it lying there.
I kicked through drifts of collapsed ceiling and shattered bodies and saw my assault rifle. I shook off the dust, ejected the magazine, slapped it back in place. Sliding the bolt, I ejected a shell, then racked a new one in the chamber. Round about then I felt blood spatter on my chin. It wasn't the red rain falling from the ceiling, but my nose in full flow. I wiped the blood from my face with a sleeve, starting walking cradling the gun.
My coordination was still shot to pieces, but movement helped. I only staggered twice before reaching the door. Leaning against the frame, I checked the short passageway ahead. Placing my finger on the trigger, I was acutely aware of the pain in my hand. Broken or not, it would just have to work.
Fifteen feet away a man lay face down.
Hoping it was Rickard, I moved forwards. At the body I paused long enough to kick it over on to its back. The round-faced soldier grinned up at me. Except this grin was a rictus smile. Beneath his chin a wound stretched equally wide. His throat had been opened from ear to ear and I guessed that Rickard had made it out of the room after all. Guarapo – the grenade thrower – had felt his wrath.
And now it was Rickard's turn to feel mine.
The only thing stopping me was the man at the head of the stairs pointing a machine gun at me.
Chapter 37
Rickard was both exhilarated and furious.
Exhilarated because he was still alive. Intensely angered by more than one thing.
Foremost in his rage was that the cowardly son of a bitch, Guarapo, had tried to kill him by lobbing a hand grenade at him. Well, he'd shown that asshole the error of his ways soon enough. When the L2A2 had clattered to the floor between him and Joe Hunter, Rickard had known he had seconds to live. It's surprising how much ground a man can cover when trying to save his ass. He made it out of the door just as the grenade blasted the room. The percussion knocked him sprawling, but he avoided the flying shrapnel and came immediately to his feet again. As he did he whipped out his ceramic knife, the same moment as Guarapo popped up from where he'd been crouching and blinked at him in dismay.