Seven Day Hero

by J. T. Brannan

  Albright looked at Mark Cole through the sight of his own weapon. There had been barely disguised looks of concern from the other operators as he had pulled it out of his bag, but Albright didn’t care. There was only one thing he cared about at the moment, and he was about to make it happen.

  Cole had rolled to a stop close to the front door, barely able to control his excitement.

  All the stress and fear and anxiety about his family that he had been repressing welled up in him like an iron ball in the pit of his stomach, making him feel sick. He knew he could have lost them all, but now he was here, and he could finally protect them himself.

  Smiling, he took a deep breath and opened the car door.

  Albright held up a warning hand, keeping the other agents from shooting.

  ‘No,’ he said into his lapel microphone. ‘Identity is still unconfirmed. We need to make sure it’s him. If we shoot and it’s the wrong guy, we’ll ruin everything.’

  The men decided he was right, and just kept tracking the target through their weapons sights.

  ‘Let’s see the reaction of his family,’ Albright suggested. ‘We’ll know for sure then.’

  Through the window of the front door, Sarah Cole could see him; finally, she could see him! After all that had happened, he was finally going to be with them again!

  ‘He’s here!’ she cried with delight, pulling the door open with unbelievable energy and limping out to her husband, Ben and Amy running beside her.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’

  Cole’s face lit up as he saw his children running towards him, his wife following on crutches. What had happened to her? He smiled widely at her, as Ben and Amy jumped towards him, arms grabbing his legs, hugging him tight, tears of joy running down their cheeks.

  He hugged them tight back, and then Sarah was with him, and they all embraced, tears now running down the faces of all of them. Sarah’s face rested upon her husband’s shoulder; now she could relax, now she could rest, now she could be properly comforted, now –

  Sarah Cole’s eyes went wide and she screamed.

  Albright had needed no further prompting, and without mutual agreement, he had pressed the trigger of his weapon, a Starstreak High Velocity Missile. A man-portable missile launcher designed for shooting aircraft out of the sky, the Starstreak was overkill gone mad, but that was exactly what Albright wanted. He wanted to make sure they were all destroyed, blown off the face of the earth once and for all.

  There was barely enough time for the first stage rocket motor to burn out; certainly none for the second stage, which would have accelerated the three dart munitions up to Mach 3.5. But, distance or not, the impact from the second stage rocket and the munitions package was definitely going to have drastic consequences.

  Cole heard the noise, and then felt Sarah pushing him away. He fell backwards with Ben and Amy just as he saw what looked like a bolt of lightning shooting above them.

  Albright watched as the bitch pushed her husband and children out of the way, having seen the blast from the launcher.

  The missile passed over Mark Cole, but hit Sarah straight in the chest, burying straight through her body and lifting her, carrying her backwards through the front door until her body smashed into the bearded man behind her, and then the missile was carrying two bodies, still alive, their eyes wide open despite the massive gaping holes in their chests; and then the missile and the bodies hit the wall at the back of the hallway and there was an explosion that shook the valley.

  ‘Now!’ Cole heard from the tree line behind him, and before reality hit him, he heard the chatter of automatic fire, felt the snow spraying around him as the bullets kicked it up from the ground, smelled the cordite in the crisp, clean air. He had fallen down in front of the car bonnet, the metal hulk of the body providing cover, but Ben and Amy had fallen to either side. He turned to grab them, to pull them to the floor and cover them, but it was too late.

  First Ben on one side and then Amy on the other, the bodies arching unnaturally backwards as dozens of high velocity rounds entered and exited their small bodies, blood flying through the air and staining the snow red even before they themselves hit the floor, dead.

  Cole was dazed, blood leaking from his ears from the explosion, but he crawled to his children, pulling them back in front of the car, holding them tightly as they looked up into the sky with lifeless eyes, their blood running through his fingers.

  And then there was another shriek, another missile, and the car they were hiding behind seemed to expand and pulsate before exploding in a huge great fireball that blasted Cole forwards into the thick black smoke of his friend’s ruined hallway.

  From the tree line, Albright launched his last missile at the house, targeting the kitchen. It struck home, and the lower floor ignited in a colossal firestorm.

  He knew Sarah and the two children were dead, along with Stefan Steinmeier and most probably the rest of his family too, especially if they had still been in the kitchen, but he still couldn’t see Mark Cole, blocked as he was by the gutted wreck of what had once been a silver VW.

  Sarah Cole was dead, and that was his main objective. It was a shame he couldn’t have taken his time with her more, or maybe even just made her watch her kids die, but you had to play the cards you were dealt, and he knew he would not have ever been given a better opportunity.

  But the mission was to kill Mark Cole, not his family, and so he set down his missile launcher, picked up his Steyr assault rifle, shouting ‘Let’s go!’ to his comrades as he charged out of the tree line towards the house.

  Through his dazed half-consciousness, Mark Cole’s survival instinct pulled at him, forcing him to recognize the shouts from the tree line, getting closer, realizing what it meant.

  Driven by this pure instinct, he pulled himself slowly across the floor into the house. The hallway was a blazing inferno, and he could just see the burned carcasses of two bodies lying in bits at the far end, his mind not allowing him to dwell upon who they were.

  To his left, the kitchen was aflame too, engulfed by fire. He looked up and could see the ceiling starting to sag. There were bodies there too, and again his mind forced him to ignore them. As he pulled himself into the sitting room to the right of the hallway, he heard the kitchen ceiling collapse, the heat from the flames billowing out across the corridor, scorching his back.

  The sitting room had fires raging through it, but it wasn’t yet the hellhole that he could see on the other side of the hallway. His mind still dull and unresponsive, he slowly pulled himself up to a standing position to the side of the thick wooden doorway.

  There was a panel next to the door, and in a distant part of his mind he knew there was an assault rifle concealed in the compartment there. He moved the panel and entered a code into the key pad underneath, but nothing happened, and Cole realized that the fire must have fused everything. The house may have been full of weapons, but he couldn’t get to any of them.

  And over the din of the blaze, he could hear people approaching; they were just outside.

  Two of the operators rounded either end of the gutted VW, weapons aimed down at the floor; all they saw was the bloodied bodies of two dead children, and a thin trail of blood leading across the snow into the house.

  Hand signals were given, and four of the men moved to the doorway, two to each side. Two others took off to check around the exterior of the house and make sure nobody had escaped, Albright stayed back in order to monitor the situation from a distance.

  Before they had left the tree line, Albright had ordered the MI5 team to make a tactical exit from the area, which he was more than sure they would have done by now. They would be contacting their colleague with the van to come and pick them up, and Albright felt pretty sure that they would also be able to finish up here and liaise with the van.

  He sighted down his rifle as he watched two of the men enter the burning building, disappearing into the smoke as the other two provided cover.

  Cole saw the
men entering the building and despite his soporific state, reacted instantly.

  As the muzzle of the first weapon nosed through the sitting room doorway, Cole’s hand grabbed it and pulled, the man following straight behind it. As the camouflaged operator stumbled past, Cole twisted back the other way, wresting the rifle from his hands and sending the man spinning into a heap on the floor.

  Cole then leaned back into the doorway and double-tapped the second man in the forehead, two rounds going clean through and blowing out the best part of the rear of the skull. Less than a second later, Cole had turned back to the first man, who was on the floor and trying to pull a handgun from a tactical holster on his thigh, and fired another two rounds, again straight through the head, killing him instantly.

  He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and his head and weapon moved as one towards it.

  There was another soldier, outside the house but raising his rifle to fire through the sitting room side window. Cole’s weapon fired first, spitting out another two rounds that resulted in another instant kill.

  The fire in the sitting room was worsening, and he could see that this ceiling was also threatening to collapse. He knew he had to get out of the house as soon as he could, but what was waiting for him outside?

  His head snapped back to the sitting room doorway, and he saw two more white-suited assassins coming through, respirators on to protect against the smoke, assault rifles levelled.

  This time Cole didn’t have time to fire his own weapon, and he dived for cover instead, jumping behind a long leather couch that was being eaten by flames. As he hunkered down behind it, he felt the impact of the 9mm rounds rock the couch, just as the flames burned his arms and chest.

  He rolled out to the side, firing low and catching both men in the legs. They returned fire as they went down, but Cole retreated to the relative safety of the couch. He waited to catch his breath and then rolled out to the side again, rifle on full-auto as he sprayed the area where the men had fallen until his magazine clicked empty.

  He pulled back to avoid the return of fire, but there was none. Flicking his head back out to have a look, he saw the men dead on the floor.

  Getting cagily back to his feet, he looked about him. The hallway was now an inferno, flames were licking the walls of the sitting room, and the ceiling was bulging down several feet in the middle. How am I going to get out of here? Cole wondered helplessly.

  Albright was concerned that the men had not returned. With the fire that intense, the only reason they would not have returned would be that they were dead.

  His radio crackled on. ‘Albright, it’s Stevens. I’ve just got around to the other side of the house, where Stahl started. He’s dead on the floor, two in the head, right outside the sitting room window.’

  ‘Get back from the window,’ Albright ordered, knowing instantly what had happened. ‘Stay there and watch from a distance so Cole can’t get out, keep your weapon on the window. Is there any other way out?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Right, so he’s trapped in there, and the whole house is about to collapse. I’ll watch the front and you watch the side, make sure he doesn’t get out, and he’ll burn to death.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ the other agent confirmed, and Albright knew he would be moving back and taking position as requested.

  He looked at the sitting room window, flames starting to lick against the broken glass. If the building collapsed, they would have to wait for an excavation and an autopsy to reveal whether Cole was truly dead, and he knew Hansard wanted the matter taking care of for certain, once and for all.

  To be certain, Albright decided he had to lure Cole outside, where he could shoot him dead in plain view.

  ‘Hey, Cole!’ he shouted from a position of cover beside the burning hulk of the VW. ‘What are you hiding in there for, you fucking pussy?’ He had to anger Cole, make him commit to a careless, rash action. ‘I’m the one who killed her, Cole. I killed your useless slut of a wife, and I’m the one who tortured her too. You know, I think she kind of liked it, the fucking whore. I killed your kids too, while you just stood there like a useless prick!’

  Cole could barely hear the words above the roar of flames, but he understood them perfectly. On a logical level, he knew the game the man was playing, knew that he was trying to get him to come out so that he could get a clear shot. But on an emotional level, the right buttons were getting pushed, and Cole struggled to keep his mind straight.

  So it was the man outside who killed them? Who tortured and killed his wife? Killed his children? Cole’s breathing started to increase despite his best efforts to control himself. But it was no use, he was beyond controlling.

  And what was the point of controlling it? He’d be dead soon enough anyway if he stayed here. He had no idea how many men were waiting for him outside, but he no longer cared.

  However many there were, he would try and kill them all.

  ‘Come on, pussy!’ Albright was still taunting. ‘Come on –’

  And then something came flying out of the sitting room window towards him, burning brightly, and he ducked reflexively.

  It was the seat cushion off a leather couch, he realized, set alight with the flames radiating off, almost two feet high.

  He looked back up and saw a man jumping from the window and running towards him, firing his assault rifle. Albright reacted quickly and rolled behind the ruined car, before popping back up and opening up with his own weapon.

  Cole was struck in the chest by five rounds, the force of the impact knocking him back onto the snowy ground. Albright came from around the car, gun aimed at the body, but then Cole snapped up and fired off a burst from his own gun.

  Albright retreated back again. A vest! Cole must have grabbed it off one of the other operators before he came out, Albright realized.

  It was going to have to be a head shot.

  Cole saw the man duck back behind the car as he regained his feet and charged towards him.

  It seemed that there was only one man left, the man who had been shouting; shaven, scabbed head, eye patch and nose guard, a strange sight indeed. Whoever had started the job on the man, Cole was going to finish it.

  He slipped the fire selector switch back to full-auto as he ran, laying down a hail of gunfire to cover his movement towards the car.

  Albright remained pinned down, and suddenly Cole was there, just as his weapon clicked empty. Using his forward momentum, he jumped, springing over the wrecked bodywork towards the ugly man sheltering behind.

  Albright was caught off-guard. He had heard Cole’s gun click empty, and was just about to spring up and lay one right in the man’s forehead, but then his vision was filled with a flying body and he just had a chance to get off a short burst into his chest before the man’s weight crashed down on top of him, driving him down to the floor.

  Cole recovered from the impact of Albright’s short burst of fire quickly, having prepared himself for it beforehand.

  He knocked Albright’s gun to one side and then swung his own violently down into the man’s face; once, twice, three times, huge welts appearing almost instantly, the white plastic eye guard smashed, Albright’s hollow eye socket peering out from beneath.

  Cole brought the empty weapon up again for a fourth strike when he was suddenly pitched forward, rounds exploding into his back.

  Albright took his chance and kicked Cole off his prone body, getting to his feet and making a run for the thick tree line to the west of the house, hoping his colleague would be able to finish the job.

  His head ached painfully as he ran, legs pumping.

  Cole used his momentum to fall into a roll, gathering up Albright’s fallen gun as he did so.

  As bullets kicked up the snow around him, narrowly missing his unprotected legs, Cole followed the roll through into a low crouch, firing off four rounds that struck the approaching agent in his legs, dropping the man to his knees. Before another second had elapsed, Cole ha
d depressed the trigger again, shooting the man straight through the eyeball, the back of his head splattering across the snow behind him.

  Cole turned and looked, seeing Albright just reaching the line of towering pine trees.

  No you fucking don’t, Cole promised, as he took off after the man as fast as he had ever run in his life.

  As Cole entered the tree line, he could hear the first faint sound of sirens in the distance. He knew the area would soon be crawling with police, security and other emergency services; but he couldn’t let that distract him.

  He saw the line of tracks in the snow ahead of him, ploughing straight through the trees. Cole had been hunting with Stefan before here, and turned to the right, taking the high ground.

  Albright was out of breath, panting hard, pushing himself as hard as he could. He was going fast, he had a big head start, he had to be a long way in front, hadn’t he?

  As he whipped through the trees, he knew he could not slow down; Cole was following, and was going to kill him, Albright realized that now.

  The others had been easy, but this one was different; and now his only chance was to go faster.

  He had been running all out for what seemed like hours, but what was in fact only minutes, and had still not heard any sign of Cole behind him. Could he afford to slow down, to take it easy? No. Not until he was well and truly safe.

  He could see the trees widening out up ahead, the ground sloping down at an ever-steepening angle until it opened up onto a hillside, and started to wonder what he should do. Should he just try and hide in the trees, hope Cole couldn’t find him? Or just keep running, even going out into the open, and just hope he could keep his advantage?

  He never had time to think of an answer, as a movement caught his eye and he turned his head to see Mark Cole hurtling towards him from a small bluff to his right.