by Stevens, Tim
There were six, approaching form the direction of the church. It was difficult to make out their features but none of them looked to Calvary like Blažek.
He stood and faced them. They stopped. He saw their heads moving as they glanced about. As though they didn’t believe it would be this easy, Calvary on his own.
He brought his right hand out of his pocket, held up what he had there.
‘You see this?’ he called out in Russian.
Even if they couldn’t quite see it, they would quickly work out what it was.
‘I want to see my friends.’
None of them moved. Slowly, very obviously, Calvary pulled the pin from the grenade and hooked his thumb over the safety lever. He took a few steps forward.
One of the men muttered something over his shoulder. Ten seconds later two stumbling figures were shoved forward. Their hands were fastened behind their backs, and from the sounds they were making Calvary realised they were gagged.
Max and Jakub.
Calvary put a finger to his ear and muttered quietly, nothing that made sense but he wanted to create the impression he was communicating on a hands-free mobile phone. He called, ‘Listen carefully. My friends are going to walk over here to me while you stay where you are. I’m going to untie them. Then they’re going to walk away. Once I get the signal they’re clear, I’ll put the pin back in this thing and you can have me. If you try to obstruct or harm them in any way, I’ll let go of the safety lever and you’ve lost me forever.’
Again a mutter, and a push at Max’s back. The two of them weaved towards Calvary. As they drew closer he could see they had both been roughed up hard.
Calvary walked the remaining distance to the two men. Keeping his eyes on the row of men ten yards behind them, keeping the grenade raised, Akos he pulled off Jakub’s gag with his left hand. Jakub gasped, his mouth writhing and bloody. He turned and Calvary picked at the cord binding his hands. When the knot was loose enough he pulled his wrists free and immediately set to work releasing Max. Calvary said to them, quietly, ‘You know where you are?’
‘Vysehrad,’ said Jakub thickly.
‘Are you familiar with it?’
‘Yeah.’ Max this time. He was staring at the bandage around Calvary’s head. ‘What –’
‘Shut up and listen. Lose yourselves in the park. There’s going to be a lot of shooting in a moment. There are Russian agents about, so try to steer clear of them. Get out however you can, but don’t use the exits. Use walls, trees, whatever.’
They stood there, staring at him. He said: ‘Get going, for God’s sake. There’s nothing more you can do here now. Find Nikola. I don’t know where she is’
Akos Jakub grabbed Max’s arm. Max stood, undecided, then took off with him. Calvary watched them disappear into the trees.
Come on, Krupina.
Calvary called, ‘Remember, until I get word that they’re clear, I keep hold of this thing.’
The damp air was starting to feel cloying and oppressive rather than bracing. The night was still, the trees insulating the park from the noises of the city on either side. Calvary caught the smell of wood smoke from somewhere, heady and redolent.
Calvary put his finger in his ear again and muttered, then lifted his head and called: ‘Blažek. Come out here. I need to see you as well.’
There was a sound then, the rustle of clothing and the crunch of boot on fallen foliage. Four more men emerged from the trees. Both were dressed entirely in black, crew-neck sweaters and combat trousers and running shoes. Both held handguns by their sides. They stood fifteen or twenty paces away, watching Calvary.
He raised the hand with the grenade higher and called, ‘Ten seconds, Blažek. If you haven’t shown yourself by then I’m releasing this pin.’
The first six men had begun to advance until they formed a semicircle with the four newcomers.
Then Calvary thought of something that made the skin on his neck contract.
The effective kill zone with most modern grenades was around fifteen feet in diameter. If he were close enough to the men it would be simple for Krupina’s people to shoot him where he stood, setting off the grenade and taking out ten of Blažek’s men at the same time. Improving the odds with one shot. Calvary eased backwards, fighting the urge to run, until he was backed up against a tree. He felt the sting of sweat in his eye and was thankful for the drizzle.
Then he heard it, the faintest ratcheting click from off among the trees, as if a gun were being cocked.
*
The Audi was parked in sight of the Tabor Gate. Through her earpiece Krupina listened to Arkady’s murmured monologue, fluid and concise.
‘All ten advancing now. Calvary’s backed up, and they’re still coming on. One of them looks like – yes, it’s Miklos. I repeat, we have visual confirmation of Miklos Blažek.’
Krupina let out a breath. ‘Go.’
*
None of the men reacted to the noise. They maintained their perfect semi-circle, evenly spaced along its curve as if they had rehearsed it, which they probably had. There was a poised tension in the arc they formed. At any moment there was going to be another sound and this time they would notice it.
It came out of sequence, a crack as of two fighting sticks being smashed together and trailing an echo behind it. By the time Calvary heard it he had already seen much more. One of the men was flung forward on to his knees like a supplicant prostrating himself at the feet of a religious leader before his torso and face hit the earth. A fraction of a second after the crack of the shot another of the men was hit, a large calibre bullet tearing through the side of his neck as instinct turned him partially to look behind him; his feet were lifted off the ground and he was hurled back down again several feet away.
Loud noises could have a paralysing effect on the human capacity to act. Calvary lost a second as his nervous system struggled to make sense of the assault. Two of the remaining men wheeled round and began blindly to return fire. The other two charged Calvary, pistols raised in double-handed grips. It was a risky move on their part because Calvary’s instinct was to drop what he was holding and extend his arms in a fending-off gesture; but they were giving him credit for professionalism and were assuming he wouldn’t do that, and they were right. Instead he darted round the tree against which he was backed. It was a large oak with a thick and ancient bole. As he slid round to the other side he heard the sing of a ricochet and saw a quick, violent disturbance of the leaves in one of the trees off to the side.
His forehead banged on a low branch. The pain was shocking, stalling Calvary’s breathing for a moment, and in the time he lost remembering how to inhale again, one of the men reached him and rammed his elbow into his face while the other came round from the other direction and grasped his right wrist, raising it high. Calvary aimed a sideways kick into the abdomen of the man holding his wrist but he was too close and Calvary overbalanced on his other leg and went down. The man who had elbowed him was on him then, snapping a head butt into Calvary’s face. Calvary reacted instinctively, lowering his head to allow his forehead rather than his nose to absorb the butt, before realising that this wasn’t perhaps advisable given his injury.
The hammer blow of agony caused Calvary’s right hand to open reflexively. He turned his head and saw the grenade drop and bounce once and come to rest six feet away against an exposed root.
TWENTY-FOUR
On his knees, Calvary reached forward with his left hand. The grenade lay several feet beyond his grasp, like some dark and gleaming malignant fruit. The man who’d grabbed his right wrist still had hold of it and was applying traction sideways, at ninety degrees to Calvary’s own direction of movement. The man on his left was on his feet.
Calvary pulled his right arm free and propelled himself a few inches closer to the grenade. The big man on his right, having abandoned his attempt to move Calvary away from the grenade, had turned and begun to run. The man on the left, who began to flee immediately, had covered mor
e ground and was launching himself into a dive, away from the explosion he knew was imminent.
What happened next wasn’t immediately clear to Calvary. He found himself lying on his side with the man on his right now next to him, sprawled doll-like on his back. The right side of the man’s head was gone, and one of his arms splayed across Calvary’s waist in a grotesque parody of romantic attachment. Wet sucking mulch gripped Calvary’s face like a starfish: the man’s blood, and his brain, and the even more intimate fluids from his lymphatic system and his cerebrospinal circulation, had coalesced into an invading organism the size of a large palm that had chosen Calvary as its host. The man had been flung on to Calvary by the force of the gunshot which destroyed his head. His mouth was distorted by old scars. Distantly, Calvary registered him as the man he’d fought in the bookshop, ages ago. Pavel Kral.
The pin of the grenade had been knocked from Calvary’s fingers before he could reinsert it.
Calvary clambered to his knees again, his hands hooked into a scavenger’s claws, soil and leaves spilling from them in matted clumps. The grenade rested propped against his thigh. The pin had disappeared into the darkness.
*
In the classic World War Two ‘pineapple’ fragmentation grenade or Mill’s bomb, the flame that crept along the slow-burning material in the fuse reached the detonator within four to six seconds. The grenade Krupina’s man had given Calvary was more modern, but even so at least ten seconds had passed since he’d dropped it. Calvary doubted that it had been designed to work on such a long fuse. The whole point of grenade development was to keep the delay down to a minimum, long enough that one could throw it safely but not so long that the enemy might grab it before it exploded and lob it back.
Calvary had dropped the egg, fallen to his knees, wrestled off an opponent; had crawled to the egg, picked it up, found the pin in his pocket, lost the pin after the man had been shot and landed on top of him; had scrabbled around to find the pin. And still the thing hadn’t gone off.
Krupina, the harpy, had given him a dud.
It made sense when he thought about it. If he had decided to turn the tables on Krupina, Calvary might have used the grenade on her men. There was no way either he or Blažek’s people would have been able to tell it was a fake. She was a devious monster, Krupina, no question; yet Calvary was alive because of it. A laugh tried to ram its way up from his stomach, a mad condemned man’s cackle, but he ground it back down.
Tinnitus had set up a high background whine in his ears. Cutting across it was a confusion of shouting, gunfire near and distant, a scream.
Calvary stayed down, kneeling with his head low. There was a lot of gore, much of it decorating his face and hair. With the two of them, him and the dead man, huddled like that, it might be difficult for somebody coming upon the scene to tell if either of them was alive.
Calvary’s face was turned on the soil towards the half-headed body slumped beside him. Suddenly the head rocked up and forward and then came to rest again. Calvary understood that something had hit the body in the torso, an instant before the crash of the shot came, horribly close.
Jesus, they were shooting the corpses.
Calvary felt the bulk of the shape above and behind him and heard the sudden silence and then the racking of a spent magazine out of the butt-end of a pistol. He turned and hefted the dud grenade and hurled it at the man. It was one of Krupina’s Russians, a man he hadn’t seen before. The useless egg hit him hard between the eyes and he went down, his own weapon flying from his hand. Calvary stood, took a second to find his feet, then made a move for the man’s gun, but there was shouting and gunfire in the trees nearby and another ricochet howled off the bark next to his ear and made him fling himself back.
Then the beast kicked in and Calvary forgot about guns and grenades and the other beautiful trappings of modern life and barrelled himself away across the grass and into the trees, stumbling and crow-hopping and sprinting over fallen smoking bodies and dropped branches, his arms flailing, all pain ignored, his being contracting to the pulsing torrent of his heart and his lungs.
*
Bartos hit the path at a lumber, his phone pressed to his left ear, his right hand reaching inside his jacket for the stock of his pistol. Into the handset he screamed, ‘Talk to me, damn it.’
Ahead of him, beyond the spires of the church, the air flashed and sparked with gunfire, the noise rising and spreading above the city. Behind, his driver had abandoned the car and was racing to keep up.
‘An ambush –’ Miklos’s yell was cut off in a blast of white noise, as though something had rasped against the mouthpiece. ‘They’ve got us pinned.’
‘Where’s the Brit?’
‘I can’t tell how many there are, it’s –’
‘Where’s the Brit?’
‘He’s running.’
‘Which way?’
‘It’s hard to say. I’m pinned behind a tree.’ Before Bartos could reply Miklos said, ‘Wait. Looks like towards the art gallery. I’ll –’
His voice was torn away and the crash of a rifle set to rapid fire blasted down the line. Bartos listened as he charged down the path.
‘Miklos?’
The line was dead.
He knew the layout of the park. Had conducted late night business there several times before. He especially knew the gallery in the southwestern corner, because that was where the ruins of Libuse’s Baths were. The legendary prophetess Princess Libuse was supposed to have thrown her lovers to their deaths from the tower there. Bartos had himself done something similar, not to lovers but to business rivals.
He tacked right, towards the wall at the perimeter of the park.
*
At Calvary’s back was an unseen sound-picture of violence, the heavy crack of high-calibre fire in rapidly sequenced patterns. His animal brain told him he needed to be away, to insert distance between himself and the carnage.
The wall was ahead. He weaved instinctively, providing a zig-zagging rather than a linear target for whomever might be taking a bead on him from behind. A path separated the five-foot-high wall from the grass and he traversed it and peered over the edge. Dense wooded ground sloped away towards what he assumed form the noise of cars was a riverside road, far below.
He ran left, following the wall southwards. The gunfire was becoming more intense behind him, the bursts more prolonged. He wondered where Max and Jakub were, whether they’d made it out or were holed up in the park.
Ahead he saw a jutting promontory, some sort of ruined tower on the edge of a sheer cliff face. Beyond, the vast unsettled bulk of the river.
It was difficult for Calvary to distinguish individual sounds in the melange his brain was receiving: the pulse of blood in his head, exploding small-arms fire, human yells. But something was trying to rise to the foreground. He concentrated on it as he ran until it became clearer. It was the sound of footsteps pounding, but not his. It was coming from behind him. Then, suddenly, it stopped.
It could mean only one thing, that whoever was behind him was taking aim. He sidestepped in mid-run and dived, rolling on his shoulder, an instant before the shot sang past. There was a double crack, that of the firing mechanism and the impact of the bullet against the wall, followed by the whine of a ricochet. Calvary came up on his feet and saw the large man, thirty yards behind, advancing at a trot, gun arm extended.
Bartos Blažek.
Calvary was unarmed and at that distance he didn’t have a hope of reaching the man without being hit, so he ran at the wall and leaped over, the second shot coming dangerously close this time, its slipstream tugging at the back of his jacket. He crashed into the foliage beyond the wall and landed hard on the leafy carpet of the ground and kept the momentum going, ignoring the knuckles of root and branch ploughing into him as he tumbled over the earth.
At the base of a large oak he paused and hugged the bole and risked a glance round. Almost vertically above him, Blažek was clambering gracelessly over the wall. T
wo other men, a couple of his minions, lither and quicker, had already dropped on to the slope a few feet along from Blažek and were scrambling down, their guns drawn.
Calvary was off again, dodging and slipping in the mulch, the low branches slashing at his face. One end of the bandage was flapping in front of his eyes. He shoved it aside. Dizziness and disorientation were beginning to take hold again.
He caught a glimpse of movement to his right. One of the men was flanking him, coming up at the five o’clock position. It went against every instinct but Calvary stopped when he drew alongside another thick trunk. He scrabbled at the lower branches, found one that was both dry enough to be wrenched off and solid enough for his purposes.
A quick glance round the trunk showed the man almost on him. Behind, the other man was closing the gap, Blažek further back, cursing. Calvary pressed his back against the trunk, counted to three, forming a mental image of the man’s position based on where he had last seen him, then whipped his arm across in a backhand strike. The branch caught the man across the throat and he howled and dropped to a sitting position. Calvary brought the branch down hard on the crown of his head.
There was no time to grab his gun because the second man was stumbling towards him, carried down the slope by his own momentum. Calvary turned to meet him. From further up came Blažek’s bellow and then a crackle of light scattered across the top of the wall an instant before the high-velocity rounds sizzled past down the slope, a salvo of furious wasps. Calvary flung himself down just as Blažek’s man ducked behind a trunk.
Both Blažek and his man were pinned, now, helpless behind cover. Calvary crawled headfirst down the slope, feeling like Dracula descending from his castle window. Ahead, not close but no longer impossibly distant either, he could make out the end of the trees, the main road.