ENEMY -THE-

by WOOD TOM

  He grabbed the balcony door and flung it shut, creating an obstacle and combined warning system if he was wrong. Before he’d let go of the door, he was spinning round, aiming at the kitchen doorway.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  The short woman with the plain face and boyish hair emerged from the darkness beyond, gun up, a two-handed grip, arms bent slightly at the elbow. She was already squinting, in preparation for looking into the light, expecting to see Victor’s back.

  He fired first, at centre mass, not risking his last round on a head-shot on a fast-moving target in the dark.

  The expended shell case clinked quietly on the floorboards.

  The Israeli let out a dull cry, staggered backward, and fell into the kitchen. She wasn’t dead – he guessed due to a concealed Kevlar vest. A subsonic 9 mm would not have penetrated it, but the blunt-force trauma to the sternum had stunned her, paralysing her diaphragm and leaving her gasping for breath.

  Victor hurried over to complete the kill and take her weapon and radio if she had one, but he heard a noise, to his left – from the hallway where he’d entered – spun around and hurled the empty Beretta at the open doorway.

  The gun clipped the six-four Israeli on the forehead as he appeared out of the shadows. The forehead was the hardest part of the skull, but even empty the Beretta weighed almost two pounds.

  The assassin reeled from the impact, arms flailing, giving Victor time to close the distance. Using his left hand, he grabbed the Israeli’s own Beretta while there was only one hand gripping it, hooked his thumb around the end of the index finger through the trigger guard, and squeezed the guy’s nail against the hard edge of metal, at the same time twisting the hand back on itself and against the joint.

  The Israeli released his weapon. Victor caught it by the barrel in his right hand, tried to reposition his grip, but the assassin shouldered Victor first, knocking him into the wall, pinning him there with his size and strength, trapping Victor’s arms so he couldn’t attack. His enemy was only a couple of inches taller, but forty pounds of muscle heavier. The Israeli slammed a forearm down on Victor’s wrist, and he dropped the gun before it could be ripped from his hand. It clattered on the wet floorboards.

  Victor’s weight was on his left leg so he lifted his right, wrapped it around his enemy’s own load-bearing leg and wrenched it off the floor.

  The Israeli fell, landing on his back, Victor on top of him, rolling away, going for the gun, on his hands and knees, cutting himself on broken glass.

  He grabbed the Beretta and spun around.

  The assassin threw himself at Victor before he could take aim, knocking the gun aside and punching Victor clean in the face. The Israeli didn’t get his full power behind it, but the fist caught Victor on the jaw and sent a huge jolt of pain and disorientation through him. The gun was torn from his hand with ease.

  Victor grabbed a handful of broken glass from the floor and smashed it into his enemy’s face as the muzzle twisted Victor’s way. The assassin grunted, knocked sideways, shards of glass buried in his cheek and forehead.

  A hard kick to the wrist forced him to drop the Beretta and it skidded across the floorboards. Victor jumped to his feet and moved, circling his enemy, towards the gun. The Israeli stood just as fast, stepped laterally into Victor’s path, blocking him before he could get close to the weapon.

  The assassin charged forward, arms out, ready to grapple – two hundred and twenty pounds of strength and skill. Victor timed the attack, waiting until the Israeli’s head inevitably dipped to grab him below his centre of gravity, and brought his knee up into his enemy’s face. It caught him under the jaw, but the Israeli’s momentum carried him forward regardless and he collided with Victor, slamming him backward into a wall. Plaster cracked. Victor elbowed the Israeli on the back of his head but the blow wasn’t hard enough to stop him grabbing Victor and spinning him around – off the wall – and hurling him.

  He hit the floor, cracking wet floorboards, and rolled backward over his head and on to his feet. Blood, rain and sweat covered the Israeli’s face. Moonlight glimmered against the shards of glass buried in his cheek.

  Victor took a series of deep breaths. Hand-to-hand combat was exhausting against a similarly sized enemy, let alone a bigger, stronger one. The female assassin writhed on the floor of the kitchen, still winded, but she wouldn’t be for much longer. Victor spotted the gun. It was too far to get to before his opponent was upon him. Victor read the assassin’s expression well enough. He wasn’t going to risk it either. But he didn’t need to.

  The Israeli grabbed a shard of glass from a broken window of the staircase door, held it like a knife. It was slim and narrow, five inches long. He gripped it tightly, not caring that it was cutting into his palm and fingers.

  He attacked with fast thrusts to Victor’s abdomen, not wanting to risk breaking the glass against ribs. Victor dodged to the left, maximising the distance between himself and the right-handed attacker. The Israeli turned with Victor, slashed at his neck. Victor ducked beneath the blade and darted away.

  His enemy was composed, patient, maintaining his range advantage by keeping the shard out before him, arm almost fully extended. His arms were longer anyway, but with the extra inches of glass Victor’s own reach was far too short to deliver a meaningful blow without bringing himself too close to the makeshift knife.

  He backed away, circling, using the space of the lounge. He glanced around quickly, looking for weapons. The couch was obviously no good, the water cooler too big and heavy to wield. The rest of the shards around the smashed window were too small to be effective weapons.

  Victor dodged the assassin’s attacks, always circling, waiting for an opportunity to strike back, but he was running out of room as the Israeli slowly forced him closer to the wall. Sweat and rainwater ran into Victor’s eyes. He blinked it away. Lactic acid made his muscles ache.

  He faked a stumble and the Israeli lunged to take advantage, his momentum carrying him forward an extra step, giving Victor enough time to sidestep out of the way and grab the assassin’s right hand in his own. Victor squeezed, hard.

  The Israeli grunted, blood oozing out between his knuckles as his hand was contracted against the sharp edges of the glass shard.

  The assassin threw his free elbow, striking Victor on the temple before he could twist his head away. The blow destroyed his equilibrium. His whole body sagged.

  The Israeli pulled his right hand free, dropping the glass shard, and it landed on the floor, intact, slick with blood. Hands grabbed Victor’s shirt and shoved him backward, off balance and dazed from the blow to the temple. The assassin set his feet, planted his shoulder into Victor’s chest, twisted his hips and pushed with his legs, throwing Victor to the floor.

  He hit the floorboards hard, awkwardly, reacting too slow to break the fall. His head span. The Israeli scrambled on top of him, knees either side of his hips, grabbing the shard of glass in his left hand.

  It came down fast, point racing to penetrate Victor’s face. His senses cleared in time for him to grab the wrist with both hands, halting the shard two inches above his left eye.

  Immediately the Israeli brought his injured right hand to add extra strength. The right hand was badly sliced and couldn’t be fully employed, but he didn’t need it. He was stronger, heavier and had the advantages of position and gravity. Victor’s arms shook under the pressure. The shard descended towards his eye. Victor couldn’t stop it, only slow it down. The assassin’s face was directly above his own, cheek and forehead embedded with glass.

  Victor set his left foot down outside his opponent’s right knee and pushed up with his hips, trying to roll to the left, but the Israeli’s legs were too strong and easily resisted the move. Victor tried to slam his knee into his enemy’s kidneys, but the assassin’s position was good and Victor couldn’t get enough strength behind the blows to be effective.

  The shard continued downward, now less than an inch from his eyeball. With it came the Isr
aeli’s face, ever closer to Victor’s. Blood from the wounded hand ran down the edge of the glass. The point continued its inevitable descent. The burn in Victor’s muscles intensified exponentially with every passing second.

  Glass sparkled above Victor’s eye. When he blinked, his lashes brushed the tip. The Israeli’s own eyes were wide, eager for the kill. His face was mere inches above his hands as he leaned over to make maximum use of his weight. Sweat and blood dripped down on to Victor’s skin. The pain in his elbows was horrific. The tip of the glass was moments away from piercing his cornea and plunging through the eye socket and down into his brain.

  Victor felt the strength in his wounded right arm failing. Two seconds left alive.

  One.

  He rolled his head to the left and at the same time stopped resisting. The glass shard came down in a straight line, hard and fast before the assassin could adjust. The tip caught Victor on the side of the head, in the hairline, slicing through his scalp and ear in a line that followed around his skull and down into the floor.

  The Israeli fell forward, but reacted in time to stop his face colliding with Victor’s. Blood poured from the wound on the side of Victor’s head. The tip of the shard was buried in a wet floorboard next to him. Both his arms were pinned between himself and the Israeli. He didn’t have the strength to pull them free. It would be easy to finish him off now his arms were trapped.

  But the Israeli was exactly where Victor wanted him.

  Skin split, cartilage ripped, and bone crushed between Victor’s teeth as he bit his enemy’s nose off.

  Blood splashed down over Victor and the assassin screamed. Loud. Shrill. He threw himself backwards, tearing the last shreds of tissue that linked the end of his nose to his face.

  Victor spat out the nose and rose to his feet. The assassin stumbled backwards, agony and shock and horror controlling his actions, hands pressed to his face, blood gushing out between his fingers. Screaming.

  Victor rushed for the Beretta, but before he got to it, he caught movement in his peripheral vision. From the kitchen.

  The female assassin – recovered enough to move – was scrambling for her own gun. And she was going to reach it first.

  Victor changed direction, shoving the screaming Israeli out of the way, flung open the balcony door and charged down the staircase. He heard a muted gunshot behind him, heard glass shatter, and leapt down the remaining steps.

  He landed and powered forward, stumbling to keep his balance, knowing by the time the woman was on her feet and through the balcony door he would be lost in the darkness.

  She fired anyway, hoping for a blind hit as she fanned rounds, the rapid clacks echoing throughout the factory. Bullets whizzed through the air, thudded into the ground, or pinged off pillars and machinery. Victor didn’t slow down, sprinting in a straight line for speed because the screams of the noseless Israeli drowned out Victor’s footsteps and because the main factory area was massive and the odds of a tiny bullet passing through the same space as him at the same time were negligible.

  Victor reached the wall with the huge windows, found the one that was smashed out by his enemies to gain entry earlier, and hauled himself up and through it. He dropped down outside. Raindrops bounced off his face.

  The third assassin would either be covering the opposite side of the factory exterior, or responding to the screams of his brethren. Victor ran. He ran back the way he had come. He ran up the incline. He ran across the wasteland.

  He heard sirens. On the other side of the row of workshops would be cops and ambulances. A risk, but given the choice between arrest and death, Victor would take the former every time. The chain-link fence was hard to climb with his weakened limbs, and he added more gashes to his legs and arms getting over the razor wire.

  On the other side, fatigue overwhelmed him and he fell down to his knees. Rainwater mixed with blood on Victor’s face. He tilted his head backwards and let the rain fill his mouth before spitting out the blood and remains of flesh and cartilage.

  He put a hand to the cut on his head. There was too much adrenalin in his veins for him to feel the pain. The top of his ear was still there, but only just. The glass had slit the superficial temporal artery on the side of his skull – the main source of the blood – but it wasn’t going to kill him. He used the rain to wash his face and head.

  When he felt a semblance of his strength returning, he stood, keeping a palm pressed over the wound to stem some of the bleeding as he walked parallel to the workshops. Through alleys and gaps between buildings he saw the flash of police cruiser lights. Any surviving Israelis would have fled the scene before the cops had arrived. Witnesses would no doubt be telling crazed stories of guns and shooting. Eventually the area would be secured and searched, but by the time the factory was searched, the Kidon assassins would be long gone.

  Victor hurried away, rain pelting his head and drenching his clothes. Within fifteen minutes he was a mile away, on the outskirts of Sofia, walking along a quiet street. He paid a homeless guy fifty euros for his woollen hat before catching a bus. Victor sat at the back, with the cut side of his head pressing against the cold window glass to keep pressure on the wound, and looking like just another tired and soaked traveller. There were five people on the bus. Nobody paid Victor any attention.

  The pain intensified as the adrenalin faded away. He checked his watch. A little after midnight. A new day. Wounded but alive, with the remaining members of the Kidon team far behind him. The Israelis wouldn’t be looking for him now. They would be extracting, just like him, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the failed kidnapping. They wouldn’t want to tangle with the Bulgarian authorities any more than he did.

  Before the day was out the surviving members of the team would be back in Israel, trying to work out what went so wrong. In the coming days there would be reports to write, bodies to recover, funerals to attend, a nose to reconstruct. For the time being, they were no threat to him, but Victor knew the danger hadn’t passed. After tonight, more than ever before, Mossad would want his blood. They could get in line.

  The reflection in the glass stared back at Victor. The eyes were unblinking black orbs set in a face without expression, distorted by raindrops. A translucent spectre hovering over the world beyond.

  The bus headed out of the city. To where, he didn’t know. He didn’t much care. Victor closed his eyes, and let sleep take him.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As with my first novel, I owe thanks to many different people. Firstly to my incomparable editor, Daniel Mallory, and the wonderful and hard working men and women at Little, Brown – Hannah Clark, Richard Collins, Hannah Hargrave, Anne O’Brien, Thalia Proctor, Kate Webster, Tom Webster and everyone in the Sales team. I couldn’t ask for a more talented and dedicated bunch behind me.

  I can’t thank enough my legendary agent, Phillip Patterson, for booking me a seat on this fantastic journey and for keeping me pointed in the right direction. Thanks also to the tireless efforts of Isabella Floris and Luke Speed at Marjacq.

  Thank you to my parents, Susan & Roger, and my sister Emma for all the support and enthusiasm. My brother Michael’s ongoing contribution cannot be overstated, and my debt of gratitude to him grows larger all the time.

  Finally thanks to Emmalene Knowles, Mag Leahy, Paul Mathews and Chris Wright for the numerous helpful comments and suggestions.