Godsen and ‘muscles’ came out of the door of the hotel with Westwood a few steps behind. Just then my screen started beeping at me. I quickly scanned the page of info. The plates were registered to a Rachelle Verdeau of Geneva and were supposed to be mounted on a nice little Mitsubishi. There had been no report of missing plates, or of a missing Rachelle for that matter.
Muscles had the door to the car open now, and was gallantly waving them inside. This didn’t look good. I broke comm silence.
“Ronnie, stall, don’t get in the car. Give me thirty seconds, that’s all. Over.”
She made a little stumble, and then complained about her shoe having developed a loose heel, while she leaned on the car and removed it. That was all the time I needed. I had the Audi started and in first gear before I thought about it. I squealed out into the road, with the car showing a definite lack of low-end torque. It probably got great mileage on the highway.
‘Muscles’ wasn’t sure what was going on with me, but he didn’t want to stick around to find out. He grabbed Godsen to toss her in the back of the Mercedes, and he handled her like I would a Cabbage Patch doll. There were serious workouts in this guy’s past. He didn’t stop to consider Westwood though, or made the mistake of dismissing her as a serious threat. Westwood struck hard, and I have to admit, she looked good in action. She kept it simple, taking out ‘muscles‘ left knee with one kick. He dropped like a stone, but not a sound passed his lips. This guy wasn’t just fit, he was trained. When he hit the ground he rolled over once and came to rest with his back against the open back door of the car, and he had a gun in his right hand.
I had the Audi right there at that point, but the gun changed the strategy. “Grab hold of something Therese!” I swerved into the parking lane and rammed the big Mercedes in the rear at about forty kilometers per hour. Fairly slow as far as bad accidents went, but I had enough inertia built up to knock their car about a meter or so forward. The guy with the gun and the bad knee saw me coming at the last minute and tried to roll away from the car. He’d been leaning against the open door with his gun trained on Westwood. If he hadn’t moved, the force of the door slamming shut would have caught him between a rock and a hard place. As he rolled away from the door, he leveled his pistol at Godsen. He made the mistake of taking his eyes off of Westwood, which, considering his new mobility problems, was a bad move at best.
Her ‘Flying Feet of Fury’ struck again, in a double kick that involved a leap and mid-air twist that Bruce Lee would have been proud of. Personally, I would have been very impressed if I’d had the time to stop and admire it. She was smart about the sequence as well, taking away the immediate threat, the gun. The first kick must have broken several of the small bones in his right hand, which sent the gun sailing towards the hotel steps to land on the sidewalk about ten feet away. The second kick struck as she returned to earth, and must have had her full weight behind it, as well as the inertia of the full leg swing she’d gotten from her jump. She caught him right in the side of his head rolling him over facedown on the sidewalk. It looked as if it was a ‘lights-out’ kick, but you never know with a well-trained opponent, and this guy must have outweighed Westwood by a factor of two. Not good. Not good at all.
I got most of that over the top and around the side of the damned airbag, which had inflated immediately on impact, practically breaking my nose in the process, and virtually pinning me to my seat. I was having a hard time getting out from behind the damned thing. I had always thought that they deflated rather quickly after being deployed, but this one seemed to have a mind of its own. Finally, I opened the door and spilled myself into the middle of the Lindenstrasse.
As I rolled out into the street, ‘Slow Time’ descended on my world. There was a technical name for it, and not many people can do it, and even fewer can do it naturally. It had something to do with certain brain chemistry balances and adrenaline. Lots and lots of adrenaline. Then, of course, there was the training in how to use it to your advantage when you needed it, automatically, without thinking. It was sort of a Bio-Zen type thing I guess.
I’d been taught by the best survival instructor that had ever been born on British soil, and in the process we’d discovered that I was one of those rare people to whom it came naturally. Lucky me. I only reflect on that in a sarcastic manner because the way you discover whether or not you have the full blown version of the ability is in the field during a split-second life or death moment. If you live, it means someone else didn’t, and you did good.
Having been pre-authorized to make this kind of decisions while on the mission doesn’t make your first kill any the less ugly or traumatic. Some of the people I worked with could wipe a target, and then ask you if you wanted Chinese or Italian for lunch. It wasn’t like that for me. The first mission I did I killed three people, probably in the space of two seconds. It had seemed like ten or fifteen minutes to me, and I kept wondering why everyone was moving as if they were swimming through molasses.
I couldn’t sleep for a month afterwards. I saw their faces every time I closed my eyes. Every detail of their faces, and the expressions they had as death overcame them. The treatment for this condition I was suffering from was to subject me to more of the same. If I’d known, then what I know now…
Then they sent me on my next mission, and I was forced to kill again. I wasn’t supposed to be killing people though. Reconnaissance and communications were my mandates. That had been the part of the contract I was up for when I signed it. When I was enjoined to sign it. There was no need for any special abilities the second time. I helped one of our team out of a dead-end spot by shooting two people in the back. They never even knew I was there. That’s when I realized I’d better get over my emotional involvement with the missions. There was time for remorse when you were all snug and safe back at home base. If you cared to be remorseful. I found it to be of no use whatsoever, dead is dead, and it’s always better when it’s them, not you. Simple, right?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I hadn’t been overcome by ‘Slow Time’ in years, and just like that, snap, I needed it, and it was there. The aftermath of ‘Slow Time’ was hard on the body, and you want to get it over with as soon as is possible, but when it’s on you, that’s not something you think about. You focus on the problem at hand, period. It puts you into an automatic state, and you don’t come out of it until the danger is dealt with or you’re dead.
There was a citizen’s car coming at me from behind, but it had almost a whole block to go before it hit me. I had enough time to finish the job and do the paperwork before that threat became a reality.
The big Mercedes was pulling away from the curb, back tires smoking. There was no lack of low-end torque there. Evidently the driver had his own mission agenda, which didn’t necessarily involve bringing back his comrade-in-arms. I was making my mission agenda up as we went along. It occurred to me that I’d like to have a chat with the driver as well as the muscle, whom I saw from the corner of my eye was still face down on the sidewalk. Westwood had gone to Godsen to cover her. She was standing there on the sidewalk with one shoe on and one in her hand. She hadn’t caught up with it yet, and she certainly hadn’t been expecting anything like this. And it was just starting. Westwood wasn’t paying enough attention to the one she’d decked, just to Godsen. She’d started out great, but she was making a mistake now. All of this went through my mind as I focused on the car.
Everything was happening in slow, slow motion. I rolled to a sitting position and pulled the Colt out from under my left arm. I had taken one of the H&K’s with me, but I instinctively drew the Colt. Carefully, I squeezed off two rounds in quick succession, turning his two rear tires into several pounds of rubber ready for the recycling heap. and, unless this car had half-inch Titanium wheel rims he’d be replacing them as well. The penetrating power of a hot-load .45 would astound the most ardent devotee of the 9 millimetre class round.
I could see the fountain of fire and smoke erupting from the barrel of
the gun as I fired, reaching out almost two feet. Once, a long time back, when I had been certain I was going to die, I had even seen the bullets as they tracked to their target, but not today. The Colt had a heavy kick, particularly with the hot-loads I was using. The gun tried to jump up and to the side after each shot, but I held it steady, locking my whole body into the firing of the gun. Focus. Focus and you live. Focus and the enemy dies.
That was one of the rules. It was one of the key rules as well, quite close to the top on a very short list. Each time I fired, the blowback traveled down my locked arms and transferred itself into my body, making me bounce backwards a half-inch or so, but my arms never wavered, and neither did my two-handed grip on the Colt. My aim was tracking true, and that was all that counted.
The car started swerving all over the road, and slowed right down, which for me meant it was almost stopped. I put a third shot into the back window just so I could see the driver. My third, fourth, and fifth rounds were always hand-cut flat-x slugs, and the lead splattered as it hit, and shattered the entire back window into small pieces, more than a few of which must have hit the driver when they sprayed the inside of the car, because he skidded across the road and broadsided a Volkswagen, pretty much writing off both cars in the process.
He jumped out the driver side door with an agility I hadn’t expected for someone who’d just been in two car crashes. The problem wasn’t his agility though; it was the machine pistol he had in his hand as he swung around with what I had to assume was the intention to take us all out. Now we were playing for keeps. Agile or not, he never had a chance. In my mind, he was moving like those ‘super slo-mo’ replays you get when a good pitcher whips a fastball over the home plate in excess of ninety-five miles an hour. The real-time image is just too fast for the human eye, so we re-run it in ‘super slo-mo’. That’s as good a description as any of ‘Slow Time’ when it was on me.
I was still sitting in the road with both legs stretched out in front of me for balance and two hands to shoot with, and I had all the time in the world to aim and fire. He was moving so slowly to me, that I had time to notice his height, weight, clothing and the colour of his hair before I killed him. I still had six rounds in the Colt. Five in the clip, and one in the chamber. I put the fourth slug into his neck, just above the breastbone. Again, a fountain of fire and smoke poured out of the end of the barrel. That shot takes out a lot of important stuff on its way through. Like the top of the spine, where it connects to the brain stem, for example. The rest of it is irrelevant at that stage because your target is already dead. Needless to say, he dropped the machine pistol. His head seemed to fall down onto his chest, while at the same time his upper body flew backwards from the force of the hit, landing half in-half out of the driver’s seat.
The hole in the front of his neck had been large enough to see easily from across the street, where I was sitting. It was about twenty-five to thirty meters. I knew without looking what the exit hole would look like, I’d seen them before. There was a lot of wet stuff on the inside of the Mercedes, where the bullet had ended up.
Instinct had taken over while I’d been busy with the driver. As soon as I’d pulled the trigger on the Colt, apparently, I’d drawn the H&K with my left hand, and had put the red laser dot on the side of our other would-be kidnapper’s head. Westwood had backed off of him, having put him out of action, and then had taken two large steps and covered Godsen with her body. All of that I saw out of my right eye, while the seconds ticked by in my head like some clock out of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.
The car that had been approaching in the lane I was sitting in had started to lock up their brakes. I could hear that from behind me. Still plenty of time. The Colt holstered itself as I did a tuck and roll, ending up on my two feet, standing about five meters from the pickup man, who was still out cold. Supposedly.
‘Trust none of what you hear and only half of what you see, and you won’t go far wrong’. That was something my maternal grandfather had told me when I was very young, maybe five years old. At the time, I hadn’t understood, but as I grew I came to realize the strength of the simple folk wisdom that he possessed.
My left hand still held the H&K, and the targeting dot was on the side of his head. He hadn’t moved, but I knew he would. It was just a question of when. ‘Slow Time’ was still in my brain, and everything was running on automatic. Westwood had taken out his right knee, then delivered a vicious blow to the side of his head. Not bad, but if he’d rolled even a little with the head kick, he could be coming out of it any second, or he could already be awake and waiting for an opportunity to make his move. He also probably had at least one more gun on him and maybe two. In addition, he was just too well muscled for my liking. Those types are hard to put down with a kick.
I was watching his ears and the side of his head as I walked towards him. I saw his ear move an involuntary muscle movement as he shook off the effect of Westwood’s kick. I had only taken two paces, but my vision was clear and sharp. He was awake, and that changed the approach.
I didn’t particularly want to kill him, I’d rather have had a chance to chat for a bit, but I could hear the sirens already, and they were close. Maybe two blocks away, max. I gave him a chance, just to see if he was an independent thinker. I called out for him to freeze or some such, in Swiss German, English, and French. He acted like a deaf man. That meant he was going to make a move.
I had been right, he was wide awake now, and rolling over onto his back. His right hand went into his jacket, and I had to assume he was going for a gun. Always assume the worst. Then if it turns out to be nothing, you can laugh about it. If it was the worst, you were prepared. I waited until I could see the gun and verified that it was coming out to play. The extended clip showed it to be a machine pistol, most likely a twin to the one his buddy driving the car had pulled. Again, I had all the time I could have needed, and then some.
The red dot dropped to his left knee and I pulled the trigger once, my first shot with the H&K. The recoil from the H&K was much more controlled than the Colt, which surprised me. They had put a lot of engineering effort into rigging the blow-back so that it was mostly soaked up by the polymer frame. Very smooth indeed. It had less kick than the Colt, but that may have been because of the load. It was a standard load, with a copper jacket. The copper jacket was good for penetration, but tended to bounce around a bit.
The bullet hit his knee from the right top side and kept on going. I was lucky that my intended target was the only one hit. The bullet ricocheted off of the concrete under his knee like nobody’s business, and then dug a pit in the lovely Italian marble flashing that surrounded the hotel entrance. It looked to me like the angle had been at about forty-five degrees. It left a significant pit in the marble, which upset me, because of the relationship I had with the owner. Where it went after that I don’t know. It may even have stayed in the marble. All of that data was coming to me from my peripheral vision, and being processed on automatic. My full focus was on the man I had just shot. He screamed only once as the .45 slug tore apart his knee. The splash of blood on the sidewalk underneath him was considerable, but in fact, he had been lucky that I was using the H&K. If I’d used my Colt, the round would have been a hand-cut flat-x, which just might have taken his leg off at the knee.
I had to give him credit, most guys would have been too out of it at that point to act in any lucid manner whatsoever, except for maybe rolling around screaming, if they were really good, or passing out for real, if they were normal. This team had obviously been told not to bother coming back without having the job done, so he was trying with odds that were so stacked against him what was hopeless. Originally, he hadn’t known that, but by now there could have been no doubt in his mind whatsoever, and he was still trying. I had to grant an ‘A’ for effort, but effort and success were two different things completely.
He was now internalizing the scream of pain from the knee shot, that was obvious from the contortions of his face, and it had
n’t put his lights out. He was definitely trained. I wondered idly whether or not this guy was on some kind of wonder drug. He had leaned to the left when the knee was penetrated. Now he had rolled back to face me, and was trying to get the machine pistol out again. He was shaking pretty bad, but he obviously intended to follow through no matter what.
It wasn’t worth the risk. In the movies, the white hats always got to shoot the gun right out of the hand of the black hats, neat as you please, at which point the black hats would surrender in a fit of abject defeat knowing they were outclassed and the cause of the dark forces was lost.
In real life, it was a bit different than that. The true scenarios often involved a goodly number of hats of both colours being blown to hell at the same time, with no apparent winner on either side.
A machine pistol has very little accuracy beyond the length of, say, the pitcher’s mound to home base, and I’m talking amateur softball here. This is compensated for by the rapid fire rate, and sheer number of rounds these guns spit out. The calibre was usually a small one, but getting literally sprayed by small calibre rounds will do as effective a job of making you dead as a well-aimed single large calibre round. It wasn’t as clean a job, but it achieved its purpose anyway. People got killed. The dangerous version of this concept is several notches up the kill chart. The Uzi. These weren’t Uzi’s. He had the gun almost all the way out of the holster now, and was about to become dangerous. The trick was to eliminate the threat at that stage, so I did.
The small red dot slipped up his body, resting on his throat, just above the breastbone. Since he was already down on the sidewalk, the force of the bullet didn’t have far to move him, but still, his head hit the cement hard enough to make a cracking sound that I could hear clearly, but I doubt anyone else did. Since the H&K had those copper-jacket rounds in the clip, it didn’t spread and splinter the way my hand cut slugs did. The ricochet came back up off the concrete of the sidewalk and took out part of ‘muscles’ left face on its way back out again. That was kind of dangerous, I’d have to check all of the rounds that came with the H&K’s to see that they conformed to my particular tastes.
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 33
