by Lee McGeorge
Was it for him? It couldn’t be. They couldn’t know. He craned his head and saw the helicopter to his side, flanking him. He looked in the rear view mirror and saw the line of cars spreading out to cover all lanes.
It was an ambush.
Calea Bucharest was closing. They were pulling out police cars to block the road.
Paul slammed on the brakes feeling the van pull to the side. He twisted the wheel to accelerate the turn, looking to get off the road but there was nowhere to go. One long road, fields of deep snow on either side. A few megastore supermarkets hundreds of yards away.
The van spun and backed into a snowdrift stopping the vehicle harshly. A beige car that had been following drove straight into him, crashing into the front, jarring the vehicle and throwing Paul’s head back. The doors opened. Men got out. One had a pistol ready. The other cars skidded as they stopped. More men, more guns.
Paul didn’t even bother with the door. He went out through the front window and as he did, he watched the world slow down. He was in the air, his hand reaching for the karambit on his chest. The car that had collided had two men. An older man, his gun pointing in the air. Lines of yellow electrical energy cascaded through his whole body, turning him, twisting his body into position as Paul careened through the air. The second man was younger with spiky hair. His hand was trying to pull a gun from the holster. Beyond them a blue car was stopping, the doors opening before the wheels had even stopped sliding on the road.
Paul moved through the air like he was gliding.
He saw everything.
He had time.
Targets in priority. The older man first, then his spiky-haired partner.
Paul hit the bonnet of the car with both feet, deliberately jamming his foot in the windscreen wiper for purchase. He bounced off to the left slicing the karambit across the gunman’s forearms as he passed. The world slowed deeper. He watched the earth coming up towards him, he knew he had to curl his body and roll on his shoulder. As he went over he saw from his upside down position an arc of blood spraying away from the older man. The gun could work for him. He should roll, bounce back to this man, seize the weapon and use it to fire back across the bonnet at spiky hair.
The roll was executed to perfection. He slammed the gunman hard getting a good dose of blood on his own clothing. He didn’t grab the gun out of his hands, rather pushed the weapon in the right direction and forced a finger to the trigger. It was hard whilst still holding the karambit but he found the trigger and even made time to align the gun before the hammer struck the bullet. The aim was true, lifting Spiky Hair off his feet, a cascading shock of yellow energy pulsing from the bullet wound in his heart.
Two men down.
Three seconds elapsed.
The helicopter engine slowed to a whap… whap… whap…
There were four cars here. Two men in each car. Two down already. Six men to go.
Whap……... Whap…...… Whap…...…
This was going to be easy.
----- X -----
“Contact made, shots fired. Repeat, shots fired.”
Razvan Mutu was experienced at working the camera in the helicopter and relaying what he saw back to the control room. Except, today he was seeing something that… he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. In the direct optic camera he was seeing through snowfall and the image was obscured. On the FLIR camera, showing heat signatures, he was seeing a man move like a leopard between the cars leaving a trail of destruction. Guns were popping, each burst showing a brilliant flash of white sparks from the muzzle. The men were white shapes against grey cars and a black road. The man they were shooting at was ducking and dodging, spinning the policemen left and right. Four officers were already laying on their backs. Then five, then six. The seventh and eighth men began running away but continued to trail one arm back towards the carnage shooting at their pursuer as they fled.
He didn’t chase. He got into one of the unmarked police cars and powered towards Calea Bucharest.
“Airborne One. Be advised. Suspect has taken a vehicle and is heading into Brasov. I repeat, suspect is mobile… Ambulance required at…”
Razvan was losing his power to speak. The helicopter was moving towards the road block which had suddenly exploded into life of blue flashing lights. There had to be at least twenty police cars there and they had switched on their lights in unison.
“Are you seeing this?” came the voice of Stefan Silviu, the pilot. Razvan thought he meant the roadblock, but then noticed the pilot was looking to the side, back at the carnage in the road. Through a lull in the blizzard he saw six men bleeding in red pools amongst the snow. Six armed policemen had just been cut down by a man with a knife… and that man was only seconds away from ramming a police roadblock of twenty more cars.
----- X -----
On the corner of Calea Bucharest, the Captain Nemo Club was making good trade. Over a hundred people were sitting at the windows that stretched around the long curved street corner. When the cars arrived, a policeman rushed in and shouted for everyone to stay inside. The bar staff locked the doors and the punters were pressed up against the glass with cell phone cameras, taking pictures.
The police were covered behind their cars, pistols drawn, pointing further down the road.
What could be happening?
It was very exciting.
There was a helicopter overhead.
The lights on the cars all clicked on. Blue strobes flashing through the glass of the club. The policemen seemed to brace.
Then gunshots rang out. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang…
Then came a crash as a car on the far side rammed the roadblock. Things happened out of view, an errant bullet popped the window in the club doorway and people jumped back and hit the deck as shattering glass dropped to the floor. Girls screamed and ran to a fire exit at the back of the club, whilst others tried to take cover and raise their cell phones over the window ledge to film the action.
----- X -----
Mihai Negoita was fifteen years old and dreamed of being a TV cameraman. He was on the ninth floor of a block above the action. He’d obsessed about a job in television so much his mother had bargained for a dated video camera as a Christmas gift. It was Mini-DV format, a redundant technology, it had cost more than she could afford but Mihai would make her money back a thousand times with his footage.
He was perched above the roadblock, his camera angle wide enough to capture the scene of police cars and the man snaking his way through them. The man was fast. Lightning fast and he attacked the police as though they were sedated and fighting a Kung-Fu master. From his vantage point, Mihai could see that the police had made a devastating tactical error. They had aligned their vehicles to block the road, but then parked the other cars haphazardly to make a maze of vehicles. When facing the oncoming car they had perfect line of sight to shoot, but once their assailant crossed the roadblock the police were in a desperate mess because they risked shooting at each other.
The attacker moved in a fluid way without any waste of effort, without any redundancy to his actions. Each step and turn was precise. He hit the police and they went down and stayed down.
Mihai thought the man had a knife, but it was too unclear to see. If he zoomed in he couldn’t track the action, when he zoomed out it was too distant to tell. He trusted his instincts. His years of thought and preparation all coming into play at the precise moment to set the camera correctly, to judge the amount of gain, the iris, the shutter speed all in a heartbeat and then frame the action correctly.
His skill would pay off. He would have the best footage filmed of Paul McGovern’s Brasov attack.
----- X -----
Paul weaved through the police cars, running in a stoop. Bullets popped overhead. He needed to get out of here. They had him pinned. There seemed to be a hundred cops out of nowhere. He couldn’t survive here for more than a few seconds. He had to keep moving. The haphazard cars gave him cover, he was moving whilst the police officers stood still an
d rotated on the spot. Their movements and aims too uncoordinated to hit him, but they were blasting from every angle. The cars were being riddled, the safety glass of the car windows broke into tiny cubes and dropped from their frames.
Two men were ahead, a few feet apart. Paul rounded a vehicle straight into them. They both aimed. He watched the cascading shockwaves of energy pulsing along their arms to the trigger fingers. Too late to back out. He was committed. He tried a leap of faith, jumping high to clear a car bonnet with a karambit swipe to take out one of the cops. Time slowed to a virtual halt the moment his feet were off the ground. He swung the blade and watched it heading towards the fingers of the closest pistol. The knife blade cut into flesh at the same moment his feet touched the bonnet. The second gunman fired. There was a split moment without time… There was no movement at all... Paul was looking at a gun pointed right at him. There was a huge burst of muzzle flare, like a blast of flame ahead of the weapon. He could almost sense the position of the bullet in the air as it rushed towards him.
----- X -----
Victor Costel was the shift manager of MacDonald’s. He was seventeen years old but had impressed enough to be fast tracked to management. He had already backed his staff into the rear of the kitchen, dispersed the customers through the back door and shut off the lights to the restaurant to hide them.
The staff were covered, the customers running away shielded by the building.
Victor remained at the front of the kitchen watching from behind a coffee machine that he was sure could take a bullet. He saw the aggressor. He was a man, who seemed to move faster than he should be able to. He watched him rush past policemen with guns, swinging a knife into their arms or faces. He rushed past policemen who then dropped to the floor and didn’t get up.
It was a vision of pure horror. This man, this thing, was cutting the policemen to ribbons and they seemed powerless to stop him. Then he jumped across a car, landed on the front and went spinning off the back to the sound of a gunshot. They’d hit him. No question, he was shot and it had knocked him off the car.
----- X -----
Lupescu was in the control room listening to the radio reports. Two were coming in simultaneously, one from the helicopter, one from the ground.
He’d sent so many cars. He’d sent so many men. It should have been overkill but from the ground radio it sounded like a warzone. All he could hear were gunshots and screaming. It was one man. They should have put him down in seconds. If they hadn’t stopped him after one minute of shooting they were unlikely to stop him after another five minutes when most of them were injured.
Lupescu rubbed his brow with his hand and felt the sweat pouring from him. “I need you to contact Police headquarters in Bucharest, Special Situations Response” he said to a girl in the control room. “Hurry.”
The girl pulled out a ring binder and flipped through pages. She made a call and handed over the telephone. It rang twice.
“Buna. Respons Speciale Situatiae,” came a man’s voice.
“This is Comisar Sef de Politie, Ion Lupescu of Brasov Jurisdiction. We are dealing with a major terrorist attack. Multiple officers injured by small arms and knife attacks. We require military help.”
----- X -----
Paul hit the floor on his back and rolled quickly. He’d felt the gunshot but didn’t feel pain or injury. He sensed the damage more than he felt it. It was his left flank just above the hip. Intestines were there, nothing else. It would bleed. He would lose blood and his body would go into shock, drawing his blood away from the skin to focus on his head, heart and lungs.
He couldn’t survive this fight if his body was in shock.
His roll landed him back on his feet. He saw the successful gunman lining up for a second shot. The trigger was pulled but Paul was already ducking away from danger and the bullet embedded in the road behind him after passing between his head and right shoulder. It made a sharp crack noise like a whip as it passed his ear.
He launched forward feeling his speed and strength diminished from injury and fatigue. His left hand pushed the gun up, the karambit followed slicing into the arm from underneath between tricep and bicep. This was the bastard who had shot him. He carried on with the slice, past the elbow, into the forearm, cutting deep for revenge. He grabbed the pistol and let the policeman fall backwards as his clothing and skin flapped away from the bone.
Escape. Evade.
He still held the pistol by the hot barrel.
He looked around. The Captain Nemo Club. People were in there, a few were pushing through a rear fire exit. If he could get into the club the police couldn’t shoot without hitting the customers.
He sprinted hard across open ground and leapt in through a window that had been broken in the shootout. His flank jarred with a piercing pain as his feet landed. He heard women screaming, he saw a man backed into a corner holding a chair ahead of him like a lion tamer.
Paul pushed through the fire escape and out into the rear street and a stunning silence. It was dark. There were no blue flashing lights. Large snowflakes drifted about him.
Decision.
Be wise. Don’t make a mistake. What was the advice from the old commando training manual? Take the hard way out.
He’d bought seconds of time with evasion, but they would be following. They would be closing the area. He had to get out of here somehow.
----- X -----
The gunfire had ended. The cops still standing were pointing guns at The Captain Nemo club and edging in slowly. Too slowly. Their antagoniser could be running away with speed whilst they tiptoed at a snail’s pace behind him. The patrons were calling out, saying the man with a knife and a gun had gone through the fire exit, but the police still moved at a shuffling pace. Guns ready, clumped together, moving through the club towards the fire exit.
Officer Constantin Luga had only been a police officer for two years. He thought he was bulletproof. He believed he could handle any situation. He crawled back to his car on his knees holding his right arm with his left as blood rushed everywhere from a deep cut to his inner forearm. He wobbled as he moved, his vision felt sharp but lacked depth to such an extent that the helicopter making all the noise above him looked like a toy miniature, close enough that he could reach out and pluck it from the sky.
He slumped into the car seat, crying out in a whine. He tucked his right hand under his chin to try and keep the wound to the crook of his elbow under pressure. He pulled the radio microphone near to his mouth.
The passenger side door opened.
A man jumped in.
It was him…
A gun pointed from the man’s left hand. A hooked knife blade from his right reached over and dug into his belly, breaking the skin, ready to open his abdomen.
“Vorbiti Engleza?” the man asked. Do you speak English?
“A little,” Constantin whispered as he pulled his stomach in.
“I want you to land that helicopter. Tell it, it needs to land to take the wounded to hospital… If you don’t, I’ll kill you.”
Constantin looked around him. He saw the last of the able officers vanish inside the club. Ahead of him he saw wounded men on their backs, sitting against cars nursing wounds, or like him crawling for help. There was no help. There was no backup. This Englishman had divided them and doubled back. He had literally run a circle around them.
The karambit blade pressed firmly into his side.
“I will tell the controller to do it,” Constantin said. He keyed the microphone and barked instructions placing emphasis on the words ‘elicopter’ and ‘la spital’.
The crackled voice returned saying, “Control, Luga, inteleasa.” The message was understood.
“If that helicopter doesn’t land…” he began saying.
“It is… Look, it is…”
It was true. The helicopter was dropping through the snowfall onto the crossroads at the top of the road, then drifted sideways to avoid the overhead cables for the electric trolley bu
sses.
“Please,” Constantin said. “You said you don’t kill me.”
The Englishman looked at him with black, lifeless eyes then jerked upwards slashing the blade towards him.
For a moment, Constantin thought he was dead, or had suffered a fatal blow. After a few seconds in a flinched and tense position he opened his eyes to see the Englishman running towards the helicopter. He felt his neck and throat for a wound and found nothing, then opened his hand to see he was gripping a microphone with a severed cable. The vampire had kept his word. He had cut the mic cable and allowed him to live.
----- X -----
The helicopter was touching down, throwing the already heavy snowfall in every direction beneath it.
“Get out and assess,” Stefan the pilot called to Razvan. “Triage. Let ground ambulances take the wounded. We’ll take the desperate.”
Razvan unhooked his harness, uncoupled his helmet headset and climbed out of the jump seat. Spectating from above was horrifying. He was watching as man after man was cut down by this psychopath and there was not a damn thing they could do from the air.
Razvan gave a thumbs up as he climbed out of the seat and moved to the back of the helicopter. The Mi-8 was a big transport bird capable of airlift rescue, troop transport, cargo drops. you name it. It was big, it was bulky and it was versatile as hell.
Razvan clicked the button to lower the rear loading ramp and slid open the side door to get out faster.
Someone rushed up the ramp.
Razvan saw a gash open across his blue flight suit. Something oozed out of him that his hands grasped in reflex. He was spun, he saw a boot on his chest kicking him backwards out of the helicopter. He landed hard on his back, the full down-force of the rotors blowing blindingly cold air into his face.
