by Will Jordan
His mind couldn’t process it, but his body was already starting to react. He could feel his heart pounding, could hear the blood rushing in his ears.
Anya was yelling something. He could hear the reverberation of her voice, even if he couldn’t focus on the words. As if in a trance, Alex looked up from Landvik’s body just as Anya launched herself at him, tackling him around the midsection like a rugby player.
They fell and landed hard, the impact knocking the wind from his lungs and pressing agonizingly against his already bruised ribs. The polished hardwood floor presented almost no friction against their lateral movement, and they slid several yards before finally coming to a halt in the corridor beyond.
At the same time, more shots tore through the house, shattering windows and slamming into the wall opposite. The wall-mounted television disintegrated in a shower of broken plastic and shattered electrical components, followed a moment later by one of the kitchen cupboards.
‘Alex, are you hurt?’ Anya asked, her face mere inches from his.
He didn’t respond. He was staring around the corner at the pool of blood and brain matter that was slowly spreading out from the remains of his friend’s head.
‘Alex, look at me!’ Anya shouted, forcefully turning his face towards her. ‘I’m sorry for your friend, but I need you to focus or we both die here!’
Finally his mind seemed to emerge from the dull shock that had numbed him for the past few seconds. ‘The police...just murdered him. Why?’
‘It’s not the police. It’s the Agency,’ she said, drawing the automatic from her jeans. ‘They must have intercepted police communications.’
Backing up against the wall, she leaned out just far enough to survey the area beyond the shattered living-room windows. Sure enough, the chopper was maintaining station about fifty feet above the surface of the lake. Low enough to give the shooter an excellent field of fire over the house, but high enough that the aircraft’s downwash wouldn’t kick up surface spray and interfere with his aim.
From her extensive knowledge of such aircraft, it looked like a variant of the Bell 206. Such choppers had been exported all over the world, and were used in everything from traffic reports to police pursuits. It was a civilian rather than a military aircraft, with no armour belt or inbuilt weapons systems, but it was a perfect vehicle for moving an Agency strike team around without attracting attention.
Her USP pistol was useless against such a target. Even without armour protection, the chopper was still well beyond the effective range of the automatic, and the minute she exposed herself she’d be under fire from what sounded like a Barrett .50 calibre rifle. Such a gun was designed to take out armoured vehicles, never mind the fragile human bodies inside them.
As to remind her of this fact, the gunner perched in the chopper’s doorway opened fire again, forcing Anya to duck behind cover as another heavy-calibre shell slammed into the wall mere inches away.
Guessing his intentions, she flattened herself on the floor as a second round punched right through the retaining wall above her, followed by a third, and a fourth. He was working his way methodically along the wall in case she was foolish enough to think it offered any protection.
‘They have us covered,’ she said, wiping concrete dust from her eyes. ‘We can’t escape.’
‘We could wait them out,’ Alex suggested. ‘They can’t stay up there forever.’
The woman shook her head. ‘The chopper is there to keep us pinned down. Ground teams will be moving in to surround the building.’
What she couldn’t understand was why the chopper gunner had decided to move in and open fire on the building in the first place. It would have been far more prudent to wait and allow agents on the ground to surround and storm the place, taking them all by surprise and subduing them without a shot fired.
Then again, perhaps he had an entirely different plan in mind. Something that would ensure none of them lived to talk about what happened here.
The aircraft outside was moving, doing a slow circuit of the building in search of a better shot. With such constant eyes in the sky, there was no chance of them escaping unseen. They were trapped here.
Alex looked at her, sensing her unease. ‘What the fuck are we going to do?’
They couldn’t go anywhere with the chopper overhead. One way or another it had to be dealt with. Anya chewed her lip for a moment or two, deep in thought, before finally nodding to herself.
‘Does Landvik keep any weapons in the house?’
Alex closed his eyes, focussing his razor-sharp memory on his one previous visit to this house. Gregar’s father was an outdoors type – very much into 4x4s, mountain biking and above all, hunting. He used to pride himself on the freezer full of elk meat that he’d killed, cleaned and gutted himself, as if the ability to point a gun and shoot somehow made him more of a man.
Regardless though, he made sure to keep the tool of this particular trade within his home, and had even shown it to Alex on one occasion.
‘There used to be a hunting rifle under the stairs,’ he said, though he had no idea if it was still there. ‘It’s the only gun I know of here.’
‘All right. Get to the computer, retrieve the files.’ Without hesitation she turned the automatic around and thrust it into his hand. ‘Shoot anyone you see who isn’t me.’
Alex swallowed, staring at the weapon as if it might explode in his hands. ‘I’ve never fired a gun in my life.’
He saw a fleeting look of disappointment in her eyes. ‘There is a round in the chamber. Just grip it tight, point and shoot; don’t hesitate. That’s all you have to do.’ Reaching out, she laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You can do this, Alex.’
Saying nothing further, she jumped to her feet and took off down the corridor, leaving him alone.
*
Fifty feet above, Jason Hawkins surveyed the big lakeside house through his magnified sniper’s scope. The Barrett M82 automatic rifle in his arms was a leaden weight that few men could have easily manoeuvred in such close confines, never mind used effectively, but years of intense training and experience had endowed him with a strength and skill that was almost unmatched.
He held the weapon steady, his face a mask of calm self control that hid the conflicted emotions vying for dominance within him. He’d felt a momentary surge of excitement and anticipation at seeing Anya again, at having her in his crosshairs and knowing he had the power to put her down.
Only her quick reflexes, and the stupid fat bastard who had inadvertently acted as a human shield, had saved her life. She was still alive and somewhere inside the house, though he was confident she couldn’t escape without being seen. As well as this chopper and the ground team surrounding the house, he could also call upon a remote-controlled drone aircraft that had been tasked to the operation. Orbiting high overhead, unseen and unheard, its thermal imaging cameras were covering the entire area. Even Anya couldn’t compete with the technology arrayed against her.
He had her. And one way or another, he would take her down.
There would be no arrest this time. No handing her over to a foreign government only to see her escape later. Hawkins was out to finish what he’d started six years earlier.
‘Bring us around to the south-west side,’ he said, indicating to the pilot that he wanted to switch position, then quickly changed frequency to broadcast a message to his ground teams. ‘Alpha to all units. Tangos confirmed on-site. Hold the perimeter and don’t let anyone leave.’
His radio headset crackled. ‘Alpha, who’s shooting?’ a female, and very pissed-off, voice demanded. ‘We’re in position. Let us move in.’
Hawkins gritted his teeth. Mitchell, the woman who was rapidly becoming a pain in his ass. A pain he wasn’t prepared to tolerate much longer. She questioned too much, thought too much, saw too clearly. People like that were liabilities he could ill afford.
‘Negative, Charlie,’ he replied tersely. ‘Hold position. We have armed tangos inside.’
Spotting a sudden movement in one of the bedrooms overlooking the lake, Hawkins adjusted his aim, focussing in on the window. A curtain had been drawn to hide the interior from view, but the thin fabric could do little to disguise the heat emitted by a human body – heat that his thermal imaging scope was perfectly capable of detecting.
Pressing his eye to the scope, he could make out the flickering glow of a computer or TV screen, and the red outline of a figure leaning over it. Yates.
It would be the last mistake he ever made.
‘I have a tango!’ he called out. ‘Hold us steady.’
Tensing up, he took aim and pulled the trigger.
*
Alex was just leaning over the computer to check the download progress when he paused. The engine noise of the chopper outside had changed note, as if the pilot had made some correction to his course. He wasn’t circling the building any more in search of a target; he’d stopped.
He’d found his target. But who?
Anya was too clever to expose herself, and Landvik was already dead.
That only left…
Reacting on nothing more than gut instinct, Alex threw himself to the floor just as something punched its way through the window, tearing a hole in the curtain and impacting the computer he’d just been standing over.
‘Shit!’ he cried out, curling into a ball as sparks and fragments of broken plastic and metal flew outward from the ruined machine.
Keeping his belly flat against the floor, he crawled backwards towards the hallway even as more shots tore through the window, destroying what was left of Landvik’s workstation. And the files he’d been in the midst of downloading.
*
‘Tango in the upper bedroom,’ Hawkins reported. ‘Possible kill.’
It was hard to tell what had happened in there, given the sudden thermal bloom as a stray round destroyed whatever electrical equipment had been running. All he knew for sure was that the figure he’d been aiming at had fallen from sight.
No sooner had he spoken than another voice cut into the radio conversation. ‘Overlord has movement in the building. First floor window.’
Overlord was the call sign for the Reaper drone. Larger, faster and capable of flying higher than the Predator it was slowly replacing, the Reaper was the ultimate in pilotless aircraft. Its thermal-imaging cameras could pick out even the smallest movement, making it impossible to escape.
Some, like the one watching over them today, were even coated in radar-absorbing material, allowing them to operate in foreign airspace undetected.
Hawkins’s eye was back behind the scope in a heartbeat, muscles bunching and straining as he brought the cumbersome weapon to bear on a new target.
He was a moment too late.
*
Below, Anya sat crouched by the window of the upstairs bedroom, watching the chopper as it slowly moved past her line of sight. The bolt-action rifle pressed against her shoulder was of a type unfamiliar to her, but seemed to have been designed with big-game hunting in mind. The .270 Winchester cartridges it used, popular with hunters the world over, were lethal at up to a thousand yards, and powerful enough to take down elk and moose with a single shot.
It was just as well, because her chosen prey was almost forty feet long and weighed over 2,000 pounds.
Sighting the chopper, she adjusted her aim upward to the engine housing and the delicate mechanical systems contained within. She would have preferred to take out the gunner, but the chopper itself was likely fitted with thermal-imaging equipment that was being used to direct ground units to their position. One way or another she needed to put it out of action.
Taking first pressure on the trigger, she relaxed her arm slightly in preparation for the recoil, exhaled, and fired.
The report of the weapon in such a confined space was deafening, the blast reverberating off the walls until it left her ears ringing. She let out an involuntary grunt as the weapon slammed back into her shoulder with enough force to leave bruises, the foresight jumping upward despite her efforts to hold the weapon still.
Straight away her right hand was moving, working the bolt action to eject the spent cartridge and draw a fresh one into the breech. In just over a second she had chambered her second round, sighted the engine housing once more and loosed another shot.
*
Hawkins almost smiled as his sights came to rest on Anya’s head. With the power of the Barrett .50 cal, a hit just about anywhere on the body would cause catastrophic damage and deal a disabling if not a fatal injury, but he wanted a head shot.
He wanted to look into her eyes in that final moment before her skull disintegrated.
‘Bang, you’re dead,’ he whispered as his finger tightened on the trigger, taking first pressure.
Suddenly the helicopter shuddered as the round impacted above him. Before he had time to react, the aircraft yawed violently to port, pulling the barrel of the gun upward just as he squeezed the trigger.
The Barrett discharged with a thunderous boom, sending its projectile sailing harmlessly off into the woodland beyond the house. Abandoning the cumbersome weapon, Hawkins grabbed hold of a restraining harness to steady himself as the deck tilted beneath his feet, threatening to pitch him right out the open doorway.
‘What the fuck’s going on up there?’ he snarled as the surface of the lake lurched and swayed dangerously beneath them. It was as if the chopper had become caught in the funnel of a tornado.
‘We’ve been hit,’ the pilot replied, fighting with the stick as if it had a mind of its own. ‘I’m losing hydraulic pressure.’
Hawkins ground his teeth. No way was he abandoning the attack now. ‘Bring us back around and get me another shot at this bitch.’
‘Working on it, sir,’ he said, frantically trying to stabilize their erratic, lurching flight.
Chapter 26
In the house below, Alex started at the sharp crack of two gunshots coming from the upper floor, followed moments later by a sudden change in the high-pitched whine coming from the chopper’s engines, as if they were labouring and straining somehow.
Chancing a look, he leaned out just far enough to see across the lake. And to his amazement, he watched as the chopper peeled away and retreated, struggling to maintain its course as wisps of smoke trailed from the engines.
In the comparative silence that followed, he could hear footsteps on the stairs. Turning with the weapon at the ready, he almost sighed in relief as Anya hurried over to him, clutching a heavy-looking bolt-action hunting rifle.
‘The chopper is out of action, for now,’ she informed him without emotion, as if it were no more than a minor inconvenience easily dealt with. ‘Get the file. We’re leaving.’
At this, Alex shook his head. ‘They fired on me when I went in there. The computer’s fucked. I lost the download.’
Anya said nothing for a moment or two, her jaw clenched, then shook her head and turned away. ‘Come on, we have to go.’
‘Fuck that. If we leave now, this is all for nothing.’ Alex was already moving towards the bedroom, seized by the desperate notion that he could remove the hard drive from the shattered casing and perhaps salvage the file later. Getting to it would take precious time, but it had to be worth a try at least.
Anya caught his arm and pulled him to a stop, spinning him around to face her. ‘We have no time for this.’
He tried to pull away, but her grip was surprisingly strong. ‘Let go of me!’
In response, she pulled him close and fixed him with a hard glare. ‘Listen to me, Alex. The file is no use to us if we’re dead!’
Releasing her grip, she moved over to a window overlooking the driveway and the woodland beyond. The evergreen forest created a dense canopy that virtually blotted out the sun, but also resulted in few bushes or other forms of ground cover.
‘They’re coming,’ she said, her voice low and urgent. ‘I can’t hold them off for long.’
Alex glanced at the long barrel of the hunting rifle. ‘What are you going to do?’
Her answer was simple. Her intentions weren’t. ‘Buy us some time.’
Reversing her grip on the weapon, she slammed the butt against the window, shattering the glass, then angled the barrel out through the jagged hole.
*
Hawkins clung on tight as the chopper’s deck pitched and rolled wildly beneath his feet, the pilot working hard to gain some altitude and stabilize their course, fighting the sluggish controls of an aircraft crippled by loss of hydraulic power.
The attempt to kill Anya with a clean, surgical sniper attack had failed. Hawkins was still seething over his failure, but knew that self-recrimination would have to wait. In any case, he had other means of taking Anya down.
Gripping a restraining harness with one hand, Hawkins keyed his radio with the other. ‘Alpha to Overlord.’
‘Go, Alpha,’ the pilot of the Reaper drone replied.
‘You are weapons-free. Authorisation Bravo, Zulu, Niner. Roll in strike package on previously identified coordinates.’
The Reaper wasn’t just there to observe the assault. If surveillance wasn’t enough and the situation warranted it, the drone’s payload of air-to-ground Hellfire missiles could reduce virtually any standing structure to rubble in seconds.
