After It Happened (Book 7): Andorra [The Leah Chronicles]

by Ford, Devon C.

  Discovery was at the most heightened danger then, with either a shout or a flashlight able to spell our end, and I held my breath as he covered the final few feet and paused. He pushed the gun forwards, pressing the suppressor hard into the flesh beside his windpipe as his left hand clamped over his mouth. I wasn’t close enough to hear, but I was certain that Dan would have shushed him. The man, woken in terror and darkness, rose from the chair very quietly and slowly, the front legs touching down on the road surface with the barest of sounds. He stood, and Dan’s left hand ran swiftly over his body to remove anything he could use to escape or raise the alarm. He was turned and began slowly walking towards me as Dan held the back of his collar with his left hand and pressed the barrel of the Walther into the right side of his throat. I knew why he did that; he was ready to shoot out his windpipe and weigh up the risk of the suppressed gunshot and the subsequent noise of the round hitting the concrete wall and flattening against the risk of a shout being heard. Dan reached me, slowly pushing him down to his knees so that his wide, terrified eyes shone brightly in my view. He seemed to look straight at me and I didn’t know if the outside world offered some slither of light that he could see me in or whether he just sensed that someone was in front of him. I heard the zzzip and a small grunt as his hands were bound behind his back, then saw Dan reach around his neck in an exaggerated way to hook his right fist up behind the sentry’s left ear. He issued an involuntary noise, a hint of a strangled yelp before he was unable to utter any other sound. His feet began to dance manically on the roadway and I lowered my gun automatically to secure his boots and keep the noise to a minimum. It took Dan maybe twenty seconds to put him out; strong forearms cutting off the supply of blood to his brain and rendering him a ragdoll who posed no threat for a while.

  He was lowered gently to the ground and Dan rose, chest heaving from the effort of his burning muscles squeezing the man into unconsciousness, and he raised his gun again to turn back to the door.

  I stacked up behind him, just as I had been taught, and placed my left hand on his left shoulder to indicate that I was ready. The drills we had practiced and perfected over the years had never been more important than they were then in the silent darkness as he opened the door. There was no lighter glow from inside, no sudden flash of light to white out our goggles, meaning that there were no lights on inside. There were only three rooms inside, one locked, one bearing ranks of electrical switch boxes, and one containing a grubby mattress and a shape in a sleeping bag. He lay on his back, mouth open and a chesty wheeze emanating from it, and his eyes shot open like headlamps hitting full beam when Dan simultaneously put a knee into his abdomen and pressed the tip of the suppressor hard under his nose.

  Whoever he was, he got the message instantly. He didn’t make a sound, didn’t offer the slightest hint of resistance as he was bound and had a discarded T-shirt used to gag his mouth. I used another cable tie from my own vest, looping it through a second to secure them around a thick pipe and his neck to keep him sat up and still. Dan wordlessly went back outside and brought the other one in, still totally off the planet, and he was tied up beside him. I knelt down to put my face beside the conscious man, his face bumping off the goggles as I had forgotten he would be closer than I expected, and I asked a simple question after removing the gag and pushing the barrel of my weapon up under his chin.

  “Combien?” I hissed. How many?

  “Ici?” he answered in a quavering whisper. “Deux.”

  Only two there. Perfect. I relayed this to Dan, and the others were brought inside. He went to fetch them one by one, leading them back with their hands on his shoulders until they were safely inside the windowless room. Only then did Dan warn them to shield their eyes before clicking on a tiny flashlight to bathe the small room in a dull, red glow. White light would have blinded us all, ruined any night vision the others would have developed, and the warning allowed me to finally remove the goggles and stretch my neck from the cramping effort of holding that small amount of extra weight up for so long.

  My estimation of how long it would have taken us to walk through the tunnel was ridiculously wrong, as Dan muttered to me that it had been a little over seventy minutes since we had set off, adding that we had three hours before sunrise.

  Which meant it was two hours until game time.

  We Meet Again, Mister Bond

  I shot a glance up to the ridge above me, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to see Lucien but hoping for some kind of connection with my guardian angel, meaning the devastating power of the 417 he held, and convinced myself that I wasn’t thinking about him. We crept forwards towards the town, following the whispered directions of the conscious guard who was only too happy to tell us exactly where the people were housed in the town.

  They had taken over the hotel which was at the furthest end of the tiny town, still in view of the tunnel entrance, but he helpfully informed us that a path ran from there to the tunnel which is how he went to his post each night and returned each morning. The other one had woken up, panicking at being so restrained, and insisted on making a desperate noise through his gag which resulted in Neil administering something he liked to call ‘manual anaesthetic’ via the medium of the butt of his shotgun to the head.

  After that, the chatty one got even chattier.

  He tried to explain that he had never hurt anyone, that all he did was stand guard at night and never involved himself with the politics of the others. He said that he barely knew their leader, some former policeman from Andorra which is why they had roamed back through Spain to take the country. He said that he wasn’t a violent man, that he hadn’t hurt anyone or taken part in any ambushes or attacks, and that he was only with them because they wouldn’t let him leave.

  I had believed some of what he said, not the parts about his hands being clean of all wrongdoing, obviously, and asked him where they would have taken Rafi.

  “In the hotel,” he had assured me, “on the first floor. There is a storage room beside the staircase where they keep him.”

  I had thanked him, leaving him to sit in silence for a moment, before looking at Neil and inviting him to step in with an open-handed gesture. He stood, readjusted his clothing, and applied a second dose of manual anaesthetic.

  We followed the path, the dull glow of a lighter grey sky making the skyline behind us barely visible, and we followed the path towards the lights. They kept guards stationed there, just as lazy and unconcerned as the ones sleeping in the tunnel, and we stayed back in cover to watch them. I took off the goggles as they were more of a hindrance then and looked at Dan where I could just about see well enough to make out the dark and thoughtful expression on his face. He shuffled back from our makeshift observation post and reconvened in the dead ground.

  “Chloe,” Dan said, “swap your four-one-six for Neil’s shotgun, then go back to the tunnel and collect their weapons. When you get the signal, you start firing their guns like there’s a fight going on. Hold that position and shoot anyone coming to investigate who isn’t us. Understand?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, “what is the signal?”

  “An explosion.”

  Silence.

  “Okay,” she said finally, retreating to make her careful way back along the path to the tunnel.

  “An explosion?” Mitch asked carefully.

  “What’s the range on your bomb-lobber?” he asked.

  “Three fifty to four hundred,” the Scotsman answered blankly.

  “Good,” Dan said, offering nothing more for a few tense seconds before adding, “they’ll be expecting us to attack at dawn, right?” The question was rhetorical. “So we hit them before sunrise. You fire a 40mm towards the direction of the tunnel and Chloe starts rattling off like there’s a firefight happening there. They’ll come out of the hotel and we drop them.”

  “Easy as that?” I asked, filling the silence that fell after the plan was declared.

  “On my signal,” Neil intoned in a Hollywood voi
ce, “unleash hell.”

  “Yeah,” Dan said, ignoring Neil’s inappropriate levity, “we take the rest as it comes. Get ready, spread out. Mitch and Neil take centre and we’ll take left,” he said meaning he and I would be the ones to cut down anyone making it out of the door and heading towards the tunnel, “and confine fire to ground floor only, remember we have a friendly on the first floor.”

  We settled in, gun barrels pointed towards the small hotel in the cluster of the twenty buildings in the small town. It was the biggest building there, and as the grey of the sky grew lighter it showed its bulk more clearly. Dan checked his watch repeatedly, his nervous tension evident and picked up by Ash who fidgeted and nudged him until a reassuring hand went to his large head.

  Still a puppy, I thought, no matter how big and bad he is.

  The fact that I could make out the shape of Ash beside him reminded me that it was almost time to start; to wage a tiny, small-scale war between a handful of hairless monkeys on a ball of rock and water spinning around the biggest natural power plant going. In the grand scheme of things our imminent conflict was irrelevant, but to us, right then, it was all.

  Dan knew it too, as he could make out enough detail below to start proceedings.

  “Mitch,” he hissed, “now.”

  Mitch wriggled back down into the dead ground and rolled on his back to point the rifle up and away towards the direction of the tunnel. He gauged it from memory, aiming further to the right to be sure he didn’t accidentally pepper Chloe with shrapnel, and pulled the trigger of the launcher. The metallic and percussive ffoomph of the small bomb launching up and away in an arc had barely faded when the sharp pop of the resulting explosion echoed loudly out over the small valley. Silence followed, and I saw the two men outside the entrance to the hotel stare at each other in sudden, uncomprehending fear. They had obviously been told to expect an attack later in the day, not when the sky was still dark, but the sounds that followed spurred them into action as they ran inside and shouted loudly.

  Boom, rat-at-at-at-at, boom-boom.

  The sounds of Chloe’s mock gunfight drifted down to our position, clear and precise and very convincing. She fired intermittently, clearly pausing as she set down one weapon and picked up another as though two people exchanged fire in panic from cover.

  “Get ready,” Dan said unnecessarily, as they began to run out of the main doors to the hotel in ones and twos. Mitch sensibly left the first few, allowing us to pick them off with measured bursts from our suppressed carbines before the majority realised they were under more direct attack than they feared.

  They ran blindly into our kill zone, only faltering when bullets kicked up sparks from the road and the crumpled bodies of the others before the accurate fire cut them down. The flow faltered, as though only a handful were dressed enough to join the fight. I counted nine down and called over to Mitch who still hadn’t fired a shot in anger yet.

  “Stir the nest,” I said, meaning for him to start stitching the windows of the hotel, but instead he rose to one knee and reached for the trigger mechanism under his barrel again.

  Ffoomph-BANG, the launch and answering detonation sounding as though no time separated them at all. Mitch slid open the breech of the fat tube and pushed in another of the 40mm bombs from his vest, snapping back the open section and pumping a second one into the windows on the left side of the ground floor this time.

  It worked. People ran from the main entrance where they had clearly been cowering and waiting for orders, and the staccato rattle of the unsuppressed rifles of Mitch and Neil rang out loudly in the grey end of night. Bodies fell, some answering the barrage with shots of their own indicated by the differing light shows of muzzle flashes from inside. Glass shattered everywhere until the return fire simply stopped.

  “We’ve done it,” Neil answered, then ducked and swore savagely when bullets began to impact on the rocky ground ahead of him. He tucked up like a hedgehog and threw himself down the slope to avoid death, which for some unknown reason I found hilarious in the moment. It stopped being funny when the intensity of the returning fire grew so strong that Mitch was forced to duck back also. He looked at me, the whiteness of his eyes just visible in the growing light, and the head they were set in shook. I poked my head above the crest to see muzzle flashes and silhouettes on the roof as they poured fire down at the position in front of the main doors.

  Trapped, my brain said, no way out of the dead ground. They have the height advantage.

  I popped up, pointing the barrel of my gun at the moving shadows on the roof, and let fly the whole magazine in three long bursts. Dan did the same, sixty rounds flying towards half-seen targets in the hope of killing or suppressing them, but the fire turned on our position and forced us to duck back down.

  “Fucking bollocks!” Dan roared, the fingers of his right hand dabbing at a cut on his cheek where a slither of stone had been thrown up by the onslaught.

  We were pinned down, still with probably half of their force in play, and it was all going to shit.

  There was this brief moment of fear, fear of failure more than death, as each of us tried to figure out a way to break the deadlock. As I took a breath, fresh magazine seated in my carbine and heart beating out of my chest, I rolled a metre to my right and prepared to rise again and pour fire back at them. Just then a sensation of warmth, barely detectable in the chaos, touched the back of my head and made me turn to see the sun crest the mountains.

  Then, the sweet sound of a high-velocity bullet passing through the air ripped my senses back to the present. It was followed by more, each of them coming down at a steady, rhythmic rate like some wrathful and vengeful god smiting the unworthy.

  ~

  Lucien had crept up the winding road during the evening, his eyes alert for any sign ahead of the enemy, but the dog walking uncertainly beside him made no sound to warn of another human being in sight or smell. Nemesis had spent the first hour issuing small whines as she looked back down the road, clearly not fully understanding why her master had left her. That abated when the town below dropped from sight, as his careful movements forced her to recognise that the prospect of enemy was a realistic one. She stalked beside him in silence, claws clacking only occasionally on the smooth tarmac, which had baked dry during the hot day, until he reached the summit of the road. He moved off the easy path, electing instead to angle across the rocky ground to where the two roads would converge and make his careful descent under the cover of darkness to a spot he had picked out at dusk, and he sat and shared his snack with the dog.

  Taking his time so as not to disturb the night air, he crept forwards with the dog and settled himself in beside a sparse bush to overlook the town below. And he waited.

  A sudden popping explosion tore him from a daydream he had lapsed into as Nemesis raised her head and growled deep in her throat. Gunfire echoed back, sounding like a battle was taking place below him but he saw no sign of movement or muzzle flashes to support what his ears were telling his brain. Before he understood that, more gunfire rang out with another pair of muted explosions, and the angle of his spot hid the source from his sight.

  “Faut-il partir? Faut-il rester?” he asked himself, receiving a nudge from Nem and decided that they should go instead of staying where they were. Moving, he knew, was risky because the sun was starting to rise in the far-off landscape over his left shoulder, and detection as a sniper was fatal.

  He went, leaving his bag and roll mat where they were in favour of speed over comfort. He ran, skipping low over rocks and clumps of stiff grass until he half saw the flashes of gunfire ahead and below him. He dropped to the nearest patch of flat ground, settling himself as he squirmed towards the battle, and put an eye to his scope. Ten or more shapes poured from the hatch, where they stopped near to the ledge of the roof and aimed their weapons ahead of them. Firing sounded heavy and constant, faltering only once before resuming with greater intensity than before, and just as the sun broke cover to illuminate them
, he fired.

  Boom.

  Two of them fell to one bullet, so he switched his aim and squeezed the trigger again to drop another two and spill a third over the unprotected edge to fall to the ground below. He fired again and again, not taking such careful aim but just pouring the heavy bullets into the people who threatened his own, who threatened his friend and the young woman he suddenly decided that he very much wanted to see whole once more.

  ~

  “Pretty boy!” Dan exclaimed gleefully, readying himself to rise and fire again. We did so as one, popping up like reanimated corpses to unleash a coughing rattle of hell and death at the bastards who had trapped us in the dead ground below them. And just as rapidly as it had begun, the firing stopped. Nobody could have been alive or showing themselves on the roof as the cracks and booms of the distant rifle ceased, and as I scanned the shattered glass of the entrance to the hotel I saw the most bizarre of things.

  A table cloth, at least I guessed it was one, hung limply from the barrel of a gun as the man carrying it stepped into the light with his hands held wide.

  “Mitch, Neil,” Dan said, “hold position.”

  He rose to his feet and I followed, as did Ash. We stepped awkwardly down the slope and raised our guns, stopping in the only low cover between us and the man appearing to surrender.

  “Everyone out,” Dan called, “slowly.”

  The man turned back over his shoulder and spoke. I hadn’t clearly seen his face when I had him in the scope of my bigger rifle the first time, but the way he carried himself was the same. This was their leader. Six others came out, the last of them with a long barrel protruding over his shoulder and a pistol held against the head of the person he pushed in front of him. He I recognised instantly, despite the bruised and swollen face.