by A P Bateman
Spare kit and clothing had been used up and weapons redistributed. The dead man’s assault rifle replaced the one taken by the Englishman, and the sniper had been given the dead man’s pistol. Two pistols and an assault rifle had been taken from them, along with vital ammunition, but they had enough firepower between them to wage war on this place. And that was exactly what they were going to do.
The Colonel had finished looking at every window. He could still see the man and woman on the top floor. They were too obvious to have training. He doubted he could take them both out from here with his assault rifle, but once the shells started to drop and he closed his distance under covering fire, he was sure both could be taken out efficiently. He frowned, feeling the vibration of his phone in his pocket. He looked at the screen and studied the text. A short message followed by a number. He let go of the binoculars around his neck, pressed the highlighted number feeling a rush of adrenalin as it was answered.
69
Caroline checked every floor. Both the waitress and the chef were peering out of the windows on the third floor. She nodded to Rashid, who had pulled out a sideboard and was using it as a bench rest for the rifle. He had set up similar rests in two other rooms and could now fire from three sides of the building. The SAS trained sniper had spread pillows on each sideboard to steady his aim and positioned the pieces of furniture several metres back into the room, so he could use the rifle without the barrel being in view, or the subsequent muzzle flash becoming visible from outside should he have to take more than one shot. Caroline had tried not to snigger at Rashid’s hair but had failed. Rashid had flipped a middle finger and turned back to survey outside through the sight of the rifle. As she had walked back along the corridor, she told the waitress and the chef to stand further back from the windows. They nodded, but she could see from their expressions that they were well outside their comfort zones.
She found King in the lobby. He looked at her and the two shared a moment, like a couple at a party neither wanted to be at any longer but had managed to shake off their friends long enough to sneak a quiet word or a kiss.
“Huss is no longer in his quarters,” Caroline said. “I’ve just checked, and he’s gone. I locked him in, but I suppose it wasn’t a stretch to have spare keys hidden somewhere.”
“I suspected as much,” King said.
“Somebody may have released him.”
“I think that’s a given.”
“But who?”
“Were the waitress and chef upstairs the whole time?”
“Yes. I think so. On the third floor, a roving patrol checking out of the windows.”
“And the manager?”
“I passed him on the stairs. He is armed with a can of bear spray and has been guarding the stairwells. He’s joining Marnie and Ramsay on the second floor. And then there’s the two Russian workers. There’s no knowing where they are,” she paused. “It’s one thing having an enemy out there, but if we can’t guarantee the safety inside… What are we going to do?”
King smiled. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
King held up his phone. “Marnie organised this,” he said. “GCHQ are scanning the hotel. With a triangulation of satellites. Anybody making a call has had their mobile phone intercepted and now I’m able to track their GPS. I don’t know who is denoted by which signal, but the person who received the text and made the call is outside and directly in front of us. That is undoubtedly a member, most likely the leader, of the hunter team. But two people have used their phones from the hotel. One internally, and the tracking doesn’t allow for floors or rooms, because none of those architectural diametrics have been entered. But another was outside, to the rear of the building. I have a copy of a text that has been sent as well. And a recording of the conversation.”
“And?”
“Somebody has sold us out,” said King.
“Who?”
“It’s complicated.” He walked past her and glanced inside the bar. The rooms were public areas and now that they were empty, they took on an eerie feel. He looked back at her, then pointed towards the windows of the conservatory. “The storm is here,” he said. He took out his phone and dialled Rashid’s number. “Be aware. I think they’ll move under the cover of the storm,” he said. “Keep your head down.”
“I’d best come down, then. Won’t be able to hit anything in the strong winds anyway.”
“No, stay,” he replied. “If you can get one of them in open ground, they’ll take a big psychological hit. And be aware, Huss is no longer contained and must be viewed as suspect.”
“I already did. I only trust the team.”
“Well, ere on the side of hostile, then.”
“Check.”
“And there’s at least one other. Somebody in collusion. Marnie’s app has shown two people have made a text or call.”
“That’s it?”
“Sketchy, I know, but that’s all I can tell you.” King ended the call and looked at Caroline. “Both signals are in the grounds, not the main hotel. One is in the maintenance huts at the rear. There is no access to the hotel without triggering the IEDs. The only way in is through the front door, or the side door. The other signal is coming from the side of the hotel. Where I parked up the maintenance truck. Now, there will be another set of keys for this, so I think we should expect this hunter force to come through there.”
“Someone here is in contact with the hostiles?” Caroline exclaimed.
“Looks that way. Text message and a short conversation.”
“And what was said?”
“The text passed on a telephone number and said that the person was onsite and could be trusted.”
“And the conversation?” Caroline asked incredulously.
King said, “It detailed how many of us there are. My Russian isn’t great if it’s spoken at speed, so I got the gist of it, but not in detail. It was between the leader of the hunter team and this mystery man. Either Huss, the manager or this hook-nosed man who seems to have disappeared. Marnie said she suspected him of stealing her laptop, and I would agree. Ramsay and her both said he had a limp and was dusted with snow when they bumped into him. The timing fits. And that ties in with him being the same man who was shooting at us. You winged him for sure. I don’t think he’s part of this hunter team, but there is most certainly a link. And I suspect he knows about how Fitzpatrick, the two police officers and the doctor died. I’m certain he was present at those murders. So, I imagine he will use the hunter team, guide them as best he can.”
“We need to take them down.”
“I’m not entirely sure who. On the surface it looks like both of them. But what if it’s the Russian waiter and the barman? Maybe Huss and the manager have simply bottled it and run away? They could be innocent.”
“Can’t GCHQ discover the phone records prior to this?”
“Yes, in time. But all of this will be over before they get that far.”
They both tensed as a tremendous roar engulfed them, as if a jet airliner were taking off overhead. Caroline found herself pulling close to King, and he hugged her, both ducking their heads at the noise. Almost at once the glass blew out in the conservatory and the wind tore through the hotel, pushing them backwards across the lobby and into the reception desk. King let go of Caroline to try and regain balance. He caught hold of her and pulled her with him to the stairwell. The wind did not reach here, and as they took shelter, they watched glass, snow, ice and debris blow past them and pepper the desk and office behind. King took out his phone, but all signal was gone. He wanted to call Rashid, get him and Ramsay to come down and cover the lower floors. No way could he see anybody in this wind and debris, let alone take a precision shot. King’s only solace was that he doubted anybody could expose themselves in the storm to attack.
He was wrong.
70
The explosion ripped through the lobby and picked them both off their feet. King landed heavily on the stairs, his cracked ri
bs taking the brunt of the fall. Caroline landed on top of him and he fought for breath as she knocked the wind from his lungs. He breathed hard, rolled over and gathered the assault rifle, shouldering it and backing away to take in both the side and front entrances in his periphery. Movement came from the side, the east exit. King crouched, saw the figure in white and fired three shots. They went wide, marginally so, but a miss is as good as a mile, and the figure returned a volley of fire that sprayed over King’s head and into the desk, splintering the wood, some of the bullets going high and smashing the glass in the door to the ice hotel. King aimed, but the figure ducked back outside, and he did not want to waste ammunition peppering the door, unsure of who could have been outside. He got back to his feet and signalled for Caroline to go upstairs. She shook her head and he glared at her.
“Too much wind and debris here! Go up a flight and keep it covered!”
She conceded and took the stairs two and a time. King was sure she thought he’d follow, but he ran across the lobby, battling with the ferocious wind and checked the scene outside.
King could see a figure in white running across the open ground. He raised his rifle and aimed, ready to take fire a burst in front of the man as he ran, but the figure fell to the sound of a single gunshot. King smiled as he thought of Rashid upstairs. If anybody could make a running shot in one-hundred-mile-an-hour winds, then it was him. He doubted anybody else on the planet could make such a shot. King got closer to the front entrance, sheltering in the lee of the supporting wall. He ducked his head, but when he looked up he saw the attacker getting to their feet and hobbling towards cover. King shouldered the rifle, but the man had reached cover, diving over a low wall and into a line of fir trees.
King battled with the wind but could take the cold no longer. He found himself running back to the stairs, his own survival instinct moving him on, aided by the strength of the wind. He took the stairs two at a time, shouted as he rounded the first flight. “Caroline, it’s me!”
He took the next flight, saw Caroline aiming the pistol at his face. She moved the weapon away, beckoned him up. “We need to get snowsuits on,” she said. “It’s colder in here than it was outside this morning!”
King didn’t answer, but he was cursing himself. The hotel had been so warm. He should have anticipated the ferociousness of the storm, the vulnerability of the glass. He ran with her, stopped as they reached their room. King crouched low and aimed his weapon at the stairwell.
“Get the suits,” he said. “Put yours on, then get upstairs and get everybody to regroup down here. Get the chef and the waitress to lie low…” he was cut off by the blast of an explosion, followed closely by two more. The hotel shuddered and above the cacophony of the wind, falling debris was clearly audible.
“Oh my god!” Caroline exclaimed. She was pulling on her suit, the door to their room open. She tossed King’s suit to him and he put down the rifle to get his legs inside. He pulled it over him, slipped the spare magazines and Walther into the outer pockets. The gloves and beanie followed out through the door and King was grateful for them. He asked Caroline for the extra jacket. She was changed now, handed King the jacket and said, “Are they grenades?”
“Mortars,” King said. With that a dull thud sounded and the hotel shook. He looked at Caroline. “IED,” he said.
“They’re on all sides!”
“Get Rashid and Ramsay down here,” he told her. “Then get the asset. Keep her close, but remember where she was working and the exposure she had to god only knows what…”
Caroline looked at him, then flung herself forward and kissed him. He responded but pulled away and shouldered the rifle. “Be careful,” he said.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Hunting,” he said. He turned and made his way down the corridor taking out his phone and looking at the screen. There was no signal, the storm was simply too violent for that, but the positions of the two dots had frozen in an automatic screen-shot activated when the signal died. He studied the layout. It wasn’t current, but it was a good place to start.
71
King checked the side entrance. It had been forced open and the truck had been pulled forward. The storm outside was battering the trees all around and many had fallen or been uprooted. The wild, relentless and unidirectional vortex rocked the truck from side to side. The loose ice which had been covering the ground and trees in a fine powder of crystals had blown away, and now the swirling debris was predominantly broken twigs, pine needles and fir cones. The noise from the wind was like nothing King had experienced before. Now that he was outside, the sound unmuffled from the inside of the building, the storm sounded as if a helicopter was manoeuvring overhead. With the minimal daylight swallowed up by the dark clouds, King cupped his face to protect himself from the debris, strained his eyes in the gloom and tried to look out towards the wall where the wounded man had taken cover. He couldn’t see anyone, but he suspected the man would either be lying dead behind the wall, having succumbed to his injury, or long gone – the bullet absorbed by a flak jacket and trauma plate. King certainly wasn’t going to risk stepping out into the open to check. The debris alone would make it risky and the storm created too many variables, too much distraction. The risk of walking into the line of fire from either the hunter force or Rashid from above was simply too high.
King stepped out into the maelstrom, the dense clouds now creating an early blackout with precious little ambient light to see by. He took the steps tentatively, aimed the rifle down the side of the hotel, then stepped back and aimed the rifle down the other side. He couldn’t make out any unnatural shapes. No shine, shadow or silhouette either. He started out over the snow, but the night turned to day and the sky tore itself apart with a monstrously bright pulse of sheet lightning. The sky flickered, then turned blacker than before. The rumble of thunder carried on, indicating that the lightning was directly overhead. King blinked the white out of his eyes, his retinas temporarily burned, but he heard the whump of a mortar round and ducked down before it exploded into the hotel. The explosion rumbled through the open door and again, he could hear debris falling. He just hoped that Caroline had taken cover, then felt a pang of betrayal to Marnie, Ramsay and Rashid, as he thought of the mortar round tearing through the roof, ceiling and floors.
***
In the darkened room Rashid had been looking through the scope as the lightening broke across the sky, a sheet of electric white light that was still making itself heard with the loudest thunder he had ever heard. He had lost his night vision, the images he had been looking at now burned onto his retinas. The lightening had been directly overhead, the thunder sounding like a Howitzer shell landing on top of them. And then had come the mortar round. Quieter in comparison to nature’s wrath, but almost certainly deadlier. The explosion shook the floor beneath his feet, rocked him and made his internal organs feel like they had been turned to liquid. He realised that he had not been breathing and took a grateful intake of breath.
But he had seen something significant. In that flash of fury from the storm, he had seen deep into the forest and could make out a clearing beyond the fringe of trees. He kept the rifle aimed, closed his eyes as he recaptured the moment. How tall did the figure appear in his scope? Two inches? Crouched. Almost certainly over the mortar tube which had just unleased hell down upon them. He opened his eyes, mentally calculating. The rifle scope was a 4x40 with no aperture adjustment. So, four times magnification and 40mm objective lens. About average in terms of light admittance through the lens. Through the sight at two-hundred and forty metres, the man he had shot whilst lying down at the summit of the hill had filled the lens. Rashid calculated the size difference from laying to crouching as a factor of two-point-five. Which put the figure he had seen at the wrong end of five-hundred metres. He calculated the arc of fire, this time elevated to a firing position of approximately sixty-feet. And then there was the head wind. Which although wouldn’t deviate the yaw of the bullet, would
slow it considerably. Rashid estimated a two-feet of elevation. He settled into the stock of the rifle and waited.
“Have you got a target?” Caroline asked from the doorway. She peered around the jamb, the pistol held in her right hand.
Rashid didn’t move a muscle. He was breathing steadily, half-filling his lungs, to keep the rifle true. He didn’t answer.
“Well, has he?” Ramsay asked over Caroline’s shoulder. He looked on, glanced at Caroline and flinched as the night was turned to day.
The room was as bright as if someone had turned on the light. The great sheet of lighting filled the sky and Rashid moved the rifle just once before he fired. The rumble of thunder was instant, almost suppressing the sound of the gunshot. The light dimmed, then flashed brighter for two more seconds before the room switched back to darkness and Rashid slowly stood up and picked up the rifle.
“Not anymore,” he said quietly. “Not anymore.”
***
King moved up on the maintenance huts. He could see a dull glow of light from within, shining under the door. The huts looked like two converted shipping containers that had been welded together. There was only one door, cut into the side of the structure, but it was a double affair which King assumed allowed for large items of equipment to be stored.
The huts lay in the lee of the hotel which afforded some shelter, but the spiralling wind was still blustering at fifty-miles-per-hour and it was an effort for King to remain steady on his feet. The blustering effect made walking difficult because of the start-stop effect, causing King to overcompensate when the wind dropped. By the time he corrected his stride, the wind blew him off balance again. King reached the hut and studied the door. The vertical bolts of the shipping container had been replaced with a regular pull-down door handle, and King tested it as gently as he could. The door gave, and the wind did the rest, blowing it wide open. King went with it, ducked inside and moved to his left for no other reason than the open door blocked his movement to his right.
