He was already bringing his gun round to shoot me again, but his angle was wrong. I landed on my feet directly in front of him, even as I swept my forearm against his gun, knocking his next shot astray. Then my momentum took me chest to chest with him and we both crashed into a wall. I punched Rickard in the face. It took everything not to scream; an agonising flame leaped from my hand all the way to my brain. Something felt like it had broken in my hand when my SIG had been wrenched away.
Yet I couldn’t let that stop me. If I gave him even the briefest of moments to rally, he would shoot me point-blank and that would be the end of it. So, my damaged hand became a bludgeon as I drove it four times in quick succession into his body.
Yelling directly into his face, I grappled with his gun. He yelled back. Nothing either of us said made any sense; it was just the bestial roaring of two wild animals engaged in a life or death battle.
Rickard was no slouch. He gave me a couple punches of his own. One of them got me in my right ear, the other dangerously close to the eye socket. I head-butted him, and he gave me one right back. He kneed at my groin, but I jammed his leg between mine and forced him against the wall. We were too close for clean strikes now and we both clawed. I got my fingers in his nostrils and forced his head back. Rickard stuck his thumb in my already stinging eye. Finally I managed to bang his gun against the wall and he released it. But that gave him two functioning hands as weapons. He punched me in the ribs. Air left my lungs, but I wasn’t about to back away now. If I did that he might draw that blade he’d been holding earlier and then I’d be in real trouble. Instead, I sank my teeth into his shoulder at the exact point where my bullet had nicked him moments before. Rickard howled,and I echoed his scream through my clamped teeth.
We were both in frenzy, unmindful of the form standing in the open door behind us. We were too intent on ripping lumps from each other. But even in that primal state something impinged upon my senses. The blocking shadow in the doorway suddenly fled, allowing light to spill inside from the passageway. On the beam of light I saw the tumbling cylindrical object arch towards us as if it was moving in super-slow motion.
I experienced one of those snapshot moments.
L2A2.
My subconscious mind identified the object. It took another split second for it to push the military term to its hiding place in the back of my head and come up with the layman’s name. Hand grenade.
Dear God!
I don’t know which of us spoke those words. Maybe we both did. Because in the next instant we spilled apart just as the grenade landed in the gap we’d made.
The L2A2 is an anti-personnel weapon, a tin-plated fragmentation device with a coil of notched wire and packed with one hundred and seventy grams of high-explosive filling. It is designed to kill anyone in a radius of up to eighteen yards. The room we were in was no more than eight or nine yards square. It didn’t give either of us very good odds at survival.
There was only seconds until detonation.
I went one way and Rickard the other. To be honest I forgot all about him in that instant, was only vaguely aware that he was nearer the exit door than I was. I threw myself over Jimena’s still form and on to the floor, crouched and got my fingers under the edge of her bed and heaved it up so that the bed toppled, spilling its occupant on to the floor. The bed on its side wasn’t much of a shield, but it was all I had.
It’s hard to describe the explosion. I was so close that I didn’t actually hear it, just felt the metal frame of the bed slam me and throw me back against the near wall. For the briefest of moments it seemed the frame was going to cut me to pieces, as though I was being passed through a massive dicing machine. But then the pressure was gone, I went face down on the floor and the bed collapsed on top of me.
That wasn’t so bad.
Until I tried to raise my head and found that the commands of my brain were being ignored by my body. Then I heard noise: the slamming beat of blood pounding through my inner ears, someone roaring in deep-throated agony.
Pain assaulted me in every fibre.
My fingertips were twitching and I was oddly aware of the movement as though watching from outside myself. I wondered who was groaning in agony. A black wave passed through my mind and I felt like I was falling into a deep hole. I clawed at a dull spark of lucidity, refusing to succumb to the darkness, except it was a losing battle.
It was as though a black drape dropped over my head. In panic I imagined that I was being zipped into a body bag and I fought against the enfolding material. I’m still alive, I wanted to scream, but nothing came out. I kicked, bucked and came to my knees. Or that’s how it seemed. When I opened my eyes again I was still face down. A troop of Nazis marched over my spine stamping down with their jackboots.
And someone was still groaning.
Me.
I shoved over on to my side. It was an Olympic-scale effort just to do that. My hearing was compressed by the pressure of the detonation, so that all I could hear were screeches and clicks and the beating of my own heart. The latter at least was a good thing. Didn’t mean I was going to survive but it was a start.
Coming to some semblance of lucidity, I unfolded my arms; only then realising that I’d wrapped them round my skull at the last moment. It meant that my earlier image of watching my twitching fingers couldn’t have been true, but everything about the entire situation felt more than surreal. Pressing an elbow to the bed frame, I pushed against it. The bed wouldn’t move. Blinking through dust, I saw that one of the legs had been thrust into the wall, skewering deep into the plaster covering. It had missed my body by inches.
It was a Herculean task to get a knee under me and press my shoulder against the bed and move it away. As the bed frame scraped across the floor, I slipped and went down hard on my damaged hand. I cringed, but pushed up again. Part of me wanted to give in, to lie down and succumb to the bliss of unconsciousness. Another part screamed at me to get my arse in gear. The screamer was the most adamant. Even if Rickard was dead, the one who’d thrown the grenade at us wasn’t. Any second now, he’d be coming back to make sure the explosion had done its work.
The room was full of smoke and dust, and dripping stuff. I didn’t like to think about what was smeared on the ceiling and walls, or what the crimson chunks were that had been scattered to the four corners of the room. No way possible to count if those steaming entrails belonged to three corpses or four.
Staggering, I made it round the edge of the bed. First I looked to the door but I could detect no movement through the acrid smoke so I looked at the bed instead. The mattress had been shredded. Clumps of foam erupted from ragged holes where shrapnel had torn into it. The metal headboard had been ripped loose and was a mangled wreck a few feet away. A dark banner floated on the unnatural breeze as displaced air began forcing its way back into the room. It took a moment or so to realise that it was a lock of Jimena Grajales’ hair. I closed my eyes against the sight and turned away.
My ears were pulsating.
Gunfire crackled from somewhere, but my senses were so rattled that I couldn’t get a fix on the direction. I placed my palms on my ears, pressing and releasing, attempting to pop my eardrums into a more natural configuration. When I withdrew, the palm of my left hand was spotted with blood. I didn’t think that my eardrum was ruptured; the blood was more likely from a superficial wound on my face. Who knew?
I’d more important things to worry about.
I gave myself a once-over. I hurt everywhere but, apart from my throbbing hand, nothing seemed to have been broken or torn loose. So I bent in search of a weapon.
First thing I found was my SIG Sauer. There was an indentation on the slide where Rickard’s lucky shot had struck it. I doubted it would function properly, but still jammed it into my waistband. Call me sentimental but the gun had been with me through too many trials to leave it lying there.
I kicked through drifts of collapsed ceiling and shattered bodies and saw my assault rifle. I shook off the dust, ejected the magazine, slapped it back in place. Sliding the bolt, I ejected a shell, then racked a new one in the chamber. Round about then I felt blood spatter on my chin. It wasn’t the red rain falling from the ceiling, but my nose in full flow. I wiped the blood from my face with a sleeve, starting walking cradling the gun.
My coordination was still shot to pieces, but movement helped. I only staggered twice before reaching the door. Leaning against the frame, I checked the short passageway ahead. Placing my finger on the trigger, I was acutely aware of the pain in my hand. Broken or not, it would just have to work.
Fifteen feet away a man lay face down.
Hoping it was Rickard, I moved forwards. At the body I paused long enough to kick it over on to its back. The round-faced soldier grinned up at me. Except this grin was a rictus smile. Beneath his chin a wound stretched equally wide. His throat had been opened from ear to ear and I guessed that Rickard had made it out of the room after all. Guarapo – the grenade thrower – had felt his wrath.
And now it was Rickard’s turn to feel mine.
The only thing stopping me was the man at the head of the stairs pointing a machine gun at me.
Chapter 37
Rickard was both exhilarated and furious.
Exhilarated because he was still alive. Intensely angered by more than one thing.
Foremost in his rage was that the cowardly son of a bitch, Guarapo, had tried to kill him by lobbing a hand grenade at him. Well, he’d shown that asshole the error of his ways soon enough. When the L2A2 had clattered to the floor between him and Joe Hunter, Rickard had known he had seconds to live. It’s surprising how much ground a man can cover when trying to save his ass. He made it out of the door just as the grenade blasted the room. The percussion knocked him sprawling, but he avoided the flying shrapnel and came immediately to his feet again. As he did he whipped out his ceramic knife, the same moment as Guarapo popped up from where he’d been crouching and blinked at him in dismay.
Guarapo didn’t expect anyone to survive the bomb.
He certainly wasn’t prepared for when Rickard grabbed him, spun him and wrapped a hand round his jaw. A quick jerk back on the man’s head and a swipe of the blade and that was all it took.
Next on his checklist was that Guarapo’s indiscreet betrayal had killed Joe Hunter when the honour should have been his. Rickard might have come here to murder his employer, but it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t have seen the job through. A deal was a deal, the way he viewed things: only Jimena Grajales broke contracts.
Alvaro Silva was another point of anger. Had he ordered Rickard murdered or was that solely Guarapo’s plan? Maybe he’d been harbouring a plan for revenge since they first met and Rickard had tickled his balls with the tip of his knife. That was something to think on later. There was something far more pressing on his mind.
Alisha.
The way Jimena made it sound, his wife hadn’t betrayed him at all. She hadn’t led men to his apartment. Not killers sent by Jimena. But the fact remained, Alisha had conspired against him with the men he’d killed in Miami. Any way that he looked at it, the bitch needed punishing. Maybe it was as simple as that Alisha had been having an affair with the man he’d surprised in the elevator and the man had come back with some friends to do away with the competition. In retrospect Rickard recalled thinking that they weren’t very good when he’d killed them, not professionals. Proof of his theory of Alisha’s infidelity was the way in which she’d run off, seeking solace and protection in the arms of another man. Rickard had never learned the name of the cocaine dealer in Liberty City, but he didn’t doubt that he’d been screwing Alisha when Rickard was out of town.
Bitch!
The thing that angered him most was that Alisha hadn’t died. He believed Jimena’s words. There was no reason for her to lie. She knew she was going to die, so why mention that his wife had survived? Unless it was to anger him, to throw him off while she positioned the gun she had hidden in her bed. Perhaps she thought he’d be so stunned that he wouldn’t notice what she was doing and would not react in time. But he didn’t think so. Jimena wasn’t afraid to die; in fact it looked like she had fully embraced the idea. She’d only intended taking him with her. She’d told him that Alisha was still alive to score some points on him before she died. One up for the girls!
Yeah, we’ll see about that.
And after he finished with Alisha he had a date with that other cow, Imogen Ballard. He’d promised her that things weren’t finished.
No woman would ever fuck him over again.
First things first, though. He had to get away from this battleground, avoid the opposing armies and get himself back to the States.