The Cassandra Sanction (15 page)

At this distance, though, no compensation
was necessary. He aligned the exact centre of the crosshairs on target. The scope’s inbuilt laser rangefinder told him the house was eighty-two yards away from his firing position. Eighty-two yards was like point blank range for a rifleman of his experience, armed with a high-velocity precision tool like the HK.

‘Cook, in position,’ he said into his headset microphone, and imagined the Boss
smiling to himself and thinking this was already in the bag. Six on two, no witnesses, no distractions, nowhere to run.

Easy.

Cook lingered on the front entrance, then slowly panned a few degrees right, the rifle muzzle moving imperceptibly as he scanned his target. Seeing nothing in the window on the right side of the entrance, he swivelled the rifle gently in the other direction. His
reticle flashed by the image of the doorway and found the window to its left.

The glass was dusty, but there was no mistaking the figure of a man standing at the window gazing out. Five-eleven, blond hair. His features were easily clear enough through the optics for rapid identification.

Hope.

Cook felt the familiar stab of satisfaction.
Ping.
Target acquired.

He eased the selector
switch to fire. His finger stayed off the trigger, resting against the curve of the trigger guard.

He muttered into his mike, ‘Cook. I have a clear shot at Number Two. Awaiting instruction.’

That was directed not at the other team members, but at the Boss himself.

The Boss replied immediately, ‘Take the shot.’

Cook moved his finger to the trigger. The target remained steady in
his crosshairs. He slowed his breathing to settle his heartbeat. Drew in a breath, let it half out. Felt the trigger mechanism break like a glass rod under the pressure of his finger.

The gun boomed and recoiled against his shoulder.

Chapter Nineteen

The cat is a wild predator. Fundamentally untameable, a force of nature, governed by a feral instinct informed by a million generations of wild predators before it. And Ben Hope was as close as it was possible to get to that in human form. He’d spent so much of his life so close to violence, come within a whisker of sudden violent death on so many occasions, that it took
only the tiniest stimulus to instantly strip away the veneer of the ordinary man and reveal the primordial creature hiding under his skin.

In the split-second the cat reacted to whatever unseen danger it had sensed, Ben reacted too. Why he flinched away from the window at that precise moment was not an impulse that ever reached his conscious mind. Pure instinct. He simply was, and he simply
acted, without thought, without hesitation.

In the next instant, the window exploded.

Ben spun back into the corner as the storm of broken glass blew into the house. His conscious mind was still disengaged. He didn’t have time to think about what was happening, or why. He didn’t have time to be surprised.

There was a momentary pause, just long for him to make eye contact with the frozen,
aghast faces of Raul and Kazem and yell ‘Get down!’

Then they were under heavy fire from both sides at once. The other front window burst into a million shards and splintered holes punched through the door, while the kitchen windows shattered and more bullets hammered into the walls from the opposite direction. Ben could tell that the crossfire was angled and calculated by an unseen enemy
who had a pretty good idea of what they were doing, firing from both sides without endangering one another. Who they were, and what they were doing here, were questions that could be addressed later.

Raul had thrown himself to the floor as bullets zipped overhead and smacked into the walls. A table lamp blew apart, showering him with china fragments. The chair Kazem had been taped to caught
a violent impact that split its backrest and toppled it over.

Kazem didn’t move. He stood pinned to the spot, paralysed by shock at the suddenness of the attack.

From where he was pressed into the angle of the thick walls, Ben shouted ‘DOWN!’ Kazem stared at him with huge bewildered eyes. Then his shirt seemed to ripple and pucker and a spray of red flowered from his neck, below the corner
of his right jaw. He staggered a half-turn and his knees buckled under him and he hit the floor, hard. He lay there on his belly, his face turned towards Ben. His mouth was opening and closing, like a landed fish. His eyes were distant and glassy. The blood was pumping fast from his neck and chest wounds and spreading over the floor.

The gunfire continued in sporadic bursts. Ben chanced a
glimpse out of the shattered window next to him and saw two men in black ski-masks and tactical vests strafing the silver Kia with submachine guns. Its screen and windows blew in and silver-ringed holes patterned its bodywork. The men dumped their magazines and slammed in fresh ones as they ran onwards from the car to the house.

Ben reckoned on at least three more round the back. Five men,
not counting the sniper who’d come pretty damn near to tagging him at the window.

Kazem looked in a bad way. And Ben and Raul were seconds from joining him, if they didn’t do something. Ben scrambled from the corner. Kept his head down and crossed the floor in a half-bounding, half-crawling gait that took him through the blood pool in the middle of the room. Raul was pressed down tight behind
the side table, as if flimsy wooden legs could protect him from a bullet. The moment the attackers invaded, they’d shoot him where he cowered. They’d finish Kazem off with a shot to the head, and then they’d do the same to Ben. No questions, no mercy. Simple execution. These men were here to do business, and it was not a situation in which Ben liked to be unarmed and utterly defenceless.

Ben got to Raul and reached up and over the table. His fingers closed on the hilt of the chef’s knife he’d used to slash Kazem’s tape bonds, and managed to pull it down off the tabletop without getting his arm shot to pieces. His hand was slick with Kazem’s blood after splashing through the spreading mess of it. He wiped it on his jeans and gripped the knife. The blade was a slim triangle, seven inches
from tang to tip. It had been sharpened recently. The steel was shiny, stamped
SOLINGEN – ROSTFREI
at its base. Solingen was in Germany’s Rhineland and was known as the ‘City of Blades’. They’d been making swords there since medieval times.

Almost defenceless. But not quite.

More bullets pounded through the front door, tearing splinters from its ripped slats. A brief lull, then the door
smashed inwards as a heavy boot kicked it open. The shape of a large man in black paramilitary kit was framed in the low doorway. He was wide and bulky in armour and vest, and he was an inch or so taller than Ben, which meant he had to duck his head two inches to clear the lintel. Ducking cost him somewhere just short of a second, and in that second Ben had him.

The knife whipped hard through
the air. To the man in the ski-mask, it was nothing more than a blur that crossed the distance between him and his targets faster than he could react. He hadn’t even got his gun raised before he was staggering backwards with the first four inches of sharp Solingen steel embedded in his right eye socket and punched through bone deep into his frontal lobe. He was brain dead before the message reached
his legs to crumple under him. His trigger finger went into an involuntary spasm that loosed off a burst of rounds in a sweeping arc which stitched a jagged line of holes in the floorboards.

Ben was right behind the knife. He caught the man’s weight before it crashed lifelessly to the floor. Kicked out and slammed the door shut in the face of the second attacker who was running towards it.
Shots slammed through the wood and punched into the dead man’s back. His MP5 was attached to a single-point sling looped around his neck and shoulder, made of bungee cord material that was elastic enough for Ben to twist it round under the dead man’s armpit and rattle off a burst of fire through the door to discourage anyone from following.

Up close, the noise of the gunshots was ear-numbingly
loud, but not so loud that Ben didn’t hear Raul’s yell. He half saw, half sensed the men running into the house from the back door, into the kitchen. Ben let go of the submachine gun and heaved the dead guy’s weight around to use as a body-armoured human shield as the attackers from the rear opened fire. Two of them were armed with military shotguns. The blast was twice as loud as the rip-snort
of the nine-millimetres. Ben made himself small behind his shield of dead human flesh and thanked God for sending him a big guy. The impacts from the shotguns were hard and heavy. Solid slug rounds, one-ounce lead ingots travelling over the speed of sound.

Ben reached down to the dead man’s hip and tore the pistol he was carrying from its holster. In the world of generic modern polymer-framed,
striker-fired combat pistols, they all pretty much operated the same way: just point and squeeze. Ben punched the weapon out from behind the dead man’s side and loosed off three, four, five rounds as fast as he could mash the trigger,
BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM
, before he felt the weight of the corpse start to fall away from him and he couldn’t hold him up any longer. But by then, one of the attackers
was on the floor and the other two were falling back through the kitchen and out of the back door.

Ben let the dead man flop to the floor and stepped quickly over to Raul, grabbed his arm and hauled him out of the crisscrossed lines of fire that could start coming from either side of the house at any moment. Raul was trying to speak, but couldn’t make the words. Ben popped the pistol’s magazine
release to check his ammo. It was a high-capacity Walther PPQ, and a full mag minus five left him with ten, one up the spout and nine in store. He replaced the mag and shoved the pistol in his pocket, bent quickly over the dead man and unclipped the MP5 from its quick-detach sling mounting. The submachine gun was nearly empty, but there was a spare mag nestling in the guy’s vest pouch. Ben slipped
it out, making the change as slickly as anyone who’d done it ten or fifteen thousand times before. The MP5 was to him what a fork or a toothbrush was to an ordinary citizen.

Working fast, Ben yanked the chef’s knife from the dead man’s eye socket. It came free with a sucking sound and liquid oozed from the punctured eyeball. Ben wiped the blade clean on the guy’s trousers and thrust the knife
in his own belt. He glanced down at Kazem. He seemed still to be breathing, but only weakly, and there was a lot of blood. Ben felt bad for him, but there wasn’t time to do much to help him at this moment. He had no idea how many of them might still be out there. He only knew that another wave could move in at any moment, and he couldn’t hold off a sustained assault from both sides at once.

He stepped over to the second dead man and snatched the identical Walther PPQ nine-millimetre from his pocket. A pistol was safer to entrust to a novice than a semiauto shotgun that could blow your foot off if you swung it around carelessly. He thrust the Walther into Raul’s hand. ‘It’s easy to work it. Just aim and pull.’

‘What’s happening?’ Raul managed to groan.

‘We’re surviving this,
is what,’ Ben said.

Chapter Twenty

Ben pointed through the study, towards the door that led through to the base of the dome. ‘That way,’ he said, and hurried Raul through into the bare block-built square that supported Catalina’s observatory. There was no other way in or out and no windows, making it invasion-proof as long as Ben had the door covered. Or as long as the ammunition held out. It was the best tactical
retreat he could come up with, in the circumstances.

He told Raul to stay still while he ran back into the living room and grabbed Kazem’s prone body by the collar. Kazem was still alive. Ben couldn’t say how long for, but he wasn’t going to leave him alone out there. He snatched the roll of tape they’d used to bind him up earlier. Then dragged the young guy through the doorway, slammed and
bolted the door securely behind them and propped him against the big round steel pillar in the middle of the space.

The blood trail across the floor was thick and shiny. Kazem’s clothes were black with it. More blood spurted from his lips when he tried to speak and began to cough. The wound in his neck was drawing air with a terrible wheezing noise as he fought to breathe. Raul stared at the
blood and looked about to throw up.

Ben used the kitchen knife to slash material from Kazem’s shirt, and stuffed it into the wounds to try to stem the bleeding. ‘Put pressure on here,’ he told Raul, pointing to the chest wound. Ben did the same for Kazem’s throat wound, trying not to choke him. Blood welled up between his fingers and soaked the shirt material. Ben pressed a thicker wad of
it against the wound, tore off a strip of tape and fastened it into place, but the tape wouldn’t adhere to the blood-slicked skin. It was hopeless.

The gunfire had stopped. Either the bad guys had packed up and left in defeat, or they were just regrouping. Ben didn’t think they’d gone. ‘You’re going to be okay,’ he lied to Kazem. ‘Hold on. Keep looking at me. Listen to my voice.’

Kazem
blinked and tried to focus, but his eyes kept fading. His head lolled. Blood bubbled out of his mouth and ran down his chin. Ben glanced back towards the door. Still nothing happening outside. It wouldn’t remain that way for long. That was for sure.

‘Stay with me, Kazem. You’re going to make it through this.’

The Iranian slowly raised his head and looked at Ben. His red, glistening lips
moved a fraction and he managed to rasp some indistinct words out that took Ben a couple of seconds to understand.

‘
She … is … alive.
’

Raul jumped as if he’d been shocked with a cattle prod. ‘Have you seen her? Where is she?’

Kazem managed to shake his head that he didn’t know, but it seemed to cost him almost all his remaining strength. He mustered up what was left to croak a few
more words, crimson bubbles forming at the corners of his mouth.