They both ducked instinctively at the sudden hammering of AK47 gunfire. The visitors, now weary of knocking, and finding themselves getting nowhere with shots from a handgun, had switched to automatic fire.
Brutal gunfire raked the house. Lara and Carter heard the hard cracking of the panes in the windows only metres from where they were hunkered down.
“Someone’s getting impatient,” said Lara. “Check the kitchen. I think they’ve given up there.”
Staying low and dodging furniture, Carter made his way to the rear of the house.
“Can’t hear anything back here!” he called to her as loudly as he dared.
Lara held her position, aiming her weapon in the direction of the gunfire. They weren’t letting up. They were hosing the house. Lara figured they must have spent several magazines.
She hoped for their sakes the men had brought a trunk full of ammo.
She hoped so for her own sake, too. I might be her best way out of the villa.
Burst after burst. She could see the dancing flicker of muzzle flash out front.
But there was no sound of glass shattering or falling. Just the bullet impacts and the cracking noises.
Carter was back to join her. The noise of pounding started afresh. This time it wasn’t thumping on the door. This time, it sounded like a sledgehammer on plate glass.
“It’s got to give,” whispered Carter. “The sustained gunfire will have weakened the windows. Even armoured glass—”
“Any minute now,” said Lara.
The first piece of the shot-frosted windowpane separated along its cracks and fell onto the tiled floor, bouncing with the clatter of hard plastic, rather than glass.
Lara immediately fired into the gap where it had been. She heard the impact of bullet on flesh and fired again, but visibility was poor.
“Hold this position,” said Lara. She ducked around Carter and crossed the room.
“Where are you going?” he hissed at her.
Lara jabbed a finger upwards, hoping that he’d be able to see it.
“Okay,” he hissed again.
The Wolf-Heads couldn’t make a real impact until they could get into the house, and while they were trying to take out the window, it only took one person to pick them off, one at a time. She and Carter had the advantage. It was like Horatio holding the bridge.
The slow and difficult progress of ingress gave Lara the chance to check the windows on the first floor. If they opened, or if they were regular glass, she could go on the attack.
Lara ran down the long corridor, through the centre of the house.
Someone grabbed her from behind before she reached the stairs.
He was screaming like a banshee and clinging to her back, one arm around her neck.
She grasped the top of his arm with both of her hands, swung out her hips, and dropped her head, pulling hard. Her attacker had no choice but to let go of her neck.
She flipped him onto his back on the floor in front of her, winding him. His screaming turned into coughing.
It was Strand.
“Idiot!” she said. “For heaven’s sake, Strand, get back to wherever Carter put you and stay there. Get out of my way!”
Strand was still coughing, trying to recover from his fear of an invasion, and from the flip.
“Is that you, Lara? Why is it so dark?”
Lara didn’t answer. She booted him in the side to make room to walk past him, and continued on up the stairs.
The master bedroom, at the rear of the house, had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a balcony. Beautiful, but useless, except that Lara could see the Wolf-Heads had abandoned the route into the villa.
The smaller rooms at the front of the house were clearly used by Denny’s men. The wall was old stone, and the windows were small, in the traditional Turkish style, to maintain ideal temperatures, year-round: cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
Lara tried a handle but could already tell that the windows had been painted shut, probably inside and out. She put her palm flat on one of the small panes. It was far too small for anyone to escape through. The glass felt cold and smooth, but not quite flat, not quite true. It felt like the kind of glass the Victorians used in sash windows.
The room Lara was in was directly above the main entrance to the villa. She left it and moved along the corridor to the end room, a bathroom. It had the same type of small, old windows. She wished she could remember what was below the bathroom, on the ground floor.
The pounding on the window below became rhythmic once more. Lara held her gun firmly by the slide and punched out the window with the grip in time with the next blow. She barely heard the tinkle of the glass as the pane shattered easily. Lara got rid of the last shards and looked out. There was only just room for her head.
The sky was clear and the moon was high. Visibility was much better outside than inside. That was something to bear in mind when she moved back into the interiors of the house.
Craning her neck, she could make out five figures below.
Three were definitely men, big men. Two of the figures looked as if they could be women. Lara had seen women at the auction, wearing the Wolf-Head badge. From her angle of view, she assumed that she was not able to see whoever was pounding on the window. She also assumed that Vata was in one of the cars—although she could only see their roofs—and that he would have at least one more bodyguard with him.
That made eight, in total.
If she fired her weapon, she would give away her position, but she had a good line of sight and easy targets. She could take out two or three of the eight. Easy kills. How long before they got into the house? Had she hit someone with her first shot, and, if so, how good had that hit been?
Lara heard a shot. She didn’t see a muzzle flash, so the shot had to have come from inside the house. It had to be Carter.
She decided not hesitate any longer.
She pulled her head back inside and aimed the gun out.
Her first shot was aimed at the body of one of the men. He was a big target, and he went down hard. The Wolf-Heads responded immediately, taking cover and looking for a target. Her second shot was lucky. She got it off quickly, targeting the second man, but he was ducking, and it hit one of the women instead. She had literally walked into the bullet meant for Lara’s target. It glanced the side of her head and probably wasn’t fatal, but the scalp bled badly, and the woman wouldn’t be in a state to fight for a while.
Her companions rapidly dragged her into cover.
Lara couldn’t rule her out of the fight, long-term.
She began taking potshots at moving targets or at people in cover. Then, the opportunity was gone. Three guns were shooting back at her. Bullets smacked into the window surround and sprayed chips of stone. She took a couple more blind shots, and then ran out of the room. She was reloading as she ran down the corridor.
Under the cover of gunfire, Lara broke a window in the bedroom over the main entrance and fired on the Wolf-Heads again, winging another man.
Instantly, she found herself under fire once more.
“Two down, I think, maybe three,” she whispered at Carter as she returned to the drawing room.
“They’re almost through,” said Carter. “How many?”
“Maybe eight.”
“Jesus,” said Carter.
“Do you want to do this?” asked Lara.
“Do we have a choice?”
There was another almighty crack, louder than the subsiding gunfire, as another piece of the window broke free and fell onto the tiles.
Lara reflex-shot into the gap, but there was no one there.
“They’re getting good at this,” said Carter. “How do you think they’ll do it?”
“Guns blazing!” said Lara.
The gunfire came in low, trackin
g across the floor in a wide arc. Machine-gun fire. Flagstones cracked and chipped, and carpet fibres billowed into the air.
Lara had no idea how it had missed both of them. Instinctively, they both leapt off the floor, Carter onto the chesterfield, belly down; Lara, crouched, onto a large, low table. More gunfire came in at shoulder height, but the Wolf-Heads were shooting blind.
It was obvious that Vata’s men couldn’t see into the black depths of the drawing room after the moonlight exterior they had become used to. They were shooting hard, but they were also visible, backlit by the starry sky. They were clambering in through the window, over the prone body of the man giving them covering fire at ground level.
Assault tactics. Polished and effective. Lara couldn’t allow them to be successful.
“Take the one coming in,” she hissed to Carter.
She’d given him the easier shot. She aimed, carefully, for the prone man supplying covering fire. Lara and Carter began firing in unison.
She hit squarely. The prone gunman jolted. His trigger finger locked. He was no longer raking the floor at a low angle to clear the room. The misaligned weapon tilted, and one bullet after another emptied into the wall of the drawing room a couple of metres behind Lara.
Carter blasted at the men storming the window. Framed in the moonlight, a standing gunman jerked. His gun dropped from his hands, but still hung from its strap, thumping against his body. He fell clumsily, like a sack of loose rocks, onto the man he’d been stepping over, and the covering gunfire finally stopped.
Silence. Smoke curled in the air. Lara could hear a thick, ugly gurgling coming from the throat of the intruder Carter had taken down.
Then Lara heard a wild cry.
She raised her gun instinctively, ready to aim it at the next Wolf-Head through the window.
No one came.
She heard the cry again. It wasn’t human. Was it the wolves? It sounded quite different from the howls that Strand had hated so much.
A single shot spat into the room.
It spanged off the leg of the table that Lara was crouching on, and she stepped off it, ducking into her original cover.
More shots followed. The remaining Wolf-Heads were using their dead colleagues as cover, but the gunfire was erratic and undirected.
Lara counted three dead, for sure, and two injured. Probably more.
She and Carter kept in cover, guns aimed, but there were no clear targets, and they didn’t want to give away their positions. Denny’s house was keeping the Wolf-Heads at bay.
The siege was on.
Then the crying noises started up again in earnest.
Eerie, almost human cries came out of the darkness all around the house, fast, repeating, overlapping. The shrieks and screams hung in the night air.
Then a howl, a proper howl this time, penetrated the baying, crying voices. It rose and built to a blistering crescendo. It was answered by a second beast, and then a chorus started up, a new wolf taking up the cry as each howl abated.
The shrieks and the howls, like two demented choirs embarking on an atonal music combat, became an unbearable symphony.
“I can’t stand it!” yelled Strand, bursting into the drawing room.
A gun went off.
The shot looked good. Someone outside had spotted the open movement, aimed, and hit his target.
Strand dropped hard to the tiled floor, unable to gasp, let alone cry out. Lara assumed that he was dead.
Moments later she heard ferocious growling, then another gunshot. This time, the shot wasn’t aimed into the house.
“What the hell?” said Carter.
They listened, guns ready.
They heard a shout, a scream, another gunshot, and all to a background of snarling and growling.
Then, quite clearly, a woman’s voice. “Get it off me, Dibra! Kill it!”
Carter looked at Lara, and raised his eyebrows.
“I think our friends have run into trouble with the local wildlife,” he said.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” she replied. “Denny Sampson told me so.”
Gun still aimed, Lara stepped out of cover and hurried towards Strand’s prone body. She squatted beside him and reached out a hand to take the pulse in his neck. It was strong and steady.
The commotion outside had worsened, taking attention away from her and Carter. Lara holstered her gun and turned her attention to Strand. She located his injury. Not fatal, thank God. A superficial shoulder wound. She didn’t care for Strand, but she didn’t wish the stupid kid dead.
She used Strand’s own shirt to strap up the wound. Then, one hand over his mouth to try to prevent him making too much noise, Lara shook him conscious.
“Shut up, and do as I say,” she hissed at him. “You’re fine. No harm done. Get on your stomach and be ready to move back to your hiding place when I tell you. Got it?”
She took her hand away from his mouth, and then immediately clamped it back down again when she felt the tension in him.
“You need to calm down right now, Jamie, or I’ll put you out again,” she snapped. “We’ve got this under control, Carter and me. Do you get it?”
This time she didn’t remove her hand. She waited for Strand’s nod. Finally he nodded, and she took her hand away slowly. She waited while he rolled onto his front. Then, she armed herself and took up her old position.
“Okay, Carter, covering fire,” said Lara. As Lara and Carter fired into the gap where the window had been, Lara called out over her shoulder, “Move it, Strand! Right now!”
Strand was clear and Carter was reloading when Lara saw the grenade beyond the muzzle flashes of her twin guns.
“Duck!” she yelled, and hit the deck, with Carter a split second behind her. The grenade was thrown hurriedly and landed long, several metres behind Carter and Lara, and against the stone wall that divided the large living room from the corridor beyond. The impact was noisy, but did little damage to the wall and only cratered the tiled floor. The fire was the real problem. The rug was smoking, and flames were beginning to lick over the big couch where Sandler had been slumped when they’d first arrived. In a moment, a wall hanging was ablaze, and then the decanters on the console table began to explode. Lara and Carter were caught between the fire, which now had a momentum all its own, and the Wolf-Heads.
“Time to leave,” said Lara.
Outside, the voices were still yelling.
“Help!”
“Do something!”
The howling had not stopped. It was close, very close, and the Wolf-Heads were calling out. The gunfire was sporadic.
But there had been no mistaking the authentic desperation in that cry.
Lara rose to a crouch.
“Okay,” said Carter, getting up beside her. “Let’s do this.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
The Toros Mountains
Carter saw strings of spittle shining off long, yellow teeth. He saw a flexed, pink tongue and black gums. He saw wide-set, yellow eyes, fringed with black, and he saw acres of tawny fur.
The wolf slammed into him.
He didn’t even have time to curse or cry out. He’d been ready, tensed, and still the sheer speed of the thing had taken him by surprise. The moment he’d emerged through the window and dropped onto the ground outside, it had come at him, rearing up, attacking with its full height and weight.
Carter was knocked flat. He landed with a thud on the corpses of the Wolf-Heads blocking the window, and expected his last sensations to be teeth wrenching into his throat and ripping it out.
A shot rang out. He heard a yelp and felt weight slump onto his chest. Warm blood soaked him, spreading.
“Carter?” Lara called from close by.
“I’m okay!” he shouted back.
He heard more sh
ots, and heaved the dead wolf off his body. The wolf’s blood was cooling quickly on his shirt, sticky and uncomfortable, but he didn’t care. Comfort could wait. Lara needed his help.
Carter got up, gun raised. He hunted for targets. Shapes moved like ghosts in the darkness around him. He opened fire, aiming at the guttural growls, at pelts, at anything with four legs.
He could see the bright, strobing flashes of two gun muzzles to his right.
Lara was holding both of her 9mm handguns at arm’s length and was trying to keep the pack at bay. Vata’s men hadn’t been lying.
One of the big dogs slunk in low and snapped at her ankle. She kicked at it, and it grabbed the toe of her boot, piercing the patent leather with its incisor. The power of its bite was frightening. It clung on. Lara tried kicking free, but the beast was too strong. It wrenched back and whipped her off her feet. She landed flat on her back.
The wolf clamping her foot worried at it hard, shaking her. More animals bounded in, eager to reach prey that had been brought down.
Lara calmly got off two more shots, one from each gun, fending off the predators lunging hungrily at her prone body. Then she aimed at the dog wrestling her foot. That took concentration. The wolf was swinging its jaws savagely from side to side. She matched the movement and fired, blowing a hole between its eyes.
It dropped, its jaws still clamped on her boot. Her focus had given another dog the chance to come in on her left side.
It snagged her braid and began trying to toss her head. Lara brought her right hand around and smashed the wolf in the jaw, the grip of her sidearm adding weight to the blow.
The dog yelped and let go its hold. It glared at Lara, snarled, and was suddenly felled by a bullet. Lara couldn’t tell where the shot had come from.
Lara sat, shot at three more of the wolves, and tried to get to her feet. But the dead dog’s jaws were still locked around her boot.
One of the dogs let out a wild howl. She looked up and saw it twenty metres away on a rocky rise, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Its neck was stretched up, its jaw extended. The shrieking and yelping of the other animals ceased for a moment. Then, the remaining wolves returned his call, and they began to pad away.