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.
‘I … am … sorry … I … lied … to … you … She … tell … me to …’
‘She told you to lie,’ Raul said.
Kazem nodded weakly, then coughed and spat another gout of blood. It was bright red. Arterial. Not good.
‘She … knew … they … come … for … her … She … have … to … dis …’
‘Disappear?’ Raul said. He turned to Ben. ‘She was running from them. It’s what we thought.’
Now Ben understood the real reason why Kazem had taken flight when he’d seen the two of them arrive earlier. He’d mistaken them for whoever was after his former employer, believing they’d come for him too.
But that was all he had time to think before he heard the fast steps on the other side of the door. The men were back.
Gunfire exploded from the living room and splinters burst from the inside of the door. The attackers knew where they were hiding, and they were intending to shoot the door down. A few shotgun blasts, and it would separate into firewood. Then they’d be inside.
Ben ran to the door and pressed himself flat against the wall next to it. Thick, solid stone, impenetrable to any kind of small arms fire short of a big fifty-calibre. He reached out to his side and jammed his pistol against the splintered wood and squeezed the trigger, then again and again until his ears were ringing badly and the gun muzzle was smoking hot and the wood was smouldering.
The gunfire fell silent again. He seemed to have driven the attackers back for now, but it had cost him every round in his pistol. Ben tossed it. All he had now was the submachine gun with one magazine. Thirty rounds wasn’t as much as it sounded in a weapon that spat out thirteen of them every second.
Kazem coughed more blood. Raul was right beside him, clutching his hand. His trousers were soaked red to the knee.
‘What do these people want?’ Raul was asking. His tone was urgent but he seemed oblivious of the shooting and the danger. He seemed hardly to notice the blood any more. Kazem was slipping fast, and what he knew was everything that mattered to Raul at this moment. ‘Kazem, talk to me. Why is she in trouble?’
Kazem raised a bloody arm and extended his finger towards the dome above. He was pointing at the observatory.
Ben understood Kazem was trying to say that it had to do with Catalina’s work. But that was impossible. Her work was studying space. By definition, there was no less worldly occupation. Detached from all human concerns, from politics, from money, from religion, from everything.
Kazem bubbled red from the mouth and a croak came from his lips that to Ben’s ringing ears sounded like ‘core sheet’.
Then Ben realised that Kazem had reverted to his native tongue as his life ebbed away. It wasn’t ‘core sheet’. It was the Persian word ‘khorshīd’.
Khorshīd was Persian for the sun.
The sun, which had been the main focus of Catalina’s work. Kazem’s fluttering, bloody hand was pointing up at the dome where he’d helped her carry out her solar observation work through the specialist Lunt solar telescope.
But how could that be?
Ben wanted to ask him. He didn’t know if the dying man could reply, but he opened his mouth to ask him anyway.
His question was drowned out by the shotgun blast that exploded like a grenade the other side of the door. Wood shards blew into the room and a hole the size of a grapefruit appeared in the shattered planks. Then another, and the hole elongated and the door came loose at its top hinge.
Raul threw himself behind the steel pillar for cover. Ben spun towards the attackers and hosed a stream of automatic fire at the door, turning what was left of it into a colander of nine-millimetre holes. Thirteen rounds a second. Ben kept his finger on the trigger maybe a second and a half. Long enough to drive the enemy back again. Long enough to deplete most of his only magazine.
Now there was little left to fight with, and only one place to run. Up into the dome.
Cornered.
Chapter Twenty-One
The air was acrid with gunsmoke and the stink of cordite. Ben crushed empty cartridge cases underfoot as he hurried over to Kazem, thinking he’d have to carry the injured man over his shoulder.
But Kazem was already dead. His eyes were a glassy stare and the hole in his neck had stopped sucking air.
‘Leave him,’ Ben said to Raul, who was gaping at the dead man who’d been his sister’s assistant and possibly the last person to speak to her. Ben grabbed Raul’s arm and shoved him towards the spiral steps.
Behind them, the door crashed in and tore off its second hinge and came apart as it hit the floor. One, two, three men in black ski-masks burst through the doorway.
Ben shoved Raul’s back, urging him to go faster. Their racing steps clattered on the metal staircase. Shots cracked out. A bullet whanged off the steel pillar a few inches from Ben’s head. Another sparked off the metalwork at his feet. Raul stumbled and for an instant Ben thought he’d been shot. Raul’s gun fell from his hand as he grabbed the rail to steady himself. The weapon clattered and bounced past Ben on its way down the steps. No time to try to go back for it. He pushed Raul harder. Raul kept moving. He plunged up through the hatch. Ben was right behind.
Now they were inside the dark, shady interior of the astronomical dome, and Ben knew that his tactical retreat had turned into a bad mistake. They were trapped in a dead end. You could defend it, if you had enough ammunition. Which they didn’t have. But either way, with the enemy occupying the only exit, you couldn’t escape from it.
Already, he could hear the voices below as the gunmen took control of the room beneath them. One of them sounded as if he was talking into a radio or phone. Ben caught the words ‘They’re in the tower’.
Speaking English. London accent.
Ben didn’t have time to wonder why. He checked his weapon. Three rounds in the magazine, plus one in the chamber. Not good. Not good at all.
The darkness inside the dome was their only friend. Ben found the light switch on the wall near the hatch, but he didn’t turn it on. He hit it hard with the butt of the submachine gun, felt the plastic crunch and hit it twice more until the switch was in pieces and dangling uselessly from its wires. He grabbed Raul’s arm again and urged him into the shadows.
Now there were footsteps ringing on the staircase as the three men headed up towards them. Ben and Raul drew back behind the hulking forms of the telescopes. Ben wondered why the attackers didn’t just fire up through the floor with twelve-gauge slug rounds, or just pop a grenade or two up through the hatch. It was what he’d have done. And these people didn’t seem short of hardware. It wouldn’t take much more firepower than they’d already demonstrated to blast the whole dome and everything in it to pieces. But there was something reticent about their tactics. Almost as if … The first man emerged through the hatchway. Just a dark outline, dimly illuminated by the daylight shining up from below. Followed by the second, then the third. In turn, each vanished into the shadows. Ben could no longer see them, but he could sense them splitting up and circling the dome, guns ready. He could picture their relative positions from the tread of their footsteps on the spongy rubber floor. He didn’t dare fire, because the muzzle flash would only give away his position and invite an overwhelming reply of superior force. He quietly transferred the gun to his left hand and drew the knife from his belt. Nudged Raul as if to say, ‘Stay close to me.’
Ben listened hard in the dark, visualising what his ears told him. One man had moved to the left, one to the right, stalking around the circumference of the dome in opposite directions to flush out their prey. The third man was cutting across the middle, stealthily approaching the telescope mounting in the centre of the floor. Not stealthily enough. His rubber soles creaking on the rubber floor, under the weight of a large man weighed down with body armour and weaponry and ammunition. He stepped forward another metre, then another. He was close now, close enough that Ben could hear him breathing.
Ben waited, perfectly immobile in the shadow of the telescopes. He silently
placed the gun down by his feet. Laid a hand on Raul’s arm, telling him to hold steady. Three more seconds. Then five. Creak. Creak. He could smell the guy’s sweat.
Then Ben struck, with the speed and surprise of an attacking leopard when it explodes out of deep cover to take down an unsuspecting gazelle.
Except that Ben’s enemy was no gazelle. He was a dangerous predator in his own right, and Ben had to put him down hard and fast. He knocked him sprawling backwards into the operator’s chair attached to the rear of the twin telescope mounting, and used the knife. It was brutal, and it was merciless, and it was exactly what Ben had been trained to do many years earlier.
As the man twitched his last in the chair, Ben was already retreating back into the depth of the shadows, clutching the bloodied blade. He picked up his near-empty weapon. There hadn’t been time to snatch the man’s gun. The other two, fanned out at opposite sides of the dome, had heard the muffled commotion and come rushing to the centre to investigate, and he’d had to withdraw quickly. Ben heard the rustle of clothing as one of them crouched down to check their fallen companion. It didn’t take them long to tell there was nothing they could do for him. They quickly split up again.
Ben and Raul pulled deeper into the darkness. Ben felt the edge of one of the racks of high-tech astronomical equipment against his elbow and slowly, silently moved around the back of it.
A mechanical click caught his ear. Followed by the hum and whirr of an electric motor, the taut jerk of a steel cable taking up slack, the sound of wheels turning, pulleys rolling.