He dived, cannoning into Rebecca, sending her sprawling against the hard rock surface, even as he swiped his arm backwards and shoved Delatour off his feet.
A sheaf of sound hissed towards them.
An instant later, the edge of the ridge behind them exploded.
The noise was thunderous, bellowing out across the open sea. A shower of rocks spewed upward and outward, black inside a nova of orange flame.
Nineteen
The sound in Purkiss’s ears was dual-layered, a low throbbing hum overlain with a relentless high-pitched ringing.
He shouted, his voice almost inaudible to him: ‘Over there, over there, get behind the rocks.’
Beneath his belly and his chest the rock was harsh and rough, chips and protrusions digging into his flesh as he crawled, flattening himself as far as he was able while still moving his arms and legs. He saw Rebecca to one side of him, Delatour to the other. Kendrick would be behind, but Purkiss couldn’t afford to stop and turn to confirm it.
Rebecca reached one of the boulders first and pressed herself against it face-first, clasping it like an infant animal seeking solace from its mother. Purkiss deliberately angled away so that he put distance between him and Rebecca, and he gestured with his hand for Delatour to do the same.
It had been a rocket-propelled grenade. As such, they were better off spaced apart rather than bunched together.
The rock Purkiss reached was smaller than Rebecca’s, which meant he had to crouch lower in order to keep his head down. Beyond her, he saw Kendrick pressed against a whole cluster of boulders. To Purkiss’s left, Delatour had taken similar cover.
The sonic effect of the blast continued, a terrible, overwhelming noise that threatened to drown out all thought, all ability even to move one’s limbs. Purkiss had been close to explosions before, and he knew the dread the after-effects engendered, the horrible fear that one would never be able to hear properly again, that this droning, unrelenting ringing would torment one’s days and nights forever.
The immediate problem was that with his hearing impaired, Purkiss couldn’t rely on auditory data to assess the threat ahead. Which meant he’d need to use his eyes, and that meant risking exposure.
He signalled to the others on either side — keep down — and gripped the rock in front of him to steady himself, noting the tremor that was starting up in his fingers. By sidling along to one side, he found a crack in the boulder through which he could peer.
The tower behind the ruined façade was just as before. There was no movement there. No further sign of life.
Purkiss angled his vision to take in the foot of the hillock on which the ruins and the tower stood. He looked up at the tower again. The distance to the hillock was perhaps three hundred yards. The elevation of the top of the tower he estimated at sixty or seventy feet.
They could, he supposed, make a run for the hillock. Once they got there, they’d be out of view of whoever was in the tower. The rocky ground between them and the hillock was only slightly sloping, with minor obstacles in the way in the form of boulders and outcroppings.
But they’d be open targets.
If they made their advance spaced well apart, one or more of them could make it. An RPG launcher was a devastating weapon against a stationary or relatively slowly moving target such as a tank. It wasn’t particularly versatile as a weapon when the enemy was a collection of individual human beings following separate paths.
But the RPG could take out two of them, easily. And that would leave just two others, unarmed except in Kendrick’s case. Even if two of them made it to the point of immediate safety at the foot of the hillock, whoever was in the tower could simply wander down at their leisure and pick them off with ease.
Besides, the RPG might be just one of several weapons at their unseen opponents’ disposal. If the hidden enemy in the tower had a sniper’s rifle, all four of them could be dispatched in short order.
No: a direct, frontal approach was too hazardous to consider. Tactics were needed.
He looked again to either side of him. On the left, Delatour remained flat against his rock. To the right, Rebecca crouched, looking back at Purkiss, awaiting guidance.
He couldn’t communicate with either of them meaningfully. The aftershock of the grenade blast continued to hamper their hearing, as it did his.
Instead, Purkiss nodded past Rebecca at Kendrick.
She understood and turned, beckoning. Purkiss saw Kendrick’s face beyond her, caught his eye.
Kendrick was military. He knew the hand signals for the different approaches, and had taught them to Purkiss. They’d used them on more than one operation together.
Purkiss pointed at his own chest, jabbed his curved fingers forward. Then he indicated to his left and right, and pointed straight ahead.
Kendrick gave him the thumbs up. He was grinning.
It was a basic move. One person — Purkiss — approaching round the side, circling the enemy to mount a rear attack. The others providing a distraction by stealing forwards in increments, risking exposure in the process.
Purkiss knew he had the easier task.
He turned to his left, caught Delatour’s attention. Keeping eye contact, he gestured repeatedly to his right, towards Rebecca and Kendrick beyond her.
Purkiss drew a deep breath. He readied himself, feeling the adrenaline surge in his blood, and rode the crest and explode out from behind his rock to sprint towards Delatour.
He dropped beside the man within five seconds, his heart hammering. There’d been no gunfire. No hiss and blast of a second RPG round.
Cupping his hand at Delatour’s ear, he yelled, ‘Follow Kendrick’s lead.’
He waited until he saw Kendrick emerge from behind his cluster of rock cover and take a long, loping run towards the next boulder, before falling to his belly once again and beginning a fast crawl towards the western perimeter of the plain.
It took Purkiss five minutes to draw level with the side of the hillock, and a further three or four to reach a point where the tower was slightly behind him.
He saw now that the ruins extended a good fifty yards back from the facade. There was a similar, columned wall at the rear, though more dilapidated. The tower appeared to be the only one of its kind, and the only new structure in the midst of the ancient temple, or whatever it was.
Behind and to his right, he glimpsed the others appear one by one as they sprang from their cover and advanced a few paces before concealing themselves once again.
Purkiss stopped, hiding himself behind a lip in the surface of the rock plain. He studied the tower. It had multiple small square windows around its front and sides, all of them without glass. At the back, he saw a wooden ladder leading up to some kind of doorway.
He estimated the structure could hold five or six people.
Movement caught his eye. He watched Delatour break cover and run at a stoop towards a finger-like rock outcropping ten yards ahead of him.
The gunfire erupted, its noise shocking in the relative quiet, cutting harshly through even the steady tinnital hum of the grenade aftershock in Purkiss’s ears.
The ground before Delatour’s feet exploded in dust and rock chippings and he veered, flinging himself sideways so hard that for a few seconds he seemed airborne. He hit the ground and rolled as the scythe of bullets tracked him, fast as a burning fuse.
Then he was behind a series of low rocks and the chatter and spang of the bullets ceased abruptly.
Fully automatic fire. It meant an assault rifle of some kind.
Up against that kind of firepower, at close quarters, they didn’t stand a chance.