Get in, and turn the land of the PIG into a bacon factory.
Drake ran for the thick shrubbery that grew under a ground floor window. The SAS team they had sent in thirty minutes ago should have secured the nightclub area and its ‘civilian’ guests by now. Bullets flew from the chateau’s windows, peppering the gatehouse walls as vehicles flooded inside. The coalition force returned fire with a vengeance, smashing glass, striking flesh and bone, and chipping the stone facade into mush. Shouts and screams and calls for reinforcements rang out.
Chaos reigned inside the chateau. An RPG screamed from a top floor window, crashing into Frey’s own gatehouse and imploding part of the wall. Rubble cascaded down onto the invading soldiers. Machine-gun fire was returned, and one German mercenary toppled from the top floor, screaming and tumbling until he struck the ground with a horrendous crack.
Dahl and another soldier fired a burst inside the front doors. Their bullets or ricochets took out two men. Dahl ran forward. Hayden was somewhere in the melee behind him.
“We need to get inside this hellhole! Now!”
More explosions shook the night. A second RPG delved a massive crater a few feet east of Drake’s Hummer. A shower of dirt and rock plumed into the sky
Drake ran, crouch style, staying below the criss-crossing tracery of bullets that riddled the air above his head.
The war had truly begun.
The crowd betrayed its thirst for blood before Kennedy and Kaleb even touched. Kennedy circled carefully, her toes squeezing the dirt, her feet testing for rock and earth, moving erratically so as not to be predictable. Her brain struggled to make sense of all this, but already she’d spotted a weakness in her opponent — the way his eyes drank in the figure that her formless pantsuit conservatively covered.
So that was one way to kill a killer. She concentrated on finding another.
Kaleb made the first move. Spittle flew from his lips as he lunged at her, arms flailing. Kennedy batted him away and side-stepped. The crowd bayed for blood. Someone threw red wine on the earth, a symbolic gesture of the blood they wanted spilled. She heard Frey, the sick bastard, egging Kaleb, the heartless psychopath, on.
Now Kaleb lunged again. Kennedy found her back against the wall. She’d lost concentration, distracted by the crowd.
Then Kaleb was on her, his bare arms around her neck — his sweaty, disgusting… bare arms. The arms of a killer…
… of atrocity and death…
… smearing their putrid filth all over her skin. Warning bells tolled in her mind. You have to stop thinking like this! You have to focus and fight! Take on the fight and the fighter, not the legend you have created.
The eager crowd howled again. They banged their bottles and glasses against the fence, braying like beasts, yearning for a kill.
And Kaleb, so close after everything that had happened. Her hub of concentration was shot, blown to hell. The monster rammed a fist into her side whilst pulling her head against his chest. His dirty, sweaty bare chest. Then he hit her again. Pain exploded in her ribcage. She staggered. Red wine showered down over her, thrown from above.
“That’s it,” Kaleb taunted her. “Get down where you belong.”
The crowd roared. Kaleb wiped his disgusting hands in her long hair and laughed with a quiet, fatal malice.
“Gonna piss all over your corpse, bitch.”
Kennedy fell to her knees, briefly out of Kaleb’s grip. She tried to shuffle away from him but he got tight hold of her pants. He was pulling her back towards him, grinning like a death’s head savage. She had no choice. She unbuttoned her pants, her formless figure-concealing pants, and let them slide down her legs. She used his instant surprise to squirm away on her backside. Stones raked her skin. The crowd bayed. Kaleb lunged forward, got a hand into the waistband of her underwear but she kicked him savagely in the face, the underwear twanging back just as his nose twanged sideways, bloody and broken. She sat there a moment, looking up at her nemesis and finding herself unable to look away from his blood-flecked, leering eyes.
Drake rolled through the fancy doorway into a massive entry hall. The SAS had indeed secured the nightclub area and were covering the grand staircase. The rest of the chateau wouldn’t be so friendly.
Dahl tapped his breast pocket. “Blueprints show the vault room to our right and into the far east wing. Don’t second guess anything now, Drake. Hayden. We agreed that’s the most logical place for Frey, our friends and the Tomb to be.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hayden dead-panned.
With a force of men scrambling behind him, Drake followed Dahl through a door into the eastern wing. Once the door was opened, more bullets strafed the air. Drake rolled and came up firing.
And suddenly Frey’s men were among them!
Knives flashed. Hand-guns fired. Soldiers went down to left and right. Drake rammed the barrel of his gun against the temple of one of Frey’s guards, then let the weapon swing into firing position just in time to put a bullet into the face of an attacker. A guard thrust at him from the left. Drake skirted the lunge and put an elbow in the guy’s face. He bent down over the unconscious man, picked up his knife and threw it end over end into the head of another who was about to cut the throat of a Delta commando.
A gun fired next to his ear; the weapon of choice of the SGG. Hayden used a Glock and an army-issue knife. A multinational force for a multinational incident, Drake thought. More gunfire erupted from the far side of the room. Bring on the Italians.
Drake rolled flat under an enemy’s sideswipe. He flung his body around, legs first, sweeping the guy off his feet. When the man landed heavily on his spine, Drake ended his life.
The ex-SAS officer stood up and spied Dahl a dozen steps ahead. Their enemies were thinning now — probably just a few dozen martyrs sent to wear down the invaders. The real army would be elsewhere.
“Good for a warm up,” the Swede grinned, blood around his mouth. “Now come on!”
They went through another door, swept a room clear of booby traps, then another room, where snipers took six good men before they were eliminated They eventually found themselves facing a high rock wall complete with loopholes through which machine-guns rattled. At the centre of the rock wall was an even more formidable steel door, reminiscent of a bank vault.
“That’s it,” Dahl said as he ducked back. “Frey’s viewing room.”
“Looks a tough bastard,” said Drake, sheltering at his side, holding up a hand as dozens of troops ran to his side. He looked for Hayden, but failed to see her slim frame among the men. Where the hell had she gone? Oh, please, please, don’t let her be lying back there… bleeding…
“Fort Knox tough,” a Delta commando said after taking a goosey.
Drake and Dahl shared a look. “Grapplers!” they both said at the same time, sticking to their ‘speed and no fucking around’ policy.
Two big guns were passed carefully up the line, soldiers grinning as they watched. The powerful guns, like rocket launchers, both had a solid steel grappling hook attached to their barrels.
Two soldiers were sprinting back the way they had come with optional steel cables cradled in their arms. The steel cables attached to a hollow chamber in the launchers’ ass-end.
Dahl double-clicked his Bluetooth connection. “Say when it’s a go.”
Seconds passed, then the answer came. “Go!”