She picked up the shotty, jacked a cartridge into the chamber, and poked the muzzle out through the shattered window. The Benelli was loaded with a buck ‘n’ ball combo that gave her a nice spread for quick and dirty area clearance, but still packed a nasty surprise in the form of one larger, molybdenum disulphide-coated brass slug at the centre of the load. Unlike softer malleable rounds, it was armour piercing and would slice through a car door or ballistic vest without bothering to slow down much.
She methodically pumped half-a-dozen rounds of buck ‘n’ ball down-range, angling to do some damage to the men behind the vehicles, but occasionally raking a shot along the front of the building to shut down their partner in the recessed doorway. She briefly heard a few distressed cries and more shouting upstairs, and the hammering of feet on bare wooden boards, but then the uproar of her sustained gunfire drowned out everything else.
I need to get a handle on this fucking mess, she thought. She was still firing blind, however, attempting to disrupt the flow of her opponents’ advance and hoping for a lucky hit.
The briefest of lulls drew her attention upwards again, to the sounds of renewed panic. Caitlin let loose out of the window with another four shells from the shotgun and then ran, reloading, clearing the ruined sitting room and bouncing off the slimy, plastered wall of the apartment’s main corridor. She leapt over Monique, who was writhing and crying pitiably – ‘Hold on, baby,’ the American muttered, ‘these fuckers are gonna regret getting out of bed today,’ before speeding towards the staircase, slipping the shotgun over her shoulder and bringing the Heckler amp; Koch into play.
Bounding up the stairs she swung around at the first level and raced for the front of the building. An open door led onto a small bedroom just ahead and she rushed in, grateful to find there was no baby in the cot that was pushed up against one wall. She thumbed the selector on the machine-gun to full auto. One of the reasons she liked the H amp;K was its relatively low rate of fire, a modest 600 rounds per minute, which, in the hands of an expert operator, made the burst mode all but superfluous.
Caitlin looked out the window with a black widow’s smile. Two of the three shooters were crossing the road, giving her a clear line of fire. ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Much obliged.’
The operatives both squeezed off covering fire at the groundfloor position she’d just left as they crossed the Route d’Asnieres. The dense, rapid crack of their FAMAS rifles was painfully loud. They edged forward, right into her sights.
Her movements were quick and machine-like. One sharp pull on the trigger shattered the bedroom window, and as the two men instinctively looked up, she nailed the pair of them with short auto bursts, aiming for the centre mass and letting the muzzle drift upwards to punch a couple of rounds into each of their skulls.
The first man simply looked surprised, his eyebrows raised comically and mouth a perfect ‘O’ shape before five rounds stitched him up from the sternum to the forehead. His head all but disintegrated. The second attacker was fast, well trained – but doomed. He managed to lift his muzzle up a few inches, and even squeezed off one misdirected round, before Caitlin nailed him in the same way. A fan of blood and brain matter painted the side of the car next to which he died.
One more. There’s one more, at least, she screamed silently at herself.
She didn’t pause, instead leaning back from the exposed position and holding the gun forward, angled down, to let rip at the guy who had been sheltering in the doorway. There was no direct line of sight, but Caitlin fired from memory, confident she could at least keep him pinned down. A woman was screaming nearby, and downstairs she could hear Monique’s guttural cries of pain becoming more ragged and intense, more animalistic in their abandonment.
‘Shitfire!’ spat Caitlin.
She took half a second to scan her immediate surroundings and plug them into a larger mental map of the world outside. A triangular block, typical of the streets of Paris, was her battlefield. Time to slip backasswards.
Setting off at a sprint, she exited the room and charged down the first-floor corridor – a dank, evil-smelling space. She headed away from Monique, away from the cries of the tenement’s occupants, moving as fast as possible for the rear of the building. A closed wooden door loomed ahead of her, and she went straight through it, shoulder-charging the old frame, which disintegrated in a storm of splinters and dust. A faraway part of her mind thought, Termites.
She’d been expecting either a small storeroom or a water closet. It was the latter, as filthy and unkempt as the rest of the place, but she didn’t care. A sash-window, grey and completely opaque with grime, opened onto a rear courtyard below. The pulley ropes were broken and hung uselessly, one of them trailing its frayed end through a petrified blob of toothpaste. Caitlin ignored it, safed and shouldered her weapons, and hauled herself awkwardly through the window.
It was a straight drop into the muddy courtyard, with no shed or ledge to step on. She levered herself out, and hung down as far as possible; then she pushed out and dropped. Her knees folded up under her, just as she had been trained to do by the good folks at the US Army Airborne School at Fort Benning.
There was nothing elegant about the move, which ended with her rolling in the wet earth. The submachine-gun squelched underneath her, digging painfully into her ribs, but she mostly kept the Benelli out of the muck, and with no time to check and clean the guns, she chose that as her primary. Pulling out more shells from the side saddle, she finished reloading on the run towards the small wooden fence that separated the courtyard from the property behind.
The muted rattling cough of the FAMAS reached her, adding urgency to her flight. But as she stood, a wave of disorientation swept over her and threatened to steal her balance. Caitlin took one precious second to stand perfectly still, draw in a fresh breath and attempt to centre herself, to gain some measure of control over her traitorous body. Then there was nothing for it but to forge on, leaning forward into the vertigo that had seized her and biting down a rising tide of bile that was trying to erupt upwards out of her stomach.
She leapt over the wooden fence, catching her jeans and almost crashing down in a heap on the other side as she lost her footing on a dead pigeon. Her momentum was enough to carry her forward, however, and she brought the shotgun around, flicked off the safety and jacked a round into the chamber.
In front of her now was the rear door of a building that faced onto the Rue du Bac d’Asnieres, the other side of the elongated triangular block formed by its convergence with the similarly named route – from her point of view, the quiet, uncontested side. The van was at the apex of the triangle, flat tyres and all. An empty bakery stood before her, if she recalled correctly. This just might work…