Five minutes later a second, much larger man, came out of the building and turned towards the rear of the property. From a distance of thirty yards, he could quite clearly see that the man had the inert body of a small female slung over his shoulder. The man walked quickly around the back of the property and into the outbuilding. As he passed, he didn’t look towards the field were Stone was lying, or take any notice of the bush where he was hiding.
Although the gun was chafing his back and his knees were sore, Stone quietly continued the bush/arm/crawl maneuver along the track. When he was twenty yards away from the house, he saw two shadows passing fleetingly in front of the French doors. One was a man of medium build and the other was a petite female. Although the image was fleeting and distorted by the curtain, Stone was positive that he had just seen Linda. He pressed the transmit button and whispered into his radio.
“I have eyes on Linda. Begin in five.”
There was a double click of static in his ear as Carter acknowledged.
He continued his forward belly crawl until he was just ten yards from the back of the house. Then he draped the bush across his back and slowly brought the crossbow to his shoulder.
A minute later Eric heard a car approaching fast, its engine revving enthusiastically. Bright headlights swept across the front of the house and there was a screech as Carter brought his car to a sudden stop on the loose gravel. He gave the horn a long blast and then performed a wild turn. The tires could be heard scrabbling for grip as he sped away.
Stone rolled his neck to relax his muscles, took a deep breath, and brought the sniper scope to his eye. He flicked the safety switch to ‘fire’ and checked that the laser-sighting device was disabled. Ten second later the large man came out of the outbuilding, gun in hand. He jogged to the corner of the house to investigate the source of the noise.
“Fuck’n kids!” he whispered.
The man stood very still staring towards the road with his back facing the field. He was just eight yards away from where Stone was lying. From such a close range, the back of Bunny’s thick neck entirely filled the view through the telescopic scope. Stone centered the scope’s cross hairs at the very top of the big man’s neck, level with his hairline, and he waited. When Carter sounded the car’s horn again, Stone breathed out and squeezed the trigger.
With a sound no louder than a single handclap, the string of the Ghost 410 crossbow released. The high tensile reinforced string completed its fifteen-inch power stroke in one millisecond. Propelled by one-hundred-forty-nine foot/pounds of energy, the twenty-two inch bolt left the crossbow at four-hundred-ten feet per second and covered the 26.4 feet to its target in 0.06 seconds.
For a horrible moment, Stone thought that he had missed, but then he saw that he hadn’t. He stared in amazement as the giant bodyguard remained standing, apparently unaffected by the crossbow bolt embedded at the base of his skull. Then, like some huge tree uprooted by a storm, he slowly tipped forward and fell flat onto his face. Drawing his knife and staying low, Stone cautiously scrambled across to the recumbent form, but his vigilance proved unnecessary. The crossbow bolt had instantly severed the bodyguard’s spine. Bunny was dead.
Stone considered trying to drag the corpse into the cover of the field, but a quick tug on Bunny’s legs convinced him that the bodyguard was too heavy. The best that he could do was to roll the body out of the moonlight and into the shadow of the house. Panting from the effort of manhandling such a dead weight, he crouched low at the corner of the house and reloaded the crossbow. After carefully scanning the immediate area and deciding that he was still unobserved, Stone silently moved to the outbuilding where Bunny had taken the girl. Keeping his right eye tightly shut to preserve his night vision, with knife in hand, he cautiously stepped through the door.
It was an ordinary garage and workshop, lit by a single strip light. Inside there were two cars, a white Porsche and a red Ferrari. Between the cars, naked and spread-eagled on the hard concrete floor, the girl lay in a pool of blood. Stone gently placed his fingers to the side of her chin so he could check for a pulse. There was none. He thought that in life, she may have been a pretty girl, but it was hard to be sure, because her death had been caused by a violent and sustained beating. He reached over and gently closed her one remaining eye, silently praying that she had died before the final ignominy that the big bodyguard had inflicted, with the screwdriver that was still embedded between her legs.
Now fearing for Linda’s safety more than ever, Stone strode across to the exit. As he reached for the door, it was suddenly pulled open. He recoiled in shock and surprise. There before him was the identical twin brother of the man he had just killed with the crossbow. Kitten was equally surprised to find a stranger standing in the garage doorway. Both men involuntarily took half a step backwards, before realizing the danger. Stone reacted quickly, but Kitten reacted first.
The huge Russian’s fist whipped around and landed a mighty punch to the left side of Eric’s head. It was an ill-timed and glancing blow, but it still landed with devastating force. Stone’s legs went stiff and his vision blurred as he staggered away. He would have been easy meat for a follow-on attack, had one come immediately — but it didn’t. Perhaps it was because he was facing what he perceived to be an inferior opponent, or because he was distracted by the body of the naked girl, but Kitten hesitated. Stone knew that he had been badly shaken by the punch, but he also had experience, and a fighter’s survival instinct.
Shaking his head and blinking to try to clear his vision, he staggered away to his left, placing the Ferrari between himself and his attacker. The bodyguard quickly assessed the situation. With a forbidding sneer, he reached under his jacket and pulled out a gun.
“Put your hands up.”
Stone knew that surrender would undoubtedly lead to death — both his and Linda’s. He had no option but to fight. With a shrug of defeat, he began to raise his arms, and as soon as the crossbow cleared the back of the Ferrari, he pulled the trigger. It was a snap shot, driven by desperation and poorly aimed — but he got lucky. The bolt barely missed the low hood of the sports car, struck the floor with a puff of concrete, ricocheted upwards, and stuck firmly into Kittens shin. The bodyguard winced in pain and hobbled backwards, slightly lowering his aim. Knowing that he had just this one chance, Stone threw the crossbow with all of his might, and charged.
It should have been the last thing he ever did. Eric should have died there, writhing on the cold concrete floor with a bullet in his head — but he didn’t. For some reason Kitten did not see the attack as a threat from a dangerous and desperate man, rather he treated it as an affront to his ego and manhood. His steroid twisted brain seemed enraged by this outrageous show of disrespectful aggression, and after he had batted Stone away, Kitten made a big show of putting his gun onto the workbench.
“I’m gonna beat you to a pulp you little shit!” the bodyguard said.
Even with the crossbow bolt sticking out of his shin, Stone had no doubt that Kitten would deliver on his promise. The man was a mountain of muscle. His biceps’ were thicker than Eric’s thigh, his fists were like bowling balls, and his neck was broader than his shaven head.
Stone had fought big men before, and he had fought muscular men. He had always won by using space, stamina, and time, to his advantage. Usually he could dance around a bigger, but slower assailant, keeping his distance, and taking his shots whenever he saw a gap in the defenses. Over time, his superior fitness and speed would always give him the upper hand, but this confrontation was different. With no room for maneuver in the confined space of the garage, and under pressure to rescue Linda quickly, Stone did the only thing he could. He stepped out from behind the car, took up a fighting stance, and waited for the other man to make a move.