Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

Come on, Krupina.

Calvary called, ‘Re caalign=member, until I get word that they’re clear, I keep hold of this thing.’

The damp air was starting to feel cloying and oppressive rather than bracing. The night was still, the trees insulating the park from the noises of the city on either side. Calvary caught the smell of wood smoke from somewhere, heady and redolent.

Calvary put his finger in his ear again and muttered, then lifted his head and called: ‘Blazek. Come out here. I need to see you as well.’

There was a sound then, the rustle of clothing and the crunch of boot on fallen foliage. Four more men emerged from the trees. Both were dressed entirely in black, crew-neck sweaters and combat trousers and running shoes. Both held handguns by their sides. They stood fifteen or twenty paces away, watching Calvary.

He raised the hand with the grenade higher and called, ‘Ten seconds, Blazek. If you haven’t shown yourself by then I’m releasing this pin.’

The first six men had begun to advance until they formed a semicircle with the four newcomers.

Then Calvary thought of something that made the skin on his neck contract.

The effective kill zone with most modern grenades was around fifteen feet in diameter. If he were close enough to the men it would be simple for Krupina’s people to shoot him where he stood, setting off the grenade and taking out ten of Blazek’s men at the same time. Improving the odds with one shot. Calvary eased backwards, fighting the urge to run, until he was backed up against a tree. He felt the sting of sweat in his eye and was thankful for the drizzle.

Then he heard it, the faintest ratcheting click from off among the trees, as if a gun were being cocked.

*

The Audi was parked in sight of the Tabor Gate. Through her earpiece Krupina listened to Arkady’s murmured monologue, fluid and concise.

‘All ten advancing now. Calvary’s backed up, and they’re still coming on. One of them looks like — yes, it’s Miklos. I repeat, we have visual confirmation of Miklos Blazek.’

Krupina let out a breath. ‘ Go. ’

*

None of the men reacted to the noise. They maintained their perfect semi-circle, evenly spaced along its curve as if they had rehearsed it, which they probably had. There was a poised tension in the arc they formed. At any moment there was going to be another sound and this time they would notice it.

It came out of sequence, a crack as of two fighting sticks being smashed together and trailing an echo behind it. By the time Calvary heard it he had already seen much more. One of the men was flung forward on to his knees like a supplicant prostrating himself at the feet of a rel feit. By igious leader before his torso and face hit the earth. A fraction of a second after the crack of the shot another of the men was hit, a large calibre bullet tearing through the side of his neck as instinct turned him partially to look behind him; his feet were lifted off the ground and he was hurled back down again several feet away.

Loud noises could have a paralysing effect on the human capacity to act. Calvary lost a second as his nervous system struggled to make sense of the assault. Two of the remaining men wheeled round and began blindly to return fire. The other two charged Calvary, pistols raised in double-handed grips. It was a risky move on their part because Calvary’s instinct was to drop what he was holding and extend his arms in a fending-off gesture; but they were giving him credit for professionalism and were assuming he wouldn’t do that, and they were right. Instead he darted round the tree against which he was backed. It was a large oak with a thick and ancient bole. As he slid round to the other side he heard the sing of a ricochet and saw a quick, violent disturbance of the leaves in one of the trees off to the side.

His forehead banged on a low branch. The pain was shocking, stalling Calvary’s breathing for a moment, and in the time he lost remembering how to inhale again, one of the men reached him and rammed his elbow into his face while the other came round from the other direction and grasped his right wrist, raising it high. Calvary aimed a sideways kick into the abdomen of the man holding his wrist but he was too close and Calvary overbalanced on his other leg and went down. The man who had elbowed him was on him then, snapping a head butt into Calvary’s face. Calvary reacted instinctively, lowering his head to allow his forehead rather than his nose to absorb the butt, before realising that this wasn’t perhaps advisable given his injury.

The hammer blow of agony caused Calvary’s right hand to open reflexively. He turned his head and saw the grenade drop and bounce once and come to rest six feet away against an exposed root.

On his knees, Calvary reached forward with his left hand. The grenade lay several feet beyond his grasp, like some dark and gleaming malignant fruit. The man who’d grabbed his right wrist still had hold of it and was applying traction sideways, at ninety degrees to Calvary’s own direction of movement. The man on his left was on his feet.

Calvary pulled his right arm free and propelled himself a few inches closer to the grenade. The big man on his right, having abandoned his attempt to move Calvary away from the grenade, had turned and begun to run. The man on the left, who began to flee immediately, had covered more ground and was launching himself into a dive, away from the explosion he knew was imminent.

What happened next wasn’t immediately clear to Calvary. He found himself lying on his side with the man on his right now next to him, sprawled doll-like on his back. The right side of the man’s head was gone, and one of his arms splayed across Calvary’s waist in a grotesque parody of romantic attachment. Wet sucking mulch gripped Calvary’s face like a starfish: the man’s blood, and his brain, and the even more intimate fluids from his lymphatic system and his cerebrospinal circulation, had coalesced into an invading organism the size of a large palm that had chosen Calvary as its host. The man had been flung on to Calvary by the force of the gunshtarfish: tot which destroyed his head. His mouth was distorted by old scars. Distantly, Calvary registered him as the man he’d fought in the bookshop, ages ago. Pavel Kral.

The pin of the grenade had been knocked from Calvary’s fingers before he could reinsert it.

Calvary clambered to his knees again, his hands hooked into a scavenger’s claws, soil and leaves spilling from them in matted clumps. The grenade rested propped against his thigh. The pin had disappeared into the darkness.

*

In the classic World War Two ‘pineapple’ fragmentation grenade or Mill’s bomb, the flame that crept along the slow-burning material in the fuse reached the detonator within four to six seconds. The grenade Krupina’s man had given Calvary was more modern, but even so at least ten seconds had passed since he’d dropped it. Calvary doubted that it had been designed to work on such a long fuse. The whole point of grenade development was to keep the delay down to a minimum, long enough that one could throw it safely but not so long that the enemy might grab it before it exploded and lob it back.

Calvary had dropped the egg, fallen to his knees, wrestled off an opponent; had crawled to the egg, picked it up, found the pin in his pocket, lost the pin after the man had been shot and landed on top of him; had scrabbled around to find the pin. And still the thing hadn’t gone off.

Krupina, the harpy , had given him a dud.

It made sense when he thought about it. If he had decided to turn the tables on Krupina, Calvary might have used the grenade on her men. There was no way either he or Blazek’s people would have been able to tell it was a fake. She was a devious monster, Krupina, no question; yet Calvary was alive because of it. A laugh tried to ram its way up from his stomach, a mad condemned man’s cackle, but he ground it back down.