Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

*

Bartos took his chance just as the pickup ploughed through the guy who’d got out the passenger side of the Hummer. Voronin, the bastard who’d been in charge of his interrogation.

Seconds earlier the driver’s head had rocked back in a dark crimson spray and the bullet had sung past Bartos’s head and embedded itselfmbefon in the seat beside him. An instant after that, the Hummer had slammed into the rear of the pickup truck. The men on either side of Bartos in the back seat had been jolted by the impact, as he had, but they kept their grips on the guns jammed into his flanks.

Voronin rolled out of the passenger door and through the remains of the windscreen Bartos saw him aim his gun before the reversing pickup smashed into him. The man on Bartos’s left gave a yell and for the first time he felt the pressure of the barrel ease against his side as the man lifted it away and began to bring it up to face the front.

Bartos grabbed the raised arm and brought it across his body, using the heel of his left hand to bend it against the elbow so that the bone cracked. Reflexively the man pulled the trigger. By this time the gun was pointing directly at the man on Bartos’s right. The shot caught him in the temple, snapping his head to bounce off the window. Bartos hauled on the other man’s arm, drawing his head down towards him, and got his arm around the man’s neck. He clasped his hands together and tightened his forearm across the throat. The man’s arms flailed but he was trapped. Bartos was a big man. He was the Kodiak. The Russian gave a last choking hiss and was silent.

Bartos shook his head, trying to clear the ringing from the close-quarters gunfire. He peered through the wrecked windscreen. The pickup was gone. Inside the Hummer were three dead men, with another on the road outside.

But he, Bartos, was alive.

He began to laugh.

He opened the rear doors on either side and shoved the bodies out on to the road. Then he clambered through to the front. The driver’s seat was a mess, gore splashed across the upholstery and the dashboard. He kicked the corpse on to the tarmac, tried the engine. It fired up.

He remembered something. When they’d first loaded him into the Hummer outside the park, before the interrogation, they’d blindfolded him, but not before he’d noticed them loading something into the boot.

He pulled to a halt down a side street, went round to the back. Lifted the false bottom away from the base of the boot. Saw the hardware clamped into place.

Beautiful.

*

‘Talk to me, talk to me.’ Her yell faded to a croak on the last word. Beside her Lev’s head was hunched forward as though he could increase their speed that way.

Arkady’s voice came through, raised but calm. ‘We’re on the Letna side, between the river and the southern edge of the Gardens.’

‘Heading which way?’

‘West, towards the castle.’

‘Keep going. We’re behind him on Milady Herakove, same direction.’

‘You operational, boss?’

‘Yes. The Hummer’s out of action.’

erath="2em" align="justify"›And Voronin was dead. She’d seen him go down under Calvary’s truck..

The pain in her abdomen was like a spear impaling her to her seat. Coughing made it worse, so she stifled it, spluttering. Lev didn’t waste time asking her how she was.

‘Where’s the other car?’ She meant the one carrying the remaining two Voronin men.

Arkady was quiet for a moment, consulting. Then: ‘Approaching from the castle side.’

The end game.

*

Calvary used the roads creatively, choosing a direction at the last minute, swinging left and right and right and left in what was probably some sort of pattern if one were to study it closely but seemed random enough to suit his purposes. Some kind of park was to his left. Ahead he recognised the sign for the Metro system. In the near distance was the Gothic grandeur of the castle.

The pickup was shaking violently as if in the grip of some ague and the speedometer showed one hundred and forty kph. Still the Audi kept at its back, matching the lane switches and the feints.

Then the shots came, a volley of three, two so close together as to be virtually simultaneous with the third lagging by a fraction of a second. There was no impact, no crash of projectile striking metal. Instead there was an explosion, briefer and sharper than the shots that had preceded it, followed by the high-pitched screech of a naked wheel rim scouring across tarmac.

Calvary risked a glance up at the mirror and saw the Audi slewing to the side, the driver spinning the wheel, his mouth stretched wide as he fought for control over the vehicle. I braked, quickly but steadily, and swung the Passat Mercedes round. The Audi’s front passenger wheel bounced up on to the pavement and the bumper hit a concrete bollard with enough force that it crumpled like crepe paper. The car came to a halt, its rear tyre on the driver’s side hanging off the wheel in a ragged ribbon, steam coming up in clouds from beneath the sharply arched bonnet.

There was no time to reflect on what had happened because the front doors of the car were already opening, the one on the passenger side with difficulty because the impact had buckled it. Calvary had time to register that the figure emerging from the passenger side was the woman, Krupina. Twenty yards,behind, Calvary saw the lights of another car, a VW — the rental from earlier — and through the windscreen Nikola at the wheel and Jakub beside her.

He used the brake firmly but not sharply, taking the pickup round in a fast but steady arc and ize="+0"›gunning back the way he had come. Beside him Gaines peered about, confused. Ahead the man who had been driving the Audi was now crouching and using one of the doors as cover, and peering back towards the VW. Jakub had opened the passenger door of the VW and was sighting along the top of the door, a gun — Calvary assumed the Browning or the Glock — in his hand. Calvary understood. Jakub had shot out the Audi’s tyre.

Calvary braked to a stop fifty yards away. asHe kicked out the windscreen of the pickup where the glass was starred. F rom behind the shield of the dashboard he fired off three shots in rapid order, catching the driver with two of them so that he slammed back off the Audi and hit the ground.

The woman cowered behind the cover of her own door. There didn’t seem to be any others in the Audi. Calvary was about to call across to Jakub when Nikola put her head through the driver’s window and screamed, ‘Martin. Behind you.’

Calvary looked over his shoulder, saw the lights coming fast from the direction of the castle, two sets of them.

And the roar of a bigger beast caused his head to snap back round. Beyond the crashed Audi, beyond the VW, its half-severed bumper sparking off the tarmac, the Hummer was advancing.

*

The trail was like that of an explorer hacked through the jungle. Cars were pulled over to the side, their shaken drivers jabbering into phones, and pedestrians milled about staring off into the direction the pickup and the Audi had passed. Bartos followed with ease, feeling a thrill at the throbbing power of the vehicle even in its battered state.

Across his lap was the assault rifle he’d chosen from the stash in the boot. He didn’t know the make but it looked Russian and modern, futuristic even. There’d been a spare box magazine and he’d taken that as well. Best of all, mounted under the barrel was a grenade launcher. He’d found a single grenade clipped into its own compartment.

It was as though an invisible police cordon had been drawn across the road running along the northern edge of the park. Cars were stalled or reversing. One or two idiots had climbed out and were frantically motioning at the oncoming traffic to turn back.