Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

There was more shooting from below him, and then a round smashed through the outer wall beside him, flinging splinters into his face and causing him to drop to the floor.

"Terrific," he muttered to himself. A virtually simultaneous boom identified the shooter as the Bear. That was always the risk with combining high-powered weapons and strategies of encirclement. You ended up shooting each other.

He wiped the blood from his face. The splinters stung, but the injuries weren't serious. He inched forward until he came to the bedroom door. Using the long handle of a sweeping brush he'd found in the workroom, he lifted the latch and opened the door very slowly.

He could see nothing but a faint patch of night sky through the window. He listened for any sounds of breathing or movement from the room, but there were none. He mentally tossed a coin and then flicked on the flashlight for a brief look around the bedroom.

It was as he remembered it, but none of that registered. All he could grasp was one brief glimpse of Vreni hanging – and then darkness. For long seconds Fitzduane fought to retain his sanity as one hanging face dissolved into another in an endless kaleidoscope of horror. The words of the pathologist in Cork – it seemed an age ago – came back to him: “He might still have been alive…”

He moved forward instinctively, keeping under cover, and snatched one more brief look with his flashlight. Her lower body was concealed by the choust through which she had dropped. Her head and torso were still in the bedroom. Fitzduane felt the last of his hope drain out of him.

He grasped Vreni by the shoulders, hoisted her body out of the hole, and rested her legs on the bedroom floor. With some of the weight now relieved, he was able to remove the noose from her neck. Her body was limp and totally unresponsive, but he could do no more for the moment. He should try artificial respiration, but there was a gunfight going on below him, and the Bear was in harm's way. He lay on the floor and peered down through the choust into the sitting room below. He could just make out one figure silhouetted against the window. The Bear was still firing from outside, but Fitzduane knew he must be running low on ammunition.

Fitzduane considered dropping down through the choust but decided that there were easier ways of committing suicide. He'd be in a crossfire from the two terrorists and in the Bear's line of fire – and he'd have to leave Vreni. There was only one practical alternative: he'd have to fire down through the choust. The angle was awkward, but by using his left hand to balance himself, he was able to fire the Skorpion with his right hand, pistol fashion.

The silhouette at the window jerked when it was hit and then vanished below the window ledge into the darkness. Any illusions that the wound was serious were shattered when a burst of flame spat from the hole. Rounds whined off the cast iron of the stove and embedded themselves in the wooden walls and ceiling.

There was a smashing of glass and the sound of a body dropping outside, then another. Fitzduane looked out the bedroom window and saw a figure running toward the small barn located at the end of the track farthest away from the village. It had sounded as if both terrorists had jumped out of the ground-floor window when they discovered they were being fired upon from both sides – so where was the second one?

Wood splintered, and the front door was smashed off its hinges to hit the floor with a reverberating crash. There was a shout from below. Fitzduane looked down through the choust to see the Bear grinning up at him, looking pleased with himself. He held up the Magnum.

"Seems to work," he said, "but if I'm going to travel around with you, I'd better learn to carry more ammunition. I'm out."

"Your timing's off," said Fitzduane. "One's still in close; the other legged it for the barn. I don't think peace has broken out yet."

A round black object came hurtling through the broken living room window and rolled across the wooden floor. Fitzduane flung himself away from the choust.

There was a vivid flash, and a wave of heat blasted up through the hole, knocking Fitzduane backward. The hanging rope, severed by flying shrapnel, came tumbling down, engulfing him in its coils and invoking an instant feeling of revulsion, as if the rope itself were contaminated. He disentangled himself and crawled to the side of the window. He looked around the frame cautiously and could see a figure zigzagging toward the barn. He fired repeatedly, but he was still shaken from the shock of the explosion – and then the gun was empty.

He ducked down behind the windowsill as return fire coming from the barn bracketed his position. No ammunition. A bloody unhealthy situation that was heading toward terminal unless he could com up with some answers. Think.

He remembered something from his last visit: the incongruity of Peter Haag's army rifle hanging in the bedroom. He fetched it. It was a substantial weapon compared with the Skorpion, but not of much use unless he could find the ammunition. Somewhere in the house there would be twenty-four rounds in a special container, but where? Regulations said ammunition should be stored separately from the weapon. He checked the bedroom closet just in case, but in vain. Peter Haag might have been a terrorist, but he was Swiss, and he would have followed regulations.

Clasping the assault rifle, Fitzduane wriggled down through the choust to the living room below. He found the Bear lying on the floor, semiconscious and muttering in Bernese dialect. The heavy metal stove seemed to have protected him from the full force of the blast, but it hadn’t done him much good either. "For the love of God, Heini," Fitzduane muttered as he searched through the living room, "this is no time to try to teach me your bloody language."

No ammunition.

Heavier-caliber fire started to rip through the farmhouse walls from the direction of the barn, and Fitzduane realized that the terrorists must have concealed some backup weaponry there. One of them had something like a heavy hunting rifle. Obviously he was no expert with bolt action, but the slowness of his fire was compensated for by the fact that the wooden walls gave no protection at all against the new weapon. It was only a matter of time before he or the Bear or Vreni got hit. The sniper was methodically quartering the farmhouse, and it wasn't too big a building to cover. He pulled the Bear further behind the wood stove and tried not to think of Verni's frail body totally exposed to the rifle fire. The desecration of the dead. Did it really matter?

Desperately he scoured the shelves and cabinets for the ammunition. He wondered if it would be hidden behind the marmalade, as it had been at Guido's. Did followers of the Steiner philosophy even eat marmalade? If he didn't strike pay dirt soon, he might get the chance to ask the long-dead Steiner personally.

A rifle bullet plowed into a second jar of mung beans, filling the air with organically approved food mixed with less friendly shards of broken glass. Brown rice was blasted into the air like shrapnel. He reached out for the lethal locally distilled spirit he remembered. Behind the rear bottle lay the ammunition. He ripped open the sealed container and fed in the rounds one by one, hoping that the rifle's mechanism wasn't jammed up with brown rice or lentils or the like. Crouched low, he went out the kitchen door. He found a firing position by the wall facing the barn. He extended the assault rifle's bipod and activated the night sight. His front was substantially protected by a bag of some sort of organic manure; whatever it was, it wasn't odorless.

The firing from the barn ceased. A single figure appeared, moving cautiously but somehow conveying the impression that it didn't expect any more opposition – scarcely surprising after the grenade and the barrage of heavy-rifle fire and the lack of response from the defenders.