Bernard Cornwell - Crackdown

I ran up to Billingsley’s terrace, but as I reached the top of the bank a match scraped and flared. I froze. I could smell cigarette smoke, then an armed guard strolled casually from within the courtyard to stand at the far side of the terrace. He did not turn towards me, but instead stared southwards at the flames which were now leaping high above the radar aerial on the tower of the big house. The man had a sub-machine-gun slung from his right shoulder.

He drew on his cigarette, then unzipped his fatigues and began to piss into an ornamental urn where a small shrub grew.

“Drop! Now!” I snapped.

The man turned, still pissing, and scrabbled for the Uzi that was slung on his shoulder, but I was holding the Kalashnikov high and the big gun was aimed directly at the guard’s chest and it slowly dawned on him that if he tried to use his small sub-machine-gun he was very likely to catch a bad case of bullet wounds, so he began to make calming motions at me with his hands and to utter small whimpering noises.

“Get down,” I said, motioning with the big gun, and the man dropped to his knees. He wanted to zip up his fatigues, but when he dropped his hands I shouted at him to raise them again. He disobeyed me, but only to make the sign of the cross. He was shaking.

“Down!” I said again and he dropped flat on his belly. He was still making the small whimpering sounds. He lay just twenty feet away from me, his Uzi close to his right hand. To reach and disarm him I would have to walk in front of the open courtyard and, if any other guards waited in that courtyard, I would be dead.

Yet surely, I thought, the narcotraficantes would not have spared more than one man to guard their women? And I needed to disarm this one man if I was to go inside the house. “Throw your gun in the pool!” I ordered him, but he did not respond except with a quick burst of speech that sounded like a prayer. I supposed he spoke nothing but Spanish, a language I did not speak at all.

“In the pool!” I hissed at him, and made a motion with my own gun to show him what I meant, but he was lying flat and he could not see me properly, and so he did nothing. The Uzi was lying very close to his right hand, too close.

I edged to the corner of the courtyard, peered round, then dodged quickly back. No one had fired at me and I had seen nothing threatening in the deep shadows about the pool. The man on the ground had not tried to retrieve his gun.

I peered round again, this time pausing longer and sweeping the darkness at the pool’s edges with the Kalashnikov. Nothing moved. The man on the ground, clearly terrified, did not move either. I felt the tension ebb out of me. The man was alone.

So I walked across the open flank of the courtyard. The man on the ground was shaking, expecting a bullet in his back, but all I did was to kick his Uzi away from his hand, then I kicked it again so that the weapon splashed into the swimming pool.

And just as it splashed into the pool, so the other gunman, the one who had stayed hidden in the shadowed courtyard, opened fire with another sub-machine-gun. And at that range, even with an inaccurate gun, the second gunman could not miss.

Six bullets struck me. I was standing with my left shoulder towards the house and the bullets whipped across me at chest height.

Five of the bullets struck my rib cage. Or rather they would have struck my rib cage, except that the bullet-proof vest stopped all five. The sixth bullet broke my upper left arm.

It was like being kicked by a carthorse, and I went down like a stunned calf. I gasped once with the shock, then there was a silence until the man who had shot me chuckled softly. Then I heard the click as he changed magazines.

There was no pain at first, just the astonishment of knowing I had been hit. The guard on the ground beside me was scrabbling away from me as though I might bring him bad luck.

I had fallen on top of the Kalashnikov. I rolled over and almost fainted from the pain that slashed at my arm and up into my left shoulder. The Scorpion had been hanging from that shoulder and I tried to reach it with my right hand, but then the man who had shot me was standing at my right side, towering over me, and he contemptuously kicked the little Scorpion away.

“You’re a fucking clown, Breakspear,” the gunman said in his easy, lazy southern voice, “and I hate clowns.” Then he aimed his Uzi right at my forehead and I saw that my death was to be at the hands of Jesse Isambard Sweetman who was still clothed in his dramatic black outfit. His hair was unbound to hang loose either side of his handsome face.

He saw the recognition dawn in my eyes, and that recognition was all he needed to make his victory sweet and complete.

“Where’s Ellen?” I asked him, and could not keep the pain from my voice.

He hesitated, then he smiled. “You’ll never know, will you?”

“Please,” I said.

“How very careless of you to lose her.” He paused, watching me, then laughed softly. “I made her cry out in bed, Breakspear. She wanted it so badly that she cried out for it.”

“Bastard—” I tried to heave up at him, but he stepped back and he levelled the gun again, and still he smiled.

“Carry a message to heaven for me. Just say no.” And he pulled the Uzi’s trigger and the small bullets flicked off the terrace by my left ear and slowly moved away from me because Sweetman had grown a third eye, a black and wet third eye, and he was falling backwards as he squeezed the trigger, and I stared up to see a jet of black glistening blood spurt from that third eye in his forehead.

The blood spurted to fall on me. The guard I had disarmed was scrambling to his feet, calling to the Virgin Mary for aid, but the M16 fired again from my left and the guard pitched forward to fall into the swimming pool.

“Ever since I got this damned gun wet,” the Maggot said, “it won’t fire in bursts.” He climbed up from where he had been hidden by the bluff which edged the beach. “I thought you were coming to join us on the boat!”

I tried to kneel upright, but could not. I was feeling sick and dizzy. I wanted to tell the Maggot that the M16 was a notoriously unreliable weapon and that he should have used a Kalashnikov instead, but I suddenly could not speak. There was vomit in my throat and tears in my eyes. Ellen, Ellen, Ellen.

Then the Maggot was beside me and pulling me to my feet. He thrust the Scorpion into my right hand and took the belt of ammunition from around my neck. He tossed his M16 away and scooped up the Kalashnikov. “I’ve got to get you out of here, Nick.” He turned me gently towards the sea.

“No.” I jerked myself away, then almost screamed because of the bolt of pain that seared up my left arm. I began walking towards the house.

“Nick!” the Maggot called.

“No!” My left arm was useless, and beginning to throb with a hellish pain. Blood was trickling inside my sleeve to drip off my fingers, but I did not care how much blood I lost or how much the wound hurt, just so long as I could get inside Billingsley’s house where Ellen was. By the light of a flare I could see the dead gunman’s blood spreading in dark wandering tendrils through the swimming pool. “I’m going in there,” I explained to the Maggot and pointed towards the policeman’s house.

“We got the boat’s radio working,” the Maggot said, “so it’s OK! Help’s coming.”

“Sod your help,” I said groggily, then I heard voices shouting from the next-door house, and I turned southward to see three men running towards us across a tennis court that lay between the house and the sea. I tried to raise the Scorpion, but the Maggot was much quicker than me. He used the Kalashnikov to sweep a green hose of fire across the court to drop all three men flat. One man stayed down, while the other two scrambled away. They were shouting for help and, even if I had been minded to take the Maggot’s advice and retreat to the boat, it was now too late because we were cut off from the beach.