Bernard Cornwell - Crackdown

“Come on!” I shouted at the Maggot. He ran towards me. I could hear the bullets flicking overhead, then we were both in the shelter of the small courtyard. But we would not be safe for long, for our enemies now knew where we were.

A screen door in Billingsley’s house was open. I stepped over the sill to see, across the room, and beyond an arch that led into a hallway, a sliver of candlelight showing under a door.

Behind me the Maggot’s machine-gun began firing. He had his back towards me and I guessed that the men from the neighbouring house were swarming towards Deacon Billingsley’s terrace. The Maggot hammered them with burst after burst of fire. A grenade exploded, but the Maggot survived for I could hear the Kalashnikov continue to fire in short professional bursts. How did a football player learn that skill?

I walked towards the slit of candlelight. I went under the archway and found myself in a long central hallway. A door to my right banged open, revealing the outer darkness lit by the fire, and also revealing a tall man standing with a sub-machine-gun. I was in deeper shadow and the man did not see me till my Scorpion fired and its bullets lifted him clean up from the doorstep. The Scorpion had a twenty-round magazine and I fired it all, throwing the man back and cutting off his sudden scream of pain. His blood stank in the warm hallway. Women began screaming beyond the door.

“This is not healthy.” The Maggot cannoned off the archway to join me in the hall. I held the Scorpion towards him and he obligingly took out the magazine, reversed it, and thrust the full magazine home.

“Put it on single shot, will you?” I asked him.

“Sure, Nick.” He turned the selector to the ‘1’, so that now the little gun would not empty its magazine in one blinding burst of fire.

“Now open the door.” I nodded towards the telltale strip of light. I could not open the door myself because I was holding the gun in my right hand and my left hand was hanging bloody and useless.

The Maggot put his hand on the door, paused as he wondered what threat waited on the far side, then he threw it open and I dropped to my knee with the gun facing a candlelit room full of screaming and terrified women. “Shut the fuck up!” I shouted, because I was just as terrified as they were.

“Nick!” a girl called in astonishment.

“Shut up, get your heads down! Down! Down! All of you! Down! Down!” I was screaming the order as I crossed the threshold and searched the room for enemies, but there were no gunmen in there, only a group of women who huddled together for protection. I could see two beds in the room which was otherwise as bare and characterless as a hotel bedroom. I could not see Ellen. It was Robin-Anne who had recognised me. The Maggot was still in the hallway. He began firing the Kalashnikov and empty cartridge cases skittered across the polished wooden floor. Outside the windows I could hear a motor running, and I hoped to God it was not the jeep with its half-inch Browning.

“Grenade!” the Maggot shouted in warning, then threw himself backwards into the bedroom as the grenade exploded in the hallway, then the echo of the bomb’s blast was drowned by the rending noise of the Browning half-inch machine-gun opening fire on us. The shutters and glass of the windows literally disintegrated, turned to splinters and sawdust and shards by the heavy bullets that now sawed at the wall of the house, chopping and chewing through it, even destroying the stone pillars at the edges of the windows. The machine-gunner was firing red tracers, and the fire was streaking across our heads to splinter and pierce the inner walls of the house. The Browning was powerful enough to fire clean through bricks and plaster and timber and sheetrock. The girls were screaming and sobbing, though the machine-gunner had fired too high and so far no one had been hit. Flakes of plaster and chips of wood rained down on us and the air was as thick as smoke with dust. The candles flickered in the gloom.

I scrambled over the room and provoked a shriek by treading on a naked pair of legs that belonged to a girl who was lying by an open window. She would not or could not move, so I knelt on her thighs as I pushed a fallen wrecked shutter aside to see the jeep standing no more than ten yards away. The machine-gunner, standing in the jeep’s rear bed, was gritting his teeth as he played the stream of bullets back across the house.

He saw my face appear at the shattered window and he began tugging the Browning’s heavy weight to face me, but I already had the little Scorpion resting on the splintered windowsill. I was sobbing and screaming myself with the pain, but I would be writhing in my death throes if I did not aim calmly and properly.

I fired my first shot and the Scorpion’s recoil felt as feeble as a pop gun.

The Browning’s bullets chopped towards me, filling the night with an appalling violence. I fired again. It was like using a peashooter against a cannon. I should have brought my Webley, I thought, then wondered why I had left it behind. The Browning’s big bullets were destroying the night, splintering a whole world, and all I had was the Scorpion’s puny single-shot power. I squeezed the trigger a third time as the plaster and timber of the wall began to explode in powdered wreckage about my ears, then suddenly the Browning’s scarlet tracer jerked upwards to shatter Deacon Billingsley’s rooftiles into thick red shards.

The gunner had disappeared backwards. The Browning’s awful noise stopped dead and in the sudden silence I heard myself whining in agony.

“Nick?” A girl spoke from underneath me. It was not Robin-Anne’s voice, nor was it Ellen’s. “Nick?” the girl said again.

I ignored her. I was watching the jeep’s driver who had taken cover behind the engine block, and I wanted to make sure that the man did not leap up to take over the now silent machine-gun. Behind me the Maggot fired a brief burst into the hallway, then there was an odd silence, except for the throbbing of the jeep engine, the crackle of flames and the moaning of a wounded man.

“Nick!” The girl underneath me was suddenly insistent, and even offended that I had ignored her so far.

“What the hell is it?” I asked irritably.

“You’re kneeling on my legs, Nick. I really think you should know that you’re hurting me.” It was Donna, who sounded very aggrieved. “Please, Nick! If you could just try to be a little more thoughtful?”

“I’m sorry.” I moved off her legs and wondered if she ever wore anything other than the flimsy bikini.

She smiled drenching forgiveness on me. “Good evening, Nick. And how are you this evening?”

“Donna?” I said blankly. I had recognised her, but I still could not quite come to terms with meeting her thus amidst the dust and smoke of this bullet-torn room.

“I’m good, thank you.” She had assumed I had asked her how she was, which I had not, but nor was she ‘good’ either, for she was very close to hysteria, but Donna had been wonderfully brought up and even amidst the grenades and bullets she was doing her best to remember her Episcopalian manners. I looked back out of the window and saw that the jeep driver was still crouching behind his vehicle, then he suddenly showed his face because he was staring upwards towards a throbbing noise that seemed to fill the whole sky and I saw that the jeep driver was Matthew McIllvanney.

“Did McIllvanney bring you here?” I asked Donna.

“Of course he did!” she said brightly. “That’s Matthew’s job.”

“So what’s he doing here?” I had to shout because the throbbing noise had turned into the percussive blows of helicopters coming lower and lower, and some of the helicopters were equipped with bullhorns through which men were shouting in Spanish and English. They were yelling that we should throw down our guns and stand still. A searchlight sliced down from one of the hovering machines. “What’s McIllvanney doing here?” I asked Donna again.