After it Happened Boxset: 1-6 Omnibus Edition, page 109
The juxtaposition of old man and state-of-the-art rifle was a thing of beauty as he carefully breathed the rhythm of a marksman which he had done so many times before.
Pausing his breathing at the right moment, he gently squeezed the trigger with a caress of his finger.
The bullet flew true, unwavering in its trajectory. He saw her face as the sound of his shot reached her, fear and shock battling for primacy, too late for her as the projectile travelled at impossible speeds and had already entered her chest.
The impact of the heavy round threw her down like nerveless meat, dead before she hit the ground.
Satisfied that he had acquitted himself well, Claude resumed his scanning of the ground ahead.
STAIRWAY TO HELL
Dan regained consciousness and looked over to see Kate stitching up Mitch’s shoulder. He tried to speak but no words came out. He tried again and was rewarded with Kate turning to look at him.
“Hold that,” she mouthed to Mitch, handing him the needle and thread she was using. Stepping over to Dan, she mouthed, “Are you ok?”
“Yes,” he lied, still in silence.
It was only then he realised that the lack of sound was because of him, not for him.
He was deaf.
“It’s probably temporary,” Kate mouthed again, meaning his deafness. “You were stood next to an explosion, do you know what happened?”
“Chris,” he said, not hearing his own voice so mouthing each word carefully. “Suicide bomb.”
His words obviously came out because the others in the room, who hadn’t heard the news about who carried the bomb, all stared at him in disbelief.
Mitch, foolishly attempting to carry on with the needle work as he pulled a face to try and see his own shoulder, added to the bad news.
“They’re in the fort, too,” he said.
Dan didn’t see his mouth clearly as he spoke, merely heard a weak noise as though he were underwater, and looked at Kate for a translation.
“He said they are in the fort,” she enunciated with deliberate care, this time the pitch of underwater noise changed and Dan could make out some of it; like being able to see shapes in the fog but the hearing version of it.
“How?” he said, rewarding himself with a ringing noise returning to his brain.
Shrugs all round didn’t help him, and he sat up despite Kate’s protestations. “Anything else?” he asked.
Kate, finally realising what Mitch was trying to do, slapped his hands away and took back control of the stitching. Craning her head back towards Dan she told him, “Everyone is hiding indoors out of sight. People are guarding the gate from the inside and the steps to the fort are barricaded, but we’re trapped.”
That, Dan understood just fine.
His head ringing and his legs feeling a little unstable, he stood. Kate knew him well enough by now to know that he would not listen to her advice that he should stay in bed for seventy-two hours and rest. She knew that wasn’t an option.
He had another infestation to clear; questions and rest could come after.
~
“There is only one way to do this,” Dan said, barely able to hear his own words as he spoke over the tinny whine still ringing in his ears. “We have to climb up and kill them.”
His assembled audience was all volunteers, and all understood that without control of the sky fort they were all prisoners under cover of the stone walls. They had no other assets, he told them. They had no way of clearing the fort without going there and doing it themselves. There were no reinforcements and there was no artillery or air support, so they had to do it the medieval way.
He was way past trying to tell Leah she had to stay, he had told her repeatedly all afternoon and into the evening as they planned what they could do.
He wanted to say that this time, of all the times she had put herself on the line, of the times she had saved his life, that this time was different. If their counterattack failed, then he didn’t expect anyone to survive. He wanted to say that she had to stay and look after Marie and Ash; that he had to do this for all of them.
From the way he spoke, it sounded as though he had already accepted his death.
Mitch had protested that he had to come, but his wound had debilitated him too much. Dan told him to raise his rifle, and although perplexed at the order, he tried. He tore his stitches and fresh blood seeped through as his face contorted with pain. The wound was simply too big and on a body part which moved too much. He would drop from blood loss before he reached the top of the steps. Dan told him, resolutely, that he had to stay behind.
“And you keep my bloody dog here, too,” he finished, brokering no argument on either subject.
Mitch grudgingly accepted that he would be more hindrance than help, and asked what he could do.
“Heal,” Dan told him, “and if I fail you starve the bastards out and finish the job.”
Dan looked at his assembled volunteers. Neil was there, unwavering in his resolve to protect the town he had grown to love, as were Adam and Pietro and a collection of angry townspeople intent on ridding their home from danger.
He could not fault their commitment or their burning hatred for the men on the mountain who had come to do them harm, but he did doubt their ability on the whole. He kept those doubts to himself.
“Go get some rest,” he told them, “and be ready to move in three hours.”
Shortly before the sun began to set, before the invaders would have chance to become more entrenched in their position above the town, Dan led the assault. They moved very slowly in the dark, step by step and making sure they reached the top with breath in their lungs. Even to Dan’s damaged hearing, the sounds of ragged breathing and the occasional scrape of a weapon on the stone walls sounded impossibly loud in the claustrophobic confines of the near-vertical tunnel they were entombed in.
The climb took close to an hour as they moved slowly, and Dan stopped as the closed door at the top came into view.
The fading light shone around the edges and the air changed almost imperceptibly as they neared the surface. Watching and waiting, he crouched next to Neil who acted as his ears for the interim.
The older man turned to him and shook his head.
No sounds.
Creeping closer as stealthily as he could, he reached the door and peered through a crack in the wood. Nobody guarded the door, instead a large shape had evidently been dragged in front of it to serve as a barricade. Standing carefully, Dan checked all around the edges of the doorframe. He found no wires indicating that it was booby-trapped, nor were any bolts showing in need of blasting away before they attacked. The door was just propped shut.
Glancing back down into the gloom, he saw the faint reflections of eyes staring back at him.
Finding no reason to delay, he braced himself and heaved the door inwards.
~
Leo did not expect an attack up the stairway. In truth, he expected nothing of these weaklings other than to try and flee. His men would pick off anyone foolish enough to show their faces and after that he would accept their imminent surrender. How could they possibly expect to win? He had the high ground, he had destroyed their defences, in part, and he held the advantage.
They were, at the worst possible time, arguing about their position.
This was not something le chasseur was accustomed to, and he did not like it one bit. His orders had always been followed, and nobody had questioned his judgement until that moment.
His men had raised the subject deftly, implying that the tactical situation had changed, so they too should re-evaluate.
They all seemed to want to climb back down the rope and melt away. He stood and stared them all down, burning them with his malevolent gaze. One by one their shame showed and they turned their eyes away.
One man, evidently braver than the others, picked up his weapon and turned his back to walk away.
“Stand still!” Leo snarled. The man paused, but continued without turning.
Drawing the gun from the holster on his waist, Leo told him once more to stay where he was. He didn’t.
A single shot sounded, making everyone atop the windswept fort jolt. The man, a bullet lodged in his spine just below his neck, dropped wordlessly. Slowly, deliberately, Leo holstered his sidearm and addressed his men once more.
“Cowards die with bullets in their backs,” he said simply.
Just at that moment he heard a noise from the other side of the courtyard.
~
Just after the forlorn hope of attackers had begun to climb the stairs, Leah paced up and down in the hospital with Ash nervously dogging her heels, occasionally emitting a whine of uneasiness.
Mitch, from his enforced position on a bed, grew increasingly frustrated by the girl’s inability to stay still.
“You trying to make a bloody trench, girl?” he asked, making her stand still and stare at him.
“What?” she said, half in hostile challenge and partly because she had been too preoccupied to hear his words.
“You’re wearing a rut in the stone,” he said in a softer tone of voice. She opened her mouth to answer, but a noise to her left down the corridor snatched her attention away.
It wasn’t quite a scream, but it was unmistakably a female in distress. Still staring, her open mouth dropped lower as she saw Marie being helped around the corner by Polly.
Her light grey trousers were showing darker all down her legs. Leah’s first thought was that she had been shot, seeing as that was popular at the moment, but her brain kicked the information into shape quickly. Mitch saw her face.
“What’s happened?” he said seriously, struggling to get up from the bed.
“Marie,” she answered woodenly. “The baby’s coming.”
It was Mitch’s turn to stare with his mouth open as the women came through the doorway shouting for Kate.
As Marie was helped back onto a bed and Kate began to fire off a series of professional sounding questions, the soldier turned to the teenager and the two exchanged a look of understanding.
Mitch hated himself at that moment, but he knew he would never even make it up the steps in his condition as he had simply lost too much blood.
He had to leave the task to a child and her pet.
Nodding once, she turned on her heel and stalked away.
Deciding that Mitch didn’t really want to be in a room where a woman was going to give birth, he dragged himself out of bed to go and take a seat at the foot of the stairs.
Leah’s mind raced as she half walked, half ran through the series of corridors to the barricade at the entrance to the almost vertical tunnel to the clouds.
“Where are you going?” a voice asked her as she pushed past.
“Going to get my dad,” she answered.
~
Dan heard a shot, then burst through the brittle wooden door and into the fading sunlight, weapon raised.
He pressed forward, all semblance of tactics abandoned as he didn’t have trained men behind him.
They weren’t trained as he was, but everyone spilling out onto the exposed stone was brave and fighting for their lives. Their home.
Neil split off left, just as Dan’s peripheral vision clocked the tip of an arrow on his right which led back to one of the most frightening men he had ever seen with his compound bow half drawn.
It struck him that he had never seen the Russian use the bow, but not once did he ever doubt the lethal combination of man and weapon.
No targets were presented, so Dan’s training took over subconsciously and he made progress away from the door which would be the obvious point of return fire.
A man rounded the central stone pillar and died with a burst of automatic fire from Dan’s HK416.
Two for two, he thought to himself, instantly regretting the fact that his weapon’s first kill had been a friend.
Gunfire erupted to his right and he sensed more than saw three of his group drop to the stones. The unfamiliar sound of hissing air, a twang, immediately answered by a butcher’s thump of flesh registered in his brain as Pietro neutralised the threat to their right flank. Gunfire to his left made him aware that Neil was in contact, and he pressed onwards.
Speed, aggression, surprise.
He scoffed at himself for using the mantra of special forces; this operation was far from special in any way other than it was a desperate fight for survival. Still, speed was the key. They couldn’t have many people on the ramparts of the fort and they had to be cleared away before they had any chance to rally.
~
The legionnaire sniper heard the stairs door burst open, not taking the time to check what came out. Abandoning his rifle, a thing he had never done, he threw himself into the doorway of the low building which served as the sleeping quarters. Two others followed him, and together they set up a killing ground to cut down anyone who showed themselves. A man with a fair coloured goatee beard leaned around the corner of the stone wall and aimed a rifle, unable to squeeze off a shot before the sniper hit him twice with his backup weapon.
~
Dan swept onwards, knees bent in his customary crouch, rifle butt pressed into his cheek as his eyes scanned wildly around with the barrel an extension to his vision. Sweeping the gun left and right as he went, the shadows to his right burst into the light.
The gun was shoved painfully into his face, his attacker with one hand on the barrel to prevent it swinging his way. The gun was attached to Dan’s vest on the short sling and with the sidearm on his left side he tried to keep control of the rifle with his left hand grasping the angled grip on the barrel. He dropped his right hand from the trigger guard and swept it under his left armpit to withdraw the Walther from its holster, but his attacker had seen the deliberate movement and instinctively knew it was a weapon grab. Finding his right wrist clasped in a vice-like grip, his muscle memory kicked in and he splayed the fingers of that hand out as he turned his wrist to break the grip.
His attacker recognised the feeling of his grip being thwarted and threw his left elbow into the stock of the rifle he held, following the distraction blow up with a change in footing and a knee aimed upwards into the solar plexus.
Dan dropped his body weight, sensing that the kick was coming on a cellular level. The knee connected, but it made a direct hit onto the base of two spare magazines for the assault rifle, prompting an involuntary sharp intake of breath as the pain registered.
The two grappling men slammed heavily into the wall, face to face with an assault rifle between them in disputed ownership. Only then did Dan clearly see the face of the man.
Leo, le chasseur, offended to the very depths of his soul by the gall of this man, this invader, snarled in his face.
“I owe you this, Englishman,” he growled, just as he brought his head savagely forward into Dan’s face.
A crunching noise sounded and hot blood poured over their hands as Dan’s nose popped like a water balloon. His eyes stung in sudden, temporary blindness, his ears still rang like a bell and an overwhelming wave of sickness added to the pain as he feared he would drop.
Vomit gurgled in his stomach and threatened to fountain upwards. He felt the pressure on his vest release and, just as Leo had known before, he believed with utter certainty that he withdrew to bring a weapon to bear on him. Releasing the rifle, still blind and on the verge of unconsciousness, he reached for the knife on the front of his left shoulder and whipped it downwards ready to drive it up under the bastard’s ribs and put him down.
His shout of rage began to sound as he began his upswing, punctuated terribly by a flash of pain as Leo’s knife penetrated deep into his own body, just outside of the protection of the vest.
Dan’s knees gave out, and the cry of rage twisted into a strangely muted gasp of unimaginable agony as the weak upward thrust with his own knife merely reached Leo’s waist and scored a deep wound. Looking up, Dan saw his own death coming in the form of Leo’s hand coming forwards, horribly faster than his own could move, reaching for the grip of the shotgun protruding from over Dan’s right shoulder.
Dan saw this. He knew it meant his end; his brutal decapitation by his own weapon.
Just then the sound of claws on stone tapped on his mind, culminating in a snarling, roiling impact of such savage ferocity. His eyes were closed, but he felt the sudden emptiness, felt the concussion of the heavy hit before him as Ash, it could only have been Ash, took the man bodily to the ground a clear three paces from him. The agony he felt intensified as Leo kept hold of the knife and tore it from his body as he was swept away.
His pained relief evaporated when the piercing sound of a yelp of pure agony cut the darkening air like a siren.
NOT LIKE THE MOVIES
Steve stood stock still, eyes closed, waiting for his recurring nightmare to become a reality.
He had achieved his goal. He had freed the population from oppression and he was happy to go into the night now; it saved him from having to face the things he had done and the pain and suffering his master plan had caused.
The shot rang out, but he felt no pain. No violent impact his mind associated with the bullet hitting him, ripping into his flesh, snapping his ligaments and breaking his bones before tearing through his internal organs and leaving him to die in bloody ruin.
The shot sounded loudly. Deafeningly in the close confines of the now crowded town square.
Steve still felt no effect of the shot which he knew would kill him, and he dared to open one eye.
He saw Richards, clutching his left hip just above the bone, and staring in horror at a man on the ground before him.
One of his own men.
Only it wasn’t. Benjamin was injured, fatally with three bullets in his abdomen, but his final act was to rid the world of the madman he had tried to overthrow without bloodshed. His plan had cost him his soul, having killed innocent people – something which burned his soul every day and made him wish for it all to end - and worst of all it had now cost him his brother.
