'Throw your gun down!' a woman called to her. British. And not a tremor of fear in her voice either. This had to be Kate.
'I'm throwing it down!' Irina answered. She sent her gun sliding across the plank floor nearly to the doorway. 'I'm in the bedroom across the hall from you! I just threw my gun out.'
'I want you to come out with your hands over your head and stand in the doorway!'
'I can't put both hands up. I've been hit!
'Step out and keep one hand on your head!'
'You're not going to shoot me?' Irina was frightened, and she let it show in her voice.
'I'm not going to shoot you, but you are going to have to step out now!
Kate crawled from the master bedroom out to the open hallway, her weapon extended. She could see the shadow of the gun just inside the doorway to the next room.
The female came out of the shadows with one hand behind her head. When her body was suddenly inside the frame of the window in a perfect silhouette Kate said to her, 'Stop right there!'
'Don't shoot me!'
Russian, she thought.
Irina
. 'If you move I
will
shoot you! Do not move!'
'I'm not moving!'
'Where's Robert?'
'Who?'
The man you were sleeping with!'
'I don't know! I think you must have killed him.' Robert could be hiding behind the door or back against the wall under the window, just waiting for her to come forward.
Kate fired twice into the wall on either side of the door then into the baseboard to either side of the woman's silhouette. She dropped the clip and reloaded.
The woman shrieked and flinched at the sound of the .45. 'Please, don't shoot me!' she whimpered.
'Girl has the female!' Malloy announced.
Ethan brought the red dot down across Kenyon's back and tightened his grip on the trigger. 'I've got Kenyon,' he said. 'Then take him out,' Malloy answered.
'Get on your knees,' Kate told the shadow. 'Please, don't hurt me.'
'I'm going to handcuff you,' Kate told her. 'I'm not going to hurt you.'
The shadow went to her knees, still whimpering. 'Please be careful, I'm hurt!'
Kate stepped to the side of the woman and took her wrist. She needed to holster her Colt in order to reach for her cuffs. As she started to do this, Irina moved with surprising agility. Kate's back and elbow lit up in pain.
'Girl is down!' Malloy shouted. 'Girl is down! Open fire!
Ethan pulled his sights from Kenyon. He swept the gun barrel down toward the house and flipped the selector to auto. 'Give her cover NOW!'
Kate hit the floor. The armour she wore had protected her spine, but her right elbow was broken, the pain worse than anything she had ever felt. She tried to focus, tried to understand what was happening, but the pain was numbing her thoughts. . .
She heard plaster popping, the crackling of bullets as they snapped through the air overhead. She could not hear the gunshots. So it was Ethan. Giving her cover. . . but why?
Then it came to her! She rolled away just as the steel rod that had shattered her elbow cut into the wood next to her head. She kept rolling, going for distance, and then saw the shadowy figure of the female snag the gun in the doorway and roll across the floor toward the fireplace and darkness. The bullets kept coming until the clip had emptied. Then suddenly the room was silent. Kate was breathing plaster dust, her eyes burning from the stuff. She had her combat knife out. Pure instinct, she could not remember losing her gun or grabbing the knife.
She looked behind her, then swept her gaze round the room. Three windows. The room was large, nearly the size of the master bedroom. With the patches of grey light on the floor and in the window frames there was enough ambient light for Irina to notice any movement, even in the shadows. A creaking board, the rustling of clothing, a piece of plaster crumbling underfoot. Anything. . . and Kate was dead.
'Cease fire!'
'Is Girl okay?'
'She's hurt. She's hurt!'
'I'm going in!' Ethan told him.
The gunfire had lasted only seconds, but it came like a swarm of bees. The plaster was still in the air from the first shots, so now it was like snow flurries.
In the silence Irina had time to think. The bullets had come from somewhere beyond the house. From the olive groves, she thought. No sound of an entry team downstairs. Nothing moving in the front yard. No lights. No helicopters.
She still had time. Irina swept the big gun in front of her. Seven rounds left — give or take. One move, one sound and she would have Kate.
Listening, waiting, watching the shadows, Irina got nothing.
Dead? Or playing dead?
Leaving his rifle behind, Ethan scrambled down an incline of dry earth laced with the roots of olive trees. Slipping continually, even falling once, he ran toward the wall. Fearing the worst, all he could think about was Malloy's panicked,
She's hurt!
What did it mean exactly? In trouble, wounded. . . dying? How much time did she have before the woman finished it? What were her chances? Irina Turner, if that was the woman in the house, was almost certainly fighting in the dark. Kate had a pair of NVGs. If she still had them, and if she still had her gun. . .
He swore softly as he slipped again and tumbled across an especially steep pitch. Coming to his feet, Ethan tried to hurry, only to slam face-first into a low-hanging branch.
Kate had wanted this, he told himself as he staggered out from under the gnarled branches. She had waited eleven years for it. She deserved it. That was the argument, and Ethan had gone along with it over Malloy's protests. Why hadn't he thought it through? With something like this nothing ever happened quite the way you planned it. So you went in with a partner. Together you covered each other. You handled the unexpected. But he had wanted to believe what Kate was telling him - that this was her fight. All Ethan had really wanted was to make her whole again, to let her take her revenge and put Robert Kenyon behind her once and for all. He realised now that he had wanted too much. His mistake was going to cost Kate her life.
It would have meant nothing but some lost pride for Kate if Ethan had insisted on coming along. They had always worked together. Why did she think she had to do this alone? He ought to have said to her. . .
He ought to have said Kenyon wasn't worth it. Let the police take him as Malloy had suggested! But of course she would never have agreed to that. No. She had found him, and she was going to make him answer - even if it killed her. But Ethan could have gone in with her, if he had only insisted. He should have gone with her!
Kate kept the knife at waist level, holding it with her thumb close to the blade. She could sweep with it if Irina came in close suddenly or throw it if it came to that.
Better on her terms, she thought, and slowly, so the rustling of fabric would not draw gunfire, Kate put the blade of her knife in her teeth and pulled her last clip free of her vest. She began thumbing the bullets out into the palm of her numbed right hand. When she had emptied the clip, she turned her hand over and took the loose bullets and the clip in her left hand. She tossed the bullets and clip across the room - sending them high to give her time.
She caught the knife handle in her left hand as the bullets rained down like marbles on the wooden floor. Kate used the distraction to step in closer. She saw a muzzle blast some fifteen feet in front of her - firing toward the sound. On her next step Kate cocked the combat knife behind her ear and snapped it toward a point just behind the sparks.
When she heard a cry of pain, Kate dived toward the sound. She heard two more shots - seemingly wild and random - and then heard the gun hitting the plank floor. Kate collided with Irina's legs and brought the woman down to the floor. She swept her good hand over the naked body as she listened to the woman's ragged cries of agony and found the knife buried in her shoulder.
'Please!' Irina groaned. 'I'm hurt!'
Kate ripped the blade out of her flesh and went for the throat.
Kate heard bullets tearing into the front door and then Ethan's shout, 'GIRL!'
'I'm up here!' Kate answered and rolled off Irina Turner as
the woman bled out, her limbs twitching slowly as she died. Suddenly all that Kate could feel was the paralyzing pain of a broken bone. Even standing up was too much.
Ethan called again from the hallway at the top of the stairs. 'I'm in here,' she said, her voice filled with the exhaustion that suddenly swept over her.
When Ethan knelt beside her, Kate realised that she had lost consciousness for a moment. 'Are you hurt?' he asked, his hand cradling her head.
'She broke my elbow.' Still holding her head, Ethan slipped his hand across her shoulder and touched the bone. The pain came like an electric shock. 'That's the one!'
Easing her head back to the floor, he asked, 'Where's your headset?'
'In the master bedroom,' she answered. 'Somewhere by the window. . .'
Ethan snagged the headset and opened the channel. 'Are you there, T. K.?'
'How bad is it, Boy?'
'Girl's elbow is broken, but she's conscious. The woman is dead. Have you taken down Kenyon yet?'
'I saw him close to the top of the rocks, but I couldn't get a shot off. I'm going to make the call, Boy. I don't think we have any choice at this point.'
'Give me a five minute head start before you do.'
'Let the police take him, Boy.'
'That's still not an option, T. K.'
'I'm going after Kenyon,' Ethan told Kate as he handed her the headset. 'Just stay here and keep talking with T. K.'
'Let him go,' she said with a sigh. 'He's not worth it. He's... nothing.'
'He doesn't get to do this to you and then walk away.'
'She
did this.'
'No. This is Kenyon's doing, and he's going to pay for it.'
Before Kate could stop him, Ethan took off at a sprint down the stairs and out the back of the house. The rocks lay some fifty metres behind the house and soared up over three hundred feet - huge boulders and monolithic slabs of dark porous stone. Though there were open faces here and there that offered technically challenging climbs, there were also slots and gentle slopes that allowed Ethan to scramble up most of the way quickly. He made one traverse across an open face that was difficult but only because he was wearing hiking boots instead of climbing shoes. Near the top, he was forced to leap across a small chasm so that he could finish his ascent on a gently sloping pillar that took him all the way to the top.
Before he left the rocks, Ethan peered out across the terrain. In front of him he saw a moonlit field that was covered with rocks, trees, brush, weeds, and shallow gullies. A quarter of a mile on, the mountain's summit took the form of a series of jagged points, a climber's paradise of exotic forms. This was Robert Kenyon's backyard - his refuge if the farm ever came under attack - and for a moment Ethan hesitated.
Without quite being conscious of his sudden fear at facing the man, Ethan looked back. He saw the outline of the Bartoli farmhouse almost directly under him. The dark terraces of olive trees where Malloy still waited were approximately three hundred metres distant. Malloy would still be able to see him at this point, but once he left the rocks, he crossed into a no-man's land. Out there he would have no cover and no backup. Not even a plan.
'Tell me something,' a voice close to him said. 'Is Kate still alive?'
Ethan drew his weapon and turned in the direction of Kenyon's voice, but even with his night vision goggles, he could not find the man's location. Kenyon was below him somewhere, usually the inferior position, but at the moment he apparently had excellent cover. Ethan, on the other hand, was utterly exposed — his silhouette cutting into the skyline with the clarity of a target. Worse still, Ethan had no fallback. His only chance of eluding a bullet was to attempt a thirty foot slide down the pillar, finishing with a ten foot drop into a chasm of boulders.
And so he stood up straight and faced his adversary. He could at least do that much. 'She's alive,' he said, 'and no matter how far or how fast you run she'll be coming for you if it takes the rest of her life.'
'But she'll be on her own, won't she?' Ethan felt a chill at the words. He realised that Kenyon was taking a moment to enjoy himself before he finished things between them. 'It must burn you knowing that when Kate was sleeping with you all these years that she was really in love with me. How did you live with something like that, Ethan?'
'Kate would have gone to the end of the world for you, if you had asked her. I'm curious. Are you sorry now that you didn't?'
'It might not be too late. Once you're in the ground. . . and she has some time to reconcile herself to the idea. . . she might see that getting back together again only makes sense.'
'You're not really that stupid, are you?'
'You don't think I could tempt her?'
Ethan had found Kenyon's position, but he had no shot at the man. He could see nothing but rocks. 'If you think Kate is still in love with you, why did you run away?'