Cronos Rising (15 page)

No: a direct, frontal approach was too hazardous to consider. Tactics were needed.

He looked again to either side of him. On the left, Delatour remained flat against his rock. To the right, Rebecca crouched, looking back at Purkiss, awaiting guidance.

He couldn’t communicate with either of them meaningfully. The aftershock of the grenade blast continued to hamper their hearing, as it did his.

Instead, Purkiss nodded past Rebecca at Kendrick.

She understood and turned, beckoning. Purkiss saw Kendrick’s face beyond her, caught his eye.

Kendrick was military. He knew the hand signals for the different approaches, and had taught them to Purkiss. They’d used them on more than one operation together.

Purkiss pointed at his own chest, jabbed his curved fingers forward. Then he indicated to his left and right, and pointed straight ahead.

Kendrick gave him the thumbs up. He was grinning.

It was a basic move. One person – Purkiss – approaching round the side, circling the enemy to mount a rear attack. The others providing a distraction by stealing forwards in increments, risking exposure in the process.

Purkiss knew he had the easier task.

He turned to his left, caught Delatour’s attention. Keeping eye contact, he gestured repeatedly to his right, towards Rebecca and Kendrick beyond her.

Purkiss drew a deep breath. He readied himself, feeling the adrenaline surge in his blood, and rode the crest and explode out from behind his rock to sprint towards Delatour.

He dropped beside the man within five seconds, his heart hammering. There’d been no gunfire. No hiss and blast of a second RPG round.

Cupping his hand at Delatour’s ear, he yelled,
‘Follow Kendrick’s lead.’

He waited until he saw Kendrick emerge from behind his cluster of rock cover and take a long, loping run towards the next boulder, before falling to his belly once again and beginning a fast crawl towards the western perimeter of the plain.

*

I
t took Purkiss five minutes to draw level with the side of the hillock, and a further three or four to reach a point where the tower was slightly behind him.

He saw now that the ruins extended a good fifty yards back from the facade. There was a similar, columned wall at the rear, though more dilapidated. The tower appeared to be the only one of its kind, and the only new structure in the midst of the ancient temple, or whatever it was.

Behind and to his right, he glimpsed the others appear one by one as they sprang from their cover and advanced a few paces before concealing themselves once again.

Purkiss stopped, hiding himself behind a lip in the surface of the rock plain. He studied the tower. It had multiple small square windows around its front and sides, all of them without glass. At the back, he saw a wooden ladder leading up to some kind of doorway.

He estimated the structure could hold five or six people.

Movement caught his eye. He watched Delatour break cover and run at a stoop towards a finger-like rock outcropping ten yards ahead of him.

The gunfire erupted, its noise shocking in the relative quiet, cutting harshly through even the steady tinnital hum of the grenade aftershock in Purkiss’s ears.

The ground before Delatour’s feet exploded in dust and rock chippings and he veered, flinging himself sideways so hard that for a few seconds he seemed airborne. He hit the ground and rolled as the scythe of bullets tracked him, fast as a burning fuse.

Then he was behind a series of low rocks and the chatter and spang of the bullets ceased abruptly.

Fully automatic fire. It meant an assault rifle of some kind.

Up against that kind of firepower, at close quarters, they didn’t stand a chance.

Purkiss looked at the expanse of rock between him and the hillock. He was thirty yards from the base. The hillock was lower here on the side than it had been at the front. He’d have a fifteen-foot scramble up the side, followed by a climb up the ladder to reach the door of the tower.

Halfway along the expanse was a gnarled tree, a hardy specimen which was one of the few examples of vegetation he’d seen on the island. The trunk was perhaps four feet in diameter. It was usable as cover, though a sustained burst of automatic fire would probably fell it within a minute.

Purkiss waited until a bead of sweat, which had crawled down his forehead like a sluggish caterpillar on a branch, reached the tip of his nose, hung suspended for a second, and dropped.

He launched himself from behind the lip of rock and focused on the tree, imagining himself ensconced securely behind its comforting bolus even as it grew larger in his visual field.

Ten yards away.

Five.

The shot rang out over the rock plain and the sea like a single cry from a dying beast’s throat.

Purkiss felt his foot wrenched sideways, causing his legs to splay ridiculously. He hit the rock with his back, the impact winding him, an instant before the burning pain exploded up his leg.

His mind gibbered at him:
still alive still alive still alive
. The rhythm of the phrase propelled him in a rolling motion, the world turning over and over crazily.

He was brought up short against something hard. His flailing hand grabbed at it.

He felt rough, raw, organic material against his palm.

The tree trunk.

Purkiss drew his legs up and clasped his arms about his knees as the second shot came, its slipstream yanking at his trouser leg. He coiled himself more tightly, wanting to compress himself into an infinitely small, infinitely dense ball.

He stared down at his feet. The right shoe was ragged and bloody, the sole almost completely detached.

Reflexively, he flexed his toes. The pain lanced up his leg once more.

But he achieved full movement. The bullet had passed through his shoe and scored the edge of his foot, without smashing any of the toes or the metatarsal bones.

His mind registered two details.

He was still mobile. Still operational.

And: the shot had come from a third weapon. A sniper rifle.

Three guns, then. Three gunmen.

Purkiss allowed himself five seconds to press himself against the tree trunk. Then he darted a look round.

The tower stood, implacable, but significantly nearer now.

He pulled his phone from his pocket. The signal was there still, weak but present.

He thumbed a text message to Kendrick, hoping the man would notice that one had arrived on his own cell.

About to make a move on the tower. Create a distraction.

Purkiss waited a further six agonising seconds while the message struggled to be sent.

Then another ten.

When no confirmation came, he sent the same message to Rebecca. There’d been no further gunfire in the mean time, which presumably meant they were all keeping their heads down.

Purkiss closed his eyes. He visualised himself up in the tower, three men sprawled at his feet, neutralised.

He absorbed the image into his limbs, his blood.

He counted down from three.

And emerged from behind the tree at a run.

*

T
he gunfire exploded almost immediately, and Purkiss thought distantly:
this is it, then. Gunned down, without the chance to put up a defence.

But as his legs pumped and the foot of the hillock rushed towards him, his mind registered that he couldn’t have been shot if he heard the sound of multiple shots, since the shots would have stopped him before the sound reached his ears.

The gunfire was coming from the front of the tower.

The hillock slammed into him, as welcoming as a lover’s embrace after a long separation. Purkiss clung to its hard surface, fighting the urge to stay there, to hug it and banish all thought from his mind.

He looked up. From where he was, he was out of the sightline of the tower.

He began to clamber up the rough surface, his hands and feet finding easy purchase on the ruts and cracks and protrusions. To his right, round the front of the hill, the crash of automatic fire and the spang of bullets chipping shards off rock continued relentlessly.

At the top of the hillock, he peered at the tower.

The ladder was ten feet away.

For an instant he gazed up at the black window space directly above, like the proverbial deer frozen in the headlights.

He launched himself up onto the flat surface of the hillock’s top and sprinted at a crouch towards the base of the ladder, registering only now the pain in his foot, the fact that he was limping, hobbled not so much by the flesh wound as by the ruined, flapping shoe.

Purkiss slapped both hands on the uprights of the ladder and began to ascend. His right foot slipped off the first rung, and, glancing down, he saw the blood had made it slick.

He mounted the rungs with renewed resolve. Above and ahead, a wooden door hung ajar in the rear wall of the tower. The gunfire from within was, he hoped, masking the creaking of the ladder, the grind of his feet on the rungs.

He surged through the door without pausing to assess the scene, to gauge the odds, and saw a lone man positioned at the window opposite, an Armalite M16 trained downwards and outwards. The man turned his head as Purkiss entered.

Quickly, more quickly than Purkiss would have imagined feasible, the man dropped the rifle and swung his arm in a backhand arc.

Purkiss jerked his head and torso sideways even as he charged forward. The knife slammed into the door jamb behind him. Before the man could reach for another weapon Purkiss was on him, driving him back against the wall beside the front window space, the tower shuddering with the impact.

The man brought his arms up, the wrists crossed, and with astonishing strength prised Purkiss’s hands free from his shoulders. A knee came up and Purkiss parried it with his own. The man’s fist jabbed, fast and hard, and a starburst of pain exploded in Purkiss’s head.

He reeled back, tasting blood, the room tilting. The man kicked at his feet, a long sweep intended to knock him to the floor, but Purkiss raised one leg and stamped down on the man’s own foot. The man tottered for an instant and Purkiss closed in once more, nausea and the threat of disorientation clawing at him.

His head cannoned into the man’s belly, and he felt the hardness of washboard-honed muscle. The blow didn’t wind the man, but it drove him backward against the wall once again. Purkiss followed with a double rabbit-punch to the man’s flanks, aiming at the kidneys. One of his half-fists hit the spot and the man gasped and twisted sideways.

Purkiss hit him with an uppercut, a blow launched like a rocket from low down and rising high above his head , even after his fist connected with the underside of the man’s jaw. The man’s head snapped back and for a moment his heels left the floor. He crashed back against the wall and slid down.

Purkiss stepped back, the room around him no longer tilting but instead threatening to spin. He stooped and grabbed the MI6 from the floor, the hot barrel scorching his palm, and he swung it to cover the man. He was ten feet away, and even if his aim wasn’t true, all he really needed to do was pull the trigger. A wild burst of automatic fire couldn’t but find its mark.

The man knew it. He sat against the wall with his legs splayed cartoonishly before him. From the corner of his mouth, a rivulet of blood wound its way down his chin. His eyes, just short of glazed, tried to focus on Purkiss’s face.

Purkiss took a few seconds to steady himself, deliberately feeling the flatness of the floor beneath each foot. His breathing was still rapid, but would take care of itself, as would his hammering pulse. What he was afraid of was vomiting. It was impossible to keep an opponent covered while one’s stomach was ejecting its contents, and though he didn’t think the man was capable of anything resembling swift action, he sensed that this was not an enemy to be underestimated.

He studied the man, registering fully what his senses had already told him but he had been unable to process.

The man was blocky and taut and muscular, dressed in a white cheesecloth shirt and khaki chinos. His skin was so deeply tanned it appeared burnished, the wrinkles and seams on his face giving it the appearance of stitched leather. The eyes were an almost alarming black, like those of a bird of prey, and the downturned, contemptuous mouth added further to the image. The hair on his head was cropped back to stubble, and startlingly white against the mahogany scalp.

He looked at least sixty-five years old.

On a table below the front and side windows, Purkiss saw an array of weapons. There was the RPG launcher, and a crate of grenades. Alongside it lay a slide-action shotgun and two pistols, one a Sig-Sauer semiautomatic, the other an Israeli Desert Eagle.

The table beneath the side window held an old Enfield L42A1 sniper rifle.

Purkiss glanced about the room, the movement making his head spin. There was no other exit. The man was alone, and had been operating the guns on his own, alternating between one and the next.

A one-man army.

Keeping his feet well away from the man’s reach, Purkiss moved to the front window aperture. He looked down, saw the rocky plain stretching to the ridge, pocked with boulders and clusters of stone.

Purkiss called: ‘Come on up. It’s secure.’

He couldn’t tell how loudly he’d shouted, because aural feedback was still impaired by the ringing from the grenade blast. It was the reason he didn’t hear the footfall behind him.

The door swung open and he caught it from the corner of his eye and spun, bringing the M16 up.

Kendrick stood there, the Walther in his hands, extended. Beyond it, his eyes blazed.

‘Tony,’ said Purkiss. ‘We’re secure.’

Kendrick transferred his stare to the man on the floor. He swung the pistol to bear on him.

‘Tony,’
Purkiss said urgently.
‘Don’t.’

He watched Kendrick’s finger tighten inside the trigger guard.

And flung the M16 straight at him, end-on as if letting go of a battering ram.

The barrel struck Kendrick in the chest. He recoiled, grunting. But the pistol moved away from the man on the floor and back to Purkiss.