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The smile on Skull’s face froze as he heard the rattle of the nearby gate. Swearing silently, he scuttled back and peered through the cracks in the back wall. There was a Swiss security truck parked outside it, and two officers were just closing the gate. Obviously they intended to check his shed.
He shoved the hatchet into his belt and descended the outside of the building from his window before they could get too close, hanging from the sill by his fingertips to drop quietly to the ground. The bulk of the shed shielded him from view, and he crept clockwise to his left as far as the front corner. He looked through the double crack there, nothing but a few flimsy angled boards between him and the two paramilitary police.
He cursed the Swiss efficiency that prompted them to inspect buildings this far out, and he cursed himself for not risking buying a silenced handgun back in Sicily. He wasn’t a close-in killer, wasn’t more than usually adept with blades, and these two men with firearms could wreck his whole situation. Not to mention kill him.
They walked up casually, shooing away curious clinking cowbelled calves. The first man unlatched the door and looked inside, then stepped in. The other stood in the open doorway. Skull crouched low to avoid being seen through the large spaces in the barn boards. Just go away, don’t check in the loft.
His silent request, his prayer, went unanswered. He heard a sound of surprise, then words in rapid French, and knew he was blown.
He rose to his feet and slipped around the corner. With his left hand he snatched the open door out of the way. With his right he buried the hatchet in the man from behind, just at the unprotected place where the officer’s neck and right shoulder connected, severing muscles and tendons, arteries and veins.
The cop collapsed with a gurgle.
Shoving past the falling body, Skull swung wildly at the other officer perched halfway up the loft ladder, his head at the level of the ceiling. The hatchet connected awkwardly, more of a hammer blow than a chop, and the man yelled in pain, scrabbling for his sidearm. He had it out and nearly pointed before Skull brought the hatchet back for an overhand chop to the man’s kneecap, splitting the patella and bringing forth a scream of agony.
The policeman’s handgun barked and Skull felt a hot poker run through the skin of his flank. The man fell heavily onto his side. Two more meaty chops from Skull’s hatchet directly into the man’s chest and he was still. He made sure of the other one as well, rolling him so he would bleed out, then tipping a heavy workbench on top of both dying men. He ripped their radios off of them and took the handguns, tossing everything into a corner.
His breath heaved in his lungs; close combat was a completely different animal from the kill shot, and his blood pounded through his veins, exactly the wrong physiological state for a sniper. He took deep gulps of air, trying to calm himself. Reaching his left hand down to his wound, he felt the flaps of skin and the welling blood. Stripping off his shirt, he tied it around his torso as best he could to stanch the flow.
Then he heard it.
Bolting up the ladder, he scrabbled for the rifle as he slithered behind it into prone position. Wiping sweat out of his right eye, he ended up getting blood in it. He spent precious seconds clearing his vision then looked through the sight.
The kill team was setting up, any noise covered by the roar of jet engines from the airport. The aircraft had already commenced its takeoff run. Skull didn’t have to look at the plane, or review his video. If the kill team was getting ready to shoot, all he had to do was put them down.
He had just seconds to set up the shot.
Shots.
He saw two shooters, two missile launchers. They weren’t taking any chances. It seemed like overkill, though; too much possibility of fratricide, one missile locking on to the other’s hot exhaust and both missing. He had time to hope they didn’t have another whole kill team that he had missed somehow before the first man lifted his launcher to his shoulder.
Skull settled the crosshairs on the man’s chest, center mass. Without enough time and without a calm heart pumping gently at sixty beats per minute, a head shot was asking Murphy to ruin everything. Taking a deep breath, he let it out slowly and naturally until it stopped, then he squeezed.
The report deafened him as the heavy rifle punched his shoulder; he’d had no time to put in earplugs. Through the sight he saw his target fall to the ground. The 7.62mm round didn’t have the body-shattering force of the .50 caliber from his Barrett, but it was still a man-killer.
If Lee Harvey Oswald could assassinate JFK with a smaller bullet from a mediocre rifle, then I can damn sure do the job with this.
—-
Karl did a double-take at the Chairman’s words. “What? Sir? Charter a plane?” He stopped, bringing the entourage to a halt in the middle of the cleared underground space.
“You said it yourself. They have a plan B. It has to involve the return trip. By now they will have backtracked our flight at least one or two legs. There will be some kind of trouble waiting for us somewhere. So charter a plane, use the emergency cash. One of our pilots will fly all of us direct to Caracas while the other plane goes back to Africa.”
“Whatever you say, sir. I’ll make sure it has enough legs to make it.”
“That would be good, yes. I really don’t want to have to repeat Jill’s feats of swimming just to get home,” Markis said drily. “Let’s go.”
A quick stop in the hotel room and they were back in the limousine. Karl went ahead to arrange the charter. The protests of short notice were soothed by stacks of Brazilian reals, now one of the world’s strongest currencies.
In short order the airplane was fueled and ready to go, and everyone but the more junior of their two pilots boarded and rolled down the runway for takeoff.
—-
Skull shifted his aim immediately to the other missile shooter, who with impeccable discipline was standing with his back to the airport, waiting for his target to fly over his head and into his field of fire. Perhaps he had not noticed the man fall to the ground next to him with the jet noise and his intense concentration; perhaps he was willing to die to take the shot.
Skull stroked the trigger, watched for the bullet to go home. The man staggered, then fell to his knees. He swore; he had pulled the shot, missed the vitals, probably hitting his left shoulder. He fired again, snapshot, then again. A fourth bullet finally put the kneeling man on the ground.
He shifted his sight picture back to look for the third man, the spotter. Icy fingers of fear wrapped around his heart – not fear of death, but fear of failure - as he saw the man’s hand clench on the oversized firing trigger of the first man’s recovered missile launcher.
Squeezing the trigger activated the missile’s seeker head cooling and authorized the system to fire as soon as it had good view of the target; unlike a gun, it didn’t fire immediately. The delay could be overridden by the operator, but Skull had hoped – had bet Markis’ life – that the spotter wouldn’t have the presence of mind to do it.
He shifted his aim point from the man to the body of the missile and immediately squeezed off a shot. The bullet was still in the air as his thumb jammed the selector switch on the assault rifle to full automatic. Holding down the trigger, the rest of the magazine emptied, a long string of heavy bullets slamming into the beaten zone.
He was never sure whether it was his aimed shot or the hail of automatic fire that did it, but one of the projectiles struck the missile, causing an immediate explosion of fuel and warhead, vaporizing the three men there. It had been his one chance, granted him because of the idiot-proof design of the missile system.
Have a nice trip home, Markis, you self-righteous bastard. You’re welcome.
—-
The small intercontinental executive charter, an ultramodern Swiss model, lifted them smoothly and powerfully into the air, and after a superb view of the springtime Alps, was soon at cruising altitude and heading for South America.
Behind them their original craft took off safely, and as soon as it left local airspace turned southward, bound for South Africa with its samples of Markis’ precious bodily fluids and the drinking glass Karl had retrieved.
“Looks like we foiled their Plan B,” remarked Millicent.
“Or there never was one,” responded the Chairman.
“Oh yes, sir, there was one,” Karl claimed darkly. “There’s always a Plan B. Your change fooled them, I bet. Good TTPs.”
“Thank you, Karl. Tactics, techniques and procedures are all well and good but it was your quick thinking that is really going to pay off – whatever we find on the glass and in the fluid samples.”
“If you two kiss each other I’m going to puke,” Millicent grumped.
“Don’t worry. Elise would never forgive the infidelity – Karl are you all right? Did I say something funny? You seem to be choking.”
—-
Skull saw flashing lights and wailing sirens converging on the construction yard. The explosion had lit the stubble of the field on fire, and smoke marked the place for miles around.
He rolled over on his back then squirmed forward, watching concealed at the corner of the window as two closely spaced jet aircraft roared into the sky over Lake Geneva. He felt drained and shaky. Forcing himself to get up, he abandoned everything but a water bottle. By the time the Swiss security got here, he needed to be long gone.
He took just enough time to splash the contents of the police truck’s twenty-liter fuel can into the shed and ignite it, then he retied his makeshift bandage tight and ran the half-mile to the parked Fiat, teeth clenched against the pain. He threw on his jacket and stuffed another undershirt against the wound.
Less than an hour later he drove back across the Italian border, waved on by casual Carabinieri. Amid the confusion of the fires, the dead hit team and the murdered Swiss police, it took almost a day before they had enough information to put out an alert for “Christopher Dunham.” By that time, Skull had purchased another identity from his Sicilian contacts and disappeared.
