The Forgotten Holocaust

Chapter Sixty-Two

Ben ducked inside the bedroom. He stood close to the door and listened in the darkness to the footsteps reach the top of the stairs and come padding along the passage. He heard doors being opened and shut, each room being checked the way he’d been doing himself. As each door closed, the footsteps came closer and he could hear them more clearly. He reckoned on four men.

Now they reached the bedroom he was in. The steps paused outside. A ray of torchlight licked along the gap at the bottom of the door. Ben thought he heard the faintest whisper.

The handle began to turn.

Ben stepped back, pointed the shotgun from the hip at the middle of the door and slam-fired three rounds of buckshot into it as fast as he could work the slide while keeping the trigger held back. The muzzle flash lit up the huge ragged hole where the centre panel of the door had been.

Through the ringing in his ears, Ben heard running steps heading back towards the stairs. Just one man. He dropped a slug round straight into the Ithaca’s breech, rammed the pump into battery and swivelled on his feet to chase the runner like a trap shooter chasing a moving clay. With a Brenneke slug, it didn’t matter that there was a wall between him and the target. The gun boomed and kicked hard against his shoulder, and a crater exploded in the wall showering plaster back at him.

Something tumbled down the stairs. Ben rushed for the shattered door and wrenched it open. He jumped over the three splayed-out, piled-up bodies lying on the other side and raced towards the stairs, plucking more buckshot cartridges from his pocket as he went and thumbing them inside the shotgun’s magazine tube. To his right was the huge hole in the wall where his slug had gone through. To his left on the opposite wall was a splat of dark blood. More blood on the stairs. Ben chased down them after his wounded target, reached the first landing and then had to pull back as gunfire sprayed up the stairwell, ripping shreds out of the heavy oak banister. Ben shoved the Ithaca between the stair rails and loosed four buckshot loads in the direction the shots had come from.

The firing went silent. Ben waited, perfectly still in the darkness. He was good at waiting. A minute passed. Then another. No sound from below.

When he was satisfied, he returned up the passage towards the three dead men. There was a lot of blood on the floor and the wall opposite the shattered door. Even in the gloom, he could see that flying splinters had done as much damage as the shotgun blasts. He stepped back over the bodies and walked on.

He checked from room to room until he found the locked door. He twisted the handle. Solid wood. Not the kind of door that could be broken down with a kick or two.

‘Ritter?’ said a voice inside. McCrory’s voice.

When Ben didn’t answer, McCrory opened fire from inside. Three splintered bullet holes opened up in the thick wood.

Ben reeled back from the door. Whatever McCrory was packing in there, he didn’t want any. But his gun was bigger. He popped another Brenneke into the Ithaca’s breech, then rammed the muzzle against the door lock and fired. It was the way military entry teams breached closed doors, and Ben hadn’t seen a lock yet that didn’t burst into pieces under that kind of punishment.

Finn McCrory ducked for cover as the door blew open with such force that it crashed against the wall. By the time he’d straightened up and pointed the .44 Magnum, Ben was already inside the room and right on him. He snatched the big, heavy revolver out of McCrory’s hands and smacked him hard across the face with the butt end. McCrory cried out and staggered back against a desk.

The study was decked out in much the same style as the rest of the ranch house. A traditional brass and green glass banker’s lamp threw out light from the desk. A leather captain’s chair stood between it and a tall fireplace. Above that hung a big rack of antlers mounted on a shield. Resting across the antlers was an old Winchester lever-action hunting rifle that presumably had been responsible for the trophy.

Ben hardly noticed any of it. He saw the beach in Ireland. Kristen running from the men McCrory had sent to kill her. He pictured her in his mind the way Moon and Ritter had left her lying there on the rocks.

‘No,’ McCrory said. His eyes were big and round. He raised his hands as if he thought he could stop a twelve-gauge round from the gun Ben was pointing at his face.

I’m not an executioner, Ben had told Kurzweil.

But in McCrory’s case, he was willing to make an exception.

He worked the pump on the shotgun, the way he’d done a thousand times before. Clack: the rearward movement for the extractor claw to get a grip on the rim of the fired case, draw it back out of the chamber and fling it away as waste material out of the ejector port. Clack: the forward movement to chamber the next round as it was pushed up out of the magazine tube.

But something felt wrong. The pump wouldn’t go back forwards. The action wouldn’t close, because something was stopping the round from chambering. The empty had failed to eject.

Classic pump-action stoppage. Every cop and soldier who’d ever received firearms training was schooled in how to fix the jam. It was something talked about in classrooms but which very seldom actually happened in the field. A one in a million chance. Just one of those things, like a flat tyre or a dead battery. Except it was very liable to get you killed.

Ben could either clear the jam by ramming the gun’s butt vertically down against the floor, or he could toss the weapon and bring into play the rifle he’d taken from Moon, which was still slung behind his back. Neither option was something you could do in less than two or three seconds, and two or three seconds was all the time Finn McCrory needed to see that his opponent was in trouble. McCrory looked startled for an instant, then stumbled around the back of the desk, almost fell over the captain’s chair and made a grab for the Winchester hunting rifle that rested on the deer antlers above the fireplace.

McCrory worked the lever. No malfunctions there. Just the unmistakable sound of a well-oiled rifle action chambering a long, high-powered cartridge. It looked as if Big Joe liked to keep his guns loaded.

McCrory grinned and levelled the gun at Ben’s head.