The Killer

TWENTY

14:18 CET

The assassin peered through his Schmidt and Bender 3-12X scope at the thickness of the windowpane. It was made up of alternate layers of glass and plastic. He recognized it straightaway. Armored. Shit.

McClury silently berated himself for not noticing before. He should have spent more time studying the house’s defenses, but he consoled himself with the fact this had been a rushed job from the very start. Beginning with a phone call twenty-four hours ago, he’d been told to head straight for Geneva. In the back of a car, he’d been given the name of a town, a location, a photograph.

It stank to high hell of a cleanup.

McClury folded back the rifle’s bipod and stood, disturbing the light covering of snow that lay across his body. His weapon was an Accuracy International L96, a bolt-action rifle made by the Brits. In McClury’s opinion one of the best all around rifles in the world for this type of work. Precise and powerful but not too big or heavy. He’d used enough of them in the past to qualify his opinion.

He wore white Gore-Tex pants, a jacket with a hood, and a white ski mask. The rifle’s furniture had been wrapped in strips of white electrical tape. McClury unbuttoned and unzipped the jacket and threw it off. It was camouflage and protection against the cold but impeded movement. Underneath he wore a black thermal shirt. He felt the chill immediately, but for now he could live with it. He left the white ski mask in place.

His hide was a little under five hundred yards away, overlooking the target’s chalet. McClury had been set up just under the crest of a snowy outcrop dotted with trees to hide his silhouette and to make him virtually invisible.

He’d been holed up outside for twelve hours straight, watching the house the whole time, waiting for the perfect shot, eating and drinking while lying down, urinating into a bottle, defecating into a plastic bag. On his own he couldn’t watch both exits at the same time and had set up with a good view of the front of the chalet, expecting the target would at some point leave that way. The target would have been dead a second after stepping out the front door. No such luck.

Soon after first light the target had left through the back way and McClury had changed positions to shoot him when he returned. Hours later he noticed the target was back in the chalet and realized he had entered through the front. Out one way, in another. Damn, he was a slippery customer.

So there had been no more fucking around waiting for him to leave. McClury had shot the naked bastard while he stood looking out of a window-only the window’s thick wooden crossbeam had denied McClury the head shot and forced him to go for the heart instead, only to have the armored glass deny him the kill. It was enough to drive a guy crazy.

McClury slung the rifle over one shoulder, hooked a satchel over the other, clipped a small bag around his waist, and grabbed his 12-gauge Mossberg pump-action shotgun by its pistol grip. He was going to have to get up close and personal to finish this one. It had been a while since he’d done so, and he was looking forward to the change in MO.

He set off down the slope, his free arm bracing against trees to slow his descent. The slope was steep, treacherous to the unwary, but he negotiated it deftly.

His eyes locked on the chalet in the distance and his prey within.

The loud noise woke Victor with a start. He sat straight up and grunted. The pain in his chest was intense; it felt as if a massive weight strapped to his ribs compressed his chest inward. He coughed several times. His lungs felt crushed.

He groaned but forced the pain from his mind. He had to think. It had been a clear half second after the muzzle flash before he’d been hit. It would have had to have been a large-caliber, high-powered rifle to have pierced the glass, probably with a muzzle velocity of around three thousand feet per second.

That meant the assassin would have been approximately fifteen hundred feet away in the foothills. It was rough terrain in that direction and would take Victor at least ten minutes to cover the distance in a hurry. He couldn’t imagine many people doing so faster.

Six hundreds seconds.

Not long. He looked at the clock to see how long he had been out, to see how long before the shooter was upon him, but couldn’t remember the time when he’d been shot. He was confident there was just one man. If there was a team here to kill him, they would have assaulted first, not relied on the sniper, and Victor would be already dead.

If he could only get to the village…

Adrenaline was pumping through him, temporarily numbing the pain, but he knew he would feel worse when it wore off. He felt weak but could still function. He had to get out. But without knowing how long he’d been out for he didn’t know if he would be running into a trap. The chalet had two exits, a front door and a back, one too many for a single man to cover. The assassin wouldn’t be able to take up a position and wait for Victor to leave. If he did that he would only have a fifty-fifty chance of picking the right exit. He would have to come inside to kill him.

Victor was still naked, would have to dress if he tried to run. Getting clothes on would eat time he might not have. It was painful just breathing. He didn’t know how hard he would be able to run or for how long. The assassin would surely be faster. Going outside would only make his job easier.

Defending the house was his best option. Inside Victor knew every inch and how to use each blind spot to his advantage. If the assassin wanted him, he would have to come and get him. Victor, in a crouch, one hand pressed to his chest, went over to the bed, reached beneath it and drew the loaded FN Five-seveN from the holster. A floorboard creaked.

The stairs.

In medieval Japan, with the ever present threat of the deadly ninja, samurai lords had protected themselves from assassination by a simple but effective method. In their castles nightingale floorboards “sang” when someone stepped on them, alerting the occupants that they were under attack.

Victor had employed the same strategy in addition to his other security precautions. The stairs had been deliberately adjusted so that every other step creaked under the slightest pressure. Other floorboards throughout the chalet did the same, with varying pitch. A moment of silence.

Then another creak followed immediately by the sound of heavy boots rushing up the stairs, the attempt at stealth abandoned.

Victor flung open the bedroom door, leaned out, the FN leading in the direction of the stairwell. The shotgun’s report was excruciating, the blast blowing a huge chunk from the door frame. Victor ducked back inside the room as another shot followed. The 12-gauge tore another hole from the pine frame. His wrist stung. A single pellet had grazed his skin. Victor slammed the door shut and locked it.

The Mossberg roared again, punching a fist-sized hole through the door to Victor’s left. He heard footsteps on the landing, the racking as the assassin fed another shell into the chamber.

Victor rushed over to the other side of the room, crouched beside the bed, the Five-seveN trained at the door.

McClury stepped carefully along the landing. To his right he could see down into the living room on the floor below. He kept the Mossberg pointed at the target’s door at all times.

He was aware of the sound his boots made on the wooden floor but it hardly mattered. The target knew he was coming whether he made a sound or not. There was no way out of the bedroom. The armored windows didn’t open. He was going to pay for that protection now.

McClury inched closer to the door but didn’t step in front of it. He stopped and reached inside the bag at his waist.

Victor heard the footsteps stop. His enemy was right on the other side of the wall, just to the right of the door. The moment he stepped in front of the door Victor would empty the FN through it.

The floorboard outside the door creaked. The handle started to turn. Victor opened fire. He had the gun held loosely in his right hand but firmly in the left, making it easier to fire faster, his right index finger squeezing rapidly, sending bullet after bullet through the wood, aiming high and low.

He stopped, his finger aching, having fired fifteen rounds in just over three seconds. There was no scream, no bang as the sniper hit the floor. Light streamed through the holes in the door.

He’d hit nothing.

McClury waited patiently for the firing to finish. He had his back to the wall and held the Mossberg by the barrel. He’d used it to press the wide floorboard directly in front of the door, figuring it would creak like the stairs. His instinct had been right. McClury had looped his belt around the door handle to pull it down without having to expose himself before the door. Evidently it had been a convincing enough trick.

He dropped the belt, reached into the bag, pulled out two grenades and ripped the pins out with his teeth. He held onto them for a quick two count before throwing them through the large splintered hole blasted in the door.

Victor was sprinting the instant he saw something appear through the hole in the door. He heard two metal objects hit the floorboards and knew exactly what they were. He reached the adjoining bathroom, saw the grenades rolling on the floor out the corner of his eye. He flung the door shut behind him, throwing his weight against it.

The grenades exploded with a dull crack.

The door blasted open, knocking Victor against the wall with a grunt. Smoke and dust filled the air. Sizzling pieces of shrapnel jutted from the door.

Victor rushed out of the bathroom as a single shotgun blast destroyed both the door handle and lock and took a chunk from the frame. He threw himself to the side of the door, pressing his back flat against the wall, his left arm extended at the elbow, his forearm fixed in a diagonal line before his face.

The door was kicked open and swung in Victor’s direction. It smacked painfully into his arm but in doing so he stopped it smashing into his face. The assassin opened fire from the doorway, sending a shotgun blast into the bathroom. The mirror shattered above the sink. Broken glass smashed and clattered in the basin and on the floor.

The moment Victor heard the assassin step forward to get a better angle on the bathroom, Victor hurled himself forward, sending the door crashing into his enemy and knocking him back through the doorway. Spinning around, Victor raised the Five-seveN and fired twice. Two holes blew through the door, chest height. There was a grunt, followed by a stumble from outside the room. He hesitated, unsure whether his opponent was dead. A shotgun blast tore through the door.

The exclamation of a foe still very much alive.

McClury grimaced, feeling warm blood trickling down his chest. He’d been shot just beneath the collar bone on the left side, but the bullet hadn’t come out so there was no huge exit wound leaking blood. No organs pierced, no bones broken, no arteries severed. Tissue damage mostly. It hurt like fuck but there was no immediate risk.

He was low on ammunition, and the target was alive and fighting. If anything, McClury was now the more wounded of the two. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. He thought all he’d have to do was finish him off, not have a room-to-room gun battle. This wasn’t working out.

He wasn’t an assaulter; he was a sniper.

So snipe, he told himself.