Ultimatum

Seventy-three

21.31

There’s nothing like the element of surprise. It’s particularly effective against people who’ve never been shot at before, and who have no experience of a bullet’s ability to change things in an instant.

As soon as the initial burst of gunfire crackled across them, Fox hit the floor. He knew the first shots fired at the van would be aimed at the tyres to disable it, so there was no danger of him being hit. Even so, he was still the first one down, just in case his rescuers had a change of plan and decided to kill him. Fox was no fool. He knew he was a lot more use to the people he’d once worked for dead than alive, and it was going to take all his natural cunning to get out of here in one piece.

The second burst of fire hit a couple of seconds later, shattering the windows, but it didn’t hit any of the cops, who were on the floor as well, several of them directly on top of Fox, crushing him into the van’s cold floor.

The loud blast at the front of the convoy that Fox identified immediately as a grenade, followed by frightened shouts from the front of the van, seemed to galvanize the men in the back of the van into action. In a cacophony of yelling and shouting, they jumped up into firing positions and opened fire through the windows in all directions like cowboys trapped in a circled wagon — which was pretty much what they were.

‘Out! Out! Out!’ screamed one of the cops, reaching over and unlocking the rear doors. ‘We’re sitting ducks in here! That was a fucking grenade!’

No one needed asking twice, and they all started scrambling for the doors. This was all about survival now and, as the adrenalin pumped through the cops, they momentarily forgot about Fox. Which was a bad move.

Reaching up with his cuffed hands, which thanks to Tina Boyd were now in front of him, he grabbed the gun from the holster of the nearest cop — the big cockney one who’d dared Fox to give him an excuse to put a bullet in him — in a movement so quick that he had no time to react.

As the cop swung round, Fox leaned back against the van’s metal partition and, with a cold smile, shot him twice in the face, swinging the gun round immediately and taking a second cop in the side of the head. Realizing what was going on, the other two made for the exit as Fox kept firing at them, not caring who he hit, or where, banking on the fact that as they spilled out of the van they’d run straight into the line of fire of his rescuers. He got one cop in the leg, sending him sprawling into the car behind, which had come to a halt at a forty-five-degree angle, its driver dead behind the wheel. But the other cop proved a more difficult proposition. He swung round fast, unleashing a volley of MP5 fire into the van at exactly the same moment that Fox hit him in the chest with a nine-mill round.

Luckily the shot knocked the cop off balance, but he didn’t go down. He readied himself in the space of half a second and started firing again as Fox’s last bullet, now aimed at the guy’s head to avoid the body armour, missed him. Only then did a burst of automatic gunfire from somewhere out in the woods finally send the cop sprawling to the ground.

Scrambling to his feet, Fox grabbed the key to the handcuffs from the second dead cop and unlocked them with a remarkably steady hand.

He was free.

As the van’s rear doors flew open, Tina saw two armed officers come stumbling out amid a series of gunshots from inside. One of the officers grabbed his leg as he was hit, and fell against the bonnet of the car Tina had been travelling in before falling to the tarmac so that he was facing her, his face etched with pain as he tried to wriggle round the front of the car to safety. The other officer turned round so he was facing the van and managed to get off a few shots before he was hit by a stream of automatic gunfire from somewhere in the trees. He dropped his weapon and fell to the ground too, momentarily disappearing from view.

Tina braced herself. The good guys were dropping like flies, and soon she was going to be the only one left.