But when Murdock glanced back over his shoulder, he saw two more figures, a man and a woman this time, stepping through the apartment building’s front door and onto the walkway outside. The man was wearing sports clothes and a light jacket and was not obviously armed; the woman wore a T-shirt and jeans and carried a bulky, white canvas bag on an over-the-shoulder strap. Murdock and Inge had just been cut off from their retreat.
“Inge,” he said softly. “I think we may have some trouble.”
He felt her tense, saw her eyes flick back, then ahead, assessing the situation. “The people behind us are neighbors of mine,” she said. “They live right down the hall from me.”
And you’re a paranoid son of a bitch, Murdock thought, but he was fully alert now, the adrenaline pumping through his system in the heady rush of imminent combat.
Even if he wasn’t yet positive that they were about to be attacked, it was still possible to apply two of the most important rules of combat when ambushed: Don’t stand still and do the unexpected. Reaching down suddenly, he grabbed Inge’s hand and turned her sharply aside. “Come on!”
“Blake!”
But she started to run with him. Then she stumbled, and Murdock cursed. She was wearing black high heels that hobbled her as effectively as a ball and chain.
The unexpected move alone, however, had been enough. Ahead, the two utility workers broke into a run. “Inge! Kommen Sie zurück!” the woman behind them called out. Turning, Murdock saw the woman pulling something small and black from the depths of her canvas bag… a handgun. And the man beside her had a pistol tucked into his waistband, its grip visible beneath the flapping hem of his jacket as he too started running.
The ambush had just been sprung.
4
The woman pointed her pistol at Murdock. “You!” she shouted in thickly accented English. “Both of you! Stop where you are!” A commercial jet thundered overhead, and Murdock realized that if the woman fired the gun, few of the people in any of the surrounding apartment buildings would even hear it.
“Lose those shoes!” Murdock snapped at Inge.
“But…”
“Ditch the shoes and run, damn it!”
If he’d been alone, he’d have had little problem avoiding the trap. With his SEAL conditioning, he was certain that he could outrun just about any army the opposition cared to send against him, and that woman would have to be one hell of a crack shot to hit a running man at ten meters with that snub-nosed revolver she was pointing at him. But he couldn’t leave Inge…
Likely, all four were armed, but the only one who had a weapon out and ready for action was the woman, and Murdock immediately tagged her as the most dangerous of the four. She and her companion were five meters off now, the utility men a bit further away in the other direction.
Always do the unexpected. Murdock charged.
“Alt!” the woman screamed. She was a hard-faced, shorthaired woman, with muscles that Murdock suspected had been honed with weight training. She brought the gun up to point at directly into Murdock’s face, stiff-armed and one-handed.
Two mistakes — trying for a head shot against a moving target and trying for a one-handed stance like a gunfighter out of the mythical Wild West. Murdock sharply sidestepped, forcing her to pivot in an attempt to correct her aim, then lunged straight toward her, his left arm rolling up in a hard block, sweeping her gun hand aside as he stepped inside her reach. His right hand clenched, but when his right arm snapped forward, he carried the impact on the heel of his palm when it slammed squarely between the woman’s small breasts, just at the bottom of her sternum. His follow-through was purely reflexive, his knee catching her between the legs so hard she was lifted from the pavement.
That particular blow was fully as incapacitating for a woman as for a man. The pistol was sent spinning through the air, and Murdock was past the woman before she could hit the ground, dropping his center of gravity, pivoting on his left foot, and bringing his right around in a savage roundhouse kick that caught the man in sports clothes squarely in his left kidney. The man oofed and went down, still fumbling at the pistol tucked into his waistband. Murdock snap-kicked him in the side of the head; there was an ugly snicking sound as the ball of his foot connected and the man’s spine broke just below the base of his skull.
Spinning to face the remaining attackers, Murdock was just in time to see Inge, her shoes gone now, throw a hard forward kick into the groin of one of the utilities workers. The man gasped and doubled over, clutching himself; unfortunately, it was his partner who was carrying the tool kit and who was just pulling an Uzi submachine gun clear of the metal box’s open lid.
The bad guys must have planned on muscle, numbers, and threat alone to force the two of them to come along, or they would have had their weapons out and ready instead of inaccessible. Murdock took three quick steps to the left and grabbed the man’s gun hand, twisting him around and over into a wrist-breaker grip. Encumbered by the weapon in one hand and the toolbox in the other, the man screamed and dropped to his knees, toolbox and Uzi both clattering noisily onto the pavement. Murdock held him down, swinging his knee up hard to connect with the man’s face. The scream broke off in a gurgle of pain; Murdock kneed him again, then released him, scooping up the Uzi as the man’s body slumped to the sidewalk.
The guy Inge had kicked was still on his feet, but doubled over. Murdock walked over, grabbed his hair with his free hand, then slammed his knee up into his face. The woman was on her hands and knees, one hand clutching her abdomen, but she was trying to crawl toward her companion, and the weapon protruding from behind his belt. Murdock walked up behind her and jackhammered his fist down hard against the base of her neck, and she collapsed facedown on the pavement without a word or a sound.
The roar of an engine exploded nearby. Spinning, Uzi at the ready, Murdock saw the panel truck jump a curb and careen into the street, its back doors still flapping open. In an instant it had cornered at the next intersection with a squeal of outraged tires, and was out of sight. So… there’d been a fifth attacker, and he’d gotten away. Not good.
“You okay?” he asked Inge.
The BKA woman was still standing over the man she’d kicked, fists clenched at her sides, her maroon dress was very much the worse — or perhaps from Murdock’s point of view, much the better — for wear. Her kick had ripped the slit in the side of the dress clear to her waist, and he could see a torn stocking and a thin strip of something sheer, black, and lacy riding high across the tanned skin of her hip. She was excited too, breathing hard in tight, rapid, almost panting gasps, and the surge of adrenaline to her system had triggered a physiological reaction that made it quite clear that she was not wearing a bra beneath the thin material of her dress. “Yes,” she said. She swallowed, then nodded her head. “I think so. God, Blake, you play rough.”
He stooped next to the man at her feet, checking for a pulse. The guy’s face was bloody and he was out cold, but he was still alive. Carefully, Murdock turned the man’s head to the side so that he wouldn’t strangle on his own blood. “When I have to.”
Inge walked over to the woman. The man lying on the cement next to her was on his back, eyes open and very obviously dead. “You… you kicked her… ”
The sheer illogic of the statement, the dull edge to her voice, the glassy look in her blue eyes, all told Murdock that Inge was on the point of going into shock. He walked over to her and took her by both arms, turning her to face him. “Inge… remember what I was saying earlier in the car? There is no fair in combat. There can’t be. You do what you have to do to survive. If that means you kill someone, if it means you use the dirtiest trick in the book, you do it, right? Because if you don’t, it’s a damned sure thing that the people you’re fighting aren’t going to show you a similar courtesy when they get the drop on you.”