He turned to his left, seeing another figure emerge from the retreating crowd, gun coming towards him. Cole raced forwards, grabbing the agent’s gun arm and head butting him square in the face. The man jerked back, trying to get his gun arm free, but Cole tightened his grip even as he took the man’s collar in his other hand, swinging him back towards the food stall.
Cole stuck out his foot as he turned, pulling the agent up and over as he tripped him, driving the man’s head down onto the griddle.
There was the sickening hiss of burning flesh as the griddle seared the skin from the man’s face, the pain causing him to rear violently backwards out of Cole’s grasp, falling to an agonising heap on the floor.
Cole looked back up to the other side of the lane just as three more figures emerged, all three with guns raised towards him.
Cole didn’t wait for them to fire, but launched himself into a headlong dive over the burning griddle into the food stall, 9mm bullets following his airborne body all the way.
88
Porter couldn’t believe what he saw in front of him; three more of his men down.
Cole was bleeding from the chest and shoulder, but it was clear that neither bullet had caused more than a graze; they certainly weren’t going to slow Cole down.
As it was, the market was going into the same sort of panic that had only minutes earlier occurred in the mall, people running everywhere, tripping and falling in the narrow lanes as others then trampled them into the ground in their rush to escape.
Over the screams of panicked terror, Porter could also hear the sounds of police sirens, much louder now, presumably at the perimeter of the market. The cars would be unable to move down the narrow lanes, but Porter was sure there would be officers entering the market on foot.
Porter watched as Cole leapt over the counter-top of the food stall, just fractionally ahead of their bullets.
The crowd was in panic, the police were on their way, but Porter never considered calling the operation off. They had their orders, and they wouldn’t stop until Cole was dead.
Porter gestured to his two remaining men, and they edged towards the food stall, reloading their weapons as they did so.
89
Cole pushed past the owners of the stall, so startled by the whole thing that they were frozen to the spot, and went out through the back of the stall into a narrow service lane that ran between two parallel rows of stalls.
He immediately entered the rear of the stall on the opposite side, which turned out to sell traditionally crafted wooden toys, and out into the next lane.
The panic hadn’t spread to this side yet, and there was a string quartet playing just outside the toy stall as people gathered round to listen. Cole watched as heads turned left down the lane, and he stifled his surprise as he saw a group of uniformed police officers heading through the crowd.
He re-entered the toy stall, not wishing to draw the officers’ attention by confronting Hansard’s agents directly in front of them. He marched past the elderly owner towards the curtain at the back, snatching up from the display a cup and ball connected by a length of string in one hand, and a beautifully painted wooden train in the other.
He got to the curtain just as the first agent pushed through into the stall. Cole let go with the ball and string, the ball spinning through the air and striking the man on the right wrist, causing him to drop his gun. Cole followed up by smashing the end of the train into the man’s face, smashing the cartilage in his nose up into his brain. The agent died instantly, and Cole wasted no time in targeting the next man through the curtain, slamming the train down into his right forearm, deflecting his aim, before swinging the ball around the agent’s head.
The string looped around the man’s neck, and Cole twisted the ball and cup violently, the string garrotting the agent with deadly efficiency. Two seconds later, the man sagged at Cole’s feet, dead.
Cole backed up, looking right and left. Two down. But where was the third?
90
Porter had let his men go through the curtain at the back of the stall whilst he had gone through the adjacent tent, circling around from the front.
He held his H&K pistol against his thigh again as he saw the policemen striding down the lane, the string quartet playing on, unaware of the violence occurring just feet away.
As Porter approached the toy stall, he was concerned his men had still not appeared. There had been some muffled sounds, but it was hard to tell above the sounds of the nearby music. Something was obviously going on in the stall, and this was reinforced when he saw the elderly owner frantically running out into the lane just moments later, shouting about a ‘madman’.
The owner’s cries attracted the attention of the inbound police officers, and Porter knew he was running out of time. He crouched down, shuffling along the front of the stall, hidden behind the counter.
He breathed deeply. On the count of three, he would spring up and give Cole the good news with all sixteen 9mm rounds from his handgun, and there was nothing the murderous, terrorist son-of-a-bitch would be able to do about it.
91
Cole was at the counter when the third agent sprang up. He had not known he was there — not for sure anyway — but when the third man had not appeared through the curtain at the back of the stall, it didn’t take a genius to guess he would be circling around to take Cole out from the opposite side.
Cole reacted instantly to the movement in front of him, thrusting both arms out straight ahead, his left arm knocking the man’s gun out to the side even as Cole’s hands slipped around the agent’s head. Cole gripped hard and pulled down even harder, driving the man’s head straight down into the wooden counter top, bouncing it off the hard surface.
Cole took advantage of the man’s disorientation and grabbed the wrist of his gun-arm, twisting it across his body and up across the agent’s chest until the gun was aimed upwards under the man’s chin. Cole didn’t hesitate for even a fraction of a second, pulling down on the man’s trigger finger as soon as the weapon was in position.
There was a loud crack, and the top of the agent’s head exploded outward in a crimson cloud of bone and brain matter.
The music finally stopped, as the crowd realized what had just happened, but Cole ignored them as he grabbed the agent’s gun in a two handed grip and moved forwards into the lane, weapon tracking left and right as he checked for other agents.
He froze as he came left, his gun aimed directly at the men strung across the lane opposite him, the barrels of their own guns pointed directly at him.
92
The police. Shit. There were four of them; uniformed officers, two kneeling, two standing with legs braced, all four with their weapons raised towards him.
‘Halt!’ shouted the man on the far right. ‘Polizei!’ There followed the command for Cole to drop his weapon, and the threat that he would be shot if he failed to do so.
Cole instinctively calculated angles and tangents. In his time at SEAL Team Six, he had fired well over twenty thousand rounds in training, in all manner of positions, and Cole knew he could dispatch the four men in under two seconds. It was what he had trained to do, plain and simple.
But he also knew that he could never do such a thing. Killing agents sent directly by Hansard to execute him was one thing; killing members of the law enforcement community was another thing altogether, and something that Cole just couldn’t do. He was an assassin, that much was true; but only against legitimate targets.