The injured policeman reached up and grabbed Court’s leg as the American moved away, a pitiable attempt to both seek help from a rescuer and to regain control of his prisoner, as if that were somehow still an issue. Gentry kicked off the dying man’s hand, picked the cop’s Beretta off the platform, and kept crawling. A spray of sub gun rounds chased Court all the way to the edge of the platform, just missing him as he and his iron anchor rolled off. Gentry dropped four feet down to the ground and behind the cover of the platform’s edge. His adrenaline-tinged brain nearly panicked when he lost the key for a moment in the snow, but he quickly dug it out. Rising to his knees, he kept his frozen red fingers steady as he unhooked the handcuff on his left wrist.
Of the five policemen who pulled him off the train, only two were still in the fight. Both crouched behind poor cover on the platform. Not wanting to place his head in the gun sights of anyone who’d watched him drop off the platform, Court moved down a few feet before he peered back over the top. He shouted to the cops, told them to break cover and come to him. One yelled back that he was out of ammunition. The other had a wounded right hand and was firing over a stone planter with his left. From the look of his technique Gentry determined the man to be right-hand dominant.
Movement in the train station caught Gentry’s eye. The few civilians at the station had long since hit the road or hit the deck, so when he saw two men running towards the platform inside the building, Court knew some of the attackers had managed to flank his position.
The door to the platform flew open, and two black-masked men appeared over the policeman with the injured hand.
Court raised the Beretta in his right hand; his left was useless with its new injury. At twelve yards’ distance, Gentry shot both masked men in the face. Their forward momentum coupled with the bullets’ impact caused them to stumble into each other and fall out the door together to the cold platform.
Court’s borrowed Beretta 92 locked open with the second shot. Empty.
“Hey! Slide me that rifle!”
This was the third time he’d called for a weapon. The difference this time, of course, was that the first two times were before the two surviving policemen had seen him at work. The young cop with the bloody hand quickly skidded one of the gunmen’s small black rifles across the platform to Gentry. Court grabbed it and ducked back down.
It was an HK MP5, the most ubiquitous submachine gun in the world. It felt comfortable in the Gray Man’s hands. The American pulled the mag and found it full, with thirty rounds of nine-millimeter ball ammo. He shouted to the injured cop to slide the other rifle to the uninjured man. When the transfer was made, Court said, “Put it on semiauto! Fire one round at a time in each direction! Do that until it’s empty! Do you understand?”
“Oui!” shouted the cop.
“Go!”
In a crouch, Court hurried along the platform’s edge, moving north, closing the distance between himself and the four who’d come from the truck on the hill.
A train was approaching in the distance from the north. Court heard sirens from the direction of the village. He tried to push everything from his mind as he crawled forward alongside the track through the snow. Everything but the men he knew would now be closing on the platform, just around the corner of the cement ahead. His wrist throbbed, and his knees stung from the window glass lacerations he received escaping from Laszlo Szabo in Budapest the afternoon before. The ever-present pain in his thigh from Thursday’s gunshot wound was the least of his maladies at the moment.
Ten feet from the corner of the cement platform, he heard them: men speaking Spanish. Spanish? Was the entire fucking planet trying to kill him? They were tucked down by the steps up to the platform. Though Gentry’s ears rang, he was able to make out the clicking and spring-tightening sounds made by the magazine change of an MP5.
When he stood, he encountered two masked men, also just standing up. Court fired the HK one-handed, fully automatic, at a distance of less than ten feet. Both attackers dropped, and Court fired another short bust into each twitching body. He dropped the submachine gun from his hands and hefted a new one off a dead gunman, then spun around and ran back up onto the platform.
He never even considered making a run for it, though he had the perfect opportunity to escape both the Spanish-speaking kill squad and the Swiss police. But there was a fight going on, Court was already in it, and disengaging at this point did not seem right. A couple of innocent cops were still alive, and they would not last long on their own. As the sirens approached, flashing lights beat off the few remaining panes of glass in the train station. Court Gentry ran back to the aid of the two policemen, his one good arm holding the HK out in front of him, searching for fresh targets.
TWENTY-ONE
Claire Fitzroy sat on her bed and looked out the window at the lawn and the thick forest beyond. The sky had been drab and gray since they’d arrived at the château the previous afternoon, but during the morning the low cloud cover had scattered, and now she could see a great distance.
Her lunch was beside her, all but untouched. Her sister was downstairs in the kitchen with Mummy and Daddy and the men in leather coats who followed around wherever her father went, but Claire had been excused from the table. She told her parents about her tummy ache, asked permission to go back to her room.
The tummy ache was real. It came from the worry that had sat heavily inside her for over a day now. The hurried shuffle out of school, the worried faces of Mummy and Daddy, the argument on the phone between her father and grandfather, the arrival of the men with guns, and the trip in the big black cars to the château in the countryside.
Something outside caught her attention. She leaned closer to the bedroom window, squinted. Then she stood excitedly. In the distance she could see the steeples. She knew those steeples! The steeples were from the huge Notre Dame Cathedral in Bayeux, and she knew Bayeux had a police station. It was near the big water wheel her Daddy had taken her and her sister to. She remembered the policemen in their smart uniforms smiling at her the previous summer.
If she could just get out of the house, maybe she could run across the huge back lawn, through the apple orchard, make her way through the woods and to Bayeux in the cold distance. Once there, she could find the police station and tell them what was happening. They could come help, make the men with the leather coats and the ugly foreign language let her family go.
Mummy and Daddy would be so happy.
It was a long way away, but she knew she could make it. She was the fastest winger on her football team. She could slip down to the cellar and out the little open window she and her sister chased the cat through the previous evening.
Resolute, eight-year-old Claire Fitzroy buttoned up her coat, pulled on her mittens, and cracked open the door to the bedroom. As soon as she stepped into the long and dimly lit hallway, she heard voices at the stairwell, but they came from upstairs. She scurried down the corridor and onto the staircase. Lowering her weight on each step, her little feet moved delicately to avoid making noise.
She heard a sudden cry above her. She stopped dead in her tracks and looked up. There was another shout. It came from the third floor. She started to descend again but looked back up to the source of the noise and heard a low, guttural sound.
It was Grandpa Donald. He sounded as if he was sobbing.
Quickly now she made her way to the first floor, bypassing the kitchen and the dining hall carefully, because her parents and sister were having lunch just now. If they saw her, her father would be angry, and he would just tell her to return to her room.