Moments later he was talking to Nightingale through his headset.
“Which way to Zaugg’s private quarters?” he asked her. “Use my cell phone signal to place me in the schematic.”
Her voice was distant, and emotionless. “Like I need you to tell me that. This is how I saved your ass in Serbia all those years ago, remember?”
He did remember. “Sorry.”
“You need to go straight ahead for around twenty yards and then there should be a staircase. You need to go up that staircase and then hang a left.”
Hawke followed her instructions, trusting her implicitly. Behind him, the others followed with the same unquestioning degree of trust.
At the top of the stairs they turned left and found themselves in another large room.
“You should be in another reception room right now.”
“Looks like it.”
“According to these schematics, his private section of the compound is up on the next level. Can you see a mezzanine or balcony?”
“Sure.”
“So go up to it. His quarters are up there.”
An instant after her last words several waves of Zaugg’s men launched an attack at them from concealed defensive positions on the upper level. Machine gun muzzles flashed orange and white as they spat their lethal fire at them.
One of the mercs ran forward halfway up the stairs. He screamed in pain and Hawke turned to see his chest exploding with the terrible force of dozens of bullets as they tore into him and blasted him off his feet. He fell to the lower level and landed with a sickening smash on the parquet tiles below.
Then, before they could regroup, another wave of soldiers approached them — but this time on foot and running directly toward them from a door beneath the mezzanine.
Hawke spun his HK around and struck one of the men in the face with the butt of the weapon. A terrible crunching sound came from inside the guy’s mouth, but before he could react Hawke punched him on the nose, breaking it and knocking the man into instant unconsciousness. He reached for the man’s weapons, leaving the submachine gun but taking a Sig Sauer and some ammo.
Hawke looked up just in time to see another man aiming an assault rifle at him. He dived to the floor and rolled to his left where he reached the cover of an antique chest at the side of the hall.
He raised the Sig Sauer and squeezed off a few rounds in the man’s direction, planting a line of hollow-points across his chest and exploding his throat. The man slumped dead to the floor.
Then, Zaugg’s forces decided the battle had turned against them and began a tactical retreat.
“I have to get to Zaugg!” Hawke screamed in the roar of gunfire. “He still has Lea.”
Reaper and Hart made an effort to run after the fleeing soldiers, going deeper into the compound and diverting their attention away from Hawke’s assault on the private quarters.
Hawke charged up the stairs and prepared for the end game.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The wounded man grunted like an animal and heaved himself over to her with every last bit of energy he could muster.
“I will make you suffer for this,” he said, spitting with rage.
Baumann grabbed Lea by her shoulders and lifted her off her feet as if she were a rag doll. He smashed her back into the wine rack behind her, and she howled in pain as the corks rammed into her spine. He growled and smashed her into the bottles a second time. Then a short giggle.
Lea’s spirits were raised when somewhere above her head she heard the unmistakable sound of machine gun fire — Hawke must have survived and was launching a rescue attempt at this very minute.
But how long could she hold out against Baumann?
She saw her torturer was pale now — he had lost a lot of blood since she’d stabbed his leg, but was it enough to take him down? She kicked out against him, but this only made things worse because Baumann simply grabbed her around her neck with his metal hand so he could use his free hand to hold her legs down. She felt the icy cold steel as it gripped her soft throat.
Her tormentor grinned like a maniac as he closed the steel claw around her throat and she felt her windpipe constrict. She gasped for air, instinctively expecting the cold air of the cellar to flood into her lungs, but none came. She began to panic in response, flailing her arms out wildly trying to strike her attacker, but his arm was too long, and he held her at a distance long enough to avoid any reprisals from her much smaller body. He nodded his head in appreciation of some unvoiced thought and increased the grip on her throat.
“Because you tried to kill me,” said Baumann, his breath in her face, “I’m going to make this last a very long time.”
Up closer than ever now, less than half a meter from her face, Lea looked at the face of Heinrich Baumann — his repellent milky eye and scarred face, the stench of some kind of lubricant on the mechanism of the steel claw, the gentle whirring of the humidifier on the wall beside her aching head. This, she thought, was going to be her last minute on earth — her last sight, her last sound, her last smell — all Baumann, for now and forever.
She began to lose consciousness.
With the blackness encroaching all around her, Lea Donovan had only a few seconds to think before her processing faculties left her forever. Her world was tiny now — Baumann and his claw, the feel of his breath, the sound of the humidifier…
The humidifier. Just a few inches to her left was a humidifier gently whirring away, and she saw now that it was plugged into the wall right beside her. Without stopping to think anything through, she reached with the last of her strength behind her head and searched with her hand until she felt a wine bottle, which she pulled from the rack and brought crashing down on Baumann’s head.
The giant man screamed in pain and released Lea, who now, finally free of his devilish grasp, collapsed in a heap on the floor. Both were now on the ground on their hands and knees — Lea heaving the breath back into her body and Baumann in a puddle of wine woozily trying to regain his balance and hang onto consciousness.
Lea acted fast, and out of pure instinct. She tore the cable from the humidifier, and then climbed out of the spilled wine and onto the wooden crate.
“Go to hell you fucking freak!” she screamed, and dropped the cable into the wine, causing a massive electric shock to course through Baumann’s body. She was pretty sure that wine was an excellent conductor of electricity, and was only too glad to put her theory to the test.
Now, Baumann writhed on the floor in a fiendish shower of sparks, convulsing like a dying fish, his blood-curdling screams bouncing off the cellar walls.
He groped and slipped about in a vain effort to free himself of the terrific electric current now frying him alive. His metal hand sparked and scraped on the concrete floor in his final death throes, and then there was nothing left except a damp, smoking heap, reeking of wine.
Lea pulled the cable from his corpse and pushed the end into the straw bedding around one of Zaugg’s most expensive bottles of wine. She watched the fire grow for a few moments before running to the cellar door.
She made it up the twisting stone steps and to the door leading back from the cellar into Zaugg’s compound. Gently craning her neck around the door to see if the coast was clear, Lea Donovan decided to make a run for it, but before she could even get into the room she heard a familiar voice behind her.
“I’m impressed.”
She spun around to see Dietmar Grobel standing in the corridor.