Chapter Twenty #2
A salvo of automatic fire hit the window above him, sending broken glass over the bench and onto the ground all around. As he kicked he looked back over to his right. A second policeman had been hit in the shoulder and hip. He dropped his gun and writhed on the cement in agony.
It took over thirty simultaneous strikes with both feet to break the iron end piece away from the wooden bench.
On the last drive down with his boot heels, he yanked back with his arm.
The pain in his left wrist was excruciating, but the bench broke apart.
Gentry crawled to his knees, knelt over the heavy piece of ornamental metal, and lifted it.
It was easily thirty pounds and still attached to his scraped and swelling wrist. He hooked his handcuffed arm over the metalwork and hefted it off the platform.
Then, in the line of fire from both directions, he ran towards the injured cop writhing in agony in the middle of the platform.
When he was still a dozen feet away, he flung the iron out in front of him, down next to the man, and fell with it in a slide.
The piece clanged on the cement with nearly as much noise as the gunshots barking all around.
His swelling wrist tightened inside the metal cuff.
Kneeling over the Swiss officer, he reached to the man’s midsection.
The cop cried out to his rescuer. “My hip! I’m hit bad in the—”
“Sorry,” Court said as he pulled the handcuff key off the chain on the cop’s utility belt.
It was smeared with the young man’s blood.
Crouching lower in response to a supersonic whine just inches from his right ear, the American assassin pushed the ornamental iron armrest out in front of him, towards the platform’s edge. He crawled along as he pushed it again.
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.