Free The Killing Club by Paul Finch

hornets.
    With a dull metallic clinking , two small objects came dancing out of the darkness and across the road surface. Braithwaite watched them incredulously as they rolled to a halt by the front offside of the first gunship.
    Hand grenades.
    They detonated simultaneously.
    Their combined explosion was not adequate to throw the heavy troop-carrier over onto its side. It was a smidgen of the power applied by the IED that had done for the second gunship, but it mangled the driving cab, in which Montgomery’s sidekick was still taking shelter, blowing out all its windows, shredding the guy in a hailstorm of glass and metal. The rearmost section buckled with the force, the blazing gunfire increasingly ripping through its reinforced bodywork.
    Braithwaite was still helpless, still frozen – unable to comprehend the unfolding events. When a brutal implement smashed without warning into the back of his unguarded skull, sending him reeling to the floor, it might almost have been expected. There was a resounding thud as Mulligan suffered the same fate.
    The blacktop backhanded the side of the chief inspector’s face, yet somehow he retained consciousness, and despite the hot red glue dripping through his vision, found himself staring again down the length of the cavalcade, against which numerous figures were now moving, having emerged from the darkness on the right. Some were attacking the ambulance by hand, working with tools on its battered doors, prying them open. Others were still shooting – particularly down at the far end, Braithwaite realised, which meant they were drilling bullets through the burning, blasted scrap remaining of the second gunship, finishing off any poor devils who hadn’t yet been turned to a mess of meat and bone. Though dazed, Braithwaite was struck with wonderment at the variety of reports issuing from the weapons on view. But one was louder than the others: a repeated deafening clatter, as though a dozen men were beating iron frames with hammers.
    He craned his neck up, blinking through the crimson stickiness. And he saw it.
    A Hotchkiss Portable Mark 1 machine gun, already fixed on its tripod and with a two-man crew operating it – one to fire, one to feed the belt. It was on the road to the rear of the first gunship. Stupefied as Braithwaite was, a terrible understanding struck him. With no other choice, the surviving SOCAR team – so well armoured, so expertly trained – would have extracted their MP5 assault rifles from the safe in the troop-carrier’s floor, and would now be disembarking from their vehicle in ‘stick’ fashion, as they’d rehearsed so many times – straight into that focused fusillade, the stream of red-hot .303 slugs cutting through them like a buzzsaw.
    ‘No … pleeease …’ screamed a shrill voice behind.
    Though it required a heart-straining effort, Braithwaite managed to roll over and look the other way. His eyes alighted on Sergeant Mulligan, lying face-down, a wound like an axe-chop in the middle of his stiff blond crew-cut. But he also saw their assailants, for the first time up close: ski-masked, gloved, wearing dark combat clothing. They stood around on the road in no particular formation, talking idly, dressing their smouldering weapons down.
    ‘Tavor TAR-21 … Beretta MX4 …’ he mumbled, eyes flickering from one gun to the next. ‘Chang Feng … SR-2 Veresk … SIG-Sauer MPX … Mini-Uzi …’
    No doubt it was the stock of one of these that had crashed against his cranium, and Mulligan’s too … but in Christ’s name, this was a devil’s brew of hardware! Where had the necessity arisen to pack such firepower?
    Behind him, meanwhile, the heavy machine gun had ceased to discharge. One by one, the other, lesser arms also fell silent … so now he could hear additional voices. These too sounded relaxed, some were even chuckling. It was over, the fight was won – and they were enjoying the moment.
    ‘Pleeease …’ the frantic voice cried