Battle Cry Read online

  Which Raeburn wouldn’t mind if he was just a spectator, but as it was…

  “What model’s that?” MacGregor asked, as if it made a bit of difference.

  “Dunno,” Raeburn replied.

  “The bastard can drive,” MacGregor said. “I give him that.”

  “Give him a bit more gas, why don’t ya, and let’s get this done.”

  They both had pistols, Raeburn’s being a Swiss SIG-Sauer P-239. He had two spare magazines, which gave him thirty shots, and he was also carrying their big gun for the evening, a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun with eight rounds of buckshot in its magazine.

  Not that he planned on shooting anyone, he thought. Their orders were to follow and observe the suspect car, but when the Toyota took off at speed, running them down became the only option. Any idiot knew the other driver wouldn’t lead them back to his hotel, once he’d seen that he was being tailed. And with the day he’d had already, Raeburn didn’t want to think about the damned tongue lashing he’d receive from Gibson if he came back empty-handed.

  So, they had to catch the cheeky bugger and find out who in hell he was. Depending on how that went, Raeburn would decide what happened next. A local wouldn’t run that way nor should a tourist out to put some mileage on his rental car after dark. That meant a guilty conscience, Raeburn figured, and fear of being caught.

  But who? And why?

  “We’re losin’ ’em,” he warned MacGregor.

  “Och, gimme some credit, will you?” the driver answered, pouring on more speed from somewhere, narrowing the gap.

  Raeburn had heard about the shoot-up down in Glasgow, but he couldn’t quote chapter and verse about the city gangs. A thousand people had to hate Frankie Boyle, but how did that connect to someone shadowing Macauley’s place—and possibly the research boat, as well?

  Questions. And he’d have answers, once they’d stopped the runner and found out what he wanted, who he worked for, what he knew about Macauley working with the TIF.

  Ask him about the loch, while they were at it. Sure.

  But first, they obviously had to catch him.

  “Faster, Colin! Jesus! If he gets to Inverfarigaig, we’ll lose him to the police.”

  “And suppose he is the police, eh?” MacGregor replied. “What then?”

  “Just drive,” Raeburn replied. “I’ll do the thinkin’, shall I?”

  MacGregor muttered something unintelligible, and they raced on through the night.

  “THEY’RE HANGING IN,” Bolan advised Beacher. “The wheelman knows his business.”

  “Worse luck for us,” she said, still half-turned in her seat to watch the headlights coming up behind them. She had her Glock in hand, index finger straight beside the trigger guard.

  Bolan could think of worse places to stage a running firefight, but the lochside road was bad enough. It was narrow and sinuous, with nowhere to stand and fight that wasn’t on or near civilian private property. With Britain’s strict controls on firearms, gunshots in the middle of the night were sure to prompt a flurry of alerts to the police.

  Where would they come from, then? And how long would it take them to arrive?

  Beacher had pegged the Fort Augustus station as a two-man shop, which meant twelve-hour shifts with one on duty and the other off at home or somewhere else. Beacher wasn’t sure about the town of Inverfarigaig, ahead of them. No clue as to its size or population, whether there would be another station there, but Bolan doubted it. There would be cops to spare in Inverness, but that was forty minutes farther north, at least, once they were notified and en route with sirens bleating.

  So, they didn’t have to worry about getting busted in the short term, but he dreaded pulling one or two unseasoned constables into the middle of a shootout where the other side might feel no hesitation in eliminating them. Bolan had no idea if rural stations kept a weapon in the house for dire emergencies, but most cops in the UK were unarmed, and thus doubly at risk from any unexpected clash with terrorists.

  “I have a thought,” Beacher advised him, “but you may not like it.”

  “Go,” Bolan replied.

  “All right. I’ve changed my mind about a stop at Boleskine House.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s vacant, and it gets us off the highway,” she replied. “We’ll be a quarter mile or more from any neighbors, buffered by the hills and forest.”

  “Lead them down there,” Bolan said, thinking aloud, “and show them some black magic.”

  “If we’re doing it,” she said, “the turnoff is about a thousand yards up ahead, and on our left.”

  Procrastination wasn’t one of Bolan’s weaknesses. He made the choice and saw the left turn coming at them in his high beams, slowed enough to make it with the rubber squealing underneath them, then he powered through a short dogleg and found another road that took them back in the direction they had come from, running parallel to the B852.

  “There’ll be another turnoff to your right,” Beacher said. “Watch for it within a quarter mile.”

  “Will do.”

  And if they missed the turn to Boleskine House, the map in Bolan’s head told him they would keep rolling down the east shore of Loch Ness to pass a large fish hatchery, then a waste treatment plant, before they hit a cul-de-sac at lochside and were trapped.

  No good.

  It was the Great Beast’s former home or nothing, if they meant to keep the scuffle relatively quiet and away from prying eyes. If they survived, there would be time to think about disposal of the losers and their vehicle, any touch-ups the Camry might require, or even ditching it to hire another ride in Inverness. The best way to approach successive crises was by dealing with one problem at a time.

  Survival first. If they could pull that off, the rest would follow naturally. And if they had a chance to question Macauley’s men, so much the better.

  But he wasn’t counting on it.

  The pursuit was shaping up to be a rumble, and in most such situations, only one side walked away.

  If that.

  He saw the access road to Boleskine House, working the brake and gas in tandem as he made the turn.

  “Be ready,” Bolan told Beacher. “We only have one chance to do this right.”

  MY FAULT, Beacher thought, as they roared into the turn and swooped downhill toward Boleskine House. A cemetery flashed past in their headlight beams, its mossy headstones ranked like dwarfish soldiers in the darkness, there and gone almost before they registered.

  As soon as Cooper accepted her idea, Beacher had felt a surge of second thoughts. But he was turning then, leaving the B852, with their pursuers coming up behind. She couldn’t take it back, confess her own misgivings when he needed only strength from her, and fortitude.

  It meant more killing when they stopped, unless the people who were chasing them decided to surrender, and she didn’t see that happening. Whether the hunters were Macauley’s men or hard-core TIF—or both—she knew they would be under orders to identify their quarry and eliminate them, if they posed a threat.

  So be it.

  She’d signed on for this with eyes wide-open, as had her superiors. If anything went wrong, built-in deniability would leave Beacher holding the bag and taking full responsibility for any violations of procedure. She would certainly be sacked, and likely prosecuted in the bargain. Twenty years in Cornton Vail, the Scottish women’s prison, ought to get her out of sight and out of mind.

  On the other hand, if she and Cooper succeeded…then, what? There could be no public recognition or reward, only a shifting of responsibility to blame the fallen for their own demise.

  At least the government was fairly good at that, she thought.

  A heartbeat later, they were rolling past tall hedges at the ent
rance to a kind of courtyard, headlight beams sweeping a house with vacant, darkened windows as expected. Anyone who met them here would be a squatter or a ghost, and Beacher had no fear of either.

  “Be ready to bail,” Bolan said, as he kept driving, on around the south end of the long, low house to put the Camry out of sight. However briefly, it would add confusion to the mix and possibly protect the car from damage.

  When he braked, Beacher was out and moving with her Glock in hand, retracing their path toward the front of the house. Cooper was a little slower, she noticed, opening the Camry’s trunk and rummaging inside one of the bags he had secreted there. She heard a clank of gunmetal and wondered what he had in store for their pursuers.

  Then the other car was coming, revving down the curved driveway, then slowing when its high beams showed no vehicle in front of Boleskine House. If these were local drivers, they would likely know the layout of the grounds; if not, they might suspect that they had missed a hidden turnoff, maybe lost their quarry somewhere in the twists and turns of leaving the B852 behind.

  Delay was good. It let Cooper join her while the chase car idled in the driveway, then began to creep in closer, moving at a crawl. The big American carried some kind of assault rifle. Her mind clicked in a second later, with the ID on a Steyr AUG.

  “I wasn’t in the Girl Guides,” he advised her, “but I like to be prepared myself.”

  “They’re undecided,” Beacher whispered to him, standing in the shadow of a house known for black magic and dark deeds.

  “I won’t mind if they turn around,” he said. “If we have to take the long way home, it’s better than a premature firefight.”

  Beacher was wondering if their pursuers had the Camry’s license number, or were smart and well-equipped enough to trace it. If they did and could, they would have Cooper’s ID—for whatever that might be worth. Where they might go from there was anybody’s—

  “Here they come,” he said.

  The chase car rumbled toward the porch of Boleskine House.

  “YOU RECOGNIZE this place?” Raeburn asked.

  “Why the hell should I?” MacGregor replied.

  “Jaysus, you’re ignorant. You didn’t even see the sign we passed just now?”

  “Somethin’ about a mole,” MacGregor said.

  “Not mole, bole. This is Boleskine House!”

  “Is that suppose to mean somethin’?” MacGregor asked.

  Raeburn could only shake his head in awe at the deficiency of his partner’s education. Next, he’d claim he never heard of Irn-Bru or Tennent’s Lager.

  “It’s the Devil’s house,” Raeburn said. “Did ya never learn that as a child?”

  “Devil my arse,” MacGregor scoffed. “Just tell me if ya see that damned Toyota.”

  “Nothin’ yet,” Raeburn replied, clutching his shotgun in a stranglehold that made his knuckles ache.

  “I’m goin’ in,” MacGregor said, lifting off the brake, letting the Benz coast the remainder of the way into the courtyard with its engine barely idling. Even so, it seemed hellishly loud to Raeburn, riding with his window down and peering past their headlight beams into the darkness.

  “Think we coulda missed ’em?” Raeburn asked, hating the hopeful tone he heard in his own voice.

  “On that road?” MacGregor answered. “Not unless they beamed up, Scotty.”

  They were rolling closer to the bulk of Boleskine House, a yard at a time. Raeburn turned in his seat and eased the muzzle of his shotgun out the window, covering the south end of the structure more or less.

  “They musta pulled around in back,” MacGregor said, and turned the Benz in that direction, still not giving it much gas. Their headlights swept across the house’s long facade, making the windows seem to wink at them like knowing eyes.

  “If they’s inside the house—” Raeburn began, but never had a chance to finish as the dark night came alive with muzzle-flashes. The Mercedes started taking hits, and while he fired a shotgun blast in answer, he was more concerned with ducking below the line of fire.

  Too late. The windshield popped, then shattered into pebbles as the safety glass imploded. Raeburn heard MacGregor’s cry of pain but didn’t check to see how badly he was hit. If dead or dying, he was already beyond his help. If not…well, he could damn well look out for himself.

  As Raeburn meant to do.

  He spilled out of the car’s passenger side, cursing the dome light that exposed him to his enemies, and hit the pavement hard on his left shoulder, rolling awkwardly away as the Mercedes grumbled on without him. Raeburn heard slugs breaking glass and punching rude holes in the Benz’s body. Somewhere in the middle of it, MacGregor revved the engine and began returning fire with his handgun.

  Which covered Raeburn as he scuttled toward the shadow of Boleskine House. It wasn’t much, in terms of sanctuary, but he’d damn well take what he could get.

  The driveway’s gravel hurt his palms and knees, but it was better than a bullet in the gut. Raeburn crept closer to the house, watching the Benz absorb its punishment, dome light still burning over MacGregor’s slack and bloody form, until the car collided with a hedge and stalled.

  They’d come hunting him next, he knew. Even if they had missed him bailing out, they had to see the open door and grasp its obvious significance. Two guns, at least, and one of them an automatic shooter, damn it.

  But if he could find them first…

  The best defense was still a good offense, whoever said it. Rising from his knees and taking baby steps to keep the gravel quiet, Raeburn went to find his enemies.

  “THERE’S STILL ONE,” Bolan said. “I saw him bail.”

  “He may be running,” Beacher whispered back.

  Bolan stood listening, his ears still echoing with gunfire, while the stalled Mercedes engine ticked and cooled. He heard no sound of running feet on gravel, nothing like a body pushing through the hedges that surrounded Boleskine House, but he supposed the second shooter might have found a place to hide.

  “We can’t leave him behind,” he told Beacher.

  Or even drive out safely, with a gunman crouching somewhere in the shadows. If he wasn’t wounded, wasn’t terrified, he’d have the perfect opportunity to ambush them.

  And leaving him alive increased the chance that they would be identified before Bolan was ready to reveal his hand.

  “So,” Beacher answered, “do you want the front or back?”

  It had become a lethal game of hide-and-seek, not Bolan’s favorite, but he had played it many times before, prevailing with a mix of stealth and ruthlessness.

  “Front,” Bolan answered, guessing that the second shooter hadn’t traveled far in the few seconds since he’d leaped out of the battered Benz. Whether he’d try to creep around the house and take them from the rear was anybody’s guess, but Beacher could prevent him getting to the Camry, leaving them on foot.

  They separated then, and Bolan eased his way around the southwest corner of the house. Across the sloping lawn, through treetops, he could see Loch Ness with moonlight on the water, but he had no time to stop and look for monsters rising from its depths.

  A real-world danger occupied his full attention.

  Clearing the corner, Bolan found a strip of grass and soil to walk on at the driveway’s edge, clearing the gravel. Behind him, he could hear a dripping sound from the Mercedes, maybe fluid from the punctured radiator or—

  A whump corrected that impression, as the leakage from a broken fuel line found hot metal, sparked and spread. Bolan was dropping to a crouch when flames blossomed behind him and the yard of Boleskine House was suddenly illuminated.

  In front of him, the second shooter wore a shocked expression on his pale face, muttered something that was probably a curse and swung a shotgun into line.
/>
  Bolan was faster, triggering a 3-round burst of 5.56 mm manglers at a range of twenty feet or less. The standing figure took all three and toppled over backward with a wheezing sound from ruptured lungs. Too late, he found the shotgun’s trigger and dispatched a blast of buckshot toward the sky.

  Beacher came running from behind the house, pistol extended, lowering the piece when she saw Bolan on his feet beside a corpse. “That’s it, then?” she inquired.

  “Looks like it,” Bolan said.

  Eyeing the Benz, she said, “You want to put that out before it blows?”

  “We may as well,” Bolan replied.

  She disappeared again and came back from the Camry moments later with a tire iron and a fire extinguisher. Bolan relieved her of the iron and used it on the Benz’s hood to spare his hands from scorching. Once he had it open, Beacher foamed the engine down with the extinguisher and left it steaming in the night.

  “My good deed for the day,” she said.

  “No need to burn a piece of history,” Bolan said, as he turned away.

  Back in the Camry, Beacher said, “They’ll have something to think about, at least. Whatever they’ve been doing on the loch, maybe they’ll hurry up.”

  And start to make mistakes, Bolan thought, though he couldn’t count on that.

  “They’re after something,” he replied. “If we knew what it was, we’d be a long way toward the wrap-up.”

  “Well, we can’t exactly ask,” she said.

  “Maybe we can,” Bolan replied.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  “I’ll have to think about it. First, I want to get a look behind Macauley’s walls.”

  “Now that he’s looking out for trouble?”

  “It’s a problem I can work around,” he told her.

  “Not tonight?” She sounded worried.

  “No,” he said. “We’ll let them stew a bit. Tomorrow, after breakfast, when his crew’s out on the loch.”