crossbow? You know, if this stake-out is a dud, we're going to look awfully - '
'God!' Gower cut him short, dropped to one knee and worked furiously at the valve on his hose.
'What?' Newton gave a massive start, glared all about, held his loaded crossbow out in front of him like a shield. 'What?' He couldn't see anything, but he knew Gower's talent lay in reading the future - especially the immediate future!
'It's coming!' Gower no longer whispered. In fact, he was shouting. 'It's coming - NOW!'
At the front of the house, where Guy Roberts and Ben Trask pulled up in Roberts's truck, Gower's shouting wasn't heard over the throbbing of the vehicle's engine.
But on the north-facing side of the house it was. Trevor Jordan instinctively crouched down, then began to run at an angle towards the rear of the building. Ken Layard, hampered by his flame-thrower load, was slower off the mark.
Layard, stumbling through damp shrubbery, saw Jordan's figure swallowed into a rolling bank of mist where he ran past the open door in the small outbuilding
- then saw something erupt from that door in a snarling, slavering frenzy! Bodescu's great dog! Without pause the flame-eyed brute hurled itself into the mist after Jordan.
'Trevor, behind you!' Layard yelled at the top of his voice. He yanked open the valve on his hose, jerked the trigger, prayed: God, please don't let me burn Trevor!
A roaring, gouting stream of yellow fire tore open the curtain of mist like a blowtorch through cobwebs. Jordan was already round the corner of the house, but Vlad was still in view, bounding purposefully after him. The expanding, blistering 'V' of heat reached after the dog, touched him, enveloped him but briefly. Then he, too, was round the corner. -
By now, at the front of the house, Guy Roberts and Ben Trask were down from the truck. Roberts heard shouting, the roar of a flame-thrower. It was still a minute or two to five but the attack had started which probably meant that the other side had started it. Roberts put a police whistle to his lips, gave one short blast. Now, whatever else was happening, all six INTESP agents would move on the house together.
Roberts had the third flame-thrower; he headed straight for the main door of the house where it stood ajar in the shadow of a columned portico. Trask followed. He was a human lie-detector; his talent had no application here, but he was also young, quick-thinking and he knew how to look after himself. As he made to follow Roberts something caught his attention: a furtive movement glimpsed in the very corner of his eye.
'Twenty-five yards away between billowing banks of mist, a flowing figure had passed swiftly, silently inside the shell of the old barn. Who or whatever had gone in there, there would be nothing to stop it from clearing off out of the grounds once Roberts and Trask were inside the house. 'Oh no you don't!' Trask grunted. And raising his voice: 'Guy, in the barn there.'
Roberts, at the door of the house, turned to see Trask running at a crouch towards the barn. Cursing under his breath, he strode after him.
At the back of Harkley House, Vlad came coughing and mewling out of the mist and attempted to spring at the three men he found there. The dog was a blackened silhouette sheathed in smoke and flame, burning even as he launched himself lopsidedly at Jordan's back.
As Jordan had come running round the corner of the building, Gower had very nearly triggered his flame-thrower; he'd recognised Jordan only at the last possible moment. Harvey Newton, on the other hand, had actually -drawn a bead on the misted figure and was in the act of firing his bolt when Gower cried a warning and shouldered him aside. The bolt flashed harmlessly off at a tangent and disappeared in mist and distance. Fortunately Jordan had seen the two men saw them apparently aiming at him and thrown himself flat. He hadn't seen what pursued him, however, which even now overshot his sprawled body and arced overhead in a cloud of sparks and smoulder. Vlad landed awkwardly, gathered himself to spring at Newton and Gower, and discovered himself forging head-on into a withering jet of flame from Gower's torch. The dog crumpled to earth, a blazing, crackling, screaming ball of fire that tried to run in all directions at once and ran nowhere.
Jordan got to his feet and the three men