but just as he did, Court brought his knees to his chest and shifted his legs to his left.
With all the might left in him he kicked with both feet into the rope that had been burning fiercely for thirty seconds, and in so doing he tore away the last of the fibers that had not burned through.
Hines smiled as Court’s wild kick missed him and hit a burning rope, and then he heard a loud squeaking noise several feet above his head.
His eyes met Court’s in the firelight.
And now it was Court’s turn to smile.
The iron gate dropped like a guillotine, and the vertical shanks slammed into Hines’s back, penetrating his rib cage, lungs, and heart, exiting out his chest and slamming him face-first into the stone floor.
His face just a foot from Court’s, blood gushed from his mouth. He choked out one last “Fuck you!” before he died, a look of astonishment frozen into his wide-open eyes.
Court climbed to his knees and looked back into the smoky room around the body. His rifle was on the opposite wall in a raging fire, but his Glock pistol was just within reach through the square openings in the gate. He reached in for it, next to Hines’s left hip, and scooted it with his fingertips back towards him. But when he tried to pull it through the gate he realized the weapon was just slightly too large to get through.
“Shit,” he said. With his one good hand still on the other side of the gate he dropped the magazine from the weapon, fired off the round in the chamber, then pulled the slide back a half inch by pushing the grip back on the floor. With his thumb he pressed the takedown lever on the frame. After he pulled the trigger again, the metal slide slid off the pistol onto the floor.
Now Court easily pulled the frame through the opening next to the dead man, then reached back in and grabbed the magazine and the slide, barrel, and slide rod off the floor and brought them out as the heat began to overtake him.
Lying on his side he reassembled and reloaded the pistol, still with one hand, all the while worrying about Zoya, somewhere down here in pursuit of her father.
He coughed as he stood with the weapon, then used the flashlight on the rail below the muzzle to light his way forward.
He made it only a few feet before he saw a human form lying facedown. Closing carefully, he realized it was Fox, and he’d been shot in the left shoulder blade.
Court figured the one shot he’d managed to fire, which hadn’t been aimed anywhere near Fox, had ricocheted around the room and wounded the man, who’d bled out fifty feet down the tunnel.
Just to be certain, though, Court performed a dead check, shooting him in the back of the head. The man had a SIG MPX submachine gun lying next to him, and Court hefted it, slung it around his neck, and pressed on.
* * *
• • •
Feodor Zakharov set the master timer on the plastic explosive so the entire chain of thirty explosives around the underground portion of the castle would go off simultaneously. He gave himself and the two sleepers with him five minutes before detonation, then initiated the countdown on the detonator. He and his men would be far enough down the stairs by then, and he assumed the Royal Scots Dragoons would be down here around that time looking for him.
Along with his daughter. Zoya would die, but Zakharov told himself this was something that was long overdue.
Once the timer was set, Zakharov shined his flashlight on the two sleepers. “Let’s get out of here.”
The men had their pistols aimed down the arched corridor they had used to get here, expecting anyone chasing them to come from that direction, but another passage ran off to their left. It had been completely pitch-black inside, until a pair of flashes in quick succession, simultaneous with loud gunshots, sent Zakharov ducking low and spinning his light towards the noise and light.
Both sleepers dropped where they stood, shot in the side of the head and neck at a distance of less than twenty feet.
Zakharov moved to turn off his flashlight, but before he could, a high beam shined in his eyes. He dropped his light on the floor. Softly he said, “Zoya, darling? Is that you?”
“It’s me.”
Zoya flipped off the light on her SIG MPX, allowing the illumination