One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,76
garage and for all he knew he’d be setting off an explosion under a truck loaded with bombs.
Luc’s only realistic option was to jump down the stairs and hope that the gas had either slowed his opponents or forced them to back off. He landed with a clank of metal, and glanced through the window of his gas mask at dim orangey bulbs and a bluish haze.
He tiptoed around the garage. It was big enough for six trucks but currently only held two, plus a tatty car up on jacks. As he kept his back to the wall, Luc looked for any sign of movement under the parked trucks. It was close range and his machine gun was an indiscriminate weapon, so he pulled his silenced pistol from a belt holster as he watched shadows.
He’d reached the cab of the last truck when he heard a coughing sound close by. He spun and dived behind the truck as a man took aim from the other end of the garage. Luc hit the floor, flat on his chest. He took aim between the tyres and shot the German in the ankle.
As the German yelled, Luc crawled rapidly under the truck and finished him off with a shot through the chest.
‘Jean, Didier,’ he yelled. ‘Get down here and cover me.’
Luc studied the dead German. The gas cylinder contained water, concentrated pepper oil and ether. The mixture was supposed to cause breathing difficulties and drowsiness, but judging by the man’s horribly swollen eyes the cocktail was more potent than the way Henderson had described it during the detailed briefing.
‘Try to find some controls,’ Luc said, as he approached a winding staircase. ‘Levers, buttons, whatever. Get those blast doors back open or we’re shit out of luck.’
As Jean and Didier hunted, Luc moved towards a spiral staircase which ran around the outside of a cargo lift. According to the French draughtsman that Henderson had tracked down, the bunker was designed as a place to store weapons, safe from the threat of German bombs. The design was quick-and-cheap, with one entrance, one lift and one set of stairs leading down to a cavernous storage area.
‘Zweig, why have you closed the door?’ someone down below shouted in German. ‘Don’t you know the commandant is still out there?’
Luc’s German was far from perfect, but his accent was passable and he hoped that the echo on the stairs might hide the fact that he wasn’t Zweig. ‘The commandant wants everyone out searching.’
As Luc said this, Jean pulled on a lever and the doors started opening again.
Marc was first in, and was shocked by the sight of Henderson slumped against the narrow corridor wall, almost unconscious. But before he could worry about that he heard Luc’s pathetic attempts to lure more Germans up the stairs.
Marc’s German was excellent and he rushed towards the stairs and shouted authoritatively. ‘The commandant is going ballistic,’ Marc shouted. ‘I’ve just reopened the doors. He wants every free man up here searching the woods.’
‘Who’s that?’ the man at the bottom shouted.
Marc deliberately didn’t reply. There was no sound of footsteps on the stairs, but just as Marc and Luc started to assume that the Germans down below were suspicious, the lift began moving upwards.
‘Henderson should survive, but he’s away with the fairies at the moment,’ Goldberg said. He stared aghast at the lift. ‘Are they really that stupid?’
‘I reckon Luc’s number one man for massacring Germans coming out of a lift,’ Marc said. ‘Shall we go down and flush the rest out?’
‘You bet,’ Goldberg said. ‘Didier, we might need gas. Come with us.’
The lift was designed for strength not speed, and Marc watched its rusty drive cable shudder inside the wire cage as he raced down ninety stairs behind Goldberg.
‘Hello, boys,’ Luc said, when the lift juddered to a halt in front of him.
The front of the lift was a folding metal gate, so the men inside could see Luc as he pushed the muzzle of his gun between the bars. He swelled with joy as five desperate Germans either lunged for their own weapons or tried shoving another man in front of them.
‘This one’s for my parents,’ Luc stated.
Luc squeezed his machine gun trigger, spraying rounds from point blank range until there was nothing but dead bodies and a stream of blood draining from one corner and spattering the floor of the lift shaft twenty metres below.
Luc was clutching his fists and grinning madly as he backed away, dropping his clip and fitting