Читать книгу The Lost Relic - Scott Mariani, Scott Mariani - Страница 27

The world erupted in a wall of noise. Ben hit the floor painfully on his shoulder and rolled twice as the hurricane of bullets and debris whipped all around him. There was no time to return fire. He lashed out with his foot, kicking open a fire door. Scrambling through it, he caught a glimpse of gleaming tiled steps spiralling steeply down below him in a tight square pattern. He realised he was on the landing of a fire escape stairwell.

In the next instant, the two gunmen crashed through the swinging fire door after him. Ben threw himself down the steps. The heavy boom of the shotgun resounded in the stairwell. A window shattered, showering Ben with broken glass as he went tumbling down the tiled steps. The next landing was just a few metres down. He hit it on his back and returned fire upwards, one-handed, feeling the snappy recoil from his Steyr twist his hand up and round. The three-shot burst caught the shotgunner across the chest and his knees buckled.

First kill. Ben hadn’t wanted it that way, but sometimes you didn’t get the choice.

The dead man came tumbling down the fire escape, carried forward by his own momentum, and landed on Ben with an impact that drove the air out of his lungs. The big guy straddled the top of the stairs with his feet apart and aimed the AR-15 down the stairwell. Ben knew all too well that those rifle bullets would punch effortlessly through car doors, toughened glass, even masonry. A human shield wasn’t going to slow them down much. He aimed the Steyr over the shoulder of the corpse and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The whole problem with small automatic weapons was that they tended to shoot themselves dry in a matter of seconds. A twenty-round mag in a fast-cycling action like the Steyr’s didn’t last long at all. Worse, the spare he’d tucked in his jeans pocket had fallen out as he’d rolled down the steps. He could see it lying there halfway between him and the landing. No way to get to it in time.

But it wasn’t just Ben’s gun that had run empty. The big guy swore, released the taped-together mags of his rifle and reinserted them upside down. Before he could release the bolt and hose the stairwell with bullets, Ben had slid out from under the body of his colleague and was leaping down the stairs. He made it to the next bend before the big guy could get him in his sights again. Bullets hammered off the wall where he’d been a second ago. Leaping down the stairs, Ben spotted another landing with two doors leading off it. He made a split-second choice and ripped open one of the doors, praying it wasn’t a broom cupboard.

It wasn’t. A dark corridor opened up in front of him. Before the big guy could see which way he’d gone, Ben had slammed the door shut behind him and was sprinting hard down the corridor. He tore through another door, hit a fork in the corridor and took a right.

As he ran, he was getting his bearings. He was on the ground floor now, and had probably come down the same way the guys he’d locked in the kiln had come up. The second two must have come round the other way, heading him off in a pincer movement.