Firepower by John Cutter (ebook reader online .txt) 📕

*

The wind rose, trying to push Vince off the escarpment. It soughed off the stone and spattered him with intermittent rain.

And he was stuck.

Vince had gotten himself boxed into a corner, hundreds of feet over the foot of the cliff. The darkness had fooled him. When he got to the lip of the cliff, at the top of the crack he’d been using for footholds, he found a boulder beetled over him, right in his way. It was jutting out too far for him to reach over. If he tried, he’d fall.

Now what?

He held on with his left hand and his feet and reached into his coat with his right hand, tugging out the flashlight. He switched on the light and shone it at the rockfaces to the left and right of him. To the left it was sheer. Not a handhold in sight. To the right — the same.

But when he tried again over to the right, moving the light more slowly, the oblong glow of the light played over a recess in the rock, almost within reach. If he could grab it with his right hand, maybe it’d hold him long enough so that he could grab the upper edge of the cliff with his left, where the cliff’s lip was flatter. But that would require lunging for that recess. There was a very good chance he wouldn’t be able to hold on even if he caught it.

He could climb back down and try to find another route. But what was happening to Deirdre Corlin, meanwhile?

You’re a Ranger, he told himself. Focus, and bring all of your attention to this, and you can do it.

Vince took a deep breath, leaned in as close to the rock wall as he could, memorizing the exact position of that recess. He flicked the flashlight off, slipped it in his pocket, stretched out his right arm — and lunged at the handhold.

He slapped his right hand down into it — and felt the water coating it, his fingers slipping…

He clapped his left hand down on the upper lip of the cliff… and it caught a rocky knob. His right slipped from the recess and he fell with a jerk to the end of his left arm…

He ground his teeth with pain and thrashed with his right hand at the recess. He felt for a foothold and the toe of his right boot caught a tiny ledge. It held his weight and he was able to lift up half an inch and slap his right hand into the recess. He did a crooked pull-up, feeling close to tearing a muscle. There was a roaring in his ears. The wind tugged at him — then he slapped at the lip of the cliff with his right hand, and caught hold. Now he could do a regulation pull-up. He grunted, feeling the gravitational pull of the world dragging at him like a living thing as he pulled himself up to the edge.

An agonizing three seconds — until his chin was level with the top. He lashed his right hand out, found a crack in the stone, gripped, and pulled, clambering with his feet…

And then he was crawling over the edge, onto the top of the cliff.

Vince lay there panting for ten long seconds.

You’re a damned fool, Bellator, he told himself. But so far, still alive.

He got to his knees and glanced around. The top of the ridge in this area was ruggedly flat, like a modest plateau. No one was in sight. But he could see the hulking shape of the camouflaged helicopter about fifty yards away.

Vince got up, wiped sweat from his forehead, unsheathed his knife, and started for the heli, thinking he could use it as cover to get nearer the emplacements.

Then he stopped. It occurred to him that they might have surveillance cameras around the chopper.

He changed direction, heading south on the uneven stone of the escarpment’s top, trying to move as quietly as he could. Much of it was cracked, pebbly granite, broken up by red-barked shrubs and witch hazel. As he moved to the west, he spotted the hump-shapes of the concrete and steel emplacements up ahead, still some distance off.

The witch hazel — shrubby trees — grew thickly closer to the emplacements. He moved in a crouch, using clumps of the small trees as cover, picking his steps as carefully as he could in the frail light.

He stopped from time to time, listening and looking. He heard men’s voices, the words unintelligible, but the timbre hinting of casual conversation. He saw no cameras pointed his way.

Vince eased forward, seeing a pool of light from the back of the emplacement. The gun battery was a low, semi cupola of reinforced concrete, with gun slits in the western side for light machine guns and sniper rifles. The interior was recessed into the top of the ridge, bunker-style; the back was open, with green tarps that could be hooked to the back of the opening in case of heavy rain. He was glad the rain had stopped. If the tarp had covered the back entrance to the emplacement it would have complicated matters.

As he got closer — fifty feet away — he could see two men in paramilitary uniforms sitting on benches to either side of the guns. One short, one taller, both crewcut white guys. They had a shelf of equipment handy. Vince couldn’t see it clearly, but he figured the gear was binoculars and night-seeing goggles. The militiamen were sitting facing one another, eating sandwiches and talking.

Vince planned to kill them silently if he could. Unnecessary gunfire would alert the other emplacement, maybe the whole compound.

Knife in hand, he stole yet closer, keeping to the south so that the man on the left would be unable to