Plumes of woodsmoke floated into the air above the homes and dissipated in the gray sky above.
A green truck, identical to the one on his right, rolled slowly out of the village and pulled into a gas station thirty yards from where Court sat. It jolted to a stop in the parking lot, away from the pumps.
The Gray Man decided in seconds that he had just been surrounded.
“Sergeant!” he called quickly to the cop in charge.
The older man was speaking with his subordinates, but he walked over towards Court on the bench.
“Please listen carefully. We have a problem. On both sides of us are green trucks. In or near those vehicles are men who have been sent to kill me. They will not hesitate to kill you and your men to get to me.”
The policeman looked to his left and right at both of the vehicles, then back to Gentry.
“What is this shit you are saying?”
“They will be well-trained killers. You need to move us all inside the station. Hurry!”
Slowly, the policeman pulled his walkie-talkie from his belt and brought it to his mouth. His eyes did not leave Gentry’s. In German he instructed his men behind him to come over.
He switched to English. “Two green vehicles. One to the north, one to the south. This man tells me they are men here to rescue him.”
“Not rescue! Kill!”
All five looked up and down the platform at the vans. There was still no movement from either.
“It’s a trick,” said a young blond officer as he unfastened the retention restraint over the tang of his pistol.
“Who are you?” asked another man.
Court didn’t answer. Instead he said, “We need to go inside. Quickly.”
The lead policeman told his officers, “Watch him. I’ll check this out.” He turned and began walking up the platform towards the van to the south at the gas station.
“Sergeant! You really do not want to do that.” Court called out but was ignored by the silver-headed policeman in the heavy coat.
The cop descended the platform steps and onto the property of the little gas station. The green van had tinted windows. It sat at idle, steam pouring from its exhaust and drifting away in the air behind.
As the Municipaux officer approached the truck, Gentry spoke to the four remaining men.
“He’s going to die. Don’t freak out; we will all have to work together. If you try to run, they will just gun you down. If you want to live, just do what I say.”
“Shut up,” said one, and all four were looking at their sergeant as he approached the driver’s-side window. He used his walkie-talkie to tap on the tinted glass.
“Don’t forget about the other van!” Court pleaded to the uniformed men standing over him.
“Shut up,” repeated the policeman. Gentry could see their growing concern as their heads swiveled back and forth between the north and south.
The sergeant tapped harder on the glass. As Gentry and the others watched, the silver-haired man seemed to peer closely through the heavy tint. He must have seen something, some movement or other indicator of danger, because quickly the Swiss policeman stepped back and reached down to the pistol on his hip.
The driver’s-side window shattered with the crack of gunfire. The cop backpedaled away quickly, and the door opened. A man in a black jumpsuit and a ski mask slid out from behind the wheel and onto the pavement, a short-barreled machine pistol in his hand. He fired another three-round burst into the sergeant’s stumbling body, and the Swiss officer dropped dead on his back.
All four Swiss cops around Court drew their pistols with technique hampered by panic. At thirty yards an accurate shot would be difficult, but the young men fired rounds downrange as they shouted in shock and dropped for cover.
“The other truck! The other fucking truck!” Court screamed as he himself dropped to the cement. He lay on the cold pavement next to the bench, his left arm above him in the seat, shackled to the armrest.
The cops looked behind them and saw four masked men walking down the blacktop road towards their position. They all held rifles similar to the man at the gas station, who was now joined by three confederates. All eight moved closer with confidence, like they had all the time in the world.
“Uncuff me! We’ve got to get inside!” Court yelled, but the policemen just pressed lower into the cement platform, squatted and ducked behind a wooden push-cart or lay flat in the open, and they fired inaccurate rounds at the gunmen as the men in black approached menacingly through the swirling snowfall from opposite directions.
A bald-headed young policeman shouted into the radio affixed to the epaulets of his jacket. He crouched fifteen feet from Gentry behind a luggage cart that provided him poor shielding from the men on the hill to the north and no cover whatsoever from the men fanned out at the gas station to his south.
Court watched bursts of concrete stitch up the platform, race towards the young cop as he looked the other way and screamed into his microphone, unaware. Each explosion of cement and dust tracked closer to him, until finally supersonic machine pistol rounds burrowed into his legs and back. He spun onto his side and twitched on the concrete. The death throes ceased as quickly as they began.
“Somebody give me a gun!” Gentry shouted. The three remaining policemen ignored him. They fired inaccurately and reloaded slowly with jittering hands.
Court swiveled around on the cold concrete. He put his boots against the iron legs of the bench and kicked as hard as he could. He desperately tried to break the large iron end piece to which he was manacled free from the rest of the twelve-foot wooden bench. The metal handcuff bit into his left wrist as he kicked and pulled. Soon he created a rhythm to his work. A kick with his feet, cracks of the old wood, and searing pain in his wrist and hand.
A salvo of automatic fire hit the window above him, sending broken glass over the bench and onto the ground all around. As he kicked he looked back over to his right. A second policeman had been hit in the shoulder and hip. He dropped his gun and writhed on the cement in agony.
It took over thirty simultaneous strikes with both feet to break the iron end piece away from the wooden bench. On the last drive down with his boot heels, he yanked back with his arm. The pain in his left wrist was excruciating, but the bench broke apart. Gentry crawled to his knees, knelt over the heavy piece of ornamental metal, and lifted it. It was easily thirty pounds and still attached to his scraped and swelling wrist. He hooked his handcuffed arm over the metalwork and hefted it off the platform. Then, in the line of fire from both directions, he ran towards the injured cop writhing in agony in the middle of the platform. When he was still a dozen feet away, he flung the iron out in front of him, down next to the man, and fell with it in a slide. The piece clanged on the cement with nearly as much noise as the gunshots barking all around. His swelling wrist tightened inside the metal cuff.
Kneeling over the Swiss officer, he reached to the man’s midsection.
The cop cried out to his rescuer. “My hip! I’m hit bad in the—”
“Sorry,” Court said as he pulled the handcuff key off the chain on the cop’s utility belt. It was smeared with the young man’s blood. Crouching lower in response to a supersonic whine just inches from his right ear, the American assassin pushed the ornamental iron armrest out in front of him, towards the platform’s edge. He crawled along as he pushed it again.
The injured policeman reached up and grabbed Court’s leg as the American moved away, a pitiable attempt to both seek help from a rescuer and to regain control of his prisoner, as if that were somehow still an issue. Gentry kicked off the dying man’s hand, picked the cop’s Beretta off the platform, and kept crawling. A spray of sub gun rounds chased Court all the way to the edge of the platform, just missing him as he and his iron anchor rolled off. Gentry dropped four feet down to the ground and behind the cover of the platform’s edge. His adrenaline-tinged brain nearly panicked when he lost the key for a moment in the snow, but he quickly dug it out. Rising to his knees, he kept his frozen red fingers steady as he unhooked the handcuff on his left wrist.
Of the five policemen who pulled him off the train, only two were still in the fight. Both crouched behind poor cover on the platform. Not wanting to place his head in the gun sights of anyone who’d watched him drop off the platform, Court moved down a few feet before he peered back over the top. He shouted to the cops, told them to break cover and come to him. One yelled back that he was out of ammunition. The other had a wounded right hand and was firing over a stone planter with his left. From the look of his technique Gentry determined the man to be right-hand dominant.
