Without warning

felled her. Caitlin went down on the dirt under the angry buzz of bullets zipping overhead.

‘Son of a bitch!’

She rolled over Monique and grabbed her by the backpack. Strap in hand, juggling her own hold-all, Caitlin hauled the young woman towards the door of the nearest apartment block. She didn’t pause to think, to examine her surroundings, to question the choices she was already making. Her largest handgun, the Glock 19, had quickly appeared in her free hand and it roared, biting huge chunks of wood and masonry from the solid timber door.

Rather than screaming, Monique was gasping and grinding out an arrhythmic series of grunts, like somebody punched in the stomach trying and failing to draw air into their lungs.

Glass shattered as rounds zipped and cracked past Caitlin’s head to chew up the brick facade of the old, run- down tenement. The gunfire echoed against the bricks and mortar of the surrounding apartment buildings. She logged the direction and volume of fire, and part of her mind calculated that they faced maybe three attackers.

Three? She looked out of the corner of her eye. No, four shooters. They’d emerged from a white van that had turned down onto this wide street just a minute ago. Four, she could be certain of – but were there more? A second vehicle perhaps? A lookout who’d been scoping the street for hours?

Her boot slammed into the door, which flew open and crashed into the wall, and they were suddenly through, into a darkened passage that smelled of boiled cabbage and dog hair. She dropped Monique on the threadbare carpet running down the long, poorly lit hall and spun back towards the street.

Caitlin holstered her Glock and hauled out both of her Steyr TMP s from the shoulder rigs under her jacket. With the safetys flicked off, she held the weapons out around the corner of the door and unloaded both of them into the free fire zone of Route d’Asnieres in the direction of the van. The outgoing fire sounded like canvas sheets ripping in the high wind.

After three bursts, she took a quick peek to her left around the doorway to check her surroundings and see what she’d caught. – A civilian, on a bicycle, lying in the centre of the road, probably dead. Head shot. Shit.

A small Fiat, faded blue paint, up on the footpath down near the railway tracks, smoke or steam pouring out from under the bonnet. One flat tyre.

And birds – dead and dying birds everywhere.

A woman in a bright floral headscarf, cowering in the doorway of an empty boarded-up shop, shielding what looked like a child with her body.

Across the road from her, a dirty white van, parked at a slight angle in the gutter about fifty metres away, cabin door slid open. One leg hanging out of the interior, twitching. Windshield smashed, horn blaring.

Three identified shooters there. All white males, dressed casually, armed with FAMAS G2 assault rifles. One behind the van – possible leg wound. One crouched behind another vehicle, a grey, ageing Volvo. The last man, running, aiming for a deeply recessed doorway fifty yards away.

She snapped off two quick bursts at the figure heading for the doorway.

G2 rounds crashed around her once more, pulverising the ancient red brickwork and forcing her to fire blind again. Caitlin emptied the rest of the Steyr magazines with much greater accuracy this time, however, having sighted her targets, then she turned back into the building and shoulder-charged the first door on the right. It gave way with a crack of splintered wood and she tumbled into the small sitting room, taking cover below the window ledge, crunching broken glass under foot.

In one quicksilver motion, Caitlin slipped off her backpack and poured half a magazine of 9 mm hollow-point from the Glock through the smashed windowpane into the street outside, mostly aimed at the shooter behind the Volvo – the closest, easiest target. Chances of nailing him were low, but she could at least keep the fucker bottled up.

Monique moaned loudly just outside the room, and glancing back over her shoulder, Caitlin saw her legs begin to scythe and kick in reaction to the burning pain that would now be making itself felt. Gut shot by a military assault rifle. There was gore and leakage everywhere. Caitlin knew the exact location of a couple of morphine syrettes in one of the bags, but to attend to Monique now would have meant ceding the initiative to their would-be killers.

She opened her oversized hold-all and pulled out the artillery. The pistol-grip Benelli shotgun came first: customised 12-gauge, extended mag with a side-saddle shell carrier. Next was the deal closer, a specially cut-down Heckler amp; Koch UMP.45, with an extended box mag housing thirty rounds of.40-calibre Smith amp; Wesson goodness. She slung the HK over her shoulder. It was a large, excessive arsenal for just one young lady to haul around, but Caitlin Monroe very much adhered to her daddy’s rule that when it came to guns it was always better to have ‘em and not need ‘em than the other way around.

She picked up the shotty, jacked a cartridge into the chamber, and poked the muzzle out through the shattered window. The Benelli was loaded with a buck ‘n’ ball combo that gave her a nice spread for quick and dirty area clearance, but still packed a nasty surprise in the form of one larger, molybdenum disulphide-coated brass slug at the centre of the load. Unlike softer malleable rounds, it was armour piercing and would slice through a car door or ballistic vest without bothering to slow down much.

She methodically pumped half-a-dozen rounds of buck ‘n’ ball down-range, angling to do some damage to the men behind the vehicles, but occasionally raking a shot along the front of the building to shut down their partner in the recessed doorway. She briefly heard a few distressed cries and more shouting upstairs, and the hammering of feet on bare wooden boards, but then the uproar of her sustained gunfire drowned out everything else.

I need to get a handle on this fucking mess, she thought. She was still firing blind, however, attempting to disrupt the flow of her opponents’ advance and hoping for a lucky hit.

The briefest of lulls drew her attention upwards again, to the sounds of renewed panic. Caitlin let loose out of the window with another four shells from the shotgun and then ran, reloading, clearing the ruined sitting room and bouncing off the slimy, plastered wall of the apartment’s main corridor. She leapt over Monique, who was writhing and crying pitiably – ‘Hold on, baby,’ the American muttered, ‘these fuckers are gonna regret getting out of bed today,’ before speeding towards the staircase, slipping the shotgun over her shoulder and bringing the Heckler amp; Koch into play.

Bounding up the stairs she swung around at the first level and raced for the front of the building. An open door led onto a small bedroom just ahead and she rushed in, grateful to find there was no baby in the cot that was pushed up against one wall. She thumbed the selector on the machine-gun to full auto. One of the reasons she liked the H amp;K was its relatively low rate of fire, a modest 600 rounds per minute, which, in the hands of an expert