Plus it was aimed at the Mercedes, which, though in the stream, was positioned broadside to him, presenting a great and easy target.
He was about to make sure he finished the job he had started.
Henry swore, his dumb brain clicking into gear.
‘Get out, get out,’ he screamed at Flynn, who was already moving, having seen what Henry had seen, and after releasing his seat belt was cursing as he tried to force open the damaged and stuck passenger door with his shoulder.
The man fired. The muzzle flash exploded spectacularly against his black shape.
Four bullets smacked into the side of the Mercedes.
Flynn banged his shoulder desperately against the twisted door as Henry lurched across his knees to add the force of his hands and body against the door, which opened with a creak.
Flynn tumbled out into the stream.
Henry rolled out on top of him.
The man fired again. Henry heard three cracks as bullets hit his car and felt one whizz just above his head before it thudded into the grass bank opposite.
Flynn scrambled low along the stream, virtually crawling, Henry following in the ice-cold water.
There was a scream of anguish from the man with the gun. Henry glanced back to see him scuttling sideways down the slope, obviously realizing that his intended targets had survived the terrible crash and the hail of bullets.
Henry kept behind Flynn, hoping to put some distance and darkness between themselves and the man.
But Flynn had disappeared.
It was only a slicing cut that Flynn had received to his head as the car tumble-dried itself down the slope. He wasn’t even sure what had cut it, but it wasn’t caused by a direct blow, for which he was grateful. It meant he kept a clear head.
He’d been kept brilliantly in place by the seat belt and when the car crashed to a stop, like it had just been dropped from a great height flat down into the stream, he knew he’d cut his head, but also that nothing else had been damaged.
He saw the man on the road at the same time as Henry.
Appearing with the headlights behind him, gun in hand, like some kind of murderous demon.
The car door had been twisted, but it opened and Flynn rolled sideways out into the stream, then came up on his hands and knees in the shallow water. Ignoring its bone-freezing temperature, he scuttled away, knowing Henry was right behind him.
Then, for a few moments, it didn’t feel like Henry was there.
Flynn did not look back.
He knew the gunman had run down the slope and if he and Henry had simply just run away, all the guy would have to do was stand in the middle of the stream and strafe the darkness into which they had escaped.
Every chance that at least one of them would be cut to ribbons like Bonny and Clyde.
Flynn, therefore, knew he had to move.
He scrambled to his right onto the bank, into the cover provided by a clump of thin bushes which whipped his face, snagged his new clothing. Thorns cut the palms of his hands as he forced his way through them and up the banking, keeping as low and silent as possible, hoping the sounds of his movement were covered by the burbling of the running water and the noise from the still-on engine of the Range Rover.
There were more shots.
Flynn powered on upwards, moving like a fast Komodo dragon, belly just above the grass, driven by instinct, fear, rage and commando training from many years before.
Twenty metres up, he moved right, still keeping to the ground, and emerged at a point ten metres below the Range Rover and fifteen metres to its right, just on the periphery of the sweep of its headlights.
More importantly he was above and behind the gunman, who was still in the centre of the stream in front of the Mercedes. He was crouched low, the machine-pistol in the firing position, not moving, peering into the darkness.
Flynn’s mouth curved into a vicious snarl.
He was about ten metres from the man and the guy clearly hadn’t heard or seen him, or even suspected that one of the men he’d tried to kill had circled back with murder on his mind.
But ten metres was a big distance in the circumstances.
If Flynn started to move for him, he would surely sense the approach, pivot and fire.
By which time Flynn might have gone two metres.
Flynn did not move.
He took a moment to control his breathing, try to reduce his heart rate.
Then the man stood upright and like some demented terminator, leaned slightly backwards, screamed something incomprehensible that Flynn could not make out — but could tell from the voice it was yelled in wrath — and fired the machine-pistol, spraying bullets in a wide arc, maybe forty degrees, down the stream and into the darkness where Henry and Flynn had disappeared.
Then the magazine was empty.
It was obvious the man knew the gun would empty, because as it did he flicked the magazine-release catch and let it slide out into the water, then smoothly began to replace it with a magazine from his back jeans pocket.
But it was a senseless move, one brought about by rage, Flynn guessed, who knew that emotion should never play a part in a dangerous game like this. It clouded judgement and let the enemy in. He should have taken cover when he reloaded.
Flynn ran down the slope, estimating he had about three seconds before the gun was loaded and cocked again.
He held back his own urge to scream, moved silently, the only sound the thump of his feet in the grass.
Just before Flynn launched himself, the man must have sensed something. He twisted, still with the empty gun in one hand, the full magazine in the other, almost slotted in place. He tried to use the gun as a club, but Flynn was in the air at a forty-five-degree angle and the gunman could not manage to swing the pistol around with enough force or accuracy to clobber Flynn’s head.
Flynn connected and as his hands encircled the man, he realized the guy was all muscle. Hopefully, steroid muscle.
The gun went flying and both men staggered backwards.
With a contemptuous curse, the man broke free from Flynn’s grip like Samson bursting from his shackles, and hit Flynn on the side of his face with a huge, hard fist. Fortunately it was a poor, badly aimed, rushed blow, but nevertheless it sent Flynn spinning backwards, far enough away for the man to recover. Flynn saw the glint of a knife blade in the man’s right hand.
It wasn’t a big knife. A serrated four-inch kitchen knife, possibly.
It didn’t have to be long to kill. Big knives were mostly used to intimidate. Smaller, more discreet ones were used to kill efficiently.
The man grinned, the lights from the Range Rover casting an eerie distorted glow across his face. His teeth twinkled.
‘We meet again, but this time I kill you proper, fucker.’
Flynn thought there was probably a good chance of that happening, especially when the man moved towards him with incredible speed. In the darkness, mixed with the light from the Range Rover, with long and short shadows intermingling, it was hideously difficult to judge exactly where the man was, at what point the arc of the knife was. Flynn had to fight almost blind, trusting to instinct and his abilities.
He sidestepped, swerving his whole body from the knees upwards like a matador, then went in low and — he hoped — under the trajectory of the knife, so that he came back uptight, face-to-face, body-to-body with the guy and the knife was waving uselessly in mid-air behind him.
Flynn knew that would only be momentary, a fraction of a second before the knife came back around into his back, somewhere under the shoulder blades.
He had that amount of time in which to act.
