He folded up the multi-tool and replaced it in his holster, then walked cautiously back toward the car, approaching it at an oblique angle, hopefully staying out of sight in any of the rearview mirrors.
He stopped about twenty feet behind and to one side of the car, measuring the remaining distance by eye, then acted. He swung the bush back, and then lobbed it underarm toward the vehicle. It was another BMW, as he’d guessed, this one a 3-series.
The bush with its cargo of earth described a parabola, landed with a dull thud almost directly in the middle of the trunk lid, then slid off it and fell to the ground behind the car. The impact wasn’t enough to damage the vehicle, but Bronson was sure the man inside would have heard and felt it. And would want to investigate the cause.
For a few moments nothing happened, and he wondered if he’d been wrong, if the car was empty, if he’d been tricked by a shadow and hadn’t seen anyone in the driver’s seat. Maybe the car had simply been used by the men waiting in the clearing as a means of transport.
Then he heard a click, and immediately closed his eyes to preserve his night-sight, because the driver’s door of the BMW had just swung open, triggering the interior light. Bronson knew that the bulb was very low powered, just a few watts, but in the blackness of the night it was like a searchlight snapping on.
He stared down at the ground before he opened his eyes, but then the light was extinguished as the man closed the door again. Bronson looked up and watched as a dark, bulky figure stepped around to the back of the car.
As soon as the man looked down at the bush, he muttered a single word-“ Schei?e ”-which Bronson didn’t need to be a linguist to translate.
But by then, he was already moving.
31
24 July 2012
Bronson covered the dozen or so feet to the other man in a few swift and silent strides, then stopped right behind him. He reached forward over the man’s left shoulder and wrapped his hand around his mouth. At the same moment, he hit out with his right fist with all the power he could muster. The blow connected with the other man’s back beside his right kidney, exactly where Bronson had been aiming. It was an incapacitating, not a killing, blow. The man loosed a sudden muffled grunt of surprise and pain as he arched backward.
Bronson was already pulling him in the same direction, and the man tumbled helplessly to the ground, cracking the back of his head on the hard-packed soil as he did so. But Bronson hadn’t quite finished with him, and swung his right fist again, this time aiming for the solar plexus, driving every vestige of breath from the man’s body. And he followed that with a sharp uppercut to the jaw to complete the process. The man’s head snapped backward as unconsciousness claimed him.
It was a rapid and brutal demolition job, and had offered the man no possible chance of responding, which was precisely what Bronson had intended. For about half a minute he stood where he was, staring down the track into the darkness and listening intently. He doubted if the noise of the assault could have been heard more than a few yards away, but he needed to be certain nobody was approaching him. But he heard nothing, no sound of movement.
Then he bent down and quickly searched the unconscious man. He found a Walther pistol-this one a PPQ model, very similar in appearance to the smaller Glocks-in a shoulder holster and with two spare magazines in a belt pouch. A metal tube in one of his pockets turned out to be a suppressor for the weapon.
Bronson shrugged, pulled off the man’s jacket, and took the lot. He took off his own jacket, donned the shoulder holster and the belt pouch, and screwed the suppressor onto the threaded barrel of the Walther. He pressed the magazine release and hefted it in his hand. It felt full, but he had no time to check it. Bronson replaced the magazine in the pistol and eased the slide back just far enough to confirm that there was already a round in the chamber.
That was the first part of his plan completed. Now all he had to do was get past whoever was waiting for him in the clearing further down the track.
Bronson still needed a car, and had realized that it might make sense to “borrow” the BMW, rather than even try to retrieve the Hyundai. BMWs, after all, were as common on the roads of Germany as Fords were in Britain, and he would stand out less driving that than the British-plated vehicle.
There was nothing in the Hyundai he needed to recover, and it couldn’t be traced to him because he didn’t own it. And despite the addition to his armory, Bronson still wasn’t happy about tackling the men in the clearing. He knew there were at least two of them, and even they would be a handful. If there were three or four waiting there, he’d almost certainly come off worst. In all respects, taking the BMW and getting the hell out of Dodge made sense.
He walked round to the driver’s door, slid into the seat and closed the door. The keys were in the ignition, and he immediately started the engine and switched on the lights, selecting main beam. There was no point in trying to be sneaky, because not even Harry Houdini could have managed to spirit a four-door saloon car past the men waiting in the clearing.
He lowered the door window and placed the Walther on the seat beside him, where he could easily reach it. Then he engaged first gear and began driving slowly down the track.
He was watching where he was heading, making sure he kept the saloon on the track, but most of his concentration was directed toward the wood on his left, waiting to see what would happen when he reached the entrance to the clearing. Would one of the men step out to stop him and ask where he was going, or would they just assume he’d been recalled to the house by Marcus?
A squawk from the dashboard made him look down, and he spotted a small two-way radio on the front of the transmission tunnel. The noise was followed by a short burst of German, so he guessed that somebody, presumably one of the men in the clearing, wasn’t waiting for him to reach them, but was asking him what he was doing.
Clearly he couldn’t reply to the question, so he just kept on driving, but picked up the Walther in his right hand and rested it on his lap, just in case they tried to stop him. Then he saw the two large trees on his left, and knew he’d almost reached the clearing.
The radio barked another string of words at him, which he again ignored.
Then a figure wearing camouflage clothing emerged from beside one of the trees, a pistol held in his right hand, but pointing at the ground, and his left hand raised.
Obediently, Bronson slowed down the BMW slightly and dipped the lights. He lifted the Walther off his lap and rested the end of the suppressor on the door, aiming the weapon at the man as the car approached him.
The figure stepped forward a couple of paces, then seemed almost to recoil as a spark of recognition crossed his face. Immediately he began to raise his pistol, but Bronson was a whole lifetime faster.
He adjusted his aim slightly and squeezed the trigger of the Walther. The pistol coughed in his hand, the suppressor doing its job, and the man beside the car fell backward, the front of his camouflage jacket suddenly turned crimson.
Bronson didn’t wait around. He flicked the lights back to high beam and floored the accelerator pedal. The BMW leaped forward, tires scrabbling for grip on the loose and rutted surface of the track. There was no point in him watching his mirrors, because the night behind him was impenetrably black, and the first warning he’d have if he was being shot at would be the arrival of the bullet.
Instead, he just concentrated on covering the ground as quickly as he could, trying to increase the distance between him and the other man-or other men-in the clearing.
A sudden flash of light from the track behind him caught his eye. Then he heard the bang of a gunshot, the noise echoing all around him. It sounded like a pistol, in which case, unless the man firing it was an Olympic- standard shot, Bronson had nothing to worry about. Few people can hit even a large stationary target with a pistol at much more than twenty yards, and he reckoned he’d already covered well over fifty. Another shot rang out, then a third, but all missed the BMW.
Now he was almost at the end of the track, trying to work out whether to turn left, which would take him past the front of the house, or right, to follow the Rothen road, which he knew curved around in a large loop to join the road he’d driven down to get to Spreenhagen earlier that day.
