Hunters, Matt Rogers [pdf ebook reader .txt] 📗

taking cover behind the giant slab, blocked from the line of sight. Her hands were still over her ears. She looked up at him. She was safe. Unharmed.

He didn’t have the opportunity to breathe out.

However bad the blast had been in here, outside it would have been far worse. They’d carved out a narrow window of opportunity and to sacrifice it with complacency and hesitation would be to die.

King ran for the broad front door, pumping his arms and legs, putting his all into it. He screeched to a halt in front of the big wooden slab and snatched a SIG Sauer P226 MK25 out of the pot plant in the entranceway. It was already loaded with a full mag, a lifeline for emergencies.

This was an emergency.

He flicked the safety off, threw the door open and saw two silhouettes in full tactical gear maybe a dozen feet from the front porch. They were shaking their heads in unison, trying to clear the cobwebs. They wore matte black combat helmets with tinted visors but the flashbang had still rocked their world.

King noted the Kevlar vests and the bulletproof helmets, identified their exposed necks.

He put a round through each throat, his movements unconscious from daily conditioning, then slammed the door shut before he even caught sight of the bodies falling to the lawn.

It didn’t matter that he’d fired the first kill shots. If mercenaries in full tactical kit were storming the estate, there was no chance their goal was to wound.

They were here to neutralise.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

Bullets shredded through the front door, fired from further down the lawn near the perimeter wall, but King had anticipated that. He was already pressed into the corner of the entranceway, minimising the surface area available to hit. Rounds from automatic rifles blew chunks out of the brick surrounding the door, but none made it through in the initial burst. The gunshots were unsuppressed, like a thunderstorm in the estate, and King knew without a shadow of a doubt their time in Vegas was over if they made it out of here.

He sensed commotion in the kitchen and stuck his head around the corner to assess.

He counted five people and his adrenaline spiked.

Three were brawling with kill-or-be-killed intensity.

17

Slater went from calm to rippling with adrenaline in milliseconds, but he was used to that.

He watched King sprint at the window and catch the grenade on the first bounce. He missed the rest of it because he’d already grabbed Alexis around the waist, hurled her off her stool and covered her with his own body. Then he jammed his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut and—

Bang.

The flashbang erupted, but it mustn’t have happened in the kitchen because he could still hear and see, and he forced Alexis down to the floor for her own safety and spun to see King already at the front door, wrenching it open and firing out through the slit with a SIG Sauer that had somehow materialised in his hand.

Slater thought, They’ll breach from multiple access points.

That’s what he’d do.

He ran past Violetta, took a moment to check she was okay, and made it to the hallway entrance that branched off from the kitchen. It led to a number of spare rooms, including the de facto armoury, and culminated in a side door leading out to the estate grounds. The door was locked, but that wouldn’t stop them from—

Deafening gunfire roared as rounds laced the front of the house. Slater couldn’t hear a thing but he pulled up against the side of the archway and pressed his shoulder to it to hopefully lay low for long enough to tap into the element of surprise. He inwardly cursed the poor positioning — there were backup guns in multiple rooms, but none around the kitchen island.

He sensed the presence of a hostile body, and his vision narrowed to an impenetrable tunnel.

Wait.

Wait.

Now.

The first mercenary stepped through the archway, coming out from the hallway, having breached the side door. He spotted Alexis and Violetta shielding themselves from gunfire behind the kitchen island, and stepped forward into a firing position. He raised his assault rifle. It was a CQBR Carbine, a variant of the M4 with a more compact barrel, designed as the name suggested for “Close Quarters Battle.”

Slater grabbed him as he stepped into the kitchen, pinning the rifle to his chest, and heaved him up with the strength of a near-professional powerlifter. The guy came off his feet and Slater pitched his momentum forward and literally hurled him head-first off his feet. The guy managed to stumble once, then lost his balance and fell face-first into the hard edge of the kitchen island. The countertop cracked the visor of his combat helmet, and as he crumpled to the floor blood geysered from underneath the broken face shield.

Slater realised the impact had driven the broken pieces into his face, maiming or killing him. He would be useless.

Another mercenary followed, practically colliding with Slater as he charged into the kitchen. The trajectory meant he hadn’t had time to stop, blindly following his comrade into the fray. It was noble, but Slater grabbed the man’s identical CQBR and simply ripped it out of his hands like the highest-stakes tug-of-war imaginable.

The guy tried to throw a punch but he was clad in bulky Kevlar and his vision was inhibited by the combat helmet he wore, so Slater sidestepped it and thundered an elbow into the gap between the top of his vest and the bottom of his helmet.

He felt the hard point of bone crunch through throat tissue, and the man went down choking and spluttering.

Slater dived onto the first man — the maimed, bleeding one — pinning him to the floor, and ripped the CQBR out of his hands. He rolled off the guy, who he only now realised was unconscious, and spun to meet a new mercenary clambering through the shattered kitchen window.

Slater shot him once in the thigh, and the