Page 69 of Duke

On a quick scan, I counted thirteen, plus the two Temple took out, back in the bedroom.

My face stung, and there was a dull hot throb in my left leg, but I didn’t have time for pain. I heard Anselm firing still, but the sharp crack of the .308 was absent, so I assumed he’d taken the sniper out.

I jogged back into the bedroom to snag my carbine. “Temple, stay here, babe. Same rules as before—lock the door and stay put, and if I don’t say it’s me, you shoot. Got it?”

“Got it.” A brief pause. “Duke? I lo—”

“Don’t say it,” I cut in, leaning into the bathroom doorway to look at Temple. “When you say that to me, we’re gonna be naked and I’m gonna be balls deep in that tight pussy. Until then, don’t say it.”

“Okay, Duke.” Her eyes were wide with fear, her lips trembling, sweat on her forehead, chest heaving.

“You’re fine.”

“I killed them.”

“You did what you had to.”

Anselm cut in over the radio. “Apologies, but this is not yet over.”

I heard a helicopter overhead, low, close, and loud.

“They’ve got a fucking helo?” I shouted. “Motherfucker!”

“They are remarkably well equipped, but unprepared for an encounter with operatives of our caliber.”

I hustled to the front door. Bodies littered the gravel driveway and the front lawn, the Suburban was smoking and on its roof, the Hummer still burning. And yet there were still mercs behind the Wrangler and another Suburban, and now a helicopter was descending, two descent lines dangling from each side.

I angled out the front door, which had been blasted open. Black-clad figures with rifles on their backs slid down the descent lines—I heard the Barrett speak, and one of the bodies went flying. I fired at another and watched him drop. Carbines and HKs chattered from the line of vehicles, rounds smashing into the front porch and the wall and the door, forcing me to duck back under cover.

I heard a truly terrifying sound, then: the chainsaw buzz of a door-mounted SAW.

“You havegotto be fucking kidding me,” I groaned, throwing myself away from the doorway.

The SAW rounds disintegrated the front wall of the house, shredding the door and the porch and the roof, punching holes to reveal spears of daylight.

I heard the Barrett again as I scrambled for the kitchen door. The SAW went silent momentarily, and then started up again, the massive rounds chewing up the house. I threw myself out the kitchen door and came face to face with a stunned merc who’d been trying to do an end-run in through the door I was exiting—my trigger finger was faster, and he fell backward, choking on the hole in his throat. Once again I found myself at the front left corner of the house, staring down a numerically superior force—which now included a fucking helicopter and a goddamned SAW.

The helo was hovering a good two hundred meters away, less than fifty feet off the ground—well within range of my 203, right? I took a knee, calculated the trajectory best I could, and squeezed the trigger.

Kick—thunk—silence—crumpBOOM!

Apparently I’d calculated the trajectory pretty damn accurately, since the grenade smashed into the side of the helo’s engine just beneath the rotor, belching yellow-orange flame, the rotor shredding and tangling. It hit the ground behind the line of vehicles in a blinding, deafening explosion, sending shrapnel flying in every direction. A jagged chunk of metal spun past my head, barely missing my face, to bury in the trunk of a tree several hundred meters away.

I sprinted across open ground, carbine barking three-round bursts, target after target dropping. I deked and juked side to side, throwing off their aim, and even then rounds whined past me, one snapping so close to my ear I felt the sting as it burned past me. I hit the side of the Suburban, hunkering behind it.

“That was an amazing shot,mein Freund,” Anselm said over the radio. “But you have a problem.”

I leaned around the front of the overturned Suburban and poured fire on the operatives. “What’s that?”

“Look behind you.”

I slid to my haunches with my back to the SUV, and my heart sank. A line of mercs were emerging from the woods, having circled wide to flank me. They had the drop on me, ten of them all with rifles trained on me; they were holding their fire as they jogged toward me, which meant they wanted me alive, even after the number of corpses I’d created.

“Can you take ‘em out?” I asked.

“Nein. My angle is no good. I might hit you. By the time I move to a better angle, they will have you.”

“Fuck.”