The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Six gunmen bulled into the lobby, deliberately slamming the innkeeper against the wall. Evie Hathaway stood at the doorway to the family apartment, glaring at the L’Escorials.

Ramon Luria entered behind his men. He looked at Evie, then Georg. “Where are the Frisians?” he asked.

“They’re gone—” Georg began.

Ramon nodded. Two of the gunmen grabbed Hathaway by the wrists.

“—twenty minutes ago when—” Georg said, his voice climbing a note with every syllable.

Ramon punched the innkeeper in the belly with all the strength of his pudgy body. Georg’s breath whooped out; his face lost color.

“The Astras sent for them!” Evie cried. “They went to the Astras with nothing but their guns!”

Ramon turned from the husband and slapped the wife. It was a full-armed blow which Evie could have dodged had she wished to. Instead she accepted the whack, knowing that there was no escape but death from whatever Luria chose to do.

Three scarlet armored cars were in the street, their armament pointed at Hathaway House. Several score gunmen milled around the vehicles. If the tribarrels and rocket launcher ever opened up, shrapnel and fragments of the facade would kill more of the L’Escorials than the Frisians could in the first few seconds.

Evie’s head rocked back. She put a hand to her cheek, then snatched it away as a sign of weakness.

“Go on,” she said. “Go on! The Astras came for them twenty minutes ago. Hitting me won’t change that!”

Ramon panted from his exertion. “Search the place,” he ordered his men generally. “Search it all!”

Four men of the group who’d entered with him scattered. Three went upstairs while the last entered the kitchen with his sub-machine gun outstretched like a cattle prod.

More L’Escorials stamped through the outer doorway, multiplying the number of searchers without adding organization to the process. One gunman began opening the console’s access panels, though only a child or a midget could have fit into the enclosed volume.

“Hey, there’s a ladder up to the roof!” a man called from the top of the stairwell.

The Frisians faced the barrels that formed the side of their concealment nearest the trapdoor. Each of them but the intelligence officer held a weapon ready.

Barbour started to pick up the sub-machine gun on the floor beside him; Coke laid a hand on his and shook his head. Barbour nodded understanding and let the weapon lie. The chance that the intelligence officer would do something noisily wrong was greater than any help his unskilled shooting would provide if the situation blew up.

Sten Moden carried three shoulder weapons, two slung and the last in his hand where it looked like a pistol by comparison to his size. There wasn’t room in the narrow hide for the rocket launcher he favored, and the big missiles would be useless in a point-blank shootout anyway.

Three L’Escorials came out onto the roof clumsily. Each of them climbed with one hand and waved his weapon through the trapdoor ahead of himself. The first man out shouted in alarm as the next prodded him in the back with a fléchette gun.

“They been up here,” a L’Escorial noted. “Hey, look at this!”

He’d found the panoramic camera Daun glued to the coping of the facade weeks before. It was a relatively large unit, about the size of a clenched fist, and Niko hadn’t tried to conceal it. The camera provided a view of the entire streetscape—distorted at the edges, but correctable into normal images by the console’s processing power.

“It’s a bomb!” cried the man with the fléchette gun. Why he thought so was beyond imagining, especially since the next thing he did was put the muzzle of his weapon against the camera and fire.

If it had been an explosive device, it would have detonated and killed all three L’Escorials. Instead, the gun’s enormous muzzle blast blew the camera across the street in tiny fragments. The osmium fléchette left a split and a crater in the facade of L’Escorial headquarters.

“What’s that?” a gunman in the street screamed. Another man emptied an automatic shotgun upward, scarring the reinforced concrete of Hathaway House. Dust and sparks flew past the coping.

“You bloody fool!” a L’Escorial snarled—correctly—at the man with the fléchette gun.

“Hey!” called a man through the trapdoor. “You dickheads up there? Come on back, we’re moving!”

Two of the L’Escorials moved quickly to the trapdoor. The third demanded, “What do you mean, we’re moving?”

“I mean we’re going to take out the Astras once and for all!” cried the man below. “Pepe just gave the order!”

The last of the three gunmen jounced down the ladder. Coke waited another thirty seconds, then reached for the latch holding the side of the barrel closed. Bob Barbour touched his hand. “Not yet,” the intelligence officer whispered. “I’ll tell you when they’re all clear of the building.”