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  "We'll do it anyway," Falk said. Tal had found a mask with a rubberised bag valve. She was stripping the sterile plastic wrap off an intestinal loop of plastic tubing.

  "This?" she asked.

  "Yeah," he said, and took it. He looked at Milla. "Go take the plastic sheeting off that couch," he said. "Try not to rip it."

  She hurried to obey.

  "Tilt his head back," said Underwood. "You need to open the airway as wide as possible. You'll have to pull the tongue forward and down, most likely, to stop it getting in your way. Use a depressor, if you have one. Or your fingers."

  Falk moved Lenka aside, and got hold of Bigmouse's head. There was frothy blood around the man's lips. He felt cold.

  "I think," said Rash, "I think there might be a pulse now. Really far away."

  Falk nodded. He took the tube that Tal was holding out.

  "Don't slide the tube down his oesophagus," Underwood said quietly. "Don't force it. You don't want to jam it into the wrong pipe, and you don't want him to aspirate stomach contents into his lungs."

  "How will I know if I'm getting it down his oesophagus?" he asked. He was fiddling with the floppy tube, with Bigmouse's lips and tongue.

  "I don't fucking know!" Rash replied.

  "Just slide it in," said Underwood calmly. "Do the best you can."

  Falk began to insert the tube. His hands were trembling. It was like trying to feed a snake through a wet sports sock.

  Was this how the snake had ended up in his own stomach?

  He fed it in further. He felt a tremor that might have been a slight gag reflex in Bigmouse's throat muscles.

  "Go on, go on," said Rash.

  "Is it in yet?" Underwood asked.

  "Almost," said Falk. He glanced over his shoulder at the girls. Milla had pulled a large sheet of thick, clear wrapping free.

  "Lay that out on the floor," he said to her in Russian. "Lay it flat, then fold it over several times, double or triple layers, but keep the sheet long. We need to make a sling to carry him. Like a hammock. Yeah?"

  Milla nodded. She and Lenka started to flatten the plastic and lay it out.

  "Okay, it's not going to go in any further," said Falk.

  "Fine," said Underwood. "Tape it off to his cheek or chin, then connect the end to the mask and start pumping the bag."

  "Tape!" said Falk. Tal fished a roll out of the box, and started to peel off strips of it. Falk secured the tube end to Bigmouse's face. The tube pushed Bigmouse's mouth open in a half-gape, so he looked like a man gagging as he tried to either swallow or regurgitate an eel.

  "Give me the mask," Falk said.

  Rash handed it to him. It took a second to discover how the plastic connector mated, then he pressed it in place and anchored it with the strap and more tape.

  "Squeeze it," he told Rash. "The bag, the bag."

  Rash started to pump the bag. There was a nasty, sucking, crackling noise as air went in and out of Bigmouse's slack body. Falk checked Bigmouse's throat, pressed his fingertips in.

  "That
is
a pulse," he said. "That's definitely a pulse."

  He looked at the others.

  "Okay, we're going to lift him. You and me, Rash. Tal, please, keep working the bag."

  He realised he'd said it all in Russian.

  "I got the gist," said Rash, getting his arms around Bigmouse's lower legs as Tal took over with the mask.

  Falk got his hands under Bigmouse's shoulders.

  "Support his head as we lift," he told Tal in Russian. She nodded.

  "On three. One, two, three."

  They got him off the couch, and shuffled him across the carpet until they were standing over the laid-out rectangle of plastic sheet.

  "Down, gently," Falk said. They lowered him. All the while, Tal kept the bag pumping with her left hand and cupped the back of Bigmouse's skull with her right. Then he was flat on the plastic.

  "You do this," Tal said to Lenka, demonstrating how to keep the pump going. "You do this and don't stop. Milla and me, we lift the feet."

  "Okay," said Falk.

  Rash saw what they were doing.

  "I'll get the heavy end," he said to Falk. "You take point and walk us out."

  "Sure?" asked Falk.

  "It's your fucking show," said Rash.

  Falk got up and retrieved the Koba. Rash clamped his PAP to his plate, then crouched beside Bigmouse's head and gathered in the hem of the sheeting and wrapped it around his right hand for grip. Milla and Tal did the same at the feet, pulling the plastic into a papoose around Bigmouse's form. Lenka kept pumping the bag the way she'd been shown.

  "Okay, let's lift," said Rash.

  Between them, Rash and the two girls raised Bigmouse in the plastic sling. It was heavy and unwieldy, but much easier than trying to carry him loose.

  "Move," said Rash. "I don't want to just stand here."

  Falk led the way out through the hall into the annexe, moving slowly so they could keep up, struggling along under the burden.

  "What's the situation?" asked Underwood. "Falk? What's going on? Is he breathing?"

  "Leaving is more of a priority," Falk replied quietly.

  "What?" asked Rash.

  "Nothing," Falk replied. Quietly, he added, "Put Cleesh back on."

  "What did you say?" Rash called.

  "Just keep it coming," said Falk.

  Preben and Valdes had blown out the candles on their way through the annexe, but amber light was flooding into the darkness through the windows and skylights. Falk adjusted his glares for low light, kept the Koba up. He could feel cold, outdoor air on his face, smell the damp. He could smell burning too, the falling cinders. He edged down towards the annexe exit, with the carry team shuffling along behind him. The plastic sheeting was making so much fucking noise.

  The back door was ajar. Amber night outside, cool, rainstorm air. Already, the scents of petrochemicals and smoke were evident. A few snowflake coals, glowing orange, floated past.

  Behind the house there was a turfed area growing thick with invasive meadow grasses, a gulley, and then the dark woods beyond. To his right was the extension of the service block, a structure containing a bulk rainwater tank and filtration system, and several large composting tubs. To his left, a row of oil or grit drums against the wall, and the corner of the house. There was no sign of Valdes or Preben. Falk could hear engines, loud, approaching.

  Did they have time to move? Could they get through the door and across the grass into the trees? Could they disappear before the visitors arrived?

  He was actually going to try it, but Preben appeared, to his left, running back from the end of the house, shaking his head.

  "They're already at the front," he hissed. "Two trucks, squads in each one. They're stopping, dismounting."

  "Shit. Where's Valdes?"

  "Fuck knows!"

  The third truck suddenly came into view. Passing the others, it had swung around to the rear of the house. Its lights were still off. It came through the long grasses, rollering the brush and damp turf flat with its heavy, crossterrain wheels. Preben and Falk ducked back into the doorway. The SObild pulled up almost opposite the door. Men jumped out. In the shadow of the house, headlamps came on, pooling splashes of blue-white light in front of the vehicle and across the outblock and water plant. They could smell the heat and fumes of the truck. Blurds began swirling excitedly in the headlights.

  "Back! Back!" Preben whispered at Rash and the girls. They edged their cargo backwards down the annexe hall.

  Voices raised outside. Falk tightened his grip on the Koba. The SObild driver, the squad leader, had jumped down, pulling an assault weapon into place on a shoulder sling, racking it. He was issuing instructions. The men getting out of the truck with him began to fan out. Some were coming right for the doorway. It was so matter-offact, so routine. The ordinariness of it made it so much more sinister.
Go in there. Look in the door. If you see anybody,
shoot them. We've got things to do.

  "Get the doorway!" Falk heard the leader shout in Russian. "Stick a slapcharge in there! Get the place checked! Pera, go around the side!"

  There was no hope of hiding. In a second, a concussion charge was going to come bouncing in through the door, bowled underarm.

  This was what the Hard Place really meant.

  Falk glanced at Preben. He could see how fixed and intent the man's expression was. Preben understood that they had entered, miserably, one of those non-negotiable states where even fear was no longer currency.

  Falk tapped the thumper in Preben's hands, then indicated a direction to the right of the door, the outblock.

  "Show me how to do this," Falk whispered. Preben nodded, but Falk had been talking to Nestor Bloom.

  He stepped out of the door. The Koba was already at his shoulder. Coming right towards him were two Bloc troopers in rugged black blate and webbing. They had been advancing to take positions on either side of the doorway, to check and enter. Both had Kobas. One had a slapcharge in his hand, produced from his pouch.

  Falk put the first burst into the other man's face, because slapcharge-man was fumbling. The other man's weapon was ready. It was intensely short range, no more than three yards. Falk aimed high because the man had decent ballistic plate. It was instinct.

  His target's head pulped in a spray of pink meat and bone, like a watermelon smashing. His face disintegrated before it had time to register anything, surprise, alarm, anger. The man walloped down onto his back, his feet coming up as though they had been expertly swept and lifted.

  Falk was already turning to fire a burst at the second man. Not so clean. The shots ripped across his chest blate, spinning him up and around like a street dancer executing a roll drop. The slapcharge sailed out his hand. He made a huge
oooff
grunt as the rounds struck him, like the comedy gasp of a winded cartoon character.

  Preben almost pushed Falk out of the way as he followed him through the doorway. He was turning right, his boots sliding in the wet grass. The thumper cannoned two grenade rounds in the direction of the compost tubs and the outblock. The Bloc squad members who had been spreading that way wheeled around at the bark of Falk's first burst, surprised, horrified, guns coming into line. Two of them got off shots. One flurry zipped past in front of Falk, whiplash cracks. The other burst hit the doorframe and house wall beside Preben.

  The grenades exploded. The first hit the outblock wall, and the compressed force threw three of the men across the yard as though they had been tossed from a speeding vehicle. The other grenade detonated as it struck the sternum of the man whose shots had just missed Preben. The blastforce drove him down into the ground like a peg, and left his upper body and arms mangled and burning. The Koba clutched in his scorched hands emptied its clip, crazy and jigging, killing the side of the house in a shower of masonry dust, plastic flecks and shattering shingles.

  Falk kept moving. If a bullet was going to find him, it would find him. He wasn't going to stop and wait for it, or cower in the hope it would miss. Once he had emerged from the back door, he broke stride only once to shoot the two men face-to-face, then kept bolting, running towards the truck. The Bloc squad leader and the two other men with him could have shot Falk easily, but simple animal instinct made them turn and run. Falk was running, they should run too. They didn't even think about it. It was pure threat response. By the time their brains had processed the situation, a synapse
zap
later, they were turning away, out of position, all advantage lost. Falk shot one with a burst that split the man's back blate up the centre line and ploughed him down onto his face.

  The leader made it to the truck's cab. The door was still open. He grappled to haul himself up and in, desperate for cover. Falk's shots hammered across his backside, his spine, the back of his thighs, the cab frame, the door panel. Metal sparked on metal. The leader cried out a sharp noise that had a right-angle of pain in it, and fell back out of the cab, loose, heavy, bouncing off the frame, the step rail, the wheel arch, shoulders, hips and elbows glancing off everything on his way down. He ended up with his back against the SObild's big front wheel, one leg folded under him, staring squarely at Falk as he came at him. Somehow, he still had his Koba. It had stayed on his body because of the strap. He fired. Falk never found out where the bullets went. It was wild, inadequate shooting. The knee-length grass around him hissed and cracked and bloomed with clouds of shredded fibre. Falk fired. He hit the seated squad leader in the face and chest. Blood went up the wheel and the wheel arch like it had been applied with a paintgun. The man's head banged against the wheel arch repeatedly, hammered by the impacts. His mouth was open in a silent yell. Somehow, involuntarily, he fired again. Falk felt a savage sting like a cane's lash across his left hip.

  Falk kept firing. The top two-thirds of the leader's head ruptured and plastered the wheel with gore and pulp. Only the lower jaw and tongue remained intact, slack, disbelieving.

  Falk fell down a few feet from the dead man. The pain in his hip flared like a furnace-white poker was jabbing into it.

  "Fuck! Fuck!" he screamed.

  The third man had split past the front end of the SObild, running for the woods. He turned, favoured by the halfcover of the truck, and aimed the M3A he was lugging. But Preben, moving out from the doorway behind Falk, had already adjusted, and pumped a grenade in the man's direction. It dropped into the long grass about five yards in front of the truck and blew grass stalks, roots and all, in every direction. The blast shock lifted the Bloc national, threw him into the SObild's front grille, broke his face, his ribs, his collar bones, his neck. He rebounded and tumbled over in the grass.

  Preben reached Falk, and lifted him by his blate straps.

  "Get up!"

  "I'm okay! I'm wealthy!"