Chapter 36

"Fuck!" Eva gasped, throwing herself against the aluminum shed with a sharp bang. She coughed and wiped her mouth with the back of her right hand, holding her Glock 17 in the left.

"We're almost there," Wolfgang said, checking the magazine in his own pistol and slapping it back into place. "I've got three rounds."

"I've got two," Eva breathed. "Do you know where she is?"

"In the barn," Wolfgang answered and then shrugged. "I think. Where's Kurt?"

"He's down," Eva managed a weak smile. "I took Klein as well. He was very surprised."

"Heh!" Wolfgang smiled back at her, turning his body towards the shed. He took a deep breath and jerked his head out for a fraction of a second and then did it again.

"Fifty meters open ground," he said. "There's a tractor and a wooden fence, that's all. A hundred meters to the barn."

"Yeah," Eva nodded, blinking at the sweat in her eyes and picturing the layout from the briefing photographs they'd studied. "That fucking DSR..." she breathed, " ... Sometimes I really hate your girlfriend."

"I'll go first," Wolfgang said. "When she takes the shot, you follow me. Keep your head down, huh?"

"Always," Eva agreed.

Wolfgang crouched for a moment in his standard Bundeswehr fatigues, devoid of any patches or insignia, and without hesitating took off at run towards the old, rusted farm tractor and the barn that lay another fifty meters beyond it. He zigged left and right and right again as a sudden explosion of gravel blossomed bright orange less than three meters behind him. There was no sound and no muzzle flash, of course, and the only reason he was still moving was because Veronique had expected him to go left again.

As soon as she saw the shot, Eva took off, sprinting to follow her brother, running at a crouch to cover the distance in less than a dozen seconds, slowed mainly by her own jinks and jukes to confuse the sniper's aim. Even so, a round went past Eva's head close enough that she could hear the air being rent by the projectile's swift passage. She dove beneath the tractor as another shot hit the steel chassis above her.

"See her?" she asked Wolfgang. He'd removed a small range scope from his pocket and was looking through it.

"No," he answered. "It's dark inside. She's in the loft."

"She'll move," Eva predicted and her brother nodded. "We don't know what's in there either."

"Scared?" Wolfgang teased her and Eva gave him a withering look.

"Bored," she replied. "Let's go kill the bitch so we can go home."

"You want to go first this time?"

"Yeah," Eva nodded. "Left side. There's two ... three windows, I think, and the door."

"Okay," Wolfgang said, tucking his scope away.

She sprinted across the dirt towards the barn ahead of her. She danced left and right, but there was nothing to evade. Veronique must have given up her sniper rifle and now the woman would be waiting someplace inside the large structure with her pistol at the ready. That wasn't a thought to comfort Eva, since she knew only too well how skilled Veronique was with the Glock 17 she carried.

Eva reached the side of the barn, constructed of stone for three meters and then wood for another ten above that before reaching the steeply sloped roof. It was a broad structure and roughly square, used over the last hundred plus years to house the necessary animals and equipment to operate the place as a working dairy farm. The farm had been sold some ten years before, but the new owners had little interest in agriculture.

Wolfgang soon joined his sister and they approached the door warily. It was a large, sliding door mounted on rusty rails. The windows were high on the walls, three of them, all broken with jagged shards of dirty glass jutting from the frames.

"Take a look?" Eva wondered, eying one of the windows two meters above her head and Wolfgang frowned. "Didn't think so. Hi-low. I'll go right, you go left, yeah?"

"Okay," he nodded.

The door was unlatched and one good shove would slide it open far enough for the two of them to enter, or so he hoped. This wasn't the scenario they'd wanted, chasing down Veronique in an unfamiliar building, but that was precisely why she was in there and they had little choice in the matter. The woman was their objective and orders were orders.

"On three..." Wolfgang breathed. "One ... Two ... Go!"

He shoved the door open to the left as Eva crouched low and stepped into the barn. She spun to the right, holding her pistol in her left fist, cupped in the palm of her right hand. She scanned the barn quickly, turning to her left as Wolfgang did the same thing, crouched now as well, but aiming and looking higher as turned to his right. It took them only a second and then they were moving, Wolfgang to take a position against the side of a wooden stall to the left and Eva to the right, kneeling behind a stack of 50Kg feed bags, old and moldy and ripped open by mice.