His hand shot out and trapped the guard’s hand where it snatched at the pistol, jamming it back down into its holster. At the same time he drove his knee into the man’s groin and butted him in the face. The guard made some noise but not much. And then he was out like a light.
Harry set another charge right there in the corridor; but now he noticed just how badly his hands were shaking, how profusely he was sweating. He wondered how much time he had left, considered the possibility of getting caught in his own fireworks.
He made one more jump — straight into the Château’s central Duty Room — and in the instant of emerging caught the Duty Officer a blow that knocked him clean out of his swivel chair. The man hadn’t even had time to look up. Moulding the rest of his UHEP onto the top of the desk between the radio and a switchboard, Harry fixed a final detonator and straightened up — and looked straight down the barrel of a Kalashnikov rifle!
On the other side of the raised counter, unnoticed, a young security guard had been dozing in a chair. This was obvious from his gaping mouth and dazed expression. The sound of the Duty Officer hitting the floor must have roused him. Harry didn’t know how awake he was, how much he’d seen or understood, but he did know he was in big trouble. He’d only set one minute on the last’ detonator!
As the guard gabbled a startled question in gasping Russian, Harry shrugged and made a sour face, pointed at a spot just behind the other. It was an old ploy, he knew, but the old ones are often the best. And sure enough it worked. The guard jerked his head that way, turned the ugly snout of his weapon, too —And when he turned back Harry was no longer there.
Which was just as well, for his ten minutes were up.
The pillboxes went up like Chinese firecrackers, blowing their concrete lids off and bursting their walls. The first explosion — the intense flash if not the blast itself, which was minimal at this distance — caused Zek Föener to stagger and cower back where she was about to climb up into Gerenko’s jeep. Then the crack and rumbling roar sounded, and the earth gave the first and least of many shudders. Anti-personnel land mines, fatally disturbed in the fields around, began to go off, spouting fountains of dirt and turf. It was like a bombing raid.
‘What?’ Gerenko turned in his seat and looked back, couldn’t believe what he was seeing. ‘The pillboxes?’ He shielded his eyes against the blaze of light.
‘Harry Keogh!’ Zek breathed, but to herself.
Then the main building went; its lower walls of massive stone seemed to inhale and go on inhaling. They bowed outwards, and finally blew apart in white light and golden fire! This time Zek did feel the blast: it tossed her down on the road and stung her hands where she held them up before her face.
The Château Bronnitsy was slowly settling down into itself. A sandcastle caught in the first wave of a swelling tide, it crumbled like so much chalk. Volcanic fires burned in its guts, and spewed out through its cratered walls; and as the upper storeys and towers fell inwards, so there came secondary blasts to throw them up again. Already the Château was a total ruin, but then the big one in the Duty Room added its voice to the cacophony of destruction.
By this time Zek had managed to climb into the jeep beside Gerenko. They felt a huge fist batter at the rear of the vehicle, shove it forward; felt their ears savaged by the massive detonation, shuttered their eyes against a sudden incendiary glare. A brilliant fireball like the breath of hell turned everything to a negative photograph, blotted out the entire scene and made night into blinding day, then slowly faded and revealed the truth — that the Château Bronnitsy was no more. Bits of it, from pebbles to huge blocks of concrete, still rained to earth. Black smoke curled up across the moon; white and yellow fire seethed and roiled in the gutted ruins; a mere handful of figures stumbled about like crippled flies, trying to make their way outwards from the centre of the inferno.