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and the mist billowed up more yet. 'You with that bloody great torch on your
back and me with a crossbow?
You know, if this stake-out is a dud, we're going to look awfully - '
'God!' Gower cut him short, dropped to one knee and worked furiously at the
valve on his hose.
'What?' Newton gave a massive start, glared all about, held his loaded
crossbow out in front of him like a shield. 'What?' He couldn't see anything,
but he knew Gower's talent lay in reading the future - especially the
immediate future!
'It's coming!' Gower no longer whispered. In fact, he was shouting. 'It's
coming - NOW!'
At the front of the house, where Guy Roberts and Ben Trask pulled up in
Roberts's truck, Gower's shouting wasn't heard over the throbbing of the
vehicle's engine.
But on the north-facing side of the house it was. Trevor Jordan instinctively
crouched down, then began to run at an angle towards the rear of the building.
Ken Layard, hampered by his flame-thrower load, was slower off the mark.
Layard, stumbling through damp shrubbery, saw Jordan's figure swallowed into a
rolling bank of mist where he ran past the open door in the small outbuilding
- then saw something erupt from that door in a snarling, slavering frenzy!
Bodescu's great dog! Without pause the flame-eyed brute hurled itself into the
mist after Jordan.
'Trevor, behind you!' Layard yelled at the top of his voice. He yanked open
the valve on his hose, jerked the trigger, prayed:
'God, please don't let me burn Trevor!'
A roaring, gouting stream of yellow fire tore open the curtain of mist like a
blowtorch through cobwebs. Jordan was already round the corner of the house,
but Vlad was still in view, bounding purposefully after him. The expanding,
blistering 'V' of heat reached after the dog, touched him, enveloped him but
briefly. Then he, too, was round the corner.
By now, at the front of the house, Guy Roberts and Ben Trask were down from
the truck.
Roberts heard shouting, the roar of a flame-thrower. It was still a minute or
two to five but the attack had started which probably meant that the other
side had started it. Roberts put a police whistle to his lips, gave one short
blast. Now, whatever else was happening, all six INTESP agents would move on
the house together.
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Roberts had the third flame-thrower; he headed straight for the main door of
the house where it stood ajar in the shadow of a columned portico. Trask
followed. He was a human lie-detector; his talent had no application here, but
he was also young, quick-thinking and he knew how to look after himself. As he
made to follow Roberts something caught his attention: a furtive movement
glimpsed in the very corner of his eye.
Twenty-five yards away between billowing banks of mist, a flowing figure had
passed swiftly, silently inside the shell of the old barn. Who or whatever had
gone in there, there would be nothing to stop it from clearing off out of the
grounds once Roberts and Trask were inside the house. 'Oh no you don't!'
Trask grunted. And raising his voice: 'Guy, in the barn there.'
Roberts, at the door of the house, turned to see Trask running at a crouch
towards the barn.
Cursing under his breath, he strode after him.
At the back of Harkley House, Vlad came coughing and mewling out of the mist
and attempted to spring at the three men he found there. The dog was a
blackened silhouette sheathed in smoke and flame, burning even as he launched
himself lopsidedly at Jordan's back.
As Jordan had come running round the corner of the building, Gower had very
nearly triggered his flame-thrower; he'd recognised Jordan only at the last
possible moment. Harvey Newton, on the other hand, had actually - drawn a bead
on the misted figure and was in the act of firing his bolt when Gower cried a
warning and shouldered him aside. The bolt flashed harmlessly off at a tangent
and disappeared in mist and distance. Fortunately Jordan had seen the two men
saw them apparently aiming at him and thrown himself flat. He hadn't seen what
pursued him, however, which even now overshot his sprawled body and arced
overhead in a cloud of sparks and smoulder. Vlad landed awkwardly, gathered
himself to spring at Newton and Gower, and discovered himself forging head-on
into a withering jet of flame from Gower's torch. The dog crumpled to earth, a
blazing, crackling, screaming ball of fire that tried to run in all directions
at once and ran nowhere.
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