Crisis Four Read Online Free PDF

yelled again. ‘Sarah! Sarah!’
    He responded by lifting his head slightly to scream out even louder. It gave me a momentary window. I head-butted him, trying to make contact wherever I could. He did the same. Then something happened that moved the situation on. You don’t normally feel pain during a fight, but I felt a stinging in my left ear. His teeth were sinking in. I could actually hear the skin break and then the sound of him straining to bite harder. The fucker had a gristly bit of my ear lobe in his mouth and was starting to pull his head back.
    I felt the capillary bleeding at once, warm and wet, splashing the side of my cheek as his heavy breathing spat it out. He was in a frenzy, growling at me through clenched teeth, snot and saliva. I was still trying to get my hands down towards my leg so I could reach my pistol, which wasn’t helping keep my ear intact.
    I managed to get my legs around his gut. I tried to squeeze, but could only just about get my feet together. I felt the snorting from his nose move away from my face slightly, which wasn’t good news for my ear. Then his head jerked back, taking part of the lobe with him. The pain felt like a blowtorch on the side of my head, but now that he’d moved back a bit I could start to get my hands around his head. I could see the blood on his face and snot running down from his nose as he fought to breathe through his still-gritted teeth. My fingers reached his eyes and he squeezed me up even more, shaking his head and screaming as I began to get a good hold on his face and dig deeper with my thumbs. He tried to bite my fingers. I moved my right hand so I had a flat palm underneath his chin, then switched my left to just below the crown of his head and grabbed a fistful of his hair.
    You can’t just whip a head round to break someone’s neck. The design is too good for that. What you have to do is screw it off, as if you were untwisting the cap on a jar of Marmite. You’re trying to take the head off at the atlas, the small joint at the base of the skull. It’s relatively easy if you’re doing it against somebody who’s standing, because if you get them off balance, their body is going down and you can twist and turn at the same time, so their momentum works against them. But I couldn’t do that; all I could do was keep my legs around him and try to keep him in one place.
    I managed to get my boots interlocked, and at last I could squeeze and push down with my legs, at the same time twisting up with my arms as hard as I could. I kept on turning as we both screamed at each other. The fucker didn’t like it; he knew what was going on, but fortunately for me he was too old and too fat to do much about it.
    His neck went without too much of a crack. He slumped down, and there wasn’t much noise coming from him; there wasn’t even a body jerk. He just went very still. My hands were covered in blood, snot and saliva. I rolled over and kicked him off.
    My weapon was only about five feet away. I picked it up and checked that the magazine was on tight, and that I still had a round in the chamber. I started to move back to Sarah, then stopped. I ran back to the Syrian. I could hear firing again, and people screaming and shouting, both Brits and Arabs, maybe just thirty metres away. It’s funny how these details take a back seat when you’re worrying about other things.
    I scrabbled around and eventually found the piece of my ear still in his mouth. I couldn’t be arsed trying to stop the bleeding on the side of my head because I knew it wouldn’t; capillary bleeding goes on for ever. It would sort itself out. But I would want to get the severed bit sewn back on. It wouldn’t be too good with a chunk missing because I’d have a VDM (visual distinguishing mark); but worse than that, I knew a couple of people with bits of their ear missing, and it looked fucking ugly. The only alternative was to have a 1980s Kevin Keegan haircut to cover it up.
    I got back to