Rickard was no slouch. He gave me a couple punches of his own. One of them got me in my right ear, the other dangerously close to the eye socket. I head-butted him, and he gave me one right back. He kneed at my groin, but I jammed his leg between mine and forced him against the wall. We were too close for clean strikes now and we both clawed. I got my fingers in his nostrils and forced his head back. Rickard stuck his thumb in my already stinging eye. Finally I managed to bang his gun against the wall and he released it. But that gave him two functioning hands as weapons. He punched me in the ribs. Air left my lungs, but I wasn’t about to back away now. If I did that he might draw that blade he’d been holding earlier and then I’d be in real trouble. Instead, I sank my teeth into his shoulder at the exact point where my bullet had nicked him moments before. Rickard howled, and I echoed his scream through my clamped teeth.

We were both in a frenzy, unmindful of the form standing in the open door behind us. We were too intent on ripping lumps from each other. But even in that primal state something impinged upon my senses. The blocking shadow in the doorway suddenly fled, allowing light to spill inside from the passageway. On the beam of light I saw the tumbling cylindrical object arch toward us as if it was moving in super-slow motion.

I experienced one of those snapshot moments.

L2A2.

My subconscious mind identified the object. It took another split second for it to push the military term to its hiding place in the back of my head and come up with the layman’s name. Hand grenade.

Dear God!

I don’t know which of us spoke those words. Maybe we both did. Because, in the next instant we spilled apart just as the grenade landed in the gap we’d made.

The L2A2 is an anti-personnel weapon, a tin-plated fragmentation device with a coil of notched wire and packed with 170 grams of highly explosive filling. It is designed to kill anyone in a radius of up to eighteen yards. The room we were in was no more than eight or nine yards square. It didn’t give either of us very good odds at survival.

There were only seconds until detonation.