by Adam Hamdy
Once out of the city, he rode cautiously, crawling along flooded, slick roads, and after two hours he finally saw the RPM bar on the horizon. Situated in the woods just beyond Fall City, local police intelligence reports identified the place as the Red Wolves hangout.
There were hardly any vehicles out here and the roads were awash with run-off. He slowed to take a bend and when he straightened up, he saw the RPM bar directly ahead. The lights were blazing brightly in the storm, and the parking lot was packed with bikes and trucks.
Wollerton slowed as he approached, and cruised past the bar to see it crowded with people. He pulled over a short distance further on, killed the engine and wheeled his bike into the trees. Once it was safely concealed, he walked back through the forest until he found a vantage point directly opposite the bar. Sheltered from the worst of the weather by the densely packed needles of a tall pine, Wollerton settled in to watch and wait.
Chapter 110
‘What’s the range?’ Leila asked.
‘Six hundred and fifty miles,’ Ellen replied.
Leila and Clifton sat behind the two engineers, who were each piloting one of the drones over the Pacific. Two dozen LCD screens were ranged in front of Ellen and Marty. About a third of them displayed footage from on-board cameras, and the others showed telemetry data and satellite positioning. One screen gave the position of the aircraft relative to the GPS signal of the Elite Voyager. Pearce and Brigitte were six miles from the ship.
‘Top speed?’ Leila asked.
‘Two hundred and eighty miles per hour,’ Marty responded.
‘Flight ceiling?’
‘Twelve thousand feet,’ Ellen replied.
‘Payload?’
‘Will you let them concentrate?’ Pearce said, his voice broadcast by speakers built into the command console.
‘Oh, it’s no problem,’ Ellen remarked. ‘Everything’s pretty much automated. The AI is keeping you on course and if we lose satellite uplink, the drones are programmed to hover until it’s re-established or you take manual control.’
‘We’re ninety seconds out,’ Marty informed them all. ‘You might want to cut the chatter.’
‘Copy that,’ Pearce replied.
He was reclining in the cockpit of his drone, which was speeding above the waves at an altitude of no more than fifty feet. Brigitte was twenty feet away from him and the aircraft kept perfect formation, the AI making them rise, fall and turn together. The heads-up display projected a holographic overlay of the Elite Voyager, which was now some four miles distant, along with telemetry data. The cockpit lights were set low, and when Pearce looked at Brigitte, he saw little more than a shadow against the roiling clouds. The rain whipped the canopy, but the foul weather didn’t seem to affect the ride. The cockpit moved independently of the hull, and Pearce could feel the rapid adjustments of the servos, working hard to keep him level.
The Elite Voyager loomed on the horizon; Pearce made out bridge, cabin and running lights through the storm. The vast ship was rising and falling on the huge waves, and Pearce hoped the drone was as good as the two mouthy engineers had indicated.
‘We’re bringing you in on the aft deck,’ Marty said through a speaker concealed somewhere in the cockpit.
The noise of the elements was muted by extensive soundproofing. Pearce had been right to liken the craft to a luxury car. It certainly felt more like a Bentley than a chopper. He wondered how soldiers would react to the craft, and had little doubt the Department of Defence would strip out all refinement as a cost-cutting measure if these drones ever saw front-line service.
The drone climbed as it approached the Elite Voyager and a marker materialized on the heads-up display’s 3D rendition of the vessel. As they rose high enough to see the aft deck, Pearce caught sight of something that set his heart racing. A large motorboat was tied to the far side of the Elite Voyager. A group of armed men in fatigues were marshalling crew members, who’d formed a human chain and were transferring packing crates to the motorboat.
One of the men looked up, and Pearce recognized him as Elroy Lang, the man who’d broken Ziad out of Al Aqarab. He saw Elroy bark a command, and three of his comrades raised their assault rifles and opened fire.
Chapter 111
Sparks flared and danced around the sky as bullets hit the drone’s rotors. Pearce heard a fearsome roar and turned to see Brigitte’s Vulcan cannon rattle off a hundred rounds per second. The tracer line cut across the aft deck like a laser and shredded four of Elroy’s men. Everyone else scattered.
‘Scott,’ Leila said urgently. ‘Seven o’clock.’
Pearce looked to his seven and saw a man on the aft deck of the large motorboat with what looked like a PSRL-1 shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Pearce used the heads-up display to target him and opened fire, but the rocket blazed and took to the sky an instant before Pearce’s Vulcan tore through the man and much of the deck.
‘Manual control,’ Pearce yelled, and the display signalled he now had command.
He pushed the joystick down and banked right into a stomach-lurching descent, as counter-measures burst all around him. He felt the rotors cut out and the craft plummeted towards the Elite Voyager. As the aft deck rushed to meet him, Pearce pulled back on the stick, and the rotors kicked in, stabilizing the craft.
He heard an explosion and glanced up to see one of Brigitte’s rotors on fire. Her drone spun wildly out of control and dropped rapidly.
‘I’m hit! I’m hit!’ Brigitte’s voice came over the radio.
Pearce watched in horror as her drone fell towards the churning waves, one of its rotors burning, the two either side of it broken and misshapen like the gnarly branches of a rotten tree.
‘Scott, they’re leaving,’ Leila said, and Pearce realized Elroy Lang was mustering his men onto the motorboat, and his crew were preparing to cast off.
Pearce was torn. If that shipment made land, thousands of lives would be put at risk.
‘Mayday,’ Brigitte said. ‘Mayday. I’m going down. I’m—’
Her distress call was cut short when her drone hit the water.
Pearce knew what he had to do. He descended towards Brigitte’s drone, which was slowly sinking beneath the waves.
‘Notify the coastguard,’ Pearce said. ‘Tell them there’s a bioweapon on board the –’ he read the letters on the motorboat’s stern as it roared away from the Elite Voyager – ‘Orion, and advise it needs to be intercepted as a matter of urgency.’
‘Got it,’ Leila replied. ‘Can you see Brigitte? We’ve lost all feeds from her craft, and your cameras must have been damaged in the firefight.’
‘I’ve got eyes on her,’ Pearce said, looking down at the Frenchwoman, who had opened the canopy and was sliding into the icy water. ‘How do I get my landing lights on?’
‘We can do it from here,’ Marty said, and an instant later the choppy water was illuminated.
Pearce could see a lifeboat being lowered from the Elite Voyager. He hovered thirty feet above Brigitte, close enough to see her signalling for him to leave. Her frustration was clear as she pointed towards the Orion, which was vanishing into the darkness. Pearce longed to follow it, but he knew that if he left Brigitte, there was a chance the waters would take her and without a light to guide them, the frustratingly slow rescue team might never find her.
Chapter 112
It took twenty-five minutes for the lifeboat to reach and recover Brigitte. Once she was safely on board, Pearce piloted the drone towards the last contact point and conducted a sweep of the area, but the Orion was nowhere to be found and could have been anywhere in hundreds of miles of dark empty ocean.
‘You’re getting close to your range limit,’ Marty said. ‘You need to head back, or put down now.’
‘Copy,’ Pearce said. Frustrated, he turned back towards the Elite Voyager, and minutes later set down on the aft deck, which was abuzz with activity.
Crew members were tending wounded colleagues, while others covered the dea
d with tarpaulins. The crew from the lifeboat were helping a wet and bedraggled Brigitte out of the small craft, which had been returned to its position between a pair of hoists.
As the rotors of his drone slowed to a halt, Pearce opened his canopy and climbed out. He was immediately approached by the ship’s commanding officer, a slim black man in a thin cotton roll neck, black trousers and a captain’s cap.
‘Who the hell are you?’ He had a Haitian accent and spoke like a man at the end of his patience. ‘And what are you doing on my ship?’
‘We were trying to stop those men,’ Pearce said, indicating one of the Red Wolves Brigitte had shot. ‘The cargo they took is extremely dangerous.’
Brigitte joined them. ‘You should have gone after the shipment,’ she said angrily. ‘I can take care of myself.’
‘What do you want with it?’ the captain asked.
‘To destroy it,’ Pearce replied. ‘It’s poison.’
The captain studied Pearce and then looked at Brigitte, whose eyes were burning.
‘I know what it is,’ the captain responded at last. ‘I know what it does. There’s something you need to see.’
The Haitian captain led them through the ship, two armed crewmen alongside him.
‘That vessel hijacked us three hours ago. They boarded and forced my crew to empty a container at gunpoint,’ he said, taking them down a step run of metal steps. ‘We formed a chain and unloaded fifteen hundred boxes onto their craft.’
They walked a short way along a corridor before the captain stopped outside a berth. ‘But we already knew something was wrong. A couple of crew were reported missing this morning. We found them in their quarters.’
The captain opened the door to reveal a four-berth room. The stench of decay filled the corridor immediately, and Pearce covered his mouth. One man lay on the bottom bunk on the right. A second crewmember was sprawled on the floor. At the end of the dead man’s bunk was a three feet by three feet packing crate like the ones taken off the ship, and Pearce saw black patches like the one on Brigitte’s shoulder, each wrapped in translucent wax paper. He glanced at Brigitte and saw the relief on her face. Her death had been forestalled, but the grim reaper had taken these two men, and as Pearce studied the scene, he saw why.
The man on the floor clasped a tiny piece of a patch between his thumb and forefinger. About the size of a matchbox, the piece had been cut from a patch that lay next to him. There was a pair of scissors on the bunk. Some opioid users cut fentanyl patches into small pieces and rubbed them on their gums. It was a risky way of taking the drug, but it resulted in a more potent high. When these men used the patches that way, the XTX shut down their parathyroid glands and destroyed the PTH in their bodies, but without the presence of the synthetic supplied by the patch, they would have died within moments.
‘We notified the coastguard about the fatalities,’ the captain said. ‘I had no idea these two were junkies or they wouldn’t have been on my ship. They must have found what was in that container and stolen a box.’
‘So you know why we came to destroy it?’ Pearce replied.
The captain nodded.
‘We need to find that vessel,’ Pearce said to Brigitte.
Her eyes didn’t leave the box that offered her life.
‘We’re going to need that box,’ she said.
The captain hesitated.
‘If it falls into the wrong hands – a corrupt cop, a careless port official – it will kill people. We can’t take that risk,’ Pearce said.
The captain frowned.
‘Give it to us, or we’ll take it anyway,’ Brigitte said.
Pearce frowned at her, and the captain scoffed, which was just about the worst reaction he could have had. Brigitte heel-kicked the shorter armed crewman, punched him as he hunched over, and grabbed his pistol from its holster before his crewmate even had the chance to draw. She pointed the gun at the captain’s head, and he froze and eyed her uncertainly. A moment later, she offered him the gun.
‘The authorities won’t miss what they didn’t know existed,’ she said as the captain took the weapon. ‘And if they do, you can say you were robbed.’
The captain smiled. ‘OK. Whatever gets this stuff out of my hair and you people off my ship.’
Chapter 113
The captain and some of the crew braved the elements and gathered on deck to watch the drone leave. According to Marty, the aircraft would have just enough power to carry both of them back to shore, so Pearce and Brigitte sat side by side in the cramped cockpit. The contents of the crate they’d taken from the dead crewmen’s berth were stowed in the drone’s cargo hold, stashed in a duffle bag the captain had given them.
‘We’re good to go,’ Pearce said, as the canopy closed.
‘Copy that,’ Ellen replied.
Once the pressure seal had formed, the rotors started and the drone rose into the sky. The crew ducked and stepped back to avoid the downdraft, and the craft cleared the deck and accelerated out to sea.
‘You get all that?’ Pearce asked once they were over open water.
‘Yeah,’ Leila’s voice came over the radio. ‘The Red Wolves must have decided it was too risky to wait for the Elite Voyager to make port.’
‘With the Salamovs still alive, the route is exposed,’ Pearce agreed. ‘They know how product is brought through the port, and one call to an honest cop could have put the whole shipment at risk.’
‘The coastguard is on alert but there’s no sign of the vessel,’ Leila said. ‘What now?’
‘Contact Kyle. Tell him to stay with Eddie and Kirsty Fletcher. They’ll know where the product is headed. When we get back we’re going to bring them in.’
‘Copy that,’ Leila replied.
Pearce watched the heavy rain trace streams over the canopy as the drone raced above the dark swells. If the coastguard couldn’t intercept the Orion, he prayed he could find the toxin taken from the Elite Voyager before it hit the streets.
Chapter 114
Ziad felt sick to his stomach. He’d spent much of the journey to intercept the Elite Voyager hunched over a chemical toilet, vomiting. The mid-sea hijacking had been fraught and dangerous and the attack from the sky as they’d been unloading the final containers had shaken him. Elroy had seemed unconcerned and the loss of four Red Wolves hadn’t stirred his calm resolve. In contrast, Eddie and Kirsty Fletcher were furious. The appearance of such heavily armed state-of-the-art aircraft pointed to government intervention, and as well as the loss of their friends, they railed against the risks Elroy had exposed them to.
‘What the fuck just happened?’ Eddie Fletcher had asked when they were safely out of range of the Elite Voyager and the remaining aircraft. ‘That was some military-grade shit.’
Elroy ignored the remark and headed to the bridge. Ziad, Fletcher and Kirsty followed, while the rest of the Red Wolves transferred the last of the cargo crates below deck.
Elroy order the captain to take a circuitous route back to Seattle, and checked on Awut, who manned what looked like a military surface-radar system. Elroy told him to make sure they kept well clear of any contacts.
‘I asked you a question,’ Fletcher pressed angrily.
‘And I would have answered it, if I’d been able,’ Elroy replied calmly. ‘I have no idea what those aircraft were or who sent them. But they are no longer a problem.’
‘Tell that to the four men we left behind,’ Kirsty snapped. ‘The cops will be able to link them to us.’
Elroy sighed and left the bridge, and once he was gone Ziad saw Kirsty and Fletcher share an angry glance.
Ziad followed Elroy outside and was grateful for the fresh air. The ceaseless buck and roll of the ocean wasn’t the only thing making him feel sick. Whenever he was idle, he saw Essi’s face in those last moments, red and ugly with horror, tormenting him like a spectre. He’d done everything he could to keep the memory at bay, but even when his mind turned to other things, she was always there, like a shadow in the ba
ckground.
Ziad found Elroy on deck. He was leaning over the guard rail, peering into the darkness. Wind whipped around them and waves crashed into the hull, hurling refreshing spray at them. Ziad wiped his face and settled beside Elroy.
‘They seem worried,’ he said.
‘They are small people with small minds,’ Elroy replied. ‘They don’t see the big picture. Few can.’
‘Do they know?’ Ziad asked. ‘What these things do?’ He indicated the crates being hauled below deck.
Elroy shook his head. ‘Small minds.’
‘So you’re using them?’ Ziad pressed.
Elroy turned to face him with something approaching sympathy. ‘Awut told me what you did at the Salamovs’ house.’
Ziad looked down, ashamed at the thought others were talking about the hideous death he’d inflicted on the woman he’d once loved.
‘That took courage,’ Elroy continued. ‘The kind of courage we look for.’
Tears threatened, but Ziad held them back. Why was this man praising him for such horror? How would he ever know right from wrong with these people?
‘When we return to Seattle and store the narcotics, there are some things that need to be done,’ Elroy said. ‘There is a man called Scott Pearce. He will likely use the Fletchers and their gang to try to find us. And if not them, Ben Cresci.’
‘Cresci?’ Ziad asked in dismay.
‘I believe he’s been told the truth about our plans,’ Elroy revealed.
Ziad felt sick again. It made sense. Cresci was the only one outside their circle who knew the vessel the shipment was coming in on.
‘The Fletchers were right. The police will link those four dead men to them, but I am concerned that Pearce or Cresci might try to force them to betray us.’
