by Danny King
“Do it!”
But the Tech Chief told him he couldn’t because he didn’t have any tools, which was when Dunbar cut his fingers to pieces pulling a nail out of the wooden bench to equip the Chief with.
“No more talk, send the fucking signal!” Dunbar demanded.
The Tech Chief frowned and pursed his lips before getting to work levering the housing off my GPS eye.
“What are you sending? You’re not calling in an air strike are you?” Mr Vasiliev wanted to know.
“And what if I am?” Dunbar shoved. “You think you’re not expendable?”
“Hey, we’re all expendable,” Mr Smith said. “Just include us in on the conversation, yeah?”
“You’ll see,” Dunbar simply grunted, the merest hint of a smile teasing his eyes.
I wasn’t sure we’d get the time though. The sound of boots marching and keys jangling echoed along the corridor to remind us that life was short and full of woe, and it was about to get a lot shorter and even more woe-filled, but then the Tech Chief looked up and smiled to tell us he’d done it.
Dunbar snatched my eye out of his hand and jammed it under the crack of the door, before banging on the locked steel to entice the guards.
“Come and get us you mothers! Come suck my dick!”
He then grabbed Lieutenant Copeland, who was still curled up in a little ball and wheezing by the door, and dragged him clear, ducking down against the far wall, before inviting the rest of us to do the same.
“Everybody down!”
24.
A BLACK HAWK PAYBACK
Keys in the lock and barked commands just outside the door told me our presence was requested in the mortuary and I was really starting to hate Rip Dunbar when all of a sudden all hell broke loose. A blinding throb of heat and light filled the cell and threw us against the far wall, almost like a flashbang exploding in the room. Only there’d been no bang, just a flash. The back of my neck was savaged as if I’d sat under the midday Saharan sun for a full twelve hours and I discovered to my dismay that my clothes – and the clothes of those around me – were actually smoking.
Still, that was nothing compared to what had happened to the door itself – and those who’d been opening it at the time. It was no longer there. Nothing was; the doorframe, the ceiling, the floor below or the men who’d been stood on the other side. All were gone.
All that remained was a steaming, searing, crackling hole.
“What the fuck was that?” the Tech Chief asked.
“A little something from our buddies at NASA,” Dunbar said, implying some sort of satellite had just targeted a photon pulse on our position. “Now come on!” Dunbar insisted, dashing out through the opening to look for things to karate chop.
Mr Smith shrugged when I looked at him, as if I’d asked him a question, which I hadn’t, then chased after Dunbar. I immediately followed, leaping across the steaming abyss and straight into a fire-fight. Dunbar, Mr Smith and a couple of the others managed to grab rifles off the smoking wounded outside and were now engaging the remainder of the Omega detachment as they poured in on us from both stairwells
“Heads up!” Dunbar grunted, and I turned just in time to catch an M16 straight in the face. As painful as this was, things could have been a lot worse as the space I’d just been occupying was suddenly filled with a whip of tracer fire.
I looked up the corridor to see half a dozen more Omega troopers squeezing their triggers in my direction and only just managed to avoid the fruits of the endeavours by squeezing into the adjacent doorway.
Alas, the hapless Lieutenant Copeland was not so fortunate and his crisp white shirt exploded with scarlet the moment he jumped out of the cell and across the line of fire.
Others too met with little forgiveness, as Mr Hasseen and our co-pilot were picked off as they tried to join the fight, but at least half a dozen of the guys did make it, with Mr Vasiliev and Mr Deveroux scuttling across the floor to peel M16s out of the crispy fingers of those who’d originally come for us.
Back near me, Dunbar was screaming as if he were cumming in his pants, emptying clip after clip into the Omega troops at the northern end of the cell block corridor and doing his damnedest to get through his ammo as fast as possible. He’d also managed to lose his shirt in the last couple of minutes and was sweating as if his previous sweat had been a mere practice for this, the main stench.
“You mothers! You mother-mothers!!!” he was screaming, shooting from the hip on full automatic and painting the far end of the hallway with clouds of brick-dust and blood.
Mr Smith was right next to him, and pelted with a fine lick of sweat every time Dunbar spun around to engage a different part of the corridor. I half-thought about sending the pair of them over some more ammo and a packet of wet-wipes but never got the chance as shots were now zipping past my ears and peppering the walls around me as Omega troopers from the southern stairwell closed to within thirty feet.
I hung my M16 out into the corridor and took a bead on the trooper closest to me. His head bobbed in and out of cover as he shot in my direction, but I didn’t fire. I only had one clip and needed to make every round count, so I waited for him to break cover and didn’t have long. The Omega trooper lunged across the corridor, making for the cell doorway four doors along from mine, and I opened up with a measured burst, only to see him and the guy who’d followed flung back and turned into Swiss Cheese as Dunbar drilled twenty bullets into each of them, screaming; “Suck my dick! Suck my dick, you mothers!” before bounding off up the corridor to take the fight somewhere different.
“He’s keen,” I shouted over to Mr Smith.
“You can say that again,” he replied, wringing his eyes and nose. “Keen as fucking Gorgonzola.”
The base alarm was now blaring away over the crackle of gunfire, tipping off the residents that not all was well with the day. One of our lot, I don’t know who it was, wasted a few bullets killing the speaker at the far end of the hallway, but it was a purely cosmetic gesture. Griffin Marvel would know from the Command Centre computer boards where the problem was coming from and he’d be directing all his resources our way soon.
A grenade went off next to Mr Egorov, ripping open his sides and splashing a considerable portion of him all over the far wall, but Mr Vasiliev was able to sling back the next two that dropped into our laps to give the Omega boys a taste of their own medicine.
I didn’t feel bad about fighting the Omega lot. I had no friends amongst them and couldn’t stand them as a unit. There’s almost always a detachment on any job who think they’re a cut above. They’re invariably the boss’s personal bodyguards or a special ops unit who’ve been given a Hollywood make-over and let it go their heads, but even by usual standards the Omega detachment were still some of the biggest Wallace & Gromits I’d ever worked with. They wore red from head-to-toe, caps straight and laces tied in double-knots as if their mums had dressed them at the base gates. This wasn’t the reason I hated them of course, because we were all at the mercy of whatever daft fashion sense our employers had, but it was the fact that they wore this get up 24hrs a day. Even on their days off. Even when they exercised in the gym.
They never smiled either, which was always a bad sign. They had very little sense of humour, never laughed, barely chatted and ate their corn flakes each morning with military precision. But the thing I hated most about them was the fact that they were rude. Ask them a simple question: “Here mate, where’s the washing powder kept? We’ve run out again,” and they’d just look at you as if you were kicking over headstones in a pet cemetery. “Here mate, washing powder yeah?”
They weren’t Agency hired either, which body guards often aren’t, and as a result their loyalties lay entirely with Griffin Marvel. They were his men, ergo an entire unit of boss’s sons.
I finally managed to shoot one of my Omega persecutors, knocking him back into an electrical box to simultaneously fry him, and rather satisfyingly saw that it was the guy who’d dissed me o
ver the washing powder, so it felt good to even the score.
As a result, the lights all along the corridor flickered, allowing us to break cover and close on the remaining Omega men, who were still lit up from the stairwell lights.
Mr Vasiliev, Mr Smith and myself cleared the southern end after a fierce assault, while Mr Deveraux, Mr Jean, the last surviving reservist Mr Capone, and the Tech Chief cleared the north.
For the moment we had the detention block to ourselves.
“How are we not dead yet?” the Tech Chief asked, but I was buggered if I knew. I just hoped it stayed that was for a little while longer.
“Where to now?” Mr Vasiliev then asked.
“The Command Centre, I gonna kill that arsewipe Griffin Marvel,” Mr Capone suggested, to universal dismay.
“Screw that, let’s just go home,” Mr Deveraux bettered, and this time we all agreed.
“Yeah, there’s still more than a hundred men upstairs and they’ll soon be in here on top of us if we hang about,” Mr Smith pointed out. “Come on, to the monorail.”
We gathered up what ammo and grenades we could off the fallen Omega men and took to the stairs. To our surprise, there were signs of a fight and bodies on every landing and that’s when we remembered Dunbar.
“Should we tell him where we’re going?” someone asked.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what we should do,” Mr Smith agreed, before adding; “Stupid ass.”
We reached the middle level and found an unguarded monorail parked at this floor’s embarkation point. After a quick look around we dashed towards the open carriages and jumped in. The Tech Chief hit the pedal and we moved off as one, rifles pointing out in all directions like a porcupine with attitude.
We rolled on through a long rock tunnel, dodging the lights and passing more bristling alarms, but we encountered no trouble along the way. Our luck didn’t hold for long though and soon we emerged out onto an open concourse near the stores and into the line of sight of half a dozen Omega guys.
We opened up on them as one, riddling the small detachment with hot lead to knock them down like tin ducks. The Tech Chief didn’t slow the monotrain for an instant and we continued gliding around the concourse before disappearing into another tunnel.
“Two more clicks to the helipad,” Mr Smith told everyone, locking and loading his M16 as he slammed in a fresh clip.
The next cavern we emerged into was the snowmobile dock. This area was guarded by our own guys, guys we knew, not those Omega arseholes, so we lowered our weapons and waved a cautious greeting as we trundled on by.
One of them, Captain Collett, recognised us and flagged us down, prompting Mr Vasiliev to flip the safety off his Colt, but Mr Smith urged caution.
“Let me handle this,” he whispered.
We slowed to a gradual halt and pulled up alongside the Captain and his men.
“Mr Smith, what’s going on?” he asked.
“The base is under attack,” Mr Smith told him. “A break-out from the detention centre.”
“Who?”
“Us,” he said, suddenly bringing his rifle to bear. Mr Vasiliev, Mr Jean, Mr Deveraux and the others all followed suit, getting the drop on the Captain and his men, but Mr Smith barked at everyone to hold their fire.
“Wait! Just wait a minute,” he urged.
We knew Captain Collett to be a reasonable man (he’d given Joseph O’Conner’s Star of the Sea a solid four out of five and you can’t be much more reasonable than that) so we took a risk and explained the situation to him. The Captain was shocked to hear that we’d been locked up, sentenced to death and double-crossed. He’d had no idea, obviously – it wouldn’t have been the sort of thing Griffin Marvel would’ve posted on the bulletin board – and as a result he immediately threw his lot in with us.
“… because it’ll be us next if we don’t,” he told his lads and to a man they agreed. I was so proud of them – book club members one and all. Except for Mr Lennox, who preferred his Game Boy – illiterate cunt.
“Okay, we’ll secure the helipad and give you a call, then you come and join us,” I told the Captain.
“Check,” he agreed, sending his men away to take up defensive positions.
The Tech Chief hit the pedal and we glided away, around the snowmobile dock and into the next tunnel. I wondered if Captain Collett had come around to our side a little too easily. I mean, people do occasionally say things they don’t mean when they’ve got half a dozen automatic rifles aimed at their chests, so I told the Tech Chief to take the long way around and approach the helipad from the rear, just in case the good Captain had phoned through to arrange a welcoming committee for us.
The next cavern was eerily empty. There should have been four or five white-coated technicians working here on the base’s mainframe but the place was dead. I wondered if the technicians were too.
We circled south, taking a series of left-hand forks until we emerged into the enormous subterranean aircraft hanger. Here, there was plenty of activity – and gunfire. At some point in the last ten minutes or so, Rip Dunbar had traded his M16 for an M60, with a twenty-foot-long magazine belt and under-hanging pump-action grenade launcher, and was taking on several complete units of Omega and general base security. This was a tricky situation because we knew some of the blokes from the base security unit, but there was no way of getting to them to explain the situation, so we did the only thing we could – we sunk out of sight inside the monotrain and continued on to the next tunnel.
Crash! Bang! Ratter-tat-tat! “Suck my dick!” were the sounds that echoed around the hanger as Dunbar waged war on anything in sight and blasted his way towards the Command Centre at the far end of the cavern. Griffin Marvel would be in there no doubt, frantically sending everyone else off to their deaths to forestall his own, but sadly I never got a chance to see how things panned out for him because we rounded the bend and disappeared into the next tunnel before riding the rail the last hundred yards or so to the helipad’s southern elevators.
The Tech Chief stopped the monotrain and we all jumped out, taking up positions either side of the tunnel entrance, while Mr Vasiliev summoned the elevators.
The first appeared with a ping and the seven of us crammed ourselves in. Probably a bit stupid to be honest, but like I said, when you’re this close to the end of an action, it’s so hard to stay focussed.
We glided up several hundred feet and emerged into a cold and blustery Greenland morning. The Omega Guards just outside the elevators went down with a short burst a piece and we fanned out across the helipad as their fellow Omega brothers ran to engage us.
It was winter in Greenland and the snow was piled high in dirty mounds at the edges of the helipad from where the dozer had scraped it back. Most of us were still in our white and black ops gear from the skyjacking and difficult to pick out as we dashed between the snow and rocks of the exposed mountain slopes, but unfortunately the Tech Chief still bought it as he moved on one of the Westlands. I saw him drop like a marionette who’d had his wires cut and he hit the cold hard tarmac probably not even realising he’d been killed.
As disheartening as this was, the Tech Chief was the only one of us they got, for despite being evenly matched in terms of numbers, we had one thing going for us that the Omega troops didn’t.
Namely, we weren’t wearing red against snow.
I hugged the black rocks on the Eastern side of the helipad and picked off colourful tunic after colourful tunic, painting the snow around them with short bursts until the entire Omega detachment were finally camouflaged – against their own blood.
“FSOs on me,” Mr Smith shouted after the fight, so we drew back and took up defensive positions to watch over the elevators as Mr Deveraux checked out the Westlands.
“The birds are good; keys and full tanks in two of them. Enough to get us to Paamuit, maybe even Nuuk.”
“That’s it then, let’s roll!” Mr Smith ordered, covering me and the rest of the lads as we piled on to the neare
st chopper before joining us himself.
It was only then that we discovered the flaw in our otherwise flawless plan.
“Er… does anyone know how to fly one of these things?” Mr Smith asked, when he saw that we’d all jumped in the back. “Mr Deveraux?”
“What?”
“Can’t you fly a helicopter?”
“No.”
“But you just checked them out?” Mr Vasiliev reminded him.
“No, I just looked to see if they had the keys and full tanks of gas. It doesn’t take a pilot’s licence to do that.”
“Jesus!”
“But you all flew the Chariots,” Mr Capone said, who’d been the FSOs’ gofer on the Tupolev.
“That’s different; different controls completely,” I said.
“But if you can fly a Chariot, then presumably you can fly a helicopter too,” Mr Capone insisted.
“That’s right. And if you can program a washing machine then presumably you can hack the Pentagon’s super-computer too,” Mr Jean chipped in.
“I don’t believe this,” Mr Smith sighed.
“Well what about Captain Collett?” Mr Vasiliev finally said, which wasn’t a bad idea at all. He’d had almost a dozen men under his command when we’d rolled on through, so it was feasible that one of them might be able to fly a helicopter. It was worth a shot.
“Let’s do it.”
We tried him on the internal phone system, calling the snowmobile dock from the elevator phone, but no one picked up at the other end.
We whipped a digi-headset off one of the dead Omega troopers but still couldn’t elicit a response from anyone at the snowmobile dock.
“Dunbar,” Mr Smith said.
“Yeah,” I remembered. He’d been fighting near the Command Centre and must’ve have taken out the uplink equipment or the server lines.
“It’s no good, one of us is going to have to go down there,” Mr Smith said.
“One of us?” I said, not liking the sound of this.
“There’s no point in all of us going. Some of us have to stay back to guard the chopper,” he argued, which was a fair point but even so, I could feel the fates closing in around me.
