by Danny King
Mr Smith inched the frag closer and closer, guiding it into the foot-wide gun hole until their expressions changed to one of disbelief.
“What the fu…!” I heard them shout just as Mr Smith pressed the fire button triggering a dull thud in the distance.
The firing around our hole immediately stopped.
“That worked,” Mr Smith admitted as I tossed the next frag into the air. He read the pin I’d handed him and keyed the frag’s “Pin Number” to take control of it, then began guiding it across the rocks to the next enemy position.
“If you happen to pass Rip on the way, do see if you can dock with his grenade belt,” I suggested, much to Mr Smith and Mr Capone’s amusement.
Pretty soon we weren’t the only ones flying frags across the landscape and the gunners quickly cottoned onto the danger. But the frags were small, barely the size of King Edwards and coloured to match the terrain so that they were virtually impossible to spot, let alone shoot.
More thuds resonated along the ridge as the guns fell one-by-one and soon the only sounds of automatic fire were coming from us.
“That’s it, move out!” came the inevitable shout, accompanied by a few gun-happy whoops from some of the loopier lads as we poured from our holes and out onto the slopes.
The rocks were dotted with dead, both ours and those of our Italian forebears, and I was sorry to see Mr Rousseau was amongst them. I’d shared a cell with him for three years and in all that time we’d only had one argument. Sure some of his habits had annoyed me, just as I’m sure some of mine had annoyed him, but I was still sorry to see him face-down on the shingle no matter how much the dirty bastard loved to pick his feet with my paperclip.
“Big Cat, we’re coming!” I radioed without getting a reply.
Jack Tempest appeared alongside me as we ran for the ridge and afforded me a flash of his eyebrows.
“Still with us Jones?” he honked.
“For the moment, Jack,” I replied, realising I was going to have trouble with this one before the day was out.
Just short of the ridge were a series of newly excavated trenches. We approached at a sprint but held off jumping in because we’d been advised they’d been booby-trapped. Unfortunately Mr Capone couldn’t have got the memo because that’s exactly what he did, shredding himself to suet when he charged in like Braveheart, only to come flying out again like Rocket Man.
“What an obliging fellow!” Tempest quipped, jumping into the same trench once the smoke had cleared.
“I can’t believe he just said that,” Mr Smith gasped, hands on hips in outrage.
“Shocking isn’t it,” I agreed, equally disappointed with XO-11. Tempest had a lot to learn about respect. And more importantly judging an audience. After all Mr Capone might have been a professional bad guy but he was still a friend of ours. But more firing cut these sentiments short, along with Mr Williams a few feet from me, and once more we were diving for cover.
I looked over the lip of the trench and saw X3’s guys pouring out of the rocks a hundred yards north.
Our guys were taking them on, gun-for-gun, and making a fight of it, when all of a sudden a whirling blur came out of nowhere and ran right up the middle with the biggest gun I’ve ever seen.
It was Rip Dunbar.
He’d somehow torn one of the .50 cal machine guns off a hovercraft and was running riot. I had no idea how he was even staying on his feet, let alone aiming to fire it. I doubt whether I could’ve even lifted the enormous cannon or the ammo box that hung beneath it, but Rip seemed as happy as a lamb in spring as he scampered from gully to crevice, hosing X3’s men off the rocks with a continuous chugga-chugga-chug.
Tempest popped up beside me to watch the carnage for a moment or two. “Dumb gorilla,” was his considered opinion before he sunk from view again.
A shaped-charge blew open the door at the far end of the trench before Tempest, Mr Smith and I slid down the rails of the steel staircase inside to catch those at the bottom with our sub-machine guns.
The time was 0605 hours. We’d used up a lot of minutes getting in. I just hoped we hadn’t used up too many.
Base sirens were wailing and a sexy mechanical voice was informing the corridors around us that security had been breached in Sector Seven.
“We don’t like gossips around here, sweetheart,” Tempest said, shooting the speaker off the wall.
“That should fix the problem, I’m sure they only had the one speaker,” Mr Smith said, but Tempest ignored the jibe.
“Come on.”
Three more guards met with three more bursts of machinegun fire as we sprinted through the sweeping corridors until we came to a crossroads. Branching three ways, signs pointed towards the Command Centre, Sector Six and the Submarine Dock. We opted to split up, with Mr Smith and Mr Petrov coming with me to Sector Six, while Mr Jean and the others headed for the Submarine Dock, leaving Tempest to pick his own path towards the Command Centre.
“You get the kids. I’ll get Triple X,” he said locking and loading a new clip into his MP5 with a theatrical flourish.
“Sure, if Major Dunbar doesn’t get him first,” I reminded him. Tempest didn’t look too happy about that and dashed off without further consideration.
“How did we get lumbered with that bloke?” Mr Petrov wanted to know.
“Big Cat, Big Cat, this is Book Mark, do you copy, over?” I radioed.
A burst of static responded a few seconds later, sharp, crackly and violent and soon I realised it wasn’t static at all – it was bedlam.
“I read you,” Big Cat finally came back. “Where are you?” he pleaded, his transmissions brief and to the point.
“Sector Seven,” I replied. “Give us directions.”
“We’ve fallen back to Sector Four, down as far as you can go. Stairs at Five… motherfuck…!”
“What’s your situation, over?” I asked.
“Two dead. RPGs. Don’t think we can hold…” a whoosh and a roar cut that transmission dead before Big Cat summarised the situation with a single word. “Hurry!”
“We’re coming, over,” I promised him, the heat turned up beneath my resolve.
We took off at a canter, gun-sights to the eyes, silencers to the fore and downed two more of X3’s boys along the way.
Sector Six was almost identical to Sector Seven as far as I could make out. Only the sector logos were painted in blue, rather than red. Here we met more resistance, though these guys played dirty, hiding behind doors in the corridor ahead as they waited for us to pass. Mr Smith, Mr Petrov and myself ran straight through the ambush, opening up on their doors as we ran past and reducing our would-be assassins to Swiss cheese before they could say “boo”.
Normally we might not have stood a chance against such an ambush but thanks to the US military we had an advantage over the opposition. See, other than the guns, the frags, the body armour and hot knives they’d so generously kitted us out with, they’d also fitted me with a new eye. One that could see.
“We’re clear,” I said, scanning the corridor ahead for signs of movement but finding none.
Okay it couldn’t actually see, as in see – as in trees or horses or the faces of terrified children – but it could see all the same because I’d only lost my eyeball in Africa, not my optical nerve. The images were no more than colourful patterns, confusing and unintelligible at first, like those 3D picture books that never quite caught on in the eighties, but I’d soon got the hang of them and what they represented on the flight over. Ultra-violet, infrared, heat signatures, even sound, I could see all of them with a little tuning of the iris. It was just a question of fusing these images in my mind to create a decipherable picture.
And thirty seconds earlier that picture had told me there were four guys with hot bodies and cold guns lying in wait for us in the corridor ahead.
I retook the point and we sprinted the last hundred yards until we came to steel door that marked the start of Sector Five. There was movement behind the
door’s tiny window, lots of it, but Big Cat was continuing to die inch-by-inch in my ear so we had no choice but to proceed.
“Anytime now would be good!” Big Cat chided me, his voice barely audible over the never-ending sputter of machinegun fire around him.
I smacked the green button on the door panel and me, Mr Smith and Mr Petrov ducked through and found cover before we were seen.
Sector Five was different still. It wasn’t just a long series of corridors. It was an open hanger the size of a football pitch, with rocket tubes stretching all the way up to the concrete ceiling and scores of surface-to-air missiles lined up like terracotta warriors.
X3’s men were running backwards and forwards loading the tubes and firing off missiles, telling me either our air cover had just returned or that the UN fleet was now closing. Either way; the lads in Sector Five were busy, so the three of us tip-toed through as silently as we could and might have made it to the stairwell had some little drone in a white hard-hat not rounded the corner and blundered straight into us.
Mr Petrov dismissed him with a silenced muzzled burst but it was too late, we were clocked.
“There! There!” Sector Five’s lieutenant screamed, pointing at us from his gantry position and winning a volley of 9mms for his troubles.
Several of the drones dropped their ordnance trolleys and started shooting, so we took cover and returned fire, until some little Chinese scientist in an orange boiler suit ran out into the fray and urged us all to stop shooting.
“You’ll kill us all. You’ll kill us…” were his last words before Mr Smith gave him something else to worry about.
It was only then, when a bullet missed my head by inches to ping off the white tube behind me that I realised what our little peacemaker had been so upset about – we were hiding amongst the missiles. The opposition seemed to twig this too because the shooting abruptly stopped and was replaced by gasps of exasperation.
“Jesus! What the hell! I forgot!” that sort of thing.
“Come out of there, you’re surrounded,” we were ordered.
“Make us,” Mr Smith suggested, aiming his MP5 at the nearest missile.
“You’ll kill the kids as well if you do that,” he was told.
“And you’ll kill them if we don’t,” Mr Smith replied.
A few of X3’s men started edging around to cut us off from the stairs. There must’ve been about eight or nine of them in total, six of whom were armed, so I slung my MP5 over my shoulder and pulled out my hot knife. Some enormous oily Krout a few feet from me smiled as he found his own blade and squared up for the fight.
“I’ll have you for breakfast,” he grunted, passing his knife from hand to hand and cackling with delight at the prospect. Knives were obviously this man’s speciality. I would’ve stood no chance against him if this had been a fair fight.
But it wasn’t.
I squeezed the rubber grip of my handle and whipped back the magnetic blade like a fishing rod, yanking the hulking murderer’s knife from his hand as if pulled by an invisible cord. I caught it in my free hand and hurled it straight back before he knew what was happening, scoring a double-top as I skewered him between the eyes.
The others baulked in surprise, giving us the chance to disarm three more of them before the shooting started again. Mr Petrov let off a stream of lead at a couple of fleeing backs, cutting them down in their tracks and blowing a gas canister in the corner of the hanger. This got us all motoring and we dropped into the stairwell as fire extinguishers and screaming broke out behind us.
“Which way?”
Section Four stretched out in two different directions and resounded with gunfire and explosions. It was difficult to tell which way the sounds were coming from, so I tuned in my eye and saw the sound waves pouring from the right-hand tunnel.
“This way.”
We set off again, more cautious this close to the battle, and soon found men and mania to accompany the crash bang wallops.
Around a long sweeping bend the corridor opened up and became a large provisions depot, with cupboards, shelves and crate after crate of Pot Noodles. About thirty men were here, running backwards and forwards between the crates as they tried to get to the kids. The far end of the store blazed with shrapnel and shards like the most spectacular indoor firework display ever and right there, in the very epicentre of all that hell, almost invisible against the sheer weight of fire being brought to bear on it, a lone gun fought back to keep at bay all the evil X3 could throw at it.
It was Big Cat.
“Big Cat, Big Cat, we’re here. Watch you’re fire and we’ll push them into your path, over,” I radioed.
“Do it!” Big Cat demanded, his voice now more determined than frantic.
We fought our way through the back markers and into the stores along with Mr Woo and Mr Jean who’d secured the submarine dock and soon more Affiliates were joining us until X3’s men were the ones on the back foot, hemmed in on two fronts and suddenly fighting for their lives.
I don’t think I killed anyone else over the course of the battle. Not for the want of trying, you understand, but I used up most of my ammunition all the same covering the others as they thinned out X3’s men.
Mr Smith in particular fought like a man-possessed, taking personal umbrage at those who sought to harm these kids and hacked away with his hot knife until he had to be dragged away.
“That’s enough! They’ve given up!” I said, bundling Mr Smith away from the men on their knees before he could carve up any more of them. “Remember it’s just a job. For us and for them.”
I held onto Mr Smith while he sucked in a few acrid lungfuls of smoke and eventually he seemed to snap out of it.
“I’m all done,” he announced, sheathing his knife and walking away.
Naturally X3 wasn’t amongst our prisoners or the dead, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. I couldn’t see him getting his hands dirty with this particular task, which meant he’d be in the Command Centre, either letting Jack Tempest out of tubes or having his eye sockets romanced by Rip Dunbar. Not that I cared. We’d done what we’d come to do. Everything else was above and beyond. And I didn’t do above and beyond. I was a flat-rate kind of guy.
“Are we clear?” Mr Woo was calling.
“Clear.”
“Clear!” we sounded off, kicking away the prisoners’ guns and checking over the dead to make sure no one was faking.
When we were confident it was safe, we gave Big Cat the okay and told him to come out. Big Cat was reluctant at first and I can’t say I blamed him. Stacked up all around his hastily erected barricades were piles and piles of dead. Burnt, battered and mutilated; arms, legs and heads; it must’ve been a terrible fight but by the skin of his teeth Big Cat had somehow held out. I can’t tell you how because I’d not been there fighting alongside him, but I knew him to be a survivor because we’d walked away from worse in the past – a nuclear blast and a tumble into the Zambezi being two such adventures – and finally Big Cat rose from behind his makeshift battlements and shot me a broad, toothy grin.
“Good to see you again, Mr Jones.”
“Good to see you again too, Mr Bolaji,” I replied. “The kids?”
“They’re shaken, but not too stirred,” he said inviting us into his inner sanctum to see for ourselves.
I must say, with the limited materials at his disposal, Mr Bolaji had done well to protect them. He’d chosen a large, solid larder at the far end of the stores and worked to ring the entrance with crates. He’d stacked them up to form three lines of defence, forcing his former colleagues to funnel through a single point, then fallen back as each line had been breached, but only after making his attackers pay a heavy price.
The kids themselves were inside, huddled against the far wall and cowering under more bales and boxes. One of Mr Bolaji’s colleagues, Mr Trent, was in there with them, covering the cell door with a mini-gun as their last line of defence. He and Mr Bolaji were all that remained. Well, a
lmost.
Four dozen tear-streaked eyes turned to look up at me as I slung my gun over my shoulder and pulled an eye-patch over my falsie so as not to frighten them with the grinning devil’s skull that stared out from my face – well, it is a classic design, you know.
“Come on then children, let’s go home, shall we?” I suggested, holding out my hand to a girl of six who was shivering uncontrollably nearby.
At first she hesitated, flinching with fear and wobbling her lip, but Mr Bolaji reassured her I was a friend, helping her find the courage to climb into my arms.
“Okay then little darling, I want you to close your eyes, okay? No peeking,” I insisted, speaking to her as softly as I could. The girl did as I said, burying her face into my neck for fear of what she might see outside, so I winked at Mr Bolaji – though when you’ve only got one eye, a wink can so easily be mistaken for a blink – and headed back to the surface.
33.
A STING IN THE TALE
The others followed my lead, helping the kids to their feet and carrying the smaller ones out through all the carnage. With hands across faces and whispered reassurances, we did what we could to protect their minds as well as their bodies, at least until they were someone else’s problem.
Even the lads on the other side wanted to lend a hand. We’d taken four prisoners at the end of the fighting and they were all keen to make amends for their recent paedocidal efforts. Well, when the shooting’s over and the battle’s won, there’s no point in holding a grudge, that’s for amateurs or the Rip Dumbbells of this world, so we let them come with us. Of course, we didn’t let them anywhere near the kids, we weren’t that silly, but instead had them carry Mr Petrov out who’d lost a foot along the way.
Sector Five was deserted. Smouldering and bloodied corpses littered the floor, so I made sure the little girl’s eyes were still closed before proceeding. They were. I wondered if she’d ever open them again.
If the rest of Île de Roc looked like this then we’d done all we’d needed to do, so I hijacked X3’s base frequencies and put out a call across the airwaves, telling the lads to finish what they were killing and make for the exits.
