by Danny King
“Roger.”
“Will do.”
“Copy.”
“Sector Three still hot. Avoid if possible.”
“See you on the surface,” came back their quick-fire responses.
All in all, we hadn’t fared too badly today. Judging from the confirmations I received and the eight or nine men who were helping me move the kids, we’d probably only suffered some fifty per cent casualties, which is harsh by most standards, but not ours. Fifty per cent’s actually pretty good for us.
It’s mad when you think about it, but believe me when you’re an ex-lifer on The Agency’s books your life’s not yours to worry about anyway. So we do what we’re taken on to do and try to enjoy the ride. Because it eventually runs out for everyone you know, regardless of whether you drive a cab for a living or try to melt the North Pole. None of us can avoid it forever.
We’d made it as far as Sector Seven before running into more opposition. Two guys who’d not heard they’d been beaten were given a harsh heads-up by Mr Woo. He peppered them up against the walls with his MP5, startling both the guys and the kids we were carrying, filling the tunnels with their ear-splitting screams.
“It’s all right, it’s okay. Just a silly man being silly,” I said, hugging the Prime Minister’s daughter so tightly that I thought I might squash her. “Don’t look darling. Keep your eyes closed.”
I took a sneaky peek myself, and instantly wished I hadn’t. Neither chap had any sort of face left, and in one case, the entire top half of his skull had come off too.
Mr Woo looked lip-smackingly pleased with himself.
“Now that’s what I call a splitting headache.”
“Oi, do you mind?” I chided on my way past.
“Yeah, you pick up Jack Tempest’s joke book or something?” Mr Smith echoed, looking equally disdainful.
“Fuck me guys I’m only trying to lighten the mood,” Mr Woo protested.
“Language,” Mr Jean reminded him, getting the little boy he was carrying to cover his ears as well as his eyes.
“You lot have changed, you know that?” Mr Woo moaned. “You used to be cool.”
We hustled to the pipe interjunction at Sector Seven that led back up to the surface and found half a dozen Affiliates already there covering the stairs.
“We ready, Mr Choe?”
“All clear up top, Mr Jones,” Mr Choe confirmed. “The fleet’s ten minutes out.”
“We got the signal?”
“He’s right on time,” he replied, a glimmer of excitement flickering across his eyes.
“Let’s move it then,” I suggested patting Mr Choe on the shoulder as I went.
We started taking to the stairs, men and children first, when all hell broke loose behind us. Machinegun fire, explosions and laughter, causing those of us caught in the open to scramble with our kids for cover.
Mr Choe and Mr Woo attempted to defend the rest of us as we scuttled away but were cut down by an unstoppable spray of lead within seconds.
We’d been hit so fast that it was impossible to tell what was going on. My main concern was for the PM’s little girl (or more accurately, the years her continued breathing knocked off my sentence) so I bundled her out of harm’s way under the stairs and unslung my MP5.
Coming out of the darkness of the southern corridor was a blinding flash of heavy machinegun fire. I took a bead on its core and rattled off an entire clip, but the muzzle flashes didn’t flinch. Not even a flicker. They simply turned on me and fired back, ripping up the pipes and the stairs around where I was crouching, causing me to dive on top of the PM’s girl and hold my breath until the hailstorm had turned elsewhere.
What the hell was that?
Over the fighting I could now hear the laughter more clearly. Evil, mirthless peels of cruel delight that grew and grew as the danger neared until it stopped opposite the main pipe bank.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the laughter challenged so I twiddled my false eye until I could see through the concrete I was sheltering behind. What I saw there when the stairs fell away I could scarcely believe. It was the outline of a man, only bulbous and unnaturally tall. It was clearly some kind of machine, like a robot, or even a protective suit, because it sparkled with flashes as scores of bullets ricocheted off it to no effect. Hot flashes shot from its arms, directing machinegun fire to all corners and its legs trundled, rather than walked, suggesting it was on some kind of tank tracks.
A series of deafening blasts ripped through the stairwell, threatening to perforate my eardrums for a second time in as many minutes, when the lads hit it with their grenades but this only served to intensify the laughter.
“Is it my turn yet?” the booming voice asked.
The machine swung around to shoot mini-rockets to my left and I used the eye my mother had given me to take a sneaky peak around the stairs and saw that the beast was indeed some kind of suit. Like a deep-sea diving suit, the steel figure had two arms and two legs, while the head was a shiny smooth turret encasing a human face behind a thick polycarbonate dome.
It was X3.
“Here’s a bedtime story for you children!” he roared, machine-gunning every nook and cranny as he attempted to blast us from our hiding places. “No one destroys my plans. No one!”
This was a somewhat spurious claim to say the least because me and Jack Tempest had specialised in bunnying up his operations in recent years, hence all this revenge malarkey, but I decided not to quibble over semantics and instead flew a frag around X3’s suit looking for the back door. The grenade detonated between his legs but it didn’t even bring a tear to his eye. X3 just turned my way and guffawed some more.
“Ha ha hah! Your feeble bombs are no match for my diamo-steel exo-skeleton,” he boasted, cranking his wrist ninety-degrees to switch his weapons system from machinegun to flame-thrower. A sheet of boiling napalm splashed across the stairs and pipes, forcing us to flee before his merciless jeers, and swarms of 7.62mm rounds followed us down the corridor to obliterate our surroundings.
I dived with my girl into a storage cupboard just off the main pipe interjunction, only to see the doorframe behind me disintegrate to matchwood a nanosecond later. The cupboard was just a couple of feet deep and offered us minimal protection, but we’d be toast the moment X3 went past with his flame-thrower.
“Help me! Help me!” the little girl was crying, but I was in no position to help anyone – not even myself – and looked up to see the hulking mass of X3’s exo-skeleton lumbering into view. He turned to face me, a demented look plastered across polycarbonate dome, and I was just about to put a bullet the little girl’s heads to save her from the flames when Mr Smith appeared behind X3…
… and threw his knife?
Well I’m all for heroic gestures but Mr Smith’s effort was not only feebler than knocking a shuttlecock at a Los Angeles Class submarine, it was also off-target – by almost ten feet.
X3 saw the knife whizz past his dome and turned to look at Mr Smith, presumably out of sheer incredulity.
“Out of ammo already?” he laughed.
“You know what moved that rubber tree plant?” Mr Smith asked.
“No what?” X3 replied, delighted to humour the biggest fool in the Mediterranean as a final request.
“Little old ants,” Mr Smith replied, “with high hopes.”
Just then, Mr Jean stood up and threw his knife too, also missing X3, and sticking it a few feet from where Mr Smith had stuck his. Mr Bolaji then followed, as did Mr Grey, Mr Kim, Mr Petrov and a dozen others.
X3 couldn’t have been more amused had they been throwing custard pies at each other but I finally understood what they were doing, pulled my hot knife from its sheath and twisted the handle. I ran at the door and hurled the knife at a cross section of RSJ behind X3 and ducked back out of sight again.
As amusing as these petty acts of defiance had been, X3 wanted to get on with his rampage and turned to finish the job, but one-by-one the timers on th
e knife handles clicked to zero and X3’s diamo-steel exo-skeleton was suddenly swamped with powerful magnetic pulses.
He’d been swivelling to burn us out of our cupboard when he lost his balance and stumbled to his left. Here he ran straight into another pulse and was violently buffeted the other way.
“Let’s go!” I told the girl, bundling her up and scuttling underneath the exo-skeleton’s reeling arm as X3 started panic-firing in all directions like the town drunk who’d been given a bottle of Malibu and a couple of Uzis for his birthday.
The others made a break for it too, keeping as low as they could to stay out X3’s range as he machine-gunned our polarised knives overhead, and soon we were taking to the stairs.
“No! No!! No!!!” X3 screamed, alternating between machine-gun and mini-rockets as he sought to kill us while he could.
We’d made it past him and to within a dozen steps of daylight when the inevitable happened and a stray pulse spun him around to face us. There was no time to do anything, we were caught in open ground, and the flames began spewing from a nozzle under his wrist – when a shape roared out of nowhere and smashed straight into X3.
It was a forklift truck.
And it was driven by that whoop-crazy foul-mouth, Rip Dunbar.
“Eat this you mother!” he roared, naked from the waist up and as filthy as a Welshman six months from his birthday. Just what the hell had that bloke been up to?
He plunged X3 into a knot of pipes against the far wall, diving from the forklift as it was engulfed in a whoosh of napalm, then rolled across the tiles, grabbing a discarded MP5 en-route and rattling bullets at X3 as he spun away to cover.
The pipes behind X3 erupted to drench him with steam but still he was able to fire his machineguns, roaring with indignation as he fought to untangle himself from the steel.
It’s a sad state of affairs when not even Rip Dunbar’s best efforts can put a dent in your diamo-steel exo-skeleton, but all credit to X3’s machinists for producing such a quality piece of kit. Surely they were the real heroes…
… at least, until Jack Tempest stepped into view.
He appeared behind Dunbar with an MP5 and shot up the pipe work around X3’s head. A pall of sparks exploded as he cut through the main electrics cable, dropping it onto X3’s back to weld him to the spot and fry him alive inside.
“Don’t look darling,” I told the PM’s daughter, pulling her face into my chest, but this was one death she was determined to see, fighting free to glare at X3 as he exploded under his polycarbonate dome like an egg in a microwave.
“Okay, we can go now,” the little girl said, taking me by the hand and leading me up the stairs and back to the surface.
Inevitably, Tempest had his own pithy take on X3’s passing.
“I don’t know where he gets his energy from?” he quipped, looking about the stairwell for giggles but finding none, not even from the kids.
“Why did that man just say that?” the PM’s little girl asked.
“I don’t know, darling,” I said. “But don’t stare, it’ll only encourage him.”
34.
LIVING FOR DAYLIGHT
We made our way up top and did a revised head count. We’d lost another five guys in the attack but luckily three of those guys had been X3’s own men. Less fortuitous had been the loss of both Mr Woo and Mr Choe. One had been North Korean while the other had been South Korean, though I’d never been able to remember which was which. I don’t suppose it mattered now. It certainly hadn’t to them. They’d both been wanted on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel for multiple crimes against their respective states and neither of them had ever wished to return to either the peninsula so I guess they got their wish in the end.
As we emerged into the glow of a new day, Dunbar and Tempest were arguing over who’d killed X3 but Dunbar broke off when he received a radio flash from fleet telling him an unidentified aircraft had just violated the exclusion zone and was heading straight for us.
“Kilo Two, Kilo Two, you are in restricted airspace and will be fired upon if you do not turn back,” we could hear fleet’s air controllers ordering. “Kilo Two, do you copy, over?” But Kilo Two ignored their warnings and continued racing for Île de Roc.
“What now?” Tempest sighed.
“Okay everyone back inside. Move it!” Dunbar barked, snatching up the .50 cal he’d been playing with earlier and urging the kids back underground.
“It’s okay Major, it’s cool, they’re with us,” I reassured him, pointing to the horizon to show him the broad-winged dot flying low out of the rising sun.
“What?” Dunbar said, but I didn’t get the chance to explain fully because, at that moment, Mr Smith laid his fellow countryman out with a shoulder stock to the back of the neck. They might be hard to kill these gung-ho heroes but they’re usually a piece of piss to knock out.
“Idiot,” Mr Smith concluded.
Tempest saw this and snapped into action but he was surrounded on all sides and carrying a gun that was fitted with a blue-on-blue chip, whereas we’d ditched our MP5s in favour of the AKs and Bullpups we’d picked off X3’s dead.
“Careful Jack, we don’t want to kill you but we will,” I warned him, slowing Tempest as he twisted and turned in ever-decreasing circles before realising we had him cold. He threw down his gun and made a great show of it, putting up his hands and glaring at me as I radioed fleet.
“Fleet, this is mobile assault, stay your missiles, over. I repeat, stay your missiles.”
“I knew we couldn’t trust you, Jones,” Tempest scowled.
“Relax,” Mr Smith told him, pulling Tempest’s hands off his head and urging him to chill. “You’ll live longer.”
“Mobile assault, who is this? Identify yourself, over,” fleet responded.
“Fleet, this is Jones. Stay your missile. We have the situation under control. Over.”
“Specialist Jones, we have Marines in transit. You are ordered to take the puppies below and await their arrival, over?”
“Fleet, I’m not going to tell you again, stay your missiles, turn back your Marines, and do not attempt to impede Kilo Two in its flight or there will be consequences. Over,” I warned them in no uncertain terms.
There was a short pause while they picked the bones out of that one before asking;
“Specialist Jones, what are your intentions, over?”
“Our intentions are to get off this island, over.”
“Our intentions, Jones? Over.”
“I have sixteen surviving Specialists with me, and we’re all boarding that plane, over.”
A new voice now came on the radio.
“Specialist Jones, this is Vice Admiral Buck Hendershot of the United States Sixth Fleet. We have a three-strong carrier battle group with a hundred and eighty planes, twelve destroyers and sixteen cruisers and we would strongly advise you to rethink your intentions. Over.”
“And we have the kids,” I reminded him. “Now stay your fucking missiles. I won’t tell you again. This is Jones. Over and out.”
Tempest grabbed my arm as I turned to head down to the beach.
“We had a deal.”
“Oh yeah, and I’m sure you would’ve lived up to your end once we’d all been safely tucked up in McCarthy again,” I hawed to show him what I thought of that, “but we decided to make our own arrangements, just in case there was any confusion over the small print.”
“What sort of a man are you?” he demanded.
“A very tired one,” I replied, nodding to my left.
Tempest looked over and saw Mr Bolaji parking all the children in a defensive trench before legging it down the beach to pile into one of the hovercraft landers along with the rest of the chaps.
“You’re not taking the kids with you?” Tempest blinked.
“Hey, we’re not even going to kill them,” I said, causing one of Affiliates who was passing to laugh. “Help yourself, they’re all yours. Just do us a favour and don’t tell the Admir
al for fifteen minutes, okay?”
“This is a bluff?”
“Jack, we’re not the bad guys. We just occasionally work for them,” I explained.
Tempest’s eyebrows twitched as he got a slight erection at the thought of being left alone to take all the glory, then nodded and told me to go.
“Before fleet gets here. I’ll give you a fifteen-minute head start. I won’t try to stop you.”
“Promise?”
“Scouts honour,” Tempest said, saluting me Benny Hill-style with two fingers to his brow.
I smiled at that and held out a hand. Tempest shook it and wished me the best of luck.
“You too Jack. Maybe I’ll see you around,” I told him.
“Somehow, I don’t doubt it,” he chuckled.
A big seaplane pitched past overhead at that point, banking just above the crashing waves to circle back for its final approach.
“Just one thing, Jones?” Tempest said, stopping me as Mr Smith got the hovercraft engines roaring to life. “How did you do it? How did you arrange all of this?”
That was a good and fair question, but I’ve been in this game long enough to know that you should never stand around giving good and fair explanations when you should be jumping on hovercrafts or flushing XO agents through turbines. Much better to leave them guessing.
“I’ll drop you a postcard,” I simply said, before jumping into the hovercraft as it spun around in the surf.
“Okay, let’s go!” Mr Bolaji shouted when he’d pulled me on board, and a moment later we were falling into our seats as Mr Smith slammed down the accelerator to take us out to sea.
If Jack Tempest had ever read The Client by John Grisham, he might have known that one of the main characters (I won’t say which in case you haven’t read it) jumps on a plane at the end of the book and heads off to start a new life. This had been our Fourth Protocol, our pre-arranged signal to Pops back in Arundel to alert the extraction team to come and get us. The number of stars I’d awarded it and the comments I’d posted had simply explained the hows, wheres and whens.
