‘There won’t be a ride if that thing activates!’
‘Good, because if this thing is so lethal it’ll take out all of Veer’s men!’
Riggs pushed her aside and Hannah backed off as she watched the SEALs set up their firing positions inside the main hatch. Ethan had remained in the command center, helping Saunders maintain a steady rate of fire on Veer’s main force, and she wished desperately that he were here now to help convince Riggs to shut off the charge.
‘Are you getting inside or what?!’ Riggs demanded of her.
Hannah looked at the charge on Black Knight and she knew that she couldn’t risk it blowing them all to hell. She launched herself off the stairwell and down onto the dock.
‘Ford, get away from there!’
Hannah ran for the Black Knight, and then all at once she realized that she was too late as four figures broke the surface of the water, ugly black assault rifles pointing at her as the entire cavern erupted to the sound of deafening gunfire.
*
Veer’s men broke free of the water just above him, and almost immediately he saw bullets zipping trails of bubbles through the water as they came under attack, heard the muted rattle of machine gun fire as they fired back. Veer pulled his rifle carefully off his back and hesitated beneath the surface, watching as his soldiers fired at their assailants up on the docks.
One of them twisted violently in the water as his head snapped back, a cloud of scarlet blood billowing in the water as he was hit in the face and killed instantly. His body rotated in the water to lay flat on its back with limbs extended, and Veer kicked for it as he reached the surface, using the dead body as a shield.
Veer broke the surface and opened fire on two Navy SEAL gunmen huddled in a narrow hatchway above the dock. Even as he fired he saw four of his men clamber up onto the dock and hurl grenades at the hatch.
‘Grenade!’
The scream went up from one of the SEALs and they vanished into the corridor and slammed the hatch shut. The two grenades bounced off the closed blast door and detonated, blowing it open again. The blasts were deafeningly loud as Veer’s men ducked to avoid the shrapnel burst from the weapons, chunks of metal zipping through the chamber in all directions. Veer ducked behind the corpse of his soldier before he kicked for the dock and hauled himself out of the water.
Veer turned to look at the biohazard tent and the strange object contained within, a dull black bell-shaped structure. ‘Secure it!’ he bellowed.
The troops swarmed over the object, two of them bursting in through the tent entrance. Veer saw them creep up to the object, their weapons held before them as they reached out to open the interior flap of the tent, and then he saw Hannah Ford hiding beneath the stairwell, crouched with her hands over her ears as she squinted and turned away from Black Knight.
‘No!’ Veer yelled at his men.
A sudden, deafening blast erupted from within the object and Veer ducked and turned aside as from the corner of his eye he saw their heads torn from their necks in a cloud of flame and smoke that ripped through the tent’s transparent plastic.
The tent collapsed around the object, the two bodies of the dead soldiers slumping against it as blood pulsed from the ragged remains of their necks. Two thumps from inside the tent echoed through the dock as their heads bounced on the unforgiving dock beside them.
Veer, his hands clamped over his ears to prevent the blast from bursting his eardrums, saw Hannah Ford break from cover and dash to the hatch.
‘They booby trapped it!’ somebody shouted.
‘Congratulations, genius!’ Veer roared as he pointed to the base door. ‘Get that open! Whatever was inside this thing has likely gone with them!’
The soldiers rushed up to the door of the base, even as Veer’s radio crackled. ‘General, we’ve got company!’
Veer heard a blast of gunfire distort the line as he bellowed his response. ‘What’s going on out there?!’
‘The Navy’s here sir! They’ve got a submarine!’
Veer glared at the door of the rear of the base and realized that he’d been duped. If the submarine surfaced then reinforcements would flood the base and this would all be over – he’d be kissing goodbye to his fortune. He yelled his reply.
‘Drop charges into the water and scare them into staying deep! We’re on our way!’
He was about to make for the door to the main base when a strange vibration caught his attention. Suddenly, he realized that the chamber was shaking softly, and slowly his men fell silent as they all turned to look at the Black Knight.
The strange hieroglyphic text around the base of the object was glowing a bright electric blue, like a halo that was growing in intensity with every passing second. Veer squinted as a piercing pain struck his eardrums and he whirled away. Nausea wrenched his stomach and he staggered sideways and vomited onto the dock, his vision blurring and the entire dock trembling as though struck by an earthquake.
Through blurred eyes he saw and heard his men staggering about and crying out in agony as the emanations from the Black Knight grew in intensity. The water of the dock rippled and swirled in angular peaks, like a model of an impossibly uniform mountain range, and Veer grabbed at his facemask as he hurled himself toward the water.
To his left, alongside Black Knight, one of his men’s agonized cries was twisted to a new and unbearable crescendo as his flesh seemed to melt off his bones, his wetsuit bubbling as though made from boiling oil. Veer saw the man’s face collapse in upon itself as the chamber’s walls shivered and chunks of ice began spilling from the walls and crashing into the dock.
Veer threw himself into the water and plunged deep beneath the waves.
*
Hannah felt the incredible noise coming from the rear dock sear through her eardrums as she stumbled down the corridor, and she knew that she would not be able to make it out of the building and onto the dock in time to escape the horrendous agony consuming Veer’s men on the docks outside.
She hurried along the darkened corridor in pursuit of Riggs’ men, and then she came up against a steel door that had been firmly closed. Hannah reached out and pulled the handles of the door, but the SEALs had fled and secured it closed behind them, preventing Veer’s men from following them easily into the main base.
Hannah cursed as the noise intensified, an ear-splitting screech that seemed so powerful that it was a physical thing, as though invisible men were assaulting her all around her body, battering her with endless blows. In her pain and confusion, she turned away from the source of the sound and in doing so found herself looking at the entrance to the anechoic chamber.
And suddenly she understood.
She staggered alongside a pressure hatch and turned right, stumbling into the anechoic chamber as she turned and tried to force the door shut. Her limbs were numb, the noise reverberating through her chest like war drums and shaking her eyeballs in their sockets as she heaved the door closed, squeezing her eyes shut as she felt what seemed like razor blades piercing them and her eardrums.
The hatch sealed and some of the intolerable pain eased. Hannah sighed in incredible relief as she leaned against the hatch and twisted the valve closed. The terrible pain and the horrific noise vanished and she slumped to her knees, her vision starring and her ears ringing as though they were about to burst.
*
Veer floated thirty feet beneath the waves and watched as his men hurled themselves into the water. He could still hear the infernal noise screeching across the dock above, but down here it was sufficiently muted that he could bear it.
The bodies landed in the water, some of them missing limbs, some of them thrashing in agony and gradually falling apart, the water stained red with blood that diffused the already meagre light from the glow sticks on the docks.
Veer remained silent and still, even when the enormous form of a sea leopard loomed past him, homing in on the gruesome feast appearing on the surface of the water. The enormous creature was three times Vee
r’s size, but it remained beneath the surface of the water until the terrible cacophony had faded away before it climbed and began tearing at the mass of flesh now clogging the surface.
Veer allowed himself to ascend slowly, saw one or two of his men appear from the darkness around him and clamber out of the water again, careful to avoid the gigantic predator feasting on the grisly remains all around them.
Veer swam to the dock and pulled himself out of the water, then yanked his mask from his face.
‘What the hell happened?’ one of his men asked in horror.
The dock was littered with corpses, most of them no longer recognizably human, the flesh having split from the bones and been reduced to a bloodied jelly inside the wetsuits his men had worn.
‘Acoustic weapon of some sort,’ Veer uttered, his voice sounding strange in his own ears as he looked at the blast door and then at his companions. Three men, of an original hundred, remained with him.
‘With me, let’s finish this!’
‘Get that door open, and let’s finish this right now!’
Veer led his men inside the corridor at a run, weapons held before them and their barrel-mounted flashlights illuminating the interior in stark beams of white light. They only covered fifty paces before they came upon the sealed blast door.
‘Blow it, now!’
Veer watched impatiently as his men attached charges to the sealed door and then backed away down the steps. Veer huddled in below the door and covered his ears as the troops activated their detonator and flipped the switch.
An ear shattering blast thundered through the chamber and Veer heard the heavy door crash down as his men burst from their hiding places and rushed the door with weapons drawn.
Veer prepared to open fire even as Hannah Ford stumbled out of an adjoining door, a pistol in her hand. She saw him coming and immediately tried to aim the weapon at his face. Veer smashed the pistol from her grasp, the weapon spinning away across the dock and into the water with a splash as he jammed the barrel of his rifle up under her ribs.
‘Hello again,’ he sneered, water streaming down his face and across his thick beard.
‘It’s here!’ one of his men shouted.
‘Looks like your boyfriends have stood you up at the last,’ he smiled without warmth. ‘Don’t worry though, we’ll make good use of you just as soon as we get out of here.’
‘Got to hell,’ Hannah snapped back at him.
‘You first!’ Veer snapped and shoved her along in front of him.
***
XLVII
‘You did what?!’ Ethan yelled above the clatter of gunfire.
‘Hannah’s still back there!’ Sully replied. ‘She made a dash for Black Knight but Veer’s men showed up and cut her off!’
Ethan’s voice echoed down the corridor as he ran after Sully, rage seething through his veins.
‘There was no time!’ Sully shouted back as he raced up the stairwell to the command center. ‘If I hadn’t shut the door that damned thing would have killed us too!’
Ethan cursed as Riggs and his team hurried across the center to rappel lines Ethan and Saunders had thrown out of the shattered windows, secured against the thick steel legs of the planning table.
‘Tell me the sub’s coming up!’ Ethan asked.
‘They’re almost here and aware of the enemy!’ Riggs replied as he checked the radio set. ‘Time to leave!’
‘Hannah’s still back there!’ Ethan snapped. ‘We can’t leave her!’
He saw the conflict on Riggs’ face, swiftly overwhelmed by mission protocol.
‘We can’t save everybody and she made her choice, Warner! We go now, or we stay buried here forever! You gonna cry into your cups or cover us?!’
Ethan felt like screaming as he hurried to the windows and grabbed an M-16 rifle. Riggs took one last look at the dock, the water below them churning now as something began rising up from the black depths.
‘Now!’
Ethan aimed out of the command center windows as Del Toro and Saunders opened fire on the darkened maw of the tunnel opposite. Gunfire raked the icy walls of the tunnel and drove Veer’s men back out of sight as Ethan lifted the M-16 rifle and aimed carefully at the tunnel entrance through the smoke drifting through the cavern.
He selected the 203 grenade launcher and fired twice. Two grenades arced from the weapon across the pens and bounced onto the icy dock as they rattled into the mouth of the tunnel. Above the rattle of gunfire from the SEALs Ethan heard the cries of panic from within the tunnel and then two blasts thundered out as bright flares of light illuminated the ragged tunnel mouth.
The grenades showered Veer’s men with supersonic shrapnel and Ethan saw chunks of ice plunge from the ceiling of the tunnel to clutter the entrance as the armed men fled the assault. Ethan turned to his left and yelled across the control center.
‘Go, now!’
Riggs and his men burst from the control center windows and plunged down the rappel lines as Ethan and Saunders opened fire once more, covering their descent.
Alongside the pens Ethan saw the surface of the water rise up as though some gigantic black whale was ascending from the icy depths. The water flooded over the dock as from the deep rose an enormous submarine, a glossy black leviathan that almost filled the entire pen from front to back. Even as the submarine was ascending, from its bridge leaped armed men clothed entirely in black, more Navy SEALs who rushed out of the interior and clambered down onto the hull, weapons firing at the mouth of the tunnel.
Veer’s men were firing back but already in heavy retreat as they fell back into the tunnel, and through the smoke he could see them turning and fleeing.
‘They’re in retreat!’
Riggs and his team landed on the docks and dashed toward the submarine as Ethan turned and looked behind them down the corridor that led to the stairwell and the rear dock. He could see Veer’s men running toward them and firing as they went. Del Toro hopped through the open hatch and then slammed the door behind him as Saunders pushed a heavy container in front of the door.
‘Let’s go, now!’ Saunders snapped.
They dashed together across the command center and leaped onto the lines, descending toward the docks as Ethan covered their escape, the soldiers amassing at the mouth of the tunnel and opening fire. Ethan saw Veer’s men fleeing en masse down the tunnel, firing as they went but desperately trying to escape the hail of fire being directed at them.
Riggs and his team scrambled up the ratlines thrown to them by the submarine’s crew as Ethan hesitated.
‘What the hell are you doing?!’ Riggs yelled up to him as the chamber began to shake all around them.
‘I’m not leaving Hannah with these assholes!’ Ethan shouted back down.
He turned and checked the magazine of his rifle and then that of his pistol. Fifteen rounds in the rifle, ten in the pistol. Veer’s men had been pushed back by the SEALs into the tunnel and would most likely flee. That left Veer’s personal escort, which had looked to be about six men who had assaulted the rear dock. At least one had been shot in the water and two had died in the blast inside the tent, which left Veer plus three.
Ethan edged his way toward the entrance to the command center as he saw the flickering glow of flashlights approaching through gaps in the door. Veer’s assault was over before it had even really begun but Ethan knew that the submarine would not wait for Hannah or him and would make good its escape within moments.
Ethan had only an instant to think before Veer’s men would burst into the command center. He heard their boots rushing upon his position and he knew that there could be no escape.
***
XLVIII
General Veer hurried along behind his three remaining men, shoving Hannah in front of him with the barrel of his rifle as they ascended the steps to the command center entrance and came up against the blast door, sealed shut from the other side.
‘You want us to blow it?’ one of his men asked.
; Veer shoved him aside and bellowed into the command centre.
‘We’ve got Ford! Open up, or I’ll execute her right here and now!’
They could hear the rattle of occasional gunfire from outside but nothing more.
‘Looks like your men have abandoned you too, Veer,’ Hannah spat, unable to prevent the cold grin that spread on her face. ‘So much for your leadership skills.’
Veer did not look over his shoulder as he drove his elbow into Hannah Ford’s ribs. The agent folded over the blow, her long hair hanging over her face as she slumped against the wall.
‘Open it!’ Veer bellowed at his men.
The soldiers rammed the door and it cracked open, the weight of a barrel on the far side pinning it shut. Two more attempts, and then as one they burst into the command center and swept it with their weapons. Veer spotted the dead bodies of two of the SEALs laying sprawled on their faces nearby, saw the shattered windows of the command center and the rappel lines now fastened around the legs of a large table.
Veer dashed to the windows with his men and saw the massive submarine sinking below the waves that trembled as the entire chamber around them rumbled with the threat of collapse.
‘No!’
Veer’s roar of rage was almost drowned out by the rumbling, shaking roar of the gradually collapsing chamber around them. He turned to Hannah, his grip on her arm painfully tight as he glared at her.
‘This is what they do!’ he bellowed. ‘They’ve abandoned you, left you here to die! Even Warner’s gone!’
Hannah’s heart plunged in her chest and her shoulders sank as she saw the submarine sink into the abyss, the waves around the massive hull churning and tossing the dead bodies of Veer’s men around amid chunks of ice as it vanished. She couldn’t blame Ethan for taking his chance at escape, but it felt a crushing blow all the same and now she knew that there was no reason for Veer to keep her alive.
The Black Knight Page 31
