by Alex Ryan
“Keep working. We must start immediately,” Feng’s manic voice said.
“That sounded like gunfire,” said a woman’s voice this time.
“My God, are we under attack?”
It’s him! It’s Nick. He’s going to save me and kill this bastard.
“I have an army of men protecting us. Get started.” Feng paused. “Where do you think you’re going?”
She heard the pop, pop of gunfire, closer now.
“Give me the damn scalpel. I’ll do it myself.”
There was a moment of commotion, and then Feng was whispering in her ear. “It’s time, Dr. Chen. Let us begin.”
Panic gripped her. They were too late. There was no cavalry in the nick of time in real life.
“Guard the door and kill anyone that comes through it,” Feng ordered.
Not Nick. Please don’t let anything happen to Nick.
She felt a gloved hand on her chest, her skin pulled taut between strong fingers, and then the blade . . . gentle contact at first, but then a terrible, searing pain erupted just below her breastbone as the blade flayed her open.
She screamed in silent terror and with deafening agony, but no one could hear her.
No one could hear her scream . . .
CHAPTER 31
Nick watched Lankford undog the hatch and push it open. He advanced through the oval-shaped opening in a combat crouch, sighting over his rifle. The immediate passageway was deserted, but shadows were moving in his peripheral vision. This area of the ship had been completely retrofitted and had the look and feel of a hospital instead of a merchant vessel. An expansive frosted-glass window stretched along his left, and he ducked down below the midline. Lankford squatted and slid in beside him, their backs pressed against the metal half wall.
Nick mimed smashing the window and then engaging the targets inside.
Lankford nodded.
Simultaneously, they popped up and smashed the frosted glass with the butts of their rifles, averting their faces as the glass shattered and fell in exploding sheets to the floor. A beat later, they were sighting over the aluminum frame.
Nick registered a million data points in a split second: laboratory benches, an empty hospital bed in the center of his room, an IV stand, a vital sign monitor on rollers, and ducking in the corner, a man in a black uniform swinging his rifle to bear. Nick squeezed his trigger without hesitation—sending a 7.62 mm round tearing through the center of the man’s face. Blood, brains, and bone exploded out the back of the man’s head and splattered the pale-green wall behind. Before the body hit the ground, Nick swiveled right. With the window gone, he straddled the half wall and stepped into the room. He looked back at Lankford and signaled for the CIA man to remain in the outboard passageway, advancing in parallel with Nick. He then heard three pops from his Snow Leopard teammates, who were advancing on the port side of the ship but were separated by at least one, maybe two, divider walls.
He scanned left and right, moving forward through the room, but there was no other movement.
“Clear,” he said.
At the next doorway, he paused.
Gunfire erupted from his right, and he saw the muzzle flash from Lankford’s rifle.
“Clear,” Lankford said.
Nick depressed the lever and swung the door open. He crossed the threshold and cleared the empty room, which was a virtual copy of the first. Except here, he found the gray pantsuit and shoes Dash had been wearing bunched in a pile beneath the bed. He picked up the clothes, just to be sure, and a black lace bra and thong fell to the ground. Heat and rage erupted inside.
“Coming to you,” Lankford called over the radio.
The knob on the passageway door moved, and Nick trained his rifle on the door just in case, lowering it when Lankford’s face materialized.
Lankford eyed the clothes in Nick’s hand. “Are we too late?”
“There’s still a chance,” Nick said, his words a hiss through clenched teeth. “We need to find the operating room. We go together, okay?”
“Of course,” Lankford said.
Nick dropped Dash’s clothes and was out the door and into the passageway in a flash. He felt Lankford fall in behind him and hoped he was clearing their six. Nick had never felt less focused on a mission. Rage and terror were driving him now. Without pausing, he headed into a crossing hallway that joined the port and starboard passageways.
“Wait,” Lankford said, jerking Nick by the shoulder.
A shower of high-velocity rounds exploded from the hallway and tore chunks from the wall, pinging off the iron framework. Nick collapsed backward into Lankford and crouched at the corner.
“Thanks, bro,” Nick said over his shoulder. He had to calm down and focus or he would get them all killed, including Dash. He grabbed one of the flash bangs from the ammo pouches on his kit as he spoke into his mike.
“Three, One. We’ve got shooters in the crossing hallway. I’m tossing a flash bang.”
“Go,” the Snow Leopard said in his ear.
Nick rolled the concussion grenade around the corner. A beat later, lightning flashed, and thunder erupted in the passageway. Nick slid around the corner on his knee and felt the tap on his back as Lankford passed behind him. Four uniformed figures were standing in tactical crouches, but they were not engaging with their weapons. Disoriented from the flash bang, he could see them desperately trying to clear their heads and their vision. Nick and Lankford engaged simultaneously, and in less than two seconds, they had all four shooters sprawled on the floor in growing pools of red.
“Clear,” Nick said. “Keep moving.” He heard the desperation in his own voice and said a silent prayer they weren’t too late.
In hunched crouches, they advanced ten meters down the passageway to an aluminum-framed set of double doors. The doors were set up in a manner Nick recognized, like the sliding entrance to an operating room. He crouched beside an access panel, his left hand just millimeters from the push button that would open the doors.
Lankford nodded at the placard on the wall. “This is it—the operating room.” He spoke into his radio. “Three, One. We’re at the OR. Ready to breach.”
“One, Three. We have a problem,” the Snow Leopard said, calling from a mirror-image position on the port side of the ship. “We have no access to the OR from the port side. Give us one minute to circle back and cross to your side.”
Nick’s chest tightened. By now, the voice keeping time inside his head was screaming at him.
“Copy that, but there’s no time,” he said and locked eyes with Lankford. “We’re going in.”
Nick held up his left hand. Three fingers up, which he quickly counted down to one and then slammed his fist into the button.
The double doors hissed open.
Still in a crouch, Nick slid through the door, his body low and his rifle up. He was aware of the tracer rounds that zipped over his head but was unable to pull his gaze from the horror in the center of the room.
“Nick!” Lankford screamed from his right. “Behind you!”
Nick blinked and twisted left. His left pectoral muscle burned like fire as sutures popped and the knife wound that Dash had sewn shut reopened. As Nick spun left, his mind registered the uniformed security guard pointing a pistol at his head, and in that millisecond, he realized he was too late. He hadn’t cleared his corner, and now he would die for it. But instead of seeing a muzzle flash, Nick watched the man’s head snap violently to the left as a round from Lankford’s rifle tore off the bottom of the man’s jaw. Another rifle burped—this time to his right—and Nick spun to the threat. But instead of targeting him, this guard was aiming at Lankford and squeezed off a second round a microsecond before Nick’s bullet blasted through the guard’s left eye socket.
In his peripheral vision, he registered a third person moving right to left. Nick led the target and sent two rounds flying that found real estate in the man’s forehead. He scanned the room and took an inventory of the remaining pers
onnel. Dash lay sprawled on the OR table, hidden by blue drapes except for the large oval of orange-stained skin in the center, where her chest and abdomen were exposed beneath harsh white light. A nurse, dressed in blue scrubs, cowered in the corner. Two other similarly clad figures stood by the table: a taller man with his hands raised over his head and a shorter man holding a scalpel in his gloved left hand—a hand coated in Dash’s blood. Nick fixed his gaze on the long, vertical incision stretching down her abdomen.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” the surgeon hollered in shrill, panicked English. “I’m a doctor. Please, don’t shoot.”
Nick tensed his finger against the trigger of his rifle.
A shadow swept along the far wall, and Nick ticked his gaze right just long enough to confirm it was Lankford flanking and not a new threat. The surgeon capitalized on the moment and flung the scalpel at Nick’s face. Nick ducked reflexively, and the flying razor cleared the top of his head by a scant centimeter.
An enemy guard materialized in the doorway to their right and provided cover fire for the fleeing surgeon. One of the two operating lights above the table shattered in a hail of glass and sparks. Nick dropped to a knee, raised his rifle, and dropped the shooter just as the blue-gowned surgeon cleared the room. Nick squeezed off another round that shattered the glass door as it recoiled off the doorstop. Nick brought his rifle back to center and fixed his sight on the tall doctor, still standing frozen by the table.
“Get out,” he barked at the gowned assisting surgeon and then turned to the nurse. “You too.”
Whether they spoke English or not, he didn’t know, but they scurried from the room just as his radio crackled in his ear.
“One, Three,” came the call in his radio. “We’re coming in behind you.”
“Roger,” he said. “We have the package.”
Nick fixed his attention on the naked female figure laying on the operating table as the two Snow Leopards from the port side joined them in the OR.
“Oh shit,” Lankford said to his right, and there was pain in his voice. “I’m hit.”
Nick glanced at the CIA man. “How bad?”
Lankford winced. “I’ll live.”
Nick nodded, then tore down all the blue drapes around the operating table, slinging his rifle under his left arm as he did. He laid one of the blue curtains across Dash’s lower body, covering her from the waist down. He checked her vitals on the machine and exhaled relief at the heart-shaped pulse icon on the LCD display. He shifted his gaze to her face. Her eyes were half open, staring up at the ceiling. But there was something in her eyes. Recognition? Awareness? Not the dull, vapid stare indicative of sedation.
There’s something weird with the anesthesia.
He was no anesthesiologist. He stared at her, not sure what to do next.
After a brief hesitation, he closed the clip on the IV that went into Dash’s arm, stopping any sedatives flowing with the IV fluids. It was also possible that anesthesia was being blown into her lungs from the ventilator. He looked back at the monitor, which showed her blood pressure in green numbers, stable but a little high. The pulse rate was flashing in red and showed one hundred forty beats per minute.
Is she in shock?
But her blood pressure was high, if anything.
What the hell is going on here?
He looked back at her. A long incision, starting at the base of her breastbone and extending down to her pubis, was filling with crimson blood. The blood reached the edges of the wound and then began to spill out onto her Betadine-painted skin, running in little streams over her sides and onto the table. Nick snatched a stack of gauze sponges and packed them into the entire length of the wound. As he worked, an alarm sounded, and he looked up to see that the pulse rate was now one hundred sixty. His own heart rate shot up with fear and worry as he pressed the gauze firmly to staunch the bleeding.
“Nick,” Lankford called out, his voice still strained. “Nick!”
“What?” He turned.
Lankford was on the floor, one of the Snow Leopards kneeling beside him and pulling out a medical blowout kit from a cargo pocket.
“Is she okay?”
Nick blinked and swallowed hard—felt the tears spill onto his cheeks—and looked down at Dash’s abdomen. The wound was long and gruesome, having parted the skin and subcutaneous fatty tissue, but it was only a first-pass cut. The surgeon’s scalpel had not cut through her fascia into the abdominal cavity. With sutures, she would be fine.
“Yes,” he said. “Are you okay?” There was a small puddle of blood forming around the CIA man where he sat half upright on the floor.
“Don’t worry about me.” Lankford grimaced and said, “That short doctor—the surgeon who threw the scalpel at your face—that was Feng.”
“What?” Nick said.
“Feng was performing the operation,” Lankford said. “I’m positive.”
Nick turned to the Snow Leopard who was guarding their six.
“Come here,” he ordered.
The operator joined him at the operating table, and Nick took the man’s gloved left hand and pressed it on top of the stack of gauze piled on Dash’s stomach.
“Hold this firmly,” he ordered.
“How long?” the Snow Leopard asked.
“Until I get back or the bleeding stops,” Nick said, shifting his gaze to Dash’s face. He gently brushed a stray hair from her forehead. Her eyes ticked up. “You’re okay. You’re going to be fine,” he said to her. Then, he kissed her cheek—tasted cool tears—and stepped away from the table.
“What are you doing?” Lankford asked.
“I’m going after Feng,” Nick answered.
“He can’t go anywhere,” Lankford said. “Zhang will have control of the ship any minute now. We’ll get him, Nick, don’t worry.”
Nick shook his head. He looked at Dash, her body violated by the madman’s knife, the tears shining on her cheeks.
“Take care of these two,” he said to the lead Snow Leopard, gesturing to the two people he cared most about in the world at this moment.
The operator nodded.
And without a backward glance, Nick sprinted out of the operating room to find the madman and mete out justice.
CHAPTER 32
Nick left the OR and advanced forward, clearing rooms and gliding along walls until he reached the transverse passageway. Directly across the passage was an oval hatch, indicating to him that the doorway he was standing in marked the end of the hospital ward. He stuck his head through the open doorway and glanced left. Clear. He took a knee, glanced right. Clear. He crossed the passage in two strides and pressed his back against the far wall. He exhaled, quickly stuck his head into the hatch, and pulled it back, pausing to register what he had seen. The room appeared to be a crew’s mess—a long table in the middle with flanking bench seats. In the back wall, he’d spied a large serving window, closed now by a segmented metal roller door. On the port wall stood a beverage station, which was empty except for two large cylindrical coffee dispensers. He did not register any other details of significance.
Nick took a deep breath, counted to two inside his head, and then burst through the hatch, scanning forward and then turning left to clear his left rear corner, as he always did. Being alone, he could not simultaneously clear both corners.
Unfortunately, he chose wrong.
Pain exploded in his neck and the back of his head as something heavy struck him from behind. As he crumpled to his knees, clutching his rifle to keep from losing it, he wondered whether Feng had known he would—out of habit and training—turn left as he entered, or if the madman had just gotten lucky. He didn’t intend to let the bastard live long enough to ask him.
Nick dropped his left knee and rolled left onto his hip, spinning his rifle up and back as he did. Halfway around the arc, his weapon struck something immobile, the entire rifle suddenly twisting in his grip. His right index finger, which was inside the trigger guard, torqued painfully at the j
oint. The instant before he lost control of the weapon, he squeezed the trigger. The weapon spit fire, but the bullet sailed wide of the target. A glint of light off steel caught his eye as Feng slashed down with a curved knife toward his throat. Still holding the forward grip of his weapon with his left hand, Nick jerked the barrel up to block the attack. The sling caught and pulled taut, and Feng’s knife passed through the heavy canvas like it was butter. The maniac smiled, jerked the rifle from Nick’s grip, and flung it to the other side of the room.
Nick pivoted on his right elbow, ignoring the throbbing pain in his index finger, and kicked his left leg blindly in a wide arc. His boot hit something soft, and Feng grunted. He continued his spin, rolled onto his hands and knees, and popped to his feet. He surveyed the man before him. Feng was a head shorter and looked to be at least sixty pounds lighter, but instead of finding eyes filled with fear at confronting a blooded Navy SEAL, Nick saw only rage—and something else, something he had seen in the eyes of jihadist zealots he had hunted in Iraq and Afghanistan. A hunger to die.
Next to Feng’s left foot lay a fire extinguisher with a smear of Nick’s blood across the base. This made Nick suddenly aware of the river of blood streaming down the back of his collar from the gash that had opened up from the impact. His gaze flicked to the blade in Feng’s left hand.
So he’s a southpaw.
Reflexively, Nick reached for his SOG bowie on the front of his kit but found it missing. His stomach sank when the little voice in his head reminded him that he wasn’t a SEAL anymore, and he wasn’t wearing his kit. Feng laughed at him but then did something Nick did not expect. He opened his left hand, let the knife fall to the floor, and kicked it. Then, with both hands, he grabbed at his scrub top where the neckline formed a V and tore the shirt off his torso with such ease that the fabric might as well have been tissue paper. He tossed the shredded garment to the floor and tipped his face up, emitting a chilling howl. When he lowered his face, his eyes seemed to be glowing with maniacal blood lust. Nick could not help but marvel at his opponent’s torso. From neck to navel and from shoulder to elbow, the man was a muscular, sinewy canvas of overlapping tattoos—hanzi, symbols, and creatures. The middle of his chest displayed a wolf face, mouth open and snarling, the bottom jaw disappearing beneath the waistband of his surgeon’s scrub pants. Feng shifted into a fighting stance; he was like a coiled viper, wound tight and ready to strike.
