Noble Man

by William Miller

  The generator cut out. The lights went dark.

  Her heart beat so hard she could hear blood pulsing in her ears. Her legs shook. The gun suddenly felt like it weighed no more than a paperback novel. She had studied enough biology to know that adrenaline was giving her strength, causing the muscles to contract harder and for longer periods of time. It was how mothers lifted cars off children. Tomorrow her whole body would ache, but for now, she felt capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Eat your heart out, Superman.

  A second after the construction lights went out, a pair of headlights blazed into existence. The DNY hurtled along the gravel access road, kicking up a plume of dust in its wake. The night erupted with the deadly rhythm of automatic weapons. Sam’s breath caught in her chest as the soldiers peppered the car with bullets. She watched, transfixed. It was impossible to believe anyone could survive.

  A loud whipcrack yanked her out of her daze. Less than sixty meters to her right, a man in a black military vest and denims crouched at the lip of the quarry. He had a long rifle with a scope balanced atop his left knee. All of his attention was on the car. He fired again. A brass shell casing leaped from the breach, trailing smoke.

  DNY turned into a slide, impacted the overturned ore cart, and sent one of the mercenaries sailing over the hood. The car ground to a stop, and the mercenary landed in a tangle of broken limbs. The passenger side door opened. Jake must have piled out on the far side.

  The sniper fired round after round, keeping Jake pinned behind the car. He couldn’t move until Sam did her part. She knew Jake was counting on her, but she was rooted to the spot, paralyzed. The moment she moved, the sniper would see her. He would turn the big rifle on her, and the last thing she would hear was the awful thunderclap before the bullet tore through her brain. It took every ounce of courage she had, but Sam managed to take a step.

  The fear broke as soon as she moved. She dodged through the trees and underbrush, snapping twigs and crunching leaves. Noble was right; she could barely hear over the cacophony of gunfire. And if she couldn’t hear, neither could the sniper.

  She got within five meters and considered taking the shot. She pushed the gun out in front of her and sighted on his torso just below his left armpit. Her index finger tightened on the trigger, but she heard Jake’s voice in her head telling her to get as close as she could.

  She bared her teeth. Her nostrils flared. It felt like stepping into a cage with a hungry lion, but Sam crept through the woods and stepped out of the tree line close enough to spit on him.

  He stopped firing long enough to drop the magazine out of his weapon and push in another. He gave the full magazine a hard slap to be sure it seated, then shouldered the weapon.

  Sam raised the .22 Walther in both hands and aimed at the back of his head, but she didn’t pull the trigger. “Put it down, or I’ll shoot!”

  He tensed and, slowly, turned his head to peer over his left shoulder. One corner of his mouth turned up in a sneer. He spoke with a German accent. “You will not shoot me.”

  The weapon trembled in Sam’s grip. It was an effort to keep her knees from buckling. She had to remind herself to breathe. “Don’t force me.”

  His eyes narrowed. Seconds stretched into hours. He swung the rifle around.

  The weapon jumped in Sam’s hands. She was aiming for his head. The bullet drilled a dime-size hole through his Adam’s apple and exploded out the back of his neck. He made a surprised face and crumpled like a plastic statue melting in a microwave.

  She hadn’t known she was pulling the trigger until she felt the gun jerk. Now the sniper lay dead at her feet. And just like that, it was done. She refused to look at the dead man.

  Down in the quarry, Jake conducted a one-man war against the enemy. For Sam it was like having a bird’s eye view on the D-day invasion. From her vantage point, she could see a mercenary crouched behind a large boulder. His back was to her, totally exposed. Sam realized she could fire down into the pit with impunity. She was safe on the ridge, and the sniper had loaded a new magazine into his weapon.

  She dropped the pistol, stretched out on her belly, and slid the rife out from under the dead man. It must have weighed seven pounds. Sam let the barrel rest on the rock ledge. She adjusted the butt stock in her shoulder, placed her finger on the trigger, and peeped through the scope.

  The sniper had made it look easy. At first she tried putting her eye directly against the scope, but all she could see were her own eyelashes. She pulled her head back a bit and saw a half-moon. After some side-to-side adjustment, she got a clear sight picture. She could see the rocky floor of the quarry and a pair of cross hairs along with a red dot in the center. There were several hash marks and numbers that Sam did not understand, but the red dot was pretty self-explanatory.

  When she pivoted in search of the mercenary, it screwed up her view through the scope. It took her several tries, peering over top of the rifle to locate the mercenary and then putting her eye back to the scope before she got the man in her sights. When she finally connected the two, she placed the red dot on his back and pulled the trigger.

  There was no hesitation this time. She wanted the fight to be over. Simple as that. Unfortunately her bullet smacked the rock a half meter to the mercenary’s right.

  He turned and hosed the ridgeline with a burst from his automatic weapon. Bullets embedded themselves in the rock wall and zipped around Sam’s head like a swarm of bees. She buried her face in the dirt and breathed in a lung full of dust. Her throat clutched. Tears welled up in her eyes. She wracked out a long, painful cough.

  61

  Noble was pinned behind the back tire while the mercenaries drilled round after round into the vehicle. They were using overwhelming firepower to quickly shift the momentum of the battle in their favor. Lead chewed through the fiberglass door panels and shredded the seats. Within seconds, Noble had gone from offense to defense. He was usually on the other side of this equation.

  He had to engage and keep the pressure on, or they would use their numbers to outflank him. He fired the MAC10 through the blown-out windows in the direction of the crushing facility. Three short bursts finished off the magazine. Noble dropped the empty weapon in the dirt.

  The sharp crack of a long-range rifle echoed like thunder across the quarry. A bullet hissed past his ear, forcing him back down. He bared his teeth. Where was Sam? Surely she had marked his position by now. Hopefully she hadn’t choked.

  The twisted body of the mercenary that Noble had run over lay in the gravel two meters from the front bumper. His arms and legs were bent at wrong angles. Dark red blood covered one side of his face, but he was still alive. A pink bubble formed at the corner of his lips as he tried to speak. His weapon, an H&K 410 assault rifle, lay underneath him.

  Noble decided to make a play for the gun. It would give the sniper something to shoot at and give Sam a chance to sneak up on him.

  He inched along the back of the car toward the rear bumper. One of the mercenaries was sheltered behind a large rock. Noble stepped out, aimed his pistol at the boulder, and hammered it with two quick rounds, forcing the shooter to take cover and drawing the sniper’s attention to the rear of the wrecked DNY. A bullet whined off the trunk.

  Noble ran in a crouch to the front bumper and lunged for the assault rifle. He grabbed it by the barrel and tried to reverse directions, but the 410 was on a single-point sling secured around the man’s neck.

  A bullet kicked up a cloud of debris two centimeters from Noble’s foot. There was no time to remove the harness. The sniper, if he was any good at all, would not miss again. With a curse, Noble flexed the muscles in his back and legs in an effort to drag the mercenary behind the car. He reached cover in time to avoid the next shot. The headlight exploded.

  The sniper wasn’t satisfied with driving Noble behind the car. He winged several bullets off the hood as a warning. Noble sat down hard in the dirt and went to work removing the 410 from around the dead man’s neck. In the
time it took him to do that, the sharp crack of the sniper’s rifle fell silent.

  Hope blossomed. Had Samantha pulled it off?

  He stuck his head up long enough to draw fire and heard the purr of automatics but not the distant crack of the rifle. Noble felt a flash of fierce pride. She had come through. The girl had guts.

  The sniper was out of the battle. Noble checked the action on the 410 and found a round in the chamber. The odds were turning in his favor. He moved to the rear of the DNY intent on engaging the remaining enemies and heard the sniper rifle crack.

  The sound turned his blood to ice. He had an image of Sam lying dead up on the ridgeline. The thought left a sick, sinking feeling in his heart.

  He glanced through the shattered windshield. What he saw filled him with savage excitement. The mercenary behind the boulder broke cover and sprayed the top of the ridge with a full auto burst.

  Noble knew immediately what had happened. Sam had used the sniper’s rifle to take a shot at the mercenary’s exposed back. She missed but drove him into the open. Noble aimed the 410 through the blown-out windows and squeezed the trigger. The assault rifle chewed out three rounds with a satisfying buzz. The man arched his back, collapsed to his knees, and went over face first.

  Three out of the five mercenaries were dead. The remaining two were in the crushing facility, but they weren’t content to stay put. One leaned out the open door and fired while Henries sprinted to the abandoned dump truck for a better angle on Noble.

  The two kidnappers had yet to put in an appearance. Maybe they had already taken their money and split. Noble leaned out and fired at the redhead behind the dump truck. The 5.56mm rounds smacked off the steel hood in a display of sparks.

  From behind the dump truck Noble heard an Australian accent yell, “Reloading.”

  The shooter in the crushing facility forced Noble to take cover with a series of short, controlled bursts while Henries slapped a fresh magazine into his weapon. Then they took turns hammering the DNY, preventing Noble from mounting any sort of counterattack. Exactly what he was afraid of. One man would keep him pinned while the other moved. They would surround him. He couldn’t defend from two directions at once.

  The dead mercenary at Noble’s feet wore a chest rig. Noble ripped open one of the Velcro pockets and found a full magazine inside. He performed a tactical reload, swapping the partial magazine for the full. He kept the half spent mag in his left hand, ready for use.

  He had a full weapon but nothing to shoot at. Both mercenaries had good cover, and they kept him pinned with a hailstorm of lead like angry hornets stinging the driver’s side of the DNY. Noble remembered the cartoons where the blue dog with a sheriff’s badge on his chest and a white cowboy hat took cover behind a rock. The outlaw, usually a bulldog with a cigar and a black hat, would carve away at the rock with a spray of bullets and the resulting statue was the Venus de Milo. Noble doubted the DNY would be a famous work of art when the fight was over, but he was running out of car to hide behind.

  Sam came through again, once more turning the tide in his favor. That beautiful, gutsy woman had relocated along the ridgeline to give herself a better angle on Henries. She winged a shot off the truck, inches from the Australian’s head.

  She couldn’t shoot worth a damn, but Henries didn’t know that. He could probably stand there all day and let her plink away at him without taking a bullet, but she had come close enough to scare him. He pulled a hand grenade from his chest rig. He yanked the pin and lobbed it at the DNY, then sprinted to the door of the crushing facility while the other mercenary covered his retreat.

  62

  Bati curled up in a ball, trying to make herself as small as possible. Fear immobilized her. It sounded like World War III outside. The thunderclap of automatic weapons clawed at her sanity. She let out a scream that dissolved into hysterical sobs. One thought worked its way through the panic; she did not want to die here. Not like this.

  She had a chance to reach the toolbox while her captors were distracted. With any luck, she would find a knife or scissors to free her hands. She wobbled to her feet and stumbled deeper into the facility, trying to retrace her steps. Her knees threatened to give out. Her head spun. The floor pitched like a ship on a high sea. She reached the spot where she had crouched to pee. The kidnapper lay dead on the floor. His brains had congealed into a sticky paste. Bati staggered to the conveyor belt and knocked the dusty toolbox off with an elbow. It landed on its end with a bang, and the lid popped open, disgorging tools.

  Bati allowed her tired legs to buckle and sat down hard. She spotted a pair of tin snips. They were old and covered in grease, but they would do the job. She turned around and patted blindly at the pile until her fingers closed over the snips, then she went to work trying to slip the blades over the plastic zip tie.

  Several times she thought she had the tin snips in place and squeezed the handles. Each time the blades closed on empty air. Bati whined in frustration. Outside the battle raged on. She tried again and felt the blades meet resistance. She squeezed. The tin snips snapped through the plastic and pinched her skin.

  She winced. She had a small cut on the inside of her left wrist and bruising from the plastic tie, but her hands were finally free. She rubbed her wrists. Her fingers were pins and needles. She waggled them like a sorcerer trying to conjure fire in an effort to get the blood flowing.

  When her hands and fingers were working again, she used the conveyor belt to pull herself up. She wanted nothing more than to lie down and drift off to sleep but knew if she let her eyes close that she would never wake up. She pulled herself along the conveyor belt to the tall machine where the kidnapper had left his handgun. She reached one trembling hand up and felt around. Her fingers closed over the barrel.

  63

  The small green globe arced through the air. Noble watched it bounce in the gravel near the front bumper and roll to a stop. The passenger side door was still open. He threw himself across the front seats. The grenade exploded with a heavy whomp. Shrapnel blistered the side of the car. The concussion blew the last remaining shards of glass out of the window frames, shredded the tires, and hammered Noble’s eardrums.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head to clear it. Being that close to the explosion was disorienting and might have caused permanent hearing damage. Only time would tell. At the moment, he was more worried about getting back into the fight. He needed to engage before they could lob any more grenades in his direction or storm the car. He rolled onto his side, stuck the H&K 410 over the dash, and fired blind.

  ...

  Henries sprinted to the open door of the crushing facility. The rescuer tried to cut him down with a spray of bullets. A round sizzled past his ear. He hunched his shoulders up and ducked his head.

  Rene, crouch behind sacks of crushed gravel, covered his retreat with three short bursts from his AR15. He ejected an empty magazine— the aluminum case clattered across the floor— and seated another mag with a slap.

  Henries stopped inside the door and took a knee next to Rene. Everything had gone to pot with alarming speed, but then, that’s how it usually happens in a gunfight. One minute you had the upper hand and the next you were scrambling to stay alive. Graham, Daniel, and Otto were all dead. Henries had barely escaped the sniper’s bullet. It wouldn’t take the man long to relocate to a spot on the ridgeline that afforded him an angle on the door. The attackers now had the initiative. He and Rene were cornered. Their only bargaining chip was the girl.

  “Stay away from the door,” Henries said. “They’ve got a sniper up on the ridge. He’s good too. Nearly took my head off.”

  Rene thumbed his selector to single shot and fired three rounds at the car. “I hope you have a plan. I’m running out of ammo.”

  “I’m not going to die for the likes of Eric Tsang,” Henries said. “They want the girl. Let’s see if we can use her to buy our way out of here.”

  Rene nodded in agreement. “I’ll hold them off while
you go and fetch her. Don’t be long.”

  Henries slipped a full magazine from his tactical vest and passed it to Rene before going in search of the girl. He had already lost two-thirds of his team. He had no intention of dying here.

  ...

  Noble crawled feet first from the bullet-riddled DNY and hustled around to the tail end of the vehicle, keeping as much metal between him and the two remaining mercenaries as possible. He leaned around the busted taillight and stitched the front of the building with bullets.

  His enemies responded in kind, but they had a limited angle on the DNY from their position inside the open door. If Noble could force them behind cover long enough, he could make it around the side of the building where a conveyor belt entered through a square opening big enough to admit a man. He would have to cross a lot of open ground, but he wouldn’t do any good hiding behind the bumper of a shot-up car.

  He waited for them to fire and then broke cover. He shouldered the 410 and triggered short salvos while moving, hammering the corrugated steel door. The 410’s bolt locked back on an empty chamber as he reached the overturned ore cart. He took a knee behind the sturdy metal container long enough to swap mags and then sprinted for the side of the building. A trail of lead chased him, kicking up little puffs of dirt in his wake. He made the corner, leapt onto the stalled conveyor belt, and ducked through the opening.

  Silence descended on the quarry. After all the shooting and explosions, the quiet felt deafening and unnatural. Noble hopped off the conveyor belt and moved to his left, into an envelope of darkness.

  The facility was designed to pulverize rock from the quarry into increasingly smaller chunks until finally the pebbled rock could be loaded into bags and shipped. The conveyor belt led to a giant crusher. From there, several more belts branched out to different-sized machines scattered throughout the rest of the building. The place was a maze of crisscrossing conveyors and motors. Electrical wires snared up the floor. Fine powder filled the air and made Noble want to sneeze. It would be a cruel twist of fate to survive everything else only to sneeze and get shot in the dark. He ran a finger under his nose until the urge passed.