by Cliff Ryder
The brown-haired man was hunched over something, his right arm rising and falling with powerful regularity. Drops of some liquid spattered against the cabin's ceiling, and it took him a moment to register that blood was spraying with each blow. The man was savagely beating someone.
Maggie.
David crawled inside and lunged at the man, ready to put him down once and for all.
As he did, however, the man whirled to meet his charge, bringing up his pistol and going for David's throat with his other hand. Stopped in midstep, David was forced back against the closed door, with the man choking the life out of him until he could bring his pistol over to shoot him. David got his free hand up to stop the pistol before it was aimed at his head, but he was exhausted after everything he had gone through, and the muzzle came closer and closer to the side of his head.
Stars swam in his vision as the man's choke hold intensified, cutting off the flow of blood and oxygen to his brain. Something had to give, and David knew what it was. The only question was whether he could do it before he either was strangled to death or took a bullet in the brain.
Grasping for whatever gasps of oxygen he could suck down, he moved his wounded arm to the door handle. His opponent, hearing him wheeze, snarled and squeezed even tighter.
"You just don't know when to fucking die, do you?"
"Afraid not…despite your…best…efforts…" As he had hoped, the retort made his attacker more furious, and he redoubled his efforts to kill David, smashing him into the door. At the same time, David pulled on the handle and pushed back with all his strength, leaning out into the airstream. He shoved the pistol away and grabbed the man's jacket with his hand as he arced backward, pulling the mercenary out of the helicopter with him.
David tumbled head over heels, and felt a peculiar, weightless sensation as the earth and sky tumbled crazily about him. Then reality reasserted itself, and the nylon strap connecting his leg to the skid tightened around his thigh with a painful jerk as it stopped him cold, leaving him suspended in midair. The momentum of his fall shot him completely under the helicopter, making him swing back and forth, all of his limbs flailing wildly.
The plan should have been more or less foolproof, except that something had gone terribly wrong. A heavy weight was wrapped around David's torso, crushing him, dragging him down. Something blocked his vision and David heard panicked, ragged breathing in his ear that he was sure wasn't his own.
The bastard's hanging on to me! Hanging more or less upside down, David's injured arm dangled uselessly below his head, and for a moment he thought his other one might be broken or injured, as well, since he couldn't seem to locate it as he whirled and spun in the downdraft. The other man's arms and legs seemed to be everywhere at once, crawling on and clawing at him as he tried to improve his hold. David's uninjured arm smacked into something, and he grabbed on and held on tightly.
The other man shouted, but David couldn't make out what he was saying. He realized he was holding on to the back of the man's jacket, and that his enemy was trying to climb up David's body to reach the nylon strap. Using his hold on the cloth, David pulled him back with all his strength. The man tried to wriggle free, but David brought his free leg up into the man's face, feeling the crunch of cartilage as it met his nose. The man's grip slackened, and David did it again, and again. He pulled at the man's back, trying to peel him off.
David felt fingers scrabbling at his torn and bloody sweatshirt as the stunned man slipped farther down. He helped him along by grabbing his wrist and twisting it. Finding the other hand near his mouth, David sank his teeth into the back of it, biting as hard as he could. His opponent shouted in pain, and David tore at the slick, bloody flesh until the fingers released. The hand clawed at his face, but David swung his head so that it couldn't find any purchase. His sweatshirt was peeling away from his body as it came apart under the pressure.
As a last-ditch effort to save himself, the man tried to bring his legs up to wrap around David's waist, but David jackknifed backward to prevent him from cinching around his lower abdomen. The last threads of the sweatshirt tore apart, and the man fell away from David.
David hung there for long seconds, completely exhausted. Now that he had gotten the man off him, there was the complicated matter of trying to get back up into the helicopter. The pressure on his leg was excruciating, the nylon biting deep into his thigh, cutting off the blood supply. If he didn't do something about it quickly, he would end up permanently crippled. Taking a deep breath, David arced up, his fingers straining for the strap. His hand just brushed it, then he fell back again, sending a fresh jolt of pain through his leg and shoulder.
Long seconds passed before he gathered the energy to try again. This time he attempted to get himself rocking back and forth, building up the momentum to make that one desperate lunge to grab the strap. David swung back and forth, going just a bit higher each time. But he tended to swing around in the helicopter's downdraft, which could put him into a dizzying spin and make him miss the grab or, even worse, black out completely. But if he didn't try, David knew he was dead anyway.
He kept going, arcing himself up higher and higher, until with one final burst of energy, he hooked the strap with a white, wind-chilled claw of a finger. He hung there, unsure of what to do next. There was no way he'd be able to haul himself up with one hand…
David looked down, wondering if it might be better to fall rather than succumb to hypothermia, when he saw something very odd indeed. The ground seemed to be rising to meet him.
For a second he thought it was a trick of his vision, some kind of optical illusion, but the landscape below kept growing closer. We're going down, he thought. Sure enough, the helicopter descended to a field near the coast, slowing enough and hovering until it was only a few feet from the ground, then slowly settling to the earth. David managed to avoid the skids of the helicopter, landing and rolling out of the way as it settled into the grass, whipping twigs and debris up all around him. David lay on the ground, trying to claw the strap off his leg, when a shadow fell over him.
"Let me!" The voice sounded odd, clenched somehow, as if the words were spoken through gritted teeth. Someone bent over him, and with a few quick movements, the strap was off his leg. "Come on, let's get you inside!"
He allowed himself to be helped up and into the helicopter, which revved up and took off again. David lay on the floor, looking in disbelief at the orange strap that ran from around the pilot's neck to Maggie's wrist, held taut by her. Her face was a mask of bruised, torn flesh and blood, with one eye swollen completely shut, and her nose squashed into itself, crushed under the pounding she had taken. The way she held her jaw suggested that it had been fractured at the very least.
"Thanks…" he gasped, massaging the numb flesh of his leg with his good arm as he lay on the floor. He thought she might have grinned in response, but it turned into a grimace of pain instead.
"I had to pay you back for saving my life — again." She leaned back against the bench seat, slipped on a pair of headphones and addressed the pilot. "Now, take us to Heathrow, and you get to keep breathing normally."
David tore a strip of his shirt off to make a compress and tried to apply pressure to his arm wound, but he couldn't make his fingers hold on. His vision kept graying out, but he knew he had to stay awake, to make sure she was taken into custody.
"Oh, you're bleeding bad. Here, let me do that." David felt a warm hand on his skin, and firm pressure was applied to his shoulder wound, making him grit his teeth with the pain, and causing the grayness at the edges of his vision to swell into black as he passed out.
44
The next several hours were a blur for David. He remembered bits and glimpses — being carried from the helicopter…the roof of a fast-moving ambulance…hearing a squeaky, rattling wheel as he was carted through bland, sterile hallways…searing pain as something was done to his shoulder…then merciful blackness again.
He came to with a grunt, half-sitting up
in his hospital bed, only to fall back as pain racked his body. His left arm was in a heavy, immobilizing cast, and he felt a thick bandage covering his left side, as well.
Before he could move or speak, a doctor was at his bedside to check on him, along with a nurse.
"Water," he croaked from a dry mouth, which was quickly supplied, the coldest, freshest liquid he ever remembered sliding down his throat. They monitored his vital signs, adjusted the flow of two IVs stuck into his arms and nodded to a short, chestnut-haired, intense-looking woman with gray circles under her piercing gold-green eyes. "You've got a minute, maybe two, then the morphine will kick in again. He needs to rest anyway," the doctor said.
She nodded, the simple action appearing to take more effort than it should. "Leave us."
David stared at her for long seconds, wondering if he should somehow know her, but unsure from where. "Hello."
"Good evening, Mr. Southerland. Glad to see you're still with us."
Regardless of her appearance, her voice was certainly familiar. "Nowhere else I'd rather be — even if I don't know where that is," he said.
She smiled, the simple expression fransforming her face. "Rest assured that you're with friends. My name is Donna Massen, from Primary."
David's brow wrinkled. "Really? The lock word is 'alpine.'"
Her grin turned sly, as she nodded. "Very good. The key word is 'evergreen.' Glad to hear that your training still comes through, even in your current circumstances."
"Which are what and where, exactly?"
"You're in a private hospital that Room 59 keeps available in western England for just such occasions. You've earned a fairly lengthy stay here, due to that shoulder, but they'll have you right and fixed up as soon as possible."
"What about Maggie?"
"We found her with you at the airport. She could have left, although I'm not sure how far she would have gotten, looking as she did. But she didn't. She said she wanted to make sure you were all right. We've taken her in, as well. It's best to keep her out of sight for now, for both the obvious and more subtle reasons. She's going to be fine, even with the number that was done on her."
"Well, if she doesn't know, tell her that the man who did that to her won't ever come after her again. He's splattered over a half acre of Belgium right now."
"I'm sure she'll sleep easier hearing that. They wired her jaw, but she still tries to speak, even while asleep. She mentioned two names — one is Ray, does that mean anything to you?"
David shook his head, the motion making him dizzy, and he leaned back against his pillow. "Maybe a relative?"
"The other name is yours."
He shrugged, wincing at the movement. "We've been through a good deal together. What about the package?"
"It's been recovered. MI-6 are going through it, just to make sure that all is as it should be. Still, we'll keep our Web crawlers busy for the next couple of weeks, just to make sure that nothing was leaked."
"Glad to hear the mission was a success," he said.
"I know about the losses your team took. It was a terrible thing."
"I let my team down. I couldn't save them. I don't know why I lived and they didn't," he said.
She frowned. "I think you do know the reason why, even if you don't want to admit it. If you had been killed, Mr. Southerland, then the enemy would have that information, and from there who knows where it would have gone and how many more lives would have been lost. You did the right thing. You kept going, even though it must have been very hard to do."
A pleasant heaviness was spreading over David's limbs, and his eyes drooped to half-mast. "Not that difficult. Had to continue the mission…"
"Yes, the director mentioned something about your stubbornness. Apparently you don't like to lose."
"Not if I can help it. What about the…rest of the team. Were they brought back?"
An odd look crossed her face, but Donna recovered quickly. "Their bodies are being flown back from France as we speak." She smoothed the blanket at the edge of the bed, a gesture David found oddly maternal. "You just get some rest now, and we'll begin your debriefing in a few days, when you're feeling better. After that will be several weeks of intense physical therapy, since we'll want you back in tip-top shape. Sleep well, Mr. Southerland."
David barely heard Donna Massen's goodbye or her quiet exit from the room, as he was already drifting off into sleep…
Epilogue
Outside David's room, Kate resisted the urge to tear the brown wig off her head, striding instead through the quiet halls until she had left the hospital part behind as she headed back to the small manor house on the grounds, now divided into several apartments for visiting personnel and recovering operatives.
As she walked, she punched an autodial number on her cell, then slipped her earpiece on.
"Kate, you're right on time."
"Have I missed anything?"
"No, just inconsequential small talk." She heard the quiet sounds of chewing. "Jake, are you eating while talking to me?"
"My roasted Cornish scallops with white truffle and white chocolate risotto is best eaten while hot." Although Jake was usually under strict orders to never leave Kate's side, the hospital, between the Snowdon Forest and Lake Te Anau in Wales, was guarded by a rotating schedule of Midnight Team members. Kate felt quite secure there, even with Jake a few hundred miles away.
She trotted up the refurbished nineteenth-century home's front steps and through the doors into the main suite. It was as well appointed as her hotel room back in London. Making for her laptop, Kate brought up the screen. "And here I thought you'd be an Angus-beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding sort," she said laughing.
"Not while on duty. All that heavy meat can make a man slow to react," Jake said.
Kate sat at the desk and brought up what Jake was looking at through his spyglasses at the moment — a stunning redhead in an off-the-shoulder black velvet dress. "And I'm sure you have no designs on impressing the young lady across from you," she said.
"That young lady, as you so casually describe her, is Darlene Thomason, who, I think, has done as many missions for MI-5 as I did for the army, perhaps more. But enough shop talk for now, darling," he said, raising his voice and taking his dinner companion's hand. In a lower tone, he spoke to Kate. "The show's about to start. You sure you don't want to get some rest and read Samantha's report in the morning?"
Even though Kate's eyes felt as if bits of ground glass had been sprinkled in them, she said no. "This guy works for the bastards who casually murdered four of our operatives, and nearly brought MI-6 to its knees. I wouldn't miss this for the world."
"Then switch over, because Samantha's claws are about to come out."
"Switching over to Samantha now. Enjoy the rest of your evening, Jake."
"I will. Oh, and Kate — I wouldn't wait up."
"I have absolutely no intention of doing so. Kate out." She switched over to Samantha's spyglasses in time to see her glance about the room, taking in Jake's chatting up of his companion. He was alert enough to catch her gaze out of the corner of his eye and nod subtly at her.
I have to admit, the room is something else, Kate thought. The Grill Room at the Dorchester was decorated in an unusual blend of baroque and modern elegance. Gilded gold chandeliers dangled from the recessed ceiling, casting their intimate light around the room and onto the classical figures painted right onto the walls. Dark-green-and-bright-red-plaid patterns on the casually mismatched chairs accented the red tartan pattern on the carpeted floor. Tall wine cabinets dotted the walls, and the whole place looked as if serious money flowed into and out of it. Kate would have bet a year's salary that the food no doubt tasted like it, as well.
She tuned in to the conversation. "More wine, Terrence?" Samantha asked.
"Thank you, but please — allow me." He poured what looked like a chardonnay into her glass, then refilled his own. Terrence Weatherby looked like a man who was slowly coming apart, but doing his best to hold himself
together. Although he was impeccably dressed in a dark, worsted-wool suit that draped his tall frame well, Kate saw small beads of perspiration dotting his hairline, and noted the small tremble in his hand as he replaced the wine bottle in its ice bucket. He's nervous about something, she thought, watching him polish off half his wine in one large swallow. It might be just that he's sitting across from Samantha, or it might be something else entirely.
Regardless of how he looked, Terrence was still trying to project a nonchalant air. "It is so refreshing to relax in a fine restaurant, with such attractive company, for a change."
"Terrence, you're too kind. I suppose your work keeps you busy, especially nowadays," Samantha said.
"Well, you know how it is in the global security market — good business is where you find it."
Oh, Terrence, you really shouldn't set yourself up like that, Kate mused.
Apparently Samantha had the same thought, for she leaned forward a bit, making Terrence grow larger in her view. "And how is business in Europe for Mercury — say, in France, particularly?"
Terrence had been about to take a forkful of what looked like some sort of fish in a cream sauce, and he barely paused as he ate it, chewed and swallowed. Not bad, taking a moment while he tries to figure out exactly what she means, Kate thought.
"France? I'm not sure I follow. There isn't any reason for us to be in France at this time."
"Oh, excuse me, I must have been too vague. How about your business in Paris, in particular, at the Gare du Nord train station earlier today?"
Terrence tried to chuckle, but the sound died in his throat. "I heard something about a shootout there on the news. Are you insinuating that my company had something to do with that?"
Samantha dabbed at her lips with her napkin, then laid it across her plate. "Terrence, you should know me better than that by now. I don't have to insinuate anything. We have the bodies of two of your mercenaries. And we also have one of your pilots, taken alive from Belgium, where he was sent to pick up a certain young woman who had carried out a very nasty mission on your company's behalf."
