by Jon Land
As such, he expected that hall to be heavily defended. Not surprisingly, the windowless heavy steel door was locked from the inside, meaning it too would have to be blown, and this time Alexander himself readied the charge from his pack.
“Leave me two men,” he said to Paddy. “The ground floor is yours.”
Paddy winked at him, beaming like a kid on Christmas morning as he adjusted his headset microphone closer to his lips. “Don’t do a bloody thing, mate, till I do it first.”
* * *
Paddy led his team up a ladder to yet another hatch that, according to his sense of the fortress’s structure, led onto the ground floor it was his job to secure. He drilled a small hole in the hatch itself and poked an eye-line device through that was no thicker than a straw. Rotating it provided a 360-degree view to his eye pressed against the bottom half and what he saw wasn’t good.
Eight men occupying what looked like an expansive concrete and steel space packed with vehicles. He’d been smelling oil, gasoline, and tire rubber for a few moments and now understood why. The entrance to the mountain he needed to breach was very well defended, the size and scope of the complex surprising him. Hearing it had been constructed within a mountain cave had him picturing something more contained. He was thinking submarine and what he got was an aircraft carrier, but he’d come prepared.
Paddy had learned long ago that nothing beat distraction when it came to overcoming superior numbers and positioning, at least initially. At this point, there was no way he could get his people into position without taking significant casualties and forfeiting the surprise of his team’s presence earlier than planned.
Paddy slid the eye-line device out from the hatch and replaced it with a tubular extension rigged to a small tank he removed from his pack containing a simple compound that stunk to holy hell once it mixed with air. Something like the overflow from a septic system, only much worse, and easy enough to take the guards’ minds off anything but its source. Make them so sick to their stomachs, they’d want to puke.
Distraction.
Paddy turned the small spigot on the tank and heard the initial hiss of the noxious gas escaping above.
“You read me, mate?” he called to Alexander through his throat mic.
“Loud and clear.”
“Shite’s about to hit the fan.”
He signaled his men to pull back down the ladder a bit, ready a mere minute later when the access wheel to the hatch begun to turn above him. Paddy could hear one of the guards retching and coughing from the odor as he started to hoist it open, flooding the chamber with light.
“Evening, mate,” Paddy greeted him, and then opened fire.
* * *
Alexander triggered the charge he’d set himself as soon as he heard the gunfire clanging above. He and the two commandos with him backed off and covered their ears, assault weapons dangling at their chests in the ready position. His own M-4 carbine came equipped with an M203 40mm grenade launcher attached beneath its barrel, the additional handling weight well worth the extra firepower it provided.
Pooooofffff!
The latch disappeared in a flash and the door blew open behind a surge of smoke. His men were through the door just as Alexander spotted the red laser line amid the smoke.
“No!” he cried out an instant too late, just as the wall-mounted mines blew a blanket of shrapnel outward that ripped the men apart before they could even scream.
Alexander dove into the smoke, through what was left of the shredded bodies and beneath the bursts of gunfire coming from the other end of the hall. Three shooters, he figured, as he steadied his M4 and fired on full auto in a sweeping motion aimed at the muzzle flashes that had erupted through the smoke-riddled darkness.
He heard cries, screams, enough to tell him he’d felled all three gunmen. Back on his feet and sliding down the hall in the next instant, spotting the trio of bodies lying in a heap halfway down the iron hall. He fired one grenade from his launcher and then a second straight for the door.
The explosions seemed to merge, the flame burst and smoke clearing to reveal a jagged chasm blown in the now charred, smoking steel. Alexander picked up his pace, fresh magazine jammed home and fresh 40mm grenade chambered. Drawing closer to the lair, he thought he heard classical music playing somewhere, expecting movement to flash within, more targets making themselves known to defend their leader.
But he reached the breach recording neither; he was beginning to feel something was awry, even before he surged inside, rifle rotating and ready.
No more guards. No more defenses.
“Shit,” Alexander muttered to himself.
Vladimir Dracu’s lair was empty.
ONE HUNDRED SIX
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
Michael felt the lobby’s marble floor seem to quake beneath him. He could see smoke and flames climbing down the Strip through the Seven Sins glass façade that had shattered from the percussion and blown inward, flying shards of glass wounding a number of guests who were already being tended to by a combination of other guests and Seven Sins security personnel. He grabbed one of those plainclothes security men as he surged forward.
“Was it a bomb?” Michael asked the man, whose nametag identified him as JACOB, as shrieking, panicked visitors stormed the lobby from the valet area.
“I don’t know, sir,” Jacob told him, after a moment of shock over whom he was addressing. “Reports are all over the place,” he continued, touching his earpiece. “Just got one that said it was the gas station on Paradise Road.”
Police and rescue sirens had just begun to sound, when Michael felt the next series of explosions through what felt like vibrations at his very core. Jacob instinctively shoved Michael behind him to protect against any further pieces of glass and debris falling from the ceiling. Michael felt dust showering him and looked up to see the lobby’s crystal chandelier breaking free of its bonds, in the next moment spotting a child and father standing directly beneath it.
He lit out toward them, shoving both out of harm’s way, and shielding them an instant before the chandelier exploded on impact with the marble floor. The sound alone fed the panic, guests charging about desperately in all directions, crying and screaming.
An all too familiar scene.
“Mr. Tiranno!” Jacob called, catching up to him.
“Go,” Michael ordered. “Help the people who need it.”
More patrons shuffled past him to see whatever had befallen the Strip, indicators, no doubt, that Las Vegas was under attack again.
But by whom?
The answer came in the next moment when his phone beeped with an incoming text. Michael wedged it close to his eyes in a thinning pocket of smoke and saw SCARLETT light up, a single message displayed on his Samsung Galaxy.
THE FORBIDDEN CITY, MICHELE. COME ALONE OR SHE DIES. TAKE YOUR PRIVATE ELEVATOR.
And Michael rushed across the lobby.
ONE HUNDRED SEVEN
HOIA-BACIU FOREST, ROMANIA
Paddy’s initial burst had taken out three guards clustered over the apparent origins of the stench, his bullets pouring out of the hatch once they’d raised it open. He went through the breach first, tumbling to the floor to a fusillade of fire from the five remaining guards who’d reacted faster than he’d expected.
Combat had been his life for long enough to recognize men for whom it wasn’t. He’d come to think of them as “rookies,” soldiers used to bullying their way and seldom, if ever, facing the kind of professional resistance, much less attack, he was prepared to provide. But the lack of a gap in the Black Scorpion soldiers’ response told him they were as professional in ability as they were fearsome in reputation. That meant this wasn’t going to be easy, which in Paddy’s mind meant it was going to be more fun.
He rolled upon hitting the floor, firing on motion more than shape, his initial bursts meant to clear the way for more of his men to join him. The bursts did that and more, felling a fourth and fifth of the guards and leaving s
everal more pinned behind vehicles, suddenly on the defensive. That meant the advantage was Paddy’s for now and he had to seize it.
He figured he had maybe a minute at most before the first wave of reinforcements arrived, giving him just that to get the main entrance open for Raven Khan and her men.
“Keypad!” he yelled to the two-man team of operators responsible for breaching the main entrance for Raven Khan, identifying the means of entry for them.
And they rushed toward it under fire from the remaining gunmen shooting from behind the cover of the vehicles parked in neat rows. In between his own shots, Paddy glimpsed his men tearing apart the keypad and running thick wires to a bypass device. But triggering the bypass tripped the system and the door remained frozen in place, forcing them to resort to explosive charges instead.
Big ones, real big ones, Paddy thought, stealing more glimpses of them wedging concentrated shaped charges into place. Reinforcements would be arriving any moment now and Paddy waved his rear phalanx on and provided cover for them to the stairwell accessing the floors above. Their mission was to secure those levels by blowing the stairwell at the third level, denying Black Scorpion’s men passage downward, and then holding at the second level in case anyone got through or tried an alternate route. They didn’t have the firepower to hold them forever but the strategy should hold them long enough for both Alexander and the woman to work their parts of the mission, while Paddy prepared to blow the fortress to hell once their mission was complete.
The thermal satellite imaging hadn’t told him everything, but it had told him enough to identify the best structural points at which to plant explosives. The problem was once he blew the main entrance for Raven and her team to enter, all bets were off and he’d be in the kind of old-fashioned firefight he’d known for what seemed like all his life.
“Have at it, boys!” he yelled, as his men rushed for the stairwell and Paddy fired a pair of 40mm grenades from his M4 carbine to better clear the path for them.
Then he put two more into the elevator to close it off as an access point as well.
* * *
Raven counted the seconds in her head. She’d moved her men into position even with the waterfall and could do nothing more until Alexander’s forces carved open the entrance beyond. She used these particular men only for the most challenging jobs when violence would almost certainly be required; like the rescue of Niels Taupmann from a Soviet gulag or, much more recently, the planned seizure of the Lucretia Maru at sea. Hardened criminals and cutthroats, with prices on their heads across the world, for whom violence was normally a first resort.
All of them here only because of the huge payday thanks to Michael Tiranno opening up his offshore “emergency” coffers, Raven was thinking when she heard explosions and the rattle of percussion within the mountain. The feeling was akin to the slight tremor of a jet flying low overhead, enough to tell her the battle inside had begun.
Hurry up, you damn Brit, Raven thought.
* * *
“Paddy, do you copy?” Alexander said into the microphone dangling even with his mouth.
“How’s the party going down there, mate?”
“Empty.”
“No shit? Having a fucking blast up here.”
“Listen, Paddy, Dracu’s not on the premises. Repeat, primary target is not—”
Alexander’s last words were choked off by the most powerful grasp he’d ever felt closing over him from behind. He managed to twist and pull free at the last, just as he started to feel the pressure in his ribs. Whirling sideways and then back to find himself facing Armura.
* * *
“Heavy resistance on third level!” Paddy heard chiming in his ear. “Holding at stairwell to heavy fire!”
“Blow it to fuck and pull back!”
“Affirmative! We got men down, sir!”
“Blow it to double fuck then.”
Paddy’s men down here had just cut down the last Black Scorpion guard, providing a moment’s respite in which the only firing he heard were the echoes still bouncing about his head. His men at the main entrance were slapping the final shaped charges into place and he had started to breathe just a bit easier, when the drop ceiling seemed to collapse beyond the rows of vehicles stowed between his position and the other side of the sprawling floor.
Bloody hell!
Because reinforcements spilled down through the ruptured tiles one after the other, something he cursed himself for not anticipating. He angled a wild spray upward to cut as many of them down as he could but plenty of live ones continued to pour out like ants from a nest.
Paddy skirted along the periphery of his team’s return fire, into the open to catch as many enemy troops as he could in a nonstop barrage. He never felt more alive than in these moments when time froze, nothing but the staccato bursts of sound and glimpses of movement registering with him at all.
Time changed. Places changed.
But not combat, one fight exactly like the last and the next. There was the gun, his targets, and nothing else. And right now he pumped out two more 40mm grenades, turning a pair of big SUVS into flaming husks, in the same moment one of his men at the main entrance hit the signal on his detonator.
* * *
The huge blast blew a burst of rubble from the mountain into the air, forming a heavy cloud that briefly swallowed the waterfall. It cleared to reveal a chasm where the mountain face had just been, a face carved away years before to be replaced by iron and steel dressed to mesh perfectly with the rest of the mountain.
Opening the door for her.
“Move! Move! Move!” Raven ordered her men.
She led them into the lake waters that glowed greenish-black in the rain still pouring from the dark sky. They sank almost immediately up to the waist and then quickly to chest level with weapons raised overhead to keep them as dry as possible. Closer up, the waterfall’s roar was much louder and the force of its spill much more intense than it seemed from the edge of the woods.
Those waters pelted Raven and her men with a pounding spray of needles as they passed under the flow. They cleared the waterfall’s drenching force, the lightest of the blast-strewn rubble clinging to the surface of the lake. Raven and her men surged past it, charging through the blown entrance to the fortress with guns blazing amidst the water pouring in ahead of them.
She immediately saw the big, steely-eyed Brit named Paddy and a small group of his men struggling to hold their ground against increasing levels of resistance and advance from a much larger Black Scorpion force. The dark figures were dropping out of the ceiling from the level above, huge amounts of fire, constant barrages, exchanged back and forth. If her analysis of the satellite’s thermal imaging scans were correct, the hostages she’d come to rescue were clustered somewhere at the far end of the corridor Black Scorpion’s forces were currently defending. Looked to be nearly impossible to break through the front they’d established.
Nearly, Raven thought to herself, as her gaze fell on the array of vehicles lined up in neat rows between Paddy’s guns and Black Scorpion’s.
* * *
“We’re under attack!” one of the monitors called out to Bemke in the control room. “We must evacuate!”
Bemke shoved him back down in the chair set before his station. “We stay here and finish our job. We wait to make sure the signal is sent.”
“We’re trapped down here! Are you mad?”
Bemke took his hand off the man’s shoulder. “No, only a madman would act against our employer’s orders. If you want to flee, be my guest.”
The man didn’t.
“We wait,” Bemke told the monitor. “Those are our orders and that’s what we do.”
“And if the signal doesn’t come on time, as expected?”
“Then we follow those same orders and activate the operation ourselves,” Bemke said, his eyes scanning the various electronic wall maps depicting the United States, thousands of green lights about to be flashing red.
&nbs
p; * * *
Alexander had never felt such power, such strength. No one he’d ever encountered before could rival this giant of a man for sheer brutal force, his hands like vices that had to be pried free instead of opened. Every time of those hands managed to close on him, Alexander felt something spasm and start to give. Knowing there was no time or space to waste trying to free the assault rifle he’d swept behind him or even the pistol snapped into his hip holster, Alexander went for his knife instead, a much easier motion to conceal until he thrust it outward from the cover of his own body.
Armura grabbed hold of the blade, closing a hand around it, just before it plunged into his stomach. Alexander saw the blood, smelled the blood, but squeezing his hand around the sharp edge seemed to have no effect on the giant. He didn’t even flinch, an utter stranger to the kind of pain he should’ve been feeling now.
Armura gained the upper hand long enough to slam Alexander into one side of the wall and then the other. He’d never felt so light, so helpless under the bigger man’s incredible strength, struck by the illusion that Armura was actually two different men sewn together thanks to the mask that covered one side of his face.
The giant discarded Alexander’s blade from his bloodied hand, the two men continuing to grapple about what looked like an art gallery fashioned amid old, heavy furniture. Little space existed for them to move, the blows of each either parried or absorbed by the other.
Alexander felt each of the giant’s like a sledgehammer pounding his flesh and one blow he took on the fleshy part of his shoulder numbed his arm all the way to his fingers. His M4 carbine remained slung behind him, within reach but not without the risk of opening himself to the kind of single blow from a man this strong that could incapacitate him on its own.
