by Jon Land
* * *
As the gunfire and blasts continued to sound above the control room, portions of the battle visible on several of the screens monitoring the fortress above, chief engineer Bemke watched the LED wall clock freeze at 00.00 without the signal having been received from Black Scorpion’s leader. He moved to his own keyboard, located on a raised dais in the front of the floor along with a half dozen technicians who’d be responsible for monitoring the effects of the United States being shut down.
Before Bemke, the control room was aglow in the lights flashing on the dozens of screens, focusing on the largest congestions of targets and highest areas of population densities. Different regions of America, different cities with separate monitoring screens for the largest twenty, different targets all highlighted and soon to be followed in real time as the Guardian chip spread its magic from coast to coast, shutting the country down. From sea to shining sea, Bemke thought, unsure if he had the words right.
The responsibility to trigger the plan was his now, and he had to do it fast, while there was still time to escape the battle raging in the levels above.
* * *
The freed scorpions seemed everywhere, the floor theirs as Alexander twisted his head and shoulders to the right to deny the giant the grip his thumbs sought on his neck. Otherwise, the man’s incredible strength would have crushed his throat, even with one of his hands mangled from grasping the knife blade. That gave Alexander the opportunity to tense his neck muscles, fighting to buy the time he needed as thumbs like steel bolts continued to press home. He had already sucked in as much breath as he could hold, pretending to flail at Armura’s rigid form desperately the way a normal man would.
But Alexander was not a normal man, his focus rooted entirely on the Beretta pistol just out of his reach to the right, amid the sea of scorpions clacking across the floor.
* * *
Paddy used the water, disappeared into the water. Held his breath as he dragged the explosive pack with him from one SUV chassis to the next. These shaped charges, fortunately, were waterproof, as were the detonators he’d wedged into place in each charge after affixing them beneath the engines, as opposed to the gas tanks themselves, to make better use of the fumes as an accelerant. He might not have been an expert on explosives, but he knew the effects of a dozen vehicles erupting in conjunction with the other strategically placed shaped charges. The nature of explosives was to multiply the effect on a geometric level as the blast radius found additional fuel to feed itself and expand. And who knew what latent gases might have been collecting here over the years to further increase the effects of the blast?
A much bigger boom in other words.
“Sir!” he heard in his earpiece the next time he popped up for air, while gunfire continued to echo and clang around him.
“You still owe me a minute, mate!” he told his squadron leader above, more heavy fire reaching his ears.
“Not much more than that before they’re through and heading your way!”
“You done good, son. Hold as long as you can, then you and your men pull back to my twenty.”
“Just me and one other now, but we roger that.”
“Alexander,” he called again into his mic. “Where the hell are ya, mate?”
* * *
Raven drew up the ladder and slid the lock over the closed hatch. She found herself on a long narrow floor with heavy doors on either side. Old-fashioned, low-tech cells barred from the outside and outfitted with a grate around eye level.
She heard whispers and whimpers as she started moving along them. The guards assigned here must have rushed to join the battle, and she found the cells holding the young women and children halfway down. Thirty-six hostages in total, as it turned out, crowded into four separate cubicles. Twenty-eight boys and girls not more than early teens and eight young women between that age and around twenty.
Raven drew them out of their cells, arranged them in a double line with the oldest of the young women bringing up the rear. Just about to get moving when a torrent of fire blew the hatch holding the fold-down ladder into shards and splinters that showered the air.
* * *
Armura kept pressing his hands attached to arms the size of fire hydrants into Alexander’s throat, Alexander’s oxygen-deprived brain starting to make him feel light-headed. Alexander felt the blood from Armura’s knife wounds soaking both of them with little if any effect on his strength. But his grasp finally slackened just enough for Alexander to latch on to his Beretta. He pressed it against Armura’s midsection, fired and kept firing.
He felt the bullets literally lift the giant off him, back to his feet where he staggered backward with his torso marred by widening pools of red to go with the damage done by the knife wounds Alexander had inflicted. Armura ground himself to a halt. The giant’s eyes had started to dim when he retrained his attention toward Alexander, ready to pounce again when Alexander yanked his assault rifle free, steadied its grenade launcher on Armura …
And fired.
The shell thumped into Armura and exploded with a force great enough to launch him airborne and spill him to the floor, blown in half with his upper and lower bodies skewing in different directions.
Taking no chances, Alexander climbed back to his feet, wobbling a bit as he approached the huge downed form, forms, cautiously, leading with the barrel of his M4. But the giant’s one exposed eye was locked open and sightless, both halves of his body still smoking from the heat generated by the blast.
“It’s about fucking time,” Alexander said out loud.
* * *
Bemke finished keying in the sequence, finger poised over the Execute key when it froze in place, seemingly on its own. The responsibility he would bear for the cataclysm to follow meant nothing to him, not when measured against failing to execute his orders from the man in the black veil.
Bemke pressed Execute.
In that very moment the command center was plunged into darkness broken almost immediately by the bright spill of emergency lighting, more than enough to illuminate a crazed old man wearing a bathrobe standing over a hissing and smoking section of the mainframe holding an empty water bottle in his hand.
The man Bemke knew as “the Professor,” designer of all that lay before him, fixed his eyes on the digital wall maps depicting the United States instead of Russia as were displayed whenever he was down here to coax him into lending his genius to the plan.
Niels Taupmann saluted and began to sing.
“Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light…”
* * *
With Vlad Dracu nowhere to be found, Alexander busied himself with a rapid search for the manuscript Scarlett Swan had described for him back in Vegas.
“Alexander!” he heard Paddy call in his earpiece.
“Finishing up down here right now,” he replied instantly.
“Well, mate, whatever you’re doing, do it fast.”
“Give me a clock.”
“Three minutes, give or take, and be prepared to swim.”
Alexander clicked off, then resumed speaking again. “Three minutes, Raven.”
No response.
“Raven?”
Still nothing.
Alexander was about to give up the search for the ancient pages to focus on finding her, when he spotted a sealed glass case resting amid several shelves containing other artifacts of history. He slid the ammo pack from his shoulder and eased the case inside it into the space vacated by all the magazines he’d spent.
* * *
Raven had heard Alexander’s voice in her ear but was too busy with the rescued hostages to respond. She led them to the far end of the prison hall to find not another door or hatch, but some kind of chute accessible through a square cutout in the wall. The stench told her it must be part of a crude sewer system built into this otherwise high-tech facility typical of the Soviets. And that meant it would offer a direct route to freedom; unless, of course, it had been bricked or cemented ove
r.
With time ticking down, though, she had no other choice and began hoisting the children of Vadja through the hole, starting with the youngest. She followed inside after pushing the last through, sliding downward into a stagnant, lime- and stench-riddled, dark pool of water where the bunker’s drained sewage collected. The hostages, soaked in grime and muck, were already helping each other from the pool placed at the cave’s lowest point outside the bunker’s rear inside the mountain.
Raven collected her bearings quickly, realizing that circling around the massive structure would take them back to the breached front of the cave wall and escape. Already hustling her charges forward, when the wall of water surging into the cave slammed into her.
ONE HUNDRED TEN
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
Dracu managed to maintain grasp of his pistol, re-steadying it on Michael in a shaky hand, when Scarlett launched herself backward. Her chair seemed to actually rise into the air, an illusion fostered by the force of her smacking into Dracu.
Instead of continuing to right his aim, he slammed the pistol across the side of her skull, toppling the chair over to the floor with enough force to shatter the wood. Michael had burst into motion by that point, recalling the lesson that hesitation killed more men than bullets. He didn’t hesitate, not at all, and was on Dracu just as his half brother was again righting the pistol on him.
Bang!
At such close range, the gun’s percussion alone made Michael think he’d been shot. But he hadn’t and continued to battle Dracu for control of the weapon, while beneath him a badly dazed Scarlett struggled to free herself from the remaining bonds of the chair.
Michael and Dracu continued to whirl about, past unfinished sections of the Forbidden City still mired in exposed wires lacking protective panels. This as more shots jerked from the Beretta’s barrel to skewer the walls and ceiling. Dracu jerked the pistol hard to regain control of it, Michael feeling the shoulder injured in his fight with Durado Segura wrenched again, his whole arm starting to go numb and weak.
Even in those moments, Michael’s mind raced with the madness of Dracu’s plan. He and Aldridge Sterling flipping a switch, only to turn it back on after they’d made their money and their mark. And when that moment came, their power and control would be solidified to a degree certain to avoid retribution or retaliation. Vladimir Dracu was a shadow, a specter. With Michael out of the way, who would even know his true identity, much less his singular goal of claiming what he believed to be rightfully his: The Seven Sins and all Michael had created and built, including his multitude of successful ventures across all spectrums and industries.
Vlad would conquer Las Vegas without a gaming license and, just like the Mafia in the sixties and seventies, he’d be nowhere and be everywhere at the same time. Above all else, though, Vlad wanted the relic. The very object he considered mandatory to obtain power and success and the reason why, he must’ve believed, Michael had been able to rise from a peasant in Sicily to a billionaire tycoon in America.
Michael spotted Scarlett crawling away from the broken chair, stripping the rest of her rope bonds free. Going for Dracu’s cell phone.
The next three shots flew sideways, kicking up sparks when at least one of them bore through a nest of exposed wires and circuits. Another shell expended before Michael realized lights powered by the hotel’s emergency generators were flashing everywhere, the system overloading and triggering portions of the atrium floor sliding open to the sub-level below, a holding area.
Where the tigers had already been brought into their habitat, the one part of the Forbidden City that was completely finished.
The animals surged up through the openings provided two at a time, tethered to posts mounted below by thin but incredibly strong ballistic-nylon chains. Michael could see the tigers whipped into a frenzy by their sudden relative freedom, loud shots and energy swirling through the air. They surged about, a few rushing toward him and Vlad only to be yanked back by their tethers at the last moment.
One of the tigers swiped Dracu’s phone away, just as Scarlett was about to grasp it. But she had the sense to lie totally still, even when the tiger roared with its teeth bared before lurching to join the other animals as they kept lunging for Michael and Vlad.
Seeing and smelling the ferocity of their struggle seemed to activate some primal instinct in the beasts’ minds, increasing their level of aggression. They began circling, pawing the floor furiously, poised to attack had it not been for the limits their tethers placed upon them.
Their struggle took Michael and Vlad into the range of the tigers’ tethers, and one of the big cats leaped for Dracu. The man known better known as Black Scorpion gave up trying to right his pistol on Michael and, instead, fired two shots into the animal when it was airborne, before Michael finally knocked the Beretta from his grasp, fresh pain exploding in his shoulder from the effort. The animal fell short of Dracu, hitting the floor dead and whipping the other tigers into an even worse frenzy. They started forward, hunched low in attack mode, only their tethers stopping them as Michael and Dracu drifted out of range again.
With no gun to battle for control over, Michael and Vlad wheeled across the floor, Michael fighting to angle for Scarlett while Dracu continued to maneuver toward the fallen cell phone. They wheeled in and around the tigers snapping and clawing as they tested the absolute limits of their bonds. Michael thought he had a clear path to Scarlett, but his injured shoulder betrayed him again and Vlad tripped him up before he could reach her.
Michael felt the animals clawing the air before him as he rose, spotting Dracu reaching down for the cell phone when a tiger lashed a paw at him, inadvertently swiping the phone away. That forced Dracu to backpedal, clearing a path to him for Michael.
Michael slammed into him hard, both men crashing to the floor, then swiftly regaining their feet and seeming to twirl dance-like across the floor. Michael managed a sidelong glance toward Scarlett who was moving for the phone again, before a pair of tigers caught the motion and lunged toward her. Michael’s breath seized up as she managed to roll out of range just in time, barely escaping their attack.
His divided attention, though, gave Dracu the opening he needed to pound Michael’s groin with a knee. A twist at the last instant spared him the brunt of the impact, but robbed him of his balance enough for Dracu’s next blow to launch him off his feet. Crashing hard to the floor and sliding through the piles of glass he felt scratching at his skin through his clothes.
Recovering his senses, though, found Michael in easy reach of Dracu’s phone. He took it in his grasp and smashed it upon the floor, then smashed it a second time, a third, and then a fourth, until nothing recognizable of the device remained.
“Michael!”
He swung at Scarlett’s raspy cry to find her in Dracu’s grasp, bent over the railing sixty stories over the Daring Sea on the back side of the resort opened up to the night beyond the shattered glass. His half brother grinning madly as he prepared to drop her from the top of the Forbidden City.
ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN
HOIA-BACIU FOREST, ROMANIA
Water was pooling along the access hall to Vlad Dracu’s private lair and starting to climb. It surged down the tube accessing the first level and Alexander had to hold his breath, fighting against its torrents as he climbed.
He pushed himself out under four feet of rising water and burst upward to add his fire to the ratcheting shells of what was left of Paddy’s team. Just three men, maybe four, by the look and sound of things when a big hand clamped down on his shoulder.
Alexander swung and found himself locked with Paddy’s ice blue eyes, the grin stretched across his face belying the wounds he’d suffered in his shoulder and leg.
“I hate the bloody water, mate. Might never go for a swim again.”
“We ready to rain hell?”
Paddy flashed the detonator he’d taped to his palm. “Just say the word.”
“You’re gonna need to go for one more swim
first.”
Alexander twisted to resume firing at the remaining forces of Black Scorpion, pushing backward through the climbing waters when Paddy latched a quivery hand onto his shoulder.
“We lost a lot of good blokes today, mate.”
“Then let’s make sure it was worth it,” Alexander followed, when a stairwell door burst open to allow a fresh surge of Black Scorpion forces to pour through into the waters.
He pumped one 40mm grenade out and then a second, his last, before the first had even exploded. The near twin blasts blew the door off its hinges, crushing whoever was behind it even as they left a thick enough debris field to block that route to anything but a few stray shots of errant fire. Return fire from Black Scorpion’s forces continued to rage, and Alexander moved to help Paddy through the waters that had reached their necks, backpedaling as he held his M4 over the flow until it clicked empty and he tossed it aside.
They were almost to the breach now, the first light of dawn visible beyond through a clearing sky when both spotted an old man wearing a drenched bathrobe standing directly before them with one hand clamped to his forehead in the position of a salute. The other looked to be holding what looked and smelled like a marijuana blunt.
“Reporting for duty!” the old man said, saluting as the water climbed past his chest.
* * *
Bemke watched his technicians working feverishly to get the mainframe up and running again. Finally, the lights in the command center snapped back on, the steady whir of machines following immediately.
Wasting no further time, Bemke rushed back atop the dias to reboot his computer and reinitiate the activation sequence. His fingers flew across the keyboard, watching his screen return to life, ready to press the Execute key to complete his orders.
* * *
Raven managed to herd her charges into a tight cluster with the oldest, teenage girls mostly, on the outside to help the younger ones, the youngest of whom were already held in their arms. Raven scooped up a pair of six- or seven-year-olds who were floundering and about to panic, struggling against the waters rising through the exposed cave’s diameter.
