“Your life for information.” Mai shot another Korean as she spoke.
“There is a missile in a silo beneath the island. It is programmed to launch, return, and explode on impact with the compound. But it’s not a one-man protocol. Not even a madman would allow that. The failsafe is that two men have the authority to launch and abort.”
Hibiki suddenly stopped short and stared at the doctor. “No,” he said in English. “That’s so unfair.”
Mai chewed her lip. “What?”
“General Kwang Yong and the base commander both have the authority to abort the launch,” Hibiki said. “By the fingerprint scanner on that console.”
“. . .final protocol will occur in two minutes. . .”
Mai ran like never before. She hurdled a body, hit the door at a dead run, shouldered it aside so that it almost crashed off its hinges. She jumped down the steps, felt her feet touch the grass and accelerated to full sprint. She vaulted a drainage ditch, leaned her body down without losing pace and scooped up the first discarded rifle she passed.
All the time counting the seconds off in her head.
“Ninety. . .eighty-nine. . .eighty-eight. . .”
She found the clearing where the overweight island boss lay. His dead eyes and chubby face stared up at her with the mocking appearance of a smile—a last laugh. Mai stepped in and didn’t give her next action any more thought. She set the rifle to auto and pulled the trigger.
Bullets slammed through the boss’ arm at the elbow, churning up dirt, blasting apart bone and flesh until the appendage separated from the rest of the body.
Mai scooped it up, dropped the weapon with a crunch, and hurled her body back the way it had just come. Forty-three. . .forty-two. . .forty-one. . .
Pounding across the uneven grass, springing from one rise to the next, a full-flight hurdle across a fallen tree, now seeing the distant comms building, seeing the door standing wide open.
. . .nineteen. . .eighteen. . .
She wasn’t going to make it.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Her life was measured in seconds. The distance between her and the fast approaching comms building seemed to elongate like some special effect, making it seem farther away. Smyth was at the door, screaming. She felt an ill-omened rumble begin under her feet. The ground shook.
The arm she held slapped a tree on the way past. Mai barely kept hold of it. If she dropped it there was no doubt—game over.
But it already was. Nine. . .eight. . .
Mai flung her entire body at the top step, skidded across the threshold and into the room, twisted in mid-slide and dug her boots against the concrete for purchase. Then like a hundred-meter sprinter, on her knees with her hands against the floor, she was out of the traps like a gold medal winning Olympian.
Smyth had cleared the path to the console. He was even pointing at the fingerprint pad.
. . .three. . .two. . .
Mai lunged.
“One.”
“Final protocol engaged.”
Mai jammed the boss’s fingers to the pad. She heard a click. But then the threatening rumble beneath her feet grew to a shaky groan. Smyth ran to the door and Mai followed him.
Above the distant trees, a trail of light and fire shot high into the sky. Mai spared a despairing glance for Hibiki and then stepped close to Smyth.
“At first I thought you were an insolent prick, my friend. It is strange that I grew to like you so much. It has been. . .a life experience.”
“That it has, Maggie.” Smyth’s eyes tracked the boiling stream of light as it painted the skies. “That it has.”
The rocket attained the end of its vertical flight and began to turn. Mai was surprised to feel Dai Hibiki’s hands suddenly resting on her shoulder. “You must go.” He coughed. “Run. You might make it.”
Even Smyth laughed. “I doubt even the great Mai Kitano could outrun a rocket, bud.”
“Well, not with a marine in tow.” Mai’s thoughts turned to Drake. Here she was, staring into the scorching face of her fate, unsure if the man she already knew she loved was even alive. She remembered their first meeting so well she could recite every line, recall every event, simply because she ran it through her head at least once a week. Chechnya had been a hellhole, a veritable outpost of purgatory and a den for all the Devil’s demons, but Mai knew it as the place where she’d met the love of her life.
Amidst battle. Amidst war. A fitting occurrence that defined all her days since the clan had bought her from her destitute parents. To be a human child, and then for that child to be remade into steel, into the hard edge of the night, and then to be turned human again by a single chance meeting with a great man.
“What the—?”
Lost in her thoughts, in her unfulfilled dreams, Mai hadn’t even been aware of the rocket anymore. Smyth’s outburst brought her back just in time to see the burning fire trail flutter out. In the same instant, the terrible weapon stuttered and fell, like a bird killed in mid-flight, straight down toward the ocean.
The doctor, the last Korean standing, sounded very matter of fact as he spoke up. “I did say the base commander could abort the missile. Abort.”
Mai resisted the urge to turn around and shoot him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Drake drove the Charger faster than any car he’d ever driven in his life. Even then, the Viper stayed ahead, its whole façade—its color, its shape, its name, its occupant—radiating an unrestrained predatory instinct. The Gulfstream jet hustled along beside it, separated by mere meters.
Kingston was running level with the open forward hatch.
“What the hell is he doing?” Alicia shouted. “He can’t get in.”
That’s what worries me, Drake thought. Kingston had called ahead. The arms dealer knew what he was doing.
“He has something,” Drake said. “He designs advanced weapons systems. Devising something that gets you out of a car and onto a plane would be child’s play for him.”
“Shag it.” Alicia sighed. “Guess I’m shooting out the tires again.”
Just as the Englishwoman started to writhe into shape, Hayden’s helicopter blasted overhead. Drake grinned. He’d forgotten about their hardy boss and her new toy. So, it seemed, had Kingston. Maybe the fleeing arms dealer had been plucking up courage, but when he caught sight of the chopper, he set off an explosion that blew the driver’s door off its frame and sent it tumbling down the runway. Simultaneously, a huge robotic arm shaped like a car door and carrying a harness shot out of the planes forward hatch, probably gun-bolted to the plane’s floor inside. The arm slowed dramatically as it reached the car, air brakes popping like pistol fire, fitting around the Viper’s doorframe.
Kingston must have engaged the cruise control. The runway at this point was as smooth as it was ever going to get. The arms dealer must have been waiting for just this moment to implement his carefully rehearsed plan.
But he still hadn’t reckoned on the chopper.
As the arm reversed its movement, bringing Shaun Kingston aboard the Gulfstream, Hayden swung the helicopter across its front end. Drake wrenched the wheel to avoid the driverless Viper as it veered off the runway.
“Look out! Shit!”
Kinimaka hung out of the chopper’s cabin, rifle nestled from chin to shoulder, taking aim at the jet’s cockpit. The Gulfstream’s engines began to scream as the plane accelerated to takeoff speed. Drake mashed the accelerator pedal against the Charger’s floor. The plane’s tail passed over the car as the forward hatch slammed shut.
Kinimaka opened fire. A storm of bullets hammered into the airplane’s body and tore through the cockpit window. Red flashed across the ruined glass. The Gulfstream lost its impetus in a second, powering down and changing direction, now heading straight for the grass verge.
Drake tailed it closely. Hayden brought the helicopter to rest a few yards from the tip of its starboard wing. Drake, Alicia and Hayden jumped out of their vehicles, drawing guns and staying
low. Kinimaka kept his rifle trained on the cockpit lest Kingston be inclined to use the jet as a getaway vehicle.
The hatch remained closed. Hayden nodded to both Drake and Alicia and then used her cell. “Do we know how many were on board?”
Drake heard the reply easily enough. “Only two pilots. It seems Kingston prefers to travel alone.”
Now Dahl and Komodo pulled up in the Shelby Mustang, the Swede giving the throttle an extra blip before stepping out, grinning from ear to ear.
“We passed the general on to the cops. Hey, is there any way we could keep this thing?”
“Question is. . .” Hayden nodded at the plane. “Who gets to go in and drag Kingston’s pathetic ass outta there? He’s alone.”
Drake studied the windows, the door. “Who will interrogate him? Make him squeal?”
Hayden shrugged. “The FBI, I guess. Gates will pull us away from the aftermath of all this. SPEAR doesn’t do mop up, but will still be privy to the intel.”
“Aye, well. There’s your answer.” Drake touched Hayden’s shoulder firmly. “Our priority now is to get Mai and Smyth off that island.”
“General Kwang Yong should be able to help with the tactical side of that,” Hayden said.
Dahl looked down at his boots, an unusual trait for the Swede. Drake discerned it immediately. “What’s wrong?”
“Ah, the general.” Dahl flicked his head in the direction of Kwang Yong, still lying with his belly to the concrete. “He called in a last order before we got to him. To destroy the island.”
Drake wavered. Not after all this, he thought. Not after dragging his arse all the way from Asia, through China and Russia and Germany and then taking down the operations ringleaders. Not now.
A blackness stole in at the edge of his vision. He hadn’t asked Mai to trust him with her life, but he had fully expected her to survive all this. He barely heard Dahl’s next optimistic comment or Hayden as she took a call. He didn’t register the Gulfstream anymore and the fact that its forward hatch had just cracked open.
Even though he was staring right at it.
Then, Hayden thrust her cell in his face. “Matt!” She sounded as if she’d been shouting his name for a while. He focused on her.
She smiled. “It’s Mai. She’s calling for you.”
Drake said a soft hi. He listened as Mai told him the rocket had been aborted, as she explained how she’d been able to send a distress call from the island’s comms room to the nearest American special forces Recon team—one recently stationed on nearby Guam by none other than the U.S. Secretary of Defense—and how she missed him every second of every single day.
“You’re famous, Drake.” Mai laughed. “I asked if they knew of a Matt Drake and they replied ‘Yep, hasn’t everyone? He’s fine.’ The team’s inbound now. We’ll get out of here before the Koreans arrive. We made one of their men call up and garble something about an accidental release.” The Japanese woman laughed, the sound like soft, summer rain to Drake’s ears. “It’ll keep them guessing for an hour or two.”
Drake still stared at the forward hatch, which was now closed again. “Did you figure out what the lab was for?”
“That’s why we hung around so long. It’s a sleeper operation. They kidnap down-and-outs, transform them, and bury some kind of ‘wake’ command deep inside their subconscious. A doctor here says it can be triggered by some guy—General Kwang Yong—verbally, or by a machine at this end. And don’t worry. The machine’s about to get some Mai-time.”
Drake grinned. Fucking Wells’ legacy would never die. “And the down-and-outs who are there now?”
“We’ll take them with us.”
A good outcome, Drake thought. Romero and he had destroyed the body. Mai had chopped off the head. And SPEAR had caught both ringleaders.
“And that general?” Mai went on. “Kwang Yong. The doc says he was always scared, always paranoid. He was acting without permission. He needed to cover his tracks somehow and used the sleepers. That’s all I know.”
Drake couldn’t stop thinking about her face. “It’s enough. Be safe, Mai. It’ll be good to see you again.”
Drake ended the call and gave the cell back to Hayden. When he looked around, Dahl was grinning at him. So was Komodo. Even Alicia had stopped texting her biker boyfriend for a minute to stick her finger down her throat.
“C’mon, Drakey. It’s not like you haven’t been there before.”
Then, the Gulfstream’s forward hatch burst open and out stepped a nightmare—Shaun Kingston, outfitted in all his advanced weaponry: his prototype “killproof” full-body armor, his bulletproof weapons-synced, computerized helmet and goggles, and toting two of the craziest, meanest, most radical guns Drake had ever seen.
“Crap!” Hayden dove for the concrete.
With no cover, they were all exposed. And they weren’t wearing their Kevlar anymore. Not even Torsten Dahl could cover enough ground to prevent Kingston from opening fire and they all knew it.
Kingston screamed as he jumped out and managed a textbook landing. “This is what I can do!” he yelled. “I am the future.”
Drake ran straight at the guns. So did Dahl. Komodo followed a second later. Kinimaka stepped in front of Hayden.
Kingston’s fingers tightened on his triggers, the sound of manic laughter fitting for this futuristic figure so decked out in all his advanced weaponry, his cutting-edge hardware with its electric-blue and blood-red lights flickering all over the killproof vest.
He waited an extra second. “Time to shred me some Goddamn pork!” he bellowed and opened fire.
The knife, the primitive shaft of sharpened steel, thunked loudly as it slammed through the lower half of his face—the only exposed part of him—just below the nose and around the mouth. In the millisecond it took for his brain to register death, the force of the blow sent him reeling backward, his weapons shooting at nothing but sky.
The last words he ever spoke were in shock. “A knife?”
Drake slowed and turned. Dahl followed suit. Alicia knelt on one knee, still poised in a throwing stance, eyes narrowed.
“A knife,” Drake echoed. “All that bloody technology. All the money they spent. And he gets taken down by a biker chick with a blade.”
Alicia shrugged. “I want that back. Lomas gave it to me as a keepsake.”
“Whatever you say, Myles.” Hayden used Kinimaka’s proffered hand to pull herself upright. With a quick scan, she inventoried the assorted machinery scattered around the airfield.
“Now, who’s driving what back?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Days later, Jonathan Gates prowled around his office as night pressed implacably against his uncovered windows. He preferred exposed, unadorned casements and skylights—it helped him see clearly in more ways than one.
The new agency had pulled off a great accomplishment but there still remained a few man-eating sharks on the Hill, their cold eyes examining and their bloody teeth bared, ready to swoop in for the kill. Gates knew it didn’t matter how many times you were successful; it just took that one bad day or unlucky decision to wipe it all out. The sharks would always circle. It was their nature.
His plans were afoot. SPEAR was about to get a new HQ courtesy of Hayden Jaye’s old agency, the CIA, one better equipped and more clandestine this time. That damn reporter, Sarah Moxley, continued to bug them, and with more clout behind her now. Gates felt that both he and the agency owed her some kind of an explanation.
But that problem would save for another day. Now, Gates walked around to the front of his desk and picked up the photograph he kept there. It showed his wife, Sarah, and he in better times. He held on to the frame as he clicked a button.
“Show Miss Fox in.”
The door opened almost immediately. Gates replaced the picture and turned around. Lauren Fox closed the door and stood with her hands folded across her breasts. “I really don’t know why I’ve been brought here, sir. Or summoned, I guess you could say.”
Gates gave her a wry smile, sensing her discomfort. “Don’t worry. I don’t wish to engage your services.” He gestured to a chair. “Sit.”
“I’m fine.”
“Please?”
Gates settled himself as she finally perched on a chair opposite him. “I grant you, it’s unusual for a Secretary of Defense to summon an expensive hooker to his office. We could have met in secret, or in public, but for what I have to propose”—he met her eyes—“this seemed more appropriate. Official.”
“Won’t people wonder?” Lauren was clearly thinking of the staff.
“They’re my people. They know me. Now, Miss Fox, I liked the way you handled yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“First—you saved lives during the attack on our HQ. You showed amazing bravery. Second—the assassin. You beat him, and that was no mean feat. The man was well-trained as we’re starting to understand from General Kwang Yong.”
“Are there more of them?”
Gates gripped the bridge of his nose. “Undoubtedly. We don’t yet know how many. We’ll most likely never know who they are. But the head has been cut off that particular snake. Now we wait for the next one to rise. And, Miss Fox, we need all the. . .” He paused. “Specialist help we can get.”
“Call me Lauren. Now what the hell are you saying? Sir.”
“You’ll fit right in,” Gates said to her and then proceeded to outline his proposal. When he’d clarified the dangers and then secured her acceptance, he watched her walk out of the room.
Damn.
Quickly he occupied his mind with picking up the phone and dialing Hayden’s cell. It was around eight o‘clock in the evening, but his second in command needed to know about his newest recruit and the parameters he’d set for her.
*****
Hayden took the call as she and Kinimaka sat down to dinner. The restaurant was crowded and noisy, but her Hawaiian partner gawked in happiness. Hayden had brought him to Washington DC’s one and only Hard Rock Cafe.
Brothers In Arms (Matt Drake 5) Page 20
