Nomad

by James Swallow

  “Another space between the hull frames,” Marc was saying. “Walkways and gantries in here going all the way up to the weather deck…”

  They ran down the corridor, each footfall making her wince. She chanced a look up and saw glimmers of light like faraway stars. Lucy could just about make out the lines of the metal struts holding the Santa Cruz’s superstructure together.

  Marc was looking at her, catching up to her situation. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Grazed,” she corrected, being generous about the bullet wound. “Hurts like hell, though.” Lucy heard movement back down toward the doorway, and shoved him in the chest. “Get up higher.” The empty ammunition magazine fell out of the rifle as she flipped the ejector tab and slammed home a fresh twenty-round box in its place. “I need a shot-caller.”

  She dropped into a crouch, hissing at the pain, and pressed herself into the cover of a thick iron stanchion. The Mark 14 pointed back toward the doorway they had come through and she fired off a couple of rounds, watching them spark off the lip of the hatch.

  “They’re gonna come in there,” Marc told her.

  She nodded. “And I can’t see them. But you can. So get up. Spot for me. We need to thin them out, else they’ll run us down before we can get topside.”

  He didn’t say any more, and Lucy heard his footsteps retreat, the grunt as he climbed the closest maintenance ladder.

  “Copy?” Marc whispered into the radio, sounding in her ear.

  “Copy,” she repeated, working to moderate her breathing and reduce the motion of her rifle’s barrel. “Anything?”

  “Wait one.”

  * * *

  Marc’s world was a hazy landscape of fuzzy emerald shadows and white shapes that loomed out of the murk, like some lo-res vision of an underwater scene. Twice he bumped into supports, or reached out to grab something that turned out to be far beyond his reach. Doubling back, he skidded to a halt on an iron platform suspended between two ladders. A narrow walkway extended off in both directions toward the stern and the bow, another access channel running the length of the ship. The decking swayed unpleasantly as he put his weight on it, and he snapped back to the guard he had shot, the man going over a similar rail. It would be a longer drop from here, he noted, and after the high-speed descent from the crane, he decided he had done enough falling off of things for one night.

  Settling to his haunches, Marc fumbled with the unfamiliar Vector, making a meal of reloading it by feel alone. But he didn’t want to take his eyes off the open hatches—there was more than one, he realized—and put Lucy at risk.

  “Watch your fire,” said an angry voice, carrying out of the other compartment. It echoed off the walls, making it hard to be sure exactly where it had come from. Marc tensed as he recognized the clipped accent. “We need them breathing, one of them at least.”

  “I know that voice,” Marc said into the radio. “Grunewald. He’s a hired gun working for the Combine.”

  The professional, he thought. The man who had threatened the lives of Marc’s only living family, who had left him to be brutally murdered on the peak of Mount Etna.

  Through the dull eyes of the NVGs, Marc saw white shapes moving at the open hatches as men tried to inch their way forward. “Multiple targets,” he said, pressing the throat mike. “Twelve and one o’clock.”

  Lucy’s reply was a snarl of three quick shots, so close together the sound of them ran into one long report. Someone screamed as she struck meat and bone, another fell back without a cry.

  “A little low,” he corrected. “Come up a couple of degrees. More on the way now.”

  Beneath his feet, Lucy was effectively shooting blindfold, guided only by her own senses and by his vantage. Still, she was brutally effective when her shots struck home, and as the guards boiled out into the corridor in an attempt to rush her, the sniper killed enough of them to make the rest dodge in and out of their sparse cover.

  Marc was calling out clock numbers again when he felt the suspended walkway under his feet vibrate as someone put their weight on it. He looked up and saw more white blurs, these ones coming for him, angular shapes in their hands.

  But Marc saw the jerk of shock as they laid eyes on him, surprised to see him up on the higher gantry. Marc turned and brought up the SMG one handed, pushing himself back with the other hand as he fired. The Vector brayed and shots sprayed out in a corkscrew pattern, killing one man and wounding a second. The third had more time to react and fired back at him, the thunderous boom of a pump-action shotgun roaring. Marc flinched away and more by luck than judgment the blast was wide of him. He caught a couple of hot specks of thirty-ought buck as they raked his shoulder. Marc fired again, his free hand coming up to slap the Vector’s fore grip and hold it steady. This time, a burst of rounds took off the top of the shotgunner’s head and he collapsed on the walkway with such dead-weight force that the entire thing creaked and swayed alarmingly. Choking on fresh cordite fumes, Marc scrambled back to his feet and looked straight down.

  Lucy was still shooting, pacing shots to keep the advance pressed back, and that was why she hadn’t noticed the hatch behind her swinging open. Marc cursed himself for missing the other doorway where it lay buried in shadows, and shouted out her name.

  She heard him and rolled over, coming around with the gun. The men behind her were a large, bull-necked guy aiming an Uzi and the Swiss merc from the mountain. Before Lucy could get off a shot, before Marc to do anything to intervene, Grunewald fired a taser into the woman’s side and discharged a surge of crackling electricity through her. Her scream resonated, bouncing off the iron walls of the compartment. Shots from the other man’s Uzi followed, sparking as they clipped the walkway at Marc’s feet.

  He bolted forward, slamming into the next hatch along, and tumbled through into the next length of the walkway, swearing violently.

  * * *

  Her body on fire, her nerves as tense as steel rods, Lucy’s teeth ground together as powerful hands dragged her back along the metal deck and into the reeking space of the improvised operating room. She had been hit by stun gun discharges before, and she knew that all she could do was ride it out. Although only a fraction of the weapon’s charge got into her body through the protective material of her tactical vest, it was still enough to temporarily rob her of control of her limbs. Finally, the shuddering tremble that ran through her began to ease away, and in its place she felt a deep ache in every joint and muscle. Lucy rolled on to her hands and knees, gulping in air. She tasted blood in her mouth and retched.

  She looked up in to the eyes of a man in a black leather jacket, artful designer stubble on his face and a disappointed air about him.

  “Who are you?” he asked, toying with a Sig Sauer semi-automatic. His accent was middle-European—this was Grunewald, the voice Marc had identified earlier. His gun wasn’t exactly pointed at her head, but it was close enough that she wasn’t willing to make any sudden moves. “Who are you with? How many of you are there? Pick one, any one. Take your time.” He cocked the weapon to show that last part wasn’t true.

  “You need…” She tried to speak, and it was hard, her tongue lolling in her mouth, thick and heavy in the wake of the taser shock. “You need to get the fuck out of here!” She shouted the last part, slapping at the throat mike in hopes that her words were transmitted to Dane and Delancort.

  Grunewald’s face soured and he leaned in and pulled at her collar. He saw the microphone rig and ripped it away. “Stupid. We’re going to find your playmate.” He turned to the balding thug at his side and prodded him in the chest. “Tell them to get the other one. Use the tasers, that’s why you have them. Bring him back alive.” He looked back to Lucy and blew out a breath. “This really is inconvenient. You’re disrupting my timetable.”

  “My heart bleeds,” Lucy retorted. She moved her head and saw the other guards dragging in the bodies of the men killed in the firefight. “Theirs too.”

  He glared at her. “I’m going to hav
e to find out who you are, and because I don’t have time to waste, it will be very painful.” He paused to consider his own words, and looked down at the Sig. “Then again, I may just shoot you dead.”

  “We know all about the bombs,” Lucy told him, probing to see what kind of response she got.

  “I doubt that,” Grunewald replied, turning to one of the other men. “There’s a blowtorch in the workshop. Bring it to me.” The mercenary held the throat mike pickup to his neck and pressed it there. “Do you hear me? I’m going to burn her to death unless she talks.” He threw the comm rig away and stamped on it. “Last chance,” he told her. “I know you’re an operator, I can tell. So, one soldier to another, let’s find a solution that works for us both, yes?”

  She thought for a second, and tried a different tack. “I work for an organization with very deep pockets. They’ll buy you out.”

  He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I’m not greedy enough to double-cross the men who currently employ me. You understand. But tell me what I want to know and we might be able to negotiate something.”

  “Can’t do that. See, my boss wants all your bosses in shallow graves.”

  “Ah.” Grunewald tapped the barrel of the Sig against his lips, almost as if he were blessing it. “We seem to be at an impasse, then.” The other guard came in with the blowtorch and the merc opened his hand to accept it. “Tie her to a chair,” he said, putting the gun down on a nearby bench.

  * * *

  “You need to get the fuck out of here!”

  Lucy’s words robbed Marc’s legs of any forward momentum and he came to a halt, reeling back against a hull spar. There was something in the woman’s voice he hadn’t heard before. It wasn’t fear. Desperation, perhaps, laced with cold dread at what they had seen in the operating room.

  You should run. That icy little voice again, the one that sounded like Sam. She’s right. Leave her and get away. Because people needed to know what they had discovered on board the Santa Cruz, they had to be warned. And maybe Lucy Keyes could buy Marc enough time to get off the boat and raise the alarm.

  Marc gripped the guard rail hard, as if he was afraid he would fall. And perhaps he would, fall away into some deep, black nothing inside himself if he just let it all happen again. Everyone in Nomad had perished and it had been on his watch. Sam and Rix and all the others, they should still have been alive. Marc was their support, he was supposed to have seen the contingencies, known what to look for. But they were dead, and everyone else was telling him he was to blame, and what if they were right?

  Why was he out here doing this, running headlong into something that he could only just about grasp? It would be safer to flee. It had always been safer, he knew that. The path without risk, that was what Marc Dane had settled for. Why did he think that this time would be any different?

  He made a low, angry noise in the back of his throat, growling at the self-doubts. He forced himself to remember the moment at a ratty little café in Camden Town, of how he had felt and what he had decided.

  Not here, Marc told himself. Not today. Not again. Lucy Keyes was not going to die because of him.

  Below, Marc heard the clank of a hatch opening and pulled his goggles back down. A man emerged carrying a shotgun, his face lost behind the bug-head mask of the big NVGs. He was looking in every corner, leading with the gun’s pistol grip in one hand, the hazard-striped bulk of a taser in the other. He was coming closer, and Marc saw an opportunity. Improvise and adapt, he thought.

  Acting quickly, Marc grabbed the edges of a metal ladder and slid down it, feet off the rungs. He made enough noise to get the shotgunner’s attention, dropping squarely into the middle of the walkway a few meters from the other man.

  “Looking for me?” He let the Vector fall to the deck and raised his hands. “It’s okay, mate,” Marc said conversationally. “I surrender.”

  The shotgun’s muzzle drooped, and the steel tines of the taser emitter aimed toward him.

  * * *

  Lucy’s head had gone as far back as the metal chair would let her, the zip-ties around her wrists and ankles cutting into the flesh as she wriggled against her bonds. The burbling flame from the blowtorch threw jumping patterns of orange light off the walls of the makeshift operating room as Grunewald brought it closer. The mercenary twisted a dial on the back of the nozzle and the jet of fire became a blade of blue-white heat that seared her face, even a hand’s length away.

  “Talk to me,” he told her. “Be reasonable. You’re fairly attractive, and I imagine you would like to remain that way.”

  “You’re gonna ugly me up?” she said, eyeing the flame. “I’ve heard that threat a few times. I gotta ask … If I was a guy, what would you say then?”

  He paused, genuinely considering the question. “The same,” he said, moving the blowtorch to his other hand. “I mean, no one wants third-degree burns on their face, no matter what gender they are.”

  “You’re an equal-opportunity bastard.”

  Grunewald nodded. “Pain doesn’t discriminate.” He leaned in. “And so…”

  The hatchway on the far side of the compartment clanked open and the mercenary swore under his breath at the interruption.

  Lucy looked across the room as a guard in one of those four-eyed low-light rigs pushed a slack, barely conscious figure before him, hands bound behind his back. She recognized the Ortek NVGs covering the face of the prisoner, and the same matte black tac vest that she was wearing. “Dane…?” Her heart sank. “Why didn’t you run, dumb-ass?”

  He had clearly been electro-shocked to within an inch of his life, trousers stained wet where his bladder had given out. The guard was struggling to hold him up, and finally let go, allowing him to collapse in a heap. The other guards in the room fingered their weapons, uncertain how to proceed.

  “Dane?” Grunewald’s eyebrows rose. “Marc Dane?” He flashed a grin. “You came here with him? That is interesting. But sadly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to interrogate two people.”

  He snatched up his Sig Sauer and put a bullet through the right eyepiece of the NVGs, the shot blowing a bloody divot out the back of the crouching figure’s head. The dead man spun away, falling into the shadows beneath the operating table.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Shock gripped Lucy’s chest like a vice closing on her ribcage, before the sensation was ripped away by a tidal wave of anger. “You son of a bitch!”

  “Was he important to you?” Grunewald asked her, without concern. “You should thank him. The fact that you are connected to that fool has just made your value to me increase considerably.” He put the pistol back down on the bench. “We suspected he had some outside help, especially after intercepting the report from the British Embassy in Rome, but … Coming here? Coming after us? I have to admit, that was a dangerous choice to make.” He gestured toward the corpse. “As you can see.” He hesitated, torn between taking a closer look at his handiwork and attending to Lucy. Unluckily for her, he turned away and picked up the blowtorch again, moving it from hand to hand. “So. I have decided not to kill you. But that still means I will need to inflict a lot of pain.”

  “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” Lucy spat back. Her training told her that what she should be doing right now was acting as if she were weak, maybe crying or begging for mercy. Anything to make Grunewald and his thugs underestimate her, to make them lower their guard. But she couldn’t go to that place, not with Dane’s body lying there in front of her. She had been starting to like him.

  The mercenary sniffed. “You think I did that out of some sense of enjoyment?” He chuckled and looked around at the other guards, the man who had brought the prisoner in, as if seeking agreement from them. “Perhaps you’re not aware of the previous attempts to end Mister Dane’s life and the annoying ability he demonstrated in avoiding them. That bullet? That was just the clock re-setting. That was death catching up to him. An end he should have had back in France, along with the rest of his
team.” He nodded to the nearest man, a stocky figure with lank hair. “Put the body with the others.”

  The guard nodded and came forward, crouching over the corpse. He reached down.

  Grunewald kept talking, gesturing with the blowtorch, the flame dancing. “Dane couldn’t live,” he said, as if the idea was ridiculous. “Every second he was still drawing breath, he was making us look bad. My employers disliked being led on a merry chase by a man who couldn’t even make the grade as an MI6 field officer.”

  Lucy saw the guard stiffen as he pulled the NVGs off the dead man’s face. Even from where she was sitting, she knew immediately it was not Marc Dane that Grunewald had executed.

  The mercenary saw her expression change and he spun as the guard muttered another name under his breath. “Sergey…?”

  What happened next was so fast it blurred into one frantic burst of motion. The guard that had brought “Dane” into the room flipped up the bug-like visor over his eyes and nose, revealing Marc’s pale, sweating face beneath. In the same instant, he pulled the trigger of the Remington M870 shotgun in his hands. The muzzle was low, aimed in an angle toward the deck that caught the thighs and torso of the crouching guard, buckshot ripping into him with a deafening report.

  Lucy had been waiting, preparing for the moment when Grunewald would come into her range—and she instinctively knew that there would be no second chances. Her feet were back and slightly below the seat of the chair as far as the zip-ties around her ankles would allow, her coiled muscles now propelled her forward in an explosive movement. She came up and on to the balls of her feet, strength and momentum rolling her headfirst toward the mercenary. Lucy’s forehead and right shoulder collided hard with Grunewald’s ribs and she heard the satisfying snap of bone breaking. He lost the blowtorch with a grunt of expelled air, the tool clattering to the deck, and he went down under the weight of the woman and the seat she was attached to.