Hunting Nora Stone

by Colin Weldon

  “Clear,”

  She nodded and pressed the door wide enough to step inside. The large stateroom was built to resemble something from the eighteenth century with varnished oak tables, priceless paintings on the walls and a large brass and granite fireplace at its centre. Worn and intricately decorated tapestries hung from the Georgian windows. Nora cleared the room quickly and checked her six. Tarsis was right behind her. They moved silently, using the walls as cover as they made their way to the bedroom. Nora signalled Tarsis to stop. He obeyed without question and placed his back against the wall. Nora moved her head slowly around the doorframe and saw her target, sleeping under a single silk sheet. It looked like he was carrying far more weight than his profile had led her to believe. She moved inside slowly, weapon raised, trying to get a better look at his face to verify it was, in fact, the intended target. Tarsis followed. A soft breeze wafted across a dressing table suddenly causing something to fall. Nora froze. The bed sheets began to move as her target lifted his head and looked straight at her. Nora raised her weapon and was about to fire when a small hand protruded from under the silk sheets, followed by a head of flowing hair. It was a young girl, dressed in red pyjamas and fast asleep. The target looked at Nora, his face beginning to sweat, his eyes blazed with the knowledge that his life was about to end.

  “My daughter,” he said in Spanish, “not her.”

  Nora looked at Tarsis who was now standing abreast of her right shoulder.

  “Report,” he said.

  Nora looked at the little girl, and her world began to fall apart. She felt something split in her mind. A stabbing pain in her stomach, the memory of a life ripped from her body. The bright lights, the blood on the table, the training, the kills she had made. All of it came crashing down on her. She looked at her arms, now holding her weapon to her targets head. She looked at Tarsis, who was poised to shoot, unfeeling, calm, resolute. She looked back and saw the girls eyes. Now awake and glaring at the two of them. She began to scream. She saw a muscle contraction in Tarsis’s shoulders that told her he was about to shoot.

  “Don’t,” she shouted, dropping her weapon and lunging for her cybernetic team member. Too late. She saw two pops from the gun as she grabbed Tarsis’s arm and used the enhanced strength of her implants to drive him into the bedroom wall, smashing a mirror into shards in the process. He looked at her coldly and responded, landing a blinding blow to her chest sending her careering backwards onto the floor. With the life knocked out of her and scrambling for air, she looked up at the bed. The target with his head flopped on the pillow, the little girl, his little girl, her eyes closed, a small hole in her back lying peacefully on his chest.

  “Mother fucker!” Nora screamed as she dragged air into her protesting lungs, enough to enable her to stand. She took her weapon off the ground and quickly snapped it around at the unfeeling abomination standing next to her. She unloaded the entire clip at Tarsis. Hitting his head, his chest, his arms, everywhere. The sound of metal on metal told her everything. They had just bounced off. Seeing her now as a threat he would automatically list her for elimination from the scenario; she was in trouble. She didn’t care. A bomb had just gone off in her mind. A fury that made her shake. She didn’t care if she lived or died, but this thing would pay. Without a thought for what lay beneath Nora sprang from her knees and planted her shoulder in Tarsis’s chest, screaming as she bore the full weight of the machine. They fell backwards. She felt the impact of the glass window behind him. She felt their bodies tumble through. She remembered the endless fall. The crunching and breaking of bone as they hit the ground. Then blackness.

  She had awoken on the grass with the sun on her face, the taste of blood in her mouth. Tarsis was gone. His recall program kicking in no doubt. She had picked herself off the dew covered grass wondering how she had survived the four-story fall. She had looked back up at the window and knew that it was time to get her little girl back. It was time for another life. She thought about Wise. She thought about the Quorum then she thought about revenge.

  Her mind turned back to the present as she twisted the throttle and tore through the trees, gritting her teeth. She was running out of time. She looked to the broken barn at the far end of the field up ahead and pointed the wheel of the motorcycle towards it. The sun was warm overhead as she turned off onto the grass. She heard the sound of the tyres muffle as the surface beneath them changed from hard gravel to soft grass. She closed her eyes briefly and felt the wind on her face. The air felt wet. She pulled back the throttle and let the bike coast. A flock of birds burst from a tree and soared into the sky in unison. She looked around and took in her surroundings to make sure there were no surprises waiting in the shadows and applied the brakes. The bike came to a stop next to the old hanger. It was made entirely from wood.

  There were gaping holes in the roof and long planks of rotten wood hung on old nails. She flicked the bike stand down and stepped off, balancing it neatly on its side. She looked around again, listening to her surroundings. A soft breeze crept across her hair. Two wooden doors were sealed by two large link chains. She reached towards two heavy metal door handles and pulled. Gritting her teeth, she let her arms do the rest. The chains broke apart and fell with a clunk to the ground. Inside was a Gulf Stream jet, partially covered by tarpaulin. She yanked it off the aircraft with both hands, throwing a haze of dust into the air. Bright shafts of sunlight split through the cracks in the wood. She picked up a long metal ladder and placed it next to the fuselage. She made sure it was stable and then climbed up. Reaching the door she activated the opening mechanism and pulled it back, climbing inside and kicking the ladder away. She closed the door behind her and turned on the electrical systems. The interior lights came to life. She walked the length of the plane, checking every compartment to make sure it was clear. She made her way to the cockpit and took a seat in the left hand seat.

  She flipped on the master switches, checked her fuel and began turning over the engines. She ran quickly through the pre-flight checks. She let the engines idle and looked out of the cockpit windows towards the empty field ahead. She checked the radios and made sure of the designation of the aircraft before pulling the throttle back and letting the engines idle for a few minutes. She would have to do this quickly. The jet was an easy target should it be detected. She put on her headset and switched the radio frequency, locking into the main control tower at Changi Airport. She listened as the commercial call signs of the various airlines radioed back and forth to the control tower. She needed to time this right. She closed her eyes and listened.

  For nearly twenty minutes she waited patiently then she heard it.

  “Speedbird0012 Heavy on 02C, take off,” came the male voice.

  “Speedbird0012 Heavy cleared,” came the reply.

  She opened her eyes, gripped the throttle and checked her wings. She pressed the brakes down, locking the plane in place and applied full power. She felt the strain of the engines as one of the walls beside the right wing began to break apart. She needed to get out of here before the barn came down on her head. She waited.

  “Speedbird0012 rolling,” said the male voice.

  She saw the roof to the hanger begin to give way and let go of the brakes. She was pressed into her seat as the plane exploded out of the old hanger and began accelerating away from it. She heard a crashing noise behind her and assumed that the barn had just collapsed in on itself. She ignored the close call and focused on her airspeed. The tree-line grew close. She had to leave it to the last possible second. She extended the flaps on the wings and held on tight. The ground beneath her was rough. There was a very real possibility that the landing gear would simply snap off if she hit a hole. She was less than a hundred meters away from the tree line now. It was too close. She pulled back hard and launched the jet into the sky, clipping the top branches of a large oak tree in the process. She pulled up the landing gear quickly and pressed down on the stick, keepi
ng the plane just above the tree-line. She banked hard to the right, manoeuvring the wings between two trees in the process. She straightened out and pulled up the flaps.

  The jet moved fast and low above the forest as she headed for the now airborne commercial airliner. It would be her shield. Her protector. All the way to France.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Well?” said Wise pressing the phone hard against his ear.

  “I don’t know what to tell you sir, they set down in a field two miles south of the city and told the chopper to report back to base. Their locater beacons went dead and Conrad has not reported back in since,” said Julian Miller on the other end of the line, “Looks to me they’ve gone dark.”

  Wise leaned back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “Did we get Stone?” Wise asked.

  “Unknown,” Miller replied.

  Wise suddenly reached out at an empty glass sitting on his desk and flung it against the wall. It smashed against it and fell in pieces onto the carpet. There was silence on the other end of the line.

  Wise closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. He grasped his hands together and tried to control his breathing.

  “Find them,” Wise said in a calm controlled voice.

  “Yes sir,” replied Miller.

  Wise lowered the phone and returned it to the receiver. He glanced out of the window as the sun began setting over the rooftops. He looked out at the crimson sky and shook his head. This would have been so easy if they had just installed the self-destruct capsule in Nora Stone’s brain before her first mission. The small device had been implanted into every other operative during their initial operation but it had only been in the experimental stage when Stone was augmented and the risk to her was too great, there was too much money involved and too much at stake to risk it at the time. He should have done it anyway. He reached over to his phone and dialled in the connection to The Academy. He waited as he was connected.

  “Tyler Shaw,” said the man on the other end of the phone as it clicked on.

  “Shaw it’s Wise, where are we on phase two?” Wise said.

  “Tarsis is responding and is three hours from wheels down. He’s going to need a few hours to cool down when he does so sir, his CPU is showing a near red line,” replied Shaw.

  Tyler Shaw, at fifty-nine years old had not left Area 51 in almost thirty years. By all accounts the man did not exist. He was the lynchpin the whole operation. The genius at the heart of the reverse engineered technology. He could have cured cancer if he had put his mind to it. A German by birth and brought to the United States by his parents after the Second World War, Shaw had been the offspring of Doctor Herbert Schneider, who had been earmarked for “early retirement” not long after the invasion of Normandy. He had escaped to the United States on the strict provision that he would work with and assist the design and implementation of the first atomic bomb along with a host of other top-secret military projects, cybernetics and human augmentation being at the top of the list.

  Shaw had a pale and pasty complexion, his demeanour was sour and his rough wrinkled skin was like a topographical map of the Grand Canyon. He was an impersonal man who seemed to derive no pleasure in anything. He existed within the confines of an underground base, building and creating technology. His psychological profile listed him as Savant. He was a thinker. A solver of problems and a builder of the impossible. The human condition meant nothing to him. Wise found him quite pleasant to be around. There was no betrayal in him. No morality issues.

  “Instruct Tarsis to initiate phase two once he’s been recharged,” Wise said down the phone.

  “Yes, sir,” Shaw said, “and the others?”

  “Leave them on standby. This scenario will have to run its course,” replied Wise.

  “What if Nora Stone penetrates the facility?” Shaw said.

  Wise frowned.

  “Penetrates the facility?” Wise said.

  “Yes sir,” Shaw said, “the possibility has to be addressed should Tarsis be unsuccessful.”

  Wise leaned back in his chair again and looked out at the red clouds.

  “The odds are that she is already dead, and even if she survived, there is no way she makes it back on US soil without us knowing, and even if she does, the base is the most heavily fortified piece of real estate on the planet. Augmented or not, there’s no way she gets in,” said Wise.

  “The device in New York is armed and ready to go, thirty minutes from your order,” said Shaw.

  Wise did not answer. He just looked out of his window, slowly lowering the phone from his ear and hanging it up on its base.

  “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” he whispered to himself.

  Singapore

  Eddie looked at Hiran who had just taken a step into a huge pile of cow shit.

  “Watch yourself,” Eddie said smiling.

  “Yeah thanks,” Hiran replied looking disgusted.

  Eddie glanced over to the house they were headed towards. It looked abandoned.

  “I’m having my doubts about this,” said Abigail.

  Eddie had to admit that he was not quite sure what to expect. He had not seen Gordon in years. He had heard rumours that the former head of MI6 had gone a bit crazy in his old age. He was not entirely sure that he would even be here, but Gordon had told him that if he ever needed help that this was the place, on a small farm on the outskirts of Singapore. Talk about the right place at the right time thought Eddie. They had landed two miles away and had walked the rest of the distance over farmland and fields. The pilot was instructed to return to Jakarta. It would buy them some time. Not much.

  “Just leave the talking to me. He may be a little….” Eddie began to say before he heard something clicking from beside him.

  He froze and looked over at Hiran. It was a hopper mine. He knew it. They were dead.

  “Hiran don’t move!” he shouted raising his hands.

  The trio froze in place. Hiran was looking at his foot. The moment he stepped off it, it would jump a few feet into the air and kill them all. There was no way to disarm it, once triggered.

  “Shit,” he said to himself gritting his teeth.

  “What is it?” Hiran said

  “Mine,” Eddie replied, “don’t make any sudden movements.”

  “Oh fuck,” Hiran replied.

  He quickly scanned the ground surrounding Hiran and looked for the tell-tale signs of small metallic protrusions coming out of the soil. He took a breath and looked towards the house. It was a standard two-storey farmhouse. The windows were dark and the rotten wood on its exterior made it look haunted. He heard something move about ten feet away from him. The ground opened up and what looked like a large machine gun fixed onto a spinning turret appeared. It moved with precision as if it had a mind of its own and pointed its long barrel straight at Eddie.

  “Fuck me!” said Hiran.

  “Nobody make a sound, or move a muscle,” Eddie said making damn sure to keep his foot planted exactly where it was.

  “Eddie, I have a son,” Hiran said locking his eyes to Eddie’s

  “What?” Eddie replied.

  “A son, living in Hyderabad, I’ve never met him. Do me a favour, get a message to him. Tell him I’m sorry,” Hiran said.

  Eddie gritted his teeth and kept his eyes on Hiran. He needed to keep him focused, in the game. If he fell apart now, he could shift his bodyweight, and that would be that.

  “Hiran, now you listen to me. First of all, meet your fucking son. That’s ridiculous. I’ll make sure you get a few weeks of leave after this is over. Second of all if that thing goes off none of us will be around to give any messages to anyone, so I need you keep calm and do exactly what I say,” Eddie said.

  Hiran closed his eyes and nodded.

  “What’s his name?” Eddie said looking aroundr />
  “Hamal,” Hiran said.

  “That’s a beautiful name, why haven’t you met him?” replied Eddie as he searched his pockets for something to jam under Hiran’s foot.

  “It’s a long story,” replied Hiran.

  “Yeah, well I look forward to hearing it,” Eddie said looking back up at Hiran. His pockets were empty. He saw tears form in his eyes.

  “Hiran, I never really thanked you properly for saving my ass back in the shack. I haven’t been very kind to you, and I’m sorry about that,” Eddie said.

  “No you haven’t” Hiran replied.

  “Yeah well, I owe you one, and now I’m gonna repay the favour. You’re not gonna die out here. I won’t allow it. I’ve never left a man behind, and I’m not about to start now. Even a pain in the ass geek like you,” Eddie said smiling.