Truly Deadly: The Complete Series: (YA Spy Thriller Books 1-5)

by Rob Aspinall

  47

  Deathstalker

  Philippe Vasquez held Inge’s lifeless body in his arms.

  He was aware of screams. Shouts. A struggle. On the outside, he remained silent. The push and pull of two forces locking him in position over Inge’s body. Civil war inside his mind. A head full of voices. A hundred home movies on a loop.

  Stealing food off tables in Barcelona.

  Fighting bullies in the training academy.

  Inge breaking a cake and handing him half.

  Struggling with the driver of the limo.

  Kissing on the Rio beach.

  Dancing with Inge in Paris.

  The two lying camouflaged at night in the African jungle.

  And a hundred missions more.

  The desert and Nathan Moore, the pregnant secretary and hiding the list in the church.

  His mind shifted to Lorna.

  Freeing Lorna in the Oslo barn.

  Watching online movies in the farmhouse.

  Teaching her how to do donuts in Austria. The two laughing as she spun the car around.

  Lorna.

  Her cries cut through the noise.

  The storm in his mind finally broke.

  Lost emotions rained down until empty—grief, joy, pain, guilt, fear and love.

  A black, heavy veil rolled clear from his consciousness.

  And then there was calm. A serene, laser-targeted rage.

  He let go of Inge’s body, picked up his pistol and rose to his feet. He turned and strode out into a corridor, following the echoes of running feet.

  They’d left a two-man team in front of the doors, armed with high-powered rifles and body armour. They unleashed a storm of automatic fire at the first sight of him.

  He ducked back and flattened against a wall. Angled his pistol around the corner and let off two rounds.

  The rifle fire stopped, replaced by cries of agony.

  Philippe rounded the corner again—the two men down on their good knees. He raised his pistol and put a bullet in either guard’s brain. He holstered the pistol and picked up a rifle.

  The doors had been manually locked. He dropped onto his belly behind one of the two burly dead men. He shot the manual lock and the doors slid open.

  A three—soldier guard awaited on the other side.

  Philippe propped the barrel of his rifle on one of the dead man’s shoulders. He killed all three in front of him, one bullet each.

  As the last of the three men fell to the floor, Philippe walked beyond them. He saw a hooded Lorna, forced onward by the grab team. Two more soldiers dropped back to provide covering fire.

  Philippe’s stolen rifle jammed. He threw it away and drew his Glock pistol.

  He knew he couldn't take both out before they opened fire, so he took aim at a fat pipe rising to the men’s right.

  A jet of steam shot sideways out of the pipe. The men shrieked in pain—their visibility lost in a cloud of white vapour.

  Philippe stopped by a junction box on the corridor wall. He opened it and ripped out the wires.

  The lights in the corridor cut to darkness.

  Philippe stayed tight to the wall. He used the sound of the men coughing and shouting as a guide. Two double-tap kill-shots and the men were down.

  Philippe followed the wall of the corridor and rounded the corner. He caught a glimpse of Lorna. A hood over her head. Forced through a sliding steel blast door. As it rolled shut, Philippe pulled a fire extinguisher off the wall and slid it fast across the floor. It jammed in the gap between door and lock.

  He turned away.

  The extinguisher blew under the pressure. It disabled the mechanism on the door, leaving a narrow gap for him to squeeze through.

  As he stepped through the door, Philippe shot a man running to stop him. But his clip ran empty. He tossed the weapon and ran across a large helipad.

  A helicopter descended from a high-rising funnel through the rock above.

  Rotors chopped against a pinprick of bright sky.

  Four remaining soldiers wrestled with a black, heavy duty body bag—Lorna trapped inside.

  Philippe could guess Nadia’s plan. They would take her for questioning. Kill her when she’d outlived her usefulness.

  He ran and jumped into the scrum of soldiers. Engaged in a rapid tangle of bodies. They tried to shoot, stab, punch, kick and restrain him.

  In return, he broke an arm, snapped a neck, shattered a jaw and cut the throat of the last man standing.

  The soldier with a broken arm staggered to his feet. Philippe punched him hard in the nose. So hard it killed him. He stabbed the man with a shattered jaw in the back of the neck with his own knife, leaving all four dead.

  As the helicopter dropped lower towards the helipad, Philippe kneeled over the bag. He snapped a tie holding the zip in place and opened it up.

  He offered Lorna a hand. She took it. He pulled her to her feet.

  “Where is the bitch?” he asked her.

  Lorna shook her head, out of breath.

  She glanced over his shoulder. Her eyes said it all, but too late.

  Philippe heard a rat-a-tat of machine automatic fire. He collapsed forward onto Lorna, a sudden flash of pain under his left shoulder blade.

  But it was the other bullet wound—that was the really bad news.

  48

  The Deal

  I noticed too late. I didn’t have time to warn him. As Philippe pulled me to my feet, I’d seen Nadia break from behind a stack of army-green cargo boxes.

  She’d been hiding there all along, waiting for the chopper to touch down on the helipad.

  She’d come out of hiding with a rifle set to automatic, the gun almost bigger than her. She’d sprayed the helipad with bullets, the rifle kicking in her hands, throwing off her aim.

  Philippe had taken two in the back and lurched forward on top of me.

  I’d hit the deck hard, his weight like a baby elephant on top of me.

  And she was coming, walking across the helipad, M4 rifle in hands.

  “Philippe!” I said, trying to push him off me.

  He stirred. Got his bearings.

  “She’s gonna kill us, get off me,” I said.

  “Here,” he said, glancing down, producing a hand cupped with blood.

  “What—?” It didn’t make any sense. He winked, closed his eyes and went limp.

  Shit, I get it.

  I pressed my palm across his, then wiped his blood up the left side of my neck and face.

  From the slit of an eye, I watched Nadia approach in her shiny black business heels. She raised the barrel of the rifle.

  “Now!” Philippe said.

  He rolled off me to his right. I sat up and pushed the rifle away as she pulled the trigger. Bullets sparked off the helipad floor. I detached the magazine from the gun. It fell to the floor. Nadia pulled the trigger in desperation. She dropped the gun and ran for the chopper. Philippe reached out and grabbed her by the ankle, stopping her getting away. I walked over to Nadia and punched her to the floor.

  I pulled her up by her hair.

  “Finish her,” Philippe said, struggling to hang onto consciousness.

  He was hurt. I mean, really hurt. Bleeding from the right kidney area.

  Nadia shook off the punch. I could have snapped her neck right there.

  “Wait,” she said, desperate, glancing towards Philippe. “I can help him.”

  “How?” I said.

  “That’s my ride out of here,” she said, looking towards the waiting chopper. “I’ll take you both with me.”

  “What’s stopping us from taking it anyway?” I said.

  “Not just a ride, ” she said. “I can get him the help he needs.” Nadia bled from the nose. Her hair wild in the rotor wind. “He’ll die without it,” she said. “You know that.”

  “And what do you get in return?” I asked.

  “I live,” she said. “Philippe lives.”

  I looked at the chopper.

&nb
sp; At Nadia.

  At Philippe.

  49

  Ling’s Mission Journal: Part V

  Protestors run through the streets of Buenos Aires. Behind them, a pack of three small canine drones hunting them down.

  Behind the canines, me—in the distance, but gaining.

  I run on the spot and the moves co-ordinate into all four legs of my drone. The protestors cut down a side alley. They tip over trash bins. The dogs in front leap over them.

  The protestors—two young guys with beards, wearing hoodies—scramble over a wall.

  The dogs fire three rocket grenades at the wall. They blow a smoking hole in the concrete. They run through the hole.

  I sprint through a swirl of black smoke after them.

  The protestors go left. The dogs skid into the turn. I charge at the one at the back of the pack. I knock it into a wall and bound after the other two.

  The drones in front unload machine gun fire at the two men. The protestors scramble clear of the bullets.

  I fire a grenade at the drone on the right. The one on the left deploys a string of hot orange flak from a tail gun. I weave side to side, sustain damage but keep running. I release another grenade. It blasts the remaining drone into a burning wreck.

  The protestors break into the main streets. I follow them out.

  The street is a smouldering war zone. Protestors and friendly drones jumping up and down. A trio of UAVs perform a fly-by. They scream low overhead, tipping their wings.

  A humanoid drone moonwalks past me.

  And then pigs shoot into the sky over the screen. They explode in a rainbow of fireworks.

  WINNER! WINNER! WINNER!

  That’s the message from the game.

  I pull off my glasses. See the giant screen. Kids celebrating worldwide. Some jumping up and down on their beds. I see the blue column on the chart is all the way up. The red column all the way down.

  The entire arena dances and cheers. Zak, Giles and Akihiro leap up and down in each other's arms.

  I throw my glasses in the air and scream.

  50

  Type A

  The helicopter rose up, and up and up towards its entry point in the earth. To the left, I saw absolute carnage. Floor after floor of drone-on-drone action. Wiping each other out with their missiles and guns. Destroying the entire complex.

  Floors crashed into the ones below. UAVs circled and bombed.

  The pilot wrestled for control—a bomb blast blowing us to one side.

  The cabin rattled. Lights and warning alarms flashed and beeped on the cockpit dash. But as you’d expect from JPAC, the pilot was shit-hot good. He held it together and straightened it out.

  Smoke invaded the cabin. I coughed on a lungful and held onto Philippe, laid out on the floor. Nadia gripped tight to a grab handle, her eyes closed, her face drained white.

  We spiralled up out of the vertical tunnel, into the Denver sky. The sun was blinding, the chopper rising high and clear. I looked out of the ledge, the sliding door still open. I saw the ground crumble and cave in for miles around. If Roni had put the call in, then all flights should have been cancelled and the airport evacuated.

  I hoped so, because the entire terminal folded in on itself, sucked into the world’s biggest sinkhole. A cloud of dust and ash the size of a planet spilled into the air.

  The pilot struggled again as a funnel of air kicked up from the ground. The chopper flew into another spin. So too, my stomach.

  But it levelled off after a few seconds. We flew on our way. I slid the door shut. It was quieter, but still noisy from the rotors.

  Philippe looked like a ghost. I kept my hands pressed on his wound, but he was losing blood fast—all over the floor.

  “Get on your phone,” I shouted to Nadia. “Make something happen.”

  Nadia pulled on a headset. She talked to the pilot. Motioned for me to pull on a headset, too.

  I did.

  Nadia told me we had a call set up with a surgeon. One of JPAC’s emergency field team. She took a tablet from a side pocket in the chopper door and teed up a video call.

  She crouched down to Philippe. The audio feed came through the headset. The doctor onscreen was a middle-aged man with grey curly hair and a brown check shirt.

  “I’ve got an emergency, ” Nadia said. “Prep for surgery.”

  “ETA?” the doctor said.

  “Ten minutes by medivac,” Nadia said.

  “Who’s the patient?”

  “Vasquez, Philippe,” Nadia said. “You might know him as Deathstalker.”

  The doc looked as if he was at a desk at a computer. He appeared to type something—glanced off screen. “Okay, got him. Can you describe the injury?”

  “A big fucking bullet hole,” I said.

  “Show me,” the doctor said.

  I took my hands off the wound. It was an absolute mess. I peeled Philippe’s t-shirt away from his lower back. Nadia angled the tablet so the doctor could see.

  “Looks like the right kidney,” the doctor said.

  “Order a replacement,” Nadia said. “I want an organ out of the fridge by the time we get there.”

  The doctor looked off-camera at his screen. “But according to his records, he’s a European asset.”

  “And?” Nadia said.

  “We only stock cloned organs in the continent of operation.”

  “Since when?” Nadia said.

  “Since the DNA Harvesting Centre was destroyed in Washington.”

  Shit, that was me and Philippe.

  “Can’t we freeze him or something?” I said.

  “The cryo-preservation units run on a computer network,” he said. “The network is down due to a hack.”

  Shit, that was Roni.

  “If it’s a kidney, surely you can just cut the bad one out,” Nadia said. “He can live perfectly off one.”

  “He has been living perfectly off one,” the doctor said, reading off his computer screen. “He had the left kidney removed eleven years ago . . . Shrapnel wound when harvesting was still in test phase.”

  “We’ve got to do something,” I said.

  “What can we do?” Nadia said.

  “Let me rephrase,” I said. “Something good happens to Philippe, or something bad happens to you.”

  Nadia chewed her lip in thought. She looked into the tablet screen. “How long can we keep him alive?”

  “Depends on blood loss,” the doctor said.

  "I'll source another organ," Nadia said.

  The doctor looked bemused. “Source a—have you seen what’s going on out there?” he said. “Besides, he’s a Type A.”

  “I know what kind of an asset he is,” Nadia said.

  “No, he means blood type,” I said.

  “It’s incredibly rare,” the doctor said. "And without blood tests and biopsies, the chances . . . well, maybe you ought to let this one go.”

  My heart sunk and my head span like the rotors on the chopper. Philippe coughed. Blood spilled out of his wound. I applied pressure with one hand. Felt for a pulse on his neck with the other. His heart was beating, but weak.

  I felt him slipping away.

  51

  Crumbs Of Comfort

  The shores of Lake Zurich, Switzerland.

  The scene was beautiful, fresh and green. It rained, but it was a friendly rain. The kind of rain that made a gentle patter on the canopy of my black umbrella. A soft breeze rustled the trees. "SOS" by Abba played out of a portable speaker on the grass, hooked up to my phone.

  I sucked up the tears before they could break and tossed a few tulips on the ground in front of me. Something to fix on, I suppose, in the absence of a grave or a headstone.

  “Well, I guess this is the part where I say something deep and meaningful,” I said. “I know we weren’t always BFFs. And you did try and shoot me. And stab me. And beat me to death. But—argh. This is coming out all wrong . . . I guess what I’m trying to say is, thanks for coming back for me. I hope you
know that I would have done the same.”

  I paused to wipe away a rogue tear. I took a breath and continued my speech. “I know you've done a lot of bad things—haven't we all? But you came good in the end. Better late than never, hey?”

  I looked at the tulips on the ground. The one remaining expression of a life. Well, apart from the ashes. And they came with the urn. I wiped away a few more silent tears and laughed a little. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” I said. “I think it’s the song,” I looked over my right shoulder. “Are you sure this is an appropriate choice of music?”

  “It was her favourite,” Philippe said, appearing at my side. “She played it all the time. It’s how she got me into them.”

  “Okay then,” I said, as we stood in silence for a moment. “You sure you don’t want to say a few words?”

  Philippe shook his head. “Nothing I haven't already said.”

  He rocked an umbrella of his own—the pair of us in Type A black. He handed me the urn and took a wrapper out of his jacket pocket. He propped his umbrella against his shoulder and opened the wrapper. He took out a cake and broke it in two. He laid half down on top of the tulips and broke the other half in two. He handed me a piece. We ate the cake and listened to the rest of the song. Philippe licked the end of a finger and checked the direction of the wind. I handed him the urn and he twisted off the top. He threw the ashes into the air. The breeze took them off over the lake.

  The Abba song ended. Before I could stop the next tune, the upbeat "Waterloo" burst out of the speakers.

  “Sorry,” I said diving for the phone.

  Philippe laughed. “She would have seen the funny side." He winced in agony, holding a hand to the small of his back in pain.

  “Stitches?” I said.

  “Stitches,” he said.

  I picked up the speaker and phone and slid them into my jacket pockets.

  “Bye Lina,” I said.

  As we walked away, the sky brightened.