ALL ACTION THRILLER BOXSET: THREE MURRAY MCDONALD STANDALONE THRILLERS

by Murray Mcdonald

  Chapter 73

  On approaching the main center complex, it became apparent that the Camp Trust attendees were blissfully unaware of what was happening around them. The mini city center was buzzing and was no place for Bill’s rifle or three camouflaged Rangers. Securing them for a quick exit, they readied themselves for the surreal café style scene that greeted them as they walked along the main concourse, milling with Trust employees who were grabbing a late bite and socializing with their colleagues. More than once, Bill heard some of them say it must have been part of the assessment. If everyone’s cell had stopped working, it had to have been part of the course. Idiots, thought Bill, as he walked through. The corporate mentality was one he had never fully understood, had never signed up to and he would never have sold himself for.

  Blind trust and loyalty in return for a paycheck that lasted as long as the corporation decided your number on the excel spreadsheet was cost effective. Idiots. Their families and friends were in turmoil, the country was in chaos and they just thought it was part of their all-important assessment. Of course, his thinking was somewhat tainted by the plight of his niece at the hands of this corporate entity.

  “The main building is just across the concourse, the one with the Trust flag protruding from the entrance,” whispered Mike, trying desperately hard not to give them away.

  “Relax,” said one of the Rangers, nudging him. “You’re going to get us noticed.”

  Bill looked up. The building stood high above the others. Somebody obviously had a bit of an inferiority complex, he thought to himself.

  “Roger Young’s office and apartment are on the top floor. He took a shine to Lauren,” he said, more relaxed and due to her uncle Bill’s presence, who after all was a stone cold killer, he left out the fact that he and Lauren were more than happy to play on her sexuality for their ultimate goal.

  They walked past the building once and continued along for another couple of blocks before walking leisurely back, discussing what each of them had seen on the pass. Mike listened with interest as each came up with details that he hadn’t even considered looking for, let alone seen. In summary, they concluded that there were three guards and a receptionist in the lobby. The likelihood was that an alarm would not only bring half the Chinese army running in but would also stop the lifts from working.

  “Okay, let’s go,” said one of the Rangers, catching Mike off guard completely. He thought they were still planning. “Bill, the receptionist.”

  Bill walked in first, followed by the Rangers, and made straight for the receptionist as directed. The three Rangers talked amongst themselves casually, bringing Mike into the conversation. One coughed and the three struck. Exploding from a point equidistant to the three guards, they hit them at full speed and pummeled them to the floor. A few well-aimed punches had the three guards disabled while Bill kept the receptionist calm and away from any alarms.

  Within seconds, the three guards were deposited out of sight and the three Rangers, to anyone from the outside world, were now securing the building, complete with ill-fitting jackets.

  “Mike, you take the desk,” instructed Bill, directing the receptionist to leave her station and to join the three tied and bound guards in the same closet. Bill returned to the lobby and, catching a pistol from one of the Rangers, boarded the elevator.

  Bill hit the button for the penthouse. Nothing happened. A keyhole suggested it wasn’t going to be that simple.

  “Mike, are there any keys on the desk?” Bill asked, exiting the elevator.

  A set was thrown across to him. The third one he tried did the trick. The doors closed and the elevator began to move. Bill checked the magazine was full and prayed he wasn’t too late. Mike had been subtle in how he said it but from what he had said, it sounded as though the general had taken a real liking to his niece. She was a beautiful girl, just as her mother and grandmother had been. Bill had been in more than one fight protecting his sister when he was younger. He’d never let her down and wasn’t going to let down her daughter. At least not if he could help it.

  The elevator opened on to the open-plan office. Other than office furniture, it was empty. Music was playing but Bill couldn’t see the source. He walked towards the desk. The sound got a little louder. Some sort of Chinese instrument was being plucked to death, he thought, but where? He walked a little further towards the noise and nearly fell through the floor. A staircase projected down, but no banister surrounded the open end, it would have spoiled the view. So the stairs just dropped into the floor. Bill walked around to the first set of stairs and tentatively made his way down. The sound of music grew louder with each step. He ducked down to see beyond floor level and into the room below. It was a vast lounge, with a kitchen area off to one side and large double doors on the other. They were slightly open. The music was coming from behind the doors.

  Bill crept down the stairs quietly. The last thing he wanted to do was alert them to his presence and have them harm Lauren. A pained scream stopped any further creeping. Bill rushed into the room and witnessed a scene no uncle should ever have to witness. Lauren was tied to the four corners of the bed, naked and at the mercy of an old Chinaman who it seemed was more interested in inflicting pain than having sex. The large metal implement he was walking towards her with would have been more at home in a medieval torture chamber than a bedroom.

  Lauren spotted Bill and unfortunately alerted the Chinaman to Bill’s presence. He immediately rushed for the telephone. Despite nearing seventy years of age, Bill found a lease of life he didn’t think still existed and dived a perfect football tackle, taking the Chinaman down in one solid hit. The red mist had descended. He grabbed the bizarre looking implement and forced it into the mouth of the old man, harder and faster than it had ever intended to be inserted in any orifice. The Chinaman’s eyes widened in absolute terror and had his throat not been stuffed beyond capacity would have screamed in agony. Bill kept pushing and only when the fight stopped, did he relent. He hadn’t even had to turn the screw that would have opened the three prongs. The man lay dead.

  Bill left him, complete with metal appendage, and quickly covered Lauren and untied her. She hugged her uncle and didn’t want to let go.

  “He had only just come in,” she said, telling him he had arrived just in time.

  “Okay, but we really need to get going. Where are your clothes?” he asked, turning away as a tear rolled down his cheek.

  She pointed to a wardrobe and he retrieved them for her and turned his back as she dressed.

  “Anything else?” he asked, grabbing what he assumed was her cell and laptop bag. She looked around avoiding looking at the dead Chinaman.

  “Nope, good to go,” she said bravely but with a tremble in her voice.

  “So that was Roger Young?” asked Bill as they walked quietly towards the lift.

  Lauren shook her head. “No, I think he’s dead, or at least that’s what the general said.”

  “So that was the general?”

  She shook her head. “No, he’s Russian, I think. That was some guy that arrived today. He kept saying something about his nephew being killed and his brother was going to make America pay. Junpeng, you know, like the Chinese president’s name. That was it, they called him Mr. Junpeng.”

  Bill hit the ‘Down’ button. Arriving on the ground floor, he didn’t pause, rushing Lauren through the lobby, “We need to get the hell out of here and quick!”

  Chapter 74

  Even with the night vision goggles, attempting to land was suicide. The charts indicated that the runway was almost five thousand feet in length, but it was nowhere to be seen and it had been years since it had been used and was almost entirely subsumed back into the elements.

  “Mr. President, are you sure it was there?”

  “Definitely. Off to the right of those buildings, just there,” he said, borrowing the co-pilot’s goggles.

  “I don’t see anything other than dirt sir.”

  In all honest
y, nor did Jack, but it had been a runway and one benefit of the C130s was their ability to land on anything that was relatively flat.

  “Okay, I can see it, so I’ll talk you in,” said Jack.

  He proceeded to give directions that had them landing almost as badly as before with a far worse taxi. But they were down and still alive.

  Frank and Butler opened the door and checked that the area in the middle of nowhere was secure. Lights burned off to their right. A sign of electricity, something none of them had noted on the journey. As far as they were aware, the country was still powerless.

  Jack did not wait for the all-clear, he just walked down the steps and onto the old runway.

  “Halt! Who goes there?” came a shout at the same time as a number of men appearing from behind the ruined buildings that once were hangars.

  Frank and Butler spun towards them, their guns at the ready but they were outmanned and outgunned. A number of spotlights lit up the area and a flag was visible flying over the ruins, a flag of the United States with two crossed muskets prominently displayed across the stripes.

  “It’s alright, guys,” said Jack to Frank and Butler. Jack stepped between them and lowered their guns. “They’re on our side.

  “Tell my reprobate cousin Victor that the cousin he hates more than life itself is here to see him!”

  “I don’t think so! His cousin is the President of the United States of America,” replied the man, one of Victor King’s Patriotic Guards of America.

  “You bring that flashlight a little closer and shine it in my face and you’ll see I am President Jack King. Now stop wasting time and tell the sorry ass that I’m here to see him!” he commanded, in a voice that screamed presidential enough that the guard bypassed the flashlight shining and scurried off back to the main camp.

  The sound of a plane landing had caused great concern around the camp. The runway was defunct and had been for a long time. The fact that anyone was using it was crazy. The fact they were landing just next to their base and in the dead of night was extremely worrying. Victor had shadowed his guards to the runway. He stood back with his towering right-hand man, Kyle, and a body of men, ready to repel an attack.

  He had heard the shouts from below and the voice of his cousin. First and foremost he loved America. He maybe hated his cousin, but that did not mean he hated his office. He walked forward and down towards the aircraft.

  “Mr. President,” he acknowledged.

  “Victor.”

  “How did you know we were here?”

  “I knew as soon as the reports from Elk Point came in. It’s an ideal spot for a camp and far enough from Elk Point that the FBI would never find it.”

  “You didn’t tell them?” He was surprised.

  “I had a lot more on my plate and I figured it was their fault the refinery blew.”

  “Damn right, idiots damn near killed us all! Shooting into a refinery.”

  Jack nodded. He knew Victor would never have fired into the refinery. He may acquire weapons illegally and immorally but he was highly intelligent and certainly not suicidal.

  “So what happened, Mr. President? You screwed up and need our help?” he joked, generating laughter from the rest of his guards.

  “Yes,” replied Jack frankly and killing the laughter instantly.

  Victor walked closer and looked into the eyes of a cousin he had grown up with, a cousin he had played with in that very location, and saw a deep sadness. He clasped his hand on his shoulder and led him back towards the camp.

  “Fort Igloo,” said Jack. “Great place for a camp.”

  A former munitions depot, the camp was filled with small igloo shaped solid concrete bunkers. Literally hundreds covered the landscape and offered perfect accommodation for Victor and his group. Access was restricted by one single road that led no further and they were miles from the nearest civilization.

  “I knew it had been bought a few years back. I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been you,” said Jack.

  “I always loved when we came up here and spent the summer with Grandpa,” said Victor, reminiscing.

  “You know, Victor, I never sold you out. Just the route,” said Jack, getting the large elephant in the room out of the way.

  Victor turned to him, genuinely surprised. “Bullshit!” he said after a few seconds.

  “Honestly, you even told me you didn’t run the guns yourself,” he reminded him.

  Victor paused and considered the revelation that he hadn’t been totally sold down the river by Jack. “But you still sold out.”

  “Only because we were losing men due to lack of equipment, Victor. I told you that when you told me what you were doing.”

  “Shit. Well you could have helped with my court martial,” he said, beginning to realize some of his hatred may have been misplaced.

  “Help you? I nearly lost the presidential race when they discovered what I had done to keep you out of prison, you stupid son of a bitch. You were caught red-handed with a crate of stolen M-16s. It cost us a fortune to keep it out of the papers!”

  “Oh,” replied Victor, feeling somewhat embarrassed.

  “‘Oh’,” said Jack. “Fucking ‘oh’? You’ve not taken my calls for fifteen years, didn’t come to my inauguration or my wife’s funeral. And all you can say is ‘oh’?!” screamed Jack. The tension of the last week was taking its toll and he swung a right hook that caught Victor perfectly on the chin, sending him crashing to the ground.

  Kyle, all six foot nine of him, rushed towards Jack, only to find Frank’s Sig Sauer .357 pistol at the base of his skull. “Don’t even think about it, big boy,” said Frank. Kyle stopped, the nozzle pushing deep into his skin. There was little doubt that Frank was about an ounce of pressure away from shooting him dead.

  Victor pulled himself up from the ground and walked towards Jack and gave him a hug.

  “Gentlemen, this is my big cousin and a man I hated, maybe wrongly, for far too long,” he announced to his group. “He is also one hard, mean son of a bitch, so keep on his good side.”

  On reaching Fort Igloo, Butler and Jack followed Victor into his own concrete igloo. Frank and Kyle stayed outside to protect their bosses.

  As Jack and Butler explained what they knew, Victor sat speechless. “Even I didn’t see that coming,” he said as they finished. “The Chinese? The sneaky little…”

  “So what do you know?” asked Jack. He knew that Victor would have means of communicating with other groups across the country. This was exactly the kind of scenario they planned for, whether by CB radio, hard line, telegraph wire, or whatever pre-electronic means were available to them, they connected with each other.

  “A lot less than you. We’re aware that power and communications are down across the country. Beyond that, very little. Most of the groups we’re in touch with are in their camps like us. We’re hearing stories of stragglers coming through who’ve witnessed lootings and general disorder breaking out. And it’s been less than a day. Our predictions for this scenario, an EMP type strike, aren’t pretty. Days are okay. Most people can last a few days and neighbors will pull together, but when you start stretching that to a week and beyond, it gets nasty. Real nasty, real quick. It may even be irrecoverable. Society is a fine line and ultimately, we’re animals with a survival instinct.”

  Jack nodded his head. His thoughts were of a similar timescale.

  “So what can the Patriotic Guard of America do for our president?” asked Victor.

  “How many men can you muster with decent weaponry?”

  “For our president, I’d say about sixty, maybe sixty-five?”

  “Christ, there are more than that in this camp,” said Butler, annoyed at the time they had wasted.

  Both the president and Victor laughed.

  “He means thousand, sixty or sixty-five thousand,” said Jack.

  “But we’ll struggle against their tanks,” said Victor.

  “Hmm, I think I may have a solution to that, M
r. President, but I’ll need to borrow your plane,” said Butler.

  “Of course,” replied Jack.

  “Victor, have you got a group in Arizona you can put me in contact with?” asked Butler.

  “We’re everywhere.”

  “What about the Army? We need to get word to them and get them involved,” said Jack.

  Victor shook his head. “What you’ve said explains a lot of the reports we’ve been getting through in the last couple of hours. American troops and equipment have been surrounding their own bases but their weapons have been pointing towards the bases not outwards.”

  “Only they’re not American, they’ll be the Chinese in American uniforms with riot gear visors and Chinese tanks and choppers painted in the American colors and bearing US motifs,” said Butler angrily. “But why are they not just attacking them? They’re effectively defenseless!” he added, posing the question to himself as much as anyone.

  “Our best chance is complete surprise,” said Jack. Butler and Victor agreed. Surprise was what would win the day.

  “How long do you need to get your men to Washington?”

  “If we want to do it without causing attention, five or six days?” said Victor after some thought.

  “Okay, six days from now, we take our country back!” said Butler, getting up to leave.

  “You might want to let the pilot sleep a little before you leave?” suggested Jack.

  “That’s a good point, Mr. President. Have you got any ex-pilots here, Victor?”

  “A few,” said Victor uneasily.

  “Excellent! Can you send them all to the plane, the more the better!”

  Chapter 75

  Wednesday July 8th 2015

  He was back where it all had started for him - the microchips. The answer had to be the microchips. His only problem was that he didn’t know one end of a microchip from another. He had asked Victor for pilots but had added that any electronic whiz-kids would come in handy too. The stream of pilots arriving over the previous few days had been impressive, more than he had hoped for and probably far more than they’d have time to equip. What had been even more impressive were the technical geniuses that had been arriving with them.