by Rob Jones
Before anyone could answer, a strange voice emanated from the shadows.
“Tu veux une clope, Miss Donovan?”
They scrambled for their guns but it was too late. Before they could defend themselves the man stepped into the light and shouted an order at them to stay where they were. To back up his point, he pointed the barrel of a MAT-49 submachine gun at them. “And if you think you can rush me, then you should know I have a colleague standing just there.”
They turned to see where the first man was pointing, and another man with a MAT-49 stepped through the door.
“We made use of your side door – allow me to introduce myself. You can call me Lefevre, and this is Devos.”
“I don’t give a rat’s arse who you are!” Mikey lunged for the shotgun on the table, grabbing the stock with the tips of his fat fingers but not quite getting hold of it. It slipped from his hand but he never knew it. Lea watched in horror as the two men opened fire on him and filled him full of lead. The bullets tore through his jacket and exploded in his chest and throat, propelling the large Irishman back through the open door and blasting him down on the gravel drive where he landed with a sickening crunch.
“No!” Kyle screamed, reaching for the same shotgun. He was closer and more agile, and managed to grab hold of the barrel and pull it toward him before the two men turned their weapons on him too. They drilled dozens of needless rounds through his body until he resembled a human pin-cushion, collapsing to the floor in a cloud of gun-smoke when the men had finally finished.
“Same happens to you two if you try anything, oui?”
Lea was too stunned to reply, and despite his extensive experience in the military, even Devlin could barely believe his eyes.
“Give me the file, Miss Donovan.”
“How do you know who I am?” Lea said. “Who are you?”
“I know exactly who you are, Irishwoman. You think I do a job tracking down Henry Donovan’s research files and not find out about his daughter? Bringing the notes to my employer will make me a very rich man, but there is a great bonus. I know a man in the Far East named Luk who is going to pay me a small fortune to deliver you to him… Now – get up slowly.”
“Mr Luk?” Lea’s stomach turned with nausea as she recalled his torture chamber back on Dragon Island.
The man pointed the gun at the door and Lea rose slowly from the table.
“We’re going outside,” the man said. He pointed the gun at Devlin. “You, sadly, are staying in here.” Without saying another word he shot Devlin in the darkness. Lea screamed as she watched her former CO collapse to the floor wordlessly.
The other gunman, the one who had not yet spoken, began to pour petrol around the inside of the kitchen and up the outside walls of the cottage. He took a final drag on his cigarette and casually flicked it at the small cottage.
Lea jumped back as the flames raced up the side of her childhood holiday home and began to eat their way inside like a pack of hungry wolves. “You bastards…” she tried to say, but it came out weaker than a whisper and sounded not angry, but pathetic. She tried to run inside to save Danny but the men held her back.
She turned to the man, her heart full of hate and rage. It was then she saw they both had tattoos on their arms – tattoos of a specific kind of burning grenade she had seen somewhere before.
“Bonne nuit, Miss Donovan,” he said.
She felt the butt of a submachine gun smash into the side of her head and then everything went black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The streets of New York, now unsettlingly far below, flashed by as Hawke strained to keep a grip of the drone’s skid, but it was getting harder with every passing second. He glanced behind him to see the Perseus was now ablaze, with most of the top deck and bow on fire and black smoke rising into the air over the Hudson River. It was surrounded by military and coast guard choppers.
Slowly he clawed his way back up over the skid and then scrambled inside the drone, strapping himself inside the pilot’s seat. He deactivated the auto-pilot but nothing happened.
“Scarlet, are you receiving this?”
“Sure.”
“I take it from the bonfire you caught up with Kiefel?”
“Let’s just say he’s enjoying his hobby from a new perspective.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means he’s decided to go into marine biology.”
Hawke looked confused. “Forget it – you can tell me later. Listen – we have a problem. The weapon is on a timer and the drone’s autopilot can’t be disconnected. I think the only way to disarm it is to hack it. I need you to patch me through to Ryan, in a hurry.”
“You mean you can’t disable it yourself?”
“You could say that, yes.”
He heard her sigh. “If you want a job doing then call the SAS,” she mumbled to herself. “I’ll be with you in a second, Josiah.”
“Not unless you can fly five hundred feet into the air, you won’t.”
“Oh, please don’t tell me you were stupid enough to hang on to the skids when that maniac took off?”
“Something like that.”
“You total prat.”
“Well, thanks for your unwavering support and respect, but right now I’m in a slightly precarious position, so please just get me Ryan.”
Seconds later, Ryan was patched through.
“Joe, what’s up?”
“Mate, need some help.”
“Yes, I heard. Scarlet just told me something about you being trapped in a helicopter drone loaded with a deadly weaponized bacteria?”
“That just about sums it up, yes.”
Then he heard Alex’s voice. “You don’t have to do this to impress me, Joe.”
“Yes, as amusing as your jokes may be, can I remind you all that I’m currently in a drone five hundred feet above Manhattan with the world’s deadliest cargo underneath my arse!”
He heard Scarlet sigh again, and then speak. “I have an idea!”
“Let’s hear it,” Hawke said.
“Why don’t we just get the USAF to shoot it down like the one in DC?”
A pregnant pause.
“Oh yes,” she continued. “That’s right - we can’t do that because there’s a numbnuts called Joe Hawke trapped inside it.”
“Thanks for your input, Cairo, but we’re running out of time. It’s obviously on a pre-programmed route. Is there any way you can hack it, Ryan, and bring it under our control before the timer releases the bacteria?”
“Yeah, I think so – how long have we got?”
“According to a readout here in the cockpit, we only have a minute left before the canister is programmed to disperse the agent. I tried to deactivate the autopilot as I just said but Kiefel must have had Jakob fix it so it couldn’t be switched off after he jumped out the drone.”
“Smashing,” Ryan said.
“So you can hack the thing, yeah?”
“I think so.”
“Me too,” Alex said. “It’s been done before, at least.”
“That’s right,” Ryan said. “The Iranians recently hacked a USAF drone flying over their border by hacking into its GPS system and uploading a maldrone.”
“A what?” Hawke shouted.
“Drone malware, basically. I can use it to hack the drone and connect it to my laptop. That would bring it under my control, theoretically, at least.”
“Theoretically, Ryan, I’m about to get covered in Medusa’s lethal bacteria and turned to stone, and if that’s not enough motivation there’s a strong southerly right now and when Kiefel’s little timer releases this shit it’s blowing all over one of the most densely populated places on earth… so can we just get a move on, please?”
“Already on it,” Alex said. “We already know the drone’s IP address because it’s one of ours, and I just hacked it and disconnected it from its internal GPS guidance system. Anything Kiefel programmed in there is now old news.”
&nbs
p; Hawke breathed a sigh of relief. “What now?”
“Now I’m turning it around…”
“Woah!” Hawke yelled as the drone banked hard to the right and steered sharply away from midtown Manhattan.
“How long have we got on that timer, Joe?” Ryan asked.
“Sixty seconds.”
“The SWAT guys have got a sealed unit for us to land it in but it’s on a US Navy ship just off the coast,” Alex said, and then added grimly, “We don’t have time to lower the drone so you can get out, Joe.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Hawke said as he strapped Jakob’s backpack on. “Our German friend left me a get out of jail free card. Just fly the drone over to the yacht and then take her out to the ship!”
Hawke moved to the drone’s door and waited as Ryan flew the drone back to the Hudson then he leaped out and immediately pulled the cord on the BASE jump parachute. He glided safely to earth and landed with a gentle thump beside Cairo at the base of the Statue of Liberty. She was standing a few yards from the container holding Medusa.
“What the hell happened to Jakob, anyway?” Alex asked over the headset.
“He dropped out of city life,” Hawke said.
“You mean the Big Apple didn’t work its magic on him?”
“No – he didn’t see the point of it.”
Scarlet rolled her eyes and they watched the drone, guided by Ryan and Alex, as it landed inside the sealed unit on board the ship in the distance.
“Can you believe we don’t even get a pension for this work?” Scarlet said.
“You’re still talking about money, Cairo, and… wait – I don’t believe it!”
“What is it?”
Hawke pointed at a small Coast Guard tender as it moved toward them. “Look who’s on the bow.”
“Who am I looking at, Joe?”
“The smug bastard waving at us.”
“Who is it?”
Hawke couldn’t help but grin. “It’s Eddie Bloody Kosinski, and he’s coming to get Medusa.”
Hawke and Scarlet shared a glance, and then burst into laughter.
*
Moments later their humor was subdued by the sight of Agent Doyle pulling President Grant from the Hudson River. The Commander-in-Chief had the wound Scarlet had aimed for, and was fine, but still needed medical attention. As the team of doctors swarmed around him on his way to Marine One, he called Hawke and Scarlet over.
“Mr Hawke, I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart…”
“Don’t mention it,” Hawke said.
“You saved a nation tonight, Mr Hawke, and maybe the world. We all owe you a debt of gratitude.”
Hawke gave a nod but made no further reply, aware that he was suddenly the center of attention.
As they loaded his stretcher into the back of the giant helicopter, Grant turned to Scarlet.
“As for you – you saved the life of the Commander-in-Chief tonight, and more than that, a husband and a father. I’ll never forget what you did, even if it was slightly unorthodox.”
“No problem, Mr President,” Scarlet said.
“If you ever need anything…”
Now he was inside the chopper and the blades began to speed up. Slowly, the large machine lifted off the ground.
“I’ll bear that in mind!” Scarlet shouted, but her words were drowned out by the turbine and then the President was gone into the night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Lea winced as the pulsing agony of the deep laceration on her head coursed through her temple and into her jaw. She felt the blood from the wound welling in her eye socket and for a moment she thought she was going to pass out again.
Only now did she feel the duct tape over her mouth and the cable-ties on her wrists behind her back. A weird stench of motor oil hung around her nostrils and a wave of nausea rippled over her as she struggled to see in the darkness, her arms now numb as the weight of her own body crushed down on them.
She didn’t know where she was. The last thing she remembered was trying to go back inside to pull Danny Devlin from the flames as they burned down her parent’s old holiday home. She never even got the chance to drag him from the fire and toxic smoke before one of the men had hit her in the head with his gun and then everything had gone black as night.
Wherever she was now, it was a small, closely confined space. For a dreadful second, she thought she was in a coffin, but then she realized her cheek was pushed against some kind of hard carpet, and as far as she knew, the interior of coffins weren’t usually carpeted.
She breathed a short sigh of relief before another wave of panic rose in her when she heard an engine fire up and then a familiar rumbling vibration – she was in the boot of car, and it didn’t take her long to work out which one.
The gunmen’s Audi A7.
Now it was all coming back.
She remembered what Lefevre had said about Mr Luk – was he really going to take her back to Hong Kong and hand her over so that psychopath could subject her to death by a thousand cuts? She felt sick at the thought, but she was given no time to think. The engine revved and she felt the car lurch violently forward, forcing her to the back of the boot and striking her head on the internal boot release. She cried out as the metal release catch dug into the fresh wound on her head, but her cry was muffled by the duct tape on her mouth into a pitiful moan.
She knew the roads around here better than anyone, and by following the turns of the car she knew where they were heading – south-east toward the coast, and that could mean only one thing. The men were taking her to Connemara Airport where they no doubt had some kind of aircraft fuelled up and ready to take her – and her father’s research files – to god knows where, but Luk rose in her terrified mind once again.
She heard an indistinct mumbling from the front of the car and then the leader of the two men started shouting. This was followed by a drastic swing to the left and the squealing of tires. Then the car went straight again and there was a rapid acceleration.
Her mind drifted to Joe Hawke, whom she had last seen in Egypt so many weeks ago. The former SBS man had saved her before, but not this time. This time he didn’t even know which continent she was on. Her only hope was the one man who knew where she was, but the last time she had seen Danny Devlin he had been half-dead from a bullet wound and smoke inhalation and was now unconscious and surrounded by flames.
*
Danny Devlin coughed the burning smoke from his lungs and staggered from the flames with his hand over his mouth. His face was smeared with soot and he stopped on the patio and violently threw up. He rushed his hands to his side and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the bullet had only produced a flesh wound – searing half an inch of his torso away and leaving what would be an impressive scar – but he would live.
He searched around him for any sign of Lea and the two men, but saw only the corpses of Mikey O’Sullivan and Kyle Byrne. He snatched up one of their shotguns, and prepared to fight. It was then he heard the sound of a car and looked up to the cliff road to see a pair of red brake lights rapidly receding into the stormy Irish night.
Lefevre must have taken Lea and the research files!
He searched Mikey for the keys to the Quattro and sprinted to the front of the property, but when he turned the corner he saw the classic Audi was on fire just like everything else. The gas tank had already exploded and now all that was left was a char-grilled shell of black, twisted metal with flames all over the remains of the bent chassis.
He cursed as his eyes crawled desperately over the property for another means of giving chase and rescuing Lea when he suddenly remembered what Lea had said about her father’s old motorbike in the garage, which had somehow escaped the attention of these maniacs and was thankfully untouched by fire.
The heavy wooden doors scraped against the gravel as he swung them open. There, in the corner was what could only be a motorcycle, concealed beneath an old brown dustsheet.
He wrenched the
cloth away to reveal what he had been praying for – a motorbike, and not only a bike but a stunning black 1967 Norton Commando, just as Lea had described to him on their journey to the cottage.
He offered another prayer that the keys were still in it, as was her father’s habit, and they were. The holy trinity of prayers was completed when he climbed on top and switched it on. It roared to life and he sighed with relief when he saw there was at least a quarter of a tank of fuel in her.
Without wasting a second he slung the shotgun over his shoulder and raced out of the garage, spraying gravel chips up in the air behind him in a great sweeping arc as he skidded out of the drive and joined the coast road on his way to catch up with the fleeing Audi A7.
As he sped along the narrow, winding lane which followed the coast, his headlight illuminated the rainfall which the Atlantic westerly was driving into his face with terrific velocity. This, Danny, he told himself, is a real bloody stupid night to be chasing after a gimp like this Lefevre bloke.
He hit a straight and accelerated to sixty, confident that on a road like this he could easily catch up with a car on something like the Commando, but then the tiny red rear lights disappeared from view. Had they turned a corner or had Lefevre killed the lights?
Devlin knew you’d have to be insane to drive blind on roads like this on a stormy night with no moon, but then was that enough to rule out Lefevre? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he wasn’t going to turn his light off because that was a four hundred foot drop to a raging ocean just a few yards to his right. He scowled in frustration but all he could do was speed up and continue the pursuit.
He turned a shallow bend on the road and suddenly saw the red lights once again. He was gaining now, and the Audi was less than two or three hundred yards ahead of him.
*
“You see what?” Lefevre drawled in Belgian French.
“A headlight,” Devos replied. He nodded his head at the Audi’s rear-view mirror. “Maybe two hundred meters behind us. Must be Devlin.”
