Sophia looked up at the helicopter. It was hovering near the edge of the rooftop. Thirty feet below it, a glass canopy undulated across the facade of the shopping mall. She aimed her grenade launcher at the helicopter’s belly. Just below it, two figures clung to a flexible ladder.
‘Get off the ladder!’ Sophia yelled into her mic. ‘Jump!’
She only had one grenade. She squeezed the trigger. The grenade punched through the air, a perfectly vertical shot. The vortex ring grenade fired upward. The glass doors behind her crystallized. On the floor above, the glass facade exploded. And then the second floor, and the third and the fourth. The canopy turned completely white, fracturing. The grenade struck the belly of the helicopter and bounced harmlessly away. The glass inside the helicopter exploded almost at the same time the mall’s canopy completely disintegrated.
‘Damien, Jay, you can get off the—’
The glass doors behind her shattered, drowning out her words. She crouched with her chin to her chest as glass fragments tore past either side of her, and into her back and hair.
* * *
Jay’s grip on the ladder tore free. Air was crushed from his lungs, and he struggled to stay conscious, eyes open, as he hurtled through space. The helicopter grew smaller and smaller, pitching left. The shocktrooper who’d been climbing the ladder above him was nowhere to be seen.
Jay instinctively tucked his chin to his chest and curled into a ball. This wasn’t a vertical drop, so the usual rules of arching his back to protect his organs didn’t apply. He was flying backward at high speed, his muscles rigid in anticipation of the unknown. The rooftop came rushing up underneath his legs. He forced himself to breathe but his lungs burned in protest. He tried to relax his limbs as he landed on his upper back, rolled off and over his shoulder. Sky and concrete bled around him. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think. Pain blossomed over his body.
His tumbling stabilized and he found himself sliding headfirst down a curved metal roof. He lifted his head so he wouldn’t get concussed and tried to spin himself around. He sprawled out, elbows scraping on metal. Pain shot through his nerves and skin. His vision was blurred, dark at the edges. He fought against it and reached an arm out. The friction hurled his body around. He rolled and slid feet first. The concrete surface of the rooftop rushed to meet him. His legs buckled on impact and he nearly smashed his skull directly into it. One arm worked quickly enough to throw him into a rough ball. He tumbled more times than he could count, bones banging against hard surfaces. He came to rest on his back, breathing fire from every muscle and bone. He reached up and ran a shaking hand through his scalp. It came away with no blood. Good. He craned his neck to check if any bones had been thrown out of place, but instead saw a shocktrooper approaching him, a Glock pistol in one hand.
Jay reached for the pistol in his jeans but it was no longer there.
The shocktrooper raised the pistol, lining the sights with Jay’s face. Then his head exploded.
Jay looked up to see Damien crouched on one knee atop the curved roof, subcarbine in both hands. Jay smiled and collapsed.
* * *
Sophia tracked the helicopter as it moved over the shattered canopy, descending in a slow, deathly spiral. It seemed to move directly toward her and at first she thought it was aiming for her, but as it wrestled through the air she knew it was out of control. She just hoped Schlosser survived the crash.
Grace pulled her to her feet. ‘Get clear!’ she yelled.
The only way to do that without running into police or military reinforcements was to move back inside the mall. It was the last place she wanted to go but there wasn’t much choice. As the helicopter plunged toward them, Sophia sprinted inside, Grace hot on her heels.
There was a deafening crash behind them. Sophia checked over her shoulder, expecting the helicopter to come through the main entrance, only to realize it had crashed into the Starbucks. It bulldozed through tables and chairs and tore the service counter into shards of timber and plastic. She ducked as a rotor blade sluiced past her head. Grace knocked her clear. From the edge of her vision, she watched the helicopter grind out of the Starbucks, across the polished floor and come to rest in the center. The side door was open and she could see one helicopter crew member strapped in beside Schlosser. The other crew member lay sprawled on the shopping mall floor, uniform damp with blood.
The crew member inside unbuckled and scrambled for a weapon. Sophia propped herself against a metal Starbucks chair and aimed her UMP through its holographic sight. She squeezed the trigger and punched a tight three-round burst through his head. Grace, lying a few feet away, dispatched the pilots with her Vector submachine gun.
Schlosser was alert, both hands gripping his harness, eyes unblinking and skin ashen. He was breathing and seemingly uninjured, so that was a good sign. Sophia lowered her UMP. She was a different story: her body burned and ached with so many lacerations, bruises and fractures that it felt like she was lying on red-hot coals. She placed her UMP on the marble floor and collapsed.
‘You are one crazy bitch,’ Grace said. ‘That’s a compliment.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The parking lot looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade. Jay noticed that didn’t stop Damien from checking the whole perimeter before entering. They found Grace’s team tucked in close between cars ‘borrowed’ from the mall. Sophia was the first to see them. She stepped into view and waited as they approached.
‘Are you clean?’ she said.
Jay sniffed his armpits. ‘That’s relative.’
‘No tails,’ Damien said.
‘Injuries?’
‘Just the usual,’ Jay said. ‘When you’re thrown two hundred feet off a helicopter.’
Sophia winced. ‘Sorry about that. But you survived, right?’
She walked them back to the rest of the group. Everyone was silent, no doubt processing everything that had gone down in the last couple of hours. Freeman and Nasira were leaning against a shiny silver minivan, half-smoked cigarettes in hand. Freeman seemed more interested in his smartphone than Damien and Jay’s arrival. The minivan’s side door was open and Schlepper was sitting inside. He had one hand bandaged and looked a bit jittery. Opposite the minivan, another borrowed vehicle: a dusty white sedan. The driver’s side door was open and DC sat with one leg out. A screwdriver clamped with a wrench protruded from the car’s ignition. DC emptied a container of its last pill and tossed it in the footwell. Chickenhead sat in the back seat, staring vacantly out the window.
Jay had seen the shocktrooper shoot Big Dog outside the bank. He and Chickenhead had been pinned down on the other side and neither of them could do anything except watch Big Dog bleed out through his neck and die. Chickenhead had emptied both magazines at the shocktrooper, hitting nothing but air as he moved into the bank and made short work of Sophia. She was lucky to be alive.
Grace stood in Jay’s path, hands on her hips. She glanced between him and Damien.
‘I can’t tell if you’re angry or sad or what,’ Jay said. ‘Is that an Asian thing?’
‘No, it merely infers my superior aptitude.’ She looked at Damien. ‘The important thing is we got who we came here for.’
‘Yeah, Schlepper here is a real popular guy,’ Jay said.
‘Schlosser,’ Grace said. ‘The Fifth Column went to great lengths to prevent us from securing him.’
‘Yeah, I noticed,’ Jay said.
‘They must’ve deployed every goddamn shocktrooper in South-East Asia,’ Sophia said. ‘I’ve never seen that many before. Mark I, Mark II, I don’t even know.’
‘We lost Big Dog,’ DC said. He winced as though he was chewing something bitter. ‘Shouldn’t have happened.’
‘We’re lucky any of us made it out at all,’ Nasira said, flicking her cigarette. ‘That was all kinds of fucked.’
‘What’s your plan now?’ Sophia said.
Jay realized she was staring at him. He shrugged. ‘Take a ferry to an island.
Airports will have our faces in an hour or two, so that’s not an option.’
‘Do you have accessible funds?’ Freeman asked.
‘Yeah,’ Jay said. ‘We’re good for now.’
‘So what’s your plan?’ Damien said.
Sophia looked at Grace, then said, ‘The less you know, the better.’
‘It’s fine,’ Grace said. ‘We’ll head back to base, debrief, get our facts straight on Seraphim and figure out what the Fifth Column have their hands in.’
‘Thanks for your help,’ Sophia said. ‘We couldn’t have done this without you.’
Damien nodded. ‘I’m sorry about Big Dog,’ he said, handing over Sophia’s P99.
She checked the magazine and laughed when she found it empty. The chamber still held a round though. Jay handed over Nasira’s P229, which he’d lost and found again on the mall rooftop. Freeman passed Damien his Glock 21.
‘Isn’t this from one of your guys back at the base?’ Damien said.
‘You might need it more than he will,’ Freeman said.
Damien thanked him and and wedged the Glock into his jeans. ‘I think we’ll lay low for a bit then,’ he said.
‘Preferably on a nice beach,’ Jay said.
Grace glared at Damien. ‘I thought you were sick of looking over your shoulder.’
‘Guess you only stick your neck out so far,’ Nasira said at the same time to Jay.
He felt himself bristle with anger, but was cut off by Sophia.
‘Nasira, that’s enough,’ she said. ‘You can always come back,’ she told Jay. ‘If you ever change your minds.’
Jay found himself without words. He felt just like he had after Desecheo Island: glad to be done with this, glad to be done with Sophia. It was exhausting and crushing to have done so much and have so little to show for it except surviving by the skin of his teeth. He shouldn’t have survived the shocktrooper ambush, but he had.
‘You should probably get going,’ Grace said, her voice decidedly softer. ‘In this traffic, it’ll take you an hour to get across town.’
Damien cleared his throat. ‘Yeah. Oh, before I forget.’
He took his GPS receiver from his pocket, which reminded Jay to do the same. They handed them to Freeman, who tossed them into the minivan.
Jay noticed Grace’s gaze linger on Damien before she turned to the others.
‘Has everyone except Freeman binned their phones?’ she asked.
‘Freeman, bin your SIM card and remove the battery,’ she said. ‘I'll do the same.’
They all responded with slow, lethargic nods.
Jay guessed that was it then. He shook DC’s hand. ‘Take care of them,’ he said.
DC snorted. ‘They’ll take care of me.’
Walking back to the newly stolen car with Damien, Jay was glad they’d disentangled themselves. Anything that involved the Fifth Column meant trouble, and that was exactly what they’d got today. Still, he did feel a little guilty dropping out now. He hoped the others didn’t think he was chickening out when things got rough. He liked it rough — he grinned at his own joke — but their idea of stopping the Fifth Column was like prodding a lion with a stick. It was suicidal.
Damien was silent. Jay knew he would be thinking of Grace. He’d seen the way she looked at Damien and knew she didn’t want him to go — not that Jay would ever mention that — but she probably had more important things weighing on her mind. Just as they had more important things weighing on theirs. Right now they had to focus on what was best for them. It was something he usually wasn’t very good at.
Jay dropped into the driver’s seat. Damien slipped in beside him, blinked and reached for the subcarbine in the footwell. He checked the fire selector was on safe before putting his seatbelt on. Jay still had his daypack so they could conceal the subcarbine inside it. He’d checked the mag earlier, it had twenty-five rounds plus one in the chamber.
Damien pulled out the Glock and handed it to Jay. Checking the magazine, Jay was happy to discover it was full. He tucked it under his right leg and started the engine.
‘I need coffee,’ he said. ‘This whole sober thing isn’t working out.’
* * *
Sophia watched Jay and Damien drive off. At least they’d look out for each other, which was more than could be said for her. Big Dog was dead, and Freeman and Benito had come inches from death. This was Grace’s operation, but she couldn’t help but feel responsible. At Desecheo Island, Nasira had been the only surviving member of her team, not counting the additional members, Benito and Damien and Jay. And before that, Adamicz. And before that, her parents. Her whole life was a long line of people dying because she couldn’t protect them. Not even from herself.
‘OK, people, we’re moving back north,’ Grace said. She turned to Freeman. ‘Have you made contact?’
Freeman shook his head. ‘I’m not getting anything.’
‘Range?’ Nasira suggested.
‘Can’t be. Signal’s strong,’ Freeman said. ‘We had contact just this morning.’
A bunch of worst-case scenarios tightened inside Sophia’s stomach. She climbed out of the minivan. ‘I saw those IP cameras on base. Can you access the NVR remotely?’
The internet protocol cameras didn’t store their footage locally but instead fed it to a network video recorder. Hopefully Freeman could still access it.
Freeman’s big fingers worked the touchscreen. ‘Logging in now.’
Sophia peered over his shoulder as the web browser loaded the video feed. It was black.
‘Dark room?’ Nasira said, peering over his other shoulder.
‘It has infrared,’ Freeman said. ‘The feed’s not working.’
‘Telephone line’s cut,’ Sophia said. ‘Is the footage stored online somewhere?’
‘Yeah,’ Freeman said, fingers working. ‘Last twenty-four hours.’ He paused. ‘Last file was modified thirty-four minutes ago.’
‘Stream it,’ Sophia said.
The web browser loaded again. This time the video wasn’t black. The camera showed the inside of a café. Sophia recognized the balcony outside. And she recognized the body on the floor with the colorful scarf. Sara. She closed her eyes and stepped away.
Freeman punched the side of the minivan. He dropped the phone. Nasira caught it. Grace took it from her and inspected the streaming video. She met Sophia’s gaze.
‘Looks like Blue Berets in the background,’ Grace said. ‘Rounding up civilians.’
‘They’ll probably blame the massacre on me,’ Sophia said.
Grace’s grip on the phone tightened. Her jaw worked. It was the closest Sophia had seen her get to expressing emotion. She turned away as soon as she noticed Sophia watching her.
Tears were rolling down Freeman’s cheeks. His large frame hunkered against the minivan. Sophia had never seen him cry before. She felt tears welling in her eyes but suppressed them.
‘I don’t know how they …’ Freeman wiped his nose with a tanned forearm. ‘How did they find the base?’
‘Where’s your nearest safe house?’ Grace said.
‘How did they find the base?’ Freeman repeated.
Grace gripped his arms. ‘Listen to me. We need a safe house. Is there one in this country?’
Freeman sniffed loudly, clearing his nose of snot. ‘Closest is Malaysia.’
‘Nothing here?’ Grace said.
‘I have a mate who runs a hotel on an island south of here,’ Freeman said. ‘I could call him.’
‘No,’ Sophia said. ‘We don’t call. We go there and you meet him in person, somewhere no one can see.’
Grace nodded. ‘We can hide there until things cool down, then get out on our false passports.’
She opened the smartphone and walked away from the vehicles, toward a rubbish bin. Sophia went after her, watching as she took the phone apart and removed the SIM card.
‘This op didn’t go exactly how I planned it,’ Grace said.
‘We have Schlosser, alive,’ Sophia
said.
Grace snapped the SIM card in half. ‘That counts for something.’
‘Freeman’s lucky to have you,’ Sophia said.
Grace tossed both the phone and the SIM card into the bin. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not stealing your limelight,’ she said. ‘This op was planned before you showed up. I was his only play. I’m not part of the Akhana.’
‘You spent time in the mountains with them,’ Sophia said. ‘So you’re just a drop-in? Passing through, free hospitality?’
‘Let’s make this clear,’ Grace said. ‘I don’t owe anybody anything. Once we reach a safe house and we extract what information Schlosser knows, I’m out.’
Sophia shook her head. ‘That doesn’t add up. Why take on this op and then split afterward if you don’t owe anyone anything?’
Grace leaned in and spoke softly. ‘For the information. Whatever’s in that man’s head.’ She indicated Schlosser, sitting inside the minivan. ‘What you do with that information is your concern. What I do with it is my concern.’
‘Does Freeman know this?’
Grace swallowed. ‘He understands the arrangement. I’m not looking for a promotion. I’m looking for answers.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sophia emptied her pockets on the hotel bed. Freeman’s friend hadn’t been especially pleased to have a bunch of fugitives turn up on his hotel doorstep. Whatever favor he owed Freeman, it must have been a big one, because he was quick to organize three rooms for them. Through the balcony door, Sophia could see a swimming pool and restaurant. Beyond that, palm trees fringed calm turquoise water. Everyone else was here because it was paradise. She was here to stay alive.
She opened the adjoining door to the next room. Grace was sitting talking with Schlosser. Benito was in the next room along. He’d only micro-slept the whole way over on the ferry, so Sophia had insisted he rest up in the hotel while he had the chance.
‘I didn’t work on any switches, sorry,’ Schlosser was saying.
He sat, hands clasped, on the room’s only chair. Grace was sitting on one of the two beds opposite.
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