Grave Games: A Collection Of Riveting Suspense Thrillers

by James Hunt

  Bryce jumped from his chair, and sprinted past Grace and straight into Mack’s office, his breathing to the point of hyperventilating. “Mack, the list… It’s bad. Really bad.” He paced in circles, his hands waving sporadically in the air, mumbling to himself incoherently.

  “Bryce, calm down.” Mack stepped around the desk and gripped Bryce by the shoulders, the boss’s meaty hands immediately bringing him to a stop. “What is it?”

  “The file Sarah retrieved, it’s a purchase list.”

  “For what?” Mack asked.

  “A nuclear bomb.”

  Mack’s grip on Bryce’s shoulders suddenly loosened. Silently he nodded, then turned back to his desk. “Do they have all of the components?”

  “Not yet, but—”

  Grace poked her head inside. “Sarah just landed.”

  “Good,” Mack said. “Get her in here now.”

  Bryce lunged forward and slapped his hands on Mack’s desk. “That’s not all I found on the folder. The Islamic State has been using a third party to collect the materials, handle bank transactions, and deliver the goods.”

  “So who is it?” Mack asked.

  “Vince Moors.”

  Chapter 3

  The moment Sarah walked into HQ she was yanked into Mack’s office, which she lovingly referred to as “the place where fun goes to die.”

  A projection on the back wall was already set up when Sarah stepped inside, and she immediately thrust her hands into the air defensively. “Look, if this is about the Toronto job, I just want to tell you up front that I found the terrorists like that in the room.” She dropped her left hand and pointed her index finger and middle finger on her right hand toward the ceiling. “Scout’s honor.” But when she saw Bryce’s already pale face reach a new color of pasty white glue, she knew this was worse than her antics in Toronto. “Why does Bryce look like he’s going to crap his pants?”

  “Sit down, Hill.” Mack’s voice thundered painfully low as she found her seat, and he motioned to Bryce, who fired up his computer.

  “If this is another mandatory HR training, I’d like to request some popcorn,” Sarah said.

  “The file that you recovered from Toronto had a lot of information about purchases the Islamic State had made over the past few months. Most of it was standard, but we did find this.”

  A schematic appeared on the wall, and although Sarah had slept through most of her annual explosives training at the beginning of the year, she recognized a nuclear weapon when she saw one. “Okay.” She turned to Bryce. “Crapping one’s pants would be an appropriate response to something like this.”

  “Bowel movements aside,” Mack said, stepping around his desk, “according to their list, they only have two remaining components needed to complete the weapon: plutonium and the weapon’s ignition system.”

  “Do we know what they’re going after first?” Sarah asked.

  Bryce looked to Mack, who gave a slight nod, and cleared his chest. “The Islamic State isn’t actually going after these two components themselves. They don’t have the resources needed to pull off the job, so they’ve contracted a mercenary.”

  Sarah leaned forward in her chair, watching Bryce’s complexion transform from pasty to translucent. “Who took the job?”

  Mack crossed his arms over his chest and looked Sarah dead in the eye. “It’s Vince.”

  The name immediately brought a sour taste to Sarah’s tongue. If there was anyone that would be on both the GSF’s shit list and her own, it was Vince. The entire agency had been looking for him since his betrayal during the Global Power crisis. So far he’d managed to stay off their radar, but it was good to know he had finally popped his head out of whatever hole he was hiding inside.

  “Where is he?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t know his exact location at the moment, but—” Bryce held up his finger, and a few strokes of the keys later, a map of the Czech Republic appeared. “He has a meeting scheduled in the small town of Hrob in twelve hours.”

  Without a word, Sarah leapt from her chair and headed for the door, but when she jiggled the handle, it was locked. She reached into her jacket and removed one of the Colts, prepared to shoot her way out.

  “That’s enough, Hill!” Mack’s booming voice reverberated off the walls of his office. He moved within an arm’s length of her. And while his face looked like he was about to blow a gasket, he laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I know how bad you want this. We both do. But there’s something larger at play here, and we need to figure out what that is before you jump into a fight you don’t know anything about.”

  Two years she’d waited. Two years of searching. Two years to let her imagination run wild about all the things that she would do when she finally caught him. But Mack was right. Reluctantly, Sarah holstered the Colt and retook her seat. “What’s he going after first? The plutonium or the computer?”

  “Well, it’s not a computer per se. It’s a circuit chip with advanced sequencing to ensure the nuclear reaction of the plutonium is able to split at the appropriate atomic levels.”

  Sarah blinked a few times, still staring at Bryce. “So… plutonium or computer?”

  Bryce sighed. “Plutonium.”

  “Priority number one is stopping the plutonium,” Mack said. “That means if you have to choose between catching Vince and stopping the deal, you stop the deal. Is that clear?”

  Sarah nodded. “When do I leave?”

  “Forty minutes,” Bryce answered.

  Sarah left Mack’s office and headed toward the armory. She resupplied on ammunition and packed a few extra magazines. If Vince was involved, she knew he would have friends with him. He’d never liked to work alone. And while he had never matched her prowess in the field, he was always prepared.

  Sarah dropped the pack of supplies on a bench inside one of the prep rooms and then opened her locker. Six pictures rested inside. Four of them were crossed out. Vince leered at her from one of the remaining two. There wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t think about him and what he’d done. Even with all of her joking, all of her antics in the field, and all of the reprimands that Mack had slapped in her file, she never would have betrayed the GSF. There was a special kind of hell for those who betrayed their own.

  “I know how much you want to kill him.” Bryce stood at the end of the lockers, his fingers intertwined with one another and his feet pivoted inward, looking more sheepish than usual. “Don’t think I haven’t been looking for him too,” Bryce said. “You’re not alone in this. You never were.”

  Sarah leaned against the lockers. “Yeah. I know.” When she looked up, Bryce had his eyes wide and that pitiful “let me help you” expression plastered over his face. “Thanks for having my back.” She punched him in the shoulder then laughed when he groaned.

  “Oh,” Bryce said. “I have something I wanted to show you.”

  “If it’s another one of your life-size action dolls, I’ll pass.”

  Thankfully, it wasn’t. Instead Bryce led her into the R&D room, which was normally off limits to her. She had a weakness for pressing buttons. And in the R&D room, pressing buttons usually led to things exploding. Mack didn’t like that.

  Bryce grabbed a black case the size of a pack of cards off the shelf. “I’ve been working on a biometric interface for the field to sync in cooperation with your communication link.” He opened the case and revealed a syringe-type device, but instead of a needle, there was a fat tube on the end. “Hold out your left arm and roll up your sleeve.”

  Sarah raised an eyebrow as Bryce hovered the syringe over her wrist. “This isn’t like a matching tattoos thing is it, because if that’s happening, I’m the one who’s choosing—OUCH!” The device dug into her flesh, singeing the skin and leaving a tiny red ring from the point of contact. “What the hell was that?”

  Bryce smiled, holding up the smoking syringe. “Squeeze your left hand.”

  Sarah flexed her hand into a fist, and a screen appe
ared on the inside of her forearm that stretched from her wrist to about halfway to her elbow. “Holy shit!”

  “It’s an interactive display linked up to the GSF satellite. I’ll be able to send anything and everything that I see on my screen to you.” Bryce opened his arms wide. “It’ll be like I’m right there in the field with you!”

  Sarah’s face went stoic. “Way to ruin the moment.” She squeezed her fist again, and the display disappeared. She squeezed it again and it reappeared. She repeated this until Bryce placed his hand on her wrist.

  “Let’s not wear out the battery.”

  “Does this thing get HBO?” Sarah asked, as Bryce rolled his eyes and walked away. Sarah followed, continuing to squeeze her fist. “What about Showtime?”

  ***

  The work day in Hrob had ended. The sun had set and the workers had left their fields to gather in what passed as their Main Street, which was nothing more than a dirt road through the center of town, comprised of eleven buildings, five on the left and six on the right. And Sarah used the term “buildings” loosely. The walls were little more than plywood, and the thatched roofs looked one gust of wind away from disappearing.

  With no street lamps and limited electrical capacity, night had cast nearly the entire town in darkness. The only bright spot was at the east end of the town, where music and boisterous laughter erupted from the local tavern.

  The fields of tall grass behind the buildings of Main Street rose three feet, and tucked away under their cover was Sarah, enviously eyeing the joyous end-of-day celebrations eradiating from the tavern, trying to remember the last time she had gone out for a beer. “I wonder if they have Hefeweizen on tap.”

  “Did you read the mission doc I sent you?” Bryce asked, trying to redirect her attention to the situation at hand.

  “Of course I did.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I know how much time and energy you put into those documents, and I acknowledge that effort by taking the time to digest said information in an efficient manner.”

  Bryce paused. “You’re playing Pac-Man on your arm still, aren’t you.”

  Sarah looked down to the chomping yellow circle devouring the tiny white dots along the maze, quickly evading the squid-like enemies that meant to destroy him. She smiled. “Yes.”

  “Sarah!”

  “There’s no one here, Bryce.”

  “Well, if you read the mission document, you’d know—”

  “Ugh, here we go.”

  “You’d know that Hrob is a rural community with close to two thousand inhabitants and is a large producer of wheat. You’d also know that Vince is purchasing four cases of weapons-grade plutonium from Czech arms dealers and then transporting the materials via train into Turkey, where they’ll ferry the goods across the Mediterranean and into Syria.”

  “Right. So stop the bad guys from buying the plutonium. That’s all I need to know, Bryce.” Sarah returned to her Pac-Man game, but the rumble of trucks pulled her attention to the east. Four pairs of headlights appeared down the road. Old diesel army trucks with canvas covering in the back. “About time.”

  “I’m showing six more trucks coming from the west as well,” Bryce said.

  Sarah squeezed her left fist and ended the game on her forearm. She guided her hands to the Colts under her jacket and kept low in the tall grass on her approach to the larger, warehouse-like building on the west end of the town, where both groups of trucks converged. She stopped at the edge of the field near the back sides of the buildings where the grass had been cut.

  Men dressed in military fatigues and armed with a mixture of M-16s, AK-47s, and AR-15s spilled out of the backs of the trucks. Teams of three removed rectangular wooden crates from the truck beds and carried them inside the building while a pair of soldiers guarded the back door. But even with all of the attention being given to the crates, Sarah kept her eyes on the one truck whose doors hadn’t opened. And it wasn’t until the last crate of plutonium had entered the barn that Vince stepped out of the truck.

  He looked like she remembered him, freakishly tall and clean shaven with that pointed nose and thin face. He’d grown his hair longer but still sported that arrogant grin as he barked orders to the rest of the group. Vince had brought two dozen men, and Sarah knew he was about to kick himself for not bringing more. Adding the dozen Czech rebels put the total number of combatants to thirty-six.

  Two soldiers guarded the rear entrance, and two guarded the front, while the rest scurried inside. Their voices carried on the breeze as one lit a cigarette, and the other joined him. Neither had his hand on his weapon. The two tiny red dots that drifted from mouth to waist were the only splashes of color in the darkness.

  “Remember,” Bryce said. “Priority one is stopping the plutonium.”

  “Uh-huh.” The two guards turned to face one another, neither paying attention to the field only ten yards from where they stood. Sarah slowed her heart rate and minimized her breaths, her body trained and prepared to move efficiently, quietly, then waited for them to raise their hands for another puff of their cigarettes.

  When the moment came, she bounded soundlessly from the tall grass. With their lips still puckered around their death sticks, Sarah rammed her fist into the first gunman’s throat, crunching his windpipe, and snapped the neck of the second. The first gunman flopped on the ground like a trout gasping for breath, his arms and legs losing their energy as his face turned a purplish blue and he finally laid still, neither of them able to sound the alarm. “You know, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to suck at my job.” She patted down the two guards quickly and removed one of the M-16s from the Smurf-looking corpse. “I’m just gonna borrow this real quick.”

  “You know what you’re doing?” Bryce asked.

  Sarah stepped along the back side of the building to the far corner and to get a better look at the trucks’ locations, along with those of the two other guards vigilantly scanning the streets up front. Sarah pressed her back against the wall and reached into one of the compartments on her belt near her right hip. “Disable the trucks. Grab the plutonium. Capture Vince. And then drink a pint down at the pub with the locals.” She twisted the squat, cylindrical tube that was her adaptable suppressor into the barrel of the M-16 until it clicked into place and tucked the weapon’s stock under her shoulder. She drew in a breath. “Just another day at the office.”

  Sarah craned her neck around the corner and sprinted to the trucks. Two quick, soundless bullets exploded into the bases of the necks of the two guards on duty up front and Sarah skidded to a stop at the rear of the first truck. She popped a bullet into each tire, working through the cluster of old army trucks until all of them rested in the grass on nothing but rims.

  “I’m surprised this is actually going well,” Bryce said.

  “Of course it is.” Sarah reached around to the back of her belt and plucked a grenade. “Now we move on to part two of my master plan.”

  “Wait, part two?” Bryce’s voice grew hesitant. “What is part two?”

  “Blow stuff up.” Sarah pulled the pin on the grenade and arced the explosive through the air and onto the roof of one of the trucks in the middle of the parked vehicles now sitting on its bare rims. Sarah raised her rifle to the barn door, through which she knew the goons would sprint, and waited for the fireworks.

  The explosion rattled the ground and sent a plume of smoke, fire, and steel into the sky. Sarah lined up the crosshairs of the M-16 to the door and placed her finger on the trigger. Vince’s patsies spilled from the side of the barn, and she squeezed the trigger. Brass shells spit from the side of the chamber and the stock pounded against her shoulder as three more targets fell to the wayside.

  The next two goons learned from their predecessors’ mistakes and fired from the safety of the barn doors. Sarah ducked back behind the truck, bullets thumping into the metal siding, and she maneuvered to the truck’s hood, her boots sliding across the slick grass. She paused at the front
driver-side tire. “Bryce, give me a satellite feed of the building.” She squeezed her fist and saw the slightly pixelated map appear on her forearm.

  One mercenary was at the rear of the same truck she was, and with her left hand, Sarah reached inside her jacket, pivoted on her heel, removing the pistol in the same motion, and lined up her shot just as the man emerged from behind the truck’s bumper. One shot and he hit the ground.

  Sarah dropped the emptied M-16, her right hand reaching for the familiarity of the second Colt, and she sprinted around the front of the truck.

  The scent of smoke and lead filled the air. The recoil from each gunshot rippled through Sarah’s arms as she guided the ends of her pistols like a conductor in an orchestra. The rhythm of her gunshots and feet blended seamlessly on her path to the building. Blood spurt from the Czech mercenaries with each successful shot. Two down, then four, then five. Another gunman sprinted to the rear of the building, but just before Sarah slammed into the side of the barn, she put a bullet in the back of his skull, and he flopped to the ground like a wet noodle.

  Sarah stepped quietly around to the ground of the barn where she saw one window between her and the still-open front door. “How many?”

  “Heat signatures show eight bodies inside, with at least a dozen sprinting away into the fields,” Bryce said.

  “Looks like some of the boys are getting cold feet.” Sarah tossed another grenade toward the cluster of trucks. The blast scorched two more of the vehicles, knocking one to its side while another caught fire.

  Flames shimmered off the sides of the Colts and the heat of the blast warmed the left side of Sarah’s body as she saw the front door swing shut. She smirked. “Nobody ever wants to play.” She ducked below the window and squatted next to the front door handle. She reached, twisted the knob, and flung it open.