CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The entire team veered to the right, negotiating through a door in the hoarding protecting the sidewalk from the building site.
On the other side, the ground was uneven and dangerous, deep soil and broken concrete leading down to a chaotic pit where the foundations of the new building were being poured. Drake noticed that the cranes were on the far side of the site and breathed a huge sigh of relief.
They stayed on the edge of the pit, running toward the point where the new building would attach to the old one. That was where the scaffolding was prevalent, reaching up at least eighteen stories, and the worker’s cabins were situated. Hayden led the way with Kinimaka and Kovalenko just behind.
Kenzie was bringing up the rear with Alicia. “They’re here,” she said. “We’re falling back and taking a few potshots to slow them down.”
Gunfire rang out. Drake looked back, saw the two women wound or kill three men before turning and sprinting to catch them up. A flurry of rain struck him in the face. He didn’t know how many enemies were back there, but it was at least fifteen. More could be arriving all the time. Whoever wanted rid of Luka Kovalenko was turning the tables on him, giving him a taste of what he enjoyed dealing out to others. Drake could handle any military situation, but he’d found that the ones involving the old and new Blood King had always been the hardest. The Russian tended to hit with overwhelming force, with surprise, and targeted those you loved.
“You all right, Drakey?” Alicia was by his side.
“I guess I’m wondering who the hell would do this in New York just to get one man. Could Kovalenko’s guess be right?”
“It’s not the attackers, it’s the man they’re attacking. They believe his death is worth it, I guess.”
Drake knew she was right. “Just pisses me off that there are so many corrupt people out there.”
Alicia nodded. “It only takes one bad onion to spoil the broth.”
By now, Hayden was approaching the northern end of the building site. Scaffolding rose like a steel maze before her. Cabins dotted the ground to the east, offering a welcome but temporary shield from their pursuers. She half-turned, seeing Kinimaka dragging Kovalenko along at speed under protest.
About 200 feet behind, men poured into the building site, pausing to drop to one knee or adopt a spread-leg stance and open fire.
Hayden ducked. Bullets flew over them, inaccurate at this distance. Some thudded into the soil. Kenzie turned and let loose a volley in return, scattering the men.
Hayden scuttled around the first large cabin. Its walls were dirty, its windows grimy. It was a work office with an open door and muddy steps leading inside. The second was identical. When she ran around the third, she confronted a sight that made her lose a breath.
No.
Running through a gap in the hoarding on the eastern side of the building site were more adversaries. At least twenty of them.
“Enemies ahead,” she said through the comms. “Twenty and counting.”
Her colleagues took stock, still running but slowing down. Nothing negative came from them, no shouts of, “Why can’t we catch a bloody break?” They used their energy, mental and physical, for pre-emptive judgment.
Dahl broke left. “Follow me.”
“That’s a brick wall, dickhead,” Drake said.
“Behold my awesomeness.” Dahl stopped before a rectangular mass of scaffolding and wrenched open a door.
“You gotta be kidding,” Alicia breathed. “You know I hate heights.”
“It’s this or face fifty or sixty guns to front and back,” Dahl said. “This elevator leads to the old building’s roof. From there, we can run north.”
“Shit.” Drake was regarding the makeshift steel, open elevator that ran up the side of the old building. Workers gained access to the new construction’s topmost heights using this industrial-sized unit. Dahl jumped in and grabbed a square control attached to a thick cable. The control had two buttons—up and down.
“Get in,” he said. “All of you.”
Without further hesitation, everyone crowded inside the rectangular shaft. Alicia put her back to the existing wall, close to Luther, Molokai and Mai. Hayden and Kinimaka had Kovalenko between them. Kenzie, Drake and Dahl were at the front, their guns thrust out between the metal bars that made up the elevator’s cage. Kenzie fired first, and the others took her cue.
Dahl pressed the up button.
The cage rumbled, jerked and grated loudly as it started upward. It was overweight. It was an old mechanism on a new site and probably in need of an overhaul. Drake saw rusted joints and bolts. It rose slowly, grinding and juddering all the way.
Alicia had her eyes closed. “Fuck the fucking fuck. I hate you, Torsten Dahl.”
Drake fired through the bars at the ground, adjusting all the time for a sharper angle. To be fair, their height gave them a far better overview of who was chasing them, and their number. Drake saw ten men to the right and thirty to the left. As the cage rose, more streets appeared, all slick with rain and crowded with people. Police lights flashed on three approaches to the building site, their lurid red lights made more vivid and striking by the rain.
Drake’s only purpose was to prevent them from being fired upon as they rode up the side of the building. They were exposed up here. To that end, most of his colleagues joined him in pinning their adversaries to the ground.
But they couldn’t stop them approaching the elevator, not completely.
The cage jangled and groaned past ten floors, just over halfway up its length. Drake saw many roofs and snaking roads now as they rose higher, but at this height New York was still little more than a mighty forest of concrete skyscrapers. The wind whipped at him up here. The cage rose higher.
“I have a nightmare,” Alicia said then across the comms. “In it, I’m rising pretty fast in a cage like this. It’s higher though. Much higher and faster. It takes a while. Then, when the cage reaches the top, it doesn’t stop. Just bursts out into the air and plummets down.”
Drake swallowed. Alicia’s fear of heights made her pretty somber.
In contrast, Cam replied in kind. “I used to think of the highest trees as my home. My home from home. When my parents fought, or the men with hammers came, or the locals tried to burn us out, I always hid in the highest tree with my sister. Safe. The distance between us and the ground was a comfort.”
Drake knew Alicia would be absorbing that. A bullet rattled their cage then, glancing off the steel holding it all together. A second one slammed into one of the welds forming the top of the cage, bending it. Drake scattered some return fire across the building site below.
“Almost there,” Dahl said. “Get ready to disembark.”
“You people are crazy,” Kovalenko said. “Always before, from afar, I wondered how you survived so long and now I know. It is because you have such a thin grasp on sanity.”
Drake was gobstruck and more than a little offended. “Coming from you that’s the worst insult I’ve ever suffered.”
He was genuinely offended. Kovalenko was pure, certifiable lunacy, just like his father before him. Drake fired downward in anger, striking two men out of a swarm running toward the base of the elevator cage.
“I don’t like the look of—”
His words were snatched from his mouth as the cage came to a sudden, lurching stop at the very top of the shaft. The termination was harder than he’d expected, sending a convulsion along the entire shaft to the foundations below. Drake held on to his gun and stumbled sideways into Kenzie.
Dahl wrenched at the exit gate on the other side of the shaft. It led directly to the old building’s roof, where several piles of material and a mass of spooled wire had been stored. The gate became stuck halfway.
“Steady. Don’t force it,” Luther said. “The runner got shot.”
Drake saw what he meant. The top steel guide within which the gate frame ran was bent. Luther produced a sturdy knife, reached up and straighte
ned it. Drake studied the ground below through a forest of scaffolding.
“Nobody’s moving.”
“What?” Mai asked. “What does that mean?”
“They know where we’re headed. Yet nobody’s trying to cut us off.”
Mai’s eyes widened. “Are they climbing the scaffolding toward us?”
Drake peered down, seeing nothing. “I don’t think—”
And then there was an explosion. A reverberating blast that shook the ground and made the scaffolding shake like trees in a hurricane. Bolts exploded like bullets. Steel distorted.
Drake felt the entire elevator shaft pull away from the building.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Drake clung to the steel struts before him as the entire cage edged out from the building it was attached to.
The explosion had weakened the entire structure. The horizon shifted to the left before his eyes, making his head spin. All of a sudden, everything that rooted him to the ground, eighteen-stories high, wavered.
“Oh, crap!” Alicia shouted, grasping the cage’s rear bars.
The cage door that led onto the old building’s roof was their only hope. Dust was pluming up the whole shaft now, smothering them in gray clouds. For one intense moment Dahl reached out through the door and grabbed hold of the edge of the old building, trying to keep the cage up close to it with brute strength alone.
Then, the Swede let go, shaking his head. “Can’t do it. Just jump.”
Alicia flew through the opening, landing boots first on the roof of the old building and spinning in place, hands out. Dahl and then Luther went next, leaping across the two-foot gap with ease. Molokai followed him. Together, Luther and Molokai withdrew ropes from their backpacks and looked for somewhere to anchor them.
Good idea, Drake thought.
But time was running out. The cage’s lean away from the building was having an exponential effect, speeding up with every second that passed. The entire team had moved away from the front side of the cage to keep all the weight at its back, but even that was barely helping.
Hayden leapt through the door onto the roof of the old building.
Next, Kinimaka was ready with Kovalenko at his side.
“We’re jumping together?” the Blood King muttered.
“I’m not putting you down for a second.”
Kinimaka took a breath and a single step and then leapt from the cage to the roof with Kovalenko held under one enormous arm. They came down hard on the concrete. Kinimaka fell to one knee. The Blood King’s forehead struck the roof a glancing blow.
Kinimaka held him up. “He’s fine.”
Drake took stock. It was down to Mai, Cam, Kenzie and himself. The cage had pulled at least six feet away from the edge of the roof. It was being held up by defiant struts, strong bolts and half-broken framework but it was fighting a losing battle. Drake could feel it shifting beneath him, a feeling that made his stomach do somersaults. The building site was distant below, but he knew once the cage really got momentum it would crash down eighteen stories in a matter of seconds.
Mai was at the door, but she didn’t jump through. She grabbed the end of a rope thrown by Luther and tied it to the cage. The rope grew taut as it stretched out to its fullest extent. The weight of the cage strained it but it held.
Dahl was on the edge of the building, arms out.
“Come on!”
Drake had every confidence in Dahl, but he wasn’t about to jump first. Neither was Mai. She glanced back, gesturing at Cam.
“You,” she said. “Go now.”
The young man moved to her side. Just then bullets rifled up through the bars of the cage, pinging from metal strut to metal strut. Drake whirled. Men below were taking potshots, wide grins on their faces. They knew exactly what they were doing and were enjoying themselves.
But they weren’t keeping track of Kovalenko.
The Blood King had been taken to the middle of the roof by Kinimaka. The two of them were alone, watching proceedings.
Drake ducked as more bullets pinged through the scaffolding. The rope holding the cage from collapsing extended and elongated, stretched to its limits. Scaffolding tubes collapsed in front and to the side of the cage, pulled out of place, tumbling end over end toward the ground or spearing straight down.
Cam stepped up to the door, evaluating the gap to the other building. Dahl waited with his arms and hands held out. Alicia was at his side.
Cam jumped.
At that moment, the rope snapped.
The cage jerked away from the side of the building, its gap suddenly eight feet and widening to ten. Cam fell short. Arms out, he grasped for Dahl’s outstretched hand, brushed the fingers agonizingly close, but failed to catch hold.
Alicia screamed as Cam plummeted.
Drake’s fingers were like vices clutching the cage’s outer frame as it fell, but it was all reflex. He knew it couldn’t save him. He was on his knees, staring outward. He saw Cam fall, saw how distressingly close he came to safety, and then the way he plunged.
Cam hit scaffolding one story down. His chest struck hard, temporarily arresting his fall. His arms wrapped around the metal tubes. For one shocking moment, he hung there.
“Hang on!” Alicia screamed.
Cam responded by clinging to the tubes. His head hung down, his legs too. All that kept him from falling was his own balance and grip. Drake would have loved to help, but he had issues of his own.
They were falling now, coming away from the wall at an angle. The entire cage was swinging away from the building and out into the air. Still, its momentum was slowed by the strong frame that still tried gamely to support it.
“No choice,” Kenzie said. “We have to jump.”
She ran three steps across the cage and then leapt through the open door into the air. Her body hit a jumble of scaffolding, her chest slamming into the tubes. Drake found he was holding his breath, biting his lower lip until the blood flowed even as the cage edged further and further away from the building.
Kenzie caught a tube and clung on. She dangled with her legs kicking almost eighteen-stories high with a forest of scaffolding below her, then pulled herself up onto the cross tube. For now, she was safe.
Drake looked at Mai. There was no time. The cage was falling faster. Their only hope was to run and jump and hope that they could find some kind of purchase. They set off together, sprinting the length of the cage and then leaping out into thin air. Drake looked for something to grab hold of. The issue wasn’t finding something, it was finding the right thing. It was grabbing hold of that thin, slippery metal tube and hanging on. His body fell. Air blasted his face. He was still flying outward under his own momentum, but gravity was already pulling him down.
A scaffold tube appeared below, coming up fast. Drake followed Cam’s example, striking it with his chest first, knowing he could grab hold at this speed.
The tube broke under his weight, tumbling away.
But it had slowed him a little. Drake was starting to lose control, to freefall. But there was one last moment of clarity in him. The tube below came up fast but not as fast as the one above it. Drake reached out and locked his fingers around its cold, cylindrical shape.
It held. Drake grasped it even tighter.
His first thought was for Mai. The Japanese woman stood easily, above and to the right, balancing on a horizontal tube and holding onto a vertical one. She was safe. Cam was climbing slowly, almost at Drake’s level.
Behind them the cage still swung out from the building. Its movement dislodged entire rows of scaffold tubes, but luckily not the group Drake and his two teammates were holding on to. There was a deep groaning, cracking sound as metal snapped and distorted. The cage fell faster and faster, plummeting through the air and crashing forcefully into the ground, shattering on impact. Men below were hit by the shards of its dying, knocked over or speared through.
It was an ironic moment.
Drake concentrated on the here and now. He
used the scaffold tube like a monkey bar, shifting over to an upright before standing on top of it. He was careful to keep well-balanced. The tubes were slick, greasy with rain. Drake wrapped his legs around the vertical cylinder and climbed up to the next and then the next, using each horizontal bar to support his weight and help give him purchase.
When he came to the top, he was forced to swing across to the top of the building where Dahl, Alicia and the others waited. It was a hard, deadly climb. His fingers ached, their joints screaming in pain. His muscles burned. Mai made it first, leaping the last few feet after using the highest scaffold tube like a tightrope to walk across. Cam made it in second place, apparently used to climbing. Drake wasn’t the least bit fazed to come in last.
He was incredibly happy to have made it at all.
“Well done, mate.” Dahl grabbed him in a tight bear hug before even Alicia got a chance.
“Just remember,” Drake breathed. “We just used our entire quota of luck for this mission. I wouldn’t hope for any more.”
Luther was studying the ground below, checking on the progress and status of their enemies.
“Strange you should say that,” he muttered. “Because we’ve got big trouble coming.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
On the roof of the old building, eighteen-stories high, Matt Drake and the rest of the Strike Force team made sure the Blood King was secure, and reviewed their situation.
The mission was twenty blocks in three hours. Drake reckoned they’d covered three, maybe four in an hour or so, which put them around 36th Street. All kinds of criminals were trying to kill them from every angle: Kovalenko’s men looking to rescue him; the old Russians looking to kill him. They couldn’t trust the cops. In fact, where the Blood King, and now these other Russians were concerned, they couldn’t trust anyone.
Drake studied the ground eighteen stories down.
“Still twenty or so down there with even more arriving. Shit, I think they called the whole eastern seaboard out to kill us.”
The Blood King Takedown Page 9