They tumbled end over end, until one fell in the sea and the other plunged, tip first, deep into the sand of the beach, where it stood like a modern addition to the surrounding ruins.
“Ohooiet!” Peter said in Russian, standing beside Knight.
“You still there, Rook?” Knight said into his microphone. “Rook?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m still here. I’m on the friggin’ shoulder now. This mega-pecker missed me by inches.” Rook’s voice came through Knight’s earpiece with a lot of static.
Knight heard gunfire then and ducked his head down. Peter crouched down next to him behind the rough, pitted stone.
A few of the structures at the baths, mostly those further from the sea, were still intact, forming nearly complete rooms and doorways, and in a few cases, a second story. But after the Colossus’s rampage, very few structures were left higher than six feet. The few remaining Doric columns had been knocked over, and walls that had stood for hundreds of years had been shattered into little more than stone and pebbles.
But there were still enough walls and rocks to hide behind, and plenty of opportunities for cat-and-mouse games, if the enemy was willing to fall for them. He had spotted some of the mercenaries jockeying for position at the far end of the ruins, and knew the others might be caught unawares.
“Queen, you’ve got hostiles slipping into the complex. Get out of there and rendezvous back with me. We need to move to more level ground.”
“I hear you. We’re on our way,” Queen said. Bishop responded similarly.
“I’d love to make it,” Rook said, “but I think that would end a little messy for me.”
“Understood, Rook,” Knight heard Queen say. “We’ll get you down as soon as we can.”
“Team: this is Deep Blue. I’ve got no satellite coverage for another twenty minutes, so I can’t advise on position, but based on what I’m seeing in older satellite maps, getting out of the ruins is probably a good idea. I’ve got reinforcements coming your way. ETA, thirty minutes. Best I can do.”
Then gunfire erupted all over the ruins. The newly arrived mercenaries had tired of waiting. Queen and Lynn came rushing back to Knight’s position from the north. They slid to a stop behind his low wall, ducking for cover, as the top of the wall pinged with shots, blowing dust over Knight and Peter.
“Nice of you to join us,” Knight said. “Lovely day for a stroll.”
“Fuckers are starting to really piss me off. This whole op is a steaming pile of shit. No recon, no idea of how many we’re up against and…” Queen’s volume dropped off. Knight understood she was about to say that they had lost King, but had stopped herself because Peter and Lynn were present.
Just then, Asya came bounding over the wall, landed a full yard beyond the four clustered people, and rolling gracelessly in the sand. Knight almost fired his pistol at her, thinking she was a threat. Bullets riddled the top of the wall, just a fraction of a second after Asya came hurtling over it. He wondered if she had been hit.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’ll be sore tomorrow. Worse if we get killed. I think we are about to be seriously outnumbered.”
“I’m pinned down,” Bishop’s voice came through the earpiece. “Move out and I’ll join you by going straight to the trees from here. Where are we meeting up?”
Queen spoke up. With King KIA, she was the field team leader. “After the trees, head north. The mercs will cut over from the ruins and try to push us south. That’s just where we want them. If we head too far west, we’ll be back at the mosque and endangering thousands of morning worshippers. The sea is to the east. South is residential neighborhoods. To the north is the Presidential palace — and I can’t believe they haven’t sent out troops yet. But they will soon. Assuming the locals aren’t in Ridley’s pocket, then I want the Presidential guard on the far side of our tangos, putting them in a crossfire.”
“Sounds like a plan, Boss,” Bishop said. “I’m on the move.”
The fact that Bishop had called her ‘Boss’ wasn’t lost on Knight. He knew that Bishop had used that nickname for King sometimes. It meant that Bishop had accepted King’s demise, and already in his head, Queen was King’s permanent replacement as the head of the team. Knight didn’t think he could process King’s loss that fast.
More bullets ripped into the sandy soil to the side of their position.
“We need to move,” Queen said. “Peter. Lynn. Get him up.”
Asya came around to the south side of the group and Queen stayed on the north side. Peter and Lynn slipped their arms around Knight and helped him to a crouch. He took in a deep gasping breath as his crushed rips stabbed into his innards.
“Go,” Queen said.
The five of them made a mad dash for the tree line, with bullets blasting past on both sides and ahead into the trees.
Knight looked back, and once more he caught a glimpse of the brilliant turquoise sea. He wanted nothing more than for his ribs to stop hurting and to be able to take a swim in that water.
Maybe, if we get out of this alive, I’ll take Beck to an island somewhere. Maybe the Maldives.
He and Anna Beck, a support member of Deep Blue’s Endgame organization, had been seeing each other for over a year now. When their relationship began, he’d thought it might not last long, but it had. Now, with bullets flying all around, and him feeling like he might die at any moment, his thoughts turned to her, and he realized how much he missed her.
Peter stumbled on a rock, and suddenly Knight fell toward the ground, with Lynn on top of him. When they hit, the impact from both the ground and Peter on one side of his ribs, and Lynn’s full weight on the other side, made Knight shout out in pain.
“Oh God, sorry, sorry,” Peter said, and he and Lynn both scrambled to disentangle their limbs from his, while Knight’s whole world contracted into a tight ball of pain. His vision went white, and he could hear a loud noise in his ears, but he couldn’t process it. His whole body was shaking with giant thumps.
As the pain subsided, he realized what was happening.
The Colossus was on the move again.
FIFTY-NINE
Edge of the Antonine Baths, Carthage
Queen thought they were done. The gigantic statue had resumed its rampage. They were taking fire from multiple locations. Knight was in no shape to move, let alone walk. Bishop was on his own, and Peter and Lynn had just dropped Knight in a heap on the ground.
Bullets ripped into the sand nearby as the ground rumbled from the Colossus’s thundering footfalls. Queen dropped to one knee and fired back into the ruins until her finger squeezed the trigger and nothing happened. She was out of ammunition. She looked to Lynn again, who had recovered and was helping Knight up.
“Any more mags?” Queen asked.
Lynn shook her head. Peter looked down.
Queen turned to Knight. “What do you have?”
“Just a few shots left.”
Queen dropped her MP-5 and pulled out her Browning handgun. She held her fire, waiting to have a clear shot at one of the black-clad mercenaries darting in and out of the remaining ruins. Then she looked up to see the statue moving her way, across the crumbling walls. It looked like it might step on some of the mercs, too, but there would be no avoiding it once it arrived.
At the edge of the grass, where they had stopped because of Knight’s fall, Queen saw a metal sign fixed to a post. Across the top was a maroon strip reading ‘Danger’ in English and Arabic. Under that was a somehow comical silhouette icon showing a man either about to walk off the end of a crenellated castle’s tower or about to break out into Cossack-style dancing. The end of the tower was crumbling and dropping stones to the ground. The sign had warning in Arabic, French and English to not walk on the ruins. Just then, the Colossus took a sweeping step and its massive foot landed on top of one of the remaining structures in the ruins. The impact sent stone flying in all directions, and a cloud of dust rose up where the structure had stood.
�
�We’re gonna take as many of these bastards with us as possible,” Queen said. She spotted a man darting for cover and fired a shot. It was well beyond the practical range of her weapon, but she clipped the guy on the shoulder and he went down in a tumble. Peter and Lynn got Knight moving again toward the relative safety of the trees. Asya fired twice more as they ran. Queen held back on her shots, making them last.
When they reached the trees. Queen took up position behind a huge palm and extended her pistol back toward the ruins. She waited patiently, breathing in slow shallow breaths. Soon she saw just what she wanted. Another fool in black, standing out against the sand colored stone. She loosed three shots from her pistol until the man’s body jerked and shuddered, then fell. Two more men popped up in the doorway of a barely standing structure. Most of the left of the wall had crumbled, and only a foot of the right edge of the wall remained. Queen emptied her weapon, but missed the last two men, who returned fire with their AK-47s. She pulled her arm back with the empty 9mm just as the side of her tree splintered outward from heavy fire.
She holstered the handgun and looked down at the ground. Okay, she thought. Now we do things my way. She pulled out an SOG Creed knife from its sheath on her armored leg. The knife was her new favorite. At nearly thirteen inches in length, it was still useful for field operations, but the broad head gave the thing more of a machete look than a typical Special Forces knife. Marketed as the perfect tool for cutting and chopping wood, she knew its true purpose was to increase the length of the cutting edge, for opening up your enemy.
She planned to open anyone stupid enough to get too close.
“Bish, you out of the shit yet? I’m about to start cutting over here,” she keyed the mic, while keeping her eye on the fast approaching Colossus.
“Changed my mind. I went for the beach instead. About to lay the hurt on Ridley’s position with the last of my mags. Should slow up the golem.”
“Okay,” she said. “ Do it. We’re moving north.”
Queen heard gunfire across the ruins and suddenly the Colossus stopped moving. She saw muzzle-flare up on the thing’s shoulder, and knew Rook had joined the fray again.
She raced through the park’s clustered trees, staying off the few paths leading to the other sites of Carthage’s ruins and quickly caught up with the others. Knight was taking more of his own weight now, running with Peter and Lynn, despite his extensive injuries. She guessed the drugs were kicking in now. It wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t find some weapons though. They were pretty much out of bullets.
They burst out into a clearing, and she saw they were too late.
Peter, Lynn and Knight stopped running. Asya started to dart to the left back into the trees before she saw it was useless. Across the clearing, at least forty men stood waiting for them with rifles raised. Queen stopped and swore. Lynn glanced back at Queen, then lowered her weapon to the ground. Peter and Knight dropped theirs as well. Asya looked unsure of what to do.
Queen clutched the grip of her knife tightly, feeling the grooves in the metal grip under her fingertips. She toyed with the idea of rushing the men and slicing up a few of them before they riddled her with bullets. She figured she could get three of them for sure. A fourth or fifth, if luck was with her.
“Put it down lady,” one of them men said in a heavy French accent.
That made her grip the knife tighter. She took a step forward with the knife clutched in her hand. The mercenary raised his AK and seated the stock into his shoulder, pointing it directly at her. It wasn’t the most accurate weapon in the world, favored more for its availability and cheapness, but Queen had no doubt the man could hit her from where he stood.
A warm wind blew through the space, raising a swirling cloud of dust and fine sand, shifting the blond hair hanging over her forehead and revealing the bright red brand of a skull encased by a star.
The merc blinked in surprise.
Queen took another defiant step.
The man’s finger twitched.
And then, a man screamed. Then another.
In the snap of a finger, pandemonium erupted through the mercenaries’ ranks. Dozens of dark bodies in flowing gray cloaks ripped into the clearing, leaping and running. The mercs opened fire at the creatures, but there were too many of them. The mercenaries were overrun, killed or bled dry by the fast-moving Forgotten who struck with surgical precision and timing.
Queen watched stunned, as the wraithlike Forgotten, Alexander Diotrephes’s strange creatures, mauled and destroyed the black-clad soldiers. She had never seen them in the sunlight, and she believed they couldn’t bear it — much like the legends around vampires. But the creatures attacked the mercenaries without flinching from the light, or from the bullets, and before she could even comprehend what had happened, they raced deeper into the ruins, hunting out and attacking more of the soldiers. She heard gurgling screams and random gunfire from the walled ruins.
She turned to see Asya and the others looking just as shocked as she was. The clearing in front of them was now littered with bodies — mostly mercenaries but a few Forgotten, as well. And to Queen’s delight, there were more assault rifles than she knew what to do with. She ran over and picked up an AK-47 from the hands of a now headless mercenary. Then she looted the corpses for more of the distinctive curved magazines. She tossed a few to Asya, who expertly loaded a rifle and passed it to her mother before taking up another.
“That might have been the strangest fucking thing I’ve seen all day,” Knight said. “And it’s been a strange day.”
Queen heard more thunderous footfalls and looked up to see the Colossus shimmying and shaking, swatting at itself like a human being assaulted by black flies. But there was nothing there. Nothing she could see, anyway. But she knew Rook was still there. Only he could irritate a 300-foot tall golem that much.
“Day ain’t over yet,” Queen said.
SIXTY
On the Colossus, Carthage
Rook clung to a crack at the back of the creature’s neck. He’d moved down from the head to the shoulder when Ridley had figured out he had hitched a ride. That climb wasn’t easy, moving down the side of the head, but the folds of the ear had made decent handholds.
After he had fired down on Ridley’s position one last time, using up the remaining rounds in his submachine gun, the bastard had figured out he’d moved. The giant statue shook and shifted about in unexpected ways — trying to throw him. The shoulder offered little cover, but he couldn’t climb back up to the safety of the ear with the damn thing doing a dubstep dance under him. As he reached out for another crease at the back of the neck, where the cape began, a huge hand came up to swat at the shoulder. The collision missed, but sent up a cloud of dust and stone. It struck a second time, the crashing blow booming like a truck accident.
Rook scrabbled behind the head, hanging from his fingers.
Then the statue lunged forward. Rook’s body flew upward. He jammed one fist deeper into the crack between the neck and the bunched cape just in time. His weight yanked hard on the jammed arm, and he felt the skin on the back of his hand grinding off against a sheet of barnacles. Then the Colossus lifted its body up, slamming Rook against the cape.
As pain pulsed through his body, Rook considered sliding down the cape again, but knew there would be nothing to arrest his fall as he got closer to the bottom. He’d simply drop the 250 feet to the ground and splatter. Then he saw the huge arm raise up again, aiming for its head. Under the arm, he spotted notches on the side of the body, where the metal plates came together at a seam. He knew what they were instantly — a ladder for the creators and maintenance people to climb the statue. He remembered images he’d seen — most based on conjecture and the scantest of written descriptions — almost universally showed the Colossus with one arm raised, like the Statue of Liberty. This arm. The right one.
Rook moved to the edge of the cape and let go of the large crack at the neck. If the statue made any violent movements now, he’d be flung a
way. He pressed his arms on either side of the cape’s ‘fabric’—broad metal plates, long since corroded to a sickly green color. He wrapped his legs around the edge and was pleased to find that the rough impact foam that bulged from places in the leg armor improved his grip.
The massive arm swept up again. Rook reached out, not looking down at the precipitous fall. His fingers grazed the little chiseled-in nook in the armpit, just missing it. He swung his arm back and then reached out again, committing to the act. He’d either catch the handhold or fall to his death. His fingers slipped inside the notched ladder rung, fitting perfectly. There was grit inside, and what felt like a smooth sea shell, but hanging hundreds of feet off the ground, he was just glad for a handhold. He let go of the cape with his legs and swung out over the open space beneath the Colossus’s armpit. He shoved his free hand inside a second notch and found it empty and solid.
Now if I can just climb down two hundred feet before this bucking bronco throws me.
He started to descend and soon found that not all the nooks were created equal. For one thing, they were hand carved, so their shapes and sizes were not even. But more troubling was that some were filled to bursting with shells and other marine debris. He was able to scoop out some of the muck with his fingertips on the first two notches he found clogged, but the third one was hardened to the consistency of cement. He could skip a ‘rung’ of the ladder, but if he ran into two or three in a row that were clogged, he’d be in trouble.
The Colossus had stopped pursuing him, probably because he was now hidden from Ridley’s sight. The giant was now moving forward carefully, crushing any structure that remained standing — giving his team no place to hide. Ridley was coordinating the mercs on the ground.
Rook looked up again. The most precarious thing in his current position, besides being hundreds of feet in the air, was the swinging right arm. If the damn thing brushed the statue’s ribs, he’d be ground into paste.
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