by A D Davies
Charlie said, “Agreed.”
“Sounds good,” Tane said.
“Okay, we got it,” Dan said. “Let’s go to work.”
Chapter Forty
Even more than when they first discovered the staging area, the stark contrast between the space’s pristine surfaces and the filth and squalor endured by the prisoners struck Jules as obscene. It was pure and light, although its purpose was, arguably, worse. Only now he was viewing it from a new angle—from behind the chain-link fence he’d seen through the lab’s door, a seven-foot barrier connected to a portable generator with a barbed overhang angled to make scaling it more difficult—if they weren’t electrocuted first.
Jules kept his surgical mask on, his hood up, and his hands in his pockets, merging with the prisoners at the rear. All of them slouched, streaked with dirt, and draped in the hooded rags endemic in the gulag. Their eyes were wide, almost hopeful as the activity ahead of them commenced.
Making his way through the crowd for a better look, Jules pushed the thought of what might be happening back in the lab to the deepest recesses of his mind. They’d all understood the risk: that capture meant death. The mission before him was too important. It ached to think that way, all but stabbing through his abdomen, but he’d expect the same of them were the circumstances reversed.
Concentrate.
The mission was in front of him, not behind.
The smooth, half-egg-shaped workspace looked like a stage, set on the same level as the odd zombie-like audience. It was lit and busy with a mixture of soldiers and scientists, but the circle of trust appeared small: Executive Ryom was the guy in charge, watching all with his arms folded. Accompanying him, Pang Pyong-Ho acted as either a bodyguard or personal assistant while two men in lab coats tended to the human-shaped chamber, checking plugs and power levels, another two monitored the blackened sphere that would activate the shield, and four guards with those cattle prod devices but no guns stood by, plainly awaiting orders.
All this, watched from ground level by the stunned, bedraggled mass, and from the balcony above by a black-clad private security officer, manning the railgun Jules spotted through the small window earlier, a weapon of war taken from a helicopter gunship or similar vehicle. It was riveted to the balcony floor, too heavy, too powerful for a man to wield it like a typical machine gun.
The other big addition to the room since Jules and the others passed through earlier was a coffin-shaped metal box on wheels. Twice as long as Jules was tall and about four times as wide, it didn’t take a genius to work out that it contained Gilim.
The hinged lid opened, revealing the giant himself. The audience managed a gasp, but even that sounded tired, as if performing a physical feat. Solid clasps pinned Gilim down—two on each arm, two on each leg, one across his stomach, and another at his neck. He was awake. Groggy, but conscious.
The men around the workspace spoke in Korean so their words went largely over Jules’s head, although his sponge of a brain had absorbed some of the language during the past few days, so he picked up, “Careful,” and, “No mistakes,” and something along the lines of a threat that ended with, “Dying.” The final bit could have been, “all will die.”
Jules tapped his ear, and—at the back, out of earshot—said, “Anyone copy? It’s now or never.”
No one replied. The comms still couldn’t penetrate.
Damn.
More orders flew. The soldiers with the charged sticks formed a barrier between Gilim and the Executive. Ryom pointed and shouted something. One guard thrust the prod at Gilim’s stomach and hit the trigger. The prongs crackled and Gilim tried to buck, yet only strained against his bindings and howled in pain.
The first man backed off. Ryom barked another order. A second man moved forward with the electrocution implement. Gilim tried to cower, to pull away, but he was stuck fast. The Executive murmured something, and the approaching guard did not stab Gilim.
They’d shown him what they could do, how they could hurt him.
Ryom nodded sharply to one technician in a lab coat—scientists or engineers, it was hard to tell. The tech typed a command on an e-tablet and pecked a “go” key. One of Gilim’s wrist clasps disengaged.
The giant lifted his hand, bending his arm at the elbow. He snarled, but as soon as a set of prongs crackled with blue sparks, he lowered the hand and relaxed his face.
The second part of his arm binding gave way. Gilim did nothing. then the other arm came free. He flexed.
The guy manning the railgun steadied himself, adjusting his aim.
When Gilim untensed, they released one leg, then the other, leaving only the metal loop over his stomach and one at his neck.
Jules kept his head down, but he was sweating. He let the gloves slip from his hands and fall to the floor, needing his fists ready, tactile. He didn’t think anyone would spot his skin color under the circumstances. Their eyes remained glued to the stage show.
Would they turn him in anyway?
They all looked so emaciated, so tired. Yet also fascinated. This was the accumulation of their backbreaking labor, why they’d suffered so much, why they’d lost friends and loved ones along the way. This… was the torture of an innocent creature presented as a spectator sport.
And they hit Gilim again. He cried out, arching his back, his arms splayed aside so the man who’d shocked him had to duck.
Shame he didn’t take your head off.
Jules had never been so close to killing. Perhaps his philosophy was as flawed as Dan said. What purpose did allowing someone like Executive Ryom live on serve?
A clear conscience for Jules, sure. But what else?
This was a man willing to kill dozens in acquiring their target and in the name of paranoia and racial superiority. Only his achievement mattered to him. Only Korean lives mattered to Ah Dae-Sung and Pang Pyong-Ho.
How could Jules justify letting these men live? Perhaps a muddy conscience was a price worth paying.
He shouldered through the small audience. The barrier’s electrification made climbing over all but impossible, and although it was only seven feet high, the barbed overhang made a leap akin to a high jumper beyond Jules’s athletic ability.
The tech released the final bindings.
At Gilim’s slow but deliberate movement, pushing up onto one elbow with narrowed eyes and a low brow, it was clear the giant was taking in his surroundings. Planning, thinking about what to do. A sentient creature, capable of thought and logic, of knowing what was going on around him.
A rod crackled, then the other three did too. Gilim pressed himself backwards.
He was a gentle beast, for sure. Other than spats between themselves, these giants had never experienced true violence before the incursion. It took Jules’s direct threat to Nan to force them to act, to revert to a massive show of force.
Gilim would have no capacity to plan a fight.
It was up to Jules to show him the way. But if he unlocked Gilim’s primal, survive-at-all-costs urge, it’d be difficult to wedge that cork back in the bottle—as Nan, Wade, and Noroth had shown. If it was the only way to prevent a catastrophe, Jules was duty bound to enact it.
One of the techs gestured for Gilim to sit upright, his arm horizontal then bending his elbow to a right angle. Nothing happened. The tech referred to his tablet and then the subject. He repeated the movement, slower this time.
Gilim’s head eased around, his gaze shifting from the guy trying to communicate with him to those with the painful weapons, lingering on Executive Ryom, before ending back on the man in the lab coat. The man seemed to smile, although it was difficult to see from behind the chain-link fence.
Gilim pressed his knuckles into the bed on which he was lying and pushed himself into the requested position, gradually and cautiously, like a partygoer with a stinking hangover trying to limit the nausea of their overindulgence.
More sign language, and Gilim eventually stood, towering over his captors. With every command tra
nslated from the computer tablet, he glanced at Ryom with undisguised hatred. The intelligence behind Gilim’s brutish exterior shone through, pinpointing the man giving the orders, the human being responsible for his pain and confusion, for ripping him from his home and family and pressing him into servitude here. In this strange place.
Jules had weaved his path. With the dazed inmates paying him little mind, he assessed his options beside the noisy generator.
A generator.
In a hydroelectric dam?
They’d seen these dotted around, powering the wan spotlights outside, the alarm system, and now the lights in here and the fence keeping this rapt audience at bay.
They were concerned this activity would blow the transformers, taking out the main grid and unleashing the masses on the few. Here, they’d been shepherded in, presumably so they could spread the word about the authorities’ ultimate power, but they must pose a danger. If this fence were not an obstacle, would they chance exposing the scientists and the Executive to such unwilling yet subdued prisoners?
They guided Gilim toward the sarcophagus-shaped compartment, upright and open. Its dimensions appeared a touch small to Jules’s eyes, and judging distance, speed, and the size of objects were all factors his brain chewed up and spat out with the ease of 2+2. A rare gift that had served him well.
Sure enough, once they got the message to Gilim, the giant needed to duck to get inside. He resisted, though. This was nothing he’d encountered before, not consciously, and bending into a place like this visibly frightened him. A jab from an electrical prod forced him to jerk and arch his back. No howl this time. Just a grunt and a glare Ryom’s way.
The soldier manning the railgun up top had tailed Gilim throughout, keeping him in sight, ready to unleash the 90mm rounds should he threaten to escape.
Then, compliance.
Jules had no more time. No one was coming to join him. No power outage, no last-minute explosion to distract security. His friends had been caught, and Ah Dae-Sung was probably prepping to execute them. Once they were clear of the lab. Perhaps Sally was resisting again, demanding no harm come to them.
He could only hope. But hoping did no good right now.
In the dark corner, where the exhausted men and women hid him from the guards at the rear, Jules lowered himself to the ground, removed the hooded fleece, and slipped his equipment from the compact pack: a snub-nosed Glock 17, one of his batons with the grappling hook and bungee cord, two multi-tools of differing sizes, and a full-strength flashbang grenade. He was kitted out like a SWAT commando, missing only a submachine gun, which they couldn’t risk fitting onto him for the HALO jump. Sergeant Massey back home would get a kick out of this.
Jules thumbed his belt. He’d insisted on his usual array of throwing knives and mini flashbangs, too. Although the knives inflicted dreadful wounds, they were never fatal. Better someone walked with a limp or suffered an aching shoulder each winter than ending up six feet under. To date, he’d been successful in never needing to kill, with only one unintentional blip on his ledger.
Would today change this?
Gilim backed into the enclosure. Jules closed his eyes, hating every moment that he hesitated. If he’d launched into action sooner, he could have spared Gilim what he expected was to come, but if he didn’t wait, he predicted a far worse outcome. No straightforward answers here.
The door closed over Gilim. From one sealed box to another. Except this box had a translucent door of something crystal-like, the enormous man inside touching the interior, hunched over at the top. It sealed with a clunk.
And that was Jules’s cue.
He ran up onto the generator and, having fed out the right amount of bungee cord, threw the grappling hook over the balcony railing. He dropped to the floor, the elastic stretching taut, which snapped back and whipped Jules high into the air. He tucked into a ball and flipped over the fence, throwing the larger flashbang grenade toward the men ringing the giants’ chamber as he snagged a handhold on the upper tier.
The flashbang went off below, a massive crack assaulting Jules’s ears even this far away. Plenty to disorient the people surrounding the chamber and the black, dangerous orb within the power coupling.
In a smooth swing, Jules lifted himself over the balustrade and drew his sidearm.
Also a safe distance from the worst of the effects, the gunman with the huge caliber weapon was already heaving it toward Jules. Too slowly, though.
Before the first bullet could fire, Jules blasted his Glock twice—one slug through each shoulder. As soon as the gunman jerked aside, seeking non-existent cover, and pressing his palms over the wounds, Jules fired twice more. The man’s hands spat blood, terror contouring his face.
Then Jules’s mind turned. It wasn’t so much that time slowed down for him, but the decisions came fast. Like he couldn’t forget the techniques of shooting, throwing knives, or generating the most power from a side-kick, nor could he prevent logic and pragmatism from guiding his decisions. Before his fourth bullet shattered the man’s second hand, Jules had already assessed the angles necessary for two more shots. After immobilizing the gunner’s hands, he loosed off two more, taking him in the meat of his thighs.
While Dan would have planted one in the man’s head, Jules opted for years of physiotherapy. If the guy survived what was to come. Which was debatable.
Jules retrieved his baton, leaped over the railing, and descended to the staging area, where the men were scrambling to recover from the ringing in their heads—the four technicians, the four guards, and Executive Ryom were all goggle-eyed and holding their skulls together. Only Pang Pyong-Ho was on the verge of picking himself up fully, shielding his boss and diving behind the metal coffin in a stuttering motion. Gilim growled and pounded from inside the compartment, protected from much of the blast, but must have been hit by the light flash.
Meanwhile, the audience had cowered but not fled. All curled up on the floor, a Pavlovian response to gunfire and violence, some only now daring to peek out from their tangled limbs. They must have thought they were being mowed down by some attack.
What the hell had the authorities here put them through?
Jules touched down with a cushioned landing and charged. Gun up. He fired into the men who’d prodded and shocked Gilim. He targeted the most painful zones—the knees, hip bones, the feet, and hands. Blood flew, bodies fell, unable to fight, and the gun’s slide snapped open when it was empty.
He didn’t slow down. Two scientists, Ryom Jung-Hwan, and Pang Pyong-Ho remained unharmed. Jules tossed the mini-flashbangs—only a tenth as powerful as the real deal, but plenty to confuse and scare an enemy.
They popped as planned, and Jules palmed two throwing knives before dispatching the pair of techs who’d hurried away from his attack, lunging for the control panel beneath the spinning sphere. He flung the blades into their backs, embedding in the muscle between shoulder blades—again, painful without penetrating essential organs. As he ran by, angling for Pyong-Ho and his master, Jules fired his heel into the knee of the guy closest to the controls. The joint snapped, preventing him from completing whatever task he was attempting.
Then the air blew out of Jules. He slammed against the cradle holding the orb and the black surface rippled with color. Not that Jules had time to appreciate it. He rolled instinctively aside as another ferocious kick came in.
Pyong-Ho had switched from defense to attack. No firearms, no blade, just him.
Jules ducked and swept at the incoming opponent but missed, still not at full capacity after being winded. He sucked air into his lungs, fast and sharp, jumping onto the console and pushing off to summit the chamber in which Gilim was imprisoned. He slid down the opposite side, evading Pyong-Ho’s grabbing hand, and sprang up onto the coffin where Gilim had slept. It gave him time to drop to the other side and force his lungs to work properly again.
Pyong-Ho moseyed around the side to face him. Yeah—moseyed was what he did. And then he stood there like
a gunslinger prepping for a quick-draw duel. Only neither of them were armed.
Okay, Jules had kept three throwing blades and one mini-flashbang. But the cruelty he’d witnessed, the glee with which they wielded power and held it over the subjugated masses of the Dragon’s Pit, overrode the factors that gave him a bigger advantage in this fight.
Perhaps those Hollywood tough guys were onto something after all.
Pyong-Ho opened with a dummy kick and two feints with his fist, then followed up with the real deal of a snap kick to the knee. Jules skipped over it and thrust an open hand at the dummied punch. He turned his own bodyweight backwards, then used the raised arm as a lever along with the kick’s momentum to toss Pyong-Ho over his hip, releasing him as he fell a good four feet away.
But he was up in half a breath. A snort and a tense pump of the fists said he wouldn’t fall for that again.
And so it was. The thrusts and parries came fast, and Jules couldn’t block them all, resorting to a retreat tactic to evade an almighty upper cut. He landed on Gilim’s compartment and sprang back with a close-in kick to Pyong-Ho’s groin—a move the muscle-head was ready for.
He secured Jules in a bear hug and slammed his forehead down repeatedly. Jules’s brow flared, his nose numbed without breaking. His brain clanged around. All he could do was slip a knife out of his belt and jam it into Pyong-Ho’s tricep. It didn’t disable him, but the damaged muscle was weaker. Jules shifted position, lowering his shoulder, then jabbed the wound with stiff fingers.
He refused to feel bad about “cheating” as the monster of a man released him.
Just enough time to breathe. To check his situation and the surrounding threats. The men he’d taken out were still poleaxed; the black orb vibrated harder; Gilim hammered on his box, desperate to escape, his fear an angry bloodlust as drool fell from his lips; more guards had arrived behind the fence, corralling the audience, trying to get them to leave, but most were watching proceedings, back on their feet, more of a spark to their eyes than Jules had seen since they landed. Executive Ryom was nowhere to be seen…