The attackers spilled into the corridor, breaking from cover and coming at Alpha team like rabid dogs. A couple went down in a wall of lead, bullet holes riddling their bodies. But more stayed on their feet.
Meredith swung her rifle at one man barreling toward her. The soldier ducked under her aim and tried to fire. Within striking distance, Meredith reacted by instinct, slamming her rifle down onto his. What had once been a gunfight devolved into close, bloody combat. Fists and elbows flew. Meredith registered each hit with a kind of detached interest: pain in her ribs, a blow to her leg almost knocking her over.
The man she was fighting looked young, perhaps only half her age. But she would be damned if she let the arrogant bastard think his youthful strength was an advantage. She came down hard on him with an elbow to his Adam’s apple then swept his legs out from under him. The man thrashed on his back as she held him down, still flailing and pummeling. Daring to lift a hand off him, she retrieved her knife and planted it in his throat.
Her attacker no longer moved.
Other scenes of struggle played out along the corridor as Miguel was backed into a corner, lashing out with the concealed blade in his prosthetic. Spencer and Glenn did their best to batter the men coming after them. But as Meredith blinked past the blood dripping into her eyes, she saw more soldiers spill into the corridor. The rest of the attackers had arrived.
She scrambled to recover her rifle. Everything seemed to happen in milliseconds as she leveled the weapon, ready to die firing as a storm of bullets tore into her. At least she could stop some of them here. Maybe it would let Glenn and Miguel and Spencer survive to push the bastards back out.
Then a miraculous thing happened. One of the men paused and pointed his rifle back into the cargo hold. There was a moment of confusion as she wondered what he was aiming at.
That question was quickly answered by a flurry of gunfire. The man who had paused dropped to the ground, bleeding out from wounds to his neck and thigh. The others slumped forward under deliberate, careful shots.
More figures strode into the corridor. This time Meredith grinned. “Goddammit, Andris. Next time, give a girl a little more warning.”
“I did not want to give anything away,” he replied. “The element of surprise was needed.”
The group made short work of the remaining attackers. Not a single one offered to surrender, even when there was only one man left. Meredith almost felt a shred of pity for the man when he went down under Miguel’s blade.
Almost, but not quite.
Despite their success down here, still the engines of a chopper above deck rumbled, accompanied by the bark of machine-gun fire.
Meredith looked at Andris, shaking her head. “These bastards don’t give up, do they?”
-6-
Dom hated being nothing more than a witness to his crew’s efforts to defend the ship. The best he could do from the bridge was to manage the teams as they fought off the attackers. Now that Bravo team had finally destroyed the attack helicopter and reinforced Alpha, there was only the transport chopper left.
“Why aren’t they running?” Thomas asked.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Dom said. Gunners on the chopper swept the deck. “Bravo and Alpha eliminated their fire squads. They should be turning tail...unless they’re planning something else.”
“Christ,” Thomas said. “You think they’re keeping an eye on us? Making sure we don’t escape so they know where to send reinforcements?”
“It’s either that, or—” Dom focused his binos on the fuselage. There were four men working hurriedly on something he couldn’t quite see. Maybe a bomb? He cursed. “They might just want to finish us off.”
“Then we better finish ’em first.”
Dom performed a quick calculation in his head. Alpha and Bravo were both in the cargo hold. Directly below the bridge was the armory. Andris had lost the Stinger he had used to bring the attack chopper down, so they needed to retrieve another, make it back to the deck, and take out the chopper before it unloaded whatever it was those people were working on.
“We’ve got to take that bird down,” Dom said. He started rushing down the ladders with Thomas hot on his heels. “Alpha, Bravo, our friends in the sky have something planned for us. I have a feeling they want a little revenge for their fallen comrades. Get everyone into their quarters.” Dom huffed as he ran down the ladders. Each step sent pain shuddering through his torn muscles. Warm blood began to seep from his wound and soak into his fatigues.
“We can take down the chopper,” Miguel shot back. “Give us a few minutes to get back to the armory and—”
“No,” Dom said. “Thomas and I will take care of it. We’re closer. You just make sure everyone is safe.”
Thomas sprinted ahead and disappeared into the armory before Dom could even reach it. He returned with a fresh Stinger and a pair of missiles. The ladders nearest them took them back to the promenade deck. They exited the hatch onto the ruined deck, wind and rotor wash whipping past them. Dom loaded the Stinger, and Thomas inserted the battery coolant unit. Then Dom knelt and took the weapon from Thomas.
“We make quite the pair of old fogeys,” Thomas said as he helped Dom stand.
“Speak for yourself,” Dom said.
Using a Stinger was usually a two-person job. One man worked as a spotter to locate targets, and the other operated the weapon. But with the chopper drifting just past the bow of the Huntress, there was no need for Thomas to tell Dom where to fire.
All the same, Thomas pointed. “Just in case you forgot your glasses, the bastards you want to shoot are just over there.”
“Helpful as always,” Dom said. He activated the missile and sucked in a deep breath. Not because it would help his aim. The heat-seeking missile was incredibly forgiving, and all Dom needed to do was get a lock on his target. But he had one shot before they noticed what he and Thomas were doing.
Dom centered the aiming reticle over the helicopter. A steady lock-on tone buzzed in his ear.
Goodbye.
A squeeze of the trigger later, and the missile erupted from the barrel, lancing out at the chopper like an angry hornet defending its nest.
There was no time to launch flares. No time to dodge the incoming warhead. It was a perfect shot. A wave of fire enveloped one of the turbine engines, and the chopper lurched sideways. Flames spurted from the other turbine. The concussion threw one of the gunners out of the bird.
Somehow, the chopper was still in the air. Dom reached for the second missile and plunged it into the Stinger. It seemed that even in their death throes, the crew of that chopper was intent on finishing whatever it was they had started.
The Stinger’s maximum range was over twenty-five thousand feet. But the minimum effective range was six hundred and sixty feet. Too close, and the missile wouldn’t have a chance to adjust its course. The shrapnel from the blast would be devastating to him and Thomas.
Heat blazed over Dom. He couldn’t tell how close the transport chopper was now. Maybe it was foolish to fire again—suicidal, even. But his crew’s lives depended on him. His finger tightened on the trigger, and the second missile blasted into the air.
A flash of fire and light spread through the sky. The concussive force slammed into Dom and sucked the breath from his lungs. He fell backward, fresh pain shredding through his leg. His vision blurred, and his ears rang.
But as he pushed himself up from the deck, he saw the helicopter lose control and veer away. It tilted sideways as flames fanned from the fuselage and engines. Then something fell from the one of the open side doors, past where the gunner had been. It looked to Dom like a metal barrel.
Is that the bomb? Dom wondered as it plunged into the ocean. The helicopter flew on for a few extra seconds, careening away from the ship’s path. At last, it slammed into the water. The ocean hungrily pulled the helicopter under the crashing waves, squelching the fires and dragging the helicopter into the murky depths.
Dom’s chest hea
ved as he recovered his breath. He wanted to feel a swell of victory, but it never came. They had won the day, but there was no one left to ask the important questions. Where had they come from? Why had they come here?
And perhaps most frightening of all, how had they found the Huntress?
“Cliff,” he called to the bridge. “Put the ship into full stop!”
***
Meredith still had her rifle strapped over her back. Sweat matted her fatigues to her body, but there wasn’t time to clean up. She wanted to know the same things Dom did.
“We’ve got to find out who they were and how they found us,” she said.
Around the table in the electronics workshop, Dom, Chao, Samantha, and Thomas were assembled, all just as disheveled as she was. Lauren and the medical crew were still operating on Terrence, and from what she’d heard, that would occupy them for the next few hours. The other Hunters were helping the engineers and ship maintenance crew clean up. They had barely managed to patch the damage they’d withstood from the Coast Guard’s assault back in the Chesapeake, and now the ship was riddled with new scars. The men they’d faced had been well trained and well armed.
Dom nodded. “This is no random group of militants like the one we confronted back in Virginia. It has to be the FGL.”
“We were able to calculate some potential flight trajectories,” Chao said. He tapped a button on his computer. The multi-paneled screen at the front of the workshop modeled the data they had recorded from their radar readings. It showed a fairly linear path. But even to Meredith’s untrained eyes, the data left much to be desired. “Unfortunately, we didn’t detect them until too late. We’ve only got about fifty nautical miles of reconstruction here. The Mil Mi-8 choppers typically have a flight range in the neighborhood of four hundred nautical miles. That means they could’ve come from anywhere in this field.”
Most of what Chao had highlighted was ocean interspersed with islands. The projected range included parts of Morocco, Portugal, and Spain, but those locations were at the very edge of the range—a very dangerous proposition to launch a bird with limited fuel.
“I don’t think I need to say it,” Samantha said, her fingers wrapped tightly around an energy drink, “but whoever launched those choppers might’ve done so from a ship.”
“Agreed,” Dom said. “There’s something else bothering me about those choppers. I recognized the Russian-made Mi-8 birds, but the attack chopper...that was something else entirely.”
“Correct,” Chao said. “We identified it from some of the images you obtained. It’s an Iranian HESA Shahed 285.”
“That jibes with our suspicions that an Iranian group decided to support the FGL,” Thomas said.
“Maybe,” Meredith said. Something didn’t sit right with her. She mulled it over for a moment, absently massaging a sore bicep. Then a cold horror crept through her. “It’s been a while since I was at Langley, but I’ve never heard of an Iranian base in this area. And I doubt any of the countries you mentioned would allow a squadron of Iranian choppers to park on their turf.”
Dom’s expression tightened. He seemed to understand exactly what she was implying.
“We toyed with the idea before,” Meredith said, “but if the Iranians and Russians, through the FGL, already have ships or bases operating around here, that proves they’re taking over in the power vacuum left behind by the Oni Agent outbreak.”
“Those bastards move fast,” Thomas said.
“Add this to the list of things Kinsey needs to know,” Dom said. “Chao, Samantha, any other ideas on where these guys came from?”
“Short of resurrecting the dead guys in the cargo bay to ask ’em,” Samantha said, “I got nothing. With those choppers on the sea floor, we can’t exactly pick apart their FMS or FDS, either.”
“Flight management system and flight data systems,” Chao clarified. “Both record all kinds of information like flight plans and navigation data. Basically, if we find one intact, we can find out where these choppers came from.”
Samantha grinned. “You know, a black box.”
“Then we have to do that,” Meredith said. “We have no other choice.”
“Only problem is we lost one of those helicopters miles from the ship,” Thomas said. “The other two are on the bottom of the seafloor. The computers are going to be waterlogged. I’m not a geek, but isn’t that a bad thing?”
Samantha shrugged. “A little water isn’t a huge problem. These things are built for crashes in all kinds of environments.”
Dom looked more uncertain than the others. “Sure, civilian craft have black boxes, but not all military craft do.”
“True,” Thomas said. He massaged the gray stubble along his chin. “And even if they do, that shit’s going to be encrypted.”
Samantha raised a brow. “So? You show me a locked door, I’ll make you a key.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Meredith said. “I mean, if we can get that kind of data, we’ll have a tremendous advantage.”
“Advantage?” Thomas shot her a dubious look. “I’m not sure I’d be that optimistic. These people tracked us in the middle of the ocean and attacked when we had our pants down. They’re still in the lead.”
“Then this gives us a chance to catch up,” Meredith said.
“You’re right, of course,” Dom said.
“Of course,” Meredith echoed.
“The only question is how do we retrieve that data.”
“That’s not really a question, though, is it?” Meredith asked with a sly grin.
Dom sighed. He ran a hand over his scalp, leaving it at the back of his neck. Meredith recognized that look. It was the moment he realized she was about to do something dangerous and that he had no right to stop her. “You’re really going to do this?”
“Absolutely,” Meredith said. “Look, I know this is a long shot. But the ocean shouldn’t be too deep around here. If we’re lucky, either the transport chopper or the attack chopper landed in the reef.”
Dom looked ready to argue with her, but he turned to Chao instead. “Get me a sonar read. I want to know where those choppers ended up.”
“You got it,” Chao said. He typed a few commands on his computer to take control of the Huntress’s sonar systems. The others waited in silence.
Tension tingled along Meredith’s spine. After the attack they’d just endured, they needed something to help them move forward, to figure out who those bastards belonged to and where they came from. Having just lost Renee in the Congo and with Terrence in the OR, his prognosis uncertain, the team needed a win.
The crew had changed since the outbreak. Each casualty cost them. Not just in terms of resources and personnel, but emotionally, too. The Hunters were still some of the bravest men and women she’d ever fought alongside. But even though Meredith was new to the team, she could see the fires behind their eyes begin to dim.
Dom and his crew had become more than just teammates in a covert ops group. They truly had become brothers and sisters, serving together in the face of overwhelming adversity with the lofty goal of stemming the changing tides of the apocalypse. She wondered how long those aspirations could sustain them. How much more they could endure before they broke.
They need this, Meredith thought. Then she considered her own role in this madness. How she still strived to fit in with the crew. How she felt the need to prove herself to the Hunters and show that she hadn’t grown weak and slow despite her time behind a desk at Langley.
I need this.
“There we go,” Chao said. “Got the two closest birds.” He clicked a button on his terminal, and the coordinates of the first showed on one of the monitors. “That’s the attack chopper, I believe.”
Meredith felt a stinging pang of disappointment. “Seventeen hundred feet.” Too deep for healthy SCUBA diving. Scientists weren’t exactly sure what the limits of oceanic pressure on the human body were, given a lack of willing test subjects, but it was pretty well accepted that diving tha
t deep without specialized equipment was a substantial risk. The last thing Meredith wanted was to die alone in the underwater darkness with her lungs bleeding out.
“We don’t happen to have a sub on the ship I don’t know about, do we?”
“That’s a hard negative,” Dom said.
“The second chopper is in a better location,” Chao said. He clicked a button, and the approximate coordinates and depths of the transport helicopter appeared on the screen. “If this is right, it’s only a hundred and twenty feet.”
“I can handle that,” Meredith said. “I used to do hundred-foot dives for fun. Some pretty interesting wrecks around the Florida Keys at that depth.”
“You sure about this?” Dom asked.
“The last time I went SCUBA diving, it was to get this ship back from a bunch of armed coasties in the middle of the night. This will be nothing in comparison.”
“You need someone to go with you,” Dom said ruefully. She understood why. He would gladly volunteer. But diving with a wound like his would be an impediment to the both of them. He still noticeably struggled when he walked, and Meredith could see the little winces and grimaces even when he tried to hide them.
The obvious choice for a diving buddy would be one of the former SEALs on the crew. A knot formed in Meredith’s stomach when she realized both the Hunters who had been SEALs—Hector and Owen—had already paid the ultimate price fighting the Oni Agent. That left one other option with the skillset necessary for what they were about to do.
Andris was a jack-of-all-trades, having specialized in one of the engineering regiments of the French Foreign Legion. It was there he’d been trained in everything from skydiving to underwater demolitions and even dabbled in sniping. That had made Andris a valuable member of the crew, and Meredith had already teamed up with him on previous missions. He was the obvious choice.
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