Fox Hunt

by James Phelan

  Motioning for Geiger to take the right, Fox took the left path and made his way to the corner to peer around the side.

  “Fox, I have a bead on the structure. Can see you both clearly.” Gibbs’s voice came over the radio, crackling with static.

  “No hostiles?” Fox whispered as he poked his head around the corner, seeing nothing but another ten metres of blank wall.

  “Negative, not from this angle, but I have a good cover on the stairs.”

  “Okay, sit tight,” Fox said, making his way to the next corner.

  “I have two contacts.” Geiger’s voice crackled over the radio.

  Fox had trouble making out the words—something was interfering with their equipment. But Geiger’s report became clear as Fox glanced around the next bend. Two burly men—dressed in the same jungle green fatigues their countrymen at the farmhouse had worn—stood barring the path, their rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “Geiger, can you hear me?” Fox whispered as he leaned up against the wall, out of sight of the guards. The only response was the static crackling in his earpiece.

  “Gibbs, do you copy?” Fox tried; he received the same noise over the radio in reply.

  Damn! he thought. He cursed again when he heard the guards’ footsteps coming closer and their conversational tones growing louder. He looked ahead of him, but a steep rock wall formed a dead end. He glanced back in the direction from which he had come, but it seemed too much ground to cover, and if he ran they would probably hear his footsteps. He noticed that the stone path was littered with hundreds of tiny objects, and with a closer look he realised they were the butts of cigarettes.

  The guards were constantly patrolling the perimeter.

  Clink! The latch freed itself from the groove Gammaldi had created in the stone. He did not dare venture outside yet; instead he stood still and listened. Not a sound was to be heard. With great trepidation he opened the ancient steel door, knowing the hinges were creaky from when the guards had opened it to throw him into the cell. He cringed as the metal on metal squeal pierced the echoing silence of the corridor, but quickly discovered that if he lifted the door while moving it aside, the noise diminished.

  Once in the corridor, he examined his options through swollen eyes. He could not recall the way he had been led down here, except that he had come down a great number of steep stairs. To the left he saw doors like the one he had just emerged from. To the right the passage was illuminated by light spilling from a room. He took off in the direction of the light and stopped at the source’s ajar door, peering inside. Some guards were playing poker. There was no mistaking the bulk, big shaved head and round shoulders of the pirate amongst them.

  Gammaldi gripped the small metal lever in his hand, its end sharpened from the use against the stone wall. For a fleeting moment he considered exacting some revenge.

  Then the men broke their silence as they showed their cards and he used the lively distraction as cover, running past the open doorway towards the dark end of the corridor.

  A faint draught blew on his face as he rounded the bend and he smiled in triumph as he bounded up the stairs.

  Popov knocked frantically on the door, as he had been doing for the past few minutes. Finally, he heard a heavy latch lift and the door parted enough for a man’s head to poke out. It was the tanned, craggy face of Dimitry Orakov.

  “What the hell is it?” Orakov demanded, his eyes groggily focusing on the dishevelled man in a suit and no shirt before him.

  “Comrade Orakov, it is Popov,” he said. Orakov opened the door a little more, although he looked annoyed.

  “There has been an attack at the airfield. I managed to escape and make it here,” Popov said quickly.

  “What?” Orakov’s expression changed from annoyance to disbelief.

  Popov frantically relayed everything he had witnessed.

  The two guards rounded the corner and kept on walking, chatting in Russian. Having learnt rudimentary elements of the language at the Academy, Fox got the gist of what they were saying—the unexpected arrival of Popov earlier had animated them and they were looking forward to some action. Their discussion was cut short as Fox squeezed off three rounds into the closest man, then pointed his silenced MP5 at the next, only to see him drop to the ground like a sack of potatoes, the contents of his head painting the wall behind.

  Fox stood up from the shadows he had been hiding in and looked around. He heard a crackling voice over his headset, which he just made out to be Gibbs. Knowing she had felled the other guard, he gave an acknowledging wave in her direction and bounded over the corpses, running around the corner of the structure to the door, where he found Geiger waiting.

  “The terrace is clear,” Geiger said. “Take a look over there,” he added, nodding to the edge of the path.

  Fox looked around. At the eastern edge of the island, bright halogen lights lit up a long modern pier. Two boats were moored there: a sleek sixteen-metre cabin cruiser, and an older, nondescript craft of similar dimensions. Fox noted that he was standing on the third and top storey of a large building. He counted six figures walking the area below him, assault rifles slung over their shoulders, unaware of any pending danger.

  “Shall we see what’s behind door number one?” Geiger asked, his M16 level with the wooden door.

  Fox nodded, then motioned with military hand signs their intention for the sake of Gibbs, watching from afar.

  “Let’s go.”

  Gammaldi continued up the stairs, stopping only once when he heard footsteps along one of the corridors. He had climbed two levels so far, and thought that was about the same distance that he had descended when blindfolded.

  At the next level he came to he looked down the length of dimly lit corridors, only to find the space full of talkative Russian voices. He assumed this level to be where the guards’ sleeping quarters were located.

  Gammaldi scuttled back down some steps as two men carrying large steaming pots walked along the corridor. He exhaled upon realising he had not been seen, then raced back up the stairs, turning the corner to climb the next set. The smell of fried eggs and honeyed porridge made his stomach groan like a birthing buffalo.

  A wooden door loomed ahead at the next level and the corridors were deserted. Gammaldi approached and saw the door had no lock. With a smile, he grasped the handle; a cold draught blew on his feet, hinting at the outside world that beckoned him to freedom.

  The alarm screamed as Geiger and Fox leaped through the doorway. Geiger went first and smashed the butt of his M16 into the face of a man behind the door, sending him unconscious to the ground.

  “Shit!” Geiger paused at the sound of the sirens, uncertain whether to continue.

  Fox ducked through the low doorway and past Geiger, not seeming to notice the siren. He bounded down the stairs with little heed for personal safety. Geiger followed.

  Gammaldi opened the door and ran for his life. The sound of sirens filled the early morning and drowned out the birds that were chirping at the first hues of sunlight.

  Two guards were running about to his right so Gammaldi turned left, to find a steep rocky wall in his path. The sound of a small army hurrying to alertness sent the stocky Australian climbing up the wall, his hands and feet bleeding as he scraped his way up.

  Fox had already passed one eerily empty level. The next floor he came to was also deserted, but with an open door leading outside. Looking through it, Fox saw at least four guards running about, looking for any potential danger. The corridor was empty and dark so he proceeded down another level.

  Gibbs was lying on the highest boulder at the top of the hill that made up the island. From this vantage she was level with the roof of the structure—covered with satellite dishes and antennae—and had a good cover of the northern section of the island. She’d heard the sirens and knew their mission was coming to an end. She tried again to raise her team-mates over her throat mike, but the same electronic interfe
rence just crackled over. She considered making her way back down to the stone pier, but the idea was short-lived. There was no way she would leave without knowing the fate of her companions.

  Then another reason for staying in position came into Gibbs’s scope—a target. It was a stocky shape emerging from the scrub at the edge of the area she was covering. The figure was hard to make out through the thatch of short trees, so she gave her sight a twist to reveal the target in infrared.

  “Come to momma,” she whispered as she adjusted her scope again to line up the target’s head. Then she noticed the figure was unarmed and limping slightly, and her finger eased its pressure on the trigger.

  Fox was at the landing of the stairs a level below ground. He watched as guards ran out of rooms and down the corridor, and tried to make sense of the orders being barked all around. His eaves-dropping did not go unnoticed. A guard turned the corner in front of Fox and stood there, stunned, his assault rifle hanging loosely in his hands. He was a young man, no older than twenty, and shook his head with wide eyes at the MP5 Fox was pointing at his face.

  “Sorry,” Fox said quietly as he swung the butt of his submachine gun up. It connected heavily with the man’s jaw, knocking him cold.

  Another man came around the corner, this one more alert. He raised his weapon to fire just as Fox felled him with a quick thump-thump-thump from his silenced MP5.

  “They’re coming!” Geiger said as he looked around another corner. “About a dozen or so.”

  Fox weighed up the odds: they weren’t good. The boom of automatic gunfire was deafening in the confines of the stone corridor. He turned to Geiger, who was just beginning to return fire around the corner at the mob approaching them.

  “I think I can hold them down if you want to— Ahhh!” Geiger fell to the floor and slid to Fox’s feet, clutching his arm.

  Fox thumbed the selector of his MP5 to fully automatic, and emptied his magazine at the approaching guards. The first three fell to the ground in a heap; the others ran for cover into the rooms off the corridor.

  “I’m okay,” Geiger said as Fox helped him to his feet. In an instant, Fox realised how selfish he was being, risking the lives of the GSR team for a slim chance of rescuing his friend. That task should be his alone.

  “Come on, we’re getting out of here,” he said. He slung his empty MP5 over his shoulder and picked up Geiger’s much heavier M16 with its underslung M203 grenade launcher.

  Unleashing a heavy torrent of fire down the corridor, Fox followed Geiger back up the stairs.

  Gammaldi ran along a path overlooking the eastern side of the island. He considered making for the pier, but changed his mind when at least a dozen armed guards came into view. They took positions by a big sleek yacht that sported a massive antenna that wouldn’t be out of place on a battleship. Instead, he ran towards the squat building at the top of the complex he had just escaped from.

  When he saw the crumpled bodies of two guards he looked around anxiously, but the sound of the alarm siren dismissed his thoughts of caution and he hobbled along the path towards the guards.

  Staring at an AK-47 lying beside one of the dead guards, Gammaldi detected movement to his left. A huge bulk squeezed out of the open doorway and stood to full height. It was the pirate, moving to block the way between Gammaldi and the weapons.

  “Bluebeard!” Gammaldi said, a little too startled for it to be a wisecrack. The hulk of a man laughed deeply in response and lunged out at Gammaldi with a flying fist.

  The smaller man managed to parry the blow and moved in to sink his own fist into the pirate’s chest. Gammaldi wondered who came off worse from the impact: his whole arm jolted and his shoulder threatened to dislocate, while the pirate merely took a step back and grunted.

  Gibbs was watching the David and Goliath struggle unfold in her scope. She knew she had to intervene for the sake of the proportionally outmatched figure. The attacker’s head was the size of a watermelon and she had no trouble putting the crosshairs of her scope in the centre of it.

  “Pick on someone your own size,” she whispered down her barrel.

  The pirate smiled at his quarry, revealing gums in severe need of specialist attention. Gammaldi saw only one front tooth in the cavernous mouth and took aim with his fist, launching himself with all his might.

  “My dentist and I owe you something,” he said.

  Gammaldi was dumbfounded by what occurred next. Just as his knuckles touched the dinner-plate-sized face and he was expecting the shock of impact, his fist flew on through the empty space where two hundred kilograms of man should have been. In the same instant he was covered in blood as the pirate’s colossal skull blew apart.

  Gammaldi stood frozen for a full minute, looking between his still clenched fist and the headless corpse of the pirate spread on the ground. He looked about him and saw nothing. He then looked up and said a quick prayer to God, reverting to a faith he had not practised for years.

  Then he ran for freedom.

  Gibbs’s rifle was still smoking as she made her way down from the boulder and towards the structure. She had the sneaking suspicion that she had just helped Gammaldi escape, but couldn’t be sure until she saw him for herself.

  She half ran and half slid down the rocky slope, then pushed her way through the spindly trees that screened her from the stone structure, trying to catch up with the fleeing figure.

  Geiger fired his pistol again around the corner and the shooting stopped. He and Fox had been held up at the next landing by a sole gunman, whom they now heard crying out in agony.

  “I’ll cover you,” Fox said as he ran around the landing and fired the M16. Geiger used the time to run behind Fox and bound up the stairs two at a time. Fox soon followed, his longer legs managing three steps per stride.

  “This is it,” Geiger said, surprised to discover Fox was right behind him. They burst out of the doorway into the brightening morning.

  “Jesus!” Fox exclaimed at the sight of the huge headless corpse before them, looking like a beached whale. He turned back and used his MP5 to jerryrig shut the heavy wooden door to the structure.

  “Let’s go,” he prompted Geiger, who was still stunned at the sight of the enormous man bleeding litres of blood across the path.

  “Hey, guys!” Gibbs came crashing through a wall of spindly trees. The pair looked up, alarmed at first, then glad to see who it was.

  “Hey, Gibbs,” Geiger replied, poking the toe of his boot into the hulk lying before them. “You get all the easy targets.”

  “Yeah. He was just about to—”

  Gibbs was cut off by a smashing on the wooden door as the guards within tried to kick it down. Fox knew the MP5 would buy them a little time but not much.

  “Let’s get out of here!” he ordered reluctantly. They ran down the path and stairs, Gibbs assessing Geiger’s injury as they went.

  Gammaldi was in the timber boat at the short stone pier. He had tried in vain to start the engine; it was impossible without a key. He heard noise coming from atop the high stairs he had just descended and leapt from the boat into the frigid water. He swam as fast as he could towards the sparse lights of the mainland shore.

  “Beasley, come in! Beasley!” Fox called over the encrypted radio throat mike, which had less static interference as they came down the stairs.

  “I read you, Fox.” Beasley’s voice came clearly over the radio.

  “Meet us at the pier!” Fox yelled, running down the last, long flight of stairs.

  Whilst waiting for his other two team members at the pier, Fox shot holes into the bottom of the timber speedboat with his pistol, remembering one of his many lessons from the Defence Academy: never leave an enemy’s equipment intact.

  Beasley hummed the electric zodiac alongside the pier and Fox got in.

  “What the hell is up with the radios?” Beasley asked Fox, who was helping Geiger down into the craft.

  “Something up there’s jam
ming the signal,” Fox replied as Gibbs jumped aboard.

  “I noticed some pretty heavy-duty antennae atop the structure up there,” Gibbs said as she wrapped a tight bandage around Geiger’s left bicep.

  Beasley motored the electric-powered craft away from the island. “No sign of Gammaldi?” he asked the team.

  “No,” Fox said. He was contemplating telling the team to leave him behind to continue the search alone, when Gibbs interrupted.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you!” she said urgently, leaving Geiger to tie off his own bandage. “When I drilled that ogre up there, he was in the process of pummelling a guy. He ran off towards the pier.” Gibbs pointed over her shoulder at the disappearing island.

  “That means he may still be there!” Fox said. He scanned the side of the island they had just left, but his night-vision goggles were useless in the sunrise, and the shore was too craggy and distant to spot a person with the naked eye.

  “Or more likely out here,” Gibbs said as she shouldered her sniper rifle and looked around them with its infrared scope.

  It took only seconds to locate the splashing swimmer in the water.

  Not the greatest swimmer at the best of times, Gammaldi went as fast as his short, stocky arms would carry him, but his lungs were burning from exertion. It was the fatigue brought on by lack of food and sleep, and the cold salty water bit at his swollen eyes and body cuts.

  He thought he heard a slight hum in the water, but assumed it was his ears giving in like his closed-over eyes had. Then he thought he heard a voice— Fox’s voice no less—and deduced his mind was going as well. He must be nearing the end.

  He was about to resign himself to his fate, stop swimming, and let the sea consume his tired and battered body, when a hand came down on his shoulder. It was a big hand, strong and warm.