Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Lost Island Rampage

  Gustavo Bondoni

  www.severedpress.com

  Copyright 2021 by Gustavo Bondoni

  Chapter 1

  Sked landed on the roof with a slight scuffing sound. He released the carabiner holding him to the line and listened until the sound of the helicopter disappeared into the night. Even though the chopper was supposed to be stealth tech of the best, and that the sound was muted, he was glad they’d chosen dark, overcast night for the incursion.

  He looked out over the side of the building, tensely waiting to see if any of the antlike security people ten floors below suddenly sounded an alarm or began to roll out anti-aircraft artillery.

  Satisfied that he’d gotten in unobserved, Sked turned his back to the waterfront of Xiamen and studied the flat expanse around him. The roof looked just like the ones on all the other office blocks on Xiahe Road: scattered air conditioning units and vent chimneys, a few pipes and silver insulation that felt rubbery underfoot.

  But this building and its blue-glassed twin ten meters away were anything but normal office blocks, despite their blue mirrored glass and their corporate logos in the lobby. They belonged to the Ministry of State Security, and they were one of the places where the Chinese government stashed embarrassing prisoners.

  Actually, only one of the buildings was a prison. The other was an office block full of signal intelligence people, and even at three in the morning, it would be full of operatives at work. That meant if the Buddha had sent him to the wrong tower, he was going to have to answer a lot of truly uncomfortable questions which, whether he told the truth or not, would land him in a cell beside Akane. That would probably qualify as the world’s lamest attempt at a rescue, ever.

  He decided not to think about that. The Electric Buddha was a colleague who wouldn’t intentionally steer him wrong. Yes, his information often came with strings attached, and they were granted when they served additional purposes beyond just helping out, so you had to be on the lookout for when the other shoe dropped. But the data was always solid. The only question was who else would be benefiting from this particular mission.

  In the end, it didn’t matter.

  The door was a beast, of course, but the Chinese were still thinking in terms of brute force. They reasoned that anyone who decided on an airborne assault would be military in philosophy. Hence the armored door.

  That was a mistake. He pulled out his laptop, a device with enough power to brute-force the Pentagon’s password systems if he so desired, and plugged it into the keypad’s inlet port. The fact that it even had an inlet port was another sign that the Chinese thought of this as a fortress to be stormed rather than an asset that could be assaulted electronically. That the Buddha had known about the deficiency was a good sign.

  The keypad didn’t put up much of a fight. Less than ten minutes later, the foot-thick door swung open on beautifully oiled hinges to reveal a staircase painted in innocuous grey and complete with anti-slip strips on the steps.

  Sked wondered if the Ministry was concerned that an invading paratrooper might slip and hurt himself on the way in and sue them.

  Concentrate, he told himself. Don’t get cocky because security on the rooftop was crap. Security on the rooftop is always crap. It’s the guys inside you need to worry about. And the guys inside are very, very good at what they do.

  He inched down the stairs and, three floors later, hit his first alarm point. From here forward, there were cameras and motion sensors in every hall and every stairwell.

  Time to take them out.

  Security inside the building was way too tight to attempt anything as things stood. Try hacking these cameras while the building was working to spec and you’d set off every alarm between Xiamen and Beijing. So, it was a good thing they’d been planning this particular caper for a week.

  “Blow the cable,” he subvocalized into the microphone implanted in his jaw. Then he sat back and waited.

  Out in the street, one of the Buddha’s other friends, someone Sked had never met and would never meet, had taken a perfectly legitimate work crew from Xiamen CCGT, a local utility company, and done some repair work on old cabling a block away. Unbeknownst to any of the other workers, one transformer unit had an extra coil made of high explosives.

  In response to Sked’s command, it exploded, cutting power to the building and leaving him sitting in the dark.

  But only for a second. The emergency lights flicked on, the cool greyish glow illuminating the hallway.

  Sked moved quickly. He had seconds, perhaps a minute or two, before the generator kicked in and the building was back on regular power. When that happened, the cameras would come back online as soon as the system rebooted, which wouldn’t take long.

  He sprinted to the nearest camera, unplugged the two cables leading into it and plugged them into two devices. The data cord went into his laptop, while the power supply went into a high-power quick-discharge capacitor he’d brought for precisely this purpose. Then he waited for the lights to come back on.

  As soon as they did, he commanded his laptop to try to get through the security for the camera system. It probably wouldn’t work, but it was safe to try, as any alarms or system instability would be attributed to the power outage causing one of the cameras to malfunction as opposed to enemy action. And in attempting to get into the system, his programs would keep the security people occupied, trying to get things running well again.

  Additionally, if things went really pear-shaped, he would order this particular camera to show some truly alarming images which could conceivably distract the bad guys and buy him some time.

  But if he had to use that, he was probably screwed.

  Once that was done, he hit the power button on the capacitor and sprinted towards the next stairwell. He had five seconds.

  Behind him, lights blew out and cables popped as the capacitor discharged hard. It wouldn’t take out the electricity in the building, but hopefully, knock out a couple of floors’ worth of circuit breakers.

  In the stairwell, he removed his black jumpsuit to reveal a set of grey coveralls topped with a matching grey cap which he pulled down over his face to conceal his extremely out-of-place occidental features.

  Then he pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket and walked down the stairs. It wouldn’t fool anyone he encountered, but it might be good enough for the cameras, especially since the coveralls had been stolen from a laundry load and matched the ones the maintenance team in the building used precisely.

  He just hoped the guys watching the cameras weren’t too diligent and that they accepted the implied story: the initial power outage had damaged something which had blown out when the generator came online. And now someone was checking it out, poking into things with a screwdriver. It should work.

  Sked reached the twenty-second floor, five stories below the roof, and two below his artificial blackout, and supposedly the place where he would find Akane. He emerged from the stairwell and found himself in a dimly-lit, carpeted enclosure. A row of empty desks stood between his position and the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Anyone looking in from outside would think it was just an office building.

  But from where he was standing, Sked could see the truth. A false interior wall separated the visible outer layers of the building from the concrete inner core. There was another door set in that core, and the intelligence told him that it wasn’t going to be opened with a keypad cracking program.

  Fortunately, he’d come prepared. He returned to the stairwell and, using his screwdriver and a hacksaw, he removed the handle on the stairwell side of the door and closed it. Security would need a battering ram to get it open because it was five centimeters of steel. Unhurriedly,
he placed small explosive charges on each of the elevator doors.

  There. The disguise had served its purpose and he was ready to act. He removed the bulky coverall, and pulled a final series of explosives out of his pack. This suite consisted of a long explosive cord as well as shaped charges for the contour of the door and a big, unsophisticated bomb for the lock. He hoped it would be enough.

  He placed the explosives, went around the nearest concrete corner and put plugs into his ears. Then, pausing only long enough to remove the automatic pistol from the holster at his hip, he hit the remote control detonator.

  The building shook around him and the noise thundered, even through the earplugs.

  Sked didn’t pause to marvel at the explosion. He was in motion, around the corner and, noting with a grin that his demolition consultants had completely overdone the explosives, ran through the ragged gap where the door had been.

  Dust clouded everything within the prisoner enclosure but Sked was ready for it and made a beeline for the guard post. He needn’t have bothered: both guards were down, one with blood pouring out of his nose, the other with his neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Sked decided that shooting them in the head as insurance would be a waste of time and bullets and headed down a corridor that wound its way in a square around the concrete core of the building, towards the cell blocks.

  His objective was the first door on the right and, since the lights were still on, he simply walked up and removed the physical bolts holding the steel panel in place. No fancy hacking was ever going to open these doors—the Ministry was too smart for that.

  He pulled it open and peered inside. It was dark, so he looked at the wall beside the door and flipped the switch he found there.

  The lights illuminated a block three meters square. A cot in one corner held a thin woman with short, dark hair. Her hands were over her ears, and she whimpered.

  Gently, he pulled one of her hands away. “Akane?” he asked.

  She didn’t respond, just whined and tried to put her hand back.

  He tugged harder. “It’s me, Sked. Listen to me. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  An eye opened and she squinted at him. “Is… is it really you?” Her face was bruised, and a long thin scar, not deep and not quite healed, ran down her right cheek.

  “Of course it’s me. Who else would I be?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Getting you out. Can you walk?”

  “I… don’t know. Help me up.”

  He put his shoulder under her arm and helped her to her feet. After a couple of tentative steps, he realized it would be quicker if he carried her.

  He took her in his arms and swallowed back a curse. He wasn’t a huge man—the paratroopers he’d trained with back in the day could have thrown him through a wall without breaking a sweat—but Akane weighed next to nothing. Even less than usual. He went as quickly as possible and let her back onto her feet when they reached the outer window looking out over the harbor.

  Behind him, a rhythmic thumping shook the area. The guards were trying to break down the stairway doors.

  “We need to go quickly,” he said, looping a harness around her waist and pulling it tight.

  “Go? Where? The elevators are back there.”

  “The elevators are booby trapped. We’re going that way.” He pointed at the window.

  “What?”

  But Sked was already moving. He put a harness around Akane’s waist—it was clipped to a similar harness he was wearing—then shot the window five times and, picking up Akane, sprinted at the collapsing safety glass. He was relieved when it popped out of its frame under their combined weight and headed toward the ground below.

  Twenty-two stories wasn’t a high altitude for a jump, so he deployed the chute immediately. Only two things mattered now: they needed to get across Xiahe Road and the imperative necessity to land in the water. If they made it, security shouldn’t be able to reach them in time.

  The distance from the wall of the building to the harbor wasn’t long, maybe forty meters, but they almost didn’t make it across the chain link fence that separated road and water.

  Sked only realized he’d been holding his breath when the fence floated beneath them with three scant meters to spare. No one had fired a shot at them yet.

  The water was as cold as a commissar’s heart, and the shock made Akane struggle, but he held onto her and said: “Quiet. Stay still.”

  This part was the hardest, because he depended on others for it to work. They knew where he’d landed… now it was a question of whether they would be picked up. If not, at least Sked knew what the cell that awaited him looked like.

  A splash sounded in the dark water nearby and Akane gripped him harder. “Is that a shark?”

  “Shh,” Sked whispered as something large rose out of the water beside them.

  “Did someone order a cab?” a British accent asked moments before a beam of light blinded them.

  “Cut the comedy and throw us a rope,” Sked replied.

  “No need for that. One second.” The object came closer and Sked felt it bump against them. “There’s a set of molded footholds right beside you.” The light illuminated them.

  “Can you climb?” Sked asked his sodden companion.

  Akane nodded and he pushed her onto the fiberglass hull of the submarine, and then kept helping her up the stairs.

  “Did I say you could touch my butt?” she asked from the darkness.

  Sked smiled. She must have been starting to feel better, must have been accepting that she had actually been rescued and wasn’t going to spend the rest of her—possibly very short—life in some clandestine jail while the spies decided where to dig her unmarked grave.

  “We don’t exactly have a lot of time here,” Sked replied. “You hurry or I’ll push.”

  “All right. You can push. But just this once.”

  The next few seconds felt like an eternity as he waited for the bullet to hit him between the shoulder blades. Surely the security people had managed to get their act together by now, and would be taking a bead on them?

  But he didn’t die. As soon as Akane had disappeared down the hatch, he dove in after her.

  “Dive!” he yelled.

  “I will, but submarines work better when they aren’t flooding,” the man replied and closed the hatch behind him. “We can’t exactly carry a large crew in here, you know. So I need to close doors and do the driving myself.”

  Sked studied their new surroundings. The hull that had seemed so enormous sitting in the water next to them actually enclosed a cramped space, barely wide enough for them to squeeze through.

  “Take a seat,” British guy told them. There would be no exchange of names or pleasantries on this trip. “We’re heading due south. Next stop, the Philippines.”

  “Why south? Isn’t Taiwan nearer?”

  “It is, but the sea between the mainland and Taiwan is crawling with Chinese Destroyer Captains whose one wet dream is that they’ll spot a submarine in the water and get to drop a depth charge or two.”

  “All right. How long?”

  “At least twelve hours. Fourteen is more likely. These drug submarines were built for stealth, not speed.”

  “Drug submarines?” Akane asked, her eyes flicking around the dimly-lit, white-painted interior.

  “Yeah. Bought this one at a DEA auction in Texas. They were selling it for scrap, to recycle the motors and stuff, and they’d drilled it full of holes to keep people from using it as a sub again.” He shrugged. “It seemed easier to patch the holes on this one than to build a new one, so I bought it.”

  “Man,” Akane said with a light in her eyes that spelled trouble, “when this is over, contact me, will you? I’m easy to find online. We have got to talk. There’s so much potential…”

  “We’ll see,” the man replied without taking his eyes off the instruments.

  Sked smiled. Akane was a reasonably major player in his circles, a hacker
whose ability to get the job done was matched only by her tendency to cause massive collateral damage and piss people off. The caper that landed her in a Chinese jail was just the latest in a career of ever-increasing mayhem that was never going to end well.

  The guy at the helm had obviously heard of her and wanted no part of the legend.

  “You got any food in here?” Sked asked.

  “Yeah. That cooler over there.”

  Akane beat him to it. “I could eat a horse,” she said.

  Sked smiled. Yeah, she was going to be okay…

  As long as he could get her somewhere safe, which, unless he planned to stay underwater for the rest of his life, was not going to be easy. The Ministry of State Security was her biggest enemy, but it was only one of them. Combined, there were few holes the people hunting her couldn’t reach.

  But there was nothing he could do about it now. None of his electronics would work until they surfaced.

  ***

  The boat they’d transferred to was an old fishing trawler owned by the same British Captain, and containing a South American crew. But at least they were on the surface and in range of a cellular network.

  The phone was a cheap disposable with a Korean chip. Unconnected to anyone or anything that had to do with Sked. It would take a monumental act of bad luck for someone to be monitoring it, especially since the call was made on the Philippine cell network.

  “So, you got her out,” the Buddha said when he called the one-time number he’d memorized. “I would have bet anything against that. My money was on both of you being shot in Tiananmen Square as public nuisances.”

  “And yet you let me go ahead with it. Some friend.”

  “You weren’t going to let me talk you out of it, so I decided to do what I could to improve your chances. I’m glad it worked.”

  “I need a place to lie low.”

  “With her?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not easy. She’s on a lot of people’s hit lists. But…” there was a pause, something very unusual with the Buddha. “I think I have something. And you don’t even need to get on a plane.”