Viper Nine

by Viper Nine (retail) (epub)

  ‘Look out,’ Wells attempted to say, the wind still to return.

  Rios dropped the tablet and moved. But Kovac was a big guy and spry for his age. He had the range and the power. And while Rios had skills, the Serb appeared highly-trained.

  As the Mexican attacked with rapid-fire combinations, Kovac countered them all and landed a punch to the face.

  Rios had a good chin. She staggered, steadied and returned with interest. The Serb grabbed her collar and threw her over his shoulder across the trailer.

  Rios hit the sidewall and collapsed to the floor. Wells felt the urge to intervene. His hurting body disagreed. Besides, Graf was on all fours, the knife only a couple of feet from his grip.

  Summoning all his strength, he pressed up off the floor and dove forward on the German’s bear-like back.

  As Graf crawled to get the knife, Wells defied the lethargy in his bones and clung on tight, squeezing a bicep around the man’s neck. Yet it was one hell of a thick neck. Worse, Kovac had control of the tablet. And with it, the fate of millions his hands, including the life of the woman he sort of, kind of, quite possibly might have loved.

  * * *

  Driver turned her wrists to the right, giving the truck as wide a turning circle as possible. The gap in the barrier was moments ahead. She turned the wheel in to perform a slow U-turn. Yet as she transferred her feet to the accelerator, it depressed beneath the soles of her boots. The wheel pulled to the right and the truck continued on its original route along the highway.

  Driver let out a scream of frustration, fighting wheel and pedals all the way. But it was no use. The truck accelerated and re-joined the lane that would take she and the warhead to the outer reaches of Mecca.

  The proximity to the city brought more traffic and a closer view of the skyscrapers.

  Driver glanced over at the device. The countdown timer dipping under thirty minutes.

  She figured the final destination had to be the Kaaba, the Sacred Mosque, its tall white towers now visible in this closing distance.

  Sure, her efforts could mean the truck falling short of the mosque itself. But with a megaton payload, it would matter little, even if the warhead was to detonate on the fringes of the city.

  Driver shook the sweat from her brow, realising the break in the remote grip over the controls in the cab hadn’t been a miracle at all. More like a glitch, a blip, a ghost in the machine. She could only sit powerless and hope for another.

  Chapter 50

  The knife handle was inches from the German’s grip. Graf stretched his thick, suntanned fingers to reach. But Wells held him at bay with a chokehold on the throat. He tightened his grip, aiming for a neck-break. Easier said than done on a man of Graf’s size.

  And the German had other ideas. He left the knife and instead went of a reverse punch to Wells’ nose. It stung like hell, brought tears to his eyes and the headlock was broken.

  A swinging elbow followed. Wells felt a hand on the neck of his T-shirt. It ripped as Graf threw him forward off his back. Wells went with it, scooping up the knife in a forward roll. Graf scrambled to gain control of the blade, but the British agent was faster. He reversed the grip on the knife in both hands. As the German threw his weight on him, he pushed it into the man’s heart.

  Yet somehow Graf lived on as they both got to their feet, a defiant smile on his lips.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Wells said, breathing hard from the fight.

  ‘Nothing can kill me—’ Graf announced, seconds before collapsing off the back of the truck.

  As the big German’s body tumbled high and wild off the tarmac, Wells turned to see Rios slap the tablet from Kovac’s hands. Wells dove and caught it mid-air. But the Serb struck the Mexican and delivered a roundhouse kick to Wells’ chest.

  He fell backwards, the tablet dropping to the bed of the trailer. Kovac booted it across the floor as Wells went to recover it. The Serb followed with a spin-kick, but the British agent telegraphed the move. Catching hold of the man’s ankle, Wells scooped him up off the floor and threw him against the wall of the truck.

  With Kovac down, he locked onto the sight of a discarded pistol hiding under one of the benches. Rios clocked it too. He left her to go for the weapon and re-focused on the rising Serb. The man wasn’t shy in coming forward and fought like a guy twenty years younger.

  As Wells took a punch to the ribs, Jana rose to her feet. She found the tablet loose in the middle of the trailer and was quick to pick it up.

  Rios was equally fast to retrieve the pistol and shoot the young woman in the left thigh. Jana screamed and collapsed. The Mexican turned the weapon on Kovac, but the Serb kicked her hand before taking a straight right from Wells.

  The gun went off, the bullet blowing a hole in the skull of the man at the wheel. He slumped forward, the truck swerving to the left. Rios went again for the tablet and Wells grappled close-quarters with Kovac. Yet the wheel spun out of control and the truck rose up and to the side on two wheels in a squeal of tyres, throwing both men across the trailer.

  Wells bounced like a coin in a tumble dryer as the truck thumped onto its side. It ploughed into the desert floor, lurching to a stop with a wall of sand surging through the torn canopy.

  Before he knew it, Wells was coughing out a lungful of dust, a hand touching a sore point above his right eye. His hand came away red. He must have hit his head. Had he been out? And how long for?

  Wells’ first thought was Rios. She was alive and moving, coughing, scouring the floor for the lost tablet.

  His second thought was Kovac. Wells didn’t see him. But he did see footprints in the desert sand and heavy spots of blood making a trail away from the crash site.

  Looking around the trailer for signs of Jana’s remote device, Wells noticed the hacker herself groaning in the corner. She clutched her wounded leg, going nowhere.

  ‘I’ll find the tablet, you get Kovac,’ Rios coughed, dark hair distressed and blood congealing around her nostrils.

  Wells nodded and hauled his tired body to his feet. He stumbled out of the upturned trailer and out onto the sand. The truck had careered a hundred metres off the road before stopping, its rear wheels still spinning but the engine cut.

  A hot wind blew sand grains hard into his face. Dead ahead was Kovac, limping away no more than thirty feet in the distance.

  ‘Here,’ Rios yelled from over his shoulder.

  Wells turned to see her throw the pistol his way. He caught it and holstered the weapon. Not that he’d be needing it.

  Wells set off after Kovac, lurching ever closer to the highway. The Serb seemed to think better of it. He stopped mid-tracks as Wells caught up.

  ‘I can pay you a lot of money,’ Kovac said.

  ‘There’s not enough money in the world,’ Wells said, faking with a left.

  Kovac moved to block, the Brit struck him with a right, tuned into how the Serbian fought.

  Kovac cried out and threw a series of moves. A kick. A punch. An elbow. Wells blocked each one. He looped a wrist around the Serb’s left arm and delivered a solid headbutt to the nose.

  He heard it break as Kovac staggered backwards. But the man wasn’t ready to hit the dirt. He charged one last time. Wells picked him off his feet and slammed him to the ground. He dropped to a knee and landed a right fist on Kovac’s chin.

  Now he was done.

  Wells was close to done himself, rising to his feet and grabbing one of Kovac’s ankles. He dragged the unconscious Serb on his back to the truck, making dead-weight tracks in the sand.

  ‘Found it,’ Rios said, as Wells left Kovac unconscious by the rear of the truck. She blew a veneer of dust off the device and swiped a finger across the screen. ‘Now it’s up to you, Blondie.’

  * * *

  From the pit of despair came hope.

  Hope in the form of a lightness of the wheel. A loss of acceleration.

  Again, a miracle. Kovac’s system was faulty. That’s it you cocksucker, this failed on you
too.

  Driver turned the wheel left and right, checking it wasn’t a dream, a hallucination.

  She had been close to passing out. The heat. The dehydration. Yet the change in fortunes breathed new life into her body, like an injection of fuel in her cylinders.

  As the truck slowed, it changed down in gears to compensate. The traffic swarming around her reacted angrily as it formed a stream into the heart of the city.

  Driver had to turn around. If she didn’t she’d soon get bogged down in the gridlock of central Mecca.

  Spotting a large roundabout ahead, Driver steered into the outside lane, knocking a taxi off the road. She applied the brake with her bound feet and swung the truck out as wide as it would go. Nudging the accelerator, Driver could no longer feel the pedals as she turned the wheel to the left and hung the truck out wide around the island.

  The tyres squealed and Driver braced as she shunted cars out of the way. A man on a motorcycle ditched his bike in the centre of the roundabout as she left a fresh pile of chaos behind her. But who cared? The truck had made it around. The device hadn’t gone off. And there was at least time to make it out of the city.

  Driver extended her legs to push the accelerator all the way down. The truck worked hard through the gears as it climbed back up the hill, leaving Mecca in the distance in her wing mirror.

  As the truck came over the crest of the hill and the highway flattened out, Driver pulled the wheel. She broke off the highway across a flat desert floor.

  The ride was bone-rattling rough. The heat intolerable. But there wouldn’t be much longer for her to bear. Once that timer ticked down to zero, Driver wouldn’t feel a thing more. But struggling again to stay conscious behind the wheel, she could only hope to steer the truck far enough away from any populated area.

  Shaking off a growing fog, Driver focused her mind on the vast stretch of yellow-orange plains ahead, steering headlong into a liquid haze.

  Chapter 51

  Pope shook the tracker in frustration. ‘Bloody thing’s on the blink,’ he said into his radio headset. As the screen froze grey and a black wheel of death buffered until the end of time, he slapped it for the tenth time.

  ‘Because that’s going to make it better,’ Lim replied with her usual droll wit into a headset of her own.

  The Chinese agent worked the stick and banked left, away from the highway and across the desert floor.

  ‘Gotta do something,’ Pope muttered, turning the device over in his hand. ‘Must be low on charge.’

  ‘Or out of range,’ Lim said. ‘What’s the maximum distance?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’ Pope replied, as if he knew anything about GPS nano-trackers. He looked out through the bulbous windscreen of the cockpit at boulders and scrub rushing beneath the belly of the Huey. ‘What are you doing, just flying randomly now?’

  Lim shrugged. ‘You said her last known location was southeast. This is southeast.’

  ‘Not exactly Magellan, are you?’

  Lim glared at the Australian across at the cockpit. ‘You got any better ideas?’

  ‘We could turn around, call it a bad day,’ Pope suggested, catching daggers from Lim. ‘All I’m saying is we’ve been flying around for an age. How much fuel’s left in the tank?’

  Lim leaned forward and examined the instrument panel. She didn’t need to say a word. Pope could see for himself, the little white arrow hovering close to the red.

  ‘Shit,’ he groaned as Lim pulled higher over a bank of dunes.

  Pope hoped in vain to see the sand trail of a truck booming across the flat desert planes. Instead, all he saw was a never-ending dustbowl and a panoramic blue sky. He cursed the unspoilt beauty of it. Where was a gas-guzzling, ozone-stripping, fixed-trailer vehicle when you wanted one?

  The last reading had led them as far as the highway, the truck having performed a U-turn somewhere on the way to Mecca. But the signal had disappeared soon after.

  At least Driver had succeeded in steering the truck away from the pilgrimage. That had to be something. It might turn out to be a lot. But it didn’t feel like a win. Not by a long shot.

  As Pope glanced out of the window to his left, he finally spotted something other than vultures and bones.

  A small boy strode across the desert floor corralling a goat across the sand. The kid couldn’t have been older than eight or nine – dressed in white with a scarf over his head and a stick in hand. The boy looked up and waved as the helicopter passed by.

  ‘What do you see?’ Lim asked, peering out of the window.

  ‘Just a kid and his pet goat,’ Pope replied. He shook his head and muttered as if the boy could hear. ‘Get out of there, you dummy.’

  The young goat herder disappeared from view as Lim peeled away to the right. ‘So what do you wanna do?’ Pope asked as a change in direction brought nothing more than a bunch more rocks the colour of Uluru.

  His smarter half wanted to pull out of there and head back to the compound before it was too late. Yet the impulsive arsehole inside wanted to say fuck it and keep going.

  Waiting on Lim for an answer, he sensed the same inner-aggro.

  Sure enough, the Chinese agent seemed to chew on it a moment.

  Finally, she broke her silence. ‘As my dad used to say…’

  Lim babbled something in Chinese and turned to Pope as if expecting him to understand.

  ‘What’s that, some ancient proverb?’ he asked, pulling a face.

  ‘It means, how do you say it? She’ll be right.’ Lim did her best Aussie accent – surprisingly good.

  ‘You’re all right, Lim,’ Pope laughed, offering her a set of knuckles.

  Lim met him with a fist-bump and they kept on flying.

  * * *

  Kovac sat slumped against the torn roof of the upturned truck with a drowsy Jana sat alongside. All attempts to get them to stop the bomb had failed.

  ‘We rigged it so it can’t be deactivated,’ Kovac insisted. ‘Not even by me.’ The Serb grinned. ‘Nothing can stop it now.’

  As the torn canopy flapped in the breeze, Wells snorted the spill of diesel fumes from his nostrils, a trail of oil soaking into the sand as dark as Kovac’s soul.

  Rios pulled a headscarf tight around the Jana’s leg to make a tourniquet.

  ‘It’s more than she deserves,’ Wells said.

  ‘Yeah, but it’ll keep the vultures away,’ explained the Mexican, rising to her feet. ‘Big motherfuckers. They shit on your head when they circle.’

  Wells cast a long shadow over the sand as he held the one remaining pistol on Kovac.

  ‘On second thoughts, maybe we should get out of here,’ Rios continued, looking down her nose at the Serb. ‘Leave the scumbag to have his eyeballs pecked out.’ She looked around. ‘And then there’s the warhead.’

  ‘We should be well clear,’ Wells replied.

  ‘Should?’ Rios replied. ‘You don’t sound so sure.’

  Kovac coughed as he chuckled to himself. It was a high, maniacal laugh ending with a spit of blood from between his teeth.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re laughing at,’ Wells said, taking the tablet off Rios. He reversed the screen so Kovac could see the GPS map. ‘Your truck is no longer headed to Mecca.’

  ‘Yes, but your little blonde girlfriend is still on-board.’

  Wells handed the tablet back to Rios. His grip tightened around the butt of the pistol, the hot winds of the Saudi desert only fanning the flames of his temper. The British agent’s pulse quickened, a rage bringing his tired muscles back to life. And he went with it. Better to be angry than think of Driver, alone on the truck, taped into the seat with a nuclear payload set to detonate any moment. He wouldn’t see her again. Wouldn’t hear her voice. Feel her touch.

  ‘I can’t watch this,’ Rios said, looking away from the tablet.

  ‘You people,’ Kovac spat in disgust. ‘Your weakness of mind is like – it’s like an infection.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Rios said, appearing a
mused by the man’s version of events.

  ‘You’re lazy, impulsive, you lack any form of conviction or fortitude,’ Kovac continued. ‘That’s why you’ll always lose.’

  Rios huffed. ‘Says the murdering mo-fo watching his plans turn to dust. You call this winning?’

  ‘This is just the start,’ Kovac shrugged. ‘There’ll be others who’ll continue my work.’ The Serb glared up at Wells through his eyebrows. ‘Your days are numbered.’ He extended his stare to Rios. ‘All of you.’

  ‘Funny, I was about to say the same about you,’ Wells replied, his finger itching to pull the trigger.

  ‘Don’t do it, Wells,’ Rios said. ‘Don’t sink to his level.’

  Kovac cracked a sideways smile. ‘I’m ready for what’s coming. Are you?’

  Wells stepped in close with the gun as Kovac checked the watch on his wrist. ‘Can you wait a few minutes longer? I want to see the look on your face when it happens.’

  ‘Wells,’ Rios said. ‘He’s more valuable alive.’

  ‘This piece of shit?’ Wells replied, anger pumping hard through his veins. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He wants you to do it,’ Rios continued. ‘So he can avoid The Hague, or Guantanamo, or whatever the fuck they do with these shit-balls.’

  Wells shook his head. ‘He’ll be on trial for years. The guy’ll use every trick in the book.’

  ‘Better than making him a martyr,’ Rios argued. ‘He wants you to prove him right, can’t you see?’

  Wells stepped in closer with the gun. A point-blank bullet to the head would make a nice hole in his skull and paint his brains all over the canopy of the truck. And he’d feel a damn sight better knowing he was the artist.

  The alternative was to watch Driver – and perhaps more – die at Kovac’s hands, and see him enjoy the moment. Only for the man to waltz off into a jail cell, where his lawyers could keep the judicial process tied up in appeals for the rest of his days. He’d be free to spread his word from his prison cell and be treated like a messiah by the neo-Nazi tribe in whatever super-max facility he landed in.