Justice

by Blake, Russell

  JET VI – Justice

  Russell Blake

  Copyright © 2013 by Russell Blake. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact:

  Books@RussellBlake.com.

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  Features Index

  Bonus excerpt from Upon a Pale Horse

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Bonus Excerpt ~ Upon a Pale Horse

  About the Author

  Bonus excerpt from Upon a Pale Horse

  A controversial, frightening bio-thriller that blurs the line between truth and fiction, Upon A Pale Horse raises disturbing questions about the man-made origin of nightmare epidemics, and posits a conspiracy so plausible that it will linger long after the novel’s shocking conclusion.

  When young attorney Jeffrey Rutherford’s brother is killed in a plane crash minutes after take-off from JFK, his life is turned upside down – especially when he discovers that his brother’s career wasn’t what it seemed. Jeffrey’s staid existence is upended as he races to unravel a Gordian knot of deceit and betrayal, and ultimately must battle an unstoppable adversary bent on systematic global genocide.

  Preview and purchase details on Russell’s website

  Preview and Purchase from Amazon

  Go to the excerpt at the end of the story

  Prologue

  Seven days earlier, Bangkok, Thailand

  Sweat trickled down the drawn faces of the men working in the harsh portable lamplight as their leader moved a heavy piece of industrial equipment into position. The hard-packed red dirt beneath their feet was damp from the torrential monsoons that had only abated the prior afternoon, leaving Bangkok rinsed clean, as though the heavens had disapproved of its debauched environs and decided to thoroughly scrub them.

  The walls of the earthen chamber were lined with timber posts for reinforcement against a cave-in – a concern when tunneling under the city’s busy streets, especially this far beneath the surface. The engineer who’d crafted their approach plan had assured the group that there would be no danger, but wood was cheap and plentiful, and as they’d dug deeper, it had seemed prudent to counter gravity’s inexorable pull with a series of support beams running the entire hundred and sixty feet of the tunnel’s length.

  A string of naked incandescent bulbs hung from the cross posts along the ceiling of the passage, a procession of flickering, fading lights suspended from hastily strung wire. The cooling breeze supplied by a makeshift air-conditioning system had faltered two days earlier, a casualty of the seemingly unending rain that had plagued the city for the last few weeks, and since then, even five stories underground, the muggy heat had been oppressive, the atmosphere viscous and dank, redolent of wet earth and the sour tang of sweat.

  “Careful. Careful…there. How are we doing on time?” Steven, the leader, demanded.

  One of the workers checked the glowing display of his digital watch. “We’re good. The alarm switchover should occur in six minutes.”

  “All right. It’s showtime. Everyone knows what to do. Once we’re through, we’ll want to move fast, but carefully.”

  An exposed concrete slab loomed six feet above them, accessible by a vertical shaft they’d hewn from the clay-filled dirt to accommodate the drill. Preliminary testing had reassured them that the slab material had degraded from fifty years of groundwater leaching through the surrounding soil, its astringent chemicals doing much of their work for them.

  The lowest part of the tunnel had been the most problematic for the same reason: water. Moisture collected at the bottom as the slope dropped beneath the enormous sewage lines that carried the city’s waste from the surrounding office buildings to the treatment plants, rendering the tunnel impassible within minutes of excavation. A quick fix had been engineered involving submersible pumps and raised wooden flooring, but with the downpour, it had been tested to its limits, and everyone would be relieved when the operation was over and the makeshift drainage abandoned.

  Three months of round-the-clock labor had gone into tunneling from the basement of a vacant building they’d managed to lease across the street from the target, at first down an additional three stories, and then laterally beneath one of the large boulevards that ran east to west through Bangkok’s busy business district. Now, at four in the morning, traffic was virtually nonexistent, and the faint vibrations from above were absent.

  “Five…four…three…two…one…go!” the man with the watch said. The powerful drill motor engaged and the long bit bored into the slab. The hardened steel-and-diamond tip tore through the material with ease. Another member of the group moved closer, a green rubber hose in hand, and directed a thin stream of water at the slab so the drill bit wouldn’t overheat.

  After twenty minutes of methodically coring a series of holes in the shape of a rough square, Steven brought a concrete saw into play, slicing through the remaining cement and rebar as the men readied themselves for the next part of the operation. They pulled thin black cotton balaclavas over their faces and strapped goggles into place, waiting for the inevitable drop of the slab section that was slowly disintegrating before their eyes.

  Steven stopped when the saw blade shrieked against metal. “Looks like our worst-case scenario – there’s a steel plate above the rebar. Get the thermite ready,” Steven ordered as he handed the saw to one of his men, who placed it in the far corner, clear of the work area.

  Their demolitions expert, an olive-skinned man with a gleaming black crew cut, ducked out of the chamber and returned a few moments later with a steel toolbox that he set down in front of Steven. After a hesitant glance at the slab above them, he opened it and removed a case with an array of gray cylinders.

  Setting the charges in place took several minutes, during which the men prepared for the blinding flash to come, when the thermite would sear through the steel and concrete at thousands of degrees, melting the metal and the surrounding structure. They donned gas masks and filed into the passage, well away from the target area, and waited there while Steven and the demolitions expert finished his job.

  The ignition created a white-hot flare, and the chamber filled with smoke. Streams of molten steel dropped from the slab. When the reaction ended, the temperature in the room was unbearable, but the top of the shaft now had a gap in it – a hole large enough for a man to crawl through. Steven neared the cavity, careful to avoid the steaming globs of metal on the dirt beneath it, and after inspecting the gap, nodded to the others. The man with the hose sprayed water onto the ground below, creating a noxious steam in the room as it cooled the molten globs of metal.

&nb
sp; After several minutes, two others lugged an iron plate into place and set it down under the shaft as they waited for the newly created aperture to cool. Steven took the hose and directed a stream of water up into the shaft at the gap, where the edges of the metal plate were still glowing. Once he was confident it had cooled, he twisted the hose nozzle off and spoke, his mask muffling his words.

  “All right. We’re in. Let’s do it.”

  A short, muscular man carried a retractable aluminum ladder to the shaft and extended it upward, positioning and shifting the uppermost rungs higher until it rose through the opening. The team of six climbed wordlessly into the vault above, silent from this point on lest they say anything that could be used to identify them. They knew from their inside contact at the bank – a vice president who tended to be talkative with his new mistress – that there was a hidden camera system in the chamber they’d penetrated, just as they knew about the alarm system and a rigged deficiency in it that would enable them to enter the safe deposit box vault between four and six a.m. without triggering it – but only through the floor.

  The primary alarm on the massive steel vault door would still be engaged until manually shut off during business hours; the designers had dismissed entry from any other area as an impossibility. Steven had arranged for the motion detector system inside the safe deposit room to shut off due to a failure to adjust the timer properly – an oversight that had been expensive to contrive, but critical to their plan, and worth every penny of the hundred thousand dollars he’d paid to the technician responsible for its maintenance.

  The unlucky vice president had been approached and convinced to share everything he knew about the systems, after having told his avaricious young mistress about the Caucasian client who’d stored what looked like a king’s ransom in diamonds in one of the safe deposit boxes – spotted on the cameras built into the ceiling. The bank official had initially been reluctant to talk, but after his son had been abducted and he’d been assured of a safe return only if he was forthcoming, he’d seen the wisdom of sharing his knowledge with Steven’s group. Of course, a half million dollars by way of gratitude hadn’t hurt, either, along with the guarantee that his son would remain unharmed following his return.

  The vice president’s untimely death the night before from one of the city’s apparent muggings gone wrong had been a necessary part of tying up loose ends in preparation for the operation, as had the hit-and-run that had snuffed out the alarm technician’s life the previous afternoon.

  In the vault, the men spread out and moved to the first bank of boxes they’d targeted – all but one of them decoys, so the robbery would appear to be random, not directed at a specific box. They’d estimated ten minutes per lock, and using two drills had calculated they could empty twenty of them before departing the scene, leaving the chaos of the ruined containers to be discovered when the bank opened.

  Once they began working, their estimates proved painfully low, and after twenty minutes they’d succeeded in opening only one door. That dictated a change of strategy, and the third box they pulled was their target – the one that contained the diamonds. Steven verified the contents before sliding the bags containing the stones into a backpack, along with the gemstones, jewelry, and gold coins from the other boxes.

  As they drilled out the seventh lock, the team member who’d stayed below in the tunnel poked his head through the hole in the floor and waved. Steven moved to investigate, and the man handed him a cell phone with a terse text message on it. Steven squinted at the two lines of information, and his heart rate spiked: the motion alarm had engaged earlier than they’d been led to believe it would, and the police were on their way.

  Steven snapped his fingers and the men stopped what they were doing. He made a hand signal and dropped through the gap, and the rest of the team quickly followed. Once they were all in the tunnel, he faced them, tearing his gas mask off to be better heard.

  “The silent alarm sounded three minutes ago. We got screwed. Let’s get out of here. Stick to the plan. Split up as agreed and we’ll rendezvous later.”

  The men nodded, no further explanation required. They ran down the tunnel’s length, knowing seconds counted. Once they were all up the shaft that led into the vacant building’s basement, the demolitions expert turned and lifted the gray plastic cover of a switch he’d earlier mounted to one of the planks. He punched in numbers on the keypad, pressed the red activation button, and watched the digits on the display count down for several seconds before he bolted for the rope ladder dangling from the shaft.

  The floor trembled as he pulled himself into the basement. Dust blew from the tunnel opening as his carefully placed charges detonated under the street, collapsing the tunnel and burying it under tons of debris, eliminating any chance of pursuit. By the time it was unearthed they would be long gone, and the minutiae of the heist would be the stuff of folklore.

  Steven nodded to a new arrival wearing loose black cargo pants, a black nylon jacket, and a motorcycle helmet. He handed over the backpack, and the black-clad figure spun and made for the rear exit. The wail of sirens ululating in the predawn as the police responded to the alarm filled the street, strobing lights of the squad cars illuminating the boulevard as they raced toward the bank.

  A van waited in front of the vacant building, engine running, the driver tense. Its twin was parked by the building back door, out of sight of the bank. Half the men ran for the front entrance, and the other half joined the helmeted figure hurrying to the rear.

  Police cruisers screeched to a halt and armed officers jumped out of the vehicles. A uniformed tactical squad with assault rifles emptied out of a personnel carrier and took up position on the street, gun barrels sweeping the area. A trace of exhaust wafting from the tailpipe of the van in front of the building across the boulevard attracted the attention of the squad commander, and he called to his men. They swiveled as one toward it just as the vehicle’s rear doors pulled shut and the engine revved. After a moment of hesitation, the commander gave the signal to fire.

  A hail of bullets thumped into the building façade as the van tore away, and only a few of the rounds struck its side as it accelerated down the wide thoroughfare. Several members of the assault squad ran into the street and continued shooting in the slim hope of hitting the zigzagging target – not likely in the gloom, by shooters who were themselves moving, their weapons bouncing with their strides.

  Another engine roared as the second getaway vehicle wheeled from the alley at the back of the building and accelerated in the opposite direction, catching the police by surprise. The commander barked an order and clutched his radio to his mouth, issuing instructions. Several of the officers ran for their cruisers, and four of the squad cars gave chase, a pair in either direction. The heavy thump of a helicopter’s blades beat the air overhead as it approached the bank. A spotlight beam stabbed through the gloom from the dark chopper and traced over the surrounding rooftops before settling on the bank entrance. It hovered there for an instant as the commander communicated with the pilot, and then began moving as the helicopter took off in pursuit of the second escape vehicle.

  The squad cars’ sirens followed the second van like the howling of enraged wolves as it skidded around a corner on two wheels. Inside, the driver’s face was coated with a sheen of sweat, his jaw muscles pulsing, his eyes glued to the road as his companion in the passenger seat fingered the trigger guard of his PP-19 Bizon submachine gun, watching for pursuers in his side mirror.

  “Two streets up on the right. Hard left. Should get us into some narrower streets where we might be able to lose them,” he managed through clenched teeth.

  “I thought this was going to be a milk run. Not World War III,” the driver complained, doing his best to drive the gas pedal through the floorboard with a booted foot. “It’s going to be hard to outrun a radio.”

  “We’ve done it before.”

  A police car swerved out of a cross street and fishtailed behind them before s
traightening out. The passenger shook his head. “Looks like we have company,” he muttered.

  “You going to do something about that?” the driver demanded, eyes on the rearview mirror.

  “You bet. Hold it steady for a few seconds.”

  The passenger rolled down his window and leaned out, the Bizon clutched in his hands, and fired three bursts at the police vehicle. The car’s windshield erupted in a starburst of glass as the flattened heads of slugs punched through it. The squad car veered toward the high curb. Its front wheel struck the concrete, and the front end lifted into the air as the tire burst with a pop, and then the car flipped over onto its side and slid along the street in a shower of sparks before slamming into a parked truck.

  The passenger rolled his window back up and glanced at the driver, who nodded.

  “Nice shooting.”

  The chopper’s spotlight beam found them moments later, illuminating the van as it roared toward its turn. The driver blotted his forehead with his sleeve and dropped the transmission into a lower gear to slow the vehicle and get traction before the intersection. Headlights appeared from behind as it neared the cross street, and the passenger refastened his seat belt. The driver gauged the turn and yelled over his shoulder into the cargo area.

  “Hang on. Grab something, quick,” he warned as the van drifted in a controlled skid, nearly tipping over before righting itself and rocketing forward.

  “Whooh. Now that’s how we do it!” the passenger yelled, slamming his palm against the dashboard with a rare grin. His exuberance was cut short by .50-caliber machine-gun rounds stitching across the roof as the helicopter brought its heavy artillery to bear. The top of his head blew off in a bloody splatter, and he slumped against the side window, the interior suddenly spackled with crimson death. The driver slammed on the brakes and took a hard right turn. As he straightened out, he reached a hand to his chest and glanced at it, taking in the thick blood with fading eyes as he braked to a crawl in a service alley.