by Mark Walden
‘We’re moving on our targets.’ Ghost addressed the masked men. ‘I want to impress upon you again the threat that this woman represents. Some of you here will be thinking that we have exaggerated that danger. If she gets past me, those men may very well be going home in body bags. You have been issued with non-lethal weaponry for a reason – we want her alive. Do I make myself clear?’
The men in the compartment nodded.
‘Good. Prep for drop. You will form a tactical cordon around the containment zone and wait for further orders. I will be going in alone.’
She turned and stepped back on to the flight deck.
‘There’s definitely something with G.L.O.V.E. technology signatures down there,’ Otto said.
‘Order the other choppers to break off and surround the area. Five-hundred-metre stand-off. I don’t want them to know we’re coming.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ The pilot relayed her instructions to the other helicopters over his headset.
‘I want to come with you,’ Otto said.
‘You’re too valuable,’ Ghost replied.
‘I’m sick of hearing that,’ Otto complained. ‘What use is all this training if I can’t use it?’
Ghost turned and looked at him for a moment. Her expression was, as usual, completely unreadable through her armoured white faceplate.
‘Very well,’ she said, turning to the squad leader on the other side of the hatch. ‘Give him a weapon.’
Raven had a vague sense of unease as she and Wing approached the abandoned lot where the Shroud was hidden. She knew she was probably just being jumpy after the dramatic events of earlier in the day, but at the same time she had learnt long ago that it paid to listen to her instincts.
‘Wait here,’ she said to Wing as they entered the lot. He raised his eyebrows as if to ask what was bothering her. She put a single finger to her lips, instructing him to keep quiet. Then she carefully slipped the kitbag off her shoulder and placed it on the ground, unzipping it as gently as possible and reaching inside for her tactical harness and swords. She’d had to take them off when they were walking through the city; it seemed fair to assume that they would have attracted unwanted attention.
‘Raven!’ Wing shouted suddenly, and she sensed movement behind her. She kicked backwards without thinking, aiming for head height, but felt her foot being caught and someone twisting her ankle with incredible strength, flipping her on to her back.
‘Hello again,’ Ghost said, standing over her. Raven rolled to her right as Ghost punched the ground, missing her head by just a few centimetres.
‘Wing!’ Raven called. ‘Get inside the building.’
Wing hesitated for a moment and then ran towards Ghost, launching a flying kick at her head with a yell. Ghost moved inhumanly quickly, ducking the kick and delivering a flat-palmed counter-blow to Wing’s stomach. He went down gasping for air.
‘I see you brought help this time,’ Ghost said calmly. ‘Not that it will make any difference.’
‘Wing! Go!’ Raven ordered him again. Wing struggled to his feet, still fighting for breath, while Raven got up and dropped into a defensive stance as Ghost advanced on her again. ‘One of us has to continue the search!’ Raven yelled.
That finally seemed to get through to Wing and he turned and ran into the abandoned building that loomed over the lot.
‘He won’t get away, you know,’ Ghost said as she walked calmly towards Raven, ‘and neither will you.’
Raven aimed a fast straight-fingered punch at Ghost’s windpipe, going for one of the softer unarmoured areas of her body. Ghost moved in a blur, catching Raven’s wrist when her fingertips were just millimetres from delivering what would have been a killing blow. Ghost twisted hard and Raven screamed as she felt pain shoot up her arm. Ghost followed up with a lightning-fast punch to Raven’s ribs that sent pain stabbing all the way up to her armpit.
‘Think a couple of ribs went there,’ Ghost taunted, releasing Raven and letting her stagger a few steps away. ‘Trent said he wanted you alive – he didn’t say anything about undamaged.’
Raven flew at her opponent with a cry of rage, delivering a kick straight to her chin. Ghost’s head snapped around with the impact and she took a couple of faltering steps back.
‘That’s more like it,’ she said, laughing, the sound made sinister and twisted by the synthesised edge to her voice. ‘It’s so much more fun when you’re angry.’
Raven was running out of ideas – that had been one of her best shots and it barely seemed to have broken the other woman’s stride.
‘Time to finish this,’ Ghost said, walking towards Raven again. She aimed a quick straight-legged kick, which Raven ducked, and followed through with a savage backhanded roundhouse punch that caught Raven squarely on the chin and knocked her to the ground. Raven tried to stand, dazed by the power of the blow, tasting blood in her mouth. Whatever Ghost was, she was not entirely human – no normal person hit that hard or that fast. Raven managed to get to her hands and knees and, ignoring the stabbing pain from her wrist, forced herself up on to one knee. She never felt the last blow from Ghost, the one to the back of her head that knocked her out cold.
Wing moved through the shadows of the abandoned building. He could hear no sounds of combat from outside. The woman in the white armour had moved faster than he had ever seen anyone move before. Including Raven. He moved towards a window overlooking the abandoned lot and cautiously peered out. Raven was lying immobile on the ground, clearly unconscious. The woman in white turned and looked up at the building and he quickly ducked. There was something about her that was undeniably . . . unsettling.
‘Don’t move,’ a voice said behind him. It was only two words, but Wing knew the voice almost as well as his own. Despite the instruction, he stood and slowly turned. There, standing just ten metres away from him, was Otto. He would have walked over and given him a rib-cracking bear hug had it not been for the fact that Otto was pointing a very large handgun straight at his chest. Wing could immediately see that there was something physically wrong with his friend. There were fine black lines, like inky capillaries, running over his cheeks, and his eyes were clouded and dark.
‘Otto, it is me,’ he said, smiling cautiously. ‘Wing.’
There was a flicker of what looked like a combination of confusion and pain on Otto’s face, but it disappeared in an instant.
‘I don’t know you,’ Otto replied, and shot him.
Nero watched the feed from the surveillance satellite, powerless to do anything about the events unfolding on the screen. The thermal imaging had shown the three helicopters move into position and drop off nearly forty men, who had closed in and surrounded the area where Raven’s Shroud had been located. He had watched as Raven and Wing were taken down, and he watched now as two stretchers were carried towards the waiting helicopters.
‘How far out are Colonel Francisco and his team?’ Nero asked.
‘Remaining flight time at current velocity is forty-five minutes and sixteen seconds,’ H.I.V.E.mind replied. Nero had missed the AI’s effortless precision, but as far as he was concerned, that simply translated as ‘too far away to help’.
‘Instruct him to stand off upon arrival. That area is too well defended to attempt an extraction now,’ Nero said, knowing that the Colonel would not like that. ‘Have the new tactical Shrouds prepped for launch. I want them there as soon as possible. Tell Chief Lewis that I want his best men on board. Any update on the position of Cypher’s Shroud?’ he finished.
‘Negative,’ H.I.V.E.mind replied. ‘Its tracking transponder has been disabled, and our inability to detect it using radar or satellite imaging suggests that it is fully cloaked.’
Nero had expected no less from Cypher. A psychopath he might be, stupid he most certainly was not.
‘There is a danger in allowing Raven’s Shroud to fall into threat agents’ hands,’ H.I.V.E.mind reminded him. ‘It employs proprietary G.L.O.V.E. technology. The navigation system is also a risk
– locational data regarding H.I.V.E. is stored within it. The data is heavily encrypted, but that might prove to be inadequate protection against Otto. Destruct sequence is primed and ready.’
It was not the navigational data on the Shroud’s computers that Nero was worried about. It was the knowledge in Natalya’s head and the unspeakable lengths that Trent might go to in order to extract it.
‘Do it,’ Nero ordered.
Ghost stood watching at the edge of the abandoned lot as the medical team passed her with the two stretchers.
‘You did well,’ she said as Otto approached.
‘It was too easy,’ Otto said. He chose not to tell her about the faint scream he had heard inside his head when he had pulled the trigger. ‘He said his name was Wing.’
‘Yes, I think I’ve met him before,’ Ghost said. ‘Was this the G.L.O.V.E. tech you tracked here?’ Ghost held out Raven’s damaged Blackbox.
‘No,’ Otto replied, tilting his head to one side for a moment as if listening to something, ‘but that thing’s tracking transponder is still active. You might want to destroy it.’
Ghost dropped the device to the floor and stamped on it with her boot heel, smashing it to pieces.
‘All quiet now,’ Otto said with a smile. ‘No, whatever I sensed was bigger. Hold on a moment.’ He closed his eyes and reached out with his abilities. ‘There you are,’ he said quietly.
Fifty metres away, on the other side of the lot, there was a shimmering in the air and then Raven’s Shroud uncloaked.
‘Excellent,’ Ghost said. ‘We’ve waited a long time to get our hands on one of these.’
Otto felt something pass through the command pathways of the Shroud and his eyes shot open.
‘Get down!’ he yelled, pushing Ghost behind the wall of a nearby building. A moment later the Shroud was completely destroyed by an enormous explosion, blazing debris scattering in all directions.
‘How annoying,’ Ghost said, looking out from behind the wall at the smouldering crater that was all that remained of the drop ship.
Otto felt an odd sensation for a moment, like an echo of the destroyed Shroud’s systems just at the edge of his senses. He dismissed it as a glitch.
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ he said. ‘Once H.I.V.E. is ours, we’ll have as many as we need.’
Several kilometres away, high in the sky, Cypher watched as the Shroud that was on the ground exploded. The flare of the detonation whited out the sensors in the high-definition camera mounted on the nose of his own drop ship for a few seconds before they normalised. He tracked the camera over to the helicopter several blocks away that was currently loading two stretchers on board, zoomed in as far as the camera would allow and studied the figures on the gurneys. One was Raven and the other was his son. Cypher could not tell anything about the boy’s injuries from the grainy image, but he hoped for the sake of whoever had done this that he was alive. Whatever Wing’s condition, there was no way he was leaving him in their hands.
‘When that helicopter takes off you are going to follow it. Stay cloaked and don’t get too close. If you lose track of it, I’ll put a bullet in your skull. Understood?’
The pilot just nodded, swallowing nervously. Cypher climbed down the ladder to the three girls handcuffed to the passenger seats that ran along the walls of the cargo compartment. If looks could kill, he would have been a smouldering pile of ash on the floor, he thought to himself with some amusement.
‘Ladies, we are taking an unscheduled diversion,’ Cypher said with a smile. ‘Your continued cooperation would be appreciated.’
‘Do we have any choice?’ Shelby asked.
‘No, of course not,’ Cypher replied, ‘but you’re all still alive at the moment, aren’t you? Let’s see if we can keep it that way, shall we?’
The truth was that although he had disabled the Shroud’s tracking transponder, he had no way of knowing if Nero had some other way of tracking their position. At least with these three on board it was unlikely that Nero would just send an interceptor to shoot them down.
‘Wing’s never going to forgive you for this, you know,’ Laura said angrily.
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Cypher said.
‘He’ll throw you off that bridge when you come to it, more like,’ Shelby said with a nasty smile.
‘Yeah, Wing’s going to . . .’ Lucy said, but fell silent as Cypher pointed his pistol straight at her head and cocked the hammer.
‘There is an old saying that children should be seen and not heard,’ Cypher said, his smile vanishing, ‘that applies particularly to you, my little Contessa. In fact, I think we’re all going to play a new game called first to speak gets their brain spattered all over the bulkhead.’
The girls all stared back at him in hate-filled silence.
‘Excellent, you all seem to have grasped the rules,’ Cypher said, lowering the gun. ‘How Nero puts up with you twenty-four hours a day, I really do not know.’
He pulled the device that he had built to neutralise Overlord from his pocket and tossed it on to the seat next to him.
‘We won’t be needing that any more,’ he said, smiling at the girls. ‘You know, I really think it would have worked, but without Wing’s half of the medallion it’s useless; it would have almost certainly killed the boy anyway. And in any case, this –’ he held up the pistol he had shot the H.I.V.E. guard dead with – ‘is much more effective.’
‘Raven is on her way back to you,’ Ghost said, her image jumping slightly on the video screen as she walked. ‘She’s injured, but she’ll live – for a while at least.’
‘That is excellent news,’ Trent said, sitting back in his chair. ‘I knew I could rely on you.’
‘We almost had our hands on one of Nero’s stealth drop ships too,’ Ghost continued, ‘but it was remotely destroyed. We did get one unexpected bonus though – we captured one of the H.I.V.E. brats as well.’
‘Good,’ Trent replied. ‘Nero is unusually protective of them, and one can never have too much leverage.’
‘And there’s someone here who wants to speak to you,’ she said, handing her communicator to someone. The screen was suddenly filled with the podgy, moustachioed face of a very angry man.
‘Señor Trent,’ the man said angrily.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mister . . .’
‘My name is Luis Fernandez de Souza and I happen to be the chief of police.’
‘What can I do for you, Señor de Souza?’ Trent replied casually.
‘You can start by explaining to me why a H.O.P.E. team has just mounted a tactical operation in my city without anyone informing me first,’ de Souza said angrily, his face getting redder.
‘I do not need to inform you,’ Trent replied. ‘We were neutralising a terrorist threat. The same person, in fact, who was responsible for the incident at Mount Corcovado earlier today. If you have a problem with that I suggest you take it up with your superiors and stop wasting my time.’
‘I report directly to the President, Mr Trent – you want I should take this up with him?’
‘By all means. It won’t make the slightest bit of difference.’
‘Just who the hell do you people think you are?!’ de Souza yelled furiously. ‘You have no jurisdiction here.’
‘We are H.O.P.E., Señor de Souza,’ Trent replied, a sudden nasty edge to his voice. ‘We have jurisdiction everywhere.’
The water thundered over the massive waterfall behind the floodlit clearing. There, carved out of the Amazonian forest, was a military encampment with several long barracks and two heavy concrete bunkers by the front gate. Within the compound H.O.P.E. troops were performing drills and training exercises, while off to either side loomed watchtowers bristling with guns. Parked further back inside the base were three bulky all-terrain troop transports with heavy machine guns mounted on their roofs. It was the sort of set-up you would need to fight a small war.
The three transport choppers came in low over the treetops.
Two of them touched down within the compound on a circular concrete pad, but the third moved towards the waterfall behind the base, hovering in front of the raging cascade. A couple of seconds later an enormous triangular stone slab slowly pushed forward from somewhere behind the wall of water, splitting the tumbling torrent in two and opening a gap in the waterfall like a pair of giant curtains, to reveal a hidden landing pad. The helicopter moved forward carefully and set down in the concealed hangar. Immediately the stone slab began to retract, hiding the secret bay once more behind a foaming white wall. Finally, huge concrete doors rolled shut between the bay and the waterfall, deadening the sound of the raging torrent and sealing the hidden facility securely. Trent watched as the loading ramp at the rear of the helicopter lowered and Ghost walked out, closely followed by Otto.
‘Welcome back,’ Trent said. ‘I take it your cargo is still intact.’
‘Yes,’ Ghost replied. ‘Raven woke up during the flight, but I managed to sedate her before she could cause any trouble. The boy is still out – the new neural shock rounds we’ve been issued with seem to be quite effective, though I still prefer the more lethal alternative.’
Trent watched as two stretchers were wheeled out from the back of the transport.
‘Transfer the boy to the holding facility,’ he said, ‘and take the woman to the interrogation area.’
The two soldiers nodded and pushed the gurneys away.
‘I am surprised they had no backup,’ he said as he watched them go.
‘By all accounts Raven normally operates alone,’ Otto replied, ‘though I doubt that Nero is unaware of her capture.’
‘I’ll give the order for the base security-alert level to be increased. I want to be ready if he tries something,’ Trent said to Otto before turning to Ghost. ‘Get to work on Raven. I want to know as soon as possible where Nero and Darkdoom are hiding. If he knows we’ve captured his pet assassin, Nero may try to relocate before we can extract any information from her.’