by Matt Rogers
‘I know,’ Slater said. ‘We can hold out until he makes it to—’
Another pair of missiles slammed home against the side of the supercarrier. He saw the intense flash in the distance, coupled with a devastating roar — but the most worrying factor was the groan that emanated from the runway underneath them.
‘What the hell was that?!’ Isla said.
Slater glanced at the stairs they had ascended moments earlier, spiralling down into darkness. The tarmac they stood on tilted slightly, and the warship buckled with the horrendous scream of collapsing supports echoing up through the ship.
The gunfire seemed to settle as the occupants of the supercarrier realised what was about to happen.
‘We need to get the fuck out of here,’ Slater said, his pulse pounding.
‘King…’ Isla said.
‘I’ll wait as long as I can. But before long it’ll turn to suicide if we do nothing. He’d do the same if it was me — I know it. Common sense has to prevail eventually.’
Isla’s face paled and she stared at the dark tunnel leading into the warship. ‘My God, I hope he’s not down there…’
14
King had never felt such terror.
It was like experiencing a nightmare. He sprinted down identical tunnels with no idea where he was headed, his mind fixated on one thing alone.
Survival.
At the same time, he heard thunderous explosions resonate throughout the supercarrier as crucial supports failed. Succumbing to the barrage of damage it had undertaken, ceilings collapsed and water began to flood the passages from an unknown source. Certainly not the ocean, or King would be dead by now. He figured the ship’s piping had burst.
He sloshed through freezing ankle-deep water. It restricted his movement, limiting the pace he could run at. With his breath pounding in his lungs, he darted round corners at a reckless pace, crashing off walls and scrambling for purchase on the slippery floor.
Just as he began to get his bearings, the door to his left burst open and a pair of paramilitary thugs crashed into him, spilling them all into the water.
They had been fleeing for their lives too, aware that the supercarrier was structurally compromised.
In the confusion, King kept hold of the Glock-22 he had lifted from the last mercenary he’d killed. He fired twice as he went down, acting out of instinct rather than measuring up his targets in clinical fashion. There was no time for deliberation.
Every second he spent fighting was another second where the ceiling could come down on his head.
The first shot went wide, but the second hit one of the mercenaries in the leg. The man screamed and buckled. Blood sloshed into the clearwater around his thigh.
The other guy swung a fist at King’s throat, with lethal intent behind it. His knuckles came whistling at the sensitive tissue in King’s neck. He raised his left arm to block the blow. The man’s knuckles crashed against King’s forearm, and the power behind the punch resonated up into his broken wrist. He snarled in pain and desperation and shot the man between the eyes with a single, punching round from the Glock.
The other guy was going nowhere fast, his leg crippled by the gunshot. He would bleed out, or die from the ship collapsing on them. King put him out of his misery with the fourth shot of the skirmish, which ended the battle entirely.
Leaving two dead corpses in his wake, he powered ahead, searching desperately for anything resembling an exit.
More pipes burst in the ceiling over his head and water cascaded down through the gaps in the framework. The brawl with the two mercenaries had soaked King from head-to-toe. He let the Glock-22 fall to his side and focused on pushing himself faster.
Being prepared for combat would only slow him down.
This was life or death, and it could come down to a matter of seconds.
He reached a T-junction at the end of the corridor and wheeled right, arms and legs pumping. He wasn’t sure exactly why — intuition, maybe — but it proved correct. Ahead lay a straight metal tunnel leading to a set of stairs that ascended into open air.
A sensation that King hadn’t experienced for quite some time.
He ran with everything in the tank, tuning out the supercarrier falling apart all around him. Despite being positioned somewhere in the centre of the warship, it seemed that the relentless attacks and explosions had created a snowball effect where certain structural supports failed one after the other.
Whether his vision was deceiving him or not, he swore the ceiling sagged slightly as he ran underneath its weight.
One shift in momentum and he would be crushed inside a mountain of steel.
A resonating boom echoed down the corridor behind him. He flashed a glance over his shoulder and saw water flooding the hallway. One of the walls collapsed, snapping at its edges. The thick slab of metal dropped into the corridor, setting off a chain reaction.
‘Shit,’ King whispered under his breath.
He turned and tore toward the stairwell, sweating profusely but intensely cold at the same time. Ahead, he spotted a figure stumbling in the same direction he was headed — wearing military uniform that didn’t look official.
King raised the barrel of his Glock-22 intuitively, but quickly recognised the mop of thick black hair.
Ramsay…
He considered the moral dilemma for only a moment. Out of principle, he wouldn’t gun down a United States official, no matter what capacity they operated in. Ramsay seemed to be hurt badly, having trouble walking. King decided to leave him to his own devices, neither rescuing or killing him. He powered straight past the man, leaving him in his wake.
‘Jason…’ Ramsay moaned.
King didn’t look back. He thought of the prisoner lying dead in the decoy cell, shot to pieces for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In his eyes, Ramsay had it lucky.
He vaulted up the steps, taking them three at a time, and launched out into a raging storm. It seemed like all his surroundings were on fire. He stared up at the gargantuan control tower, dwarfing him completely. Fiery debris fell in great chunks from the tower, which had been torn to shreds.
He searched for the source of all the commotion, and found it in the three Mi-28 attack helicopters hovering around the perimeter of the supercarrier. They continued to unleash their arsenal of firepower into the sides of the warship, inflicting as much damage as they could.
King grimaced.
They were here to silence him — but they likely figured that if they took the entire ship down, it would guarantee a successful operation.
He didn’t blame them for such a brash manoeuvre. They had a death wish if they were willing to attack a U.S. military vessel in the first place.
They might as well go all out while they were at it.
In the distance, through the sheets of rain and the muzzle flares signifying automatic gunfire, King spotted two silhouettes clambering into one of the aircrafts lining the runway. It was one of the only vehicles that hadn’t been destroyed by the attack choppers, resting idly in the near darkness with rainwater dripping off its gunmetal grey hull.
An AV-8B Harrier II Jump Jet.
He thought he recognised the silhouettes as a man and a woman — potentially Slater and Isla. He estimated the jet was a couple of hundred feet away from his location. Between them, flaming wreckages of once-noble U.S. aircraft littered the runway, which the enemy forces were using as rudimentary cover in the firefight taking place.
King ducked as a volley of bullets sliced through the space twenty feet to his left.
He had two options.
Stay where he was and pray that the supercarrier remained in one piece while the firefight faded into nothingness.
Or make a break for the Harrier, sprinting across no man’s land in the war between paramilitary forces and the United States Navy. He glanced down at the Glock in his hand and figured he could take at least a few of the mercenaries to the grave during the mad
dash.
Briefly, he considered staying and joining the skirmish. His skills could be put to good use in this battle.
But for what?
To be thrown back in a cell and left to his own devices, before being handed over to the Russians — the same people he had fled from days earlier.
He shook his head. This wasn’t his life anymore. The military and special operations and serving his country had lost its edge. Ramsay had been the final straw — disillusioning him to the entire organisation.
He wanted peace now, more than he ever had.
His last retirement had been a half-hearted effort.
Now, he would flee from combat until he drew his dying breath.
He had never been more sure of anything in his entire life.
Chaos lay ahead in the form of intersecting lines of automatic rifle fire. King knew it could be suicide to charge willingly into the fray. There was no guarantee that the silhouettes near the Harrier were even Slater and Isla. If he miscalculated, he could run straight into two paramilitary troopers in the process of hijacking the military aircraft.
He assumed they would greet him with a bullet to the chest.
Then his options ran out as the entire supercarrier shifted again. Its internals continued falling to pieces. King felt the ground shake and dip underneath his feet. He looked up at the control tower to his left and — unless his eyes were playing tricks on him — he thought he saw it sway in the storm, still aflame.
You’ll die if you stay still.
He took off across the tarmac like a man possessed, making a beeline for the Harrier in the distance. As he ran, he considered who the hell was going to pilot the aircraft in the event that it truly was Slater and Isla he was running toward.
As he considered it, he saw the two figures duck into the cockpit and swing the door closed behind them.
Shit, he thought. Up the pace.
He pushed himself faster, narrowly avoiding a sharp burst of gunfire to his right. Still sprinting, he wheeled his aim in that direction and fired off a trio of blind shots, barely able to aim due to only having a single functioning hand.
It bought him time, though.
He made it a hundred feet away from where he had started when a hideous snapping sound came from everywhere at once.
King blanched and looked back over his shoulder, fearing the worst.
His suspicions were quickly confirmed.
The entire control tower was falling.
15
He pushed himself faster until the breath rasped in his throat and his lungs burned from the exertion.
Hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel were roaring toward the runway behind him. The first level must have collapsed, and the rest of the control tower simply fell, unsupported. Given its trajectory and his current position, he imagined the tip of the tower would impact directly where he stood. It was too wide to run out either side, and there were too many obstacles in his way.
He continued his mad sprint.
The gunfire seemed to die all at once as Navy soldiers and private mercenaries alike realised what was about to occur. King knew men were screaming, but he couldn’t hear anything over the din of the falling tower.
He bolted as fast as he could manage.
A hundred feet from the Harrier, he felt the booming crash as the tower hit the runway right behind him. He kept running, not daring to look back, unable to muster the courage to do anything but power in the same direction away from the impact zone.
Heat washed over his back, and the slight tremor of a shockwave propelled him forward. He almost lost his footing, but he righted himself…
… just as the tarmac splintered and cracked underneath his feet.
Heart thumping in his chest, he fled.
The floor was disappearing under him.
He took a deep breath and closed in on the jet. The back of his head had been singed by the incredible heat. Finally, when he had put enough distance between himself and the tower to risk a look over his shoulder, he craned his neck to see one of the more unbelievable sights of his long and storied career.
The supercarrier — already structurally compromised — had been too weak to support the weight of the falling control tower. When the enormous building had slammed length-wise into the runway, the pressure had been too immense and it had sunk straight through.
King stared at a gaping hole taking up the entire middle section of the warship. Bright light spilled out of the gash, where the destroyed tower rested on its side in a sinking pile of flaming rubble.
The ship wouldn’t remain in one piece for much longer.
King felt the ground shifting underneath him, just as it had done many times since the attack had begun. Yet this time was different. Now, it felt final.
The supercarrier had undertaken too much destruction.
It had reached the end of its life.
Great fissures opened up in the runway, chasms forming as the entire warship began to splinter and crack. The control tower continued to sink through the insides of the ship, destroying everything it touched. King felt like an ant amidst the destruction. The floating island dwarfed him, and it was starting to come apart.
The sight sent awe-inspiring chills down his spine.
He ran for the jet just a few dozen feet from his position.
This is it, he thought.
If his guess had been wrong, then the Harrier would launch itself into the sky and leave him behind, now under the control of a pair of hothead mercenaries. He ran alongside its wing before the pilot could fire up the engine, which would almost certainly fry him at such close proximity.
The cockpit popped open.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Will Slater yelled.
King looked up at the man sitting in the pilot’s seat and felt a wave of elation wash over him. He might just survive this, if everything went as planned.
He quickly realised that the Harrier was in fact a TAV-8B model, the trainer version of the aircraft designed to help new recruits adapt into seasoned pilots. King breathed relief — if Slater hadn’t stolen a two-seat model, the three of them would have struggled to fit in the single-seat cockpit of the standard AV-8B.
He glanced at the seat behind Slater and saw a familiar face. He exchanged a brief nod with Isla, who he hadn’t seen since she’d sent him into the Russian Far East on an unofficial personal task.
There was time to deal with that later.
‘I need that seat,’ he said.
‘Understood.’
She shimmied out of the seat and vaulted into the tiny space at the very back of the cockpit. King had no chance at fitting in that partition. He clambered up the handholds of the Harrier and dropped into the empty seat.
‘Been a while, Slater,’ he said.
‘Seven days,’ the man replied.
‘Felt like months.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I wasn’t aware you could pilot one of these,’ King said, running his hand along the smooth controls in front of his face. They were an incomprehensible mess to his eyes — he’d never done time in the Air Force.
‘Air Force,’ Slater said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Two years.’
There was little time for conversation. King felt the seat underneath him tremble, rattled by the crippling detonations rocking the supercarrier on which they rested. Slater entered a state of heightened awareness — King noted the shift in atmosphere — and set about methodically powering up the jump jet.
‘Harriers take off vertically,’ he muttered.
‘I know that,’ King said.
‘Just a precautionary warning in case you shit your pants.’
King didn’t smile. His nerves were barely holding together, let alone finding time for comic relief. Despite all his prior experience in situations where his life was on the line, the last few minutes had been almost too precarious to handle. His brain was still firing at a million miles an hour, struggling to comprehend just
how close he had come to being crushed by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he muttered.
The sooner he put the madness of this conflict behind him, the better.
Slater clinically moved from switch to switch, firing up certain mechanisms one after the other. It looked intensely complicated, and King let him work. He noticed Isla breathing heavily behind him, crammed into the narrow space. He glanced sideways and looked out at a handful of paramilitary troopers fleeing for their boats. Navy soldiers ran — similarly terrified — heading for any means of escape they could find.
Above, one of the Mi-28 choppers fired sporadically at the other end of the runway. The other two were nowhere to be seen, raining hellfire into the sides of the supercarrier.
‘Ready?’ Slater said.
‘Ready.’
King slammed his safety harness into place and gripped the edges of his seat as tight as his grip would allow. He hated any kind of flying that didn’t involve either a parachute on his back or a commercial airliner. He’d prefer to be skydiving out of a small plane instead of going down inside one.
The Harrier rocketed skyward and his stomach plummeted. He struggled to hold down the meagre lunch provided hours earlier, catching the vomit in his throat. Slater had abandoned a comfortable take-off in favour of maximum speed.
They shot off the supercarrier.
Rain and hail bombarded the reinforced glass all around them, turning their outward view into a murky blur. Slater squinted in an attempt to get his bearings…
… and a cluster of shots rang off the undercarriage of the Harrier.
‘Who’s firing on us?’ Isla said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ King replied. ‘Probably everyone.’
‘Here we go,’ Slater said. ‘Fuck … it’s been a while since I’ve…’
He worked the controls and the jump jet surged forward, relentlessly fast. King slammed against the back of his seat, and at the same time he heard Isla squashed into the rear of the cockpit by the G-forces. His vision dulled as Slater picked up supersonic speed and the jet shot away from the warship.