The talking turned into coughing. Violent coughing, hacking, spluttering. People screamed. It seemed to come from every direction. What the hell was going on out there?
Suddenly Jay was at his side. ‘Now! Let’s go!’
He whisked Damien from the room and blindly down the passageway, reuniting with two jaguar knights at the front of the building. Damien almost tripped over their dead friend, the third jaguar knight. Under the moonlight that shone through the windows, they exchanged a grim nod. Clouds of white mist drifted outside. Damien saw clusters of soldiers at the east and west sides of the compound. They had collapsed onto their hands and knees, trying to breathe, trying to see. None of them wore masks.
‘He came,’ Aviary whispered.
‘Who?’ Grace said.
‘Abraham. It’s their CS gas.’
Damien caught a sliver of moonlight on Grace’s face. She was pulling a mask from her backpack. ‘Masks on,’ she said. ‘Go!’
She was on her feet in an instant and disappearing into the night ahead.
Damien dropped his backpack and plucked the gas mask from it, grateful they’d packed them. Jay already had his mask on and was up and moving swiftly in front. Damien checked that Aviary had her mask on properly before fastening his on. He let Aviary go first, then took up his carbine and followed her as she tracked Jay. Along the edges of his vision he saw movement: soldiers staggering, trying to regain control of their senses. No rounds their way, yet.
Aviary adjusted her path to the right, moving around what Damien assumed to be the adjacent building. He increased his speed, crossing the open space between the building and the manhole. For a moment, he saw a ripple of movement at the manhole cover. Grace. She’d be checking for soldiers or booby traps.
Damien slowed as they approached the manhole cover, waiting for Grace to clamber inside. Jay got Aviary inside and motioned for Damien to go through next. Damien slung his carbine over his backpack and, in the darkness, used his hands to locate the manhole cover. He found the first rung on the ladder and guessed the rest. He climbed to the bottom and felt Grace’s hand close over his.
Chapter Forty-Seven
‘Chickenhead said there’s no movement outside,’ DC told Sophia. ‘That’s the good news. You want the bad news?’
Sophia didn’t take her eyes off the readouts in front of her. ‘Hit me.’
‘Blue Berets are the least of our concerns right now. The hurricane’s hit. Chickenhead can barely hold himself to the ground, let alone keep an eye on the installation.’
‘Great,’ Sophia said.
Nasira appeared in the control room, pistol in hand. ‘I’ve opened the door.’
‘Everything wrapped up?’ Sophia asked.
DC was holding a metal box that contained their satphone, smartphone, Sophia’s receiver and night-vision goggles wrapped in a towel to insulate them. He gave Sophia a nod.
Sophia turned back to the computer and entered the command to generate her determined pulse of electrical current. She watched as the voltage needle flickered. Next to it, the electrical field spiked for a fraction of a second, then dropped. And with it, darkness.
She heard DC open the metal box and start unwrapping their night-vision goggles. She worked her way carefully toward him, her vision completely shot. She felt his hand in hers, his skin warm and smooth. The goggles slipped into her grasp. She turned them on, relieved to see they worked.
DC had the satphone in his other hand, using its screen as a torch to guide Nasira to the front door. Sophia kept the goggles to her eyes and followed. Nasira had her Sig trained on the front door. Sophia could hear the wind thrumming into the concrete building outside and wondered just how bad it had gotten out there.
Stepping past the decapitated body, Nasira opened the exterior door. Rain thrashed the ground outside at a steep angle. Wind howled around them. Sophia peered through her goggles. Debris smeared the air. The searchlights flared in her goggles but she was able to tell the position of the lights hadn’t shifted. The guards who’d once stood in the towers were no longer there. The weather had seen to it that the installation’s security presence was at an all-time low.
Goggles slung around her neck, she reached for her pistol and moved out, bracing herself against the wall to stop the wind from knocking her over. Squinting against the debris, she made it to the wall they’d scaled earlier. She kneeled on the wet concrete and cupped her hands.
DC was first. She hoisted him up. Wind roared around her. If he said something to her she couldn’t hear it. He remained on top of the wall for a moment before giving her the thumbs up. She lifted Nasira to the wall and waited for her to clamber over. Nasira did her same trick as before, reaching down to grab Sophia. Sophia was almost blinded by the wind and debris. She missed Nasira by a foot on her first run-up, her boots slipping on the wet concrete and slamming her knee into the wall. She dropped to her feet, clenching her teeth to fight through the pain. Her leg felt numb and didn’t want to function. She limped back for another run-up, putting her weight on her good foot. She had to get over this wall. There was no other option.
Gunfire erupted nearby. She heard it reverberate across the rain-slicked installation. It was hard to tell where it was coming from, but it seemed to be from outside the inner concrete compound. Nasira, still perched on the wall, was soaked to the bone. She had her hand outstretched, eyes clenched shut against the debris.
Sophia took another run-up. Her banged knee sent stabs of pain through her with every step but she ignored it. She stepped up the wall with her good leg, her fingers just meeting Nasira’s. Their hands were slippery and she couldn’t clamp around Nasira’s wrist. But Nasira held tight, mashing Sophia’s fingers together as she pulled her up. It felt to Sophia like her fingers were being dislocated but she didn’t care. She reached her other arm up and gripped Nasira’s belt, hoping DC had anchored Nasira from the other side of the wall. She got her other hand onto the belt too, then transferred her better hand to the edge of the concrete wall. Pulling herself onto her stomach, she looked down to see a soldier aim his carbine at DC.
The soldier shuddered and dropped where he stood. A flicker of muzzle flash from the fence line. Chickenhead. The situation was hot now; they had to get out as quickly as possible.
She pulled herself over the wall and landed on the ground a second after Nasira. Her landing wasn’t in darkness this time but it wasn’t as neat as the first one. She stumbled to her knees and struggled to get back up. With Chickenhead lying down covering fire, she didn’t bother with rear security and ran with Nasira and DC to the hurricane fence. Chickenhead wriggled from his camouflage, his position already compromised by his muzzle flash, and wrenched open their triangle of severed fence. DC crawled through, Nasira after him. Sophia threw herself on her stomach and slid underneath, the wet ground carrying her all the way. Chickenhead let off another burst that made her ears ring, and then they were on their way out.
It took them almost ten minutes to leg it back to the Honda. By the time they reached it, she was almost out of breath and her banged knee was annoying the hell out of her.
The wind howled past them. She was covered in mud and drenched by rain. She turned to inspect the beachfront. The water was fiercely dark, lashing up past the sand, foam spraying across her. The salt stung her eyes. The clouds above them were as black as obsidian and looked about to swallow the entire island.
She’d marked the correct auto tryout key with duct tape so it was an easy find in the rain and wind. She shoved it in the door, unlocked the car for everyone and threw herself inside. All four doors shut in symphony. She quickly ran through the emergency brake and key routine. Branches crashed and scraped across the dashboard as trees around them tore apart.
‘Hurry up,’ Chickenhead said from the back seat.
Sophia could barely hear the engine over the chaos outside. She dragged the car out of its spot and blasted it down the road. The wind rattled the windows. She ignored it and focused. Everyone
had their weapons ready, just in case.
‘That was almost a little too easy,’ Nasira said.
Exactly what Sophia was thinking, but she didn’t want to say it. ‘The weather might’ve slowed them down some.’
‘Something working in our favor,’ DC said. ‘Now wouldn’t that be a nice change.’
Sophia took a corner hard. The Honda lost traction briefly, then gripped again. She lined up on the causeway and accelerated. She wanted off this island as soon as possible. At the same time, she kept her focus on any vehicles that might seem out of place. Any surveillance or pursuit teams; any reinforcements rattling in to lock down the installation. Or the island itself.
The causeway stretched out over the once blue water, now jagged and dark, foaming beneath them. She had to adjust her steering to keep the Honda on a straight line. Up ahead, she could make out two parked cars, black. She tossed her goggles to DC so he could have a look.
‘That’s not good,’ he said, peering through them.
‘What’s the go?’ Chickenhead said.
Sophia planted her foot to the floor. The Honda surged ahead, aiming directly between the cars.
‘Sophia,’ DC said.
‘What?’
‘You need to stop.’
‘That’s not an option,’ she said.
As they approached, she could make out figures in black modular vests and boots, carbines in hands.
‘Everyone down,’ she said.
As she drove between the two cars, she braced herself for gunfire. But none came.
Before the Honda, a row of spikes flipped upright, pointing at her wheels.
‘Shit.’
She’d seen it too late. Her first mistake was not checking the local weather; her second, not factoring in the possibility of spikes. If she hit the brakes she’d lose control of the car. She punched the car through the spikes and heard the pop as they tore into the rubber. The Honda began to wobble, the hurricane winds buffeting hard. She kept her corrections as fine as she could, the tires beneath her thrumming the causeway as they deflated. She kept her foot off the gas and tried to straighten up, but a gale of wind roared across the causeway, stripping road signs from poles and knocking the Honda to the right. Sophia fought to adjust the sharp turn. It was a losing battle. She knew she’d lost control the moment she’d hit the spikes and everything afterward was just prolonging the inevitable.
The Honda tipped over in mid-swerve. Through her side window, the road came rushing to meet her. She closed her eyes and loosened her arms, bracing for the impact. The Honda crunched onto one side and rolled upside down. The world smeared around her. Rain smashed through, stinging her face. The windshield shattered into tiny pieces but held in place with safety film. The Honda scraped across the causeway on its roof before coming to a standstill against a concrete barrier with a perfunctory crunch.
Through her smashed open window, she could see the road block in its entirety. She counted five soldiers, or a tactical police unit, she wasn’t quite sure. They could even be Blue Berets, it was hard to tell from this far. She fumbled inside her jeans, searching for her pistol. Three rounds weren’t going to help her now.
The soldiers started moving toward the Honda, carbines ready.
Behind them, one of their vehicles erupted into a ball of flame. Sophia turned her head to protect herself from shrapnel. It clanged and pinged across the Honda’s underside. When she looked again, two soldiers were on fire and another three were clambering back to their feet. She saw a small tongue of flame across the concrete barrier. It flickered curiously, coughing in the screaming wind. Muzzle flash.
The burning soldiers collapsed. Then another soldier went down. No one turned to face the threat — they couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the hurricane. They were being picked off and they didn’t even know it. The surviving two soldiers rushed toward Sophia, carbines aimed at her. They shouted something, but their words fell silent on her ringing ears.
Her neck was sore, but she was able to turn her head without too much pain. Either that or the fresh pain in her ankle was intense enough that it overrode everything else. Next to her, DC was dazed but conscious. He didn’t have any blood on him; a promising sign. He didn’t have a weapon in his hand either though.
‘Blue Berets,’ he whispered.
She checked her rear-vision mirror but it had snapped off. Both side mirrors had disintegrated somewhere back along the causeway so she couldn’t see Nasira and Chickenhead.
A man leaped down to the asphalt beside the blazing vehicle, dark overcoat whipping in the gale. He fired at another soldier Sophia hadn’t spotted, then turned to face the Honda. His pistol coughed two more rounds and the soldiers heading for her dropped.
The man strode toward the Honda, pausing only briefly to shoot the fallen soldiers in their necks, just under the helmet. Sophia recognized his bald head glistening in the rain.
‘Why are you here?’ she whispered, barely able to speak, as he came to a stop beside her.
‘Saving your skin,’ he said. ‘Not quite what you were expecting.’
‘What do you want from me?’ She reached slowly for her pistol.
‘What I want is the same thing you want.’ Denton reached in, his hand closing over hers. ‘There’s no need for that. At least, not yet.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
Sophia held an instant ice pack over her ankle. It wasn’t broken but it was in pretty bad shape. Denton was leaning against the motel room door, watching her.
‘How did you find us?’ she said.
‘All I had to do was sit and wait. I knew you would come.’
‘How long have you known I was in the country?’
‘Since the Fifth Column shot down those cargo planes in New York,’ Denton said. He nodded at DC. ‘This is a reunion I couldn’t afford to miss.’
‘We could’ve,’ DC said.
‘I never had the chance to congratulate you,’ Denton said to DC. ‘Smuggling those scientists out on a submarine, very clever. Without you, the Akhana never would’ve been possible.’
DC said nothing.
Nasira was holding her pistol in one hand, her gaze locked on Denton. Chickenhead was sitting on the end of a bed. Aside from Sophia’s ankle, they’d incurred little more than a few bruises and cuts from the crash. Nothing that required stitches. Sophia’s fingers and toes tingled. She had a strange metallic taste in her mouth that she couldn’t get rid of even after two refills of a water bottle.
Outside, the hurricane winds and rain had tapered off.
‘Eye of the storm,’ Denton said. ‘We’ll have to wait it out.’
He was right; they weren’t going anywhere for now. Whether Sophia liked it or not, she had to sit tight. And that was becoming increasingly difficult with Denton in the room.
‘I have a proposition for you,’ he said. ‘If you’re not interested, that’s fine. After the hurricane passes, I walk away.’
Sophia crossed her arms. ‘I’m not interested.’
‘There’s a fifth transmitter,’ he said.
‘Bullshit,’ she said.
‘I second that,’ Nasira said.
‘A super-array,’ Denton said.
He didn’t seem the least bit concerned by their disbelief, which bothered her.
‘While I applaud your job with the backup transmitters—’ he went on.
‘Backup transmitters?’ Sophia exploded. ‘What are you playing at? I know how you manipulate and it won’t work. Not now, not ever.’
She felt a tightness in her chest. She slowed her breathing to calm herself. Her teeth felt strange.
‘The super-array is underground and it’s shielded,’ Denton said. ‘If you could knock it out with a surface EMP, I’d have told you by now and you could’ve fried the joint before sundown.’
Just his words made her shiver with anger. She didn’t want him here. She wanted him dead. She should be dropping him right now and that would be the end of it. But if what he was sa
ying was even remotely true, she needed to know.
‘So what do you want me to do about it?’ she said.
‘I need it taken down,’ Denton said. ‘And so do you.’
‘Hell will freeze over before she works with your ass,’ Nasira said, her pistol aimed directly at Denton.
His pistol was already pointing back at Nasira. ‘Hell just did,’ he said.
Sophia resisted the urge to reach for one of her Gerber knives. She was confident she could get in close and cut an artery before he could get a shot off. But she wasn’t about to risk Nasira’s life on that. And that pissed her off.
She looked over at Nasira’s pistol-wielding hand. It was trembling. Nasira’s pistol grip never trembled.
Denton’s fingers were clenched so tightly around the pistol it seemed unlikely he’d be able to squeeze off an accurate shot. He seemed to notice it too because he blinked and lowered his weapon. Sophia glanced down at her own hands. They were shaking. She couldn’t calm herself. Everything in the room was making her angry: DC’s irritating aloofness, Nasira’s barely-contained control, Denton’s self-assuredness, Chickenhead’s silent mourning of his fallen friend.
Sophia walked past Denton and looked out the window. A crowd of people strode past waving torches, poles, sticks with flames lit at their tips. Their murmurs slowly grew in volume.
‘This doesn’t look good,’ she said.
Denton was peering out the fisheye of the door. He punched the wood in frustration, then opened his hand to inspect it, curious at his own emotions. She exchanged a glance with him and looked back at the others. They were all thinking the same thing.
Nasira lowered her pistol. ‘They fucking beamed Miami, didn’t they?’
‘What?’ Chickenhead shouted, his cheeks pink.
‘They know we’re in the area,’ Denton said. ‘They want to slow us down.’
‘Well, what the hell do we do?’ Chickenhead said.
‘We should stay in here,’ Sophia said.
‘We should get the fuck out!’ Nasira yelled. She was breathing heavily.
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