by Matt Rogers
Fourteen men, not including the informant.
He’d dispatched two.
Which left twelve heavily armed, highly motivated hostiles to take care of.
Plus the scientists, whoever they were and wherever they were.
But the presence of the two mercenaries revealed one thing — the entire convoy hadn’t fled yet. The chimera virus was somewhere in this monastery, or underneath it. That gave Griffin all the motivation he needed to make the near-suicidal move of striding straight through the gargantuan wooden doors and stepping into one of the grandest entranceways he’d ever laid eyes on.
He soaked in the sights in a heartbeat. It was similar in layout to the military-occupied Dzong, only three or four times larger. The ceiling was domed and soared far over Griffin’s head. The walls and floors were made of smooth grey stone, and the rounded shape of the structure made it seem like the entire space was a monolithic antechamber to the mountain itself. Griffin thought of the cave complex beneath his feet and realised the fortress was exactly that.
More importantly, there were four or five men spread out across the largely-empty space, each of them dressed in similar unidentifiable khaki fatigues. A couple wore plain T-shirts above their khaki pants, revealing muscle-bound physiques.
Griffin figured it was an aspect of the job to appear imposing, especially when one’s occupation involved providing paramilitary services to rogue scientists in the mountains of Bhutan.
So a fistfight simply wouldn’t work — namely because everyone in the space was armed and seemingly prepared for combat. Despite that, they were spread out awkwardly, having adopted no particular formation or prepared for what strode through the doors.
‘What the fuck?’ one of the men cursed, speaking English with a thick European accent. ‘What happened?’
‘He was armed,’ Griffin spat, thanking the heavens that the man he’d killed also hailed from Texas. It was effortless to impersonate the guy’s accent, because Griffin shared it.
There was an awkward pause as the nearest man scrutinised him — perhaps particular intonations in his tone hadn’t added up with the man he’d killed. Then the guy shook it off and continued.
‘Where is he?’
‘Dead. He hit our man though.’ Griffin nodded in the direction of the semiconscious guy he was carrying on one arm.
‘Our man?’ one of the mercenaries up the back said, his voice echoing across the cavernous space.
I don’t know his goddamn name, Griffin thought.
He weighed the options and came up short regarding any believable way to proceed. The more he kept talking, the greater chances these men would have to pick up on the subtle cues and realise he wasn’t who he was pretending to be.
‘Take that fucking balaclava off,’ another voice snarled. ‘Why are you wearing it in the first place?’
Griffin couldn’t do that, because then his long black hair would spill out and the jig would be up.
He’d hoped to worm his way into a more advantageous position before shit hit the fan, but it seemed like this was as good as he was going to get.
He dropped the guy on his arm to the stone floor, raised the INSAS rifle to his shoulder and let off the fastest burst of his life.
11
He had the narrowest window of time with which to take advantage of the element of surprise, and he used it to the best of his abilities.
There were two men closest to him with bulky, fearsome-looking weapons in their hands, so Griffin simply turned to each of them and drilled a couple of rounds through their chests. They weren’t wearing protective gear of any kind, probably assuming the confrontation with the single straggler didn’t have a hope of reaching the monastery itself.
And that was why Griffin succeeded.
The tide turned at once — the remaining mercenaries stopped in their tracks as automatic gunfire roared into existence, resonating off the surrounding walls. A couple had been in the process of instinctually moving toward Griffin and the injured hostile.
A natural reaction to seeing a wounded comrade.
But suddenly the comrade had begun to unload bullets in their general direction, which had no doubt overridden their motor functions and thrown them into combat mode at the drop of a hat. Griffin targeted one of the men — who was in the process of gathering his weapon off his shoulder strap — and fired a short three-round burst. Things were unfolding too fast to get a full picture of the damage he’d inflicted, but the guy dropped all the same. Blood sprayed, and the two men Griffin had shot first finished cascading to the floor.
Three down.
There was one guy left in the entranceway. Cortisol flooded Griffin’s senses and he battled to control it — adrenalin threatened to overwhelm him. His insides constricted with such tension that for a moment he thought he might pass out from the sheer overload of sensations that came with a battle rush. But he kept his wits about him and wheeled to aim at the final man.
This guy was well over six feet tall.
A blessing in disguise, considering he was the furthest from the entrance.
And there was also the fact that he was raising his sidearm in Griffin’s direction.
Griffin saw a muzzle flash, but that in itself proved the guy had missed. If the bullet had struck home he would have seen nothing except a sudden darkness, like a television being pulled out of the power switch. The blinding flash of light lit up his vision and the distant roar of a gunshot sounded a moment later, hitting Griffin’s ears at the same time he fired a burst of his own.
Against a pistol, in a one-on-one duel, an INSAS rifle won almost every time.
The final man twisted and jerked as his torso was riddled with bullets from Griffin’s rifle. He dropped too, less than a second after his three friends.
Barely any time at all had unfolded since chaos had broken out.
Griffin twisted on his heel, took aim, and sent a final unsuppressed round through the forehead of the man he’d carried into the fortress, putting the guy out of his misery. The guy had been in enough pain already, and Griffin felt no need to prolong his suffering.
But he couldn’t stay still for a moment.
Despite the ringing in his ears — even though the firefight had taken place in a cavernous space, it had impaired his hearing all the same — soft distant outcries of surprise floated through the ancient temple. Griffin tried to make sense of where the voices were coming from, but too much was happening at once. He counted five corpses in the entranceway, added an extra tally mark for the man he’d beat down outside the monastery, and concluded that there were eight hostiles left to deal with if Lars’ information was in any way accurate.
And he had no reason to doubt it.
But early success had nothing to do with what was to follow. The voices grew closer, seemingly echoing from everywhere at once, and Griffin realised if he didn’t get the hell off open ground he would be shot down from any number of vantage points across the space.
He looked ahead and saw a grand staircase twisting up in two prongs to a landing overlooking the entire lobby. The enormous clay blocks composing the structure itself were whitewashed, but fading under the ravages of time. Nevertheless the integrity was sound, and as Griffin’s hearing recovered he realised the voices were condensed into the space behind the landing.
There would be armed men on that landing in seconds.
He didn’t doubt it.
He simply had to move.
He lowered the INSAS rifle off his shoulder and broke out into a sprint, leapfrogging a couple of the nearest corpses. He could barely hear the sound of his boots on the stone floor, drowned out by the sound of his heartbeat throbbing in his ears and the roaring of adrenalin clouding his senses in a foggy haze. Despite that he made it to the base of the two spiralling staircases in record time, spurred on by nerves. The neighbouring structures twisted around to a meeting point far above Griffin’s head, converging on the landing in the shape of an hourglass.
; Griffin chose the left-hand staircase at random and hurried up the stone steps, taking them three or four at a time.
At the top of the staircase a figure materialised.
Griffin’s heart skipped a beat and he made to raise the rifle in the direction of the threat, but a single glance at the man above him revealed the guy hadn’t quite put the scene together yet.
‘You hurt?’ the guy called down as Griffin thundered towards him.
Griffin realised he was still wearing the balaclava, and breathed a silent sigh of relief as he figured he’d carved out a narrow window with which to capitalise on the confusion.
‘No,’ he said, and fired two rounds through the guy’s throat.
12
The mercenary’s limbs slackened just as Griffin reached the top of the staircase and burst out onto the landing.
He couldn’t slow his momentum — and he didn’t want to in any case — so he simply shouldered the now-dead man aside and wheeled on the spot, searching for any sign of nearby hostiles. He realised he’d spun in the wrong direction as soon as he sensed movement out of the corner of his eye, and for an instant he thought his time was up. He nearly closed his eyes in anticipation for the gunshot he knew would follow, but instead of a lead round punching through the side of his head he caught a moving body to the side of his torso, all the kinetic energy transferring across.
Someone had crash-tackled him.
As soon as he sensed the oncoming impact — as thunderous as it may be — he knew he could utilise the momentum to his own advantage. He dropped his hips half a foot lower as soon as the guy slammed into him, bending at the knees to lever the odds in his favour. When the impact happened, Griffin wrapped one hand around the hostile’s waist and hurled the guy over the top of him.
A standard judo throw.
The guy spun over Griffin’s lowered torso and slammed into the stone floor on the other side, limbs flailing in all directions. Griffin had executed the throw with precision but it took him off his feet all the same — in the carnage, he wasn’t able to maintain a hold of his rifle. It sandwiched awkwardly between himself and the guy he was coming down on top of, and both of them jolted in fright as the weapon went off between them.
The bullet went wide, slicing out from between the brawl, and both of them burst into action as soon as they realised they were unharmed. Griffin lost all awareness of where the gun had ended up — somewhere underneath him, no doubt — but any attempt to make a snatch for it would leave him vulnerable, exposed to a punch to the back of the head. In a situation like this, where testosterone crackled in the air and nervous energy reached a fever pitch, he knew it would only take one strike to put him out of the equation for good.
So instead of making a snatch for the rifle he secured an advantageous position on top of the newly materialised combatant and crashed a fist into the underside of the guy’s jaw.
Now that he had a window in time with which to gather his thoughts, he took a look at the guy underneath him. The man was Caucasian, somewhere in his thirties, with one hell of a mean mug and deep-seated wrinkles etched into his forehead. His eyes were cold and soulless, a characteristic Griffin imagined was required in the kind of field the man operated in.
Up close and personal, it was the first opportunity Griffin had to study one of the mercenaries. The rest of the altercation had been an endless blur of blood and steel.
He studied how his punch thundered into the man’s throat and came away satisfied with the result. Inadvertently, he took a moment to compose himself and load up for another devastating punch, which he considered a potential fight-ending blow.
He swung back a fist, arching it high into the air, ready to bring it down on the soft tissue of the guy’s neck and hinder him for long enough to fetch the INSAS rifle and finish the job.
Then that all fell apart.
As he reared up on his haunches, he made the amateur mistake of putting enough distance between himself and his opponent for the guy to throw a desperate strike. After all, Griffin had considerably little experience in situations like these. He was making it all up as he went along. Training could only take you so far.
So when he swung his fist back, the mercenary underneath him came up with a picture-perfect elbow, putting his heart and soul into the blow. Griffin had been hit countless times before in training, but any kind of controlled sparring had some level of restraint that needed to be showed. Even in a street fight, no-one was looking to kill the other party. Here, in this ancient fortress buried in the mountains of Bhutan, it was life or death.
Which injected the elbow thrown in Griffin’s direction with enough force to cause serious damage if it connected.
It did.
Griffin felt a sickening thwack against the side of his head, and his own punch fell apart. He’d cocked his arm right back in preparation to bring it down with thunderous ferocity, but now a switch snapped in his brain and his arms and legs turned to jelly.
Fuck.
He was fully conscious. Fully aware of his surroundings. But something had rattled inside his skull, and it seemed as if he’d turned horrifically drunk for a few vital seconds.
Panicking, Griffin tumbled off the mercenary and staggered to his feet, putting as much space between himself and danger as he could during the vital seconds it would take to recover.
If he couldn’t regain his composure in the next few moments, he would certainly die.
Terror leeched through him as he stumbled across the landing like a drugged lunatic.
13
Eyes wide, brain reeling, Colt Griffin clawed for survival.
He had never experienced this before. A couple of times on the sparring mats, during his years of extensive combat training, a stray shot had slipped through his guard and accidentally knocked him unconscious. It was part of the job description. Flash knockouts were uncommon, but they happened if you put enough hours into training at maximum capacity. But they involved a sudden departure from the realm of consciousness, an overwhelming darkness that shut the lights out in an instant.
This was different.
It was cerebral, and raw, and terrifying.
He’d been “rocked”, a term he was all too familiar with, save for having any true first-hand experience with the sensation. Now he understood it all at once. He tried to plant his foot on the stone floor to stabilise himself and it lurched uncontrollably to one side, the knee buckling as Griffin tried to stay on his feet. He reached out with the other foot and it behaved in similar fashion. For a wild moment he lurched across the landing with the gait of a newborn giraffe. There was no time to think about how ridiculous he looked. He sensed a surge of movement behind him and realised the mercenary was closing in, charging after Griffin in an attempt to capitalise on his hindered state.
Griffin didn’t bother looking back. Any attempt to put up a fight would be disastrous, considering that he could barely keep his feet underneath him. His brain swam, clouding his vision and throwing his equilibrium off. Nausea crept up his insides as he struggled to return to full awareness.
Still, the mercenary closed in.
Griffin sensed the man right behind him and knew another crash-tackle was inevitable. He was in no shape to execute another judo throw, let alone put up any kind of resistance. He accepted the fact that he would be taken off his feet within a couple of seconds…
…and then he put his foot down and it held.
There was barely anything behind the motion, but it supercharged him with a newfound confidence. It was like snatching onto a handhold right before he was set to tumble off a cliff. He established the slightest amount of balance and sucked in a deep breath of air, throwing caution to the wind.
He would get one attempt at a strike.
Still mentally foggy, he wheeled on the spot and launched a high kick with as much technique and power as he could muster given the circumstances. The toe of his combat boot darted through the air, and Griffin was moving so fast that he barely had t
ime to check whether he’d aimed for the right location. He’d simply thrown it with reckless abandon, aware that if it didn’t connect it would throw him off his feet and leave him at the mercy of a furious, bloodthirsty paramilitary thug.
But it connected.
Griffin didn’t see the impact — he only heard the brutal thud of his boot slamming against someone’s jaw. The kick connected with such ferocity that it sent his leg hurtling back in the other direction, ricocheting off the guy’s face with a bang similar to a gunshot. Griffin knew he’d broken bones in the man’s face, which was often enough to end the fight right then and there.
For good measure, Griffin sized up the portion of the landing where the thug had come to a crashing, frozen halt and hurled himself across the space. He clotheslined the guy across the chest, slamming an arm against his sternum with two hundred pounds of bodyweight behind it.
The guy lurched back into the ancient railing…
…and toppled over the edge of the landing.
A long second passed before the crunch from far below echoed off the walls. Griffin didn’t even bother looking down to check whether the man was dead, or simply gravely injured. Frankly, he didn’t have time. It might have been merciful to try and put the guy out of his misery but Griffin couldn’t hold onto thoughts like that for any longer than necessary. He was still out on wide open ground, surrounded by an unknown floor plan, with — if his estimations were right — six hostiles still unaccounted for.
And that didn’t take into consideration the horde of scientists somewhere below the monastery, whoever they were and however many of them there were. Sure, they might not have combat experience, but Griffin didn’t take anything lightly. A man with a purpose and a shot of adrenalin to the veins could do all kinds of wonders. And if the chimera virus was as sinister as Lars’ rudimentary explanation had indicated, then even one scientist escaping through the cave complex would prove disastrous.