The Chimera: A Black Force Thriller (Black Force Shorts Book 2)

by Matt Rogers

  Because then the survivor — or survivors — would be out there in Bhutan, having witnessed the murder of their comrades and having watched their plans fall to pieces. Griffin couldn’t imagine the kind of rage that could build in the aftermath of that. He had already mown down eight of their men — a feat that would have astonished him had he taken the time to stop and actually consider it — and right now the remaining procession might be in sheer survival mode, hoarding as much of the chimera virus as they could before Griffin burst onto the scene.

  Because they might not know that he was just one man…

  These thoughts raced through Griffin’s head, and he started to try and grapple with them when he heard a cacophony of shouts ringing through the upper level of the fortress. He wheeled on the spot, searching for the source of the noise, but found nothing.

  You need to move.

  Now.

  The voice ushered him forward, and he obliged. Complete awareness had yet to return to him — he’d managed to deal with the charging mercenary, but his thoughts were still spaced out, his vision groggy and unfocused.

  Reality came to him in jolting fragments.

  Pale and sweating and gulping the thin mountain air down, Griffin staggered into one of the connecting corridors leading away from the open landing area. There were at least six different directions to head, so he chose one at random and set off like a drunk.

  At which point all his inexperience and ineptitude caught up to him.

  14

  Griffin staggered down a stone corridor and plunged into pitch darkness.

  He froze on the spot, suddenly cold, unsure whether the freezing sensation running down his spine was due to an actual change in temperature or simply an amalgamation of the injuries he’d received.

  It’s the concussion, the voice of common sense whispered in his ear.

  He knew it was, but he didn’t want to accept it. He’d been beaten to hell during the Operator Training Course — and during all the training he’d undertaken in the United States military before that — but nothing had altered his state quite like the elbow that had plunged into the side of his head. He couldn’t think straight, see straight, hear straight. The kick he’d managed to land on the mercenary’s chin had effectively been a stroke of luck, because now he could barely walk in a straight line without his vision lurching from one side of the dark stone hallway to the other.

  A severe concussion no doubt stripped most of one’s motor functions away, and Griffin found himself surprised that he was still conscious. When the elbow had connected it felt like his entire head had exploded. Perhaps in any other situation it would have shut the lights out, but he had some primal understanding that if he blacked out at any point over his time in the monastery, he would certainly die.

  Maybe his brain was holding on for dear life.

  It certainly felt like it.

  At the same time, years of combat training had been thrown out the window. It took him a solid twenty feet of stumbling before he realised he hadn’t even picked up a weapon on his way off the landing. There’d been a couple to choose from, discarded by various hostiles, but he’d simply heard the approaching voices, recognised his hindered state, and fled.

  He reached for the Browning Hi-Power in his waistband, a last resort…

  …and found nothing.

  It had come loose during the fight, discarded somewhere on the landing or across the monastery floor below.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  He was unarmed.

  The complete lack of natural or artificial light didn’t help to calm him down. He seemed to recall — through the hazy fog of his memory — that the cavernous entranceway had been illuminated by floodlights across the perimeter walls. It made sense, considering this monastery had seemingly been abandoned for years. To set up shop, the mercenary force had lit up the portions of the fortress that they needed to occupy.

  This corridor, evidently, was not one of them.

  When he figured he’d plunged far enough into the darkness to make himself invisible, Griffin reared to a halt in the middle of the stone floor and dropped to his rear. It hurt, but he couldn’t bare to stand a moment longer. Close to hyperventilating, he bowed his chin to his chest and stared at the floor, even though he couldn’t see what lay a foot in front of his face.

  Panic set in.

  He couldn’t help himself. Applying for the Delta Force had been a gruelling and rigorous process, ordinarily reserved for only the best soldiers in the U.S. military. Griffin had always considered himself up to the standard.

  But this was fucked.

  There was no other way to describe it. He had killed — or beat half to death — eight men in the space of a couple of minutes, and during the last portion he’d received one of the more severe concussions possible. Now he was barely able to string a cohesive thought together, alone in a freezing dark corridor deep within a monastery he knew nothing about. For all he knew his efforts would be in vain and he would find himself lost in the darkness, with no way out of the maze until he succumbed to dehydration or mere insanity.

  He tried not to dwell on those thoughts. They did him no favours. In fact he knew he was exaggerating, for he turned and looked over his shoulder to see the dull glow of the upper level landing far in the distance. Amidst the soft light emanating off the far walls, he saw shapes twisting and writhing.

  Silhouettes, moving about the landing, assessing the scene.

  More mercenaries.

  Griffin doubted he could go much further. He hadn’t even bothered to reach down and scoop up one of the weapons in the heat of the moment — clearly his mental state was diminished. How did he expect to put up any kind of fight against the men that were left?

  Because you made it this far.

  He took a deep breath, supercharging his brain with fresh air, and sensed some of his spatial awareness returning. He’d studied the concept of proprioception during his military training — the awareness of one’s body in space. That had been dismantled by the elbow, but it was now returning.

  Griffin got his feet underneath him and levered silently upright.

  He had nothing to do but slink toward the source of the conflict and do his best to cause as much damage as he could.

  He couldn’t see a way out of this situation alive. Even if he dealt with the six men in front of him, one of the scientists would probably escape with the valuable cargo intact. Griffin had spent too long in the monastery already. The alarm had been raised. They were probably packing their gear now, ready to flee into the subterranean depths.

  But all that didn’t stop him from putting one foot in front of the other.

  So he crept forward.

  And suddenly found himself taken off his feet by a jarring impact from behind.

  It had come from deep in the darkness…

  15

  At first he thought he’d been shot, considering the severity of the jolt. He sprawled face-first into the stone floor, bringing his hands up to prevent his nose breaking against the ground. But then he recognised the impact as blunt force trauma…

  …and heard the muffled ‘oomph’ of a surprised combatant falling alongside Griffin.

  Someone just ran into me.

  It was the only thought he needed amidst the tumultuous series of events.

  The man had run into Griffin from behind, heading for the landing in a flat-out sprint. Griffin hadn’t heard him approaching because of the effects of the concussion, and the guy hadn’t sensed Griffin in front of him until it was far too late. He evidently hadn’t expected this section of the fortress to be populated.

  Neither had Griffin.

  As soon as Griffin realised the man had come down alongside him, he intuitively shot a hand out through the darkness and clamped it down over the guy’s mouth, crushing the unseen hostile’s cheeks between his fingers in an attempt to stop him from crying out for help. The guy writhed under Griffin’s grip, but Griffin held tight with the stre
ngth of someone who knew he was clutching at survival.

  Griffin contorted the rest of his body, scrabbling across the cold stone to try and get a better position in the darkness. He couldn’t see, and his vision still swum, but his accuracy and timing were beginning to return. He kept his palm pressed down over the guy’s lips — who had started trying to bite Griffin’s fingers off — and reached down to wrap an arm around the guy’s throat.

  Griffin was a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, something that had taken him thousands of hours to achieve with no visible signs that he had achieved it. It was a strange phenomenon, and something he had thought long and hard about. There were men and women walking out in society who could strangle you to death in a thirty-second window, but no-one would ever know it. Jiu-jitsu didn’t rely on strength or brute force — rather, it was about technique and leverage. Strength certainly helped, which was why Griffin found it effortless to slip his arm around the guy’s neck and torque the choke hold with all his might.

  Strength was the difference between choking someone unconscious in ten seconds, or twenty.

  And in this ancient fortress, every second counted.

  But as soon as Griffin secured the choke he found himself being lifted off the ground as if he weighed nothing. He blanched as he realised the man he was trying to kill was a giant. The guy was pushing seven feet tall, and looping one arm around his neck was like trying to strangle a tree trunk. Griffin hadn’t been able to tell in the dark, but now he found himself hurled off the stone floor, suspended in space, hanging off the guy with one arm looped around his neck and the other clamped over his mouth.

  And everything was still pitch dark.

  The guy jerked and shimmied and twisted on the spot, aiming to hurl Griffin into one of the stone walls and smash all the breath from his lungs. Griffin transitioned into a guillotine choke in one fluid motion, swinging around the giant’s frame and blindly adjusting the hold on his neck. Now he hung from the guy’s neck like a front-facing backpack, his legs looped around the man’s stomach and his elbow pressing down on the base of the neck with relentless pressure.

  It didn’t take long.

  The big man managed one muffled grunt of protest before the pain became too much as his head folded toward his chest under the boa-like squeeze of Griffin’s bicep. The guy’s legs gave out from underneath him, and on the way down he tried to slam Griffin down on his back with enough ferocity to cause permanent injury.

  Thankfully, Griffin had been bracing for it, as it was basically the only way the man was going to survive the guillotine choke.

  He took the impact in the small of his back, aware of the likelihood of being paralysed but unwilling to give up the guillotine choke. It was his one shot at staying in the fight. If he released it the man would scream out and his comrades would come running.

  Five on one in a dark hallway could go no other way.

  But the man’s chin stayed compressed into his chest and the blood was no doubt rushing to his face as he battled with the immense pain. Griffin kept all his weight on the top of the guy’s head, even amplifying the power of the choke when both of them sprawled onto the concrete floor. The slam had been the giant’s last-ditch effort to get out of the hold, and now that the pain was mounting even further his will to win was sapping away. Griffin felt him accept the choke and sink into unconsciousness.

  Then Griffin kept squeezing.

  He barely gave it a second thought. He had already killed eight men — what was a ninth going to change? During the Operator Training Course, he’d grappled with the morality of killing unprotesting combatants, especially in the heat of the moment. How could he live with himself if he made the wrong decision, especially due to the morally grey nature of combat?

  But none of that even weighed on his mind in the present moment. Everyone in this monastery had one intention in being here — protecting a group of paid-off scientists conducting experiments that mashed together a variety of different bioweapons into one super-virus. There was no doubt about their morality.

  Griffin continued squeezing until he could no longer feel his arm, certain he’d caused enough damage to kill the guy. Perhaps it made it easier to enact in the darkness — it removed an element of reality from the situation. He clambered off the corpse and searched the ground around the body with his hands. Either his mind had been playing tricks on him, or he’d heard the metal clatter of a gun hitting the floor when the man had run into him.

  Sure enough, his fingers clasped around the grip of a semi-automatic pistol.

  It was pitch dark still, and Griffin couldn’t discern the exact make or model.

  As he ghosted back in the direction of the landing, he realised it didn’t matter either way.

  He had a gun, and he’d eliminated more than half of the mercenary force within a couple of minutes of forcing his way into the monastery.

  We think you haven’t had enough experience in the field to realise your true talents.

  Lars had been right.

  Five to go, Griffin thought.

  He had thrown himself into this world of life-or-death combat with such tenacity that he suddenly understood perfectly how men became addicted to fighting for their lives. If he didn’t succeed in this fortress, there would be countless deaths at an indeterminate point in the future. That could be tomorrow, or a week from now, or a month, but eventually Griffin would hear reports of a chimera virus being unleashed in a populated area, tearing through civilians like they were nothing.

  So, for the first time since he’d stepped foot in the monastery, Griffin felt some semblance of calm.

  For the first time since he’d got the call from Lars, he felt in control.

  He crouched low and stalked through the darkness, weapon in hand.

  Now he was the hunter.

  16

  There were five left.

  That was the only thought occupying Griffin’s mind. His vision shrank to a tunnel, and it had nothing to do with his surroundings. As he drew closer to the light of the landing and the soft glow began to amplify, he looked down and recognised the weapon as a BUL Cherokee, native to Israel. There seemed to be little consistency across the mercenary force’s arsenal, which led Griffin to believe the operation had been rushed — they must have utilised their combined resources and snatched up as much firepower as they could get their hands on in a narrow window of time.

  The fact that he was even connecting those dots meant his critical thinking was returning.

  It was hard to discern just where his mind was at in the darkness. He’d been grasping onto consciousness moments earlier, and with this level of sensory deprivation it was hard not to lurch from one moment to the next without stopping to consider his mental state.

  But he seemed focused again.

  Maybe the concussion would have long-term effects. It was still there, buried in the back of his mind, but the immediate consequences had dissipated. Griffin surged forward, staying as quiet as he could. Muffled voices floated from the landing, trickling down each of the connecting hallways. As he came to within twenty feet of the broad entranceway to his corridor, he paused in the shadows and listened intently for any sign of opportunity.

  Finally, the odds had shifted in his favour.

  He heard general panic in the air. On top of that, amidst the barbed insults being thrown back and forth across the landing, he sensed the frustration of the language barrier. These men had been mixed and matched from a variety of different paramilitary organisations, it seemed.

  More evidence of a rushed job.

  Griffin wondered what kind of opportunities the scientists were trying to capitalise on.

  He wondered what they were being paid to carry out the experiments…

  General commotion unfolded and Griffin heard footsteps shuffling on stone. Sharp commands were barked — a couple of them in English. Griffin paused in the shadows and smacked the side of his head as quietly as he could. The more debilitating effects of the c
oncussion were fading, but the rest of it was still there. The blurred vision, swimming from side to side. The hearing loss. Everything sounded muffled.

  He couldn’t focus on anything for more than a few seconds.

  He opted to stay in a crouch by the side of the corridor for as long as he needed, realising that foolishly charging out into open ground would only result in a quick death. The voices dissipated, and Griffin realised that the surviving men were disappearing into the bowels of the fortress, heading down any number of the darkened corridors.

  Retreating?

  He couldn’t know for sure.

  But there was still motion, coming from somewhere ahead. Griffin dropped to a pronated position and slunk on his belly over the stone. A strange sensation settled over him as he crawled — the floor underneath him suddenly became more real, more palpable. It was like he’d been coasting through a dream sequence for the last few minutes of his life. Now things were getting serious as his senses returned. Reality set in. His consciousness was restricted, and he was still no closer to dealing with the threat. He could take out mercenaries for days on end, and it would mean nothing if the scientists underground escaped with their payload intact.

  So he pressed forward, sensing every scuff and dent in the smooth stone. He came out into the light and surveyed the scene — sure enough, there was still one man breathing on the landing. He’d been left behind to take care of the bodies — or he was simply distracting himself with a task instead of standing motionless as a sentry, unwilling to be alone with his thoughts.

  For the first time, Griffin sensed genuine fear in one of his adversaries.

  The man was Caucasian, with close-cropped blonde hair and the slender frame of a long-distance runner. His combat fatigues hung loose over his physique, but there was athleticism there. Griffin sensed dexterity and true combat ability. The guy moved with practiced poise, dragging his dead friends over to the banister to clear space on the landing. Griffin didn’t know why the man was doing it. It made zero tactical sense. But there was the possibility that he had been close to the mercenaries Griffin had killed, and wanted to do something with their bodies other than leave them where they lay. The rest of the party had submerged themselves back into the monastery’s corridors, no doubt to search for the intruder, so this guy had put himself to work.