‘Dennis!’ Joaquin’s voice smashed through the scientist’s thoughts. ‘I said play that fucking camera right now, or I swear I’ll have Olaf send you to the surface the slow and horrible way!’
Aubrey looked at the arrogant, self-serving, manipulative little prick of a man who, in so little time, had caused Aubrey so much grief and despair, and the possibility of vengeance sparked flames of rage within him. Aubrey felt a hot rush of anger tingle up his spine and shudder through his synapses as he stepped down off the control deck, elation and fear coursing through his veins.
Joaquin glared at him.
‘What the hell are you doing, you insolent little—’
Aubrey reached around beneath his shirt, yanked the pistol from his jeans and aimed it at Joaquin the way he had seen it done in the movies a thousand times. He saw the flare of alarm in Joaquin’s eyes, anger quashed by fear as the younger man threw his hands up in surrender.
‘Now, Dennis, take it easy. I just need to see the—’
‘Shut up!’ Dennis snapped.
Joaquin’s jaw clamped shut as he backed away from the gun. A flood of elation rushed through Aubrey, a heady elixir of power and control borne of the complete command of another human being. He aimed at Joaquin’s chest, not making the mistake of trying to shoot the tycoon somewhere difficult like the head, where the pistol might miss and give Joaquin the chance to counterattack. And he kept well out of arm’s reach, preventing Joaquin from grabbing the pistol. Aubrey knew his cop shows all right.
‘This is what you really are, Joaquin,’ Aubrey growled, as Joaquin backed up another pace and hit the side of the control panel. ‘A coward, a bully who gets others to do his dirty work for him.’
Joaquin’s jaw worked to free itself from his fear as he coughed his response.
‘Dennis, there’s no need for this, we can work this out together.’
‘Shut it, you creep,’ Aubrey snarled. ‘All these years you’ve had it all, but you didn’t earn a damned bit of it: you inherited your father’s money, inherited his looks, inherited his decency, but then turned it into greed because you’ve never had to work for anything in your pathetic little life.’ Aubrey took another pace toward Joaquin, towering over him for the first time in his life, and a confidence he had rarely felt soared through him as he shouted, ‘And you took Katherine away from me! She thought you were worthy, thought you were a good man. I was the good man! And then you tried to murder her, like you murdered everybody else!’
Joaquin’s eyes quivered with tears as he crouched down, his raised hands instinctively moving to cover his head.
‘Please, Dennis, there is another way. You don’t have to do this. We’ve almost won, it’s almost over. You can go back to your family, your friends.’
‘Like Charles Purcell did?’ Aubrey challenged. ‘Like the people that built this place did? Like the scientists who helped capture your black holes did?’ Aubrey tilted his head mockingly at the man now cowering before him. ‘Oh, no, I forgot, you had them all killed, didn’t you, little Joaquin?’
Joaquin’s trembling voice collapsed into choking noises as tears fell from his eyes.
‘Please, Dennis, they were all fools. They weren’t like you, Dennis. You don’t have to kill me.’
Aubrey smiled, no longer afraid of this man. He aimed the pistol squarely at Joaquin’s chest.
‘Yes, Joaquin,’ Aubrey smiled without pity. ‘I do.’
Joaquin let out a howl of fear as Aubrey smiled and squeezed the trigger. The pistol clacked loudly, but nothing happened. Aubrey pulled the trigger again and the weapon clicked ineffectually. At his feet Joaquin was still howling, but Aubrey realized with a cold dread that the tycoon was not crying – his body was shaking with uncontrollable laughter. Aubrey stared uncomprehendingly at the pistol in his hand and then pulled the trigger again.
‘You’re more of a fool than even I gave you credit for, Dennis.’
Joaquin’s delight faded away as his joy mutated grotesquely into undiluted fury. Aubrey felt a pulse of terror as Joaquin leapt up from the floor, all pretence of fear gone, and reached out to snatch the pistol from Aubrey with one hand whilst the knuckles of his other fist cracked across Aubrey’s cheek.
The scientist cried out in pain at the impact as he lost his balance and slammed down onto the floor, his elbow cracking against the metal plates. He saw Joaquin follow him and a moment later the younger man’s boot crashed into Aubrey’s face and splattered blood onto the metal deck plates.
‘You gutless fucking traitor!’ Joaquin shrieked as he smashed the butt of the pistol down onto Aubrey’s head, metal scraping across his scalp as the blow reverberated painfully through his brain, and thick, metallic blood spilled into his mouth.
Aubrey desperately tried to deflect the blows, his face numbed and his arms pulsing with agony at each strike of the weapon.
Joaquin suddenly stopped, his breath heaving in his lungs as he towered over Aubrey’s coiled body. The scientist peered up at him through his pain and saw Joaquin chuckle.
‘You didn’t seriously believe that I’d let you get away with it, did you?’ he asked. ‘Sending those signals to the surface? Breaking into the armory? Olaf always leaves the clips there filled with inert bullets, because he always told me that one day somebody would try something stupid. They always do.’ He shook his head slowly as he tossed the useless pistol to clatter alongside Aubrey, before drawing a pistol of his own from beneath his jacket. ‘This one works, Dennis. Get up.’
Aubrey hauled himself off the deck as Joaquin aimed the pistol at him and then gestured for him to turn around. From his jacket pocket he produced a set of steel handcuffs.
‘Put these on,’ Joaquin ordered.
Dennis clipped the cuffs around his left wrist, trying to ignore the grinding fear that plagued his stomach. Joaquin stepped in and grabbed him, span him around and secured the cuffs behind his back. Then he turned Aubrey back around and looked at him appraisingly.
‘Now then, Dennis, you’re in luck. I’m going to let you continue your work on black holes,’ he said brightly, and then leaned in close to Aubrey’s face with a cruel smile. ‘Up close and personal.’
Strangely, now that his doom was certain, Aubrey no longer felt any fear for himself, as though the inevitability of it had scoured the dread from his mind. His only concern now was for Katherine Abell’s safety.
‘What goes around,’ Aubrey said, ‘comes around.’
Even as Joaquin’s smile withered slightly at Aubrey’s unexpected defiance, the crackle of distant machine-gun fire shattered the silence.
‘It would appear that my men have found your friends, Dennis,’ Joaquin sneered.
Aubrey felt the last pitiful remnants of resistance trickle feebly from his body as he realized that, finally, his life was about to come to an end.
And he hoped that he had already done enough to doom Joaquin.
61
June 28, 20:06
Ethan stared up at the aircraft nearest him, the fuselage caked with the rust of ages. The undercarriage had collapsed long ago and the markings had faded, but not enough to conceal the navy-blue paint on the remaining panels or the prominent white stars painted on the tip of each wing.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he uttered, ‘a TBM Avenger torpedo bomber.’
Katherine Abell glanced at the stocky-looking Second World War airplane, the serial number FT-36 emblazoned down the fuselage beside the starred banner of the United States Navy.
‘How’d you know that?’ she asked.
‘The Bermuda Triangle,’ Ethan replied. ‘Flight 19, five aircraft, all Avengers, were lost on a training mission off the coast of Florida, December 5, 1945. No trace of the aircraft was ever found. The same day, a PBM-5 Mariner seaplane sent to search for them also vanished, reportedly having exploded in midair. The last radio transmissions from the Avengers said that they were unable to find their way home. Doug’s research said that Isaac Abell had been experimenting with powerfu
l electromagnets in the Florida Straits as early as 1941 – maybe his work inadvertently caused the loss of Flight 19.’
Ethan looked past the crippled Avenger to where a more modern-looking airplane rested on its belly near a small fishing vessel.
‘Recognize that?’ he asked her.
Lopez nodded as she peered at the twin engine aircraft.
‘November 2-7-6-4-charlie,’ she read the numbers off the tail. ‘Joaquin’s men must have brought it here.’
‘No evidence, no National Transport and Safety Board investigation and no danger of prosecution for Joaquin,’ Ethan said. ‘All he had to do was locate the wreck and hide it here.’
Katherine’s hand flew to her mouth.
‘That’s the airplane that had all of Joaquin’s scientists aboard,’ she gasped.
‘The same,’ Lopez replied. ‘Joaquin ensured that, after they had completed building his machine for seeing into the future, they would never be able to pass on what they had learned.’
Ethan scanned the rest of the underwater hangar. Various small fishing vessels leaned at awkward angles, their crippled hulls stained red with rust and the passing of the years, whilst a number of other civilian aircraft lay on their bellies like steel whales stranded on a foreign shore. Like a museum of past tragedies, thought Ethan, as he realized just how these long-lost vessels and aircraft must have come to be here.
‘This part of the facility has been here for a long time,’ he said finally. ‘Joaquin built on the work that his father began, back in the fifties. His attempts to create a machine that would power the world caused accidents to ships and aircraft on the surface above, and in doing so created the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. These wrecks must have been covered up by the military at the time: they wouldn’t have wanted to draw attention to their work here. This facility was shut down in 1964, and Joaquin bought it from the military when it was no longer used. Doug reckons that all of the paperwork relating to the site was handed over during the sale.’
Lopez gestured up to the domed ceiling above them.
‘Those beams, they’re heavyweight steel,’ she observed, ‘but the ones in the docking bay were newer and slimmer.’
‘More modern,’ Ethan agreed. ‘That’s how Joaquin was able to do this without attracting too much attention. Easy to say you’re working on coral-reef conservation projects to cover what you’re really up to, and with this dome already in place you’d be able to extend outward without the hassle of starting from scratch. Hell, I’d bet that the newer domes are some kind of prefabricated constructions, easy to transport down here from his yacht.’
Lopez was about to answer, but the voice that they heard came from speakers set into the walls of the hangar.
‘Congratulations, Mr. Warner, you’re absolutely right.’
Ethan glimpsed movement from behind the hull of a fishing vessel twenty yards away, and in the same moment saw half a dozen armed men break from cover, running toward them with assault rifles cradled in their grasp. Ethan hurled himself down with Lopez and Katherine behind the fuselage of one of the Avenger bombers, as a broadside of machine-gun fire raked their position. Bullets clattered through the rusting metal hulks with a spray of bright-orange sparks and burst out above them, showering them with red dust.
‘We’re outnumbered!’ he yelled to Lopez. ‘I saw at least six.’
Katherine ducked down and shielded her head with her hands as she shouted.
‘Tell him to stop firing! They’ll puncture the dome and kill us all!’
Ethan, sheltering behind the Avenger’s brittle fuselage, looked across to the fishing vessel to their right, its hull equally aged but constructed of thicker steel. He motioned to Lopez, who was also looking at the ship.
‘On three, I’ll cover you.’
Lopez nodded, grabbing hold of Katherine’s arm as she braced her for their planned dash across the hangar. Ethan peeked over the top of the Avenger’s fuselage and saw Joaquin’s men gathered in two groups of five at each end of the largest ship in the hangar.
‘Three, two, one, go!’
Ethan leapt up and rested his arms across the top of the fuselage as he fired a rapid series of shots at the enemy’s positions. Lopez and Katherine dashed out from behind the Avenger and across open space toward the fishing vessel.
Both groups of Joaquin’s men ducked down as Ethan’s salvo battered their positions, bullets ricocheting off the ship’s small bridge with loud cracks and twangs that echoed around the dome. Ethan fired a final two shots at each group and then rushed out toward the fishing vessel where Lopez and Katherine now crouched.
A vicious shower of bullets thundered across Ethan’s field of vision, cracking the metal tiles that lined the hangar floor with bright snaking lines of sparks that leapt like electrical fields around Ethan’s legs. He realized with a sudden plunging terror that the aim of their opponents was arrow straight, each bullet snapping at his heels and cracking through the air past his head, the shockwaves assaulting his eardrums. He sprinted across the hangar and hurled himself down into cover behind the reassuringly solid hull of the ship. His heart was trying to hammer its way out of his chest as he slid along the floor, and he saw stars flashing before his eyes as he gasped for air.
‘Too close,’ Lopez said, seeing Ethan’s expression. ‘These guys know what they’re doing.’
Ethan nodded and blinked sweat from his eyes as he realized just how close he had come to being shot. The IRIS soldiers had stopped firing the moment he had gotten into cover: conserving their ammunition, keeping their cool. In fact, he decided as he regained his breath, they could not have failed to hit him at such close range.
‘They aren’t shooting to kill,’ he said.
Katherine Abell looked at him, a feeble star of hope twinkling in her eyes. ‘You think that this is all for show?’
Ethan peered carefully around the edge of the hull and shook his head.
‘No, they’re holding us back for some reason. Joaquin’s a narcissistic megalomaniac and wants us dead, I’m sure of that. He just wants it done his way.’
As if in reply, Joaquin’s voice echoed through the hangar from the speakers.
‘Mr. Warner, Miss Lopez, you are outnumbered, outgunned and swiftly being flanked. I would ask that you surrender your weapons so that we can prevent any unnecessary bloodshed.’
Ethan smirked bitterly as he shouted out his reply.
‘It’s a bit late for that, Joaquin! You’ve already got the blood of several thousand people on your hands, not least the men that built this place for you.’ He looked across at the wreckage of N-2764C, and wondered just how much Joaquin’s men knew about their boss. ‘I suspect that the NTSB would like to take a look at that aircraft, the one that you downed, killing the twenty-or-so scientists on board.’
Joaquin replied quietly, letting the speakers amplify his voice.
‘All men must choose their allegiance, Mr. Warner,’ he said.
‘They had no choice!’ Lopez shouted back. ‘You’re a murderer with a juvenile ego, Joaquin. You send others to kill for you because you don’t have the guts to do it for yourself, you limp-dicked motherf—’
A rattle of gunfire drowned her out, bullets raking over their heads as Ethan wrapped an arm protectively around Katherine’s shoulders and ducked down. He could tell from the blasts that the two groups were moving around the opposite edges of the hangar to flank them. Another few moments and the soldiers would be able to fire with impunity, and their cover behind the fishing vessel would be rendered useless.
Joaquin’s voice echoed down to them from the speakers as the gunfire stopped abruptly.
‘Surrender your weapons, or I’ll order my men to finish this once and for all!’
‘He’ll kill us as soon as he’s disarmed us,’ Lopez said.
It was Katherine who replied. ‘You don’t know that.’
Before Ethan could stop her, Katherine stood up and walked out into the open with her hands outstretched at
her sides. Ethan watched as she looked up at one of the speakers above them.
‘Is this what you want, Joaquin?’ she shouted out. ‘A few more people to kill?’
The hangar remained silent but for the fast, light footfalls of the IRIS soldiers as they regrouped and moved into position, their weapons trained on Katherine. Ethan saw the big blond assassin at their head on his right, as the men moved from cover, no longer even trying to avoid being shot. They had the advantage of both numbers and position, and they knew it.
‘That went well,’ Lopez muttered as she laid her weapon down.
Ethan sighed and tossed his pistol down onto the tiles before kicking it away toward the nearest soldiers.
He stood up and placed his hands behind his head as the big man approached, flanked by his soldiers. Quickly, both Ethan and Lopez were patted down and their spare ammunition clips taken from them. Olaf walked up behind Ethan and gave him a shove in Katherine’s direction.
As he joined her with Lopez in the center of the hangar, Joaquin’s voice chortled down at them.
‘Excellent! There, now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Olaf, please escort our guests into the control room.’
Ethan, Lopez and Katherine were shoved and prodded forward by rifle barrels that guided them past the largest fishing vessel toward a bulkhead at the far end of the hangar that was flanked by a pair of bright red fire axes mounted on the walls. Ethan briefly considered trying to make a move for one of them, but the soldiers were far too close. As they approached the bulkhead one of the soldiers, a man who looked to be in his early thirties, jogged ahead and shouldered his weapon before yanking the hatch open.
As Ethan ducked his head to move through, he glanced at the soldier.
‘You know Joaquin’s going to kill you, too, eventually?’
The soldier grinned without sympathy.
‘The secret to staying alive,’ he hissed, ‘is to not ask fucking questions.’
With that, Ethan was propelled through the hatch and into the control room.
Apocalypse Page 36