by David DeLee
She didn’t respond except to keep running. And she didn’t stop. Not even as she heard explosions behind her and overhead in Ops. More determined than ever, she ran.
Lang was her fault, an evil of her creation. She was responsible for him and she’d put a stop to him. One way or the other.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
McMurphy and Larson left the Njord’s Den first. They charged down the corridor to an elevator that would take them up to the next level. From there, Larson told him, it was only a short distance to Ops.
He quizzed her along the way about the layout of the control room. How many people, means of egress in and out of the room, etc. She stood off to one side at his insistence as he hit the elevator call button. He’d picked up one of the machine pistols from the hostiles they’d encountered in the moon pool. Now McMurphy aimed it at the closed elevator doors. Waiting for it to open.
When it did, he let out a held breath. The elevator car arrived unoccupied.
Inside, he hit the button for level two.
“I guess this wasn’t what you had in mind for the day’s events.”
“I’ll say,” Larson agreed. “You, Brice, and that woman. You do this sort of thing all the time?”
McMurphy watched the numbers over the door light up and go out as the elevator raised smoothly. “I wouldn’t say all the time. But…we answer the call is the best way to put it.”
“And you all work for Secretary Grayson?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “But we’re not supposed to say that.”
“I appreciate your candor. Will the Secretary disavow any knowledge of your actions if she finds out?”
He laughed at the old Mission: Impossible reference. “Nothing that dramatic, I assure you.”
The elevator pinged.
He ushered her as close to the interior wall as she could go, while he crouched and again aimed the machine pistol at the door, waiting for it to open.
A second passed.
It opened onto an empty corridor.
He signaled for her to stay put before stepping out, then nodded to her. “So far, so good.”
“Only authorized personnel can get gain access to Ops,” she said, explaining Lang’s lapse in security. “Posting guards out here would be a waste of manpower for a group light-staffed to begin with.”
She led him down the curved corridor, keeping them close to the wall and out of any camera’s view. She stopped him a half dozen feet from Ops. They hugged the interior wall.
“How are your people trained to react in emergency situations?” he asked.
A smart lady, Larson understood what he was getting at.
“They’ll drop to the floor at their workstations, use the rows of computer consoles as barriers, then look to their supervisors for guidance.”
He nodded. That was all he needed to know.
“I can open the door from that access panel,” she said. “But we’ll be in full view of a camera.”
“How long will it take you?”
“Two, three seconds. It’s a palm scan and then a five-digit code.”
He didn’t see any way around it. “We’ll have to risk it.” He pulled out two flash-bang grenades. “Once the door’s open, it won’t matter what they see on the surveillance system.”
Larson eyed the grenades with concern.
McMurphy saw the concern in her eyes. “They’re nonlethal. Big noise, bright light.”
She nodded and crossed the corridor to the access panel. Her palmprint over the black square revealed a lighted ten-digit keypad. She punched in five numbers and tapped a green checkmark.
Before she’d finished keying in the code, McMurphy charged at her from his hiding spot.
As the door slid open. He tossed the grenades.
One pitch, a perfectly executed curve. The grenade sailed through the opening door before breaking down and to the left. The other, tossed like a screwball, broke to the right. The flash-bangs clanged, hitting the floor then rolled before they exploded with a bang and a blinding white light.
McMurphy slipped the machine pistol down his arm and charged into the room, now full of screaming, frightened people.
Now came the hard part. Telling the good guys and the bad guys. One thing that helped was knowing the bad guys were probably the ones with the guns.
He crossed the threshold and spun left. A tall dark-skinned man in white coveralls twisted to greet him with a machine pistol in hand. McMurphy fired off a two-round burst. A red splotch bloomed across the chest of the white coveralls. The gunman dropped his weapon and fell to the floor.
McMurphy twisted to the right.
There he confronted a man wearing dark blue maintenance coveralls. Like the first one, he had a machine pistol in hand and started to fire. His rake of automatic fire went high and wide. McMurphy’s didn’t. The rapid-fired gunfire echoed in the air. The man fell back against the wall and slid to the floor, leaving behind a thick, red streak of blood on the console.
McMurphy moved into the room, squinting through the thin veil of smoke that didn’t completely fill the room, but made it hazy and considerably reduced his visibility. He stayed low, below the height of the consoles. When he reached the walkway along the right side, a woman popped up with her hands raised.
“Don’t shoot!”
McMurphy kept a watchful eye on her, looking for any movement that might be hostile in the case this was a distraction effort.
“Move to the aisle where I can see you.”
The woman sidestepped to the aisle. Later he would learn her name was Sasha Wilcox.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” he ordered.
She did. Until another man popped up like a game of whack-a-mole. McMurphy hesitated, waited the millisecond too long before he saw the gun coming up and firing. A bullet skimmed his shoulder, ripping through the thick neoprene wetsuit. It burned a hot path through his skin but ultimately was barely a flesh wound.
McMurphy returned fire, ruining the man’s face with three bullets before the gunman collapsed.
In his peripheral vision, he caught sight of the woman dropping her hands as she reached behind her back. She came out with a pistol and fired.
McMurphy dove to the floor, firing two rounds into the woman’s gut.
She dropped the gun and clutched her stomach. Blood pumped through her entwined fingers. Her legs gave out and she sank into a crumpled pile on the floor.
Breathing heavily, in the silence that followed, McMurphy called out, “Anyone else want a piece of this?”
He waited. No answer.
“Anyone?”
Still, no one answered.
McMurphy cautiously climbed to his feet to see three men standing with their hands interlocked behind their heads. Under his breath, he said, “Good boys.”
Larson rushed into the room as people started to pick themselves up off the floor, shaken and scared. The three surrendering combatants were gathered together and circled by Tiamat Bluff employees. They glared at their former captors, easily keeping them at bay.
Larson came over to McMurphy. “You’ve been shot.”
She picked at the neoprene hole, examining the wound.
“It’s nothing. A scratch.”
“That was incredible.”
McMurphy deflected. “Let’s just hope Brice makes out as well.”
Bannon knew the way to Neptune’s Den. He ran at a fast clip with Tara close beside him. Earlier, she had started to tell him about the potential conspiracy she and Kayla had uncovered. He told her they’d need to table that conversation until after POTUS, Grayson, and the others were safe.
And Chase Lang was dealt with once and for all, he added silently.
Bannon wasn’t a blood-thirsty man by nature, he didn’t think. But Lang, this whole operation, the execution of Kate Holloway…it had gone beyond the pale.
They reached Neptune’s Den.
The doors were closed and locked.
Bannon and Tara ha
d no access code to get through them. With a wry smile, he thought. I’ve got something better.
He and Tara stood back. They each pulled a pin from the grenades McMurphy had given him.
They rolled them across the corridor floor toward the door. The devices wobbled awkwardly because of the lug and fuse on top., but while he’d never bowl a three-hundred game with the little explosive devices, they reached the door and exploded.
The twin blasts knocked the doors inward, off their tracks.
He and Tara raced across the corridor and shouldered their way into Neptune’s Den.
Bent and twisted, the doors bounced inward.
He and Tara clamored over them and stumbled to a stop, stunned by what greeted them.
There were two dead men in security uniforms on the floor. One was shot dead. The other appeared to have been bludgeoned to death. Along with them were two dead civilians and several of the hostages, bloodied and disheveled sat on the cushioned seat, being attended to by others.
Bannon saw no living hostiles. And no Lang.
If he was reading the room right, in his absence, the hostages had raised up, fought back, and freed themselves. His gaze fell on President Kingsley. Alive and in reasonably good appearance considering what he’d been through. The pilot, Garcia, sat in the booth beside him.
Tara moved away from the doors, moved deeper into Neptune’s Den, desperate to find an enemy to fight. She stopped and stared down at a body on the ground. A woman. She slid her machine pistol up onto her shoulder and knelt beside it.
When Bannon stepped up beside her, she asked, “Is this Agent Holloway?”
But it was Kingsley, joining them, who said, “Yes. She gave her life for her country. A true American hero.”
Bannon gave Holloway a respectful minute. It was all he could afford. There would be time for proper mourning later. He looked around. “Lang. Where is he?”
Kingsley pointed at the kitchen area. “He ran off. That way.”
“And where’s Secretary Grayson?”
“She…she went after him.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Behind the rear partition, Lang had disappeared through was a full-service, commercial-grade kitchen filled with stainless steel counters, pots and pans, and black cast iron cooktops, industrial size refrigeration units, and stoves. Grayson ran past all that, having seen the door at the far end of the room swinging closed.
Lang wasn’t interested in hiding. His focus was on escaping.
It had been years since she was in the field, but as she reached the door, catching it before it swung shut, old instincts kicked in. She pushed through the door and swept the stairwell with her pistol. Her muscle memory guided her movements. Comfortably. Instinctively. She cleared the stairwell and ran stocking footed down to the next level as if no time had passed at all since her last mission.
Lang had forsaken stealth for speed. She could hear his boots on the stairs.
She followed quickly downward, stealing an occasional glance over the railing and down. Lang reached the bottom level, five flights of stairs, and ran through the door without a second look back. No doubt confident no one was after him.
Grayson had gained on him and reached the exit door seconds later.
She pulled it open, and with the pistol in a two-handed grip, let the door fall against her back as she swung her weapon from right to left. The lowest level of the facility, the lights in this section of corridor were off but a faint radiant glow of pale orange-red lambent light filled the area.
Her eyes teared. She put the back of her hand against her nose to ward off an awful stench. Faintly of cabbage and something coopery and acrid. A smell as familiar to an old field agent as it was disgusting. Death. Violent, burning death.
Cautiously, she moved forward.
She found Lang climbing over a pair of buckled and wrecked metal doors. They were scorched black and coated in a white fire-retardant film. The smell of a burning accelerant still heavy in the air. A few small fires still burning.
“Chase! Stop!”
He froze, perhaps surprised to hear she’d followed him. He twisted.
“Back off, Colonel. You’ve managed to escape my retribution today. Don’t push your luck.”
He resumed climbing the awkwardly angled doors and scrambled over a dead body. Burned and still smoldering.
“To look over my shoulder for the rest of my life?” she asked. “To wonder and worry about what atrocity you might commit next? Atrocities I’ll be responsible for if I let you escape.”
He leaped to the other side of the doors and faced her.
“Let me escape? Ha. You couldn’t stop me if you wanted to. But yeah, there’s a certain sort of delicious torture in you constantly wonder if—no—when I’ll strike again.”
The gun in her hand still trained on him. She pulled the trigger. Her eyes were bleary. The shot was a hair off and Lang ducked to the side. Always an excellent shot, even though her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, she wondered, how had she missed him? Had it been intentional? A last-second flinch as she hoped against hope she could still reason with him, still reach him? Even after all this time. After all this chaos.
He was out of her line of sight, crouched behind the burning door.
“Chase. Chase?”
He popped up suddenly armed with a machine pistol. He fired off a long burst. Tracer bullets lit up the darkened hallway.
Grayson darted behind the curve of the wall.
When the shooting stopped, and the echo of gunfire faded, she risked another look. Lang stood at the open door of the last remaining rescue sub. She squeezed the trigger of her handgun. Bullets pinged off metal and walls until the gun clicked dry.
Lang had stepped behind the heavy metal hatch, safe. When he’d heard her gun dry fire he stepped back out. He paused long enough to give her a taunting wave. “Until next time, Colonel. When we meet again. Wadaeaan al'an.”
Goodbye for now.
He was going to get away and she was too far away to stop her.
Behind her a voice. “Liz. Here.”
Bannon.
She turned in time to see him toss her a grenade.
She dropped her now useless pistol, caught the grenade, and without hesitation threw it at Lang. Her aim was pitch-perfect. The grenade sailed through the open hatch, past him, bounced around inside…
Lang glared into the DSRV. His expression first one of annoyance and then of concern.
The grenade exploded.
The blast blew him cartwheeling out of the hatch opening. He hit the corridor floor several feet away.
Grayson scrambled over the wrecked doors. The metal hot on her stocking feet. The retardant slippery.
Bannon caught up behind her. He grabbed her hand to steady her as she navigated the rumble.
“Careful.” His concern was as much about the fact she was weaponless and Lang might not be dead as it was for her not injuring herself climbing over the wreckage.
He joined her on the other side of the debris. The interior of the mini-sub was aflame. The fire crackling. It brightened the corridor with a dancing yellow luminescence.
Lang laid on his back. His stolen Tiamat Bluff clothes and face were darkened with black soot and burned flesh. His white eyes and twisted burned lips made his face look like a truly wicked Halloween mask.
Bannon aimed his machine pistol at him.
Grayson dropped down to her knees next to him.
He reached a burnt hand up to her face, patted her skin.
“Chase,” she said. “You should have come in. We could’ve…I could’ve helped. It didn’t have to end this way.”
Lang, his voice weak. “You shouldn’t have left me, Liz.”
His hand moved from her cheek and quickly seized her throat. She gasped and grabbed for his wrist. His skin, his clothes, were hot from the blast. She struggled, pulling at his arm, desperate to break his death grip.
“Chase! No! Please!”
Standing over her, Bannon fired a single bullet into Chase Lang’s face.
Lang died instantly.
His limp arm dropped away from her neck as she gasped and let go, jolted back by the sound of the gun going off so close to her. She sat back on the floor and covered her ear. The gunshot’s echo still ringing inside her head. On the verge of tears, she moaned, “No. No. No.”
Bannon laid his pistol down and gently urged Grayson to her feet.
“I’m so sorry.” He pulled her into him, hugged her, comforted her. “I know he was your friend. But that person was gone. Has been for a long, long time. That wasn’t the man you knew.” He indicated the dead body at their feet. “Not the man you remember.”
“No. No, he wasn’t.” She pushed back from Bannon, sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “But when we…when I abandoned him, we were more than colleagues. More than friends. We were lovers and engaged to be married and I…I left him in the desert to die.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Bannon radioed Tara and McMurphy, told them he and Grayson were okay, and that Lang was dead. McMurphy confirmed he’d retaken Ops and the facility was once again under Robin Larson’s control. Tara informed him that with the help of Trevor Garcia, the submersible pilot and former Cuban Revolutionary Navy man, and a handful of Tiamat employees, they’d tracked down the rest of Lang’s men who’d given up without a fight and were being held in a conference room under armed guard.
While he gave Grayson the time she needed to grieve, and to compose herself, during which she said little, Bannon took a minute to examine Lang’s body. He searched his pockets, searching for papers, anything that might be a clue to the greater conspiracy Tara and Kayla believed had orchestrated this whole thing. Hopefully a lead to who Chase Lang had been working for.
He didn’t find anything. But neither did he expect to. Chase Lang was too well-trained, too experienced to be that careless, even in death.
About to give up, something did catch Bannon’s eye.
He squatted and pulled Lang’s burned and torn sleeve up his right arm. On the underside of his wrist, Bannon found a small, bluish-black dragon tattoo. But something about it struck Bannon as curious. It wasn’t simply a dragon, but a dragon surrounded by seaweed and waves. More than a sea dragon. Or even a sea monster. It brought to mind one thing: a leviathan.