“That’s a chainsaw,” Elliot said.
They heard the saw cease, then a great cracking sound, and looked up to see a tree fall in the distance. The tree was just beyond the spot where Gwen had hidden their vehicle.
“Damn it to bloody hell. Now we can’t drive out.”
“We can walk out of here through the forest,” Elliot said. He didn’t want to reveal to Gwen that he had a Jeep. He was still hoping he’d get a chance to slip away from her.
“Come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“To see who blocked the road,” Gwen said. While speaking, she removed two of her homemade grenades from the fanny pack she wore. She set the timer on one to go off after three seconds, and the other one to blow after only two seconds.
Soulless saw the men from the helicopters headed his way and brought out a grenade. He crouched behind a tree and waited. He’d never make it past them, and if he did, he was sure there were men stationed to watch the road. If he could cause enough mayhem by blowing up a few of them, it might buy him time to get deeper into the trees and lose them.
Henry was in the sniper’s nest and ready to start firing when he spotted Tanner moving toward the helicopters. Tanner had his green ski mask on again and was coming up behind the men wearing the black. Two of those men, the pilots, had stayed with their aircraft and kept the blades going. Henry watched, fascinated. He was wondering how his mentor planned to kill eighteen men on his own.
Of course, he wouldn’t have to, given that he could help Tanner out by using the sniper rifle, but Tanner wasn’t aware of that.
One of the helicopters, the one farthest from the rock cliff had landed slightly behind the other one, which meant the pilots couldn’t see each other.
Both machines had their doors off to make it easy for their passengers to board and depart. Tanner came up on the pilot farthest back and shot him in the side three times with a silenced gun, making a point to jam the tip of the gun past the seam of the bulletproof vest. The man was still jerking in his seat, suffering his death throes, when Tanner moved on to the other pilot.
The men who had recently left the choppers were unaware of what was happening. Because of the steady droning of the helicopters’ spinning blades, Tanner’s silenced shots went unheard.
The second pilot died like the first one, then was grabbed from his seat and tossed to the ground. Tanner took the helmet and sunglasses off the man and put them on after removing his mask. Moments later, the helicopter was lifting into the air.
Gwen and Elliot were at the edge of the road and hidden behind a tree. There were four armed men in control of the road. Two of them were seated on the tree they had felled, while the other two sat in the bed of a pickup truck.
“I need to get all four of them closer together,” Gwen said.
“How?” Elliot whispered. “And why don’t we just hide until everything is over?”
“These men are here to kill Soulless. We have to help him.”
Elliot looked at the objects in Gwen’s hands. They were short pipes but had small clock faces attached. On one end was a wire with a ring pull hanging off it.
“Are those bombs?”
“More or less.”
“How are we going to get close enough to use them?”
“Let me worry about that,” Gwen said, then she gave Elliot a hard shove before whistling.
Elliot stumbled out into view and fell flat on his face while grunting. One of the men seated on the tree jumped up and pointed at him. The men in the pickup truck leapt down and moved toward Elliot along with the others. One of them shouted at him.
“Don’t move, motherfucker! Don’t Move!”
The four men had their rifles up and aimed at Elliot. As they moved in closer, Elliot began shaking, and his bladder let loose.
Mills detected a change in the pitch of the sound coming from behind him. He turned to see one of the helicopters taking off. It was the blue one flown by Murphy, and a man named Harding was flying the other one, the red helicopter. Mills took out his radio.
“Murphy. Where are you going?”
There was no answer other than static as the helicopter grew closer. The machine hovered, then lowered, as if to land near them. Mills didn’t notice that the pilot had maneuvered the craft so that anyone looking at him had the sun in their eyes.
Mills and the men nearest to him stayed where they were and waited for the machine to set down. The men who had been farther out started walking toward Mills and the helicopter, curious to see what was going on.
When the helicopter was only a few meters off the ground, Mills saw one of his men point at the chopper, though only peripherally. Mills turned his head to look fully at the man and ask him what he was pointing at. The man was the pilot’s best friend; they had known each other since boot camp.
Mills’ question was swallowed up by the noise of the helicopter’s engine, as were the man’s words. However, Mills had read his lips, and they were words that both confused and chilled him.
“That’s not Murphy or Harding.”
A thought occurred to Mills then in the form of a memory. He had prepared for the mission by learning as much about Tanner as possible, including rumors about the man. One rumor stated that Tanner spoke over twenty languages. Impressive if true, Mills had thought, and he himself could converse in eight languages. Another rumor, one more pertinent, was that Tanner was a pilot. The man could fly a plane—and possibly a helicopter.
That was the thought in Mills mind when the tail on the helicopter dipped and it did a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.
The helicopter’s rotor blade ripped apart the pointing man’s arm, and half his head. It shredded the skull of the man beside him, the man beside that man, and the next man as well, all in little more than a second. Mills had just enough time to react and attempted to throw himself flat on the ground. He was too slow. The rotor blades pulverized the top of his head, depriving the group of their leader.
“Holy shit!” Henry said, as he stared down at the scene in amazement. He had been wondering what Tanner was doing, and the answer stunned him. Tanner was using the helicopter as a weapon.
The helicopter moved left, dipped lower, and the rear blades tore into two more men. The fools had raised their rifles instead of diving to the ground. One of them had managed to get off a shot. It struck a skid on the helicopter. There were seven men down, nine with the pilots, and nine more still in the fight.
Smoke was coming from the tail rotor. It hadn’t been designed to double as a mobile guillotine and had sustained too much damage. The metal bird was rocking violently as Tanner sat it down only a hundred feet from where the survivors lay prone.
There was too much smoke near the helicopter for Henry to see if Tanner had left the cockpit, but he could see the men rising from the ground. As they made it to their feet, Henry took aim with the sniper rifle and went to work evening the odds against his mentor.
Two men went down from head shots before the others realized it. They had never heard the boom of the rifle. The helicopter was louder than ever, and flames were appearing at the rotor assembly. Something else appeared there, emerging from the smoke. It was Tanner. He shot one man in the neck while running at another who had been closing in on the copter. The man had brought his rifle up but not quickly enough. Tanner ducked under the rifle, struck the man a hard blow to the chin with his head, then used the stunned man as a shield. Eighteen men had become nine, then six, with one of them dazed and held hostage.
Henry killed two more of them. The remaining three armed men traded shots with Tanner, and only managed to strike their own man, who was in Tanner’s grasp. It was hard to take careful aim when you knew a sniper could have you in his sights, and while another man held one of your friends and was firing at you.
When the last of the three men fell, Tanner released his hostage. The man collapsed to the ground. Despite the bulletproof vest he wore, he had suffered wounds to his legs a
nd groin, and one round had all but severed his left ear. Tanner put a round in his forehead and finished him, then turned and looked up at the rock cliff, where a rifle barrel was sticking out of a slit in the rock.
Through a thickening haze due to the smoke, Henry saw his mentor wave to him to come down, then his gaze was directed farther to his right, where two explosions had just gone off.
Gwen had flung her grenades at the men on the road as they closed in on Elliot. The blasts went off one after the other. Three of the men were down, with one screaming in agony as the other two moaned. The fourth man, the one who’d been farthest from the blasts, was bleeding but still on his feet. Gwen shot at him, meaning to strike him in the chest, but her aim was off, and she’d struck him in the lower abdomen. It was lucky she had. If the round had hit the man in the chest, his body armor would have taken the impact. Instead, she’d managed to send a bullet to the vulnerable area right above his crotch. The man fell to the ground beside his friends and mirrored their cries of pain. Off in the distance, there came the boom of a rifle again. It was followed by the sound of an explosion.
Gwen smiled. Soulless was still in the fight.
Elliot had lifted his head to gawk at the armed men shouting at him, but he’d pressed his face against the ground after seeing the grenades land near them. If it weren’t for the trunk of a rotting tree on the ground in front of him, shrapnel from the grenades might have injured him as well.
Gwen stepped past him. Walked over to the “army guys,” as Elliot thought of them, and went about methodically placing rounds in their heads, beginning with the man who was screaming. Elliot sat up, as a strange feeling blossomed within. It was infatuation. Gwen had annihilated four heavily armed men. For some reason, that aroused Elliot.
Gwen called to him. “Are you coming or not? We can use their truck.”
Elliot joined her, but when he grew nearer to the truck, he detected a problem. “I smell gasoline.”
Gwen lowered herself to the ground, then cursed. “One of my grenades ripped open the fuel tank. Damn the luck! I made a right bags of that, didn’t I? Now how are we going to get out of here?”
Elliot reached into a pocket and took out a key fob. “I have a Jeep.”
Henry had been distracted by the explosions coming from the road. When he turned back to look through his scope, he saw a masked figure approaching Tanner’s position, hidden from Tanner’s view by the drift of smoke coming off the helicopter fire. The figure raised something over its head in a throwing position. Henry let loose a hurried shot and prayed his round wouldn’t miss.
Soulless had watched Tanner’s destruction of Mills and his men in a state of disbelief at the man’s audacity. Tanner had come at them from behind. That meant he had been in the opposite direction the men were traveling. Tanner could have avoided them altogether. Instead, the man decided to attack while vastly outnumbered. He was either insane or was every bit the consummate killing machine that he was said to be and possessed of an unwavering faith in his abilities.
The proficiency with which Tanner killed was both stunning and humbling. Soulless knew then that if he ever went head-to-head with Tanner in an even and fair fight that he would lose. To kill Tanner, one needed an edge. Fortunately, Soulless was holding that edge in his hand.
When the explosions on the road occurred, Tanner had turned to look in that direction. That gave Soulless the opportunity to leave the cover of the trees and move closer.
There was a wall of smoke and fire between them. The rotors on the damaged helicopter had stopped moving and were no longer circulating the air. Soulless looked up into a haze of smoke and couldn’t see the cliff where the sniper shots came from, which meant the sniper couldn’t see him either. But Soulless could catch glimpses of Tanner through the smoke and flames at ground level. He activated the grenade, reared his arm back to throw it, and agony erupted in his right leg as Henry’s rushed shot found his thigh. The wind had shifted and allowed Henry a view of him. As Soulless collapsed to the ground the grenade fell from his hand and dribbled a few feet away. Two seconds later, it detonated.
Tanner had dropped flat after hearing Henry’s shot and wondered who it had been meant for. When the grenade exploded, Tanner heard a scream come from a spot thirty feet in front of him and to the left. He was unable to see the source because of the growing smoke from not only the burning helicopter, but also from a spreading blaze on the ground as dry weeds and grass were consumed.
Pain blossomed in Tanner’s left arm and he realized that a piece of shrapnel had found him. It was a minor wound, even smaller than the injury Vera had suffered. He ignored it while getting to his feet to see who had screamed.
Because of the fire separating them, Tanner couldn’t get close, but through the haze of smoke he saw a figure lying on the ground. When the man stripped a mask off his face, Tanner saw that it was Soulless. Henry’s shot had done damage to the assassin’s right leg and blood was pooling beneath him. Soulless was also bleeding from numerous cuts on his arms, but they were superficial wounds. He’d been lying prone when the grenade went off. Much of the debris hurtled through the air above the level of his body, but several fragments had found his arms, and more were embedded in the soles of his boots. Had he been lying the other way, those fragments would be protruding from his skull, or embedded within it.
Soulless had removed his mask so he could breathe easier, then raised himself up onto his elbows. The two men locked eyes.
“It’s over Soulless,” Tanner said. He raised his gun to finish the man off and the wind shifted to blow black smoke from the helicopter fire into his eyes. Tanner shut them, maintained his aim, and let loose until his weapon ran dry. He was rewarded by Soulless screaming.
Soulless felt the agony of his leg wound and moments later registered fresh pain erupt in his arms when the grenade went off. He’d known there was a sniper, but he believed the smoke from the helicopter fire was blocking the man’s view of him. He’d been right, until the wind had changed.
As he sat up, he saw Tanner looking at him through the flames and haze that separated them. This time, the wind favored him, and it blew smoke into Tanner’s eyes. Soulless rolled to his left, the level of pain in his wounded leg doubled from the movement, and then he felt himself falling, only to stop an instant later. He had rolled into one of the apertures created by the pressure of the steam rising up out of the ground. Steam was still rising, and it was hot enough to make Soulless scream. He had saved himself from getting hit by Tanner’s rounds only to discover that he was in danger of being cooked to death. He freed his arm from the hole, ripped away the sleeve covering it, and fell onto his back. He lay gasping, as his left arm and right leg throbbed in unison. He was done. If Tanner found him, he’d be helpless to defend himself.
Tanner was looking for a route around the flames to reach Soulless when he saw Vera, Haley, and Brett coming towards him. A hundred feet behind them was a thin man in khakis, waving. He guessed that was Luke, Vera’s meth cook of a boyfriend. Haley reached Tanner first and grinned up at him.
“Are you okay?” A moment later, the little girl noticed the bodies strewn about, and her face turned white.
Tanner took her by the hand and began walking toward the other helicopter. As he did so, he spoke to Vera.
“Why did you come back here?”
“We came upon a bear and turned around. And there are things in the tent that I need.”
“You’ll have to leave them. Someone will spot the fires and report the explosions. We need to get out of here.”
Luke caught up to them. He was smiling as he took in the burning chopper. “It looks like a damn war went on here.” When he went to put an arm around Vera, the woman slipped beneath it. She was giving Luke a look that could kill. He had let them approach the RV even though he must have known that it had been rigged to explode.
“Follow me to the other helicopter,” Tanner said. “If you stay here, you’ll have to answer questions from the co
ps.”
“You can fly that thing?” Luke asked.
Tanner ignored him and kept walking. When they were near the chopper, they saw Henry coming toward them. He wasn’t alone. He had Tom Curry with him.
“Are you all right?” Henry asked Tanner, as he noticed blood on the sleeve of his left arm.
“I’m good, thanks to your help with the rifle.”
“They had a man up there. I took him out and found this guy. He calls himself Soulless Fan #1. He also knows who’s behind all this.”
Tanner stared at Curry. “You’re coming with us. Behave or die.”
Curry nodded his head quickly. “I won’t give you any trouble, and I can tell you who wants you dead.”
“Everyone climb into the back,” Tanner said. Afterward, he pulled the dead pilot from his seat and let the body topple onto the ground. “Henry, you’re in the front passenger seat.”
When everyone was aboard, Tanner took the craft skyward. Far in the distance, he could see two police cars followed by two fire trucks. He climbed higher and aimed the helicopter toward a wide stretch of farmland that was bordered by a town. Below, numerous fires were spreading, and two figures were moving about.
Gwen saw the helicopter take off as she was searching for Soulless. After calling for him for the twelfth time, she heard an answering call.
“I’m over here.”
She looked to where the sound had come from and saw only a wall of flames, but then she spotted the figure crawling in the grass. It was Soulless. He was dragging his bleeding right leg behind him and something was wrong with his left arm, which was beet red. As she grew closer, she saw that the leg was badly wounded and that the arm was burned. There were other injuries, but they were minor.
Soulless (A Tanner Novel Book 43) Page 18