The Darkest Day

SIXTY-TWO

Victor let all thoughts empty from his mind, passing control of his actions over to his unconscious, to the part of the brain evolved over millions of years, which some called the lizard brain. The conscious mind was slow and young and too prone to distraction and bias; the lizard brain was old and wise and could detect and analyse and process and calculate and act far quicker than any deliberate conscious thought. He felt the release of over one hundred and fifty different hormones into the blood, of which adrenaline was perhaps the most powerful. The others would be working in a variety of ways, shutting down non-essential bodily functions, focusing vision and deprioritising hearing — sound provided less clear messages than sight and warnings that were slower to receive and analyse and react to; the relative delay between processing sight and hearing might be minuscule, but it could spell the difference between survival and death.

He stood to peer down on to the open space before the terminal building and opened fire, wasting a whole magazine of .45 calibre rounds shooting blind into the darkness. Three seconds later he had dropped back in cover.

Victor crouched down on his haunches, back against the wall next to the window. Automatic fire exploded the pane and ripped chunks from the wooden framework, punching holes in the far wall. Plaster clouded in the air. Shards of glass shattered and skidded across the floor. As powerful as a .45 calibre round was, it could not penetrate solid brick, nor was anything inside the room solid enough to cause a bullet to ricochet.

He waited. The shooting was ineffectual. The gunmen were wasting rounds just as he had, but he still had an objective.

He reloaded the UMP and popped up to shoot again. This time at muzzle flashes, but without accuracy as he couldn’t afford to spend the time aiming when he was outnumbered eight-to-one. But he was gathering intelligence, not trying to kill his enemies. Even with the higher ground and cover, he wasn’t going to win this firefight.

But now he knew how far away his enemies were, and he had convinced them he was staying in the tower.

Further rounds took out more windows, scattering glass across the floor. It crunched beneath Victor’s heels as he ducked low, back against the wall to maximise the cover.

In seconds the gunmen would be easy targets for Raven, but he realised the plan wasn’t going to work because Raven wasn’t downstairs as instructed, but driving the flatbed truck.

He glimpsed it in his peripheral vision. The noise of rotor blades was enormous and had drowned out the sound of the truck’s engine. Victor saw it from the corner of his eye as it pulled out from between the two buildings and on to the runway, accelerating north towards the exit.

Raven was doing it her own way.

Halleck would have seen it too. Victor could almost see and hear the reactions and then instructions and action.

He risked looking and saw three of Halleck’s guys rushing back to, and boarding, the helicopter. It was in the air a moment later and flying after the truck, leaving Halleck and four of his guys approaching the terminal building.

In less than thirty seconds the helicopter had passed over the flatbed truck. Victor watched it bank and slow and land again in the distance.

The truck continued in a straight line, heading straight for the landed Eurocopter. The pilot would be expecting it to slow and stop, but it didn’t and Victor saw tiny specks of light as guns opened fire in the distance, shooting at the truck in an attempt to kill the driver and bring it to a stop.

When it was obvious the truck wasn’t going to be brought to a halt, the helicopter took off to avoid being hit and the guys on the ground stopped firing to clear out of the way.

Both of which were pointless because two tons of high explosives detonated.

The night sky illuminated in a brief instance of dazzling white light that blinded Victor. The sound was a monstrous boom that hit him an instant later, the overpressure wave exploding windows and popping his ears and knocking him off balance, broken glass raining down on him.

The chopper had ascended to maybe fifty metres when the truck exploded and was caught in the massive mushrooming blast. The helicopter was ripped in half, the back end falling away as flaming wreckage as the front section spun in crazed patterns until it came crashing to ground, out of sight in the woodland.