Blood Vengeance

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Drake dropped to the floor.

“Hold position! Hold position!”

“Ya don’t fuckin’ say!” The unnerved team leader shouted into his mic.

Drake heard the deep rumble die away. The explosion had come from the other side of the hotel, barely shaking the structure and doing little real damage. A frantic exchange was taking place over the comms.

“Team Echo, come back. Team Echo, come back.”

Two teams, including Drake’s, had returned the summons already, but the third had not responded. Their comms channel was still open though, its airwaves thick with the muffled sounds of pain and distress. Drake listened while staring up the staircase as the survivors finally managed to speak.

“Trap. Goddamn pressure pad or something triggered a shaped charge down the staircase from the landing above. We have wounded—”

Suddenly the comms system and its operators changed their dispositions from anxious to hysterical.

“Kovalenko! It’s Kovalenko. He’s calling the emergency number right now.”

“Jesus Christ! Get a fix on it!”

Drake settled back on his haunches, feeling helpless. He began to creep back down the staircase, each man following in the others’ footsteps as the team leader retreated from his highest point — three steps from the landing. Maybe Team Echo had been the first to make it to that level.

“We’re piggybacked onto the call! Listening in…”

Drake couldn’t hear what the Blood King said, but the sudden deathly silence on the line attested to its magnitude. Every man stopped moving, fingers to their ears, weapons lowered, listening. Every fist was clenched, every ounce of breath held. The tension soon became as thick as jungle heat.

“No…” an operator breathed.

“Alpha team here,” Drake’s team leader spoke gruffly. “What the hell is going on up there?”

“Kovalenko has Coburn… I mean, I mean the President. They’re pulling him… across the room. No—”

Drake gritted his teeth. The Blood King stood not five floors above him, yet stayed firmly beyond his reach. Hot blood and a thirst for vengeance surged through his body, making him want to run up every stair and burst in through the bastard’s door, all guns blazing, but one simple booby-trap had stopped any chance of that happening. Men were dead, and now Kovalenko was revealing the next part of his master plan. It was all staged, Drake knew. Every part of Kovalenko’s plan would have been thought through to the finest and bloodiest detail.

“Oh no … the President is now positioned before the window. The commandos are around him. Kovalenko just put the phone down, said something like ‘you want to test me? Here’s what I do.’ And… and… my God!”

“What is it?” most of the team cried. “What’s happening?”

“That madman just threw President Coburn out of an eleventh story window.”