Dead Drop

Chapter 15

Quinn gave the base of the AK-47’s magazine an upward smack with the flat of his hand, and then racked the bolt and pulled the trigger. Years of training had embedded the tap, rack, bang drill in his brain for a failure-to-fire malfunction—

Tap, rack… but no bang. Quinn chided himself for not checking the chamber when he’d picked up the weapon, realizing Saqr must have run it dry.

Abu Kaliq turned out to be much more athletic than the others in his group and jumped sideways at the first sight of Quinn, as if to try and dodge his fire. The jihadi smiled when the gun malfunctioned, and then dove for his own rifle that leaned against the wall. Quinn threw the useless AK like a spear, crashing in behind it with the point of his shoulder.

Quinn felt the other man’s rib cage bend inward as they came together. It would have been a devastating blow, but the knife wound in Quinn’s thigh throbbed as if it had been stuffed with hot coals and robbed him of a considerable amount of power as he sprang forward. Still, it knocked the wind out of Kaliq long enough for Quinn to get him rolled back on his heels — for the moment.

Quinn saw the black plastic box that had to be the cell phone jammer and tried to work his way to it, but Kaliq circled, putting himself in front of the device. Tariq was nowhere to be seen, but Quinn didn’t have time to worry about anyone who wasn’t trying to kill him right then and there.

Battle, especially in close quarters, was frenetic and unpredictable — but for a victory, it had to be fought with an end goal in mind. Inflicting pain might slow down the opponent or redirect his energy, creating a different avenue for attack. But pain didn’t stop a determined fighter. In the end, blood or oxygen to the brain had to be interrupted, from a correctly applied choke, a bullet, a blade — or the sudden fatal meeting with the concrete after a fall from twenty-one stories.

Quinn pressed forward, shoving Kaliq backward toward the rail, driven by momentum and rage. But the young jihadi had other plans, and stepped off-line to slow Quinn’s attack. At the same time, he reached over Quinn’s shoulder to yank the T-shirt up his back toward his neck, gripping all the gathered fabric from neck to hem in a stout fist. Crossing his forearms, Kaliq snaked in to grab a second handful of shirt and collar on the other side of Quinn’s neck — and then squeezed.

His turn to push, the heavier man drove Quinn backward as he pulled his forearms together, bashing Quinn into the clear Plexiglas tube that covered Dead Drop’s entry. The flimsy tube was meant for safety, not security, and it separated from the wall under the force of Quinn’s body. Tipping sideways like a tree, it rolled across the concrete to expose the trapdoor.

The collar of Quinn’s own shirt pressed against the arteries at the side of his neck, cutting off the blood to his brain. With only seconds until he passed out, Quinn shot his left arm between Kaliq’s elbows, putting the flat of his own hand to the side of his head, wedging open the jihadi’s grip with his arm and shoulder — a simple but effective choke escape called “answering the phone.”

Quinn felt the tingling rush as blood returned to his brain, and he used the renewed energy to pummel Kaliq’s open left side with a series of brutal uppercutting hooks, digging deep into the soft underbelly just below the man’s rib cage. Kaliq struggled to put some distance between himself and the brutal beat-down to his spleen. Smart enough to know he shouldn’t run, the jihadi mounted another attack the instant he felt any relief from Quinn’s punches. Injured and fatigued, the kid lumbered forward, intent on using his greater mass. Quinn sidestepped, throwing out the inside of his forearm like a club and letting it thud directly across the brachial plexus on the left side of Kaliq’s neck. The disruption of nerve impulses caused the jihadi to gurgle unintelligible sounds as his feet outran the upper portion of his body. He tried to regain his balance, but found himself caught in an explosive flurry of hooks and crosses that sent him staggering back directly over the slide’s now-exposed trapdoor. Slamming against the control column, his back collided with the red button and the door fell away, sucking him out of Quinn’s grasp.

Unwilling to let Kaliq escape to the bottom and alert the rest of his crew, Quinn dove in before the door could swing shut, following Kaliq headfirst into the gurgling darkness of the tube.

As the name implied, Dead Drop’s tubular slide fell away at a stomach-churning near-vertical drop for the first ten stories, or ninety feet, with riders’ bodies gradually coming back into greater and greater contact with the slide itself as the angle increased with each passing foot. A steady spray of water greased the way.

Diving headfirst with his arms outstretched, Quinn was in virtual freefall, coming into far less contact with the slide and producing greater speed than Kaliq, who slid on his back, feet forward. Obviously terrified, the young jihadi screamed at the top of his lungs. He flailed wildly as he slid, causing him to careen back and forth inside the tube, slowing him down even more.

Rocketing down the slide near highway speeds, Quinn gritted his teeth, arching his neck to keep his nose above the jet of water that rushed down the base of the slide. A rooster tail of spray flew up behind Kaliq as he slid. Quinn’s fingers curled around a knot of his trailing hair two seconds into the ride. The jihadi went apoplectic, screaming even louder, a hollow, otherworldly sound inside the close confines of the plastic tube. He’d had no idea Quinn was behind him, and flailed wildly when he felt something out of the darkness grab his hair.

They reached fifty miles an hour about the time the angle of the slide rose up to meet them. Quinn pulled himself forward with Kaliq’s hair as if it were a rope. Both men careened up on the side of the tube as it curved sharply to the right in a series of two downward spiraling corkscrew loops. Unable, or at least unwilling, to put his arms up over his head and fight back, Kaliq jerked his head from side to side as he sped along, in an effort to shake off the unseen attacker. Quinn tensed his core, locking his ankles and tucking his shoulders to gain as much speed as he could. Kaliq’s fighting only slowed him all the more, allowing Quinn to move forward enough to slide his right hand over the screaming face, groping forward to claw at the man’s eyes. Thrashing like he was out of his mind, Kaliq arched his back, inadvertently allowing Quinn to sink his fingers into the man’s eye sockets up to his knuckles. Kaliq tore at his own face with both hands, but it did no good. Pain and physics made his efforts hopeless. Quinn gripped the young terrorist’s face like a bowling ball, allowing his legs to come apart slightly, slowing him, forcing Kaliq to drag him along by the eyes.

The jihadi screamed a broken scream. Quinn’s stomach fell away as the two men shot out of the final loop and plunged downward another twenty feet. The angle decreased and the top of the slide opened up to form a trough instead of a tube. What had been a lubricating spray became two feet of water, slowing the men’s forward motion as surely as if they’d deployed a parachute. Eighteen seconds after they’d dropped through the trapdoor twenty-one stories above, they reached the end of the Dead Drop.

Maintaining the claw grip, Quinn arched his body and let his legs fly past the thrashing jihadi, flipping on his belly and clamoring onto the man’s back to hold his face underwater. Expecting to be shot at any moment by one of Kaliq’s compatriots, Quinn locked his legs around the man in an effort to quiet the sound of splashing water. It was over much more quickly than Quinn expected it to be and he lay there on the man’s back, holding him under long after he’d stopped his struggles.

Drenched and oozing blood from the knife gash in his leg, Quinn left the dead jihadi floating facedown in the slide. He took a quick moment to look around and gather his thoughts, finding himself alone in the shadows. A blue glow from the lights in the wave pool flickered up through the trees to his right. Apart from the music coming from the speakers, the park was eerily silent.

He’d hoped to find Terry Spencer at the top of the slide, kill him, and disable the cell jammer. The immediate scrap with Kaliq had left the swamper operational — and Terry hadn’t even been there. Quinn took a series of deep cleansing breaths, trying to make sense of things. Terry wasn’t at the top, but he had to be somewhere.

The Lynyrd Skynyrd version of “Call Me the Breeze”—another song from Quinn’s playlist — began to play over the speakers.

If Terry Spencer had any knowledge of the park at all, he’d go straight for the office to fix the problem with the radio and reestablish communication with his team.

Quinn kept to the shadows and sprinted toward the park office. Once more he found himself without a rifle. The Benchmade folder had slipped out of his shorts during the slide, so now he didn’t even have that. He saw two shooters as he ran, loitering in the trees just inside the side gate. He noted their positions, but gave them a wide berth.

Fifty meters out, Quinn saw the front door to the park offices swing shut. He dug in, ignoring the sickening ache from the wound in his thigh, and picked up his speed.

Mattie and Dan were still in the pool along with over a hundred other hostages — all surrounded by cruel men with their fingers on the trigger, waiting for an order.