Raiders

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Snatching a CS Handtoss grenade from her bag, Zara kicked the door open with her boot and rolled the weapon out into the hall. The grenade exploded in a thick, white cloud of noxious gas and the next thing she heard were two men coughing and gasping for air. Milo was wearing his mask now, and peered into the gloom through the visor. “They’re still coming!”

“Not for long.” Coughing with the gas, Zara fired the Glock 23 into the cloud and killed the two men, and then quickly slid on her gas mask before making her way down the stairs. She pulled her wrist up and spoke rapidly into the palm-mic. “Just took out two of Ezra’s local thugs up here. You got anything for me on the asset’s location yet, Cal?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We’re pinned down by some heavy fire on the first floor.”

“That means ground floor, Milo,” Mason threw in.

She heard someone else pounding up the stairs. Heavy footsteps. A man. She guessed it was Bjorn Brick whom Ezra had briefed her about earlier. She watched as his enormous frame came bobbing up through the CS gas and saw he was wearing a gas mask.

When Brick’s head was in the right place on the stairs, she kicked her leg out as hard as she could and caught the end of his mask’s filter canister with the toe of her boot. The power of the unexpected impact smashed the mask into Brick’s face and knocked it away from his mouth and nose. He fell back immediately with the force of the strike and them tumbled almost comically back down the stairs.

“Nice kick!” Milo said.

Zara heard his hefty frame crunch into the landing but he was obscured once again by the gas. He was going to be pretty pissed about getting belted like that without any warning, so she figured it made more sense to finish the job while he was still disoriented. If you’re going to poke a bear, then better off do it in his eyes.

She leaped off the top step and flew through the CS gas like a ninja, landing with a controlled thud on the landing. She was on her own. Brick had come to his senses and rolled away, and now he was hiding somewhere for her in one of the mansion’s other rooms. An angry bear with a score to settle.

She heard gunshots and realized Brick was firing on them. “Get down!”

They hit the deck and she fired back, emptying her magazine in the hope of taking out the Spider.

“You’re firing at ghosts, Z!”

Milo was right. She tossed the gun and made her way down the next staircase. “Keep up, Miles!” she said, and swept her gun from side to side as she gave chase to the Huntsman.

Dr Evangeline Starling heard gunshots all around her, but thanks to the bag on her head she saw nothing but blackness. She was disoriented, scared and she felt sick, and when the shooting got closer she was certain she was going to die.

She didn’t even know where she was. They had let her see the ankh, but that was in this windowless room and when she had done their bidding they had put the bag back over her head. The last time she had seen daylight was when she had stepped inside the Harvard Museum of Natural History and that was back in Boston. She had no idea where they had taken her but she knew it had involved a long flight.

She could be anywhere.

And now there was a gun battle raging around her and she was tied to a chair with a sack blinding her and preventing her from defending herself. She worked hard to control her nerves, but couldn’t stop herself from jumping every time one of the guns went off. If she made it through this it would be a miracle.

In the kitchen, Mason and Caleb were still under heavy fire. Mason saw in the reflection of the chrome refrigerator that their tormentors were Kyle Cage and Iveta Jansons. He knew Zara and Milo were hunting Bjorn Brick upstairs and Molly Cruise was trying to buy a latte without any money down the street, so that meant Linus Finn was guarding the asset.

Caleb took the brunt of the fire, keeping his head below the level of the kitchen units while he reloaded his weapon. Mason provided cover fire and managed to drive both the Spiders from the kitchen and back out into the hall. He could smell CS gas and knew Zara must have deployed it. It was a standard weapon they used on their retrieval missions when they ran into trouble.

Suddenly he heard the firing go silent, and peered over the counter to see both Cage and Jansons peel off and make a break for it. Linus had obviously ordered a retreat. The Raiders hadn’t caused anywhere near enough havoc to force a man like Linus to back off yet, so that meant they had what they wanted.

He saw a door leading to the basement and blew open the lock with his gun.

“I’m going down, Cal! Cover me in case they come back.”

“Got it.”

Kicking the door open he made his way down the steps until he saw the asset. She was sitting in the center of the room with a bag over her head. He moved forward until he noticed others in the darkened space, and then he opened fire on them. They fired back. The exchange was short and he heard a cry in the darkness and something hit the cold tiled floor. He had hit one of them, but now Caleb piled in behind him and added more manpower, firing at them as they sprinted through another door into the dusk.

“Is she still alive?” Caleb asked.

Mason prayed she was, and ran toward her.

With Milo struggling to keep up, Zara saw Brick climbing out of a window and heading for the roof. She gave chase, slipped through the window and sprinted along the rooftiles in pursuit of him. It wasn’t her first rooftop chase, and she was once again taken back to Lincoln Heights and the Choker. She had given chase to the serial killer, running with everything she had to keep up with the much larger man. He had vaulted over a low wall and approached what looked like the edge of the roof. She saw him jump over it again and from her perspective it looked like he had leaped off the roof and into the ether.

When she got there she realized he had leaped down to a lower roof and was now sprinting toward an empty rooftop swimming pool full of junk and surrounded by broken sun loungers. She guessed it had been pretty classy many years ago but since the crackheads moved in the pool had been turned into a giant landfill and was full of bottles, cans, old furniture and thousands of needles.

She had seen worse.

That was partly why she had tossed that life away and become a bhikkhuni.

Now Brick stood on the roof’s edge and faced her, his chest heaving up and down with the effort of the chase. “You’re good,” he said.

Zara slipped her hand into her pocket and slid her fingers through her faithful knuckle duster. “And you’re finished.”

He started laughing. “Who’s going to finish me?”

“Me.”

“You? You and whose army, sweetheart?”

Zara charged forward and smashed the knuckle duster into the left side of his jaw. She heard the sound of bones breaking as his head rocked backward. Brick looked genuinely shocked and tried to move back but the wall stopped him in his tracks. Zara brought up her other hand, also armed with a knuckle duster but this time he was smart to her tricks and grabbed the hand. He squeezed it until she thought every bone in her hand was going to break. “Jesus…”

“Looks like sweetheart has a weak link,” he said, laughing.

“We all do, right?” she said.

“No,” he said flatly.

“Let me prove you wrong,” she said, and brought her knee up into his balls. She drove her kneebone up into him as hard as she could and got the result she needed.

He howled in pain and released her hand. “Fucking bitch!” he growled, and delivered a meaty back-handed slap to her face.

It caught her off-guard and she tumbled backward and fell over onto the roof.

He padded over to her and snatched up a length of metal piping out of the detritus around him. “I’ll teach you a lesson that you won’t forget in a hurry.”

She kept her nerve and waited until he was nearly over her, and then spun around in a circle and leaped to her feet ready for another round.

She heard gunshots and looked over her shoulder to see Milo firing on Brick.

The Huntsman dropped the piping, blew her a kiss and winked. “Another time, sweetheart.” He fled like a panther, leaping off the wall and smashing down on the roof of the adjacent building. He was gone.

“Brick’s out of here,” she said into her palm mic. “I repeat, Brick’s out of the building. We’re all clear up here.”

She screamed, turned and kicked the metal piping so hard it flew over the wall and spun out of sight over the rear garden.

Mason breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Eva Starling turn in her chair. He’d just heard Zara reporting that Brick had fled, so that meant all the Spiders were gone, but at least the asset was alive. That was always the primary goal of an extraction and rescue squad like the Raiders.

“Who’s there?” she asked.

He rushed forward and took the bag off. She had been crying, and mascara was streaking down her cheeks. A slight bruising under her right eye and a split lip also told him someone had gotten physical with her as well, but they were questions for later.

“Who are you?” she said, her voice hoarse and desperate.

“My name’s Mason,” he said. “Jed Mason, and I’m here to rescue you.”

“Thank God!” she said. “I thought you were those weirdos again.”

“Do you know where Linus went?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Sorry, no… and what the hell happened to your face?”

“Long story,” Mason said.

As he spoke, Caleb snatched up a strange golden object from the floor. It was heavy, and covered in jewels. “This must be what they dropped when you hit one of the bastards.”

Mason had no time to look. “You’re coming with us. You’re safe now.”

“Wait a minute — you’re not American.”

Mason hacked at the cable ties binding her hands together and strapping her to the back of the chair. “An astute observation,” he said. “I’m working with Americans.”

“Are you SAS?”

“No. Let’s just get out of here and then we’ll talk.”

She breathed a sigh of relief, and he saw hope flicker into her blue eyes for the first time since he’d removed the bag. “Whatever gets me away from these crazies faster!”

Holding her tightly by the hand, Jed Mason told her to keep her head down, and then he led her back to freedom.