Raiders

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Virgil felt his heart pumping hard in his chest as he sprinted along the top of the dam in pursuit of Kyle Cage, Iveta Jansons and Molly Cruise. It was one of those insane Raiders moments he could hardly believe was happening. Just a few days ago he was cuddling his newborn daughter in their New York home and preparing for his second PhD viva, and now he was on another job, working for Jed Mason. All the madness and excitement that usually entailed were here tonight in spades.

Ben Speers was ahead of him a short distance and Don French on his other side as they drew closer to the crane. It loomed into the starry sky, flashing dully in the Egyptian moonlight. Were it not for the terrorists taking refuge within its walls, it would have been almost beautiful.

“This way!” Ben said. “They’re up ahead.”

Don French raised his SIG 552 Commando and buried the stock in his shoulder as he paced forward, raising the muzzle and sweeping it from side to side. “We have to knock that Caracal out of action!” he said, referring to the Spiders’ chopper.

They heard the chatter of submachine gunfire.

“Up there!” Ben said.

“They’re using flash hiders!” French said.

It was too late. French took a hit direct to the chest, and then a second. He dropped like a rock onto the concrete, crashing into the side of the crest wall and gasping for air. When he spoke, his voice was thin and hoarse. “Dammit… take… cover!”

Virgil, Ben and Sharaf scattered to avoid the incoming fire.

They pulled up behind one of the support struts of the crane’s base tower section and took a second to reload and scan the area for the enemy’s location.

“There!” Sharaf said. “I see them over there behind one of the transformers.”

“One of them’s climbing,” Ben said.

Virgil saw it too. Iveta Jansons was scaling the side of one of the lightning arresters. Not only that, she was doing it with a wounded arm from the bullet she took in Paris. He could hardly believe what he was seeing. The arrester’s function was to protect the system’s conductors and insulation from the harmful impact of a lightning strike, but it stretched up into the sky hundreds of feet. One slip, and she was dead.

“Is she crazy? She must be silly as a sack of shit.”

“She wants a better angle to try and take us out,” Ben said. “She’s got a rifle over her shoulder.”

“She won’t get the chance,” Sharaf said, and started to climb up the side of the support strut.

Virgil stared up as he watched the Egyptian Special Forces sergeant ascend into the darkness above him. He reached the gantry crane at the top moments later, and was now even more elevated than Iveta over on the lightning arrester. Far below, the moonlight sparkled on the distant Nile silently collecting in the reservoir.

“Where the hell’s Cage and Cruise?” Ben said. “You see them?”

Virgil nodded. “They’re making a break for the Caracal! Are they abandoning Iveta?”

“Not a chance,” Ben said. “They’ll pick her up from the arrester.”

His words were drowned out by the crackle of gunfire. Sharaf and Iveta were exchanging fire high above them now. Virgil watched Sharaf’s muzzle flash high above him, but then he heard an agonized cry and watched in horror as the sergeant clutched his throat and tumbled off the gantry crane.

The man fell silently in the darkness before crashing down on top of a bank of circuit breakers, dead.

Virgil’s heart quickened. He had seen men die before on previous missions, but watching Sharaf’s dead body convulsing like a marionette as the electricity coursed through it was something else. Driven by rage, he raised his weapon and fired on Iveta, striking her several times with the automatic fire until his gun was out of ammo.

She cried out, released her rifle and fell backwards off the lightning arrester. Tumbling into the darkness, she fell out of sight behind the machine hall and landed with a cannon-crack smack on the concrete platform behind the access gallery.

Virgil ejected the empty magazine and looked up at Ben Speers, expecting a nod of support but instead he saw something which turned his blood cold.

Across the other side of the dam, Caleb Jackson led his team toward the enormous generator. There were twelve of them in total, each powered by the gigantic dam, and had during their time provided up to half of the entire country’s electrical output. “Keep going, everyone!” he said through the headsets. “We’re almost there.”

Passing the service gallery and a line of transformers, they finally reached the turbine generation room and made their way inside the colossal structure in search of Linus Finn and his bomb. “I see Linus and Kat,” Caleb said. “But where the hell is Brick?”

The Spiders saw them and opened fire with a savage volley of automatic rounds.

“Cover!” Caleb yelled.

They hid from the onslaught wherever they could: Caleb tucked down behind the generator’s rotor housing and Zara and Shafik slid deftly under the platform of an observation deck.

“Just give yourselves up!” Linus shouted from across the other side of the generator room. “Resistance is futile.”

“Why would I give up?” Zara called back. “Explain it like I’m five!”

“You’ll find out.”

“Fuck off, Linus,” Zara called back over.

“I hope you don’t kiss with that mouth, darling,” said a cool English voice.

Caleb peered over the concrete housing and saw Kat Addington beside Linus. She was holding a pump-action shotgun in her hands, and Linus was making the final adjustments to a suitcase nuclear device.

“My God!” Caleb’s eyes filled with terror. “It’s a pocket nuke!”

“That answers your question about how he’s going to blow a hole in the retaining wall from the powerhouse, I guess,” Zara said drily, but then she gasped.

Caleb looked up to see Bjorn Brick holding a gun to the back of her head.

“And I guess that answers your question about where Bjorn Brick was,” Caleb said.

Zara dropped her weapon. “It certainly does,” she said, deflated.

“You too,” Brick growled.

Caleb lowered his gun to the floor, but Shafik spun around and fired on Brick.

“No!” Caleb yelled. “You’ll hit Zara!”

Shafik was a crack shot, but this time his aim was off and the bullet plowed into the concrete wall behind Brick’s head. Brick fired back, hitting the Egyptian colonel in the stomach and chest and blasting him over the edge of the wall into the generator. He fell out of sight and they all heard the screams as he disappeared inside one of the turbines.

Linus ordered Brick to bring them forward, and moments later they were face to face with their old teammate and her new boyfriend.

“How the hell could you do this, Kat?” Zara said. “This guy’s a real cock holster, you know that?”

Kat slapped her face and the sound echoed off the smooth, concrete walls of the vast generator room. “You always were a coarse bitch.”

Zara wiped the blood from her mouth. “And you’re a fucking traitor. Jed’s totally destroyed. You ripped his heart out.”

“He can give as good as he gets, I’m sure.”

“You can believe it, Kat,” Caleb said, his voice low but firm. “He won’t stop until he settles his account with you. You must know that.”

“He’d be a fool even to try,” Linus crowed. He slipped his arms around Kat and they kissed on the mouth for several seconds.

“You make me sick,” Zara said. “If Jed doesn’t get you for what you did, you can count on me doing it.”

“Sadly, you will not be able to indulge your depraved revenge fantasies, my dear,” Linus said. “Because you will be dead in less than five minutes when that suitcase nuke detonates and triggers the greatest natural disaster in human history.”

“Why the hell are you doing this?” Caleb said.

“Money,” Linus said with a wink. “Greenbacks. My employers are very generous.”

“Your employers are an insane death cult,” Zara said. “You can’t be stupid enough to think they’ll actually pay a couple of lowlife bottom feeders like you two?”

“That’s our problem,” Linus said. After telling Brick to collect their weapons, he ordered everyone out the hall. “We’re locking you in here — for your own safety, of course,” he said with a chuckle.

Caleb watched as Linus, Brick and Kat started to ascend one of the stainless steel staircases beside the nearest turbine. “Dammit! They’re getting away!” he said.

“Not so fast, Tonto,” said Zara, and reached down for the snub nose pistol she had secured in her ankle holster. She shuffled behind Caleb’s broad body for cover as she raised it into the aim and then fired over his shoulder, striking Bjorn Brick in a direct hit and sending him tumbling over the staircase.

He smacked into the cold concrete floor with a wet crunch. A spray of blood exploded outwards from his body and flicked up the side of the turbine. His pump-action shotgun and shells skidded across the polished concrete floor toward Caleb and Zara.

Linus saw the disaster unfolding and screamed at Kat to leave.

“What about the bomb?” she cried out.

He glanced at his watch. “Ninety seconds! They have no chance, but we have to get airborne right now!”

Caleb skidded across the floor, stuffed the shells into his pockets and snatched the pump-action off the deck with a greedy swipe.

“Time to make it rain fire, baby.” Zara fired pot shots from her revolver but with only five remaining bullets it was empty in seconds.

Caleb took up the slack. Folding out the stock of the Mossberg 500 and clicking it into place, he loosed a savage volley of fire from the PA shotgun, blasting chunks of concrete out of the wall above Linus and Kat as they fled for the exit.

“Give me the gun, Cal!” Zara yelled. “I’ll go after them while you shut the timer off!”

As Caleb threw her the shotgun and ammo belt and ran over to the suitcase nuke, Zara pushed more shells into the bottom of the Mossberg and then racked the weapon, sliding a live round into the chamber. Supporting the fore grip with her left hand and gently tucking the stock into her shoulder she aimed down the length of the matte black barrel and fired the gun at Linus and Kat. She peppered the door in front of them but it was too late. Her aim was wide and they were through, slamming the steel door behind them and locking it.

She ran to Caleb who was now crouching beside the nuke.

“We’re locked in, Cal!”

Caleb barely heard her words. He was too focussed on the nuclear bomb in front of him. Linus had not been bluffing — the timer was now at sixty seconds and rapidly moving toward zero hour.

“Please tell me you know how to do this?” she asked.

“Sure, it’s a piece of cake,” he said, and started to remove a panel on the side of the weapon.

“Aren’t these things fail-safe?”

He shook his head. “A device like this is made to fail-fatally, not fail-safe.”

“You mean…”

They shared a glance. “I sure do. Like air brakes on a truck. In your car, if your brake fluid leaks then your brakes fail, so they fail fatally. With air brakes on a truck, they’re kept open by compressed air. If there’s a leak then the brakes close and the truck stops, so it fails safe.”

Forty seconds.

“Same with this. The timer’s a fail-fatally, and it’s connected to the conventional explosives that are required to trigger the core. If I cut it, then it goes off, so the only option is to cut the connection between the trigger and the core.”

Thirty seconds.

Zara watched as Caleb started his search inside the weapon. “I see what he’s done here, the bastard.”

“You can stop it?”

Twenty seconds.

“Pretty sure,” he grunted, and started to unscrew an internal panel. “The connection between the trigger and the core should be in here.”

“Pretty sure? Should be? Jesus.”

Ten seconds.

“Think I got the bastard,” Caleb said, and pulled his hand back out. “All we have to do is see what happens when the timer gets to…”

Zero.

Click.

Zara gasped.

Caleb smiled. “That was the trigger firing against nothing.”

“Christ, Cal. You’re an asshole sometimes.”

“I stopped it though. Don’t I even get a kiss?”

She leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. “I could kick your balls in for that little stunt.”

He pointed at the shotgun, which was now dangerously close to his head. “Is that thing still loaded?” he asked with a wink.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Got a little fazed right there.” Pushing the pump button, she pumped the gun back and cast an expert eye down the barrel to ensure the weapon was empty and then slung it over her shoulder. “We’re done here,” she said. “Let’s back to Virgil.”

Virgil watched as Ben Speers gently pulled the hammer back on his weapon and raised it until it was pointing at him. The young polymath looked at the barrel of the gun, glinting in the moonlight.

“I can’t let you destroy that helicopter, Virgil,” Ben said quietly.

“What’s going on, Ben?” Virgil said

“It’s time to die, said the Spider to the fly.”

“I don’t understand.”

Ben gave a fiendish smirk, and his next act was the brutal firing of his weapon at Virgil.

Virgil heard the sound of the discharge echo over the dam as he clutched his stomach and fell forward onto his knees. He was dimly aware of Cage and Molly running over from the chopper to Ben. They pounded up the concrete steps and made it to the base section of the crane.

He felt his life slipping away now.

Stared up at the moonlight glinting on the gantry crane.

Heard the distant sound of the turbines in the generator room.

He prayed Caleb and Zara had stopped Linus in time, and as he clenched his teeth in agony he knew he had to tell them about Ben, but knew there would be no chance because he was already losing consciousness.

Cage and Molly approached Ben, and they gave each other a hearty slap on the back. Comrades in arms.

“Those RPGs got a bit close for comfort, Kyle,” Ben said.

“It worked though, right? Delayed the landing and gave Linus time to set the bomb. If you hadn’t been on board I could have blown them right out the sky.”

“Am I coming with you?” Ben said.

Molly shook her head. “Nuh-uh. Linus says you stay with these guys and get cosy with them. He wants an inside man.”

“No problem.”

Virgil heard them laughing, and then he saw Linus Finn and Kat Addington arrive on the scene. They were out of breath and there was no sign of Bjorn Brick. Cage and Molly explained about Iveta, and Linus exploded with rage, pacified only when Kat kissed him and ran her fingers through his hair. All of them climbed up into the Caracal and then it powered up and lifted them all out of sight.

Ben turned back to Virgil.

“Sorry, old sport, but I have to get back to the Raiders and tell them all about how Kyle Cage took you out, after a brave attempt by me to stop him, naturally.”

Virgil tried to speak, but he was too weak.

Ben raised his gun and fired one final time.

And then everything went black.