The Blood King Conspiracy

CHAPTER TWELVE

For a long moment Drake and his friends stared at each other. Bradey took his marines and raced off, the shock of it all still apparent in his voice as he barked out orders.

Drake regarded the box. “Last place we wanna be.”

He moved into the passageway. The fading footsteps of the racing marines still echoed from the bland walls.

“Remember the way out?” Kennedy asked.

Drake shot her a ‘don’t be silly’ look and set off. Moving blindly like this and with limited cover and escape routes, he felt extremely uncomfortable. Bradey needed his bollocks tweaking for not leaving them a gun. Harrison was blethering on, only further confusing the ex-SAS man’s radar.

“Let’s keep it down,” he rasped along the line. “We have no idea what we’re dealing with here.”

“I do.” Hayden said softly. “Boudreau.”

Drake paused and looked along the line. At the back stood the man-mountain, Kinimaka. His steely eyes met Drakes’ and expressed just one word.

Revenge.

Drake moved off. “I’ll tell you this, Hayden. Boudreau ain’t the hardest man on this vessel.”

The passageway ran straight for twenty feet before hitting a ninety degree junction. Signage was noticeably absent. Drake felt a moment of frustration and then turned right, almost sure it led to their cabins from which he could easily find the deck.

The odd thing was they walked in utter silence. On board a ship of hundreds he heard not a single voice. Creepy thoughts of the Bermuda Triangle entered his head.

At last they reached their cabins. As Drake paused to have a quick look a second intense explosion shook the U.S. cruiser, making the walls and the floor shiver and shake.

“Above decks could be worse,” Kennedy said.

“Now, maybe,” Drake told her. “But if those guys made it down here we’d be gravy.”

“Down here?” Hayden looked shocked. “How could they ever get down here? There’s a boatful of U.S. marines to get through.”

“But they already knew that,” Drake said. “And yet still… they’re attacking this ship.”

The ex-soldier led them on, trying to exercise speed and caution and, at last, they were standing before a set of stairs that led up to the deck. Now, the sounds of combat were more apparent.

“Seriously,” Kennedy reiterated, “wouldn’t it be easier to hold them off down here.”

Drake felt a moment’s frustration. He was trying to save their lives. Questions weren’t helping. “Stop thinking a step ahead,” he said shortly, “and try thinking four or five steps ahead. They will have planned for that contingency. Now follow!”

Boots hammering the steps, he pounded upwards, cracked open the door and glanced out. One… two… three. Five seconds, then he ducked back in.

“Ship’s clean,” he said. “No bad guys. The marines are holding them off.”

He cracked the door again and they filed out. The big five-inch gun mounted on the bow was before them. Behind them bristled the various radar arrays towers and illuminators. The deck was jammed with hard-faced marines. Alarms and sensors were going off everywhere.

But Drake read the confusion behind their eyes and saw the panic they were concealing at the shrieking warning bells and stopped dead. “Don’t like the look of this.”

He started towards the big gun and then something happened that made the British seen-it-all SAS soldier stand and gawp like a three-year-old on a visit to Disneyland.

Above the bow, above the massive gun, above the port and starboard side, and rising like prehistoric moths appeared at least a dozen choppers. In less than a second they all opened fire. The sound of metallic hell filled the air so loudly that Drake found himself unable to think.

He fell to the deck and crawled. As his senses returned he glanced underneath his own body. His friends were in a similar state, stunned into immobility. Bullets clanged and whined and ricocheted off every metal surface — a category-five hurricane of lead that tore through skin and bone and left men screaming in its wake.

Drake looked up when it stopped, relieved to be in one piece. Half a dozen helicopters were drifting over the ship, rappel lines unravelling. Drake foretold the future and scrambled quickly for a discarded weapon. There were plenty about. The carnage around him was indescribable. At least three-quarters of the downed men were still alive, in various states of hurt, but there was nothing he could do for them now.

It was kill or be killed, and this was his stage.

“Stay with me!” He ran instinctively for the side of the boat where he knew life-rafts were positioned. Emergency escape. That was all they had in their favour now.

But quicker than he would have believed possible the rappel lines quivered and men were landing lightly on deck all around them. Drake punched the first hard in the face, the second he clubbed with the machine-gun.

Many marines were still functioning and began to fight. A melee erupted on deck, gun-battle and hand-to-hand fighting of the most violent kind.

Drake led his small party through the middle of it. Mano Kinimaka bulldozed straight into a gathering group of enemy combatants, scattering them like bowling balls.

“Run, damn you!”

The life-rafts were about ten feet away. All of a sudden Drake saw half a dozen bouncing grenades litter the deck.

It was then that the war really began.