The Secret of Atlantis

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“We’re on!” Lea said, slipping her phone in her pocket and drawing her gun. “Joe and Reaper say there are more mercs at the fort and also some hostages.”

Lea’s team raced down the track toward the fort with Captain Jelena Karapandža at the wheel of the army truck right behind them. Seconds later they smashed their way through the front gates and skidded to a halt in the front drive. The truck piled in behind them in a roar of stinking diesel, mud and gravel chips. The tailgate slammed down and the soldiers filed out the back ready for action.

The small contingent of Korać’s men who had stayed behind to guard the fortress took two of the soldiers out right off the bat, their bodies tumbling down from the back of the truck and falling into the shallow ruts created by their own vehicle.

Ahead of the Serbian soldiers, Lea’s team thundered on relentlessly, but Jack Camacho received a stark reminder of his age when he quickly found himself bringing up the rear behind Lea and the others — even Ryan Bale edged ahead of him in the sprint for cover. He knew that meant more gym time when he got back to the States.

“I’m getting too old for this!” he yelled as he changed his magazine.

He watched as Lea and Scarlet covered each other in their advance toward one of the side-entrances, but Korać’s men pushed them back with superior firepower. When he caught up and joined the fight they finally turned the tables on the Serbs outside, pushing their way through the entrance and getting inside the inner sanctum.

Inside now, Korać’s goons were at the end of a long corridor, but the smell of fear was starting to rise from them. They were consolidating and trying to hold a defensive line but ECHO and the Serbian soldiers were slowly pushing them back. Then a handful came out of nowhere, rounding the basement stairs and dragging the two hostages up along the corridor from the courtyard the garage block.

Face to face with the enemy at last, the man leading the Serbs screamed at his men to kill Camacho and the ECHO team at all costs, and their response was to loose a barrage of gunfire at them and send the American and the others scattering for cover in rooms either side of the corridor. Bullets flew like firecrackers on a Chinese New Year, but whoever they were, Camacho thought, they weren’t professional. Their firing was aggressive but undisciplined and it didn’t take long for him and the others to exploit their weak cover and poor timing and take out nearly half of them. They worked their way up the corridor using the various rooms as cover until they were almost upon the men, who then turned and fled at the last moment in a bid to stay alive.

“They’re taking the hostages into the garage!” Lea shouted through the comms.

“Got it!” Scarlet said.

Camacho and the team followed them into the garage block only to see them piling into the back of a double-cab Hilux. He was horrified to see what looked like a light machine gun set up on the flatbed at the back. He was even more horrified when the Hilux skidded away in a wild roar of revs and exhaust fumes, slowing on a shallow bend to dump two dead bodies out one of the side doors.

“Jesus,” Ryan said, looking at the two corpses as they slowly tumbled to a standstill in the ditch. “That’s just terrible.”

“I’ll say,” Scarlet said. “They’ve got an M240 on the back of that flatbed.”

“A what?”

Scarlet rolled her eyes. “A crew-served, air-cooled, fire-spitting monster from Fabrique Nationale.”

“Is that bad?”

“I’d try not to get in the way of it if I were you.”

As she spoke, Camacho sprinted to the front and fired up the FAP 2026 truck, bringing it around to the rear so everyone could pile in. He took off after the Toyota but it was clear right from the start that the Serbs had no concerns about using them for target practice with the GPMG. Just minutes into the chase Camacho was forced to swerve the old military truck violently from side to side to avoid the standard chambering seven mil bullets as they punched the air all around them.

Empty bottleneck cartridges flew out the ejector port and rained down on the gravel track as the Hilux speeded along the lane on its way to the forest. The weapon was designed as a crew-served GPMG so two of the mercs had the pleasure of operating the gun as the Hilux tore through the Serbian countryside. Red-hot lead roared out the muzzle, smashing into the gravel in front of the FAP and ricocheting all over the lane.

In the distance, they heard the Hilux’s wheels squealing as the Serbs took a corner so fast they nearly tipped over. “We’re losing him, Camo!” Scarlet yelled.

“Have a little faith, would ya babe?” said the burly American.

He slammed his boot down on the FAP’s accelerator and did a little wheel-squealing of his own. The truck jolted forward leaving a cloud of blue-gray rubber smoke and exhaust fumes in its wake, not to mention a number of bemused cows in a neighboring field.

Scarlet smacked a fresh magazine into her Glock and slid a round into the chamber. With her trademark enthusiasm for the hunt, she leaned out the window, spat her cigarette out, and started firing on the Toyota. “It’s open season on arseholes!”

Back inside the truck, Lexi leaned closer to Ryan. “Does she have any friends?”

“Only victims,” the young man said, but in his heart he felt nothing but admiration for her as she unloaded a magazine of nine mil bullets. She had been the one cradling his head when he nearly died in Valhalla, after all.

Now Reaper made the same turn that had nearly sent the Hilux to the scrap-yard, but the FAP had a higher center of gravity than the pick-up. It made the turn with considerably less grace, and for a second before he straightened the wheel he thought they were going over.

The Hilux went in a different direction from the Escalade and Wrangler and soon they were zooming into a large town somewhere south of Belgrade. Seconds later they were all aware of a screaming siren behind them. Reaper flicked his eyes to the rear view and saw the blue and white stripes of the Serbian Police BMW F10 as it gave pursuit. “Shit!”

“What is it?” Lea said, turning in the back seat to look out the window. She saw the Beamer and sighed. “Shit!”

For Lea Donovan, she knew the hunt had started once again, and things were getting up-close and in her face. As Camacho hammered the FAP around another corner they saw he was making progress closing the gap between them and the Hilux, but now the Serb thugs were speeding along the A1, a straight highway south of the Belgrade suburb of Kumodrž. As they powered the FAP along the motorway the goons on the back took advantage of the long, straight road to open up the M240 on the flatbed and seconds later carnage exploded on the highway.

Innocent commuters and other travellers skidded left, right and center to avoid the lethal barrage of ammunition as the rounds ricocheted off the tarmac and punctured the steel panels of their cars.

On the back of the Hilux, one of the goons was still firing the GPMG as another fed more and more bullets into its firing chamber via the one hundred-round bandoleer in his hands. The metallic split-link ammo belt was designed to disintegrate as the machine gun swallowed the rounds and spat them at the enemy, but it still took the second member of the crew to feed more bandoleers into its hungry jaws.

Camacho reacted the same as the regular punters, skidding hard to the left and right in a bid to make it harder for the gun crew to hit the FAP, but this wasn’t impressing Scarlet who was still hanging out the window and trying to cause some havoc with her handgun. As they swerved hard to the right the GPMG chewed up the police car and sent it flying off into a ditch.

“For fuck’s same, Camo!” she yelled, and banged on the roof. “Can’t you keep this thing on the straight and narrow for five seconds?”

“Keeping you on the straight and narrow is hard, but this is impossible!”

She rolled her eyes and sighed as she raised her Glock into the aim and put the crosshairs over the top of Mr Bandoleer. It was a two man crew and the first target was the guy behind the gun but he was obscured so she settled for second best. She squinted her eye and gently squeezed the trigger, but just before she fired the FAP swerved without warning to the right and her shot went high and wide.

“Are you doing this on purpose?” she screamed.

“For fuck’s sake, Cairo!” Lea shouted. “He’s making sure we don’t get…”

Before she finished her sentence the M240 successfully ploughed dozens of rounds into the front of the FAP and punctured the grille, giving Camacho half a second to get out of the way before a line of bullets smashed into the windscreen and tore through them in the front seat. “Holy Bloody Mary — that nearly hit me!” Lea screamed.

Up top, Scarlet rolled her eyes again and shook her head. “It’s always about Lea Donovan isn’t it?”

“Eh?”

“I’m the one on the outside of the sodding truck!” And with that she took a second aim and fired. This time Mr Bandoleer got it right between the eyes, with a couple more in the chest as a goodwill gesture. Scarlet nodded with pride at a good job done as he tumbled over and fell over the Hilux’s tailgate, smashing face-first into the asphalt.

The final bandoleer he had fed into the GPMG was now gone, and the gunner had smacked it out of frustration before pulling a handgun out of his jacket and using that instead.

“At least now you’re even!” Ryan shouted.

“Even?” Scarlet shouted. “Don’t be silly, boy! He’s a man. We’re nowhere near even. Have to feel sorry for him, really.”

She punctuated her comment with a series of rapidly-fired bullets, striking the gunner in the throat and smashing the rear window of the Hilux’s double cab behind him. The pickup swerved wildly to the left and right and then skidded toward the crash barrier in the center of the highway.

It smashed straight through it and crossed the path of a DAF truck hauling timber. The DAF hit the air brakes and the massive vehicle violently juddered and jackknifed. The weight of the timber on the semi-trailer spun the truck around as the driver fought to maintain control, but the DAF’s cab just clipped the rear of the fleeing Hilux and sent it smashing over onto its side.

The surviving Serbian mercs struggled to release themselves from their belts as the timber-laden truck ploughed into them and crushed their Toyota to no more than a metre wide. The carnage was total, and soon the traffic was backed up in both directions as drivers rubbernecked to see what had happened. Somewhere in the distance they heard the sound of sirens as the emergency services raced to the scene of the accident, but the ECHO team were still staring in disbelief at how much the timber had compacted the Hilux down to almost nothing.

As she surveyed the damage, Scarlet winced. “That’s not nice at all.”

“Neither were they,” Camacho said.

“Seconded,” Maria said.

“Thirded,” said Lexi.

“Can you say fourthed?” asked Lea.

Ryan cleared his throat, unable to look at the terrible mess captivating the others. “Guys… I think we need to get out of here unless we want to spend the next ten years in a Serbian prison.”

“The boy’s got a point,” Scarlet said.

They climbed back into the battered FAP and slowly dissolving into the gridlock, they pointed the car in the direction of Belgrade.