The Swords of Babylon

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Drake heard the sound of approaching helicopters as he lay waiting atop the concrete block that was his bed. It was early morning. His eyes were closed, but sleep had never been so far away. He was waiting for this moment; that sound.

The whump, whump of the approaching choppers took him back a few months to the start of all the current madness where, in York, he had simply been photographing models at a catwalk show. Those were the days, he mused.

But now Mai was back in his life, the beat of his heart restored, and even now she was on her way to pull his arse out of the mire. He jumped up, checked that the shiv was still down his sock, and moved next to the bars. Somehow, he didn’t think this was one of those prisons that would stay locked down during a raid. The inmates would be called upon to help defend it.

Razin’s rules.

The noise increased. Prisoners across the aisle from Drake leaned out of their cell doors, arms waving, faces pressed between the bars. The choppers drew closer. The men began to shout. Drake thought the team might breach through the exercise yard wall or the kitchen area. They wouldn’t risk blowing out any wall that ran anywhere near a cell. They wouldn’t go through the front door. This was strictly smash and grab.

Which brought him to his first problem. Yorgi. He hoped the waif-like thief had heard the tumult by now and was standing ready, maybe even using the roof space to creep nearer to Drake’s cell, but he couldn’t be sure of it. So when the cell doors opened with the sound of a large bolt shooting back, he waited a moment for the aisle to clear, then slipped quickly away from his room. Following silently in the wake of the last man, he descended the stairs and circumvented the gym area whilst trying to ignore the shrill complaints of his bruised body. Rotor blades thudded just beyond the walls, the sound unmistakable now to even the oldest and most inexperienced ears. The team was landing.

Drake ran. Gunfire sounded from outside the walls. Inmates ran to the exercise yard door, but it was locked. Someone shouted for one of the guards to open it. A man recognized Drake and stepped in front, but ended up on his back, nose askew, to sleep out the rest of the day. Drake’s eyes unceasingly sought his target, but Yorgi made no appearance. He raced into the meeting room and beyond into the bright corridor. Two men stood up ahead, blocking his way, a guard and a prisoner quietly conversing.

“Here he is,” the guard said in English. “His friend. Get him.”

Drake never slowed. He used his momentum to drop and slide across the polished floor, swinging his legs as he got close to the prisoner, sending him crumpling to the floor. When he landed, Drake had already relieved the guard of his baton. He spun once, taking the guard out with a blow across the forehead and the prisoner out with a strike to the back of the neck.

Then he was speeding off again, approaching the end of the corridor. He ran down to Yorgi’s room and saw the destroyed roof tiles, pipes and aluminum framing scattered across the floor.

Someone had found Yorgi and pulled him out of his secret home.

Drake swore. Where would they take him? Was he, Drake, to blame? He searched the floor for any sign of blood or something he could use as a weapon. He picked up one of the steel pipes — a prison weapon if ever he saw one. Footsteps thundered by outside the door, guards rushing so fast that they didn’t see him. Drake walked to the frame and listened.

Muffled shouts reached his ears, the sound of a man begging for mercy behind a closed door. The standard prison echo, he thought, but this voice sounded a lot like Yorgi’s.

Drake rushed out, listening hard, pinpointing the noise as coming from behind the fifth door down. A rushing sound accompanied the screams, a sound Drake had heard before.

Oh shit.

He barged into the room, letting the door smash back against the wall. Three men whirled at the sound, one of them holding a wide, industrial hose. Yorgi sat against the rear wall, drenched, whimpering, gasping for breath. They had been trying to drown him standing up.

Drake ran hard. The hose whipped and exploded with a thick stream aimed at his legs. Drake jumped through the torrent, bringing the pipe down on a man’s nose before lashing it left across a second man’s mouth. Both screamed and bent double, holding their heads in their hands. Drake dropped the pipe and grabbed the hands of the man holding the hose, forcing the brass handle down between his legs. He let go and immediately the hose, unconstrained, began to skip and jerk like a ferocious snake. Drake jabbed the man in the solar plexus before finishing him with a rigid windpipe strike. He ran across to Yorgi.

“Hey, hey, you alright?”

The saturated man looked up. “I have had worse beatings.”

“Bloody great.” Drake extended a hand. “Trust me. I do keep my word.”

They sprinted back up the glaring corridor, Yorgi squelching and shivering with every step. Drake slowed as they reached the far door and put an arm out to stop Yorgi.

“Wait.”

He peered into the room. It was empty, but through the open door at the far end he could see right into the mess hall. Pandemonium reigned. Prisoners scurried haphazardly past the opening; shouting, gesticulating and fighting each other. A great huddle of them suddenly fell backwards, tripping over feet and twisting to crawl away. Drake heard a loud explosion before brick dust and shrapnel flew in a razor-edged cloud across the mess room.

“Now!”

Drake pulled Yorgi along. The sound of gunfire exploded from ahead. Prisoners twisted, spurting blood, as they charged forward. Drake paused for a second at the entrance to the mess hall, then walked out into full view, hands in the air.

Don’t shoot me, he silently intoned. Please…

“Matt!”

Mai’s shout came on the heels of Dahl’s cheer and just before Alicia’s expletive. The three soldiers knelt among a pile of rubble, rifles tucked firmly into their shoulders, a ragged, crumbling hole at their backs where the door to the yard used to be. Some of the prisoners recognized Drake and charged at him. The guns bucked and men skidded to his feet, already dead.

Drake ran hard, pulling Yorgi along. Mai and Alicia covered his sprint as Dahl turned to check their own retreat. A shout sounded from somewhere behind Drake. He whipped his head around and saw a spectacular sight. The whole crowd of prisoners — mostly Razin’s men — hurtling toward him in a rag-tag wedge. Not a man amongst them wanted to have to explain to Zanko why they hadn’t tried to prevent Matt Drake’s escape.

Drake reached his friends. Mai and Alicia, and now Dahl, fired around him, felling prisoners with leg and body shots so that they tripped up the men following behind. Some hurdled their fallen comrades, brandishing an assortment of weapons from plastic trays to improvised shanks; others swung knotted bed sheets full of rocks.

“Go!” Drake shouted.

“Nice to see you too!” Alicia shouted back, carefully squeezing shots off as the mob closed in. Drake ran through them, letting them cover his back, out into the exercise yard. A crazy scene met his eyes.

A military chopper had landed in the yard, amidst prison vehicles and storage sheds. The rotors were still spinning, as was the barrel of the nose cannon, having fired a burst at the prison’s main entrance where most of the guards were situated. The fence was down, a clear escape route showed right to the helicopters door. But the guards in their towers and their wired-off perches still took pot shots.

Drake whirled. “You guys bring me a gun?”

Dahl skidded to a halt beside him. “This is a quick extraction. We have no intentions of inducing a shoot out!”

“You’re taking the piss.” Drake pointed at the guard towers. “They’re all yours, Dahl.”

He ran hard, staying low, heaving Yorgi firmly behind him. At first, bullets peppered the dirt around his feet, but, after a few well-placed shots from Dahl, the volleys soon stopped. Drake exited the fenced area. Both Mai and Alicia backed out of the ragged hole. Alicia threw a small device back into the prison and shouted, “Run!”

Drake put his head down. An explosion sounded behind him, and, when he slipped a glance that way, he saw a cloud of fire stretching up and billowing out, Mai, Dahl and Alicia framed by the flames, sprinting hard, guns still firmly at their shoulders and searching for targets, faces set as grim and hard as he’d ever seen.

The chopper came up quick. Hayden and Kinimaka stared down at him. Gunshots peppered the windshield and bounced off. Drake saw Hayden finessing the cyclic stick as he clambered aboard.

Yorgi made a wet sound as he plumped down on to the seat beside him.

The chopper lifted off, barely giving the other three enough time to jump aboard. Dahl was the last, making an athletic leap to grab hold of one of the skids, then crouching and leaping again in an instant, gun swinging, like a world-class free runner.

Drake stared. “Nice.”

“New hobby.”

“I meant the rescue.”

“Oh, well, you’re welcome. Couldn’t leave you out here on your own to be horribly tortured.”

“Dahl,” Alicia said, “hasn’t stop pacing up and down since we got here. I think he loves you, Drakey.”

“Bog off.”

Dahl reddened.

“And thanks to you too, Alicia.” Drake let himself relax for just a moment as the chopper continued to rise.

“You know, they just had to say words like guns and explosions to get me here.”

Drake turned to Mai. “Hey—”

Just then Hayden screamed, “Oh no, dammit! They’ve got a fu—”

A massive explosion shook the chopper as the rocket propelled grenade struck the chopper’s undercarriage. The helicopter immediately spun out of control.

Kinimaka shouted out what was already clear, “Hold on! We’re going down!”