The Treasures of Saint Germain

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

When a man or woman is faced with death, any death, they can make one of only two decisions — fight or die. To fight might encompass a world of choice — battle, flight, hide, a jump into the unknown. But to die — that was easy. If there’s a choice, Drake thought. Fight!

Fight to live with all your being. The alternative is very bleak.

When the explosions began the whole team listened hard, feeling and testing and listening to their gravity, their depth and range. Drake knew they were deep. Leaning over he saw windows blowing out and mortar crumbling. Shocked, he saw a wide crack traveling from the foundation to the top floor, concrete parting and discharging clouds of dust.

“I’m pretty sure my legs ain’t turned to jelly,” Lauren said. “So that’s the building shaking.”

“Oh… what have they done?” Hayden gasped.

Drake couldn’t imagine the mindset of a person who would destroy a hospital full of people to safeguard a forgotten room from another century, but he could visualize his next set of choices.

“Amari’s right there,” he said, swaying. “With a dozen or so mercs, and he’s fast decelerating into insanity. Webb’s probably below us or already moved on to his final undertaking and, knowing Webb, that can’t be good for the world. I’m sorry, guys, but there’s only one decision here.”

“This building’s coming down,” Hayden said.

Kinimaka was already headed for the door, Dahl alongside.

“The people,” Alicia said. “The patients. Oh my God.”

In the midst of all hell, they ran. Chunks of plaster, lighting and plasterboard trim were already breaking free and hanging down, swaying like deadly pendulums. They pounded back to the populated wings of the hospital, saw doctors and nurses running this way and that, patients shuffling along the corridors, and heard the screams of the trapped or the hopeless.

“We get them all out,” Dahl said. “All of them.”

And he darted away.

Drake picked up a nurse who slipped beside them, looked around. “Where’s the… hey, where did that bloody janitor go?”

“Slipped away,” Kenzie growled, angry, then quickly changed her expression. “Wished I’d gone with him.”

Alicia swept her aside. “Then go, bitch.”

But the ex-Mossad agent was there with them throughout the terror. Drake set his mind and helped each person as they came along, shepherding those who wept to the exits, herding a six-strong crowd who couldn’t find their way, carrying air-tanks for a slight nurse and making sure one of Lauren’s tasks was guaranteeing the consistent arrival of elevators. Mai and Kenzie swept in and out like angels of mercy, aiding where they could and ferrying patients to the elevators or stairs.

A constant stream of people crowded the way down and tried to make way for those racing up from below. Another barrage of explosions shattered even the chaos of noise that filled the hospital, quieting every man, woman and child for just a moment.

Then, like another detonation, the panic erupted once more.

Alarm bells shrieked like desperate banshees. Glass shattered out of windows due to the pressure of failing walls above. Strip lights tumbled. Life-saving machines slid to the extent their wires would allow. A drinks machine tumbled over, its glass panel exploding. Hayden ranged along the corridors, ensuring no one was left behind. The staff fought hard too, toiling and risking it all for their patients.

A nurse screamed for help. The room she stood in suddenly skewed. Kinimaka rushed to help, and the view out of the window changed, becoming narrower as the entire building sagged. The nurse was stuck with her hands under the patient, unable to lift him, frustration creasing her face. The Hawaiian grabbed the man under the shoulder and heaved whilst the nurse grabbed whatever paraphernalia he was still attached to and then the two ran, side by side, toward the stairs.

Drake saw the bent walls, the crumbling ceiling. The halls were empty; a couple of lone doctors checking rooms.

“How are we doing?” he cried out.

A nod, a thumbs up. The elevator dinged, still serviceable but not for long. The risk had paid off, though Drake had originally had his doubts. But without their help almost half a dozen patients would still be up here, stranded, just waiting to die.

Sirens screamed from the parking lot. Drake drove the patients downstairs as they parted for paramedics rushing up. “All clear here,” he told them as the doctors arrived, and relief lit their faces.

“Just the ground floor then.”

Drake inclined his head. “What’s it like?”

The paramedic turned a flinty eye to the roof as several trickles of plaster and mortar rained down. “A shitstorm. How long we got?”

“Judging by this—” Drake barely moved as a chunk of concrete shattered at his back “—not long.”

The crowd thinned; the exit must have been flung open, maybe all the windows too. Drake hit ground level last of all his colleagues and saw them in action; making split decisions and taking impossible burdens. The weight of the hospital bore down upon them. What would it take to bring the place down? Why was depraved and detached horror the core principal of so many wealthy men?

Drake came to a room inhabited by four patients and two desperate nurses. The patients were children. He moved in, grabbed two and lifted. Couldn’t quite manage the balance. There was only one thing for it. Against the instincts of a soldier but running with personal compulsions, he dropped his weapons to the floor. No need for them here. If he ended up weaponless, facing mercs outside then so be it. He could only carry the utterly essential.

Freed from extra burdens now, he managed to juggle three children, wrapped them tight in his arms and moved out into the hallways, approaching a wide window. Here, the more able patients were climbing to safety.

Drake deposited the kids into the arms of waiting people — made up of doctors, nurses, civilians and even patients already ferried to safety, and ran back for the others. All else had already faded from his mind. There was no Webb, no Amari, no Beau or Sabrina or even any other mission. The innocents about to be crushed under the weight of another’s madness were all that mattered.

The team rallied. Partitioned walls collapsed: bending, shattering and crumbling, sending plumes of dust billowing forward. Critical walls and pillars held for now, but everyone could sense something vital was shifting. The hallways widened, flowed together into the lobby, once a confluence of seating, desks, a pharmacy and a coffee shop and filled with lots of light, but now transformed by all the elements of a battle zone.

Drake spilled into it with many others, saw a man lying prone on the floor, arms flapping, and hoisted him to his feet. He saw now why the crush had eased so quickly. The whole glass frontage had burst out, either by the weight of the building or explosives, but a wide hole had been breached. A stroke of luck. He scanned the lobby.

Kenzie and Alicia worked together to free a man from the remains of a false wall, his skull and shoulders bleeding. The two antagonists did good work, their differences forgotten for now. Mai helped a paramedic trying to resuscitate a man on the spot, shoulders not flinching as mortar rained down upon them. Kinimaka pulled rubble away from a doorway behind which people were trapped. Some of the chunks he hurled aside would have broken Drake’s back. A gray dust settled over everyone, and helped form complex footprints on the floor. Time screamed by. Another shift in the building’s edifice elevated the panic.

Drake rarely prayed, but he threw one out for the people now. A vital wall had weakened. Still, the patients streamed out and away. Still, doctors and nurses and more patients leapt in to help. Smyth came running through with an unconscious older woman in his arms. Lauren deposited a child with a paramedic. At least two doctors were being forced to attend to patients actually inside the lobby that was crumbling all around them. Then, the far side of the lobby collapsed. Debris plumed toward them, a thick cloud. The area had been previously emptied, but that said nothing for where they were now.

Drake scooped up two limping young men and ran them outside, charged back in. A scream brought him around, let him catch a girl before she tumbled onto a jagged pile of plaster. Yorgi bounded and leapt between wreckage, clearing out passages and openings where some imagined they might be safe.

The alarm bells stopped, leaving a torturous, resounding silence in their wake. Then a deep roar and thunder like nothing he’d ever heard sent Drake into overdrive.

The lobby, a later addition to the front of the hospital and not integral, was coming down.

But he’d just seen Dahl plunging back in.

Drake didn’t hesitate, just stormed the sagging door that fronted the main body of the hospital, ducking a rain of wreckage. A lone doctor staggered past him, bleeding from the ear and scooped up by Smyth. A nurse, clothing smudged and stained, rested with her head against the door jamb. Drake eased her through and pointed her in the right direction. Few words were spoken as the selfless helped the needy to safety. Drake stopped dead in a frozen heart-rending torment as a handful of doctors and nurses hurried past, carrying and shielding babies between them. Drake felt agony, fury and a stirring sadness. He waited and then moved on, deeper into the hallways.

“Dahl!”

Then it came; the collapse of something, possibly everything. Without chance to gauge how destructive this latest shockwave would be, Drake watched the ceiling slump down to within an inch of his head. Metal fittings swung to and fro, one catching him across the skull.

Drake merely ducked and forged on.

Alicia shouted as she emerged at his back. “What’s going on?”

“Dahl,” Drake answered as if that explained everything.

It did.

The Mad Swede exploded into view, bellowing for adrenalin and pushing a hospital bed complete with terrified patient at full speed. He took the corner like a pro, ducked under debris and then clapped eyes on Drake.

“Run!” he cried.

Drake turned to Alicia. “Leg it!” he yelled.

Alicia spun to a newly appeared Hayden. “Fuck!” she screamed.

Masses of rubble slammed down all around them. Drake’s shin shrieked agony as a brick ricocheted off the bone. Dahl clattered along at his back, jolting through the piles, brute force keeping him straight. A wheel stuck, but then came free, a metal spear parted the sheets between the patient’s knees. As Drake turned back he purposely slowed, catching hold of the front of the bed.

Together.

He hauled, Dahl pushed. They hit the lobby and turned, found the front exit blocked by people and rubble. Debris surged down behind them. Hayden leapt for a window, cut and bleeding, leapt out and flapped her hands. Drake heaved on the bed and aimed for it. Alicia grabbed a fallen paramedic and threw him over her shoulder. Dahl pushed with every sinew, every ounce of will, and the last portions of his strength.

Drake stumbled as an entire glass pane fell from the windowed roof and shattered by his left leg. Shards made him wince. Dahl was going too fast. They were going to…

From the corner of his eyes, he saw the rest of the team. Kinimaka and Kenzie, Mai and Smyth, Yorgi and Lauren, all still inside and rushing to help. His heart leapt. Together, they heaved the bed and the patient over the last hurdle, and managed to feed everything through the window. Doctors were already at Hayden’s side even as wreckage poured over their legs.

Drake turned. The world was going black.

They raced for windows. Without pause they leapt head-first into an unknown fate with sheer hope and the greatest optimism. Drake landed and rolled, scraped and cut by brick and concrete and a dozen other materials. He came back up with eyes to left and right, counting his friends, looking back at the great, fragile edifice.

Kinimaka stood at a window, face staring out. The opening was too small.

Above him the entire building wilted.