Warriors

CHAPTER 71

Watch out!” the scrawny Tennessee mountain boy, Elvis Peete, cried out in pain. “Someone’s up there on the third level with a gun and—”

Elvis hit the floor, already dead, gouts of blood pumping from a stomach wound.

Stoke got a glimpse of the guy up there, just a kid, really, trying too late to duck away. He put one through his forehead. Guy fell forward over the railing and plummeted downward. Three of his guys had to step aside to avoid being hit by the falling body.

He landed with a sickening thud at their feet, spattering their combat boots with soupy blood. He was on his back, blood seeping from his mouth and nostrils, his dead eyes staring up at nothing.

“What the fuck?” Brock said. “This dumb shit’s wearing a coat and tie!”

Hawke nodded imperceptibly at Stokely. The two men each plucked a dangling pineapple from their web belts, heaving the two stun grenades simultaneously on the count of two, up to the second-floor balcony.

The twin blasts, the horrific BOOM, and the blinding flash of light were deafening within the marble interior. And disorienting to anyone within immediate range of the blast.

“Okay. Let’s move,” Stoke said, starting up the stairs after Hawke.

“Go right,” Hawke said, going left himself at the top.

As he mounted the top step he saw someone to his left dart back inside an opened door. He tossed a smoke grenade, bouncing and rolling it; it stopped just outside the door, the fuse loudly hissing. Another well-dressed figure, male, stepped out in order to kick the grenade away when Hawke shot him through the heart, swung the still-chattering M5 machine gun upward to a man firing down on his troops from the balcony above, saw him crumple, half his chest torn away by the tearing slugs.

Suddenly, it came to him.

He stepped to the rail and shouted across the open atrium to Stoke and his men.

“These guards? All bloody Te-Wu, Stoke!” he said. “Assassins from the Academy! So you men mind your heads.”

Stoke answered with a long burst from his weapon.

There was an open door at the corner.

He could see armed folks, men and women, all stacked up, waiting to come out and engage the invaders. Did it make any sense? Maybe they were highly motivated, crack shots, expert marksmen. But he saw fear. Terror. And panic on their youthful faces. Some kind of suicide do, or something? But they were trying to kill him and his guys, and so he opened fire.

Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

The first guy to die fell back against the next in line. Stoke fired again. The man fell back against a young woman who pointed a gun at Stoke. And so he continued to shoot, his teeth clenched tight until his jaw ached.

Suddenly another door was flung open, then another and another. More of them. Like the others, armed with pistols, few machine guns. Boys wearing coats and ties fighting highly trained commandos wearing full body armor! Nuts! A guy fired at Stoke just as he took a knee and one of Stoke’s guys went down, his throat making horrible gurgling noises. What could they do? Kill or be killed, that’s all. He and his men returned a withering barrage.

Stoke was beginning to wonder how many more of these kids were in the building. They were everywhere. These kids were outgunned and obviously not at all used to close-quarters combat. Well, assassination was a one-on-one kind of killing. In the privacy of a hotel room or a dark alley. Not this kind of shit.

That’s when a guy who’d been on the ground feigning death jumped up in front of him, firing wildly. Stoke fired once, twice, three times, wordlessly and with great care. The force of the powerful rounds at such close quarters lifted the man off his feet, smashed him against the wall, pinned him there for one incredible second, nailed against the wall as if in spread-eagled crucifixion. Then he fell to the floor and Stoke stepped over him to find Hawke in the melee and somehow put an end to this slaughter. He’d now lost three men, with more wounded. And he was winning the damn war.

Hawke, meanwhile, was advancing up to the third floor. He and Fitz, with Brock bringing up the rear, mounted the steps. The third-floor galleries were empty except for countless expended shells scattered everywhere.

But not the fourth floor. Not empty at all.

All four sides of the atrium gallery above were lined with the Te-Wu, men and women standing shoulder to shoulder, their pistols and automatic rifles aimed at the men pouring up the stairs. A last stand — Hawke could see grim determination on their mostly terrified faces.

Hawke paused on the steps.

“Don’t shoot!” Hawke shouted up at them. “Listen to me. You people don’t have to die here tonight. Lay down your arms peacefully, raise your hands where I can see them, and I will make sure you get out of this building alive. All I want is Dr. Chase. Turn him over to me, and I have no more business with you or anyone else on this island.”

“Who are you?” a glowering mop-haired chap with burning black eyes shouted down to him.

“My name is Alex Hawke. I am—”

“Hawke! We will give you Chase,” another man shouted, “but we want you, Hawke! Even trade.”

“Show me Chase and we’ll see.”

“We don’t trust you, Hawke,” said a young woman who couldn’t have been over twenty.

“I don’t think you’ve got a whole lot of choice. So either you bring him out here where I can see him or—”

Hawke never finished the sentence.

The woman simply pulled her trigger and shot him. The bullet got lucky and found a seam in his armor plating. He felt a red-hot blast of pain in his left side, one that spun him around and down. Fitz put three bullets in the assassin’s head and dropped to cover Hawke’s body with his own.

His men opened fire on the gallery above with a vengeance. People, a lot of people, started pitching forward over the railing, dead or dying, and landing with sickening thuds three stories below.

“Is it bad?” Fitz asked him.

“Hurts, that’s all. Went right through me. Let me up. Woman tried to kill me. It was personal, Fitz. I saw it in her eyes. Get the hell off me, I can’t breathe.”

“Not till I stop the bleeding.”

“These people are zombies, Fitz. Like the walking dead; they act like they’ve got nothing to lose. I’m tired of this crap, and we’re running out of time. These goddamn automatons want to die so damn badly, heave a dozen or so Willy Pete grenades up there so they can go out in a bloody flaming white phosphorus blaze of glory…”