Authors: Jon Land
Starting at a hallway junction two-thirds of the way to the exit leading out onto the helipad, they sealed that door, another, and then set to wait behind the cover of the next junction.
“Nothing ever changes, Blainey,” Wareagle said, as they lay in wait behind the cover of a junction in the first-floor hallway.
“If it did, they wouldn’t need us anymore.”
Katie’s hand trembled, the pistol McCracken had slipped her wobbling in her grasp.
“Go ahead,” her father said, a cold bitterness ringing in his voice. “Shoot me. It’s what you’ve been doing since Stuttgart anyway. Killing strangers in my stead. Well, here I am right before you. The real me, no more surrogates.”
The gun continued to shake.
“You can’t, Alexandra, can you? Because you’re weak, just like your brother was weak. I thought I could toughen him up, could make him hate me. Because if he hated me, he’d find the strength and resolve he needed to run Roy Industries when I was gone.”
“Which only proves how little you knew your own son. Christian could never be made to hate anyone, and he never would have come into the company; he wanted to get as far away from you as possible.”
Roy tried not to let his daughter see how much her remark stung him. “We’ll never know that for sure, though, will we, because you killed him. He died in that fire you set and now you can take his place.”
“You killed Christian long before Stuttgart.”
“Maybe you were jealous of him, Alexandra.”
Katie’s eyes bulged in disbelief. “Jealous? Of what you did to him?”
“Of my plans
for
him. That’s what I wanted you to feel so you’d want it even more. I always knew you were better fit to be my successor. That was always the plan. Was I wrong, Alexandra? Tell me, was I wrong?”
The pistol quivered in Katie’s hand. She felt like a frightened little girl again, hearing the soft patter of footsteps in the halls beyond her bedroom, stopping at the door to her brother’s room.
“I won’t shoot you,” she heard herself say.
“Then I was wrong.”
And with that Katie eased the pistol upward until the cold steel was squeezed against her own temple. “No, you weren’t.”
An out-of-breath Sal Belamo joined McCracken and Wareagle just as the Japanese commandos neared the door behind which they lay in wait.
“Where you been, Sal?”
“Guess I’m not as young as I used to be, boss. Wait until you hit seventy.”
“You said the same thing about me turning sixty.”
“Good thing I’m a better shot than prophet.”
The strategy they were about to employ had been a classic since the dawn of war: make a stand, fire until the enemy advances, and then retreat to repeat the process at the next strategic point—in this case using the compound’s winding, multilayered structure to their best advantage. It was a strategy well founded in all respects, except one.
“You ask me,” said Belamo, “all they have to do is advance up a level and double back to take you from behind.”
McCracken swung toward Wareagle, feigning shock. “How could we not have thought of that?”
Just then the booby traps they’d set on the second floor were tripped, a series of ear-wrenching blasts sounding followed immediately by shrieks and screams. Wareagle had strung a trio of grenades together with simple twine he carried in his belt pouch. Loop the twine through the door frame and it would yank the pins from the grenades once the door was open. Three seconds later the boom had sounded, the effects of the blast magnified all the more by the closed confines of the hallway.
Japanese commandos reached the first blocked junction mere seconds after the blast above. McCracken waited until three men were all the way through and their targets clear before he, Belamo, and Wareagle opened up with a barrage that dropped the trio before they could get off a single shot.
Too easy.
McCracken had barely formed that thought when a cascade of fire opened up on them from the other end of the hall. He cursed himself for never considering approach from
below
, a subbasement or crawl space layered beneath the compound’s structure. The first three Japanese commandos had been nothing more than decoys, sacrifices in the true nature of the samurai code; and McCracken, Wareagle, and Belamo now found themselves trapped in a cross fire as another group stormed through the original breech pouring bullets their way.
Maybe he was too old, maybe a decade ago he would have considered such another route of potential access, and his whole plan wouldn’t have gone to shit. Now all McCracken could do was train his fire on the far end of the hall, while Johnny and Sal concentrated theirs toward the near. The submachine gun danced in his grasp, heat radiating off its barrel and fanning up into his face with smoke as he switched to three-shot bursts from automatic fire. He was vaguely conscious of the spent shells clanging to the hardwood floor, stubbornly remaining exposed long enough for his shots to find the three gunmen who’d expected to find easy targets upon their ascent from the basement. McCracken exhaled and took a deep breath, as he jammed yet another fresh magazine home.
Downing this wave of attackers succeeded only in opening the route for yet more surging out from both sides of the hallway again. With Wareagle taking point, they managed to beat back the assault from the original point long enough to get another heavy door sealed, enabling them to focus all their attention on the forces pouring up from the basement crawl space.
Whoooosssshhhhhhhh . . .
McCracken registered the sound an instant before an RPG obliterated the entire door and blew the splintery remnants and jagged chunks of wood into them. Another group of commandos charged in from that side of the hall, restoring the cross fire McCracken knew full well they couldn’t outlast forever. But for now the firing continued, the murky darkness broken by orange muzzle flashes that looked like campfires flashing in the night. Husks of the ceiling and chunks of the floor exploded in all directions amid the hail of bullets that puckered McCracken’s eardrums and left the air smelling of gun oil, bitter with smoke and a light bluish haze that lifted toward the ceiling like a vapor cloud.
“Change in strategy, Indian!”
“With you, Blainey!”
With what seemed like endless twin waves of Japanese commandos coming, McCracken, Wareagle, and Belamo backed through the next door, managing to seal it and continue toward a set of stairs, lurching up them just as a second RPG blasted debris up the steps after them.
At sixty, McCracken’s ears seemed to have borne the worst brunt of his years of blasts, bombs, and gunplay. They’d lost their tolerance for loud noises and stretches like this when sound was stolen from them grew longer each time. Not being able to hear cast the battle in a strange, surreal light, in the course of their pulling back toward Sebastian Roy’s hyperbaric chamber on the top floor of the complex built against the rock face of the mountain.
Halfway up the final flight of stairs, Wareagle ejected both magazines from the twin submachine guns he was wielding and snapped two more home in blinding fashion, missing barely a beat. Belamo was more selective with his shots as they reached the top floor, pursued by the last half-dozen Japanese commandos.
“We’re running out of room, boss!”
“Least of our problems, Sal!” McCracken shouted back, his hearing fading in and out.
“You won’t do it,” Sebastian Roy said, not sounding sure or confident at all with his daughter pressing the pistol so tight against her temple that her hand was quivering. They could hear the nonstop gunfire pounding beyond, but at that point it seemed inconsequential to both of them.
“Why not? I won’t feel anything; I haven’t felt anything in a long, long time.”
Roy raised a hand as if to make a point, then lowered it, his expression fighting for calm. “Think, Alexandra, think what you could do!”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” she said, starting to squeeze the trigger, welcoming what was to come.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!”
How much pleasure she took in her father’s desperate plea, the fact that he was seeing his own inevitable demise magnified by witnessing hers. It was so wonderful to
feel
something,
anything
. . .
Until a heavy pounding on the chamber door lifted her from the trance she’d slipped into.
Katie jammed the pistol McCracken provided into her belt and moved to the heavy steel door, working the latch. But it wouldn’t budge, the locking mechanism having been tripped. Requiring a code to open now from either the inside or the out.
“The code!” she screamed to her father.
He remained against the wall, still flinching from the sounds of fire from outside.
“
The code!
” she yelled again, coming toward him with McCracken’s pistol raised.
Roy remained motionless. “It’s just us now, Alexandra. You had your chance. Now you’re not going anywhere.”
“The code,” she said, meeting her father’s gaze. “Give me the—”
She stopped when she saw his eyes, because she knew. Somehow she
knew
!
Back at the heavy door she entered three two-digit numbers into the keypad.
Click
.
“Christian’s birth date,” Katie told him, her eyes bulging in fear as the door opened all the way.
•
They ran out of space at the same time they came down to the last of their ammo. McCracken’s hearing was almost all the way back, his ears burned anew by the constant din of gunfire blazing from the end of the hall that accessed Sebastian Roy’s hyperbaric chamber. The bullets seemed to own the air, almost visible in his imagination as sizzling specks fired from an endless array of barrels. The narrow spacing of the remaining Japanese commandos created the effect of a wind tunnel, increasing the sensory overload to an unfathomable degree, even for McCracken.
Still firing toward the onslaught raining on them from the other end of the hall, McCracken, Wareagle, and Belamo continued their retreat, just one flight to go before reaching Roy’s chamber.
With the last of their bullets draining fast, McCracken entered the same key code he’d watched Pierce press out. The only thing saving him, Wareagle, and Belamo from an all-out rush from the final grouping of commandos was the narrowness of the hall, reducing any attack the enemy force might launch to single file. That negated their advantage in number, firepower, and even positioning. But once McCracken and friends’ ammo was exhausted, all that would be rendered moot.
Still, Roy’s chamber would offer them protection and defensive positioning Aum Shinrikyo could never breach without sacrificing the remainder of their dwindling numbers.
It was over, Pandora’s jar certain to be kept from the doomsday cult’s hands now.
McCracken watched as the door eased open before him, revealing a grinning Shinzo Asahara standing next to another Japanese man holding a gun to Katie DeMarco’s head.
“Drop your weapons,” Asahara ordered.
McCracken, Wareagle, and Belamo all shed their guns to the floor, noting the presence of two more armed Japanese commandos holding their guns on Sebastian Roy.
“Now I want the jar,” Asahara demanded between heavy breaths. “Give me Pandora’s jar!”
“No,” said McCracken.
“Then the woman dies.”
“The jar’s not here.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Otherwise,
you
wouldn’t be here,” Asahara said surely, the other Japanese man maintaining his hold on Katie and positioned in such a way there was no chance McCracken could reach him before he killed her.
“Why should I give you the jar if it means we
all
die?”
Asahara grinned, McCracken noticing the black mitten covering his left hand for the first time. “Because men like you always believe you can conquer all. Because given the opportunity, you’re convinced you won’t fail whatever the odds. And maybe you’re right. And even if you’re not, you’ll always take that chance.”
“What can I say? Something works for me, I stick with it.”
“Then perhaps we should change the equation.”
With that Asahara signaled his other two commandos to move away from Roy. McCracken watched them train their submachine guns on Johnny Wareagle and Sal Belamo instead.
“Your two associates will die first. Then the woman, then you. Your sacrifice will have accomplished nothing.”
McCracken met Katie’s eyes. “Guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”
And in that instant she jerked her face downward and bit hard and deep into her captor’s hand. Kuroda flinched in pain long enough for her to twist his pistol away from her, as Johnny Wareagle seized the very same moment to barrel into the two commandos, jerking their weapons upward where they stitched two jagged patches of fire through the drop ceiling. A hissing sound erupted, the oxygen feed lines for the chamber ruptured, as Wareagle drove the men backward, one clutched in either hand, into the nearest wall and slammed their skulls against it over and over again.
By that time, McCracken had already engaged the Japanese man who’d been holding Katie. The man surprised him initially by totally abandoning her to focus on him. His gun coming around was just a decoy for the blow from his other hand McCracken proved ready for. Kuroda’s eyes told McCracken the rest he needed to know about him, a worthy opponent as well as a deadly one.
He was vaguely conscious of Belamo struggling with Shinzo Asahara, who seemed able to use only his right hand in the fight. McCracken’s next move was to use Kuroda’s possession of the gun against him, wrenching it up against his frame to make the man focus his efforts on freeing it. McCracken thought this would open up his face and neck for a strike. But Kuroda managed to deflect it and tie him up with a hand looped around his arm at the bicep, driving McCracken sideways.
The result of the stalemate was an ugly pirouette that twirled them across the room, past Katie DeMarco who was standing stiffly over the form of her father slumped against the wall in terror. McCracken lashed out with a blow that Kuroda effortlessly blocked, just as McCracken deflected his counter in similar fashion. The men continued to parry, McCracken feeling himself gain control of the pistol when . . .