The flickering lights of shifted this way and that, warped by the bending of the light by the ancient ice as they advanced, and as Ethan squinted he thought he could see the shadowy forms of men advancing toward them through the gloom. His finger slid into place behind the trigger as he stilled his mind and focused.
‘Here we go,’ Hannah whispered, her voice taut.
Ethan watched the lights flickering around the tunnel mouth, and then suddenly they vanished as one as though somebody had pinched out a candle flame and plunged the tunnel into darkness. Ethan let his eyes begin to adjust to the gloom in time to see something clatter down onto the docks before them.
‘Flash bang!’
Ethan squinted his eyes shut and saw a bright, red flare beyond his eyelids and heard two deafening cracks that echoed around the cavern and a hissing sound in their wake as from the tunnel mouth erupted a blaze of gunfire.
Ethan opened his eyes as rounds peppered the walls of the base nearby and clipped chunks of ice off the docks before them with a deafening clatter. Near the tunnel mouth, clouds of smoke billowed from the two grenades to create a smoke screen that shielded the tunnel mouth from view as the MJ-12 troops poured into the cavern.
‘Open fire!’ Riggs yelled, although his men required little prompting.
The SEAL’s opened up with their M-16s on the tunnel mouth, bullets cascading through the smoke to smash into any human being trying to access the cavern. Ethan fired controlled shots into the darkness, the mouth of the cavern now completely obscured by the smoke grenades and returned fire ripping back toward them. Bullets zinged off metal railings a few yards from where Ethan stood in the bunker doorway, Hannah flinching as she fired in return as bullets hammered the bunker walls inches from her head.
‘Tactical retreat!’ Riggs shouted.
The front-most four of the SEALs pulled back in a low run as they were covered by the comrades, then dropped into prone positions a few yards behind their firing line as Riggs and his men jumped up and ran back further toward the base. Ethan fired between the running soldiers as they retreated while maintaining a constant rate of fire against the enemy.
The roar of gunfire echoed back and forth across the cavern in a deafening cacophony as Ethan and Hannah held their position and covered the SEALs’ retreat.
Riggs switched to his grenade launcher and fired off two of the weapons, both aimed either side of the tunnel to avoid bringing it down and cutting off their own escape route. Ethan knew that the MJ-12 soldiers would be fanning out either side of the tunnel to avoid the withering fire from the SEALs, and the smoke screen they had created concealed the incoming weapons just as effectively as it veiled them from the SEALs’ fire.
Two blasts thundered through the smoke and reverberated around the cavern as the grenades detonated, and Ethan heard above the gunfire the wretched screams of injured men cut down by the blasts.
‘Inside!’ Riggs yelled. ‘Before they return the favor!’
The SEALs broke ranks and filtered into the bunker past Ethan as he fired a few more shots and then turned and dashed into cover. Hannah followed him as Riggs fired a couple more shots into the smoke and then backed into the base.
The SEALs heaved the blast door closed, slamming it shut and then driving crowbars they had found through the locking wheel and the braces to hold it shut.
‘Good enough for now,’ Riggs said, Ethan hearing him despite the infernal ringing in his ears. The MJ-12 troops were still shooting outside, the SEALs listening intently.
‘Poor command structure,’ Saunders said. ‘They don’t even know we’ve ceased fire.’
‘Those grenades took out a few of them,’ Del Toro agreed. ‘They should have stayed well back in the tunnel and used grenade launchers to flush us back into the base.’
‘They might fear bringing the tunnel down on themselves,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘A frontal assault is the only real choice they had.’
Moments later, the sound of gunfire ceased.
‘Let’s go,’ Riggs said.
Ethan ran up the stairwell with the soldiers and they dispersed at once through the control center, other members of the team already in place with their weapons aimed out of the broken windows and down toward the docks below.
Ethan found himself a corner beside a shattered window and peered out across the dock. He could still see the smoke drifting across the black water below and figures huddled around the mouth of the tunnel as well as several bodies lying on the icy dock nearby.
Through the darkness, a keening cry of agony wailed like some hellish bird of prey seeking a way out of the cavern. Ethan squinted and saw one of the bodies move, hands cradling the stump of a leg severed at the knee, a man’s face grotesquely twisted in pain as he clutched at his wound.
‘That’ll slow them down,’ Riggs said. ‘Nothing like an injured team member to test the morale of your team.’
As Ethan watched, the injured soldier began dragging himself inch by painful inch back toward the tunnel mouth. He left a trail of dark fluid behind him, his blood loss horrendous as he tried to reach the safety of the tunnel.
He was halfway there when a tall figure emerged from the gloom and a single gunshot ripped across the cavern. The injured soldier shuddered and fell abruptly still. Ethan stared in silence as the shadowy figure retreated back into the tunnel and a deep voice boomed across the cavern.
‘The game’s up! There’s no escape and we outnumber you ten to one. Surrender your positions, come out with your hands up and we’ll let you leave in peace.’
Ethan could see Riggs shake his head slightly before he called back.
‘The only people leaving here will be you and your men. The cavern is rigged to blow – either clear out or we’ll take the whole damned place down with us!’
A thunderous laugh echoed across the cavern before the man replied.
‘You won’t,’ he uttered in a dismissive tone as though scolding a wayward child, ‘because you can’t leave here without Black Knight and you won’t kill your own people, either those in that base with you or the ones we have captive right here in the tunnel with us.’
Ethan’s eyes widened momentarily as he heard a scuffle taking place inside the tunnel, and then the man’s voice returned.
‘So, just how many limbs will I have to pull of this young lady before each and every one of you surrenders?’
Ethan felt a premonition of doom sweep over him as through the last of the smoke spitting from the grenades on the docks he saw the big man holding a diminutive figure with one hand clamped around their arm. Even across the distance, he could hear her protests and recognized her voice.
‘They’ve got Amy,’ Hannah uttered.
The shadowy man pressed what Ethan guessed must be a pistol against Amy’s head, and he heard her small but defiant voice echo across the chamber.
‘Don’t come out, ignore him!’
A sharp crack and a muffled sob answered her cry and she collapsed to her knees beside the big man, who called out again to the SEAL team.
‘Sixty seconds boys, or she’s gonna lose all that fight along with an arm!’
Ethan looked across at Riggs and Del Toro. ‘Can you get him with the sniper rifle?’
‘Wouldn’t matter if I could,’ Del Toro replied, ‘another’ll just take his place and we’re back to square one.’
‘We don’t negotiate,’ Riggs added firmly. ‘We don’t have time for this.’
‘They’ve got Amy!’ Hannah repeated.
‘You all knew the risks,’ Riggs snapped at her. ‘I don’t like it, but our mission is to recover Black Knight and get the hell out of here and that’s what we’re going to do.’
‘The mission is compromised,’ Ethan said as he stood and got in Riggs’s way. ‘That means a change of plan.’
‘That’s not your call to make,’ Riggs shot back as he jabbed a thick finger into Ethan’s chest. ‘You’re a passenger here Warner, and you answer to me. Mission priority is not Amy, it’s Black Knight, and even if every other member of the team were captured in the next ten minutes it would remain my priority. We’re going to activate that submarine, collect the artefact and leave one way or the other.’
‘I know,’ Ethan said, ‘which is why you’ve got Hannah and me here. We can deal with the other side of things.’
‘What
other
side of things?’
Ethan turned to Hannah. ‘Let’s go out there and see what they have to say for themselves.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Hannah asked in amazement. ‘That guy just shot one of his own! We walk out there we’re as good as dead!’
Ethan turned to Sully, the SEAL team’s explosives expert. ‘The C4 charges in that tunnel, are they rigged to detonate in series or individually?’
‘Both,’ Sully replied. ‘It depends on what buttons I fancy pressing.’
‘Good,’ Ethan said, ‘if I get down on my knees with my hands on my head, blow one of them.’
Sully shrugged but agreed nonetheless. Riggs looked at Warner.
‘You’ll get yourself killed,’ he insisted.
‘You just worry about that submarine,’ Ethan replied. ‘Get it working and get the job done, I’ll try to buy you some time and maybe get Amy back too.’
‘You tryin’ to be a hero, Warner?’
Ethan shook his head.
‘No, I want to get Amy to safety and I want to get a better look at our enemy out there. The more we know about them, the more chance we’ve got of evening the odds and maybe getting out of here alive.’
He turned to Del Toro. ‘Cover us?’
‘You got it.’
Ethan looked at Riggs. ‘Call back, say you’re coming down. He won’t know the difference between your shouting and my talking when I get down there. Might convince them the team leader’s in front of them.’
Riggs smiled in bemusement, somewhat intrigued by Ethan’s sly thinking as he called down out of the shattered windows.
‘Stand by, I’m comin’ down!’
Riggs pulled back from the windows and waited expectantly.
‘Let’s go,’ Ethan said as he holstered his pistol and led Hannah out of the control center.
***
XXXV
Manhattan
Nicola Lopez sat in a pool car on the corner of Lexington and 75th and waited patiently for her mark to arrive. The windows of the sedan were lightly tinted, sufficiently so that she knew she could not easily be observed or identified by passers-by on the street. Beside her sat Vaughn, likewise watching a single vehicle parked along the sidewalk further down the street.
The take down would have to be swift and slick to avoid detection, but Lopez already knew exactly how she would do it. Most agents would have attempted a risky grab and run from an apartment, an elevator or some other concealed location where there would be no witnesses to the hit. Lopez knew better. The more normal something looked, the less likely it was to attract attention.
What she didn’t like was the fact that Mitchell had arranged the take down and was calling the shots. She didn’t trust Mitchell as far as she could throw him, and she would rather he was locked up in…
‘I’ve got him.’
Vaughn was looking across the street at a man walking in a long, dark coat buttoned up against the brisk winds buffeting the sidewalk. Lopez spotted him immediately and checked his appearance against a screenshot from her drone’s camera.
‘That’s him,’ she confirmed, ‘that’s Wilms.’
‘He’s going to run,’ Vaughn observed with interest. ‘But he’s not in much of a hurry.’
‘Trust me,’ Lopez said as she reached for her door handle, ‘when people have this much power they become convinced that they’re above the law, above everybody else. This guy’s got the bug all right, what I don’t know is whether we can trust Mitchell with what he’s got in mind.’
‘We’ve got no choice now,’ Vaughn said. ‘Grab him while you can.’
Lopez stepped out of the car and pulled a baseball cap down low over her eyes, her black hair tied in a pony-tail behind her head, her leather jacket zipped up with the collar popped as she thrust her hands into her pockets and strode toward Wilms. She aimed to his right, not wanting to alert him to her presence too early, and saw him heading for a glossy black limousine parked near the hotel from which he had emerged.
‘Now, Michael,’ she whispered into her microphone.
She crossed the street, dodging the traffic as she hopped up onto the sidewalk a few paces behind Wilms. The Majestic Twelve agent reached his vehicle and reached out for the rear door handle.
‘Victor!’
Lopez’s delighted cry made several heads turn, including Wilms’. The old man stared directly at her from less than two yards away, and to her genuine delight Lopez saw a brief tremor of panic flicker behind his eyes. The momentary lapse revealed a powerful man who was weak within, cosseted and protected from the vengeance of those he controlled and victimized.
The panic dissolved as Wilms straightened from the door, Lopez knowing that he could not get into the vehicle faster than Lopez could tackle him.
‘Nicola,’ Wilms replied with a smile devoid of warmth. ‘Good to see you up and about.’
Lopez closed to within a couple of feet of Wilms, her hands still in her pockets as she fought the urge to swing a right hook across this asshole’s jaw.
‘No thanks to you,’ she hissed back. ‘How much did the assassin cost you, Victor?’
‘Me? Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Don’t worry yourself, Nicola. You’re not worth an expensive hit, and before you even think about it we can’t be recorded. There are enough digital distortion devices in this vehicle to prevent any external monitoring.’
Lopez wasn’t interested in Wilms’ ride.
‘We got you,’ she said simply. ‘Got Majestic Twelve on film, right here in the city and in the company of none other than Gordon LeMay, Director of the FBI. That’ll look good on the evening news, don’t you think? Federal boss cavorting with billionaires in Manhattan Penthouse suite, being drugged by them and abducted.’
Wilms did not shift an inch.
‘You have footage of a man in the company of friends, Nicola, nothing more.’
‘Then where is he?’
‘Somewhere safe,’ Wilms replied, ‘a private hospital. Not one of the grubby halls that you and your kind fester in, believe me.’