Black Scorpion (50 page)

The powerful engine roared to her life and Raven wasted no time in screeching into reverse, shoving the vehicles behind her SUV aside before she spun it around in a whir of grinding rubber to face Black Scorpion's gunmen. They opened up on her, her men literally dangling out the windows to better return their fire as the view through the windshield disappeared before a blur of pockmarked glass.

Bulletproof
! Raven realized, finding the confidence to give the SUV more gas, plowing through anything and anyone it encountered.

She sped past the Black Scorpion gunmen still firing on her and twisted the vehicle onto a wide hall where more troops were rushing to join their fellows in reinforcing the fortress's first level. She was down to four men now and all were clacking off a constant cacophony of fire that held the enemy at bay well enough for her to continue barreling along.

Finally, her tires bore the brunt of a fusillade that spun the SUV to a halt at a break in the maze-like hall bending both straight and to the left. Climbing out with her own assault rifle at the ready, Raven reframed the thermal satellite imagery in her mind, convinced the hostages were being held somewhere to the left. Just three of her own men remained, and they all accompanied her in the mad dash through the waters that had begun to collect this far down as well.

But how to find the hostages' exact position?

That's when Raven glimpsed a parade of rats scurry past her, absurdly feeling a burst of instinct-bred fear. But where were they coming from?

Food
, she thought.
They'd congregate in areas where there was the most food to be had.

As in that part of the fortress where the hostages were being held.

Straight ahead.

*   *   *

The lake waters continued to rush in through the breached entrance, halfway up the height of the SUVs' big tires as the firefight raged on. Thanks to the reinforcements who'd dropped through the ceiling, Black Scorpion maintained the advantage over Paddy's forces that were down to six now with dwindling ammo to boot.

Paddy glimpsed two of those placing shaped charges at key points of the structure's ground floor meant to undermine its integrity once the explosive wave was triggered. Then a blast sounded from above, followed by another and then a third.

“Second Squad, report!” he called into his mic between firing bursts from his assault rifle.

“They're blasting through our debris field!” the squad leader's report came back in a hollow echo bred by the confines of the stairwell from which he was making his stand.

“Gotta hold 'em for me, mate!”

“I can buy you another three minutes, sir!”

“Make it five, you bloody wanker, or I'll shoot you myself!”

“Five, sir, that's a roger!”

He'd had just clicked off when one of the two men planting shaped charges fell to a barrage of bullets that sent his pack skittering across the floor in Paddy's direction. Paddy had never been much for explosives himself, preferring bullets to bombs, but knew an opportunity when he saw one.

Wasting no time, he flashed the hand signal to his remaining troops to give cover and then darted out for the pack, diving to the floor to scoop it free of the rising waters.

*   *   *

The floor had been built with a slight upward grade, steep enough for Raven to feel in her thighs, as she sloshed through the water up to her ankles now. Gunfire erupted behind her, one of the three men left accompanying Raven shot down immediately while the other two returned fire.

“Go!” one of them cried out and Raven knew she had no choice but to do so, continuing to follow the last of the line of fleeing rats to a break in the hallway.

Raven swung right at the head, certain the hostages, her very purpose for being here, must be close. Before her, though, was nothing but wall, this hall a dead end. And she could hear the ratcheting of more gunfire, recognizing the steady clacking from Kalashnikov-style assault rifles with which she was familiar. Her last surviving men would be overwhelmed before long, leaving nothing between Raven and the coming charge of enemy gunmen.

But the rats couldn't be wrong.

That thought left her looking at the walls again, before turning her eyes upward for the ceiling. She spotted a grooved rectangular outline up there consistent with a pull-down ladder of the kind normally used to access attics. Smelling her own sweat and feeling it beginning to soak through the Nomex gloves Alexander had provided, Raven leaped up and felt her hand close inside a deeper groove that gave behind her momentum. The folding ladder attached to the floor above dropped effortlessly, and she scrambled up the rungs and yanked the ladder back upward into what felt like hell itself.

*   *   *

As the gunfire and blasts continued to sound above the control room, portions of the battle visible on several of the screens monitoring the fortress above, chief engineer Bemke watched the LED wall clock freeze at 00.00 without the signal having been received from Black Scorpion's leader. He moved to his own keyboard, located on a raised dais in the front of the floor along with a half dozen technicians who'd be responsible for monitoring the effects of the United States being shut down.

Before Bemke, the control room was aglow in the lights flashing on the dozens of screens, focusing on the largest congestions of targets and highest areas of population densities. Different regions of America, different cities with separate monitoring screens for the largest twenty, different targets all highlighted and soon to be followed in real time as the Guardian chip spread its magic from coast to coast, shutting the country down. From sea to shining sea, Bemke thought, unsure if he had the words right.

The responsibility to trigger the plan was his now, and he had to do it fast, while there was still time to escape the battle raging in the levels above.

*   *   *

The freed scorpions seemed everywhere, the floor theirs as Alexander twisted his head and shoulders to the right to deny the giant the grip his thumbs sought on his neck. Otherwise, the man's incredible strength would have crushed his throat, even with one of his hands mangled from grasping the knife blade. That gave Alexander the opportunity to tense his neck muscles, fighting to buy the time he needed as thumbs like steel bolts continued to press home. He had already sucked in as much breath as he could hold, pretending to flail at Armura's rigid form desperately the way a normal man would.

But Alexander was not a normal man, his focus rooted entirely on the Beretta pistol just out of his reach to the right, amid the sea of scorpions clacking across the floor.

*   *   *

Paddy used the water,
disappeared
into the water. Held his breath as he dragged the explosive pack with him from one SUV chassis to the next. These shaped charges, fortunately, were waterproof, as were the detonators he'd wedged into place in each charge after affixing them beneath the engines, as opposed to the gas tanks themselves, to make better use of the fumes as an accelerant. He might not have been an expert on explosives, but he knew the effects of a dozen vehicles erupting in conjunction with the other strategically placed shaped charges. The nature of explosives was to multiply the effect on a geometric level as the blast radius found additional fuel to feed itself and expand. And who knew what latent gases might have been collecting here over the years to further increase the effects of the blast?

A much bigger boom in other words.

“Sir!” he heard in his earpiece the next time he popped up for air, while gunfire continued to echo and clang around him.

“You still owe me a minute, mate!” he told his squadron leader above, more heavy fire reaching his ears.

“Not much more than that before they're through and heading your way!”

“You done good, son. Hold as long as you can, then you and your men pull back to my twenty.”

“Just me and one other now, but we roger that.”

“Alexander,” he called again into his mic. “Where the hell are ya, mate?”

*   *   *

Raven drew up the ladder and slid the lock over the closed hatch. She found herself on a long narrow floor with heavy doors on either side. Old-fashioned, low-tech cells barred from the outside and outfitted with a grate around eye level.

She heard whispers and whimpers as she started moving along them. The guards assigned here must have rushed to join the battle, and she found the cells holding the young women and children halfway down. Thirty-six hostages in total, as it turned out, crowded into four separate cubicles. Twenty-eight boys and girls not more than early teens and eight young women between that age and around twenty.

Raven drew them out of their cells, arranged them in a double line with the oldest of the young women bringing up the rear. Just about to get moving when a torrent of fire blew the hatch holding the fold-down ladder into shards and splinters that showered the air.

*   *   *

Armura kept pressing his hands attached to arms the size of fire hydrants into Alexander's throat, Alexander's oxygen-deprived brain starting to make him feel light-headed. Alexander felt the blood from Armura's knife wounds soaking both of them with little if any effect on his strength. But his grasp finally slackened just enough for Alexander to latch on to his Beretta. He pressed it against Armura's midsection, fired and kept firing.

He felt the bullets literally lift the giant off him, back to his feet where he staggered backward with his torso marred by widening pools of red to go with the damage done by the knife wounds Alexander had inflicted. Armura ground himself to a halt. The giant's eyes had started to dim when he retrained his attention toward Alexander, ready to pounce again when Alexander yanked his assault rifle free, steadied its grenade launcher on Armura …

And fired.

The shell thumped into Armura and exploded with a force great enough to launch him airborne and spill him to the floor, blown in half with his upper and lower bodies skewing in different directions.

Taking no chances, Alexander climbed back to his feet, wobbling a bit as he approached the huge downed form,
forms
, cautiously, leading with the barrel of his M4. But the giant's one exposed eye was locked open and sightless, both halves of his body still smoking from the heat generated by the blast.

“It's about fucking time,” Alexander said out loud.

*   *   *

Bemke finished keying in the sequence, finger poised over the Execute key when it froze in place, seemingly on its own. The responsibility he would bear for the cataclysm to follow meant nothing to him, not when measured against failing to execute his orders from the man in the black veil.

Bemke pressed Execute.

In that very moment the command center was plunged into darkness broken almost immediately by the bright spill of emergency lighting, more than enough to illuminate a crazed old man wearing a bathrobe standing over a hissing and smoking section of the mainframe holding an empty water bottle in his hand.

The man Bemke knew as “the Professor,” designer of all that lay before him, fixed his eyes on the digital wall maps depicting the United States instead of Russia as were displayed whenever he was down here to coax him into lending his genius to the plan.

Niels Taupmann saluted and began to sing.

“Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light…”

*   *   *

With Vlad Dracu nowhere to be found, Alexander busied himself with a rapid search for the manuscript Scarlett Swan had described for him back in Vegas.

“Alexander!” he heard Paddy call in his earpiece.

“Finishing up down here right now,” he replied instantly.

“Well, mate, whatever you're doing, do it fast.”

“Give me a clock.”

“Three minutes, give or take, and be prepared to swim.”

Alexander clicked off, then resumed speaking again. “Three minutes, Raven.”

No response.

“Raven?”

Still nothing.

Alexander was about to give up the search for the ancient pages to focus on finding her, when he spotted a sealed glass case resting amid several shelves containing other artifacts of history. He slid the ammo pack from his shoulder and eased the case inside it into the space vacated by all the magazines he'd spent.

*   *   *

Raven had heard Alexander's voice in her ear but was too busy with the rescued hostages to respond. She led them to the far end of the prison hall to find not another door or hatch, but some kind of chute accessible through a square cutout in the wall. The stench told her it must be part of a crude sewer system built into this otherwise high-tech facility typical of the Soviets. And that meant it would offer a direct route to freedom; unless, of course, it had been bricked or cemented over.

With time ticking down, though, she had no other choice and began hoisting the children of Vadja through the hole, starting with the youngest. She followed inside after pushing the last through, sliding downward into a stagnant, lime- and stench-riddled, dark pool of water where the bunker's drained sewage collected. The hostages, soaked in grime and muck, were already helping each other from the pool placed at the cave's lowest point outside the bunker's rear inside the mountain.

Raven collected her bearings quickly, realizing that circling around the massive structure would take them back to the breached front of the cave wall and escape. Already hustling her charges forward, when the wall of water surging into the cave slammed into her.

 

ONE HUNDRED TEN

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

Dracu managed to maintain grasp of his pistol, re-steadying it on Michael in a shaky hand, when Scarlett launched herself backward. Her chair seemed to actually rise into the air, an illusion fostered by the force of her smacking into Dracu.