The Henchmen's Book Club (21 page)

There was no point lying at this stage so
I told Dunbar about my false eye.

“You’ve got explosives in your eye?”
Dunbar asked.

“No, not today,” I repeated.

“Well what have you got then?” he
pressed.

“A GPS tracker. I thought I might need it
if I went down in the Atlantic,” I explained.

Dunbar stood, reanimated after barely a
minute of taking it easy. “You’ve got a GPS in your eye? Here? With you now?”
he snapped.

“Jesus, what now!” someone asked, but
Dunbar was already on top of me, slapping the back of my head to try to get it
out.

“..kin’ get off me!” I complained and was
able to shove him away long enough to pull my own eye. “Here.”

Dunbar snatched it from me without saying
thanks and examined it closely. After a few moments he asked if it could be
reprogrammed to send a signal.

“A message? No it’s not got that
capability.”

“Not a message, an ID code. Can it be
reprogrammed to send a six-lettered ID code?”

“Er…” I erred, but the Tech Chief was
already on his feet and poking his nose in.

“It should be possible, theoretically,”
he speculated.

Dunbar shoved the eye in his hand and
told him to make it. “SEO767. Send it out.”

“Well, it’s not as simple as that…” the
Tech Chief tried, but Dunbar wasn’t interested in what was possible and what
was theory. The Tech Chief had stood up and got his hopes up and so that was
good enough for Dunbar.

“Do it!”

But the Tech Chief told him he couldn’t
because he didn’t have any tools, which was when Dunbar cut his fingers to
pieces pulling a nail out of the wooden bench to equip the Chief with.

“No more talk, send the fucking signal!”
Dunbar demanded.

The Tech Chief frowned and pursed his
lips before getting to work levering the housing off my GPS eye.

“What are you sending? You’re not calling
in an air strike are you?” Mr Vasiliev wanted to know.

“And what if I am?” Dunbar shoved. “You
think you’re not expendable?”

“Hey, we’re all expendable,” Mr Smith
said. “Just include us in on the conversation, yeah?”

“You’ll see,” Dunbar simply grunted, the
merest hint of a smile teasing his eyes.

I wasn’t sure we’d get the time though.
The sound of boots marching and keys jangling echoed along the corridor to
remind us that life was short and full of woe, and it was about to get a lot
shorter and even more woe-filled, but then the Tech Chief looked up and smiled
to tell us he’d done it.

Dunbar snatched my eye out of his hand
and jammed it under the crack of the door, before banging on the locked steel
to entice the guards.

“Come and get us you
mothers
! Come suck my dick!”

He then grabbed Lieutenant Copeland, who
was still curled up in a little ball and wheezing by the door, and dragged him
clear, ducking down against the far wall, before inviting the rest of us to do
the same.

“Everybody down!”

24.
A BLACK HAWK PAYBACK

Keys in the lock and barked commands just outside the door told me our presence
was requested in the mortuary and I was really starting to hate Rip Dunbar when
all of a sudden all hell broke loose. A blinding throb of heat and light filled
the cell and threw us against the far wall, almost like a flashbang exploding
in the room. Only there’d been no bang, just a flash. The back of my neck was
savaged as if I’d sat under the midday Saharan sun for a full twelve hours and
I discovered to my dismay that my clothes – and the clothes of those
around me – were actually smoking.

Still, that was nothing compared to what
had happened to the door itself – and those who’d been opening it at the
time. It was no longer there. Nothing was; the doorframe, the ceiling, the
floor below or the men who’d been stood on the other side. All were gone.

All that remained was a steaming,
searing, crackling hole.

“What the fuck was that?” the Tech Chief
asked.

“A little something from our buddies at
NASA,” Dunbar said, implying some sort of satellite had just targeted a photon
pulse on our position. “Now come on!” Dunbar insisted, dashing out through the
opening to look for things to karate chop.

Mr Smith shrugged when I looked at him,
as if I’d asked him a question, which I hadn’t, then chased after Dunbar. I
immediately followed, leaping across the steaming abyss and straight into a
fire-fight. Dunbar, Mr Smith and a couple of the others managed to grab rifles
off the smoking wounded outside and were now engaging the remainder of the
Omega detachment as they poured in on us from both stairwells

“Heads up!” Dunbar grunted, and I turned
just in time to catch an M16 straight in the face. As painful as this was,
things could have been a lot worse as the space I’d just been occupying was
suddenly filled with a whip of tracer fire.

I looked up the corridor to see half a
dozen more Omega troopers squeezing their triggers in my direction and only
just managed to avoid the fruits of the endeavours by squeezing into the
adjacent doorway.

Alas, the hapless Lieutenant Copeland was
not so fortunate and his crisp white shirt exploded with scarlet the moment he
jumped out of the cell and across the line of fire.

Others too met with little forgiveness,
as Mr Hasseen and our co-pilot were picked off as they tried to join the fight,
but at least half a dozen of the guys did make it, with Mr Vasiliev and Mr
Deveroux scuttling across the floor to peel M16s out of the crispy fingers of
those who’d originally come for us.

Back near me, Dunbar was screaming as if
he were cumming in his pants, emptying clip after clip into the Omega troops at
the northern end of the cell block corridor and doing his damnedest to get
through his ammo as fast as possible. He’d also managed to lose his shirt in
the last couple of minutes and was sweating as if his previous sweat had been a
mere practice for this, the main stench.

“You
mothers
!
You mother-
mothers
!!!” he was
screaming, shooting from the hip on full automatic and painting the far end of
the hallway with clouds of brick-dust and blood.

Mr Smith was right next to him, and
pelted with a fine lick of sweat every time Dunbar spun around to engage a
different part of the corridor. I half-thought about sending the pair of them
over some more ammo and a packet of wet-wipes but never got the chance as shots
were now zipping past my ears and peppering the walls around me as Omega
troopers from the southern stairwell closed to within thirty feet.

I hung my M16 out into the corridor and
took a bead on the trooper closest to me. His head bobbed in and out of cover
as he shot in my direction, but I didn’t fire. I only had one clip and needed
to make every round count, so I waited for him to break cover and didn’t have
long. The Omega trooper lunged across the corridor, making for the cell doorway
four doors along from mine, and I opened up with a measured burst, only to see
him and the guy who’d followed flung back and turned into Swiss Cheese as
Dunbar drilled twenty bullets into each of them, screaming; “Suck my dick! Suck
my dick, you
mothers
!” before
bounding off up the corridor to take the fight somewhere different.

“He’s keen,” I shouted over to Mr Smith.

“You can say that again,” he replied,
wringing his eyes and nose. “Keen as fucking Gorgonzola.”

The base alarm was now blaring away over
the crackle of gunfire, tipping off the residents that not all was well with
the day. One of our lot, I don’t know who it was, wasted a few bullets killing
the speaker at the far end of the hallway, but it was a purely cosmetic
gesture. Griffin Marvel would know from the Command Centre computer boards
where the problem was coming from and he’d be directing all his resources our
way soon.

A grenade went off next to Mr Egorov,
ripping open his sides and splashing a considerable portion of him all over the
far wall, but Mr Vasiliev was able to sling back the next two that dropped into
our laps to give the Omega boys a taste of their own medicine.

I didn’t feel bad about fighting the
Omega lot. I had no friends amongst them and couldn’t stand them as a unit.
There’s almost always a detachment on any job who think they’re a cut above.
They’re invariably the boss’s personal bodyguards or a special ops unit who’ve
been given a Hollywood make-over and let it go their heads, but even by usual
standards the Omega detachment were still some of the biggest Wallace &
Gromits I’d ever worked with. They wore red from head-to-toe, caps straight and
laces tied in double-knots as if their mums had dressed them at the base gates.
This wasn’t the reason I hated them of course, because we were all at the mercy
of whatever daft fashion sense our employers had, but it was the fact that they
wore this get up 24hrs a day. Even on their days off. Even when they exercised
in the gym.

They never smiled either, which was
always a bad sign. They had very little sense of humour, never laughed, barely
chatted and ate their corn flakes each morning with military precision. But the
thing I hated most about them was the fact that they were rude. Ask them a
simple question: “Here mate, where’s the washing powder kept? We’ve run out
again,” and they’d just look at you as if you were kicking over headstones in a
pet cemetery. “Here mate, washing powder yeah?”

They weren’t Agency hired either, which
body guards often aren’t, and as a result their loyalties lay entirely with
Griffin Marvel. They were his men, ergo an entire unit of boss’s sons.

I finally managed to shoot one of my
Omega persecutors, knocking him back into an electrical box to simultaneously
fry him, and rather satisfyingly saw that it was the guy who’d dissed me over
the washing powder, so it felt good to even the score.

As a result, the lights all along the
corridor flickered, allowing us to break cover and close on the remaining Omega
men, who were still lit up from the stairwell lights.

Mr Vasiliev, Mr Smith and myself cleared
the southern end after a fierce assault, while Mr Deveraux, Mr Jean, the last
surviving reservist Mr Capone, and the Tech Chief cleared the north.

For the moment we had the detention block
to ourselves.

“How are we not dead yet?” the Tech Chief
asked, but I was buggered if I knew. I just hoped it stayed that was for a
little while longer.

“Where to now?” Mr Vasiliev then asked.

“The Command Centre, I gonna kill that
arsewipe Griffin Marvel,” Mr Capone suggested, to universal dismay.

“Screw that, let’s just go home,” Mr
Deveraux bettered, and this time we all agreed.

“Yeah, there’s still more than a hundred
men upstairs and they’ll soon be in here on top of us if we hang about,” Mr
Smith pointed out. “Come on, to the monorail.”

We gathered up what ammo and grenades we
could off the fallen Omega men and took to the stairs. To our surprise, there
were signs of a fight and bodies on every landing and that’s when we remembered
Dunbar.

“Should we tell him where we’re going?”
someone asked.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what we should do,”
Mr Smith agreed, before adding; “Stupid ass.”

We reached the middle level and found an
unguarded monorail parked at this floor’s embarkation point. After a quick look
around we dashed towards the open carriages and jumped in. The Tech Chief hit
the pedal and we moved off as one, rifles pointing out in all directions like a
porcupine with attitude.

We rolled on through a long rock tunnel,
dodging the lights and passing more bristling alarms, but we encountered no
trouble along the way. Our luck didn’t hold for long though and soon we emerged
out onto an open concourse near the stores and into the line of sight of half a
dozen Omega guys.

We opened up on them as one, riddling the
small detachment with hot lead to knock them down like tin ducks. The Tech
Chief didn’t slow the monotrain for an instant and we continued gliding around
the concourse before disappearing into another tunnel.

“Two more clicks to the helipad,” Mr
Smith told everyone, locking and loading his M16 as he slammed in a fresh clip.

The next cavern we emerged into was the
snowmobile dock. This area was guarded by our own guys, guys we knew, not those
Omega arseholes, so we lowered our weapons and waved a cautious greeting as we
trundled on by.

One of them, Captain Collett, recognised
us and flagged us down, prompting Mr Vasiliev to flip the safety off his Colt,
but Mr Smith urged caution.

“Let me handle this,” he whispered.

We slowed to a gradual halt and pulled up
alongside the Captain and his men.

“Mr Smith, what’s going on?” he asked.

“The base is under attack,” Mr Smith told
him. “A break-out from the detention centre.”

“Who?”

“Us,” he said, suddenly bringing his
rifle to bear. Mr Vasiliev, Mr Jean, Mr Deveraux and the others all followed
suit, getting the drop on the Captain and his men, but Mr Smith barked at
everyone to hold their fire.

“Wait! Just wait a minute,” he urged.

We knew Captain Collett to be a
reasonable man (he’d given Joseph O’Conner’s
Star of the Sea
a solid four out of five and you can’t be much more
reasonable than that) so we took a risk and explained the situation to him. The
Captain was shocked to hear that we’d been locked up, sentenced to death and
double-crossed. He’d had no idea, obviously – it wouldn’t have been the
sort of thing Griffin Marvel would’ve posted on the bulletin board – and
as a result he immediately threw his lot in with us.

“… because it’ll be us next if we don’t,”
he told his lads and to a man they agreed. I was so proud of them – book
club members one and all. Except for Mr Lennox, who preferred his Game Boy
– illiterate cunt.

“Okay, we’ll secure the helipad and give
you a call, then you come and join us,” I told the Captain.

“Check,” he agreed, sending his men away
to take up defensive positions.

The Tech Chief hit the pedal and we
glided away, around the snowmobile dock and into the next tunnel. I wondered if
Captain Collett had come around to our side a little too easily. I mean, people
do occasionally say things they don’t mean when they’ve got half a dozen
automatic rifles aimed at their chests, so I told the Tech Chief to take the
long way around and approach the helipad from the rear, just in case the good
Captain had phoned through to arrange a welcoming committee for us.

The next cavern was eerily empty. There
should have been four or five white-coated technicians working here on the
base’s mainframe but the place was dead. I wondered if the technicians were
too.

We circled south, taking a series of left-hand
forks until we emerged into the enormous subterranean aircraft hanger. Here,
there was plenty of activity – and gunfire. At some point in the last ten
minutes or so, Rip Dunbar had traded his M16 for an M60, with a
twenty-foot-long magazine belt and under-hanging pump-action grenade launcher,
and was taking on several complete units of Omega and general base security.
This was a tricky situation because we knew some of the blokes from the base
security unit, but there was no way of getting to them to explain the
situation, so we did the only thing we could – we sunk out of sight
inside the monotrain and continued on to the next tunnel.

Crash!
Bang! Ratter-tat-tat!
“Suck
my dick!”
were the sounds that echoed around the hanger as Dunbar waged war
on anything in sight and blasted his way towards the Command Centre at the far
end of the cavern. Griffin Marvel would be in there no doubt, frantically
sending everyone else off to their deaths to forestall his own, but sadly I
never got a chance to see how things panned out for him because we rounded the
bend and disappeared into the next tunnel before riding the rail the last
hundred yards or so to the helipad’s southern elevators.

The Tech Chief stopped the monotrain and
we all jumped out, taking up positions either side of the tunnel entrance,
while Mr Vasiliev summoned the elevators.