Raven said, ‘We need higher ground.’
They left the room and found metal stairs thick with dust and grime that led upwards. A metal railing bolted to the wall offered support, but only for half the ascent. The rest had been bent and snapped away at some point long ago. The walls were rough and painted white, as dirty as the stairs, and a short, narrow corridor led on to more stairs through a door-less doorway. The door itself lay on its side in the corridor.
Victor passed a window comprised of semi-opaque glass blocks and climbed up again, Raven following. These stairs were wooden, warped and cracked through wear and rot.
The control room at the top was painted in utilitarian grey paint – the walls, the pillars, the floor, even the folding metal chairs and sink. The only thing that had escaped the grey was a desk fan, once white but stained to an unpleasant yellow. A door led out to a walkway that ran around the control room. A ladder led further up.
There was no air traffic control equipment in the room. The only evidence the room had ever been used as such were the holes for cables and dials that were cut into the boxing protruding from the walls.
To the west, over the neighbouring building’s roof, he could see the road and the harbour beyond it. East and north lay hangars and runways.
But to the south, visible at last because of its aviation lights, flew the helicopter, growing larger and more distinct with every passing second. It was a big commercial model, painted graphite grey.
‘That’s a Eurocopter Dauphin. I’ve been in one just like it. Maybe even the same one,’ Raven said. ‘We should get out of here.’
‘We’re in a defensive position. We can take them here.’
She shook her head. ‘They’ll outnumber us. It can carry eight passengers. There are several points of entry. We can’t cover them all. They’ll box us in. We can take the truck and get the hell out of here.’
‘We stay here and deal with whoever gets off that helicopter.’
‘You mean you want to wait and get Halleck?’
Victor said, ‘If they see the truck moving, they’re going to go after it. We can’t outrun a helicopter. They’ll fly over us and land to block off our escape from the airfield, whichever route we try and take.’
’Good,’ she said. ‘The instant the chopper is directly overhead we’re going to jump out – and they won’t see us do it.’
‘Let me guess: we’ll have set the bomb to blow shortly after we do.’
‘How fast can you cover a football field?’ Raven asked.
‘Because the lethal radius of two tons of high explosives is going to be about one hundred metres.’
She nodded. ‘Give or take.’
‘I’m fast,’ he said. ‘But that’s no kind of plan. We can’t assume they’ll fall for it.’
She relented. ‘Okay. We do it your way.’
‘I’ll stay here,’ he said. ‘I’ll take shots at them as they approach. They’re bound to split up – some putting down covering fire at me while the others close the distance and enter. Go to the first floor and ambush those guys when they come within range.’
She nodded again. ‘Good luck.’
The thrum of rotor blades grew louder and the shape of a helicopter came into view, silhouetted against the night sky.
‘Go,’ Victor said.
She descended the stairs, and Victor watched her go. He then waited in the control tower, watching the Eurocopter grow nearer. It was flying in fast; and the pilot was bringing the bird in for a hard landing and rapid deployment of the men on board.
He thumbed the selector switch on the UMP to full automatic and opened fire on the helicopter.
The sub-machine gun roared, spitting bullets skyward from his spot in the control tower. He aimed in front of the chopper to account for its speed and the distance the bullets had to travel to reach their target.
A one-in-a-million shot might hit the pilot and bring the chopper crashing to the ground, but Victor’s intent was to persuade those inside to deal with him in the control tower, making them easy targets for Raven downstairs.
The helicopter hit the ground outside the terminal building with force, rotor wash flattening grass, about one hundred metres out, and eight figures leapt out. He saw Halleck among them, ordering his men to split up and move forward. He was carrying a large aluminium case. It was heavy, no doubt lined with lead.
The seven men and Halleck began their approach.
Victor let all thoughts empty from his mind, passing control of his actions over to his unconscious, to the part of the brain evolved over millions of years, which some called the lizard brain. The conscious mind was slow and young and too prone to distraction and bias; the lizard brain was old and wise and could detect and analyse and process and calculate and act far quicker than any deliberate conscious thought. He felt the release of over one hundred and fifty different hormones into the blood, of which adrenaline was perhaps the most powerful. The others would be working in a variety of ways, shutting down non-essential bodily functions, focusing vision and deprioritising hearing – sound provided less clear messages than sight and warnings that were slower to receive and analyse and react to; the relative delay between processing sight and hearing might be minuscule, but it could spell the difference between survival and death.
He stood to peer down on to the open space before the terminal building and opened fire, wasting a whole magazine of .45 calibre rounds shooting blind into the darkness. Three seconds later he had dropped back in cover.
Victor crouched down on his haunches, back against the wall next to the window. Automatic fire exploded the pane and ripped chunks from the wooden framework, punching holes in the far wall. Plaster clouded in the air. Shards of glass shattered and skidded across the floor. As powerful as a .45 calibre round was, it could not penetrate solid brick, nor was anything inside the room solid enough to cause a bullet to ricochet.
He waited. The shooting was ineffectual. The gunmen were wasting rounds just as he had, but he still had an objective.
He reloaded the UMP and popped up to shoot again. This time at muzzle flashes, but without accuracy as he couldn’t afford to spend the time aiming when he was outnumbered eight-to-one. But he was gathering intelligence, not trying to kill his enemies. Even with the higher ground and cover, he wasn’t going to win this firefight.
But now he knew how far away his enemies were, and he had convinced them he was staying in the tower.
Further rounds took out more windows, scattering glass across the floor. It crunched beneath Victor’s heels as he ducked low, back against the wall to maximise the cover.
In seconds the gunmen would be easy targets for Raven, but he realised the plan wasn’t going to work because Raven wasn’t downstairs as instructed, but driving the flatbed truck.
He glimpsed it in his peripheral vision. The noise of rotor blades was enormous and had drowned out the sound of the truck’s engine. Victor saw it from the corner of his eye as it pulled out from between the two buildings and on to the runway, accelerating north towards the exit.
Raven was doing it her own way.
Halleck would have seen it too. Victor could almost see and hear the reactions and then instructions and action.
He risked looking and saw three of Halleck’s guys rushing back to, and boarding, the helicopter. It was in the air a moment later and flying after the truck, leaving Halleck and four of his guys approaching the terminal building.
In less than thirty seconds the helicopter had passed over the flatbed truck. Victor watched it bank and slow and land again in the distance.
The truck continued in a straight line, heading straight for the landed Eurocopter. The pilot would be expecting it to slow and stop, but it didn’t and Victor saw tiny specks of light as guns opened fire in the distance, shooting at the truck in an attempt to kill the driver and bring it to a stop.
When it was obvious the truck wasn’t going to be brought to a halt, the helicopter took off to avoid being hit and the guys on the ground stopped firing to clear out of the way.
Both of which were pointless because two tons of high explosives detonated.
The night sky illuminated in a brief instance of dazzling white light that blinded Victor. The sound was a monstrous boom that hit him an instant later, the overpressure wave exploding windows and popping his ears and knocking him off balance, broken glass raining down on him.
The chopper had ascended to maybe fifty metres when the truck exploded and was caught in the massive mushrooming blast. The helicopter was ripped in half, the back end falling away as flaming wreckage as the front section spun in crazed patterns until it came crashing to ground, out of sight in the woodland.
He didn’t know if Raven was alive or dead and it didn’t matter because there were still five live enemies outside. He shook and swept the glass from over him and climbed to his feet. His eyes stung and his ears were ringing.
He peered outside through the gap where the control tower window used to be. Halleck and his men were still there – stunned by the explosion, but all functional.
Victor let off some more rounds, then crawled along the floor, feeling the coldness of the tiles and broken glass beneath his palms and smelling the cordite from expended brass shell casings.
A stationary target, no matter how well defended, was vulnerable against a numerically superior force. Mobility was his best ally. A larger force was a slower force.
He exited the control tower and used the solid metal butt of the UMP to knock out the opaque glass blocks from the window next to the stairs. They had been strong enough to survive the overpressure wave, but five good strikes were enough to clear a large enough space for Victor to squeeze through and fall out on to the terminal building’s flat roof.
Ducking low, he crept along the roof until he could peer over the edge.
He saw four figures. Two were approaching the building, while Halleck and a companion stayed put, ready to provide cover.
Victor held off shooting. If he shot at the two closest, he would no doubt kill them, but would be cut down by the two further away. If he went for the two providing cover, the closest would have easy work killing him, maybe even before he had killed one of his targets.
Instead, he watched.
The man in the lead wore a dark nylon sports jacket, zipped up to the neck, boots, and faded black jeans. His head was shaved to the skin, bone-white scalp contrasting with the tanned face. He was in his mid-thirties, of average height but heavy with excess muscle and fat. He moved like he was used to the weight – quick and assured.
The second man was younger, with dark skin and longer hair tied back in a short topknot. A neat black beard framed a jaw set with aggression. He wore jogging bottoms, trainers and a hooded sweatshirt.
They were dressed like civilians, casual and nondescript, but they were professionals.
They didn’t look much like killers. But the good ones never did.
Victor watched them approach and communicate with hand signals. He didn’t see the fourth of Halleck’s remaining men, which meant either Victor had shot him by some minor miracle or the man had circled the building to enter through the back or to guard it as an obvious escape route.
He backed away from the edge before the two closest moved out of his line of sight. A moment later the sound of glass breaking reached his ears. It had been broken with as little force as possible to lessen the noise, but it would be impossible to smash glass from a door without a sound. He pictured one of the men reaching through and unlocking the door while the other had his gun drawn in cover.
He failed to hear the door open, but detected their footfalls as they passed through the open doorway and into the hallway beneath him. They would spend a minute or more clearing the rooms on the ground floor, one by one. They believed him to be in the tower, but they could not head straight there and risk giving him their backs if he had descended.
Hurried footsteps told him Halleck and the other man were approaching and entering the building too.
Victor waited thirty seconds so the second two would be deep within the building, then slung the UMP over one shoulder.
With his back facing the edge of the roof, he lowered himself until his arms were extended and he was holding on by his fingertips.
He dropped one storey and hit the ground and bounced on the balls of his feet to disperse some of the fall’s energy before going into a roll to absorb the rest.
Halleck and the three men had left the door open for him. Fragments of broken glass lay on the inside of the threshold. Victor stepped over the glass and into the building. The aluminium case sat inside the doorway, containing uranium or plutonium or whatever else made an effective radiological weapon. Halleck had set it down because it was heavy and bulky and a hindrance – and because he believed he was the hunter and Victor the prey.
He was wrong.
Victor heard boots ascending stairs. They had cleared the ground floor faster than he had estimated, maybe because the fourth man had joined them and helped speed up the process, or because they were not as thorough as they should be, or they were even better than he thought.
When the boots had left the stairs, he crept through the darkness, but the floor was covered in hard tiles. His enemies were making enough noise to disguise his footfalls; if his enemies heard him it would be because he was right next to them.
They were close. He could hear the men moving around on the floor above him – even less concerned about making noise than he was – but the echoing effect of the quiet, empty building made it difficult to pinpoint their positions.
He kept his boots on, despite the additional noise they made on the hard floor. In bare feet – because socks lacked traction on tiled flooring – he would be able to move in near silence, but in the confines of the first-floor rooms he might not be able to take them all out without a physical confrontation. For that, he needed shoes. He wanted the extra power a solid heel added to his kicks and stomps, and likewise wanted the protection of tough leather covering his feet from similar attacks and from broken glass scattered by the explosion in rooms with windows.
He emptied his pockets of anything that might rattle or fall out and give away his position. Triumphing against the odds often came down to such small details often overlooked by those whose life did not rely on considering everything.
He climbed the stairs, stopping midway to listen, hearing noise from both his left and right, originating from opposite sides of the building. The four men had split up to search for him.
Perfect.
He headed to the left. It was an arbitrary decision.
He approached an open doorway at the end of the hallway, hearing the rustle of nylon, and knew the man inside the room was the white guy with the shaved head. Victor stopped a metre from the doorway and kept his gaze directed at the floorboards ahead of it, because the first part of his enemy he would see would be the man’s foot as it crossed the threshold.
When that foot appeared, Victor stamped on it with his heel, then stepped in front of the man and snapped one palm over his mouth as the other hand struck him in the throat.
The man stumbled backwards, shocked and injured and overwhelmed and unable to fight back as Victor disarmed him and twisted him one hundred and eighty degrees and into a rear naked choke.
He locked the guy’s head against his chest as he applied pressure with his biceps and forearm on the carotid arteries either side of the man’s neck, and increased that pressure by tilting the head forward into the choke. The blood supply to the man’s brain was cut off.
Within five seconds the man stopped struggling. He was unconscious after another three.
With other enemies nearby Victor didn’t have time to keep the choke on long enough to ensure the man never woke up, so he adjusted his arm until the blade of his forearm was against the guy’s trachea. One of Victor’s old instructors had told him:
If you can crush a soda can, you can crush a windpipe
. He squeezed, feeling the momentary resistance of cartilage before the trachea collapsed inwards.
Victor lowered the unconscious, and soon-to-be dead, man to the floor.
Four enemies remaining.
Three of whom appeared as Victor turned round.
He snapped up the UMP and opened fire, seeing Halleck among the three but aiming for the closest threat. The sound of the UMP’s gunfire was a loud, dull bark that echoed in the confined space. The muzzle spat out bright bursts of exploded gases. Expended brass shell cases, hot and smoking, arced out of the breech, clinking off the walls and floor and crunching underfoot. The recoil thumped against his shoulder and reverberated through his body.
The closest man took a burst to the torso, shielding Halleck and the other man, who both backed off in surprise, seeking cover as Victor stalked forward, shooting in short, controlled bursts of two or three rounds. He moved in a crouch, half-squatting for stability and to reduce his height and silhouette.
He was reaching to change the magazine before he had squeezed the trigger for the last time, having counted bursts. Within four seconds he was shooting again.
They returned fire from doorways, but without accuracy because they were on the defensive. He squeezed off shots at each target, not expecting to hit any of them while they were buried in hard cover, but aiming to buy himself time to move while his enemies ducked and flinched and kept their heads down.
The response to fire went against every instinct evolution had instilled into Victor. He approached the danger, increasing the risk of death or dismemberment with each step, but in doing so he fought his enemies’ will as he fought their physicality. They outnumbered him. They were in the position of strength. For Victor to attack instead of retreating disrupted their psychological narrative. He thought of Sun Tzu:
When strong, appear weak; when weak, appear strong.
It worked.
The continuous fire and advancement made his enemies doubt their strength. They backed off and retreated. The wrong thing to do. The gunman fell amid the storm of gunfire. Halleck managed to scramble away, losing his gun in the process, but kicking open a doorway and charging into safety as Victor’s last round buried itself in the doorframe.
He released the empty magazine and went to reload but a door burst open behind him and the fourth gunman appeared.