The doctor, the last Korean standing, sounded very matter of fact as he spoke up. “I did say the base commander could abort the missile. Abort.”
Mai resisted the urge to turn around and shoot him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Drake drove the Charger faster than any car he’d ever driven in his life. Even then, the Viper stayed ahead, its whole façade — its color, its shape, its name, its occupant — radiating an unrestrained predatory instinct. The Gulfstream jet hustled along beside it, separated by mere meters.
Kingston was running level with the open forward hatch.
“What the hell is he doing?” Alicia shouted. “He can’t get in.”
That’s what worries me, Drake thought. Kingston had called ahead. The arms dealer knew what he was doing.
“He has something,” Drake said. “He designs advanced weapons systems. Devising something that gets you out of a car and onto a plane would be child’s play for him.”
“Shag it.” Alicia sighed. “Guess I’m shooting out the tires again.”
Just as the Englishwoman started to writhe into shape, Hayden’s helicopter blasted overhead. Drake grinned. He’d forgotten about their hardy boss and her new toy. So, it seemed, had Kingston. Maybe the fleeing arms dealer had been plucking up courage, but when he caught sight of the chopper, he set off an explosion that blew the driver’s door off its frame and sent it tumbling down the runway. Simultaneously, a huge robotic arm shaped like a car door and carrying a harness shot out of the planes forward hatch, probably gun-bolted to the plane’s floor inside. The arm slowed dramatically as it reached the car, air brakes popping like pistol fire, fitting around the Viper’s doorframe.
Kingston must have engaged the cruise control. The runway at this point was as smooth as it was ever going to get. The arms dealer must have been waiting for just this moment to implement his carefully rehearsed plan.
But he still hadn’t reckoned on the chopper.
As the arm reversed its movement, bringing Shaun Kingston aboard the Gulfstream, Hayden swung the helicopter across its front end. Drake wrenched the wheel to avoid the driverless Viper as it veered off the runway.
“Look out! Shit!”
Kinimaka hung out of the chopper’s cabin, rifle nestled from chin to shoulder, taking aim at the jet’s cockpit. The Gulfstream’s engines began to scream as the plane accelerated to takeoff speed. Drake mashed the accelerator pedal against the Charger’s floor. The plane’s tail passed over the car as the forward hatch slammed shut.
Kinimaka opened fire. A storm of bullets hammered into the airplane’s body and tore through the cockpit window. Red flashed across the ruined glass. The Gulfstream lost its impetus in a second, powering down and changing direction, now heading straight for the grass verge.
Drake tailed it closely. Hayden brought the helicopter to rest a few yards from the tip of its starboard wing. Drake, Alicia and Hayden jumped out of their vehicles, drawing guns and staying low. Kinimaka kept his rifle trained on the cockpit lest Kingston be inclined to use the jet as a getaway vehicle.
The hatch remained closed. Hayden nodded to both Drake and Alicia and then used her cell. “Do we know how many were on board?”
Drake heard the reply easily enough. “Only two pilots. It seems Kingston prefers to travel alone.”
Now Dahl and Komodo pulled up in the Shelby Mustang, the Swede giving the throttle an extra blip before stepping out, grinning from ear to ear.
“We passed the general on to the cops. Hey, is there any way we could keep this thing?”
“Question is…” Hayden nodded at the plane. “Who gets to go in and drag Kingston’s pathetic ass outta there? He’s alone.”
Drake studied the windows, the door. “Who will interrogate him? Make him squeal?”
Hayden shrugged. “The FBI, I guess. Gates will pull us away from the aftermath of all this. SPEAR doesn’t do mop up, but will still be privy to the intel.”
“Aye, well. There’s your answer.” Drake touched Hayden’s shoulder firmly. “Our priority now is to get Mai and Smyth off that island.”
“General Kwang Yong should be able to help with the tactical side of that,” Hayden said.
Dahl looked down at his boots, an unusual trait for the Swede. Drake discerned it immediately. “What’s wrong?”
“Ah, the general.” Dahl flicked his head in the direction of Kwang Yong, still lying with his belly to the concrete. “He called in a last order before we got to him. To destroy the island.”
Drake wavered. Not after all this, he thought. Not after dragging his arse all the way from Asia, through China and Russia and Germany and then taking down the operations ringleaders. Not now.
A blackness stole in at the edge of his vision. He hadn’t asked Mai to trust him with her life, but he had fully expected her to survive all this. He barely heard Dahl’s next optimistic comment or Hayden as she took a call. He didn’t register the Gulfstream anymore and the fact that its forward hatch had just cracked open.
Even though he was staring right at it.
Then, Hayden thrust her cell in his face. “Matt!” She sounded as if she’d been shouting his name for a while. He focused on her.
She smiled. “It’s Mai. She’s calling for you.”
Drake said a soft hi. He listened as Mai told him the rocket had been aborted, as she explained how she’d been able to send a distress call from the island’s comms room to the nearest American special forces Recon team — one recently stationed on nearby Guam by none other than the U.S. Secretary of Defense — and how she missed him every second of every single day.
“You’re famous, Drake.” Mai laughed. “I asked if they knew of a Matt Drake and they replied ‘Yep, hasn’t everyone? He’s fine.’ The team’s inbound now. We’ll get out of here before the Koreans arrive. We made one of their men call up and garble something about an accidental release.” The Japanese woman laughed, the sound like soft, summer rain to Drake’s ears. “It’ll keep them guessing for an hour or two.”
Drake still stared at the forward hatch, which was now closed again. “Did you figure out what the lab was for?”
“That’s why we hung around so long. It’s a sleeper operation. They kidnap down-and-outs, transform them, and bury some kind of ‘wake’ command deep inside their subconscious. A doctor here says it can be triggered by some guy — General Kwang Yong — verbally, or by a machine at this end. And don’t worry. The machine’s about to get some Mai-time.”
Drake grinned. Fucking Wells’ legacy would never die. “And the down-and-outs who are there now?”
“We’ll take them with us.”
A good outcome, Drake thought. Romero and he had destroyed the body. Mai had chopped off the head. And SPEAR had caught both ringleaders.
“And that general?” Mai went on. “Kwang Yong. The doc says he was always scared, always paranoid. He was acting without permission. He needed to cover his tracks somehow and used the sleepers. That’s all I know.”
Drake couldn’t stop thinking about her face. “It’s enough. Be safe, Mai. It’ll be good to see you again.”
Drake ended the call and gave the cell back to Hayden. When he looked around, Dahl was grinning at him. So was Komodo. Even Alicia had stopped texting her biker boyfriend for a minute to stick her finger down her throat.
“C’mon, Drakey. It’s not like you haven’t been there before.”
Then, the Gulfstream’s forward hatch burst open and out stepped a nightmare — Shaun Kingston, outfitted in all his advanced weaponry: his prototype “killproof” full-body armor, his bulletproof weapons-synced, computerized helmet and goggles, and toting two of the craziest, meanest, most radical guns Drake had ever seen.