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
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.